Yo content vultures. Been silent most of the week. A time for reflection, or... staring blankly into space, or... reading too much slashdot, or... something like that.

Blah. And tonight I told myself I'd try to get to bed before 04:00. Looks unlikely to happen at the moment. Oh well. Thankfully, I'll still have enough time to sleep before my next shift begins at 15:30.

Crap. Have I actually got anything to say? I don't know. My mind continually lingers on the subject of (better) employment. Been reading more of my Parachute book this week. (The one that I bought last summer, the day after the mass layoffs, when I though, "Oh shit. I'm still employed for the moment, but it might not last much longer, so now is the time to start thinking about the future." I didn't even mention it in my ramblings at the time, because I feared that if "they" found out, I might be suspected of disloyalty or something. Heh.)

There's a lot of crap in that book. Not sure how much of it is genuinely helpful, but it's interesting anyway.

With regard to the thought of finding programming work again, even when things pick up, I find myself filled with self-doubt. A common theme running through the comments in the slashdot article linked above (and many others I've seen), is that the boom allowed a lot of semi-competent "web designers" to flourish. Now that it's over, those people are out of work, but those with "real programming skills" are still in demand, and shouldn't be having too much trouble.

Which category do I fall into? Although a significant portion of my professional work while I was in the industry did involve web technologies (and associated languages such as php and perl), I don't think I would be out of line to refer to myself as a "real programmer". Though I haven't done much of it lately, I was writing C++ code back in '95 (and earlier), before the web had hit the mainstream.

(Don't look at my resume. Watch this horrible footage for evidence. Gack, if that was me, no wonder I might be considered unemployable in the "real" software industry. ;)

Aw, hell with it. This whole topic is getting old. And I have nothing insightful to add to it right now.

Let's post a couple links.

Crystal Space 3d. I downloaded and started playing with this earlier this week. Basicly, it's a gigantic 3d library with an API designed primarily to make game programming easier. Fun stuff to dabble in.

Unfortunately, after finally getting the whole thing to compile, the demos ran... very wierdly on Argo. It started out smooth, obviously using the hardware accellerated graphics to render, and then, every few seconds, the framerate would suddenly drop so low that it almost became unwatchable for a bit. Then, back to normal. Strange stuff. (Very similar to what happened last year when I tried to run a certain game from a now-defunct company, leading me to suspect something deeper might be wrong, maybe at the glx driver level. But Quake3 and my xlock stuff works fine, so I dunno.)

Maybe if I was a "real programmer", I would figure out a way to debug the xfree86 drivers and find out what's going on, and then fix it. :)

Anyway, CrystalSpace looks like some way cool stuff. Gobs of free time, patience, and dedication required.

From the inspiration/humor department, read these tales of bravery and adventure and laugh for hours. I did. You will too.

Now, I truly need to sleep. Peace and goodnight.