an awaited long weekend

last night:

the pilot episode of star trek: the next generation was interesting (although the psychic character was just tedious), but what really captivated me was trying to catch riker sitting down.

i managed to get into bed early. i needed it.

---it was a good morning, sunny and with me feeling considerably less stiff and sore. as i sat down on the metro, i noticed that the girl next to me was sketching. after furtively glancing at her page and ascertaining that i liked her work, i thought about asking her if she'd be interested in working with me. i believe that bothering strangers in a closed space isn't cool, so i didn't, but then i thought about how these are the kinds of opportunities that might turn out to be really good, and then i thought "no, you can't do that" and then "really? are you really going to do this?"
by that stage we'd passed three stations, and i was running out of time. "sod it," i thought, and i popped out my headphones and said "excuse me" in my most casual voice.

my gods, she literally jumped out of her seat with a frightened squeal! i hit a 10.0 on my awkward-o-meter, and quickly apologized for scaring her. i then asked if she's currently working on a project, and she told me she's working part-time on a video game for one of the big companies. i asked if she'd be interested in working on comics, she asked me if i had a card, i babbled about arranging a meeting and she told me she'd send me her portfolio. nice!

we then proceeded to ignore each other for the rest of the ride, except to say goodbye with smiles. i'm so proud of myself for taking the chance :)

---i got in to a bit of a nightmare. the first part was what appeared to be a ddos attack on one of our servers. the second part... have i mentioned hating mysteries? two of our servers, one local and one remotely hosted, both completely disconnected, began to exhibit the same really strange behaviour. when we finally established what the foundation of that behaviour was and were even more mystified, everything went back to normal. wtf?

the rest of my day was spent managing, with one incident of my having to take a developer aside and instill in him a real fear of not using the tools we have to keep our codebase sane. i felt bad for him, but when we got up he thanked me and assured me that we were playing the same game. the others are beginning to work in a more disciplined manner, which makes me feel successful. on a similar note, i had a lot of dealings with imperieux today and things between us are fine, so i'm glad and fortunate that yesterday's unpleasantness didn't stick.

megaman told me that he had no issues with the holidays i've been planning, but that he finds it really weird that i'm so pedantic about logging my hours that i know precisely how many over or under i am. on the one hand, it would be easier to do as he says and just log eight hours a day regardless, but on the other... i feel like my knowledge gives me a certain amount of leverage when asking for a day off here and there and it's good that my information ocd is served :)

kickboxing tonight was good, but my arms still felt heavy and my punches mostly sucked. i worked really hard, though, and i definitely had fun!

it's now past bedtime for those of us who have to be up super early to get on a bus, and i've still got to pack. but it doesn't really matter. i can sleep on the bus :D