Sheetrock's Journal: Hello world

I suppose I'm writing to procrastinate finishing my current software project, specifically the transitory period from the last chunk of new code being added and the first chunk of testing. Testing your own software of any reasonable size has always struck me as comparable to washing a pan full of silverware or assembling an office chair, a soulless task that one is nevertheless forced to undertake in order to sit down comfortably and eat like a human. This project defies unit testing without completely denying it, dangling the possibility of efficient and consistent error-checking in my face with the sure knowledge implementing such a system would in this circumstance be far more trouble than it's worth. AJAX may be pretty but it's also the third greatest atrocity the world has ever seen.

Lately I've been on a reading binge. Rather, I've fit it in amongst my other binges/benders. I'm pushing through a number of different sci-fi and fantasy series that I read long ago, just buying whole trilogies+ at a block where I can so that I can maybe find out where things wind up. More often "wind down" is the more appropriate term, given the propensity of authors in this genre to write a series till they can't. It's been interesting to reread some books for style and with a new perspective.

If I may make one request of now and future authors, tucked safely away in this journal entry where no one will ever see it: if you must proselytize, can you try a light touch rather than a cram down the throat?

I've just made it through all of the Ender books, Ender's Game -> Ender in Exile. I'd finished the first four quite a while ago, then as part of the aforementioned binge decided to go the next five. I don't know what happened to the author in the intervening timeframe, but he LOVES the word "babies". So much so that not only does the plot revolve at one point around finding stolen babies (fertilized embryos, specifically, but as we all know and agree life begins at conception), but the topic of "making babies" comes up frequently and in verbally jarring fashion:

"We really don't want to have to start all over, making babies."

"I want you to help them make babies that don't have any of the father's gifts or problems."

"Lie down with one of our young men, or one of our old ones if you want, and make babies."

"...and what would happen to her plans for making []'s babies then?"

These are all in the same book! Don't get me wrong, I'm not against reading different perspectives, but in the age of the cheap thesaurus this just felt inelegantly done. If you had told me halfway through Lord of the Rings that it was an allegorical protest of industrialized farming, I never would have believed you.

At any rate, it's good to be back reading fiction. I've been hoping for a while now that the e-ink readers would come down to Earth so I could roll through Project Gutenberg, but until then used paperbacks will do.