I mentioned recently that I was back working in corporate America, earning my living as a Java programmer. Part of the experience of returning is seeing what has changed and what hasn't. Today's topic is one of the unchanged things.

We have some fairly simple hand-washing guidelines in our home. You wash your hands after using the bathroom, before preparing food, before eating and anytime they get genuinely dirty for some other reason. Not too draconian. I think this shows I'm not some kind of helicopter parent who rushes in with the medicated wipes every few minutes.

It still amazes me that grown men can use the bathroom and then not wash their hands! (I don't use the ladies bathroom, so I have no data on how that demographic behave in the same circumstance.) Now, I'm not for paranoid levels of hand washing, but I am in favor of some, especially when you are interacting with so many co-workers.

After a financial challenge at the church this summer, I am now back to work. No details, sorry. There are some parts of pastoring that are not unlike the making of sausage or the passing of laws, in that you really don't want to watch what happens during the process.

The good folks at TeamSoft, Inc., here in the Madison area, found me a programming contract and I am now gainfully employed and have been for coming up on three months now. This is my third contract through TeamSoft and I continue to be very happy with them as a contracting agency. It doesn't hurt that they found me a programming opportunity even after I'd not written a line of Java code for exactly two years! That was impressive. The client, who shall remain nameless to protect the innocent, is actually one that I have worked at before. The Java programming community in this area is very small. There is a non-trivial chance that you'll either go back to a place or that you will work with former co-workers.

Converting back to being bi-vocational has been challenging. Especially doing so in the fourth quarter of the year when everything gets crazy busy in life, school and church. Sleep and family time have been the worst casualties. I typically leave a little after 6:00am and return by about 5:30pm, later if there are errands assigned to me by The Queen Of All She Surveys. Getting up early has never been my strong suite, so I'm really not on speaking terms with my alarm clock right now.

Let every thing that hath breath praise the LORD. Praise ye the LORD.

Psalm 150:6

King David had much to say on the subject of the Lord, as the known author of over half of the book of Psalms. The Lord had some important things to say about David. He was described by the Lord as "a man after mine own heart" (Acts 13:22), so it seems clear that David had either an acute understanding of, or a natural affinity with the Lord. Understanding this, when David speaks of the Lord, we would do well to listen carefully.

Our verse here is the final psalm and thus the last recorded verse of scripture brought to us by David. While the entire body of scripture by or about David is interesting, there is always something extra interesting about final words. It seems reasonable to expect the final scripture of David to be an important observation about God and I believe that David comes through for us powerfully here.

When learning a new programming language, and I've done this more than once, there are certain steps that I typically take in the process. I like to poke around the language web site and then read the getting started tutorials. If I like what I see and it fits my definition of an esoteric programming language, I'll install it and try my hand at some examples from the tutorials and the classic hello, world program.

These steps seem to be fairly normal for geeks like me and certainly the writing of a hello, world program is enshrined in programming lore and tradition. What is less clear is the recommended path to take after that. Some people complete tutorials, others buy books and work through them and then some dive in and work on a project so they can learn as they go. None of these are bad approaches, but I think that there needs to be something between working through tutorials or books and the big project for learning.

To this end, may I suggest the concept of Learning Projects? This involves writing a series of programs of increasing complexity that incrementally explore the capabilities of the language. I'm looking at replicating a select number of the traditional Unix tools, starting with the simpler ones and expanding from there.

The past week has been fun and satisfying. There were a few challenges, but the end result was good, so let's celebrate by recapping the good things with a selection of photographs.

Watching the Madison fireworks.