vicissitudes

the first of the most important realizations from the past two days: the tablets that i was given on thursday appear to be wholly responsible for the horrific headache and ugly exhaustion that i suffered constantly for the past week. it had an enormous effect on my last two exams and made working unpleasant - and it was only yesterday morning that something made me open up etopan's list of side effects: dizziness, headache, stomache ache, bloating, nausea, diarrhea, constipation, vomiting, mouth sores, numbness and pricking sensation in the limbs and hypersensitivity to light. one... two... three... four... twelve... and muscles aches which were listed on the oh-god-seek-help-immediately list; i didn't take the pill last night and it feels like sunlight has burst in to my life after a week of clouds and rain. erm - surprisingly parallel to the actual weather, in fact.

thanks, doc. good one.

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wednesday:

getting out of bed was tough. it had to be done, though. i got up, braced myself spiritually as much as i could and headed off to meet with the head of the english department. i'm quite proud of myself for managing to control my facial expression after the shock of the velvet door, replete with velvet door handle - everything else was gaudy, but not too wild. i played a political game [read: didn't say anything completely tactless about certain hat-wearing italians, amongst other topics], and came out alright because i've been told not to worry about the british culture mark that's been bothering me, and i've at least been offered sympathy for the quantity of courses i took this last semester and for my financial situation. i even got to make a point or two regarding her teaching methods, but i'm fairly certain that's not going to come to anything too interesting.

otherwise - freud's instincts and vicissitudes surprised me with its elegance and rationality. quite unlike his other works.

i walked out of her office quite glad for having made the effort. on my way to the exit i walked past a woman struggling with an awkward cardboard box, and i offered to help her. it was no sweat for me, and she was so pleased she made a point of finding me a breakfast sandwich from the remains of an american studies gathering :P

i left campus electrically aware of the morning's beauty: a light mist all around, the sun gently blanketing everything and the cool air filling my lungs with freshness.

i went straight to work, where i sat for the next nine hours grinding out code, or thinking about open source idiocy* and feeling absolutely terrible, with a massive headache and painful tiredness. i found a better solution to a problem i'd invested a lot of time solving another way, and spent a fair amount of time on a mass undo. a bit bitter, but better than leaving in clumsy cruft. the other developer (bingo, i dub thee!) and i sat for a couple of hours on the tangled mess of versions and eventually decided to do things the completely wrong way. which is the only way, sometimes :S

* the open source svn. i'm all for software socialism, and i believe in open source. to be fair, i think that tortoise is pretty much on par with rational's clearcase. the difference is that the open source community has no excuses when building a product that serves other developers and mangles the basic idea. all those responsible for the fact that the merge functions aren't reliable and that one cannot revert easily to a previous version MISSED THE FRIGGIN' POINT OF AN SVN. and if we're already complaining about open source development for developers, eclipse provides a wonderful example of remarkable stupidity in that the gorram *plain-text* searches are difficult to run and are unreliable. i search, i find. i modify something unrelated. i search - gone. i can see the damn code. i SEE it. but i can't search for it. how hard is it to run a search?! a little professionalism, guys?! pretty please???

i left around 9pm, feeling the worse for wear. boy, was i surprised by pg when i got to her place - she'd made cottage pie! it wasn't perfect, but it was a delicious first attempt and i am well pleased ^_^

we watched the secrets (although unfortunately without subtitles for the french) and consumed a lot of marshmallows. it's becoming a thing.

thursday:

i slept really badly. the muscle aches i mentioned earlier in particular, and general restlessness. there was thunder, and rain. there was the reading of the etopan instructions like the exposition of a low budget horror. there was stopping by my place on the way to work and discovering that my patio's roof still leaks. oh, for the money to move around the walls of my apartment and fix that damned roof! i'll get there eventually :P

i picked up amusia from the post office, whose automatic queue number system always irritates me. i've come to pick up a package, so i mustn't press the button for "packages", but "business". wtf?! why???

the disc is brilliant, at least :)

i sorted out financial stuff when i got to work, and it appears that the army treated me a little better than i'd thought. i'm awaiting confirmation, but i can't be as bitter as i was a couple of weeks ago.

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i was in a hurry to finish the re-infrastructure project before taking a vacation, and i spent the afternoon becoming progressively more frustrated, and eventually angry, because our network was stressed and everything was infinitely more of a mission that it needed to be. i'm getting to the point where, just like in the army, i'm going to stop caring if i get my shit done because you can't be the only one on the field playing ball. i don't like that point. i've managed to get a lot of shit done in the last half a year, and i'm proud of almost all of it. i've even managed to train a fresh graduate to work smarter. mostly.

in order to test one of my function sets i compared its results to those of the present version; after clearing out a couple of bugs, i racked my brain for far too long before realizing that the difference was caused by a bug in the code i'm replacing :S

the slower the network got, the more problems i had with the evil svn, the more agitated i became. then the flash boss called me, and i'd forgotten about his habit of expressing far too much verbally. eventually i'd had too much, and i was in a hurry to begin testing, and we were experiencing office hardware problems... all very last minute, and i had to lose my cool before he indicated that he understood that i was busy and would send everything in an email. which he should have done anyway.

when i went to verify the testing procedure with bingo - thank you, officer's course, for teaching us to always make doubly sure that the instructions have been understood - i discovered that we'd had a rather serious miscommunication. halfway through my repeat explanation, i stopped to apologize to him for being curt - it really wasn't his fault that i'd had enough of the day.

my office farewell - my aspie co-worker and i were agreeing on the state of the nation when the manager on duty got pissed off with my presumptuousness because i didn't go through the school system in this country. it doesn't matter that i understand the situation second-hand, enough that my position was defended by other people in the room: in my opinion that's tantamount to saying that i don't deserve to be politically active because i grew up in another country. i sent him a message later to express my sincere hope that he wasn't too offended by the ensuing response.

it was one of those days, i guess.

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four fire engines passing by of a rainy evening? seems like they're trying to make up for the big one...

pg arrived at my place with empty luggage (!). we prepped for the evening, took the bus to levontin and arrived just in time for panic ensemble; a great show, but i couldn't gauge if pg was really enjoying it or not. from there we walked to the caliph, and walked a lot further than we should have because they super-intelligently have two signs at the entrance: the one with the correct address points away. fan - tastic. we were all walked out by the time we eventually got back there. the place looked familiar...

we'd arrived too early, so after chatting with a couple of friends we went to the main road to grab some food and eat it under an awning in the rain. by the time we got back the music had begun to warm up, and by the time pg decided she was way too tired it had gotten good. can't say i hadn't seen it coming, even though i'd told her that the idea was to be out until sunrise, but i wasn't going to send her home alone in the middle of the night from an area she's not totally comfortable with. with good reason.

t'was a long walk to the taxi rank, and i don't know what time it was when we eventually got into bed. i don't know how she woke up so early (before 11am!), and she dragged me out of bed so i could take my laundry to her place (she has a dryer, and i need stuff for the trip). after breakfast i realized that i didn't really have much to do aside from sleep and post, so once i'd gotten through the supermarket and eventually* gotten through to orange to sort out my phone for the next week i sat down to post. now to hang up the other laundry and get some rest.

* five minutes of "all our operators are busy so this may take a while, in the meantime you may as well listen to some advertisements for new phone models that have just become available" before getting to the menu system, dialling all my data, and then (still on the automatic phone system) being told i needed to dial a different number. i'm fairly certain they could've gotten to the point earlier.

(!) the second of the most important realizations from the past two days: we're leaving early tomorrow morning for austria! snow, here we come!!! ^_^

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exposing fraudulent psychics: genius :))

amusing stats: the best questions for first dates