It’s the OSCON time of year again. A couple of years ago I was in a hotel in Portland OR, coding up a KinoSearch implementation of Swish3. That was then. Two years later, Swish3 is really no further on, except that it has been largely refactored and is a much more stable, yet alpha, project.

Just remembering that tonight as I update the Perl bindings of Swish3 to use the new tokenization routines. It’s the kind of project that moves in fits and starts. I would have liked to have finished it years ago, but it would not be as good, since many of the refactorings I have made over the last couple of years have been the direct result of coding strategies I have learned in my $job(s) and other FOSS projects.

And I find I like my life this way, chipping away at building a better mousetrap while I sip New Belgium beer and listen to Robert Plant and Alison Krauss. Sure, it’s a sultry July evening, and my entire life occasionally floats through my mind like a grainy day at the beach, but hey: you only get this chance once, and building a better mousetrap is not a bad way to pass some idle moments.