My Latest Addiction

Every day you hear about people getting addicted to things like drugs, alcohol or even cigarettes. Being a geek though, I am a little modified in my addictions. See, I don't do drugs (never have), I don't smoke (anymore, gave it up cold turkey 10 years ago) and I only occasionally drink.

Instead, my addictions tend to orbit around computers. My latest however happens to be a plugin for the Fire Fox web browser called StumbleUpon. After installing the plugin and restarting your browser, go into the configuration and select all of the topics that you want to "stumble upon". I warn you though, there are an overwhelming number of topics but you can right click on each and open in a new tab or window to see what the types of sites it finds.

After you are done with the configuration, open a new tab and click the "stunble" button. It will then randomly select a site from the entire list of topics and display it for you. I have been building up my del.icio.us bookmarks for the past few weeks with an overwhelming number of links to things I have found useful and/or interesting. I suggest you give it a try, you might stumble upon something you could use too.

Something New

Wow, has it really been almost 2 months since my last entry? Believe it or not I hadn't noticed. Work has kept me pretty bogged down during the day with stuff to do (yes, that is a good thing as I am loving my job) and things like blogging have had to take a slight back burner with my nightly exhaustion (that is only enhanced by the activeness off our kids.

Speaking of work, we hired an intern for the summer to take on some work that we need to do. He hails from WPI (Worcestor Polytechnic Institute) and has turned out to be a pretty nice guy. He is going into his senior year there and has a pretty interesting senior project going.

He and I have had the chance to chat it up a bit on a number of topics and during such chats, I have been intrigued by how positively he speaks of coding in Python. I always saw Python as an interesting language and had thoughts of learning it but hadn't settled definitely, until now that is.

For the past couple of weeks I have been actively reading about and playing with, Python on a regular basis. It is actually quite an elegant and neat language. The way that you do things in Python is taking a bit to get used to (as well as having to switch back and forth between Python and Perl), but I can handle it just fine.

I see Python added to my coding arsenal for the long haul and am sure that there will be some posts on it here, in the future.

I will try and put together a post containing links to get you started if you are interested. You will be surprised at how easy Python is to learn, even if you haven't done any coding before.