("and other vegetables" is a Hebrew phrase meaning "other random stuff". Any suggestions for an English alternative ?)

At work #1 I'm now doing something incredibly interesting. I'm coding a Perl script to watch (monitor) communications in a serial port, logging it to file with time stamps. Moreover, my goal is to monitor several ports simultaneously, to allow for full-duplex logging (we want to debug a protocol built on top of RS232 between two pieces of custom hardware).

To allow for the "simultaneously" part, I "use threads" and "use threads::shared" which as a couple provide a nice threading framework with shared variables, atomic locks, etc. Additionally, I employ Time::HiRes to make exact time stamps, Tk as a GUI and PAR to run it on computers that never smelled a camel.

And, as they say, when threads rain, they pour. At work #2 I'm also involved with some threaded code now (pthreads in C++ this time), as a piece of a largish component that connects a few programs on different machines - quite challenging.

If that's not enough, last night I helped my wife a little with her Operating Systems assignment, where they have to (hold your breath) modify the Linux kernel's process scheduler to use a different scheduling scheme. I gave her a hand with some debugging - weird stuff goes in the kernel, I tell ya. Lots of tasty Heisenbugs. Interestingly, I never thought that kernel debugging is the preferred Saturday-night time-spending of a married couple :-)

On the emacs front, I once again found a way to vastly increase my productivity. But I'm a tad more ashamed that I didn't find it before :-(

It's about M-*, the little magic that takes you back to where you jumped on a tag with M-.

Aahhh... had I found out about it a few years before... person-weeks of back-searching would be spared.