Christmas is almost here and Sarah has departed for Providence, RI. That leaves me alone with my laptop and a bunch of unopened DVDs. Somehow, I think I’ll make it through the weekend. I, myself, depart for Providence Monday evening.
I passed my California Driving Test today. What a joke that was. It’s a mystery to me why you can’t obtain an American licence on the basis of possessing a European licence, since European countries require a much more stringent driving test.
The timing was rather grand: my Dutch licence expired two days ago, so it’s nice to know that yet another piece of bullshit bureaucracy is behind me.
I got offered a job in Purmerend the other day. This was an actual, real job; none of your recruiter-spun pie-in-the-sky, but a real honest-to-goodness job back home. This is encouraging. There really are still jobs available back in The Netherlands and my CV is still worth dropping me a line for, even though countless numbers of qualified people back home are on the dole and looking for a job.
I’m currently reading Teach Yourself Ruby in 21 Days by Mark Slagell. The Teach yourself books are often dodgy, but this is a great one. Even though I’ve been programming in Ruby for coming up on a year now, I’ve found quite a lot in this book that I either hadn’t found in other books or hadn’t been able to fully understand.
After years of inefficient use of both Emacs (for e-mail and DocBook) and vim (for everything else), I’ve finally decided to get to know vim inside-out and abandon the use of Emacs altogether.
Both programs are sufficiently complex that I’ve grown tired of not having mastered either in all the years I’ve been using both of them. It’s time to unlearn my workarounds and harness the full power of my editor in the hope that it will improve my productivity.
Finally, never mind The Lord of the bloody Rings; go and see Bowling for Columbine instead.