What's it all about, Alfie?

I've been at a new Shop for about three weeks now, and it's got a lot more Drama than I expected. This is not news to my new teammates, but it's news to me, and sadly not something that's so out of the realm of possibility to be considered unusual for the Tech Industry. Rather than go into it, we'll just call it Drama, and leave it at that.

But someday I'm going to work at a place where I can open up this journal again, and not have to worry about anyone feeling threatened, or unhappy, or asking me to shut it down. I think today is not that day, but I'm not sure I really expected it to be. Hoped? Yes. Expected? Nope.

But along those lines, I've decided to spend a little of my free time thinking on new business ideas with some old friends. Specifically, what I could do to get back into business like I want to do, and still pay the bills. I'm not at all sure what that would be, but I'm opening up the entire gamut and willing to think about consulting - like we did with Port-to-Port, and also service and product ideas. Everything is in play.

What I'm really doing is trying to make something happen, as opposed to waiting for something to come my way. I'm not going to stop looking for that magical job to fall into my lap, but I'm willing to take a more active role in creating that job than I was in previous years.

Someday may never come. But I'm going to see if I can't give it a nudge.

Today I was talking with Carl, the friend I was doing a little side-project with in Clojure, and it was pretty clear that he didn't understand what the next steps were for the project, and while I tried to explain it to him, he's thinking in terms of cross-sectional probability functions, and I'm thinking this is all a massive Monte Carlo simulation system where the PDFs for the individual events are what you tweak, and then you run the simulation for a year of time, and see what happens. It's very simple, and while it doesn't give you direct control over the things out might want to control, it does give you the ability to see how individual actions - the promotions from one step in the sales pipeline to the next, impacts revenue.

Anyway, so I wanted to make sure that it was all running nicely, and I was using Gorilla REPL for the REPL as it has nice graphing as well as being a generally good REPL, but as I was making changes to the code and refreshing the page, I wasn't seeing what I expected to see.

Then it hit me - Gorilla REPL wasn't reloading the code.

Ouch.

I then switched to using the standard REPL with Leiningen, and everything worked fine - then firing up Gorilla REPL and reloading the page showed that it was now working just fine. Lesson learned - Gorilla doesn't reload the code when you re-execute all the code.

I've been having a little break before starting my new job at a new Shop, and I've had lots of time to catch up on shows on Netflix. One of my all-time favorites is certainly Lie to Me.

The acting, the writing, and the mere premise of the show is absolutely some of the best work I've seen in years. I mean it's on par with the best TV I've ever seen. That it only lasted a few seasons is sad, but predictable.

Great shows that appeal to me often don't last. There's not enough mes in the world to keep them going.