The wet, hot, heaviness in the air confused me at first, but I’m pretty sure I have it now: Our calendar has wandered far from the roots of our holidays. Halloween, the night when the veil is thin and spirits cross over with a certain ease, is a full week off. The world does not obey a strict Julian calendar. Hallmark does not have the power of life and death quite yet. I’ve seen gods, devils, and relatives in my dreams for the past two weeks. The past, the future, this world and others – all ride together as the world tips on its axis and plunges us into winter. I’ve had these dreams at this time of year for my entire life so far – just like the rest of my family – my mother in particular. It’s a standing joke that really isn’t terribly funny. After all, what sort of fool would believe in ghosts – and what fool who has seen them would doubt?

Most cultures recognize it. The days grow shorter. The air grows colder. A certain urgency grips your goings to and fro. It is time to batten the hatches and finish the work of summer. My Irish ancestors understood the annual departure of the sun as the descent of their warrior God into hell. No shrinking, fruit eating Persephone to be rescued – he went with sword drawn, undergoing the terrifying voyage alone each year on behalf of his people. They would pray for his success – hoping for his return with the sun in the spring.

Tonight is the night. Light a fire. Hold your family close. Set your intentions well. Be aware of your mind. Calm yourself and listen. In particular, do not wish for evil. I find that those who seek evil almost invariably find it. Take down that ghoul on your door and clean the fake blood from your fence.

For my part, I have invoked a powerful ancestral spirit this evening: I took the first fruits of the fall harvest and made borsch. Water, two onions, two stalks of celery, two cups of beets, a cup of carrots, a bay leaf, some miso, some salt. Simmer for two hours. Add another cup of shredded beets, a can of tomato paste, sugar, and vinegar and cook for 10 minutes. As it began to simmer, I thought of my mother, and her mother, and even my great grandmother – smelling the same smell at the same time of year. I like to think that they felt the same feeling and made the same soup for the same purpose.

I like to feel close to my ancestors. I love this time of year.

Serve with crusty bread and a strong wine, and raise a toast for the return of the sun, in six months or so.

Okay smart / beautiful people: Got another question.

I’ve had very own internet domain for quite a while now. For several years I’ve been with these jackasses. However, I glanced up recently and noticed that they are a truly odd combination of incompetent and expensive. So, I’m moving.

I have essentially free space in a data center, and I’ve got a couple of spare servers. I could run my very own email server. That, however, strikes me as a pain in the butt. Particularly in the spam-management department. So:

Question 1: Is it really that much of a pain in the butt to run your own email server?

Assuming that the answer is yes, we move on to question two:

Question 2: Who do you use for web and mail hosting? Do you like them? What do you pay?

Looks like I can get a reasonably full complement of web hosting services for $10 a month from the same people who provide my home internet access. Is that reasonable? Is this something that ought to be free? I just have no idea anymore.

Things are going pretty well in the “moving into the house” department. We’re, well, we’re moved in and the number of boxes is decreasing by two or three per day. I’m told that there are more boxes in the basement, but I’m not too worried about that. All things in good time.

My dad was up recently, and we had a great time. Smoked a stogie in Harvard Yard, and sat on my porch talking politics, among other things. Also, he came to Judo with me one night and was a real trooper through one of Jay’s usual insane workouts.

After my Judo adventure this evening, I can barely stand. It’s a good thing. I played hard all night, in preparation for the three tournaments that are coming up in the next four weeks. With any luck, my knee will stay strong and I’ll be back to competition for good. The third tournament is the Pan-Am Masters. North and South America, everybody over the age of 30. It’s gonna rock. I’m going to have one of those badass “USA” patches on my gi. It’s all I want, really.

Um, and it’s time for bed already?

Good day at work with NAME BRAND CORPORATION today. I had been fairly worried about it being a long and painful session because of REDACTED. It wound up being long, but not at all painful. It was simply the structured working through of a bunch of small but important issues. Honestly, I’ve rarely seen six adults actually act quite so much like adults for a whole work day. Nifty. Signed up for a bunch of deliverables and another trip in three weeks to wrap things up – and that ought to be that.

Reading Coders at Work: Reflections on the craft of programming which is a book that’s making me wonder if I was ever really a programmer. I mean, I say jokingly now that I used to be a programmer and now I write PERL. Still, as with many such things, he makes me realize that I fail on more than that one front. The outright hackers at the beginning of the book (jwz, and brad) give way to the more formal sorts of gods – ending with Donald Knuth … and I’m really neither. Still, it’s nice to hear that even the best programmers spend hours flailing at a perceived bug before realizing that they’re calling the wrong binary.

Now I’m on the train again, headed to BWI. Once there I’ll get a car and check into my schwank bed and breakfast. In the morning it’s off to do something totally different for NAME BRAND UNIVERSITY. On Wed we’re on to NAME BRAND MILITARY RESEARCH LAB.

Ah, my life. Sometimes stressful and sometimes a bit tiring … but I wouldn’t trade it.

Attended a beautiful wedding for an old friend, in Newport RI this weekend. I don’t think I’ve ever been to one quite like this … while every aspect was sumptuous, it was also understated and dignified. It was great to hang out with old friends – including robotify. Everyone’s life is proceeding along in its very own way!

Now I’m on a train to Philadelphia (currently sitting under New York City) to rent a car and turn around and go to just North of Trenton for a day’s work tomorrow. Could be sort of a long day. Not sure yet. Tomorrow evening, back to Philly, return the car, and back on the train to Baltimore. Tu – Fri I’ll split between customers in Baltimore and customers in the area. Finally, I’ll hop on Southwest and fly back to Boston. While there’s a lot of complexity to the plan, I think that each leg is simple and straightforward. We’ll see how it goes.

In Baltimore, I hope to catch up with _earthshine_, as well as with my siblings. I’ll be staying at one of my favorite little bed and breakfasts: The Inn At 2920. This is the place where they have a fishbowl in each room, and your check-in paperwork lets you know the name of the fish in your room.

My dad was up in Boston last week, and stayed with us in the new house. He went to Judo, like a trooper, and wore down a classmate 20 years younger than him. We also wandered to a bunch of museums and cooked an awesome fish dinner with capital_l and technolope.

In other news, the house is finally coming together. We have a fully functional shower – though it doesn’t have a door on it yet. Eventually, we’ll have one of those schwank frameless glass doors. However, right now a tension rod and a plastic curtain work just fine. Painters have a key to the house and will paint the bathroom and the laundry room in my absence. I love it when work gets done that I didn’t have to do.

In my head, I’m having an informal competition to come up with the headline that you *least* want to see over an article about you in the major news.

My current winner is: Incompetent idiot kills thousands

What’s your entry?

I think that my company’s structure needs some structure in order to stay cool without swamping us (me) in support calls. It occurred to me that many development teams use some sort of bug / feature / request tracking system. Broadly, instead of selling 10 more copies and struggling to stay current with support, I would like to sell 200 more copies and have a well organized system for improving the thing.

I googled around and read this, which seems pretty enlightened. I like the personal accountability aspect. If “all of us” own something then none of us is responsible for it. So I picked up a demo copy of the product he mentions, and I’m trying it out.

Turns out that my company already has three different solutions in use for this purpose:

* RT by best practical – allows us to funnel emails into a tracking system … where they tend to languish. It fails (from Joel’s article above) because: The golden rule is that only the person who opened the bug can close the bug. The programmer can resolve the bug, meaning, “hey, I think this is done,” but to actually close the bug and get it off the books, the original person who opened it needs to confirm that it was actually fixed or agree that it shouldn’t be fixed for some reason.

* Basecamp is a web based project tracking system that provides file sharing, email lists, and time tracking … but very little in the way of planning support. We’ve also sprawled out into like a billion projects for our seven person team … and I don’t think it’s recoverable without a forklift redesign.

* TRAC … which seemed like a good idea at the time, but it falls down in terms of being way too tied to “what line of code did you change” and less focused on “whose problem is this and when are they going to fix it? Again from Joel: Avoid the temptation to add new fields to the bug database. Yeah, look at TRAC for a great example of why.

Of course, the consultant part of my brain knows that any tool is useless unless you use it. There is no piece of software written that will “do my job.” All I want is a tool that will make the job I’ve already decided to do, easier.

So here are my questions for my smart and beautiful friends:

* What do you use for bug / feature / request tracking?
* What do you use for project management? Same? Different?

Another milestone, I’m brewing the first pot of coffee in the new house.

Maia discovered the basement, only three days after being relocated to the house. I was carrying stuff around and left the cellar door open. On the next trip I saw cat ears shifting down the stairs. I was like ‘ah, crap’ put my pile of boxes down, and went to retrieve her.

The core problem with cats in the basement here is that I’m pretty sure that we have at least one cat-sized hole that would allow a clever and persistent kitty to get out into the mean streets of Dorchester. Plus, well, dirty cat footprints on my comforter are not my idea of a good time.

When I caught up with her she was circling with her tail the size of a bottle brush and this look on her face like “DEAR GOD THERE’S ANOTHER WHOLE LEVEL TO THIS BUILDING! DON’T YOU PEOPLE REALIZE THE DANGER?!?!”

It was cute. Only moderate injuries were sustained when I grabbed her and hauled her kitty ass back upstairs.