Blackmoor Vituperative

Day four of week four: almost halfway there. Still in Richmond, still living in a studio apartment. It pretty much sucks. I miss Susan. I miss my cat.

The Capital One gig is not a bad job at all (I’m not forced to use a damned Mac, for example). Like most contract jobs, the work itself is pretty easy, and the people are all competent. I would prefer to have more responsibility, though. On the bright side, the system I am working on runs Unix (HP-UX B.11.00, to be exact). On the down side, bash isn’t available: the only shell available is one from the 1980s called “korn“. I am not a huge fan of korn. Bash rocks. Long live bash. (Curiously enough, bash was written in part as an alternative to the proprietary korn shell.)

Incidentally, I mean “from the 1980s” literally: this is not the 1993 version of korn shell. This is the 1988 version. If the 1993 version were available, at least then I would be able to remap the keyboard so that the cursor control keys (left, right, up, down, home, end, page up, page down) would work. Not having access to the standard keys that we all take for granted is a little tedious. I can still do my job, of course, but I am not quite as productive as I could be, and that sort of thing bothers me.

It also doesn’t help that I’ve been fighting the flu for over a week. Being sick sucks: it muddles my thinking and makes me short-tempered. At least my nose isn’t running: I am just coughing all of the time. Hopefully, the worst of it is over. I think I’m getting better. I hope so.