an interesting (and very long) thursday

with a repeat performance due to a blue screen of death

i made inspection on time again, and discovered that shaving one's head lends a new aspect to wearing the beret. styling.

i finally got through stage one in updating my personal details in the army. they can't possibly screw it up any worse than last time... or can they? i'll be tuning in next week, for more hilarious moments. then i'll be tossing my television, and buying myself a good book.

worked a bit in the morning, then prepared for inspection by our unit commander.

the inspection was going just fine, until the commander of our wing noticed that i've written "clerk" (in hebrew - the army euphemism for "janitor") on my name tag. in front of the unit commander, i was loudly and aggressively upbraided (aka screamed at like a dog who's peed on the persian), and shamed our section commander by attempting to defend myself - truth is, it IS my official job title.

i was threatened with being assigned a real janitorial position.

wunderbar.

so i spent the next part of the morning running around organizing name tags.

worked a bit more, then had a solidly aweful lunch. got back to work, and then spent the rest of the afternoon dealing with the section's mascot fish. which entailed buying a new cleaner fish, and cleaning out the aquarium.

t'was fun, but disgusting.

also continued reading neal stephenson - the diamond age, and now that i'm near the middle it has become absolutely fantastic. literally :) i got so stuck into a fairy tale i almost stayed late.

i bussed through to herzeliya, having a long, arb conversation with one of the "clerks" from the quarter-master's store (we call it supplies.), and then some guy from my algorithms class. and then i got to the bank.

i spent about 40 minutes in the bank, they've finally agreed to look into sorting out the amount of money they owe me. that's extremely nice of them. i'll be sure to be holding my breath.

*holds breath*

right, nothing magical happened. surprise.

i walked through to my boss's place, and began working on the urgent bug. a few months ago i wrote some code related to it, treating the previous "author"'s code as a black box. the problem was somewhere in there, where it turned out he'd written code that required an enormous amount of processing power (multiple recursions and logic bombs), inside a DATABASE.

genius.

so i figured out how to replace it all with simple code, by adding a kilobyte to the data stored. hmmm.

only problem is, i forgot about the code i'd written, and spent over an hour simply figuring out that what i'd changed worked, and was correct.
that's very frustrating.

i left at 22.30, and got home at 23.30. i've been reading orson scott card - ender's shadow on the busses... i quote:

"i have never found it surprising that ... speaker for the dead, xenocide, and children of the mind - never appealed as strongly to those younger readers. the obvious reason is that ender's game is centered around a child, while the sequels are about adults"

no, dude. it's because the sequels suck so badly that they're barely readable. they're total crap, and demonstrate nothing more than an incredibly naive and childish comprehension of basic human relationships and social functions. which is why you should stick to writing from children's perspectives, 'cause at least you can get that more or less (with the help from our friend, suspension of disbelief) right.

i quickly changed, still smelling sweaty and gross, and got picked up by our friend the section civilian (OFTSC). we drove through to a cool party (last night celebrated the fact that tel aviv kicks ass. officially.), with great music and superb calamari. i thoroughly enjoyed myself, dancing along to music from funk to salsa and back, until about 2.30am.

and then i wanted to see the other events. by the time i realized the guys weren't going anywhere, it was 3.30, and i walked to the balcony. sucky kiddies party, i was most disappointed. the rest of tel aviv was pretty much dead, so i walked back home.

gonna shower, shave, crash, then go to the kibbutz. ah yeah. sod the plan to rent a car, i can't be bothered.