a week to reflect - i

let's see if i have what it takes to summarize this past week. it's been a bit nuts.

---work:

when the network goes down i become my own email.

...

ceh caught me when already really tired and droned on and on about things that don't interest me to the point where my vision blurred and i was struggling to stifle my yawns. all i wanted to say was "i don't actually care, can we just finish with the work?" but he's a bit nuts and i didn't want to upset him. the cto already complained about walking past his cubicle and finding him repeatedly and violently slamming his keyboard on the desk...

...

we have a new front-end developer who lacks in experience and education but makes up for it with enthusiasm. unfortunately, that cost me a good hour or so trying to explain how svn works. it was emotional.

during happy hour yesterday we were playing lunch money and really enjoying it. one of darn's developers asked for suggestions when playing a "humiliation" card. we'd gone with pantsing and a wet-willy before, the last thing we were expecting was for the new guy (creeper) to ask "how about fingering his asshole? that'd be pretty humiliating!"

we were all stunned. he's tying with ceh on inappropriate things to say to co-workers.

...

last week we said goodbye to our interns and one of our star players; i handled the exit interviews. it's nice to close a term on a positive note in both directions!

...

at one point during the week i needed to get stuff done and was told to work from home to avoid distractions. unfortunately, that meant leaving darn in charge and that's a recipe for disaster. what actually happened, though, was that i spent hours at home trying to decipher one of darn's developers' code (he's a great coder, but not into readability) while unable to use our software or development tools because mac.

i have been suffering my macbook since february and i can't believe i've lasted this long. i returned to work, interrupted darn sharing his opinions on a technical issue he wasn't familiar with, and spent a few hours configuring a new windows machine. i'm now off mac, all that's left to do is wipe it properly and return it to the company. the new machine has shitty battery life and i'll miss mac's touchpad, but otherwise it's perfect and lets me get shit done!

...

overall this past week has been unbelievably frustrating and demotivating. darn has not only been a right prick (i've actually felt like hitting him on more than one occasion) but he's been sidestepping me and keeping me out of the loop. he and the two developers megaman brought in have done a bang-up job of forming their own private team. moonlighter and the cto are still into secrecy and merging surprises into our codebase. i don't have the energy to deal with this kind of shit.

newk'd has been disappointing of late, considering that we're friendly out of the office i felt bad dumping on him when he didn't perform. having said that, it's not like he's not trying and there are some things he does very well. when i told darn to get him to do one of those things, darn responded with "he's not credible". not only was that absolute bullshit, he said it in front of a new intern and that's not cool at all.

during crunch, there were days when i was in the office for more than eleven hours. in order to train and spend time with scrapper i was going in early, and there were a couple of late nights. since the arrival of darn and the institution of arbitrary deadlines i've found myself entirely uninterested in investing more hours in the office. it's actually become quite depressing. yesterday we demonstrated our progress and everyone was very excited, but leaving the office i found myself thinking about how disconnected i feel and wondering how much i've actually contributed to the current project. the hours i spent on development were mostly spent struggling with the environment and not actually coding, and most of my input has been in advising others or working on the tool chain. darn's developers are good even if they're not amazing, and they're at least getting shit done.

not only is this all not particularly fulfilling, but it doesn't amount to much when quantifying my involvement in the project. i'm not satisfied at all.

[continued...]

gir's in the house!

how is this possible?! how can it be half past midnight as i write this? online dating websites take an inordinate amount of time, as does preparing food and getting started with awesome crossover fanfic. it involves gir, that's all i'm saying :)

---today began with a much better wake-up than yesterday. i was still tense from yesterday, but aside from an unprofessional slip or two i managed to keep my feelings in check. even when i was being shouted at by an irate cto who berated me for not using functionality that nobody told me about and that hasn't been implemented yet.
it didn't ease my mind to learn that we're in artificial overdrive / crunch mode because megaman and darn have realized that their planning was unrealistic. i have training and scrapper to attend to, i told them i'd do every second day.

it was one of those days. i couldn't make a move without someone either waiting for me or popping up with an emergency, so of the list of things that i had to do in the morning i achieved absolutely nothing all day.

the only positive things that happened at work were
1) getting over the unpleasantries with the cto and having a productive meeting after he realized who was at fault
2) receiving my custom gir iphone case

i was supposed to meet with bnw this evening but she caught something at the convention: i had to choose between using that time for work or running off to training because after yesterday i'd rather do tuesdays and thursdays if i have to choose. sod that, i thought, and made a hasty exit.

i rushed out, then suddenly remembered throwing my life-proof case out with the cardboard box the new case came in. i rushed back to find the recycling bin empty, and was all "oh, shit!" until i hurried off and stuck my hand in my pocket. then i was all "no, shit!"
i've been doing things like that for the last while. it's not cool.

---i returned home to find that scrapper had managed to sort out the keys. awesome! and now we know why the building demands such a high deposit, the damn things actually cost $25 (O_o)

it was a super make-up-for-yesterday kickboxing session, i worked exceptionally hard and sorted myself out a bit. i worked with a boxing kid who calls himself prince, who was gassed out by the time i was finished drilling him. it was his turn next and he decided i deserved to feel the same; he completely exaggerated but i refused to give in, i took inspiration from the beast and went absolutely beserk. it took me more than five minutes after the class ended to get my breath back! the beast and prince invited me to join them on the punching bags, and i spent half the time kicking and the other half fixing prince's kicks.

overall, i feel good about my earlier decision to abandon ship.

scrapper and i had planned to meet up for dinner on the plateau, but he called to say he needed some time alone. after briefly chatting with my mom, i went online and the night disappeared.

scrapper's back, it sounds like he had a productive time. i'm now ready to go to bed, all is okay with the world. for now, and that's all anyone ever has :)

down with sickness

this morning darn informed me that i'm responsible for improving morale.
"oh. you mean i'm good cop and you're bad cop?"
"yeah."
i looked into his eyes and saw that he was soulless.

---my day didn't begin right because i got up early and exhausted to make up for the hours i'd take off later. the work day began with aota, she was stressed and i bothered her by asking for help with something she felt i should know and i walked away feeling guilty and irritated. the morning sped by and i headed off for my month and a half follow-up eye exam.

i skipped lunch because i had shit to do and was going to be losing hours anyway, so i arrived on time for my appointment but really hungry. i asked how long i'd have to wait and was told a couple of minutes. half an hour dragged on by, i got up and asked what was going on because by that stage i could've left, eaten something and returned instead of sitting burning time on an empty stomache. on the one hand i didn't want to be an ass, on the other i wanted them to know that they'd done me wrong. they told me another few minutes, which annoyed me even though this time it really was just a couple of minutes. then i went through the eye exam and my eyes couldn't focus at all when i was using both of them.

this is becoming a thing.

eventually the surgeon got to me and he told me that it all makes sense and that i should come right eventually. my next appointment is in four months. we'll see. to be fair, though, while i am having trouble with my sight it's so much better than before! i can see everything well but i just can't do detail in a hurry...

i returned to the office, wolfed down lunch and got sidetracked by a design review and an intern who'd built something on top of a major logic fail that i had to talk him through slowly just to explain where the problem was.

*sigh*

suddenly it was time to leave already and i'd barely achieved anything.

---i left for boxing and continued to bury myself in walter isaacson - steve jobs. it's as interesting and readable as everyone who pushed me to read it insisted, but it intrigues me that i see so much of myself in descriptions of his behaviour. not only in my underlying attitude to life but in the way i've always seen the world: my mother has always complained about my inability to see shades of grey. i'm definitely not as much of an asshole about it, though. at least i don't think i am...

---scrapper and i headed off to boxing. i forgot that he wouldn't be able to join the advanced class until we were already on our way and i felt bad about that. then we started warmup with the jump rope and i was failing and getting frustrated to the point where all the suck from the rest of the day focused into laser beams of anger and self-loathing that washed over me everytime i saw my reflection. and by self-loathing, i mean that "screw you!" look you might give yourself if you're staring at the mirror and seeing someone who looks just like you and is making you look bad.

the instructor walked in and when i asked the instructor if scrapper could join he responded in a way that made me feel small and stupid. for the rest of the class it was as if everything i did was pissing him off, i just couldn't get shit right and he was noticing it all. i felt like i was disappointing him as much as i was disappointing myself and my frustration levels kept rising. in restrospect, i think i actually did quite well but it doesn't matter.

he paired me up with a guy i'm friendly with but who's a beginner and doesn't really seem to be into training. a part of me felt that i was paired with him as a punishment. if it wasn't a punishment, i made it so by bringing my shit into things. i pushed him the same why i push everyone (and everyone pushes me, that's what training's all about) but he doesn't want to improve so we were both aggravated. the situation kinda improved, but then towards the end we did an uppercut drill. i got really annoyed with the way he was holding the pads, and then when it was his turn i got really annoyed with how he was hitting. it was only at the end that he pointed out how unfair this was and he was visibly upset; i realized he was right and i apologized profusely but you can't take stupid back.

fuck.

it was on that note that i left training. i'd gone to a dark place and i was seething all the way home. fortunately, talking it out with scrapper helped - it was about all sorts of things, obviously, not just a single day. it was about work and sacrifice and lessers of two evils, about expectations and outlooks and reality not being precisely what i need even though i'm aware of how ungrateful that may be considering that *knocks wood* things are going really well for me. sometimes i feel like i'm all the toys of the hundred-acre wood rolled into one.

---on a positive note my left leg is still tender and sore but it's definitely better.

...

this online dating thing is weird. according to match.com i'm missing out on all sorts of action by not subscribing, and the only way to find out if they're messing with me is to pay $20. FINE. but how come the other sites don't require cash up front?

profiling

this weekend has been all about anime, with a short break for mixed martial arts and a little bit of sightseeing and family. overall, it's been great!

---friday:

at 5am scrapper walked in, two hours earlier than expected. i wasn't in a state to greet so i'm glad i'd left him a note the night before.

in the morning i'd spent some time preparing for otakuthon by going through the schedule to highlight points of interest. they used the guidebook app which is really clever.

when switching trains on my way to work one kid sprinted across, not realizing that the other train would leave at least five minutes later. even so, the transport system is reliable and i don't feel that it's worth one's dignity to run.

---when i got into the office i spoke to megaman about my contract. i don't know what his deal is, this is the fourth time i've spoken to him about it and the third time that i've explained to him that the issues i originally had with it are non-issues and that we can proceed. it's weird dealing with a director who doesn't recall important details. in the afternoon i finally got a copy of it and we signed it: i'm finally officially working. and now i can get my options package :)
[now i just need to hang in another half a year until some of them vest]

---i walked in on darn giving the developers a hard time, and i'm annoyed that we didn't discuss it first. he's taking a hard line on the team and in one fell swoop he's flipped our culture. not necessarily for the worse - i won't say it's not good to have someone crack a whip - but i'm worried that the suddenness might over-stress the already stressed.

regardless, i think my role has been de-facto redefined and that's actually okay with me.

---ceh wanted to move because he claimed there were too many distractions on his side of the office, so i invited him to make the cubicle next to mine his. later he approached me and darn to complain that he couldn't work under those conditions, and we followed him while sharing puzzled looks as we suspected that he was hallucinating. it turned out he wasn't, but what was bothering him so much that he simply left the office was an intermittent and soft electrical snapping noise coming from the ceiling. he was shocked that it didn't bother me. we were shocked that it was distressing him.

---i went in for a massage, and about halfway through the massage therapist and i both registered that there were muscles in my back that when pressed were causing me to reflexively raise my legs. it was weird. anyway, it turned out that i needed that massage even more than i thought.

---i opened up thunderstone for happy hour and we had a good game. afterwards scrapper and i headed off to the convention. forget the videos, the stalls, the events, the panels, the videogames, and the karioke cafe. the biggest draw by far was the cosplay! it was unreal. literally. some of it was jaw-dropping, so ridiculously well-done that it seemed to distort reality! there were plenty more reasonable attempts that were clever or entertaining or both, some inappropriate or boring and some that were so bad and so wrong that we couldn't help but find them endearing.

we went to a panel entitled "the bad fanfiction panel: whathastobedone" that was, for me, quite disappointing. i was expecting it to be led by authorities who had something to offer and it was basically a handful of nobodies who weren't really good with talking to an audience. they didn't really share the horror stories, they just explained how much the horror stories had horrified them. such a tease! some of the readings were funny but they focused on "bad english" and not on "bad writing".

we focused more on a gorgeous jill valentine in the row in front of us. i was attracted even though she was vocally reminding me of annoying girls i've studied with.

i did walk away inspired to write some very specific fanfiction, and talking to scrapper about it had the two of us putting together a crazy crossover universe that works beautifully and would be so much fun to write! added to the list of things i really need / want to do. maybe it'll serve as a distraction from some of the others :P

---we got home really late and hadn't done shopping, so we ate at harvey's again. it's insane how slow those people are. i appreciate that it's not a bad burger at stupid o'clock in the morning, but still... they made us feel that if you want a reasonably good burger done reasonably quickly you'd do better to make it yourself.

i was exhausted but scrapper had been talking about a "dib shirt"... so i headed to vistaprint to put it together. between vistaprint and pixlr it really is fun and easy to put a good shirt together :)

---saturday:

i got very little sleep, i don't know why. i went downtown for a quick haircut and received very positive news about some offers on my apartment. after sending back instructions scrapper and i had lunch at subway and i picked up some good coffee before we headed back to the con.

we walked into the 404's improv, some of which was funny and some of which sucked. meh. we walked out of that and into an interesting-sounding panel covering academic enquiry into anime. the first panelist was interesting but the second spoke in french, which was unfortunately a deal-breaker. we walked in to a screening of fan parodies: some of it was unintelligible, some of it was cute and amusing and a couple of things we saw were absolute masterpieces, brilliant and hysterically funny. we had to skip the "masquerade pre-show" to reach the other side of town in time.

as the weekend progressed i felt less weird about ogling beautiful girls dressed up ultra-sexy. i (wishful thinkingly) feel like we're getting closer to a time when dressing that crazy will become normal...

---switching to fight night mode was awkward, but manageable. from giant herds of nerds to tough guys and mafiosos with real-worldly well-dressed women. it was a night of great fights, very few disappointments and some incredible action: all but one tristar fighter won, and seeing as we were there to support tristar we were pretty excited! it helped that we had excellent seats right near the octagon and could actually see what was going on without looking at the screens.

...

scrapper and i took great pleasure in coming up with inappropriate nicknames and entry music for fighters. like calling oneself "the hobbit" and stepping into the octagon to michael jackson - bad, for example.

---it was a surprisingly chilly night. we were tired. we went to a pizza place near saint laurent for "dinner" (i ate crappy fries) and then went home. as we walked in scrapper realized he'd lost my spare keys... serious bummer :(

---sunday:

a good night's sleep, but it only felt that way after i woke up early and went back to bed.

we left the final day of the con having arrived at the following conclusion: overall, the lesson learned this weekend was that buying tickets was a waste of cash as most of the fun can be had in the public areas where all the cosplayers congregate anyway.

we walked around the port for a bit and then headed up to the plateau. we walked through the tams and it's the first time i've seen it! it's really, really cool. i love how montrealers celebrate summer and just generally being in montreal :)

i may have gotten a bit too much sun. i went to godmother's for dinner, i joined yang for a long walking of the dog that included excellent sorbet from yeh, and yin drove me to the metro station and we said goodbye as she'll be returning to vancouver tomorrow morning.


---after a couple of conversations today i decided to try dating online. i spent ages setting up an account at match.com only to discover how expensive their subscriptions are and that you can't do much without them. jdate at least lets you make initial contact without paying them...

ripped and bearded

two things noticeably ripped today: me and my mr. price '99 specials. the latter on a desk drawer as i got up, i'm really unhappy about it. the former i might be exaggerating somewhat but i'm definitely feeling strong, solid and muscle-y.

on a style note, i've been under pressure and lazy this week and i'm sporting a light beard again. i'm trying to decide if i should keep it or not.

---i started the day by confronting the poor building secretary with my laundry issues. apparently the whole reason for the closing hours is for security and that it's security from whoever's tampering with the machines. it's 2013, FFS, i told her that security cameras are super cheap to install and their closing hours obviously aren't making a difference anyway. i hope she'll pass along my complaints as she promised.

on the one hand, dealing with shit like this is why it's easier to own one's own condo, but on the other i've now heard things about the hidden costs of ownership that make me wonder if it's truly a good investment in montreal...

---before leaving for work i checked my email and was disturbed to find a message from megaman informing me that an urgent case i opened yesterday was about to be delivered into the dark clutches of our backlog. i couldn't understand what wasn't clear about its relevance until i read over what i'd written and realized that i'd taken a pre-approval email and copied and pasted it, and without context it had ceased to be the explicit task i'd had in mind at the time.

it's been that kind of a week.

dealing with that made me late for work... nobody cared, though.

---jira fail: a predecessor had custom-defined a resolution called "unresolved", which atlassian specifically advises not doing. rescue seemed really complicated and unpleasant from the few sources i found online and i was super-proud of myself for finding a sneakier, simpler way to handle it ^_^
[if you've read this far you probably care, all that was needed to untangle things was to rename the custom resolution. i don't know why nobody else thought of that]

i caught cls struggling with a method i'd asked him to implement, and we got to play on the whiteboard for half an hour until we figured out how to handle it. it's the most complex issue i've worked on in ages, and it was a lot of fun!

during the past week i've asked dang for the task list for the current project a number of times and today he finally sent it. once i'd looked at the wireframe, i realized that i've actually been assigned a huge task requiring skills i haven't exercised since last october. hah! i spent an hour or so visualizing use cases and designing the underlying data structures, all the while trying to figure out how i'm going to handle my regular responsibilities in addition to actually developing software. i'm only half-complaining ;)

i was already in a hurry when the ceo called me in for a personal chat; he wanted my opinion on where we stand and how i feel about things, but he also wanted to discuss the secret project i was introduced to yesterday. the evangelist in me came out. i explained to him that he shouldn't even think about what we could do with it until i've had a chance to study it and figure out what it really is: he appreciated it when i told him that while our current plan would be served by it, it could produce a whole other business and anything he learns about it now will only serve to pigeonhole what might be capable of breaking the box.

i hope i'm right about all this.

---i arrived a bit late for training, and there was only one guy kickboxing so i joined him for the warmup as we'd be sparring. but then the slow guy showed up a few minutes later and we certainly wouldn't be sparring with him around, so i changed shirts again and hit the bjj mats. the kid instructing us put me with two real beginners so that i could help him out; amidst all the advising i did actually learn a thing or two.

a cute girl from the bjj joined the advanced kickboxing class (there's a half-hour with no overlap) and threw the numbers out, so i volunteered to do impact with her. she wasn't hitting me very hard so the instructor came over to demonstrate... until now, that's meant knocking me out. while he did wind me with one of his liver shots, i was totally stoked to find that i've toughened up enough over the last couple of months that i can now take his soft punches. i'm pretty sure i'm not ready for his real ones yet, but it's a big improvement nonetheless :)

the beginner's class was good, i worked with the beast and after the way he finished his ten straight minutes of power kicks i felt ashamed with what i'd done with mine. he was visibly wiped out and then suddenly went into beserker mode, each kick harder than the last and i was so taken by surprise he almost broke through the thai pads into my face!

that shit was inspiring.

i got home to a very slow evening. i called bnw to plan our next meetup, and finally got a working version of a prototype for horseman delivered. i've been listening to all sorts of music (finally adding linkin park - hybrid theory to my earlier purchase of godsmack - good times, bad times) and i really don't understand how it's now 1.30am already O_o

my salads are perpetually improving; it's funny how washing and chopping leaves bothers me but chopping the green beans and broccoli from the microwave stir-fry doesn't.

anyway, scrapper's returning in six hours. gotta crash.

---(slowly) rebuilding my music collection on itunes gives me some startling insights into what i truly value and what i merely enjoy listening to. one of those insights is that nostalgia plays an enormous role in deciding whether something will make the cut. case in point: foo fighters. i love a lot of their stuff, but for me nothing beats their foo fighters album (1995), which was how i discovered them.

and that i'd rather buy an album that individual songs. i think that points to me being a bit cheap.

tango

allow me to elaborate: darn upset me yesterday by dismissing my concerns out of hand. i confronted him this morning, and when he reacted even more offensively i realized that that was a mistake. aota advised my going to the product manager, but i thought it'd be best if i tried megaman one more time before going over his head.

i didn't get an opportunity to say anything until we were already presenting our work so far at an all-hands. i knew that this wasn't the time to bring up a conflict but i couldn't see any other way, so i suppressed my irritation and "innocently" asked the product manager what he thought now that he could see what was already done.

he responded that we'd need to do what i'd been arguing against, and at that point i felt that i'd potentially antagonized darn for nothing as my question would no doubt be taken as a slight. either he didn't realize that i'd pushed past him or he's just good at keeping his feelings to himself because i didn't notice any signs and the rest of our interactions for the day were just fine.

once i'd accepted that they all really want to do this thing that i totally disagree with (i have my team's support, too), i came up with a way to implement a fail-safe so that if and when the executives realize the mistake we'll be able to undo the counterproductive logic without unraveling anything. i was quite proud of myself for that, megaman agreed immediately and darn allowed himself to be convinced in megaman's presence.

words for the week: "lackey" and "minion". aota was surprised that this is the first time i've thought of darn that way.

---wednesday:

it occurred to me this week that on the days i leave early for muay thai i should go to work earlier too - for the first time since i started working for this company i don't have a bank of overtime hours.

morning weather: drizzling pleasure. i'm so excited for winter!!!

our marketing head is a surfer, and i've been invited to join him surfing in san fransisco if we find a reason to get me down to our offices there :)

i spent large parts of today quietly getting shit done. other parts were spent going over designs with my team and it was really nice to get them onboard and to receive our cto's approval for everything. i think he's really beginning to trust us.

---so, while we've gotten him off our core development he's been doing r&d, and he called me over to see what he's been working on. when i realized what i was looking at my mind started doing backflips: he's secretly been doing some incredibly cool stuff and it's so crazy i'm actually going to have to study it and write a manual just so that we can introduce it to the team. as it doesn't fit in with our corporate plan, we're going to have to do this all off the clock and behind everyone's backs, which is pretty surreal and strangely motivating.

i told him to his face, explaining that it was a compliment, that he is truly crazy. you have to be crazy to build ridiculously ambitious things that generate new development paradigms.

---i found a large box waiting for me on my desk in the afternoon - thunderstone has arrived ^_^
that was really fast!

muay thai was interesting and was either relatively relaxed or i'm that much stronger than before. boxing was awesome and i learned a lot. the state of my shin is scaring me a little and i think i'd better play it safe and visit the doctor again. i really can't tell what's damaged and if it's the bone i'm going to have to do something about it...

---i was all excited to find the washing machines available when i got home, but when i returned downstairs with my laundry there was an "out of order" sign on the door again. wtf?!?! i'm really pissed off now, and i'm going to speak with the building owners tomorrow morning. it doesn't make sense that i'm not allowed to have a washing machine in my apartment, i'm not allowed to do laundry during the only hours i'm at home, and that for the second time in two weeks the only chance i've had to do laundry has been when the machines were out of order. that's bullshit.

---i was taking out the recycling when i found a can that scrapper had opened. i've never seen anyone botch opening a can before, i'm going to have to show him how to use the opener.

*shakes head*

self-diagnostic

monday:

it's so nice to be doing piles of dishes... haven't experienced that in a while :/
i suddenly remembered that on sunday we'd seen august burns red, i guess that shows you how much of an impression they made. they were pretty good, to be fair, but yeah...

the all-hands calendar appointment was for 9am but i'd decided that the first meeting wasn't until later so i'd get in regular time. newk'd sent me an apology for being late before i was even dressed, and then i thought "damn, that was a bad idea" and rushed out. nobody seemed to care that i was half an hour late.

we interviewed one mr nervous loudwatch in the morning. there were four of us at the beginning, then everybody else suddenly disappeared leaving me alone with him. fine, i carried on, but then suddenly they all came back with executives in tow. if he'd been nervous before...
he seemed like a nice guy and gave the impression that he knew what he was talking about, but when we tried to do a technical evaluation it was a total disaster. when he did understand the questions he deftly demonstrated that he hadn't a clue what to do with them, and when hinted at he stood by his previous answers proudly.

we had a few long meetings and i had lunch with a couple of french speakers (they obliged me with english, mostly). later i was talking to moonlighter and the it guy and they stopped me and told me they'd only listen if i spoke in french. i made it through most of a pretty complicated sentence before i ran out of words, and they were well impressed :D

scrapper's phone is open for international calls but not for messages, which makes the call he made to me during a meeting pretty expensive, and the calls i made back later too. he hadn't taken my advice and had rocked up at the bus station expecting to be able to hop on for toronto, but they were all sold out until this morning. he hadn't taken the set of keys i gave him even though he's returning on friday...

*sigh*

we finished the workday with an extended happy hour with loads more alcohol and snacks than usual and everybody stayed for it. it was mostly enjoyable!

my favourite moment was after two beers when darn was telling us a story about a company he'd worked for that experimented with outsourcing.
"so... you're telling us your company went to india and found itself?"
everyone laughed or snickered, darn didn't get it and proceeded to explain what had happened as if i hadn't understood.

*sigh*

---tuesday:

that moment when you wake up from that short nap before dinner and it's 2.45am...

today was a day that made me confident in my self-diagnosis as manic-depressive. i woke up from almost twelve hours of sleep (on a weekday! i was truly broken) to find my apartment in disarray and no note:

who doesn't know the right way to put cutlery in the drying rack? to hang wet laundry? to recycle? to turn off lights? to lock the door? to clean the sink when he drops toothpaste? to refill the water filter? to remove unused hangars from the shower?

these are fairly unimportant things that i've gotten used to taking for granted since i moved into my own apartment and then lived with pg who's a neat freak.

i'm always reminded of my father screaming at my mother about how only a complete idiot can not know the right way to load toilet paper. i was a little kid and was horrified at how he was so abusive towards my mother over such a trivial thing, and i promised myself never to be that kind of asshole. so on the one hand, all this shit really bothers me and on the other, most of it isn't worth being upset about. so i'm actually less upset about them than i am about being upset by them.

also, it's only the stupid shit i'm annoyed about, otherwise having scrapper here is a pleasure and it would suck if he was in montreal an staying somewhere else. i really feel bad every time i make him feel bad for not doing things the way i expect.

---i arrived more than ten minutes late for today's set of meetings, which scored me a "we noticed" email. we enjoyed about five hours of back-to-back meetings during which i desperately needed to pee almost constantly. my bladder would only relax when i finally got to training, i don't know what the hell that was about. the creatine is supposed to make me retain water and i didn't have any more caffeine than usual...

the vegetarian lunches that were ordered for two of us came with pizza. that sucked.

our product manager asked everyone in the company to say why they come to work every day. most of the answers were insipid, so much so that i caused quite a stir when i stated that "i like to work on beautiful things that i can be proud of." i was actually embarrassed to be sitting around with such uninspired people.

the next thing that would bum me out would be the project manager (okay, i've referred to him enough that he needs a name - i'll call him "darn") informing me that the big boys all want a demo of the software that we haven't even received design approval for. to make that worse:
unless something's changed darn and i both report to megaman. we're supposed to be a team. everyone is constantly reminded that it's a small company and that any suggestions and concerns will be heard. megaman and darn made a decision that would cost us more to implement than the alternative and would limit our ability to follow the product manager's plan in addition to reducing the software's usability. i took darn aside and tried to explain this to him, and he was not only dismissive and offensively unwilling to listen but he treated me in a manner fit for a wayward subordinate.

that made my blood boil. it made me consider giving up and leaving. it made me feel a darkness well up inside me. i cannot abide incompetence, i absolutely abhor irrationality and i detest behaviour that runs counter to everyone's interests.

my impressions of darn so far include him having no sense of humour and having his head stuck deep inside megaman's arse. i now have zero confidence in him as a project manager.

that said, i can't stop thinking about the last round of interviews we've given; if i leave the company after only six months, that reflects badly on me. i still want to be there to try and keep things on track. now that i've been offered options it would be financially irresponsible of me to abandon ship before my first year is up.

i was so impressed and hopeful when megaman arrived, but i do believe that the honeymoon is over. now to just ride it out and see where it goes.

---on a different note, the product manager made a comment about using a pcmcia card and followed that with "this was way back when". yeah, well, there were kids at the table who've never heard of pcmcia cards, so that was a bit redundant :P

---i left the office late and filled with a burning desire to smash something. i arrived just in time for kickboxing but had forgotten my hand wraps... i worked light so it was okay. i was more concerned for my leg, the bump on my shin isn't going away. the horrific bruising is now "normal" in my mind. not even worth a funny photo.
the lesson was solid and i did really well, and it ended with us being offered the opportunity to buy tickets to good seats to see david l'oiseau fighting on saturday night. from the man himself, which was pretty cool, so i picked up two and we'll be there :)

on the way back i felt it - it's the beginning of the end of the shortest summer i've ever experienced. but it's not the suddenly earlier sunset nor the dropping temperature i could feel on the rainy breeze that really hit it home... it was receiving the invitation to renew my ski pass in the mail. YEE-HAH!!! ^_^

so i renewed my pass and i bought in to kite patch, a brilliant indigogo project to reduce mosquito-borne infections in africa. i chatted with a friend before buying into hot watch, which may be awesome but i'll wait to see if they actually deliver.

now it's way later than i should be getting to bed. so that's me for tonight.

heavy weekend part ii

machinehead was awesome. children of bodom was very cool. mastodon was so good they made my eyes cross. godsmack? holy shit that was intense!!

but the grand finale, if i can't use my voice tomorrow and i can't hear very much, i don't care. i just don't care!

ROB MOTHERFUCKING ZOMBIE!!!!!

---1. there's something decidedly less intrusive about being patted down by pretty female security guards.

2. i didn't know sully erna had his tattoo removed, and without it or the chin tuft i was almost certain it wasn't actually him but a look-alike!

3. "o canada" didn't work so well when rob zombie tried to get the quebecois to sing something, but his cover of metallica - enter sandman is a much preferred / better known anthem and everyone chimed in.

4. coming through the tunnels of the berri uqam station en masse and all singing along at top volume to the musicians busking with pink floyd - another brick in the wall was really cool.

heavy weekend part i

friday:

i walked in to the office feeling good on friday, but apparently looking terrible.
"look at you, with bags under your eyes!"

the day was good and pretty relaxed, the only discomfort being an aggressive and condescending "figure it out yourself" when i asked him for advice on auto-remounting samba shares. if we weren't so desperate for server devs i'd have fired him then and there...

up until last week happy hour was drinks at l'artere, and last week's in the cafeteria playing pool was considered successful all round. this week we repeated it with board games - not everyone stuck around, but most did and it was a lot of fun! it also engaged a few of the usually shy and reserved devs. cls is usually really quiet and polite, and we all laughed when i put down a tile in carcasonne and he responded with "i hate you" and we could see that he was really enjoying himself :)

friday night boxing is usually a fantastic way to close the week, but with scrapper it was even more fun. the best part was impact / conditioning at the end, and that's very different when you're striking or being struck by a friend! i don't recall what it was, but something made me laugh soon after he started hitting me and once that started i was hard to stop :)

officially, that was how the weekend started. unofficially, it began on our way to an insanely delicious chinese dinner with the discovery that the sleeper couch had been hit by fleas and that scrapper was developing a rash and wasn't feeling well.

yang had sent me an invite to a party at the belmont, so we decided to check it out.

on the way we witnessed a guy play his flute at the police as an act of defiance, and walking past a statue on a street corner i "thought the buddha was a beggar, but i was wrong".

after saying hi to yang and meeting a cute and amusing friend of his who also got excited when she heard there was a trance party happening and that there was a chance we might hit it, scrapper felt so bad that he grabbed a taxi home. i stayed, and the drum 'n bass was delicious! i had a very good, very sweaty time.

---saturday:

i realized that i'd need to call it a night at some point and i wanted to check out the other party. i didn't see yang anywhere but his friend appeared right next to me, so when the music cooled a bit i asked her if she was up for the other party - whoops! i must have pressed her "creep" buttons because she rushed off with a disdainful and dismissive "maybe".

*sigh*

yang told me he'd only be leaving in an hour so i called it a night. i needed cash for the taxi home, promising myself that i'd learn the night bus routes.

inside the bank there were two homeless men sleeping right next to the atm, which is really not cool as there was plenty of space not close enough to completely surprise a potential victim :(

scrapper was sleeping so i didn't want to turn on the lights when i got back, and that meant tiptoeing and not eating :(

i'd somehow hurt my neck again, which really sucks. it didn't matter too much during the night because i fell dead asleep, but in spite of a long, physically demanding week and getting to bed at 3 / 4am i woke up around 8am :'(

it was from a dream of entering a naval base and finding my commander abusing a sexy soldier. i kicked his ass and he turned into a small dog; i was terrified he'd screw up my release with a court-martial but he knew his career would be destroyed. so i got the girl.

concerned about mixing caffeine and creatine (turns out it doesn't really matter, the tin's just paranoid), i elected to forgo the latter to coffee up for a call to the real estate agent.

i was very pleased to hear that within a week he already has buyers lined up, and at prices not too far from what we want! this is extremely good news ^_^

that made recovering from the short sleep a lot sweeter, and it was boosted when i found that scrapper was feeling much better and that the flea problem was restricted to the couch cover.

i finished another section of my mars one application (only the personal motivation letter remains), we handled the laundry* and then went to walmart to pick up spare bedclothes, towels and something for fleas. all the flea stuff (for pets) come with dire warnings and it's hard to believe it's okay for pets - we decided to try stuffing the couch cover in the tumbledryer and hope for the best.

* sadly, the laundry basket's handle has broken

instead of returning home we went to my office to drop off the shopping and print our heavy mtl tickets, taking the opportunity for a decent lunch and coffee at l'artere.

---heavy mtl:

every type of metal freak imaginable and in huge numbers. beautiful weather. great infrastructure (free drinking water available, port-a-urinals, loads of food, drink and ice-cream stands), excellent stage set-up.

we arrived at the end of steel panther; at first we thought they were just crass, but aside from their music being good they have a great sense of humour and i'm convinced that all their crap is intentionally ironic.

black label society is excellent, they didn't wow us but we enjoyed their music. except for the long guitar solos that made us feel like we were watching someone masturbating on stage.

when a day to remember came on i said that it would have been funny if they'd been wearing madonna or michael jackson shirts. i don't know what made me say that, because the early part of their show was pretty hard stuff with lots of growling and a sense of lostprophets. but then that transformed into a sense of blink 182 and their shit just got cheesy pop. big props to them on their showmanship, though, and the way they interacted with the crowd was excellent - they beat crowdsurfing spiderman with a crowdsurfing inflatable raft, and the free t-shirt bazooka was the shit.

danzig. danzig! he's awesome. his freakishly large monster guitarist dude made for a cute gimmick, but unfortunately we couldn't really hear him and he looked like he was having a lot of fun.

in spite of the bad taste left by avenged sevenfold's (talented, i'll admit) reduction of metal into teen pop, my overall impression from the day at heavy mtl was from megadeth.
the megadeth experience was as mind-blowing as it was bad for the eardrums ^_^
their visual setup turned everything they did into stunning art, the peak of which was their background to kingmaker.
in spite of my awkwardness about them they actually managed to bring out the devil horns in me };)

scrapper and i were discussing psychiatry on the way home: "diagnosing mental disorder with a list of symptoms is insane. oh, wait, i mean it's completely sane and totally crazy... which is normal".

in spite of an excellent day, the buzzing i left with wasn't confined to my ears: it entered my brain and i was exhausted, restless and in a snappy mood. we ate a quick dinner and then turned in early, certain we'd be up early again.

---i think i'm a bad host; i'm terribly ocd about order and tidiness, which i'd forgotten while living with pg and compared to her i'm a bit flippant myself. there're so many little things!
speaking of pg, some guy posted a comment on one of my pictures of her on facebook calling her a lush. i don't know if she's seen it and i don't know if i should say anything...

...

facebook: i don't understand why my macbook can't handle it anymore, it's weird, and i'm stuck using my phone for everything. which led to a security fail: i had two-stage authentication set up, facebook's sms'es weren't coming through, accessing through a browser doesn't give you the code generator and the access codes i was shown simply wouldn't work when i tried to set up the facebook app on my phone. the only way to install the app was to disable the two-step authentication. that's pretty dumb, facebook.

on a related note, my new iphone's battery life is so much better than my old one! it's so weird that i don't *have* to charge it every night.

---sunday:

i'm guessing the early wake-up is related to the amount of sunshine streaming through my windows. the big news for the morning is that someone has already made an offer for our apartment, so hopefully we'll sort that out soon and then i can find an apartment in montreal that's facing the right direction :P
the offer's good, not exactly what we wanted but if we hurry we might not need to pay capital gains tax on it...

i woke up from dreaming a successful dream, but once the story was over i realized that i was still wearing a skullcap that i'd put on at some point and was embarrassed to be seen as jewish. i don't know how i feel about that dream.

we stuffed the couch cover in the tumble-dryer and ran regular laundry alongside it, then i went to get a haircut. no haircuts on sundays - d'oh! - so i sat at starbucks for an opportunity to write most of this undisturbed, cashed a cheque and came on home to prep for another festival day and discuss the apartment offer with my mother. we have a plan, it feels like stars are aligning, i'm feeling positive.

now - time to rock!

this is the end... of the week

i'm feeling pretty good - my leg's got a nasty little protrusion on my shin bone from that bad check on wednesday and a pretty good bruise-on-a-bruise from last night (how is it that our kickboxing instructor invariably manages to find whatever's hurting and kick it?), but i'm feeling pretty good nonetheless. like i've trained hard this week, like i've worked enough this week, like i've got a big weekend of heavy metal concerts coming up.

my eyes have been a bit weird the past few days. my left seems to have found its focus at the cost of my right whenever i'm not reading. it's like i've always got one eye out of focus, which means that everything looks fine at all distances but has an unreal effect applied to it.

---thursday:

yesterday was a decent day. we interviewed a guy who i thought interviewed well and the others thought really badly, but as he's a contractor i convinced them to give him a chance. contractors are the future, man.

jiu-jitsu was okay but filled with fails; scrapper's new to it and i couldn't get my shit together. kickboxing would have been better if i'd had caffeine in me, but i handled and it was as fun as it was tough. at least until the end, that is, when after all the post-workout punishment he usually doles out he added lunges and squats that really hurt!

scrapper and i walked to harvey's for burgers (it's really convenient living near a decent 24-hour burger joint that serves veggie patties) and began a long philosophical debate that lasted until it was beyond time to hit the hay.

---friday:

there's nothing like waking up in the middle of the night with a blocked nose, reaching out for a tissue and upsetting a glass of water. all around the power bar under the bed.

---jeff bezos is the man. and this article makes a good point about journalism versus media.

high powered

i made it to muay thai yesterday, with scrapper in tow. while he sorted out gloves, wraps and a month pass i headed into a class that would turn out very special... i was partnered up with one of the monsters. aside from a damaged left shin from a badly executed check, and almost learning an unpleasant lesson (my response was to put in my mouth guard, things went much better after that), the training session was alright. not amazing, but definitely not bad.

but the impact training... oh, the impact training! that was awesome. he was actually harder to hit than our punching bags, and when the tables turned his "gentle" almost wiped me out.

i spent the next hour and a half relaxing with scrapper and the punching bags, teaching him boxing basics. by the time class started he was ready to go, and our instructor was well impressed with his performance :)
the class was really good, the overall satisfaction level when we left all hurting and exhausted was fantastic ^_^

---tuesday:

i woke up exhausted, feeling really weak. i felt like that all day and it was only during training that i'd learn that when you use creatine you need to drink LOTS of water. i was really dehydrated!

scrapper needed a computer and i suddenly remembered an abandoned netbook stuffed into a drawer - still good enough :)

work: a very long day of meetings upon meetings. it was pretty draining.
notes for the day:
1. pg sent me a photo of a predator statue to say it reminded her of me. i don't know how flattering that is :P
2. my LEAP controller arrived! i'm actually too excited to open it without having a few hours to really play...
3. the iphone 4 came back from the repair shop, and my 3gs backup restored beautifully! i'm very pleased, the only annoyance is that the casing doesn't lock properly. last night i put together a gir phone cover using vistaprint. i was really glad to learn that i can reproduce any previous orders, they've stored my syndicate shirt design so if anyone wants to buy one i can just click a few buttons and ship it :)

i arrived at the gym intending to do jiu-jitsu and then kickboxing, but only one guy had showed up for kickboxing so the instructor invited me to join for a sparring session. i didn't have my headgear and i couldn't contact scrapper so we didn't end up sparring but we essentially shared a private lesson which was pretty hardcore. it was much easier when i discovered that i needed to drink more water, i spent some time at the spout and my performance improved dramatically quickly.

finished for the day, i hung around for a while talking to some guys and then went home. as i crossed the parking lot gg was getting out of her car, and i haven't seen her since i was all awkward and that was a while ago. she was all smiles when she saw me, we exchanged a few sentences and i walked home feeling good about myself.

i'd learn later that scrapper was at home when i arrived, but in the shower so he didn't hear me throwing stones at my kitchen window because the building entrance was locked (it usually isn't) and i still don't have a functional buzzer. after a few minutes of that i got frustrated, believing him to be fast asleep or something, and i jogged back to rejoin to beginner's class.

round two was awesome, i'm really glad i went back! in addition to training with gg again i was partnered with a really tough dude who made me work hard. i finished the day on a great note and then scrapper and i headed downtown for great chinese and a couple of beers at a nice little pub on peel.

we eventually got home around 2 / 3am. the iphone 4 may be vastly better in a lot of respects, but it's public transport routing system totally sucks.

---wednesday:

in my earlier drunken state i'd failed to set my alarm correctly, but miraculously woke up by myself with just enough time to get organized and get to work on time.

ceh: i don't care if he has personal issues he's dealing with, the look he gave me when i tried to discuss a task i needed to hand him made me want to fire him on the spot. if we weren't desperate for backend developers... later he joined a few of us for lunch and regaled us with grossly inappropriate tales involving drugs and disturbing psychological details that made a couple of the guys visibly uncomfortable.

otherwise, it was a decent day at work. the it guy was kind enough to hand me a waterproof iphone cover (which i needed just over a week ago :P ) and another cover that converts the phone into a radio receiver. nice!

then i left early for muay thai, and had that magnificent evening, and scrapper made dinner and i crashed. i'm really pleased that he's now had a taste of tristar. and i'm really pleased with how good i feel.

first world problems

it was a really difficult weekend to post. i was too busy! now i'm sitting here on a monday evening trying to wrap this up quickly so as to disturb scrapper as little as possible.

---thursday - the forgotten moments:

neck and back still hurting.

1dollarscan.com is a fantastic idea, but it's a little costly if you're not sending your book / documents to a local address. the pdf i'm looking forward to will ultimately have cost me around $30.

i should open a local branch! all i'd need is a p.o. box and a scanner. shit, there's a lot of things i'd like to do with my life. i need more of me.

---friday:

neck and back still hurting.

the massage therapist was in, and she *really* helped! i got up disoriented but with my neck and back feeling like jello. unfortunately, that sensation lasted all of five minutes before the muscles started tightening up again.

i gave my iphone a try, plugging it in to my macbook. charging! amazed and excited i was, until i realized that it wouldn't charge more than the thin red line meaning that it wasn't actually charging at all. being plugged in wasn't enough to turn it on and access the data...

friday was the end of a long two weeks stabilizing a build, and i joined the happy hour late but in a celebratory mood. we held it in the cafeteria which was more fun that going out, although i played terrible pool.

i made the boxing class on time, there's a cute new girl from ottawa and we were set to work together. turns out that in spite of her hesitation, she's been teaching kickboxing and she put me under a lot of pressure... i cannot express how satisfied i am with myself for keeping up with her pace, doing all the combinations correctly at high speed on autopilot ^_^

why is it that every time i'm paired with a girl we do impact training? she forgot to inform me that she had a belly piercing and i hit it a few times. hard. i was totally embarrassed afterwards :$

regardless, i was on an absolute high from the class when i left the gym and walked out into a beautiful, cool summer sunset.

orange is the new black is cute at first, but then it gets better :)

foufounes electriques. newk'd and jock invited me to join them for a night out. they were both pretty drunk by the time i arrived and i didn't know where to go. at first they sent me in the wrong direction, then i returned to sainte catherine and was told to go right. so i did, and i walked while on the phone with newk'd trying to figure out where he was in relation to me because he'd apparently been waiting outside for me and was walking to meet me. in the end we discovered that this was the case... he'd instructed me to turn right when i should have turned left, and actually unwittingly followed me at a distance for about twenty minutes before figuring out what was going on. wtf??!
drunk people.

anyway, i've been there a couple of times before with yang but until friday night i didn't realize that it's the very same club wp and i went to back in 2006! i felt a circle close. i also drank a lot. i was far from drunk, but i was certainly going to feel it in the morning.

while there, i was informed that my soul patch is unflattering so i've decided to drop it. on a completely different note, i walked in to the dancefloor just as rob zombie - dragula went on and i joined the crowd rocking out and growling along... the next song was marilyn manson - beautiful people which was followed by disturbed - down with the sickness and nirvana - smells like teen spirit. it took me back a good six or seven years and i thoroughly enjoyed myself even as i was already concerned that my throat was going to hurt the next day... which it did...

i said goodbye when i had just enough cash left for a taxi. the taxi took an inexplicably long route so i jumped out a couple of traffic lights early. overall i'd had a very good night indeed.

---saturday:

neck and back still hurting.

otherwise, i was feeling pretty good. i went to godmother's for lunch in the sun, then returned home feeling the previous night. i was offended by the guy on the escalator in front of me as i headed to walmart because he wiped his feet almost into my face - one asshole can ruin your whole day! (okay, i got over it fairly quickly)

i managed to get the last cheap-ish everlast headgear in stock and returned home for some more orange is the new black and a solid afternoon nap. i got up from a long, perfect moment lying in bed on a cloudy evening with the window fan's deep hum keeping me sleepy.

i love the window fan's white noise. i really do.

horseman came over for an overly long evening discussing investment theory, stats and math. some of what he had to say was intriguing, but i was tired and i wanted to be in top shape for sunday's sparring session.

---for a few days now facebook hasn't been working on my mac. i've established that it's not my internet connection and it's not facebook, but no matter what i do (restarting, etc.) i just can't see my feeds / pages properly. the hell?

---sunday:

neck and back still hurting.

tapout versus everlast: this and and this? it wasn't me, the problem is that everlast's mouthguards SUCK. the tapout instructions were easy to follow and even though i fit it skew the first time it handles reboiling and i just did it again. no problem!

my first sparring:
gloves? check.
mouth guard? check.
protective cup? check.
headgear? check.
shin pads? check.
commitment? ... check, but with reservations about how smart i was being.

1. my boxing defense is awful and i don't breathe correctly.
2. i eventually did start striking properly.
3. even though we were all being responsible, speed and accuracy make up for a lack of power. one particularly well-placed strike gave me my first insight into the accuracy of the expression "he rang my bell".
4. after an hour my arms were really, really sore.

in the end there was no blood to clean up and i have a very good idea of just how much i need to improve before getting in the ring again, so i consider the session a great success!

the guys were shocked that i weigh 90kg as a vegan. i evangelized for a short while and then returned home to do laundry. i would have done laundry if the gorram laundry room wasn't out of order! what a way to ruin my plans :(

i went out to the market to pick up clif builder bars, then returned home for a big nap, big shopping and some more orange is the new black. i finally completed my sketches for the first chapter of my comic! i'm really excited about how i managed to resolve an issue that was troubling me ^_^
then i clicked on xkcd's time post and checked out the easily accessible version before reading randall's explanation: shut up and take my money! i bought some merch in a gushing show of support because that man is one of the most committed and inventive artists and is totally deserving of the highest praise.

---i can't recall how long ago or why i was searching for this, but i found it: lewis black on water. he's rather clever.

---monday:

neck and back feeling a bit better.

it was early morning in august. the temperature was... 9 degrees. seriously. it was AWESOME. i was even a little chilly while waiting for the second airport bus (the first was full).

i had to wait a long while for scrapper to come out, he described the officials as "thorough". we had a quick bite to eat before taking a taxi home, i briefed him non-stop until we parted ways on the metro.

my jaw hurts from the sparring. the muscles more than anything!

first order of the day, arguing with the cto in a video-conference when i was the only person on screen, and couldn't facepalm or make the faces that everyone knew i wanted to. after eventually coming out on top and feeling guilty for pushing back hard when everyone was listening in, we closed the call and the guys in the room showered me with sympathy :P

aside from a lunch break with some time outside to enjoy the stunning weather and discuss dragons and terminators, it was a day filled with meetings. one of the meetings was for all the developers, and after being shocked by ceh's brattiness (which was commented on by the project manager too) we were treated to a long and very boring presentation. presentations need to be engaging, and they need to be managed properly. as it finished, i sent an email to the project manager to say "we should never do this again".

boy, was i surprised to see the email summary pop up on the screen in front of everyone! serious faux pas, the project manager was not amused and i was super embarrassed.

my eyesight's griefing me, but i suspect it's related to how tired i am. my brain still hasn't gotten used to two eyes focusing so differently... but i certainly wouldn't want to give up my right eye's near-sightedness. reading would be really tough otherwise.

i got home in time for muay thai but i really needed to do laundry. i showed scrapper the laundry system, i took him shopping, i had a short but desperately needed nap before dinner, made dinner, we played fluxx and then he went to bed while i wrote this post. it's now an hour and a half after i began and it's my turn to tuck in.

PHEW!

level up!

once again, this time in physique! for the first time in my life i've just hit 90kg. super stoked! also proud that i trained serious kicks on the taped-to-shit punching bag and came out with only light bruising. i'm feeling all my muscles and i'm feeling *strong*.

i can't drink enough water - and my craving for tonic water far outdoes my thirst for regular h₂0.

---my eyes were irritated all day, which concerns me but there's not a lot i can do about that. work-wise, we spent most of the day having meetings about how to deal with a protocol issue while a couple of the developers worked on it in the direction we agreed was best. by the end of the day, after everyone got a say including marketing, we agreed unanimously that the way the developers and i had agreed to deal with it was the right way.

*sigh*

---a meaningful last hour of the day was spent arguing about addictions and parenting with aota.

---i met with the illustrator (bnw) and was blown away by the quality of her take on the subject. and was gladdened to hear that what i'd be concerned about she gets done quickly. we spent an hour and a half figuring out where we think we should go, and i'm now under the gun to sketch out my script because apparently it's easier for her to get what i'm going for. hah!

there's a question she had about character identities that caused me to think about it in a new way, and it was only later that i realized that her suggestion of what to do about it was absolutely correct even if she didn't know what to look for. score!

punctures and rls

i went to bed late, slept well, and woke up with my neck and back in spasm. the hell?! i managed to stretch out enough to be functional, but i was severely uncomfortable. fortunately it was wellness wednesday! we didn't have a massage therapist but we did have an acupuncturist. i think it helped a bit, but even if it didn't the excuse to rest was welcome and definitely made me feel better.

the last couple of days have seen my restless leg syndrome firing up, i'm drinking tonic water but it's not doing the trick. i wonder if it might not just be the lack of foot support now that i'm wearing flip flops all the time...

---a forgotten note from tuesday: i was wearing my "follow me until you die" persuadertron shirt and some old geezer behind me in a queue came up to tell me he was having trouble reading my shirt.
"it says die," i informed him.
i think he was hoping it didn't. i felt sorry for him, so i raised my voice over everyone else to say "it basically means forever".

---wednesday:

hah! i recharged my metro pass because i thought it was the first of the month. i really hope i didn't send that money into a sinkhole. i'll find out in the morning...

the workday began on a terrible note, as the core scrum took place without me even though i specifically told the lead to wait. as i said to the new project manager, if you want to reduce my responsibilities go ahead, but who's going to handle the technical side of our development? it took half a day for someone in that scrum to report an issue that urgently needed my input.

but you know what? someone else's problem. i'm not stressing over that shit. i'm not paid enough to fight everyone else's higher-salaried bad decisions.
oh, that reminds me. megaman gave me very bad information and jeopardized my options package. i can't be sure it wasn't on purpose, but i'll be kind and think of it as incompetence.

perhaps it was my attitude, but the day felt slow. i followed it up with a hardcore boxing class, i was sore and weak but i gave it my all. for some of the drills i was really proud of myself! specifically the final one, we were working speed and power on the punching bags and i, like everyone else, was wasted by the last minute. all we had to do was one-two as fast as we could until the instructor called "time", and i got my head together and really nailed it.

oh, i paid for that afterwards, but it was totally worth it.

note to self: guru versus rockst*r? guru just doesn't cut it. i need caffeine and i need all the other stuff as well.

i managed to do laundry even though i went into overtime, made another huge salad (tomorrow will be the last one like that) and watched an episode of full metal alchemist. now, without further ado, i'm going to bed because i'm tired...