New Year's Day 2000. Big whoop. But it is also a Saturday, and just as I'd planned for winter break, I am coding myself into a frenzy. The journal is now searchable! I wrote a Perl program to index it (ignoring words that are too short or in an exclude list), and a PHP search interface to the index (search term is highlighted in results). It's primitive, but fast and niftyneato! I suspect I will be hacking on journal-related code for at least a month or two; there is a lot to do before it will be feature-complete and significantly free of bugs.

I love programming. Why? I love writing, computing, and solving puzzles. It would be hard for me not to love programming. There is no better way to demonstrate deep understanding of a puzzle than to instruct an automaton to solve it.

Will I continue programming for the rest of my life? Yes, I think so. Solving puzzles never grows tiresome. Will I continue programming for the rest of my career? Probably not. There are too many other fields I find fascinating.