Author: cdwan

Today was relaxing. Started with apple pancakes, the finally fixed a drawer in the kitchen where the support had fallen out of the middle. Installed the new attic window … learning, along the way, that windows are always a little bit smaller than the specified size…so you have to shim them. Strange. I’ve gotten to the point with this whole home repair thing that I just keep a small pile of scrap wood, since you always need to shim, adjust, replace, or otherwise fix something or other.

Took some pictures of the birds loitering on my feeders. Today, I saw the usual assortment of finches, plus: A chickadee, a nuthatch, a tufted titmouse (huh huh huh…), and a downey woodpecker. I think that most of my pictures suck, but it was fun to stalk them.

This evening, I’m savoring a bottle of the Dogfish Head “Liquor de Malt”, which comes in a distinctive 40oz container. It’s an all corn brew, with no discernible hop character. We watched the first disk in the “Firefly” series, and I finished the game “Time Splitters, Future Perfect.”

Started reading Kurtzweil’s new book: “The Singularity is near.” It’s nice to read someone who’s futurist ranting is more hardcore than mine. He’s very optimistic about the fact that “The intelligent machine is the last invention that humanity ever needs to create.”

I read The Pain comics regularly. This week, in his “artists statement”, he includes a nice little thought:

she had a fish who lived in a little fishbowl on her wiindowsill. The fish could see vague, refracted shapes sliding about outside the bowl. Once a day, fish food would rain down from the surface like mannna from Heaven. These were pretty much the sum total of facts Sandi’s fish could observe about the universe. She figured her fish had about as much chance of deducing that it was being kept in an apartment in Baltimore, Maryland, in the United States of America on the planet Earth, and of gaining insight into Sandi’s personality, as we do of ever understanding our true place in the universe or the mind of God.

That’s pretty much how I see things these days.

Additionally, all must hail Rasputin the escape rat who swam nearly half a kilometer over open ocean to elude capture, and traded his life in the end to dine on penguin. Perhaps the first rat to do so.

In which I risk life and limb to get my car back

Week from hell is over. I’m done. Baked, broiled, fried, cooked, toasted, sauteed, braised, and quite possibly docile enough to serve raw with a light teriyaki sauce on a bed of seaweed. In other words, the turkey timer has popped, the bell has rung, the time is elapsed. Stick a fork in me, I’m done.

Tomorrow, I help a friend write some software. Tonight, I sleep, before I succumb to the viral particles surrounding me in the air. Yeesh.

I have been invited to a costume party.

While I have a habit of showing up to these things in ordinary garb, laden with smart-ass attitude (my costume? I’m pretending to be one of you) … I thought that it might be fun to go all out this year. In the spirit of openness and honest curiosity, I’m looking for suggestions. My ideas so far:

* A bottle of beer
* A penguin

Both of those seem like full-body, lots of work, very sweaty ideas. I’m looking for other thoughts.

Class went well yesterday. A decent time was had by all, and then we took the class (those as wished to go) out to Legal Seafoods. I had oysters and really freakin’ sweet tuna. Oh, and beer. I had that too. Then, since it was about 9, and the next train to Providence was at 10:40, I took the green line out to technolope and capital_l‘s place, where they kindly inflated the air mattress and let me crash. It’s good to have friends.

Today, I’m feeling a bit gritty, crouched in the machine room again. Looking forward to bailing out of here and heading home.

I was having some seriously weird dreams about sitting on a park bench, conversing with a couple of Koreans who were on the adjacent park bench, all of us in our bathrobes. They spoke rapid fire Korean, and I was speaking some other language. I think it was Japanese. Anyway, it seemed to be a pretty cool conversation, even though I couldn’t understand it.

At last the week from Hell draws nearer to a close.

I really don’t know how you people who have to go in to the office every day do it. How did I survive this, back when I did it? The alarm clock every morning? Hustle for the train … fight traffic. Man, it’s no wonder we’re so messed up. Look how we spend our days.

Today I teach my class on The Software. We rented out the meeting room at Tech Superpowers, and I dropped my slides off to be made into booklets at the Kinko’s on the way there from the Back Bay station. Supposedly, I’ve got 6 people showing up. Should be a fun class. It’s material that I know, cold, and these are the people who immediately said “yes please” when we offered the class. Each attendee gets their very own cluster instance to customize (under my tutelage). With six people I ought to be able to free form it, pretty much all day.

I’ve even got a colleague hanging out in the machine room at BDC to power cycle any of my example machines that get so badly hung that they become non-responsive … and we’ve supposedly got coffee and pasteries showing up at 8:30.

The only other news is that I tested for my brown belt last night. About a year and a quarter into this karate training, it’s starting to be a substantial amount of material to remember all at once. It took almost 20 minutes to run through it all at full velocity. I don’t think that the guy on whom I was demonstrating this stuff had a very good time of it. He was bigger than me, and my teacher kept telling me to hit hard and take him down vigorously.

At this point, if history is a guide, I remain a brown belt for a year or more. This involves relearning all the techniques left-handed, and approximately doubling my store of forms and weapons. Should be fun.

He’s also been letting us use the “speed bag,” which is a trip. Punching a fast moving object is building whole new neural pathways in my mind.

I should take a nap on the train. I may need it.

Update: Door was unlocked at the place when I got here. Met the owner, good stuff. It’s going to be a good day.

I wish I was this clever. That’s the argument I’ve been trying to get to stick for a couple of years now. Problem was, my analogies were too weak. I used things like “looking both ways before crossing the street,” instead of kneecap breaking.

As I stumbled out of the Back Bay train station this morning for a breath of real air before clambering down onto the T, I had a realization: I’m living the dream. It’s my little dream, but I’m living it.

• I live within striking distance of Boston, and I get to work in town enough to enjoy it, but not enough to hate it.
• My job is cooler than I ever imagined a job could be. It’s exactly that old guidance counsellor thing: Find a way to get paid for doing things that you like to do.
• I own my own little house, with a garden. The stuff I have is as nice as I need it to be.
• I know how to do things … more things than I would have guessed. I can cook, and I can build a supercomputer. I can identify birds, and I can make beer.
• I’m 30 years old, but my mind isn’t fading, and my body hasn’t (knock on wood) shown any propensity for falling apart or failing in a catastrophic manner.
• I’ve been around the world, and I’ll almost certainly do so again.

All of this struck me at once and made me profoundly happy, on a cool and crisp fall morning.

Spent my day wrestling operating system images onto computers. In between that, I yelled at customers. Okay, I yelled at a hardware reseller who seems absolutely determined to provide their customers with a non-functional system. At one point I snapped and asked why, given that he had gotten to a working system, he had felt the need to change a bunch of OS settings after that.

“I wanted to clean up.”

Gaaaaaaaa! The mess *is* the knowledge that we spent hours building! Only profound N00bs believe that “cleaning up” code makes it better. Debugging, optimizing, tweaking … all of these add to the “not totally clean and simple” factor in your code. Only refactoring (essentially, stepping back and rewriting a portion of the thing from scratch) can sometimes yield “cleaner” code. However, then you have to effectively debug a brand new system.

It doesn’t help that the customer has a drop dead date of tomorrow for “in production” use of the system.