results, a confession pt 2

[... continued]

thursday:

uploading to youtube takes a loooooooooooooooooooooooong time. i don't know why. but almost an hour and a half regardless of whether or not other internet consumers are running seems a bit extreme, and the videos i'm uploading aren't particularly big...

the meeting on thursday morning was cancelled, so i stopped by my old office. i saw this on the way, and also went into the gadget shop to see if i could find something appropriate for pg's father's birthday.

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a strange idea occurred to me concerning traffic lights. i've mentioned them before: i suspect it might be a good idea to have intersections function as four-way stops when the roads have low load. traffic always seems to flow smoother when the lights aren't operative, and it's certainly less frustrating for the pedestrians.

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the head of the r&d team and i had a tense argument when i explained the problem i was attempting to solve with our task scheduler replacement. i'm using quartz, and my initial design included a fail-safe for the case when the scheduler fails. i'm not prone to assuming that other people's software will work... he assumed that any issues would be due to my code, and that what i need to be focusing on is finding whatever bugs i may have causing this.

fair enough - i need to profile and i hadn't thought of that. but i still suspect the quartz handler of not being in an ideal state.

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walking across the highway bridge to the bus stop made me think that israelis in general don't deserve the privilege of private car ownership. their attitudes and capabilities on the road are deplorable.

case in point: while i was waiting, a taxi pulled up and hooted. i glared at him, as he sat for a few moments before rolling his window down, and i approached him when he signalled to do so. i answered snappishly to his question, then asked him why he felt he had to honk the horn.
"what do you want me to do?"
"roll down your window and talk to me like a human being."
*funny look*
"you know it's illegal to hoot in an urban area?"
"ya, ya... "
"'ya ya', whatever, just cause us anguish."
i'm not sure that he drove off a changed man.

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i was so busy helping the stressed-out and confused old woman to get on the right bus that i forgot to get on with her until it was already pulling away. i ended up taking an egged bus, and i have to say that the experience was quite an improvement over the previous one.

work: a code review, which was overall pretty positive but required one minor change - a minor change that demanded a few thinks before i settled on a method. those few thinks gave me quite a headache :(

modx amazes me. not only does everything look and feel slick, but the fact that they dedicated the time to producing a decent package management system deserves respect.

on my way home i stabbed myself in the eye with an earpiece while putting on my sunglasses. that hurt for a while. then i got on a bus and had to wait for the soldier who was arguing with the bus driver about the legitimacy of the driver's request for him to either stop talking or to take his conversation to the back. on the second bus, also egged, i presented my card and the driver was presented with a code he was unfamiliar with. i didn't know either, so we assumed that it was the right one. i tried to call the customer service line on my way across the bridge, but got tangled up in their automated menus and eventually gave up.

on arrival, i had a quick coffee meeting with my boss and he explained to me why we need an immediate priority change. i would've begun working immediately, but the guy whose software was down had left already, so i returned to what i'd been doing before... and it was fun. by the time i left an hour or two later, i'd been excited and productive and i walked out quite satisfied with my week.

i felt *good*. like, *manic* good.

[continued...]