Surprise...
My parent's had come up to visit me these past few days. They left (or so I thought) early the morning of the 1st so they could be home so my younger brother (9) could get back to school the 2nd.
Today, I had to go over my fiance's aunt's house for New Years dinner. Loe and behold, what do I find, but my family there! Surprise! Not only did I not even know this was going to happen, but I come to find out this has been planned for about a month.
Oh darn...I was proven wrong. =)
Programming & open source
I work on proprietary stuff all day long. Most of my work involves credit card processing software, finance software, and basically anything that deals with money, and monetary transactions. It's a lot of work. Unlike a game or an email client that can have bugs (as in, if a bug is found, you really don't loose money), these programs force you to double and triple check everything.
It's nice that no money has gone missing. It's not really that difficult. Most programming follows the same pattern. After a while, you know what to look for, you know how to test. Bugs happen when you hurry, when you skip those tests. Or just because you are lazy. Most good programmers aren't.
But with all my work for companies, I want to do something for open source. I have contributed to PEAR, done a few things, but not much.
I am beginning to think I should write my own open source version of the software I write at work. It would be difficult though. I mean, I write it once, and either I take the code I wrote and open source it without the company knowing, or I rewrite it? I could ask the company to open source it, but knowing the company like I do, it wouldn't fly.
There is also the idea of starting the rewrite of the next version of the program on my own time, releasing it GPL, and then using it at work. Might work out.
Or I could be overthinking all this.