week flip

i'm cross-eyed and mind-melted and feeling tremendously uplifted from watching "het leven uit een dag". what a fantastic movie!

---yesterday:

i've come to the conclusion that if it's hot enough to rain instead of snow, it's too hot for me.

on the metro i stood next to a little kid crouched over a giant book of calvin and hobbes, and i wondered how a kid calvin's age appreciates him. i read a bit more of food of the gods, and once terrence mckenna got me considering the transition to agriculture as the fall from eden i got stuck in a downward spiral. his argument is stupefyingly logical and yields so many interesting and compelling implications that i find it hard to focus on any one aspect. i do believe that i need to list this book as a must-read, and i'm still near the beginning.

i sat in on a video conference, presumably to bear witness and nod sagely at appropriate times, but at some point in the middle there was a long pause, and then someone asked me directly what i thought. i kind of fumbled, because they were waiting to hear the answer to a question that didn't make sense. i think i side-stepped well, but it made me nervous.

i've been trying to build something for weeks and i've been distracted non-stop - yesterday, i finally completed it! and it was extremely satisfying. i could feel the stress that the week had begun with simply melt away, as if there was some sort of connection. the art director came to take a look, and i think that was the point where he decided that we think alike :D

i spent an hour with pg's photos, cropping and resizing them so that they'd be just right for photo-quality passport prints. then i hurried home to change and visit the printers at walmart.

did i mention rain? it was raining. it wasn't cold, though, implicit in the previous statement, so i put on my ski-jacket and relatively water-resistant pants, tucked my disk-on-key with the photos into a dry corner and my headphones into my ears, fast-walked to the metro and from the metro to the walmart.

i must have spent forty-five minutes with the guys there trying to print. firstly, my cellular internet sucks and it's even worse when i really need it. secondly, they will print almost any size except passport size. so if i want to print passport size, i'd have to resize the photos to pad them enough and then cut them back down to size afterwards. it was all rather silly.

this seems like a great time to point out one of the iphone's most remarkable flaws: if i close my phone while i'm reading a web page in safari, and i unlock the phone to continue reading that page, safari will attempt to reload it. even if i have no internet connection. that's the sort of behaviour that makes me want to step outside and find out just how far i can fling the phone.

having nothing better to do, and already being in that area, and wet, i decided to locate the dollar cinema. has google maps ever led me wrong? yes. do i have much choice? not really. so i walked under the bridge (it was really beautiful), and found myself in the medical center. google maps said it wasn't there, so i walked south before finding myself too far south even for google maps, and then walked back north to discover that the medical center was the right place after all.

great! he says sarcastically.

i went in through a different entrance and walked around the ghost-mall, never finding a single sign that so much as suggested at a cinema. i hit the dollar store for a couple of things, then headed home. the walk back seemed to take much longer, but that might be because it rained a lot harder and by the time i returned to the metro even my ski-jacket was beginning to soak through.

i'll be honest, though: i did enjoy walking in the rain.

i chatted with k-twang, whose troubles with canadian bureaucracy seem quite intense, and then made dinner. i'm fairly certain the salad would have come out better with cucumbers, but the entire pack was soft and mouldy. ugh. and to think i'd eaten one the night before - perhaps i shouldn't have let the softness slide...

either monday or tuesday the skin in front of my thumbnail split, and it's very much like a cracked heal: it hurts like crazy, and it's lekkerseer, and it's just not healing :(

---today: wednesday: how the heck is it wednesday???:

it occurred to me this morning that my while my statements that got me into trouble on monday night were valid apropos general psychological troubles, they weren't so valid regarding autism. because autism really is a disease. umm. as far as regular humans are concerned. umm. it's debatable. anyway, i think i need to mention my hesitation to the doctor i was trying to discuss it with when my uncle got upset.

i can tell exactly at what point my day got good - as i was getting ready to leave i was compelled to open the glove box [sorry, i had to]. the gloves cost me more than i expected, but still far less than my old ones, and holy-crap-they're-great-gloves-and-a-perfect-fit!!! that's very, very exciting, by which i mean that i'm greatly relieved that i have such a good excuse to keep them and not regret having to sell them off after all i went through to get them.

i sat with the art director this morning to discuss icon design; the concept art that he produced off my little script was nothing short of astounding, and if the big boys like it i'll get my name tagged as "copywriter". i like the sound of that :)
on a different note, icon design is complicated.

"there aren't a lot of guys like you," he told me.
"well," i responded, "i guess we need to make some more!"

after he invited me out to a great little indian restaurant next door - i ate far too much - aota got focused on my permit application while i essentially backseat-drove. that woman is an absolute blessing, i tell you: after a back-and-forth with all the bureaucrats and my personal information, she discovered that for various reasons i'm exempt from everything except the application that i've already made! win!!!

i might still have to go to new york, but we're not sure, and there's actually the possibility that i'll be sorted out and can start working in one or two weeks' time! hooray!!! now i just need to make a good impression on the officer at the border crossing. i considered taking him doughnuts, but if i was him i'd grab the doughnuts and kick me out.

it fascinates me how, in jobs-speak, i can connect the dots and see how important every little step along my way has been. from the trial-and-error svn abuse that i went through with -someone to the git expertise i gained from the tail end of my last job i have become a repo-master. this is a very good position to be in indeed. also, the junior came to sit and discuss his future plans, which involve running a gaming company. as i've told him, when i have a say in things i'm going to want each developer to dedicate a portion of his time to building apps that we're going to use ourselves, and it doesn't matter if they're tools or games. we kind of got side-tracked and i pitched the idea i've been sitting with for about twelve years now (inspired by neal stephenson - snow crash and johnny mnemonic), and the thing is is that everything is not only doable and has been for decades, but it's now so simple and feasible that it would be silly not to do it!

i spent an hour or two going through open-source solutions to see if i could find anything interesting, established my next goal and then left to come home. since lunch i'd been suffering a bit of a sore belly, and it intensified to the point of agony as i travelled on the metro, then relaxed just before i arrived home.

*sigh*

how is it so late already? all i did was watch a movie and write this!

---my favourite part of the form i need to return to hydro-quebec:

important information to ensure the safety of our meter readers
your file indicates that you do not have a dog.