Imagine you work a regular job and at the same time you have a blog in which you talk about that work. Now that job evolves into your becoming a secret agent, sworn to secrecy and all that. Then what do you blog about?

Some might say that this is a HUGE exaggeration of my current working situation. Those doubters and nay-sayers would be right. Now I'm not a secret agent (I'm too short sighted), but I'm working on stuff that isn't ready to be public yet. So what am I supposed to talk to here, the blog of my work?

I can probably tell you that I am playing with a lot of data. More then I've ever worked with before. And let me tell you, when you are programming simple straightforward data manipulation code, and using simple straightforward shell commands like wc (counts words in a file) huge tracts of data make for long periods of waiting for me and thinking for my machine. It gets worse when running simple straightforward code with errors. I've lost a good couple days that way. Start a process running, go home, come back the next day to find it failed halfway through the night with nothing salvageable.

From this data, I can tell you I am learning some interesting things. There are, for example, a lot of bloggers!! Who knew?! I mean I always thought we were the only ones. Jon will be interested in my findings...just as soon as he gets back from Australia.