Lost in OK

There isn’t really going to be too much to this travelogue on board a train thing as far as I can see, but I’m writing them anyway. We continued on into East Texas as the sun slowly begins to set. As much as I’m enjoying train travel, I should advise those looking for beautiful scenery and general quaintness to look away when pulling into a town. For some reason, people of means don’t seem to want to live next to the train tracks. However, I have discovered that there is a whole plethora of categories that can be applied to the generalized concept of “junkyard”. Treatise forthcoming . . .

Well, if you haven’t already guessed, I’m on vacation. I don’t think I have ever needed it more either. I was feeling about as burnt out as I could for the last couple of weeks and I needed to get away from all that has become routine. I decided to head off to Chicago for a couple of weeks, see old friends and generally forget about work as much as possible. I’m taking the most leisurely form of transportation that I can, the train, which is really quite wonderful. I had a nice roomy coach seat from Oklahoma City to Fort Worth. It was a wonderful journey through the plains, grasslands and the ancient Arbuckle Mountains. Now I’m resting quite comfortably in my small but quite reasonable sleeping quarters.

Well my brain has the consistancy of jello. I’ve spent the whole weekend caught in a whirlwind of architecture and code. I have a project that needs to be well underway before I head out on vacation this week and in a non-manager style pledged to do my bit. This involved me writing some actually tough code that took me back in time so to speak.

I had recently been commenting to a collegue that it has been a long time since I used any of that knowledge that was so stridently fought for during my undergrad years. Outside of the very rare recursive function most have that knowledge has retreated to the far regions of memory. However, tonight I got to write a slightly modified version of quicksort that orders a set of keys from a hash table based upon their respective values. I have to say that there was some high elation that sprung forth as I dredged this knowledge from my unconsciousness. Kind of nice to know that I actually learned something in college and that it occasionally applies to a suit like me.