I survived the layoffs at Loudcloud. I'm hoping this is an indication that I'm a valuable member of the team and they want to keep me around because of my great contributions. However, it's always possible that they kept me around because it's always nice to have someone around who you can say "Gee, I'm glad I'm not in his shoes!"

Ruby coding goes well. It is so nice to have a language where I don't have to jump through hoops to get things done. I had thought Perl was the best thing since sliced bread, but (to quote an acquaintance of mine) "My head has stopped hurting." Being able to use objects to get rid of iterators (to a very large extent) and just using code blocks wherever I need to is an incredibly cool thing. Perhaps I just didn't know what OOP was until now, but if this is it, I'm sold. You had me from myArray.each {|x| do_some_cool_stuff_with(x)}. Using end instead of braces to denote code blocks is a little wierd at first, but I've gotten used to it pretty quickly.