egoboo

Woohoo! I just came from a code review where I made enough of a contribution that Sean the QA guy (who runs them) said he's now putting me on the list for *all* of them. (Code reviews are weekly and constrained to be no longer than an hour, so that amounts to a commitment of a couple of hours a week, which seems reasonable to me. I told him that if it was ok with Werner, our manager, it's ok with me.)

The rule had been that the following people attend: the developer whose code is being reviewed (duh), Sean (our only QA person), a random developer, and a random "defender of the faith" (enforcer of coding standards and so on; currently the set is Paul and Werner, but Paul said he wants to groom me for this). When these were set up, I was under the impression that I was part of the "random developer" pool, and I figured I just hadn't been called for one yet. (We've only been doing this for a couple months, and we have about 15 developers.) But apparently that wasn't the case; Sean didn't have me on his list at all, except as a potential review target. The only reason I was at this one is that I asked to be.
(I was involved in the code.)

(There is a tool for randomly selecting older code to review; it crawls the code base and assigns points based on length, comment density, and various measures of code complexity. Since I've written some test code, I could end up as a reviewee, though I'm pretty good about comments and my code isn't very complex.)

The other thing that was cool about this one is that we have a new engineer who was there as an observer, and I was answering most of the questions he was asking. And then another engineer spotted a potential problem (which I immediately recognized as an actual problem)
but the author of the code didn't see what he was saying, but I did, so I acted as "translator". I think I scored some points for that.

Star Trek

I thought the last two episodes of Enterprise were very good. (That's "Terra Nova" and "The Andorian Incident".) TN had some major science flaws, but the storytelling was good and I was able to see past them. I hope these two are indicators of what is to come.

I figured out part of why Dani has such disdain for the modern Trek shows. (I don't know what he thought about the original series, or if he even watched it.) He thinks Star Trek is science fiction. I think it fails miserably as SF but that it is good *fantasy*. In this case the magical elements just happen to have names like "dilithium" and "anti-matter" and "phase shift", that's all.

(no subject)

I met with my rabbi this morning. We talked about a bunch of things. I told him I really miss the regular meetings that we had back when I was studying with him.

He asked what I've been learning lately and I told him about the online mishna class (from the Masorti folks in Israel) and the miscellaneous other stuff (parsha commentaries and the like), and that it's been pretty self-directed and haphazard. He asked what I want to learn and my broad answer is "most things"; I realized during the course of the conversation that what I *really* want is a study partner, and the specific topics of study are less important than the process of learning how to learn, so to speak. He knows that I've had a long-standing interest in liturgy, so we talked about that for a while.

I mentioned the study-partner thing, thinking that maybe he could suggest someone else in the congregation who I could team up with, and he said he'd be happy to study with me. Wow! This would be order of once or twice a month; I'm supposed to call his secretary, schedule something, and tell her what we're going to study. :-) (He lent me a book on liturgical history, so we'll start there.)

We also talked about my desire to be more involved in leading services. (I didn't quite have the guts to say "hey, how about getting rid of the paid soloists and letting some of us do that music instead?") He said I'm already on his short list for people to call with little notice when things come up and he appreciates that I'm willing to help. Then he asked how my Torah-reading is. I said "unskilled now but I want to change that", and told him that I've been trying to learn trope from a book. He's putting together a small group of people -- some adults, some post-b'nei-mitzvah teenagers -- who want to do this again, and he'll teach us and assign portions with a few months' notice. I said to definitely count me in. He's going to start this in January, he said.

We ran out of time (I thought I had a longer slot than I did), so I had to cram in the "oh by the way I've been leading services over at Tree occasionally; hope you don't mind" bit at the end, when I had hoped to not just spring it on him. He didn't seem to have a problem with this, which is good.