More work!

I don't remember the last time I thought of reading as intimidating or challenging, but here it is. As part of my new job, I just received four books to read. by the end of tommorro, hopefully. The expectation is to skim and minorly read, of course, but I'd feel less than perfectly prepared by that.

We'll see how it goes. There is a great deal of books, background information, and documentation I have to read here, and while reading quickly and retaining information well is one of my specialties, I expect I'll hit my limits eventually.

Being back on windows is interesting. I'm rediscovering all the little joys(having to find third party software to recapitulate functionality) and the neccesary apps(cygwin, openoffice, winRAR, etc) and benefits(incredibly easy installations, first or second-party software implementations of everything). There are downsides(the thrice damned Registry, and general hostility towards the user), and dissapointments(you mean they don't make tux racer for windows?!) but it's all part of the process, I guess.

I could have tried dual-booting, or running VMware, or Bochs, but that just seems perverse. I can get along in Windows pretty well, with many of the same applications, given some adjustments. If I had a high performance Macintosh, or Sparc hardware or something, I might consider splitting OSes, but I can prettify the desktop, and ignore the differences much simpler than dealing with emulation slowdowns.

and I rather like cygwin, it's charming, in a hacklike way. It reminds me of my first experiences with linux, where it's all very arcane and commandline, and getting anything to work was a matter of brute force and complete exploration of all possibilities.