But I thought we were friends?

Been interesting, these last few weeks. 

At this new job, I'm having to adjust to a lot of stuff. Being an FTE is very different than being a consultant, for starters.

On top of that, I have a peculiar relationship that I'm not sure how to deal with. In the past, I've always made friends at work. I've never started a job where I would be working with somebody who I was friends with before working there. I thought, going into this, that it might be damaging, and I might have to just lose the friendship in the interest of keeping the work relationship sane. So far that is not the case.

However, communications problems and stress have a new and different depth to them when you find yourself thinking "but I thought we were friends?"
 
Also, working with a lot of very bright people. All of them have different styles of coding, and different styles of work. Sometimes feel like I'm contributing an out-of-round wheel to a previously working machine. This gets better as I get more familiar with the code I'm working on, and that leads me to the next thing I've been dealing with.

Work is challenging. I've been coding a lot in pl/sql (postgres), and of course in perl. But on top of that, I've been having to figure out how very complicated (and frequently entirely undocumented, even source comments) systems work. Asking people how said systems work seems to irritate them. So I find myself kind of "reverse engineering" stuff a lot.

That having been said, I took this job because I knew it would be more challenging than the position with the Navy. I just didn't expect it to be this challenging this soon. I kind of wonder if I'm being given more work, or harder work because I'm perceived to be more capable, or whether I'm just dense. Can't say I've ever felt that way before.

So, learning a lot. Code getting written at not quite a furious pace, but fast enough. I've already learned enough to rewrite a couple projects I have on my personal backburner, and I have a couple ideas for things I want to be writing:

• a POE::Component::NNTP with a corresponding POE::Filter::NNTP
• a POE::Wheel::IRC and perhaps a POE::Wheel::IRCBot (my closet hobby)

POE is at poe.perl.org. Explore it if you dare, you will quite literally never code perl the same way again. I've also been meaning to write a paper on natural language interfaces for IDS (eg snort) for possible publication in April of this year, in time for STOS in San Francisco.

Cats still in need of death therapy. More trash scattering incidents.