Things that have kept me from blogging much:

1. Summer has finally arrived. This week has been sunny and warm, after several weeks of cold, windy, wet, distinctly non-summery weather. Add lots of evening light, and the result is one energized kid. Ingrid and I have been out on playgrounds in the evenings, cycling, splashing, running around. Today we went out after dinner and by the time I finally convinced her to go home, it was nine o’clock. She only fell asleep around 10.

2. I have experienced an unusual burst of energy myself, and spent a lot of time programming. I’m starting to actually feel comfortable with Ruby and Rails, and getting stuff done. It’s not a painful bang-my-head-against-the-wall experience any more. My expenses tracker can now do all the basic CRUD stuff, plus UI goodies like paging, sorting, filtering, plus importing from CSV.

Speaking of programming, today I also dove into Python at work. A tedious task landed on my desk, and of course I decided to automate it even though writing the script would take about as long as doing it manually. I happened to have Python installed already (a prerequisite for some tool) so that’s what I fired up. I’d never done anything in Python before but after half an hour I had it all working. Learning Ruby was a good warmup, I think: now my brain was well prepared for working with a scripting language.