You don't have to go out of your way to hate LGBT people to be a homophobe. Nor do you have to go out of your way to hate [random ethnic group] to be racist. For that matter, the fact that there are jokes about race or sexual orientation or what have you that are funny (if, perhaps, in a limited context) doesn't mean that all such jokes have an acceptable context.

For future reference - how to access the DOM from a Firefox extension.

So, work. I'm writing a Firefox extension (as the above link makes obvious) to automate web form completion. For whatever reason, the contractors chose to make that process as tedious and repetitive as possible, and we have a total of ~6000 PDFs to put into said form. I will probably be writing - or at least debugging - VB.net code soon (yeah, I know).

More interesting to those of you who are non-geeks: I'm doing avian flu planning. A mandate recently came down from on high to set up a system to track employee absence due to illness, family care, or "social distancing" (voluntary quarantine) during a future pandemic; bird flu is our model, but this could obviously apply to any such situation (including terrorist attacks, yes, but we're thinking of natural disaster-ish crap as well. Speaking of biological attacks, I found this to be interesting reading). We're doing it in Access (yeah, yeah, I know, but since we're assuming that 40+% of the office could be absent, making it self-contained is important), and we'll be generating reports saying who is out, what critical functions are understaffed, alerting alternates that the people they substitute for aren't around (in a three-deep succession plan), automagically generating a phone tree to disseminate information ("don't come to work", "you're a critical employee, report to the backup site", etc) and so on.

I do have to gripe a bit, though. Although I have Firefox installed, all of my usual tools are gone: I'm coding in Notepad, which only has one-step undo and no syntax highlighting; there's no CVS, SVN or other source code control system unless you're working in a specific department with their specific project; the question "what scripting language is preferred around here?" gets the response "scripting? Uh ... that's like VB.net, right?"; and we spend a lot of time dealing with silly workarounds (like my Firefox extension) because the low-bid contractors don't like us touching "their" CMS code, even when they're not actually developing it anymore. Kind of reminds you that in open source, people are doing this for fun; it gets done right or they go away, so things have a tendency to be done The Right Way.

Overall, though, it's a great environment - good colleagues, interesting projects, etc, etc. I'm definitely glad to be here (and not just in comparison to sitting on the couch watching Full Metal Alchemy at 3 in the morning every night).