Movin' On Up

I've been promoted, sort of. From Front-Office-Support-Understudy to Back-Office-Support-Understudy. This is an upgrade because it involves more databases and fewer quizzes about economic terms. Also more programming. Yesterday I successfully added a feature to one of the in-house programs, which ferries information between the market data feed and our trading platform. My mission: to add an error pop-ups when the program lost a connection. My mission after first contact with the code: to add the ability to detect a lost connection. Despite the resulting vast increase in scope, I was eventually successful.

A note on support: The people who make ORC (our trading platform) have certain flaws, but they have achieved one great triumph: naming the ORC administration tool "SAURON". Both of these are acronyms, of course.

A note on living: While today's shift to something more like useful work is heartening, I am still living my life at someone else's behest. This seems like an inherently unstable situation. Ideally, of course, someone would hand me a large some of money with the instructions, "Go do something you enjoy." Unreasonable though this is, it leaves open the options of research, start-up company, and music. Paul Graham is especially convincing on the startup front, and also has several essays on programming.

Also I bought a book on Erlang, a functional programming language which specializes in concurrent programming. The trend toward multicore processors makes this more important than ever -- unless specifically designed for it, a program can only run on one processor. Going to Borders convinces me I am unusual; there are plenty of books of C++ for Dummies, Beginning PHP, Java for Transorbital Lobotomy Patients, The Bipedal Lizard's Guide to SQL. My secret hope is to discover a book of Perl for Unscrupulous Lunatics or Javascript for the Dangerously Intelligent. Those books will get my money in an instant. I settled for Programming Erlang, with the knowledge that it was written by one of the language's designers (Joe Armstrong).

Also, if you are not familiar with FLCL/Furi Kuri/Fooly Cooly, well, you should be. It has been greatly enhancing my week. It is an anime about puberty, guitars, robots, and mostly about surrealism.