Where Everybody's Crazy

So, like I said, I have this week theoretically off. It's given me a chance to catch up on some long-standing programming todos.

I've found a great new place to work; I was cycling around on Monday trying to find a Starbucks in town or some other laptop-friendly cafe, since it's way too hot to be working at home. Eventually I remembered about our local Internet cafe, which looked very cool from the outside, and I had been meaning to investigate it. It promised a lot: open 24 hours, showers, karaoke, darts, pool, PS2s with plenty of games, massage chairs, free drinks, a comic library, wide-screen TVs, and a lot more.

It's all true. Plus free ice cream and miso soup! And it's cheap. But all the gimmicks in the world aren't what I'm paying for: I'm paying for a place to get out of the heat and concentrate and get some work done. And it's really, really good for that.

So what have I been up to? I've been making some major changes to Songbee, including finally getting around to providing customization preferences for the display, and starting to sort out song library imports. This has seen me digging into Javascript and XPCOM in more and more complicated ways, and I'm actually beginning to feel comfortable with it now. There are still some annoyances, but they're more architectural things than failings - I still don't get on with the fact that a lot of the working is asynchronous; if I add a stylesheet into a document, my code continues running even though the stylesheet hasn't finished loading yet, and there's no easy way to wait for it. I've hacked around it, but that kind of thing. The preferences thing is a lovely bit of JS/CSS/DOM manipulation. Go look at it.

I've also been hard at work setting up a photo sharing site for WEC Media, and making some changes that they want. Aside from programming, I've been putting together a flyer for a leadership seminar I'm giving at the end of September.

I have had time off too, even though I still feel guilty about taking some. I took all yesterday to play go, and tomorrow I'm off to visit Kobe. Then it's back to work again, with yet another camp...