Oh, once there was a wicked, wicked man And Haman was his name sir, He would have murdered all the Jews, Though they were not to blame sir

Oh today, we'll merry, merry be Oh today, we'll merry, merry be Oh today, we'll merry, merry be And nosh some hamantashen.

I posted a link to this classic children’s Purim song, earlier this week.

The first challenging thought that forces itself on me: What makes us think that Haman was “wicked”? I’ve written before about Haman’s humanity. There, but the for the grace of God…

… or not so recently.

Perl and other programming stuff

Some of what I’ve been doing during my absence from this blog, and some stories I hope to tell in more detail both here and on my software-development blog:

• Tom Metro and I launched a new brand for our Perl project consulting: welcome to The Perl Shop.

• I gave a talk on Perl 6 benchmarking, for our local Perl Mongers group, in December.

• I also participated in the Dallas/Fort Worth Perl Mongers Winter Hackathon. I hope to write more about the experience, the reason I participated, and my data-deduplication solution, all on my SD blog.

• In the interim, I also happened upon a phone interview with a local company looking for real developers to do advanced JavaScript stuff. I imagine it's probably a really nice place to work, but I was left with a less-than-competent impression based on the interviewers displayed programming skills. That's yet another story, but it's also how most companies do programmer interviews. Brief lesson: if you don't mind looking like an idiot, feel free to follow what all the other idiots are doing.