revisiting: monday

i'm splitting these up. it's been a crazy week.

---monday:

i mentioned winter coming back for a visit - my windows have been open since the temperature began to rise, and in the middle of the night i woke up feeling frozen.

later i'd wake up absolutely exhausted. it felt appropriate to walk through the rain with folk and blues accompanying me. i was also accompanied by a little trepidation, because i'd received authorization for my south african holiday but megaman did express concern as company policy is not to take more than two weeks consecutively and not to take any holiday prior to CES.

as aota said, though: if it's been authorized, then that's that. i guess in my head i'm still under military conditions regarding holidays...

one of the interns invited me to go white water rafting this weekend - i wonder if it'll materialize? it does sound like fun...

there's nothing i dislike more than crazy last-minute fixes, and being informed that with the amazon server we now have access to metrics and that these metrics show our server operating at 100% cpu after we've already hit showtime... i was not happy. it didn't take long to find the source of the problem, an infinite loop that moonlighter wrote. funny story: i had trouble trying to find a way to perform the same logic using interrupts instead of constant polling, and after a lengthy search discovered that he'd overridden the default operation of the function he was using so that it specifically wouldn't use interrupts. by the time i made that discovery, made the change and tested it, it was too late to put it into production.

not - happy...

to make matters worse, the office had been going completely nuts right until the end of the day, and i was about to pay the price for bad delegation. i asked cls, who'd helped me test my fix by making an important fix on the client, to send out the email to inform megaman and the cto what we'd done. unfortunately, cls misunderstood and thought that we were modifying our production environment to match the testing, and the cto spent the next few emails (spanning a couple of hours) shouting at us for something we weren't planning on doing. no matter how many times i explained. he wasn't reachable by phone. the whole thing was pretty infuriating.

i wasn't feeling great, so i spent the evening cleaning up a bit and trying to write posts. copywriter, my mother and overclocker all made that last bit really tough.

1. copywriter told me, in a rather circuitous fashion, that making the sacrifices that i'm making in order to establish myself as canadian is the right thing to do. on the one hand, i didn't need him to tell me that. on the other, i did need someone to tell me that. by sacrifices we're talking about things like not studying right now, and not going to burning man, and not really focusing on my comics. that sort of thing. essentially, the sacrifice of working full-time as opposed to freelancing and owning my schedule.

2. my mother and i have established what's wrong with me! well, one of the things that's wrong with me, anyway. i have information ocd. that explains why i can't not update my blog, why i need to present myself (and you) with all the details of my days that normal people would simply gloss over. and why i feel terrible when a conversation goes one way without going the other, or why i have to get the whole thought out or prevent you from continuing your story without clarifying things that i can't assimilate. <see asperger's>

i made an enormous salad, grabbed a beer and settled down to watch loads of the it crowd. i needed the beer. i was just about to get into fixing my wraps when i got blocked: it appears that pg took the sewing kit i bought and left me with a different one, one that didn't have any needles in it :S

---something that occurred to me on saturday while listening to stories about our forebears travelling through the desert (for forty years): people who travel through the desert would have to become nocturnal, which would nicely explain why the jewish calendar is lunar, why the jewish "day" begins in the evening and why unlike most cultures jews consider the moon to be masculine and the sun feminine.

it's also easy enough to imagine that the whole blood libel story might have stemmed from the passover retelling of the painting of blood over the doors to ward off the angel of death. but let's ignore the blood libel aspect and return a couple of thousand years to when the jews emerged from the desert and into the land of israel. how quickly did they return to being collectively diurnal? would their enemies (or neighbours) not have found their nocturnal behaviour strange and begun to believe them to be nosferatu? could this explain their miraculous conquest of canaan?

just a thought.