Part of my job involves once-weekly dealings with a website which requires user interaction every so often -- usually between 5 and 30 minutes. Overall, these weekly dealings can take anywhere between 6 hours and two days. As you can imagine, it's hard to get much of anything done when you're constantly having to stop whatever it is you're working on at nearly-random intervals and interact in a very exacting, meticulous way for 10-20 minutes at a crack.

So in my "down time" -- that lull between responsiveness -- I've been trying to get some stuff done which doesn't require long periods of thought. That's another way of saying "I browse the web while I wait for a slow website to respond". However, I've been browsing tech web sites and tutorials and so forth, looking for good stuff I can soak up in 10 to 30 minute sessions.

Another part of my (future) job will involve writing a lot of software in Python. So today I spent some time looking for a "Python for Perl Programmers" sort of site. I was trying to compile a list of things that I can do (like use exceptions) and can't do (like use the autoincrement operator) in Python.

During one such browsing session I came upon the one true definitive comparison between Python and Perl. And I pretty much had to stop working for the day right then and there.