My brain is going to explode

I've been watching these videos on the Ruby object model and metaprogramming. 4 screencasts in, and I think I need to nap for a good 20 hours before I can fully comprehend just how obscenely dynamic this language is. No wonder metaprogramming is slow.

Unfortunately, I'm still a fair bit behind. Computer died a week and a half ago, so that put me a week off from where I wanted to be as I ordered and then worked at reconfiguring a new one. She's a beauty, but it was still more than a bit of a pain (thank-you Vista, for not playing well with Grub, and thank you, Ubuntu 8.10 for not having a functioning partition manager). As a result, I'm still only vaguely familiar with how threading proper works in Ruby. That's not so bad, though, as I think there's a strong likelihood I'll be looking into JRuby and using Java style threading (and thread pools) in an effort to improve performance in that area. Still hoping to have something working before Easter...but we'll see. 2 weeks after break isn't much time.