For two weeks now, I have been an IBM employee. I have also just finished moving, and so the short story is that my life has been very busy. All things considered then, 3 weeks since my last diary entry can hardly be considered surprising.

Home life is good, great even, but takes some getting used to. We love the apartment: the move from a basement with little light and no climate control to a wide open, spacious apartment with frostbite-level air conditioning and a downright pretty kitchen has just been incredible. I have ordered in once in two and a half weeks, and even then it was more just to try the local wing joint than because I really needed to - cooking is every bit as rewarding as I thought it would be, and I am eating splendidly. :) We haven't started playing racquetball regularly yet, but we've played enough sporadically for me to know I'll enjoy it, and we've even gotten a semi-regular poker night going, so all in all, I'm pleased.

The getting-used-to that I mentioned is mostly getting used to working real hours. 8 hours plus an unpaid lunch, plus commute, can make a day feel pretty long, and make my home time feel pretty short, but I'm getting there - the nights are starting to feel less cramped - and having weekends all to myself, with no essays, with *nothing* overhead, is an unmitigated joy.

IBM is turning out to be surprisingly cool. Red tape is almost non-existant, which is simply unbelievable for a company this size, but there it sits. I am working pretty heavily with XML and Java, which is a happy place for me to be, and I'm doing some pretty fun stuff to boot, designing the tools that will be used to make a business 'e'. It's a bit jarring at first - you start to twitch because all around you people are spouting these buzzwords: e-business, XML (DTD, Schema, etc), integration tooling - and to be sure, some part of it is just buzzword parrotting, but a surprisingly large proportion of these people are actually using the terms because they're appropriate - they're using the technologies because it's the right choice to make, not because of the infamous phb factor - heck, my b doesn't even have ph! :)

Point is, work-wise, home-wise, things are pretty pleasant. Geek-wise, things are still a little too busy, and a little too still-in-their-moving-boxes for the geek factor to get going again, but it will come, and lord help me, a significant chunk of my upcoming paycheques will be feeding that geek fetish.