professionalism

 godsdammit, today's been long. i accompanied mr smear to school because it was threatening to rain and he had to take sports shoes (tied in an inconvenient way) in addition to his rainboots (i'm not entirely sure he actually switched them for phys ed, he says he did) and an umbrella. thank god i was with him, because he started freaking out on the bus about how the shoes were tied, and whether he should be taking shoes at all, and how to validate his bus ticket when he has an umbrella in his hand 🤦

anyway, we survived the ride to school and he seems to have managed fine while there.

...

i got home, and triggered the take-home challenge along with two or three other application processes. then i spent an hour or two doing some studying for the challenge, and then the airconditioner cleaners arrived.

look. they did a great job cleaning, the airconditioners are definitely, thoroughly clean.

unfortunately, half the mold and grime they removed from the airconditioners ended up on the walls, the floor, and anything we'd accidentally left too close to them.

before they left, i showed them that the flaps aren't working properly, to which they responded that "that's just a function of time" even though the flaps were working just fine before they touched them.

and they left us with soooo muuuuuuch cleaning to do. and we found a couple more mold blooms we hadn't seen before. we're still not completely finished. i'm fucking tired. the skin on my hands is all messed up from the cleaning materials and constant hand-washing.

i wanted to go rollerblading tonight, but i haven't even got started with the solution design.

and i'm going to have to figure out how to fix those damned flaps.

...

scr called me up today, and we had a long chat about a potential partnership. it's kinda scary, but if everything falls into place it would be an incredible opportunity...

...

we took a break from cleaning to go to the dentist, where mr smear and i argued over what constitutes an "i'm hungry" snack and worked on his geography homework* while gd finally got her new tooth installed. for real this time!

* he has to learn the countries around the mediterranean, so i had him sketch a map for himself so he can practice offline. an unintended consequence of this is that i told him about italy being a boot, and he saw a boot, only not the boot 😂

after we got home, i got back into cleaning (and reading the incal) while gd made dinner and mr smear did the math homework, dinner was pleasant, and we've changed our sheets (we're using the new comforter), and mr smear is reading deadpool before bed, and i'm about to get ready for bed and then hope i have it in me to spend some time on the design.

or... procrastinate and dive into it in the morning. did i mention i'm a bit tired?

ocular migraine two

almost immediately after posting, i developed another ocular migraine. it's been a rough day since.

lots of switching between reading (blindsight) and resting, a little bit of disco elysium, and (when he wasn't reading) a fair amount of fighting with mr smear because to his mind it's not fair that he's being punished two saturdays in a row 🤦

oh, and as for his reading: gd decided at some point that giger's artwork wasn't appropriate (lots of genitalia, but it was the BDSM stuff that crossed the line), and he got into swamp thing, and coraline.

i helped gd prepare dinner tonight, which was basically us sitting around the table and making attempts at putting together onigiri, with varying success. it was delicious.

i had a good chat with scr tonight, he's invited me to join him in a project... i'm not sure i'll be able to, but it would be nice if it worked out.

at least mr smear's bedtime went smoothly.

catching up

 i've been complaining about being really sleepy in the mornings, but the plus side is that i have actually been sleeping. i hope writing this doesn't affect anything :P

i wrote up yesterday's experience this morning after mr smear left for school, and then rushed to get the dishes done, forgetting that i also needed to clean poop from outside our windows. on my way to work, i checked in with our neighbors and learned that we're not the only ones.

i've been listening to the american gods tenth anniversary audiobook on and off, and although the narration's not 100% i am enjoying it.

most of the day was all over the place, with the majority of it being dedicated to catching up with scr and introducing him to what we're all about. the late afternoon was all about preparing a release, and although i abandoned my coworker with a proper mystery in order to get home in time for dinner, we did manage to get through a lot of the process with significant successes.

another houthi attack. just me and mr smear and a couple of neighbors with their little kids, and one of them was being so cute that even mr smear was amused.

after getting mr smear into bed (with only one time returning to remind him that he's got to handle his fears with his imagination), i spent about an hour diving in to AWS account management, finally hitting a wall that i need our office manager to help me break through in the morning.

slowdown

 i struggled to get out of bed yesterday. and today, i guess. i think i'm making up for lost time this past week, but i'm also experiencing a general sense of calm that i'm not used to. long may it last 🙏

a week after i made first contact, someone finally got back to me from the university's summer day-camp and we began the registration process. what a relief!

...

i also went through sailors draft game design that he asked me to review a few days ago, and an aspect of it reminded me of another case solved. it's such a cleverly put-together game and it still makes me sad that it was taken off the app stores... but omg! i just learned it's available from the microsoft store!

[loses some time to playing a bit, and then trying to reset it so that mr smear can begin at the beginning: it took a while to figure out that the way to do that is windows settings -> add or remove programs -> reset]

it really is an inspiration for putting game elements together in a fun and addictive way.

...

theoretically, i had one job to do yesterday, but the little time i got to put into it was primarily spent babysitting an AI refactor and so far the results seem less than spectactular. otherwise, the day was all over the place, with two highlights (three if you count great vegan sushi for happy hour):

1. scr has applied to join us! i've invited him for a visit next week ^_^

2. we had a out first game hacking session yesterday, and it was fun and interesting! when i'm down getting all this down i'm going to play a bit and see how much i really absorbed :)

...

the toenail i smashed a while back is beginning to lift, and it's making me nervous...

i was really tired last night, i ended up doing nothing but watching youtube videos and playing minesweeper until i crashed much earlier than usual. but not after seeing the beginning of the trump / musk fighting :(

anyway, one fuck-up at a time. for now, it's a beautiful day and mr smear and i are going swimming after his computer classes.

d(e/i)str(a/u)ctive

the last day has been newsworthy to say the least. there's tons of footage to be found, and all of it points towards the following:

1. bad citizens
   unfortunately, the story according to the news sources simply doesn't fit with those of eye-witnesses who i know personally and trust, one of whom is a journalist himself and another an arrestee: i've seen the video of the latter's arrest and compared it with the arrest report she published online, and the plain and simple facts are that the police more than fudged it. there were a couple of cases of vandalism, but these were isolated incidents that the national media has blown out of all proportion.
   
2. police violence
   it renders me speechless: the videos, the pictures, the personal stories: all tie in with my own experiences with the men in suits and the police. they're a bunch of thugs, and it's not clear to me how and why they other regular, contributing citizens so off-handedly. do these people subjugate their own families?
   
3. judge's ruling
   at least the judge figured out what was what, and 90 arrestees were released with a dressing-down given to the police officers. unfortunately, that's not nearly enough.
   
4. right vs left
   i have seen the excitement and glee with which the political right has picked up on the news, and called for more violence. i continue to fail to see how these people have politicized these protests into left / right, when it's (like the american's "other 99%") a protest about social responsibility and now, more than anything, the democratic right to demonstrate.
   

---
scr sent me job satisfaction rankings that made me smile. i didn't really get much work done today (about to do a little more, but i've been thinking that for the past hour), but i'm pretty sure that the three hours i spent pouring over the french exam were in vain. that was a really tough exam, and if i pass i'll be super-proud of myself :/

the climbing wall in the evening was great exercise.

a full weekly - part ii

[... continued]

tuesday:

i slept well, but still woke up grumbling about needing more sleep.

---due the fact that there's the need for a law for this, to the lady who refused to take a veteran tenant:
you don't have to agree with the wars your country fights, and you should be as vocal and violent as you are able to prevent or stop such wars. taking out your grievances on some poor bastard whose crime is that he disagreed with you? people disagree on important issues every day, and both sides of any argument are always supported by loads of idiots. at least that idiot was willing to put himself on the line when he felt, right or wrong, that his country and its people needed him. can you not respect that?

french class: the massive coffee wasn't working. and i was shocked when, after smelling something a bit weird, the girl next to me got up, brushed the seat of her skirt with her hands and disappeared, presumably off to the toilet. yes, i know that girls fart, but that knowledge is impotent in the face of what society has taught me :P

i arrived at the office to attend to a bug - the boss walked in at some point and when he heard what i was dealing with he said "oh! that happens when x and y occur. you can get around it by doing z."
his work-around let me know where the bug was, and if he'd only sent me an email the night before when he'd discovered this he would've saved us all a lot of trouble. i don't understand people who don't work with email :/

it was a day of hard work and zero customer satisfaction. additionally:
me? angry? because the unprofessional "doesn't have time" to read the instructions for an api i've constructed, so i should just tell him what he needs to do when i have nothing to do with his project?

the api is in place and in use by non-programmers, which is a subtle indicator that this is not rocket surgery. the programmer in question has access to code that uses a previous version of the api, and i had already attempted to explain the changes verbally (these are simple changes) in addition to having updated the documentation that is informal and written specifically to make our own lives easier (in other words, it's short and to the point). i cannot make the changes for him, as he is a big boy (supposedly) in charge of his own codebase. as he is a developer, on a mobile platform, i hardly think it unreasonable to expect him to make a small change to an existing api call by looking at the reference.

i have a lot of patience for stupid people, but absolutely none for people who are unprofessional. at least the boss eventually gave me some support, and when scr (who hadn't been in) heard about it he was just as irritated.

i left for an appointment with the doctor, and arrived about fifteen minutes early. if i'd known that she was running late by up to an hour, i might've taken my kindle outside for a cup of coffee...

... if the guys who've claimed they want to train with me were serious, then i'd have had a problem because i scheduled a training a reasonable amount of time after the appointment. i get the feeling that there're only two of us who're actually keen. which sucks.

i had to finish up some work before dinner and hellsing - after a few chapters it gets really interesting. it was then time for a solid blade, 30km of exercise and chatter followed by fantastically good frozen yoghurt. and now that i'm shorn, showers are a pleasure again :)

[continued...]

half-fish

today was...

... after a tough night and wake-up, making french class really difficult to get through even with two cups of coffee. the teacher caught me mid-yawn with a question, i'm *really* glad i knew the answer :P

... the first time the entire semester that we've discussed shakespeare's sonnets in our class on shakespeare's poetry. and not *just* freud or lacan. *and* i had something awesome to do as we did focus on psychoanalysis: i began storyboarding a graphic novel. it was fun!
65 panels down, and that's something like 4% :)

... the first time a couple of us were finally organized enough to begin digitizing the english department's archives.

... a super-fast hurried lunch before leaving campus for work. philip roth is amazing (the human stain).

... a relaxed day at work, right until things got hairy and my world turned into a hollywood bomb countdown sequence: scr discovered the cause later. in microsoft sql, WITH(NOLOCK) doesn't really do what it says on the tin. except for the bit on the tin that explains that they're planning on ignoring it. a massive rewrite is required.

... urgently trying to get home in time to take pg out for her birthday. it's one thing to have to wait at least thirty minutes for a sardine-packed, smelly bus during rush hour, and having to push and shove to get on. it's quite another for the bus to drive up, half empty, and just carry on as if none of us exist. it's even worse when that happens twice.

public transport in israel: the best possible promotion availble for the auto-industry.

... arriving home in dire need of alcohol. then moving out to ze sushi to happily gorge ourselves in celebration.

... sending out a really important email to a potential employer.

---personal fish consumption is severely limited: this advice goes with this advice, one shouldn't eat more than two cans per week.

just saw this video on psychiatry. the top angry response describes PTSD - that's not a disease, that's trauma. and trauma doesn't need drugs either. ‎(well, trauma might like drugs, but that's not useful resolution)

whiskey tango foxtrot?!

whiskey tango foxtrot?!

tuesday: bloody tuesday.

it was scr's birthday, and our first communication was when he woke me up to tell me that all of our systems had crashed after i'd flooded them with too much data. i... i broke a cloud database. in less than twelve hours. that's kind of embarrassing.

it took half an hour on the phone to explain to him what needed to be done, and then i passed out again. the later part of the morning was peaceful except for a tense call to our isp to renew. 1.5 megabits is no longer available (why not?!) so we had to upgrade to 10, which costs almost twice as much... but at least there's no lock-in, so if we leave the country soon we can say goodbye without a fight.

---the weather was pleasant, although a bit chilly for my having left the apartment without a sweater. no matter, i wasn't going to see much of the day anyway - after a couple of hours of things being cool, they began to go awry and i suddenly found myself in a scene straight from a hollywood emergency moment, red lights flashing and systems goings down and nothing to indicate why.

it was all very intense, and i developed a nasty headache. a major part of the problem is that microsoft upgraded the cloud servers before upgrading the enterprise manager, and not all of the functionality is available through the cloud interface: we have synchronization issues up the wazoo, and things that are only accessible through the enterprise manager sometimes fail because of the versioning. and there were a bunch of errors that were only detectable when the procedures were run under very specific conditions, which is really unfortunate for emergency handling.

once i got through that nightmare, i discovered that on top of sunday / monday's misunderstanding about certain functionality (in my defence, i'd double checked with the boss and received his blessing, only to discover the next day that he'd thought he was okaying something else), in my hurry to fix it i'd missed a really important side-effect.

*sigh*

if nothing else, at least everyone now agrees with me that we should focus on stabilizing the system before adding new features.

---
i burned an hour studying complex regex strings, trying to figure out what wasn't right - a co-worker suggested i try the same string on a web tester, and it was then that i understood that the application we use (regexbuddy) is broken.

*raises clenched fist at the sky*
DAMN YOU!!!!

---
when the memorial day siren started up, i was still at work. i found myself staring at the home key on my keyboard, which i find a bit too iconic.

i left at 9, and all i wanted to do was alcohol swab my headache away.

---
yesterday:

i slept late and woke up with an hour to go before the next siren. not wanting to be outside for it (i don't have a straight answer for why not), i shortened my run to 5km and increased my pace.

the difference between jogging and running is tremendous. i think i need to run more.

---
i spent most of the day online, working very little and catching up very much.

the argument from yesterday? it's still bothering me now. firstly, because i didn't check the first link that sj posted (the others responded to it), and it's complete and utter rubbish. he later sent me this link, contradicting the addiction argument but still claiming hollywood flashbacks happen. they do not. for more see this and this.

secondly, in the aftermath of the private argument i have remembered something crucial about sj. i haven't seen him in over a decade, and because i tend to give people the benefit of the doubt i let him lead me on that he'd grown up a bit. i've remained wary of him, i just couldn't remember precisely why (although an incident with him dating a friend of mine and really messing her up was not forgotten). now i know why: because he lies. easily.

"i did psych you didnt, sane is a term i can use [...] its the same crap addicts spew at me in counceling" [sic] - as i told him, he sounds like he'd be the worst councillor ever. he also sounds like someone who hasn't even studied pop psychology, let alone been in academia. so a brief look through his cv and... hmmm... nope, no tertiary education. thought not.

---
in the evening, i went out to do some shopping, returning home laden with two giant bags. the idea was to be somewhat traditional and use independence day as an excuse to guzzle steaks.

after another horrid cooking experience, we watched aliens (whoops! i confused 2 and 3, and 2 interested pg even less than alien :( ) backgrounded by the booming of fireworks. after that we both crashed.

---
today:

first breakfast, most of this post, a little more time in bed, second breakfast (the last steak was much more cooperative), the rest of this, and then it'll be time for housework before the usual gamers arrive in the evening. between yesterday and today, my conclusion that i'm in dire need of a holiday has received experiential approval.

---
of potential interest in addition to educational value: phd on the higgs boson

bizarro on earth day - not amusing, but interesting nonetheless.

nutrition:

chocolate vs chronic fatigue syndrome

do not place baby in shopping cart

lots - part ii

[... continued]

i had a big breakfast at one of our locals, which was fairly unpleasant due to too much honking on dizengoff. i totally forgot to take my multivitamin, and thought i'd give dry-swallowing it a shot on my way home. those were severely uncomfortable two minutes getting home :(

i was right on time for the phone swallowing bus - i was almost at my destination when i realized that my phone had slipped out of my pocket, through a crack between the seats. it was staring up at me reproachfully when i did my "paranoid pat" and discovered that it was missing. if i'd left that bus without it... i don't even want to think about it.

back at work (so soon?): more boredom while trying to get a new user up and running on the cloud. during a lunch break, the unprofessional brought up the dsm again: in addition to being unable to get it through to him that there is no such thing as mental "disease", and that referring to it as such is a cause of most of our problems, scr and i were unable to discuss his statement about autistics being smarter than "normal" people rationally.

1. the definition of autism (or asperger's) is not clear-cut; in fact, everybody experiences some of the "symptoms" and like any mental "disease" it's a case of extremity.

2. his claim that autistics are all smarter than non-autistics is simply wrong. his corollary that someone who is not autistic can therefore not be very smart is absurd.

what we do know, however, is that the iq test has little bearing on what potential someone has: it can be studied for, and extroverts usually fare less well because they're used to asking for help as opposed to figuring things out for themselves.

we "agreed to disagree" (my new way of telling someone i think that they're too stupid to be argued with), talked about the weather and finished the break with ice cream.

the afternoon:

1. raising wine glasses for passover: there was too much work to enjoy it.

2. even *i* received a holiday gift! although i left it on my desk :(

3. at 5pm, the time i'd told my boss that i needed to leave, he called me in for a meeting that took an hour and a half. i'm going to need to learn to give him an hour earlier so that he releases me on time. the word my mother used when we spoke today, "reactive", is precisely what's wrong with his management style (everything else is just fine). this behaviour is him reacting to the fact that i already have to go so he cannot delay the status meeting any longer.

he was horribly disappointed when i said "no" to his proposal for a new addition to the system; as i said to him, i'm (more-or-less) out of operation this weekend, and next weekend i will be completely unavailable (doof festival!!!) so everything needs to be stable. shit, i *hate* surprises and that's all we've had this week :(

4. my payment for january / february *apparently* went through, but i have yet to see my account updated :/

5. i got a ride home with the unprofessional, who proved himself to be an overpaid whiner.

i suffered terrible bellyaches for the rest of the evening, which i only forgot about while under the spell of caberet at the camerie. that is one of the most beautiful and emotional productions i've ever seen, and the translation to hebrew was most impressive. superb acting, the sets were fantastic and i was blown away.

exhausted, we walked home. the shopping was alright, but the walk back with the heavy bags and some random misunderstanding was miserable. my legs and knees hurt, i had a headache, and i just needed to get myself to bed.

---today:

i woke up early this morning to get some work done - little did i suspect that instead of solving problems, i'd spend the day re-installing sql server software (barely successfully). azure's web interface is brilliant, except that it's design interface is awkwardly useless and there's no way to increase the timeout settings. and now that i have the enterprise manager running (hooray!) i've discovered that azure doesn't support connecting an object explorer (pooh!) so i'm working in the dark - or juggling between the web interface and the enterprise manager, which seems a bit silly :(

[continued...]

lots - part i

[post divided retroactively]

what a week! most of it tough and uncomfortable. all of that from work: fighting fires, performing a massive technology migration... there were a couple of good moments, though. and there's almost a sense of satisfaction from a job well done.

---tuesday:

waking up at 6am "naturally" to do a tough translation for french class was ugly - amusingly enough, after driving myself (and pg) crazy figuring out how to express certain things in hebrew i was informed by our teacher that english is not only acceptable but is actually preferred. score!

french class: i spent a lot of it fighting the falling of my eyelids. afterwards, i passed out on a couch for fifteen minutes (it think it's going to become a "thing"), and once again didn't meet with wr because he was busy. i'm not offended because i think he doesn't want to talk to me, rather because i suspect him of being incapable of taking enough control of his life and situation to be able to do simple things like take a five minute break.

after lunch our database had a meltdown and i learned all about microsoft sql's concurrency handling. it's AWFUL by default, and i had to go through each and every function and stored procedure to correct for it :(

i had terrible problems to solve, and one huge meta-problem: no matter how urgent the current task is, a hundred other things seem to pop up, each demanding more attention than the last. i ended up leaving late, with the boss upset with me for having other plans.

i arrived at my cousins spaced out and worn out for a quiet(ish) family dinner. i was mostly pretty awkward. afterwards, i was off to ra'anana to meet with SxS, and i'm glad i called him before getting on the bus because he turned out to be having dinner with one of ze germans at etnachta.

people who whistle on the bus should have their lips sliced off.

ze german is no hippie, and he really doesn't get my lack of consumerism. he goes so far as to ridicule my lack of interest in becoming enslaved to a career... i guess that's part of the reason we're not really friends. grootbek joined us later, and i left soon afterwards.

---wednesday:

after a long, long sleep, i awoke to discover that the internet was down for the second day in a row... and urgent work needed to be done...

it was a day of important meetings (with a salad on rothschild in between): the first about my shakespeare paper, which was far more positive than i'd anticipated, and the second about signing the prenup. pg and i are now more or less hitched, i guess.

we celebrated with soya ice cream.

office biltong? the guy i share an office with lived in pretoria for many years, and learned to make biltong at home. what he brought in was really, really delicious. in fact, it was superior to most of the biltong i've eaten in south africa over the past few years.

scr and i began the migration to microsoft azure, and while the actual database stuff was fairly easy to handle (ie i sat next to him bored out of my skull for an hour or two) i ended up having to rewrite and repackage most of our services and the process of getting everything up and running again was infused with a sense of terror. the clock was ticking, and i could hear it.

we left late, having eaten on the office account (mike's place in herzeliya made a huge stuff-up of our order, it was weird), and i was broken again. i unfolded on the couch while pg watched angel, and was ready to go to bed when the boss called (around midnight).

i spent the next two hours certain that he was going to cry. i wanted to cry, too. the errors we were seeing were really weird and distressing. eventually, i spent a half an hour adding detailed error reporting to *everything*, and after another half an hour of testing determined that checking for the errors was enough to get rid of them.

that doesn't make any sense, but it let me get to bed (2am).

---thursday:

i got up at 7.30am, and it took me a few minutes to realize that an sms from scr had woken me and that i hadn't registered it consciously. "oh, well," i thought, "i may as well go for a run."

weird, huh? i've had running every two days on my calendar since last week, and this was as good an excuse as any. the weather was ideal, it was foggy and a bit nippy, and i changed my route a bit so it'd be easier to measure distance. this time i managed about 8.5km fairly comfortably, and while my legs are stiff and sore the satisfaction i derived was immense. what was odd was my disconnection from enjoying it totally; i kept thinking about how i would describe the morning's beauty to others instead of just focusing on enjoying it in the present.

anyway, i hope i can keep it up. running fits my schedule perfectly.

[continued...]

hero to zero

i woke up this morning with an overwhelming sense of well-being... i've been like this for a couple of days now, does it mean that i'm somewhat healthy?

thought for the morning: the only problem with cake and wine in the first class is that the next part of the day seems a bit rubbish by comparison :)

i wasn't too long in the office, and for what feels like the first time in ages, something that i'd developed and tested actually ran properly when put into production. scr would have to install my newly created distributed service on multiple machines without me... i wondered how that would go.

i hit early rush hour on my way to campus, and that kinda sucked because i really wanted to read more wired. now that i'm finally back into it. what i couldn't stop staring at instead were the signs on the backs of the seats: "stressed at work? try our tranquilizers!"

because if your work is stressful, the problem is OBVIOUSLY you!

anime afternoon: too much shouting, a weird moment of "hey! he's sleeping!" when i nodded off during appleseed (which is brilliant, btw), bad cookies, racism (the culprit did promise to stop, after realizing that i really was offended by his use of the word "nigger"), and a harsh reminder that the middle east is possessed of a culture of clapping (in delight, along to music, whatever). i've said it before, and i'll say it again, clapping is *only* acceptable when applauding a live performance of some sort.

the anime itself made up for all that, and the breathtaking sunset that i witnessed on my way out felt like a pat on the head from the universe for having gotten through such a long week.

that sensation might have been contributed to by scr calling me up to tell me that something was wrong with an installation: "wtf? oh - everything's working fine. cheers."

i ran into eidetic and the chemist waiting for the bus, and we met up with botchman for dinner: it was fun, but i had plans afterwards that needed cancelling because i suddenly realized that the marathon's tomorrow and i was super-tired.

before catching some z's, i learned that my shakespeare paper has been returned to the secretariat already. dum - dum - DUMMM...

i passed out, disturbed briefly by a call from pg to say goodnight and remind me to rotate my wheels (damn - i'll do that now), and an hour later i got up and prayed that in a reasonable amount of time we'd find the weird bug the boss had described earlier.

thanks to all powers that be, i did find the bugs. and *knocks wood* (i do that a lot lately) everything appears to be functional.

in addition to having to wake up at 5.30 tomorrow morning, israeli clocks move forward an hour tonight so effectively i have to be up in 4.5 hours. good grief.

good service

it's been almost a week since i used vinegar, and about 2/3 of a month without shampoo or conditioner. oil production appears to be more or less regulated (if i run my hands through my hair they feel weird afterwards), my hair doesn't smell funny, and i've only pulled out two plastic bristles from my hairbrush so far.

dreads will definitely be less effort than all this brushing :P

---
four and a half hours' sleep before the early wednesday psycho-babble class? nice. amusingly enough, i'm the only person in the class familiar with a rebus (i'd link to wikipedia if they weren't closed*), albeit in the form of cartoon strips called "funetics" that used to be published in capetonian newspapers and magazines.

* SOPA and PIPA are threats to the very foundations of the internet... not only because the internet is so overwhelmingly american, but because if they're stupid enough to pass laws like that then other governments will happily follow suit.
here's what wired have to say, and the oatmeal is on form as usual, and this guy is made of win.
of course, some of the big boys are in too.

i sat an hour or so with scr and we learned how to configure installers for services and perform basic debugging. i'm actually testing it right now, but it's not quite right yet :/
at least all the tricky stuff has been stored legibly in the new office wiki, so we won't have to rediscover it again.

i made it back to campus just in time for second. i enjoyed most of the class (eugenics and cyborgs), not including the five or ten minutes wherein i couldn't focus or keep my eyes open: that kinda sucked. i'm not entirely sure what was being discussed during that time, but i suspect it was interesting.

aside from some good news from the other office (my code passed the initial tests quite well), and some good news regarding sorter's project, and some planning towards the rather complicated things that need to be done to my apartment's roof, it's primarily been an evening of procrastination. and it doesn't help that this stuff HAS to work by tomorrow morning... :S

enthusiasm

but undone prep for tomorrow's classes. it's about 2am and i've spent the past few hours playing with visual studio... and actually getting somewhere. i love working with things that, umm, work.

...

french class was alright. "that guy" in our french class got me thinking: "if you ejaculate each thought as it occurs, you limit the speed of your thoughts to that of your flapping gums". i didn't say it out loud.

a few hours in the office, getting advice from scr (who's pretty much my team leader now) and discussing terms with the bosses - i *like* these terms - and then i returned to campus to get some reading done before the second class. which was another mind-meltingly interesting one.

i stopped by the old office on the way home to perform a code review and chew out -someone (as usual), then returned home to Get Stuff Done. only, Stuff ended up in the singular, which wasn't the plan...

strike out

well, that was an unpleasant surprise. having planned for a strike, and having gone to bed rather late, i was woken at 7.17am by an sms informing us that the strike would be in the morning only, and at 10am studies would resume as usual. so... umm... no difference then. except for no public transport. so i dragged myself out of bed, dressed warmly (it was quite chilly), put on my rollerblades, and was about five minutes away when i registered that there were buses picking up passengers.

what the hell kind of a strike is that?!

the sun had come up and the air was super-heated by the time i arrived on campus half an hour later; nothing like arriving all sweaty for class. i did learn about campus lockers, though - i now have one for the year. it's big enough for my rollerblades or my full bag, which solves all sorts of issues! a bit expensive, but i'm guessing it'll be worth it.

a pity the air-conditioning wasn't working in our classroom: my winter clothing was, to put it mildly, absurdly inappropriate. the three lessons in a row with nary enough time for breaks was tough. the class on rhetoric in elizabethan england was so incredibly bleak and depressing that the topic of titus andronicus was fun by comparison - i now understand where the devil's advocate *really* stands strong :(

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quitting.
i received a mail from mmf expressing his appreciation and understanding, his disappointment in my decision and his willingness to make me as comfortable as possible* on my way out. aside from correcting him about a nuance in his response, i called him up to discuss the money owed. even after my email he claimed he didn't understand what money was missing, and when i explained again his response was "but that's what we agreed on!"

no, i did not agree to be paid less the more i worked. that doesn't make any sense.

the good news is that he's acquiesced, and i will receive the cash at the end of the month. he's also been kind enough to offer me a return to the company in the future if i change my mind. nice of him, but i can't really see myself doing that - unless i get *really* desperate. and if, gods-forbid, i do, it will be with a written contract stating the payment terms explicitly as a condition.

*sigh*

at least i wasn't completely taken advantage of. still not nice, though.

* including releasing me immediately
...

the email after mmf's was from scr, and i'll be paying him a visit after i sort things out in the other office. wouldn't it be nice if i began working for them immediately?

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i bladed straight to work, for an evening of multi-tasking and finally *knocks wood* sorting out the last of the release issues and performing the final testing. i came home to excellent dinner (i really need to go running) and french homework with pg, and now that i've done the internet do's i'm off to bed early.

family movie night

we just got back from the three musketeers, and boy was that a pleasant surprise! i had no idea it was gonna be steampunk ^_^
and ignoring that, the cinematography is superb and it has a wonderful cast.

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the morning sucked, but i got some pre-lunch satisfaction, literally solving a vexing problem as i was on my way out to meet with a guy who i used to study with. and caused me to learn .net the hard way when he left the country in 2005 and i had to take over a project from him that was somewhere between design and first-draft implementation. lunch was good (although i ran into singer's brother, and while it was nice to see him it was still kinda awkward) and we talked past, present and future - including the possibilities of working together. we'll see how that goes, but it sounds really interesting!

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on the way back i met up with my co-workers returning from lunch as well. as we stood waiting for the light to change, some idiot held down his hooter and i, automatically, clapped while looking sarcastically appreciatively in his direction. what i didn't expect was for him, a middle-aged and unhappy-looking man, to pull over next to us and start shouting at me.

"are you bored?!"
i thought about answering, then thought better of it. i just looked back.
"are you bored?? what are you clapping for?"
the others had no clue what was going on, because they'd been busy talking and hadn't noticed my behaviour.
"do i need to call the police? is that what you want??"

and that was when i lost track of what was going on. he was going to call the police on me? for clapping, when it was in response to him doing something illegal? wtf?!?!

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i spent the afternoon figuring out just to what extremes i hate css. it's unbelievable just how pathetic the entire system is. also, my boss irritates me with his smugness, especially when he's speaking in defence of things he knows to be malfunctioning.

...

i left early, buzzing with agitation, and fed that into transcribing some more of my journal before we left for cinema city. i have about six pages left to go, and then i'll focus on the other million todo's...

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wow - pg just gave me an incredible deep-tissue elbows-grinding-into-sore-back-muscles massage with karnivool - all i know playing in the background - now i'm totally spaced out :)