What It Is!

Been a while since I did an update on what's what.

Precana was actually a good time. It's a long weekend - I think total we put in almost 30 hours, but it was well set up. Not a lot of endless lectures. Good discussion. It was definitely one of those "Get out what you put in" type things, but I am glad we did it. After that we went to watch the fourth installment in the Indiana Jones series. I have been looking forward to seeing this since I heard about it.

It sucked.

The dialog was bad, the plot weak, the premise sillier than most action flick premises. Harrison Ford was actually still believable, and the action scenes, especially the part with the ants, were pretty sweet. Disappointing though. Ah well.

Reading: I am reading a few books as usual. The two most active are 'The World Without Us', by Alan Weisman and 'The First Crusade: A New History', by Thomas Asbridge. The World Without Us is a pretty popular one, and it kept seeming interesting, so I finally checked it out. It's pretty crazy to think about all the infrastructure that would just crumble if we humankind ceased to exist. While the book has the potential to be really depressing, every time it veers in that direction, it gets interesting enough that you don't feel like you are being preached to or warned. I like it half way through.

I just started the book about the First Crusade, as part of my reading regimen to understand Italian and papal history. I want to be somewhat educated on what I am seeing when I go to Italia. So far the book is written in a pretty accessible way, though as with much early history, I have a problem with the inherent required guessing that takes place due to lacking solid written evidence.

Have I mentioned that I can't freakin' wait to go Italy!?!?

As far as work, I have all manner of code out on the interwebs. The php stuff seems to have solidified enough so that I won't be doing any emergency deployments any time in the next week or so, and I will take that. We are in the midst of ironing out some issues with the latest deployment of sportsvite, and I got to dust off my performance engineering skills. It's good to know that I haven't already forgotten everything. I have to admit that working on those problems is fun, and I am lucky to have worked somewhere that gave me the ability to learn some of those relatively rare skills.