Testing; Online appeals; Ambition

I haven’t even being doing much tech stuff over the last two or three weeks…

Testing

Well, that’s entirely false. I have a new job. A fulltime programming job. In Python. I only just escaped signing a "we own your brain" clause which would have meant that I would have nothing to say because it would be owned. But it was modified and I continue to own my brain during off-hours. And occasionally I will continue to use them for tech stuff.

Tech-wise, the brains’s been busy with thoughts about test driven development, which I’ve never really done before. But I’ve spent large chunks of the last fortnight updating tests to work with modified code. I’m beginning to wonder whether optimally some other programmer should always write the tests for your code. But this may be unsellable: it takes long enough to write tests for your own code.

Online appeals — a review

Andrew and I gave money to the tsunami appeals: Andrew to CARE Australia and me to the Australian Red Cross. (As a side-note, why I am so susceptible to guilt trips? I keep seeing "only ten thousand people have donated through Amazon!" guilt trips around and falling for them. Note to self: failure to donate through Amazon is not any meaningful kind of failure.)

Within one second of my provision of my CC details to those nice folks at the Red Cross an ‘official receipt’ email was on its way to me thanking me for my donation and telling me how the Red Cross is intending to use the funds. Nearly a week after donating to CARE, Andrew’s still waiting for them to actually process the donation and bill his card. (I rather suspect their online billing handlers too the Christmas-New Year week off…)

Ambition

It’s time I had some. I’m close to declaring 2005 to be the year of ambition, much as 2004 was an explicit break from it.