visualization

waking up visualizing the talk i was going to have with the cto, the horrible realization dawned on me that there's no way for us to discuss it without my at best implying that he's an idiot.

i'm not a politician, and being especially tactful is not what i do.

aota came in to the office for a short while, and i'm very glad i managed to catch her for a "talk". i shared all of my frustrations and she assured me that a) all the executives are aware of what's going on and b) that that's precisely what megaman's been tasked with dealing with.

i headed back to megaman's office to convince him that i don't need to be in the meeting and to argue with him for over half an hour about the value of commenting code.

...

if i don't give a shit and take things less seriously i *do* feel better. can i keep this up?

---i can't tell if megaman is a victim of buzzword-speech or if he's simply imprecise. regardless, he knows how to make me feel needed.

...

three things made me smile yesterday: my rocket surgeon shirt arriving at the office, buying ministry albums (psalm 69 and the mind is a terrible thing to taste), and one of the interns finding the original syndicate on gog.com.

oh, and leaving early for an eye exam.

---it wasn't hard to find the eye institute, their welcome was quick and pleasant. they did make me wait a bit, though, and i was pretty tired...

the tests went strangely. my right eye couldn't focus on the letters either, and the pressure tests left me in tears. afterwards i was led back to the waiting room where i sat for so long i began to nod off. it was in a haze that i entered the doctor's room...

... where we discovered that my right eye's vision is excellent. perhaps the test equipment wasn't calibrated correctly? anyway, for my left eye i was asked to look through a patch with holes in it and my vision was instantly corrected. science! and piracy. maybe i should just wear a patch instead of dropping almost two large on surgery?

the technician who explained the details and risks could barely speak english; he made everything awkward by constantly apologizing...

---i felt a couple of drops of rain and headed into tim horton's for a cup of coffee. i was inside and cozy when the skies opened up and the rain came bucketing down - once in a while i get it right!

while there i went online and was touched to read a lengthy note by tpj concerning consciousness; he may have missed a few steps in my personal history but he definitely internalized what i was getting at :)

i returned home with no plans to train. i did laundry, chatted for a while with SxS and then overclocker, finished season 7 of doctor who and watched another couple of episodes of death note before going to bed early.

i *was* thinking about working on my comics but i really disn't have the energy.

---today:

special deliveries! i received both my copy of the arden sonnets and my syndicate shirt! it came out beautifully ^_^

so far, it's been a positively meh day at work. the most interesting bit was designing icons for something and almost explicitly stating that cheshire cat lady's input wasn't appreciated...

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.