WhimsyLand

It's always feast or famine in the software consulting biz.  Of course, that's better than the poetry biz, where it's almost always famine.  On our plate right now is:  writing a touchscreen driver for Solaris;  completing this damnable audio slowdown code for My Favorite Client, a task that has been 90% done for a week;  setting up and verifying the GNU tool chain for an ARM-based SoC used on a client's board design; writing a Windows application that assists in the update of a video controller via JTAG; completing test routines to assist in design verification for a 10 Gigabit line card for a large router company.  I've probably forgotten something in there.  It's actually kind of fun having to know dozens of technologies.  A bit wearing, perhaps, but interesting (when everything works).

Junie is busy upstairs fixing some soup for our dinner.  I got her a big new Cuisinart for her last unbirthday and she's quite a whiz at it now.  I'll defrost some sesame pita bread and see how that goes with it.  Maybe make a salad of cucumbers, tomatoes, fresh thyme from my hanging garden with the little ceramic birds perched on the edge, and open a bottle of white.  Fat Bastard Chardonnay if I can find it at the liquor store when Junie and I drop off movies and get new movies.  We saw Live Free and Die Hard or something last night (sounds like the NH motto, doesn't it?).  Great action flick if you ignored the obvious, such as the ungodly onslaught of airpower that would have hit the bad guys early on and the fact that there would have been a couple of battalions of Marines guarding the NSA backup server farm.  Willis was never better, particularly if you believe that you can shoot yourself (and in so doing, kill the bad guy behind you) and end up with nothing more than your arm in a sling.

JL informs me that Yusef has picked the MMM Poetry Book winner.  I need to wait until all the formal announcements are made to finalists, but it was a very fine manuscript (I was a first and second reader). 

I received a poetry book for review by MMM, though we haven't been doing that as a rule (we will be featuring a couple of Jeannine's reviews in this issue, and want to make it a habit).  I was astonished to find that I actually liked the book, a first work by a lady whose name I'll have to tell you tomorrow.

So until then.