I started working on Sunday, a week and a day ago. It's a (paid) one month trial so both sides can see if they are happy with the arrangement. I'm working as a Linux C++ server programmer for Emblaze. So far I'm mostly happy with the job.

On Saturday I met with peachuk and TDDPirate on the University Café close to my home. Peach has been visiting Israel and wanted to meet us (we met online on IRC and MSN Messenger), and we decided to arrange a meeting. Since TDDPirate is deaf, I brought a laptop from home to facilitate communication with him, but I couldn't turn it on after we met. As it evidently turned out, its battery was dead. (I was worried that my back will hurt from carrying it, but thankfully it still doesn't.). So we had to do with a pad of paper.

We ate dinner there and had a nice conversation. Peach seemed different in real life, than her Instant Messaging persona, and I was happy to meet TDDPirate again.

Yesterday was an eventful day. In the morning, I was dismayed to discover that my cellphone had a low battery, because it wasn't charged properly. Then at lunch, I accidently ate some fava beans at lunch, which I might be allergic to due to G6PD. So far, I'm OK, though.

Then I left work early to go to a Tel Aviv Linux Club meeting. When I arrived at the final bus station, I noticed that I could not feel my watch. As I discovered, its chain broke, but I still have both pieces at home. I attended the talk which was about open-source Geographic Information Systems, and included many nifty and visual presentations.

That's it for real life. Otherwise, the Mandriva Cooker Linux distribution at home, recently upgraded perl to version 5.10.0, which caused many software packages there to become broken because they relied on it being the previous version (5.8.8). I had to fix some of the problems on my system myself, while submitting or reporting them to the distributor for inclusion. At work I'm now using Ubuntu Gutsy, which has its own share of bugs that are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike the Mandriva ones.

One of the things that got broken was Website Meta Language, which is an HTML preprocessor I'm using for all my sites. I've hacked a quick patch to build it, but since now the GNU Autotools setup for it has also become broken, I've decided to ditch them in favour of CMake. So far, CMake seems nice, but I only really started with the conversion process.