mcpantz.org

So here we are in 2009, and in between the hangovers and days off people are considering what they’d like to achieve this year.  I already accomplished my major goal (see last post), but there’s still much I’d like to do before I feel like I’m living a completely sane and productive life:

• I’d like to start working out again.  I don’t specifically mean getting pumped in the gym, but to get back into martial arts or somehow train myself  physically.  I’m not wasting away, but I want to make sure I still am in good shape.
• I want to be more of a polyglot, both spoken and computational.  I want to pick up Python and Haskell in the coming year, though using darcs, haskell’s community-standard revision control system, isn’t all that appealing to me.  Beyond that, I want a good excuse to start practicing my spoken languages again, as my German’s always been abysmal and my Spanish could use some polishing.  If I’m feeling particularly ambitious, I’ll pick up French; but that’s got a snowball’s chance right now.
• In addition to adding new languages, I’d like to expand my toolkit.  I worked as a web programmer for half a year a while back, and I’d like to re-vamp those skills in Perl so I can put things together myself, and actually work on the web projects I’ve had in mind for a while.
• While it’s certainly not a major issue now, I should be putting 15-20% of my take-home pay into savings.  I’ve got a couple recurring withdrawals set up to do that right now.

All in all, my goals are relatively modest, but I feel like that’s what makes them achievable.  Call me back in a year, and we’ll see where I am.

If I haven’t already given you an ecstatic phone call or instant message, then I should tell you that I’ve just accepted an offer from Zmanda as a design engineer. I feel really lucky with this; as I’m going to be working in my most familiar language (Perl) to make some fairly robust code user-friendly. I’ll be heading up a new project to investigate adding a new open-source project to our lineup; so I’ll be in a lot of murky waters, but it’s going to be a lot of fun to work with, and give I’ll have the opportunity to collaborate while being fairly autonomous.

I’m sure I’ll be blogging more about the crazy things I’m going to end up doing in Perl as a result. Object-oriented Perl is simple yet quite bizarre, so it’ll be an interesting experience to delve further into its depths. I also have a couple fun ideas for some perl modules, so keep your eyes open.

So I don’t know if any of you are familiar with Dr. Fun, but it’s a webcomic that I’ve been reading since i figured out what webcomics were. At some point in my college career I realized that the author was lurking around the basement of the Regenstein, the library at the University of Chicago, but I never went to go ferret him out.

It turns out that he’s directly my friend’s Dean’s boss, who this week gave me some old hardware they were not using. I met Mr. Farley, who was a quiet, enthusiastic geek; pretty much exactly like I envisioned him. he then showed me an original VT100.

If I haven’t already foisted it upon you, I decided to create a blog outside of the standard venues of Facebook and Livejournal.  I did figure, however, that I wouldn’t gain much traffic this way, so I decided to do the analog of Moodblast and ‘blog-blast’  to all four corners of the internet with my WordPress site.  You should be able to comment back with both other sites, but I suggest that you visit my main blog, http://www.mcpantz.org/blog/ .  Nothing’s stable at the moment, but I hope you come check it out to see how I’m doing.

Hello everyone,

My name’s Paul Mantz and I’m starting a public blog. I plan on putting my professional endeavours here; as well as my hobbies, interests, and other such things I may want public feedback on. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.