Programming Languages… what to choose next?

One of my ongoing goals over the last few months has been to learn some additional programming languages. At school, I used a lot of Java and C, with a very small smattering of C++ thrown in. I dabbled in Python and bash scripts, although this was more due to me needing to edit / support other people’s scripts than me writing things on my own.

At my internship during school, I got a chance to work on a lot of various pieces of Java. In my current job, I’m working with a fair amount of C# and Javascript (along with a few ASP .NET pieces). However, due to the web nature of the product, I have only touched just a small capacity of the .NET Framework.

I realize that I need to keep working on developing my skills, especially to save my butt in the economy today if my current job doesn’t pan out for whatever reason (I don’t suspect it will, but neither did employees of a lot of other companies). One thought is to continue working on other parts of C#, but I’m not sure if I want to run under Mono or not (at home, I have a MacBook Pro, and I’m not sure I want to run Visual Studio in a virtual machine, or boot up into Windows strictly for programming). I’ve also strongly considered picking up Objective-C (in conjunction with Cocoa), Python, Perl, and Lisp at one point or another. There’s plenty of more esoteric languages out there that I can try out too.

At this point, I’m not sure what I want to go with. I think I’m going to stick with a well-known language, but which one I don’t know. Once I figure it out, though, I’ll try to blog my experiences.

Movie Mini-review: 12 Angry Men

Great character movie. Must watch by all.

…ok, I guess this didn’t really need a separate post, but there’s not much else I can say. Not to mention my brain is a bit non-functional on a Friday night.

Book Covers

Just a quick note.

The book covers in the reviews are taken from a LibraryThing feed of user-submitted covers. It’s a simple way of getting them (without having to search on Amazon and either direct linking or storing), and it’s legal to do so. However, the images that are produced aren’t necessarily the highest-quality works, at least at the quality I’ve chosen to display. I might choose to change the size later on… stay tuned.

Mini-Review: Something Wicked by Carolyn G. Hart

Book: Something Wicked
Author: Carolyn G. Hart
Awards Won: 1989 Agatha Award for Best Novel

Third in the Death on Demand series, this book features Annie Laurence and her (as of this book) fiancé, Max Darling, in their attempts to figure out who’s behind a series of pranks being pulled on a local summer production of the classic play Arsenic and Old Lace. The pranks escalate to a murder (but of course; what would be a mystery without a murder in it?), and Max falls under suspicion. Annie works not only to clear Max’s name but to figure out who’s actually behind it all.

One reason I liked the book so much (like the previous ones in the series) is all of the allusions to other works. Annie works as a manager of a mystery store that she inherited from her uncle, so her deliberations about various clues are filled with references to all sorts of works from the classic ones to the  obscure (to me) ones. In addition, her store runs a monthly contest that gives a free book to the first person who can identify which mysteries are portrayed in five different paintings.

Summary: Good read if you like mysteries in the ilk of Agatha Christie or enjoy stories focusing on the theater. It’s not necessary to start from the beginning in the series, but the earlier two books are both excellent reads in the same style.

Snow

I’ve realized from today and this winter in general that snow is a lot more annoying when you have to drive in it. I left work at 3:30 today from work so I could avoid driving in the heaviest amounts of snow, but it still took a bit more time than usual to drive home in the inch of snow that was out there. I drove it in a few times during high school, but they were few and far between for a variety of reasons. During college, I didn’t have my car with me on campus. Thus, it’s just been right now that I’ve had to deal with winter traffic and with Indianapolis drivers in that traffic. Admittedly, most Indianapolis drivers seemed to be used to driving in the snow and take things easy, but… there’s always the crazy drivers who try to push the envelope.

Tonight as I’m watching Purdue play up in Madison, it’s still snowing out there pretty hard. Predictions are ranging anywhere from 3 inches to 12 inches (depending on who you watch / listen to), and I’m not looking forward to trying to get out in the morning with my apartment complex’s slow plowing process. Fortunately I brought my laptop home with me tonight so that I could finish up things from coming home early. As a result, I think I suspect I might end up sticking around here tomorrow and working from home. We’ll see what happens, though.