interminalable

*last* sunday:

a most decadent morning spent working hard on a poetry video

le juicy lotus for a great lunch (the owner's daughter shouldn't have talked about us in hebrew)

godmother's for coffee, some helpful advice but a frustrated gd

signing up for fiverr

evening exhaustion

*last* monday:

drafting an apology to k-twang

early coffee mission in freakishly cold wind

not the worst monday - awesome trance, some fun python and a very short nerf battle, an incredible compliment to start my day and my new poem really starting to feel *good*

running around for a dryer part, finally finding it but in the wrong size...

a long chat with my mom followed by a long chat with gd, dinner fail

mind expanded by http://www.newsweek.com/2015/01/02/thats-not-what-bible-says-294018.html

tuesday:

holy #&$£barrel! what *is* it with these people?!?!

http://www.upworthy.com/john-oliver-goes-off-on-a-terrible-practice-that-was-supposed-to-be-outlawed-in-the-1830s

poetry video inspiration, metro practice

being stupidly tired at work, caffeine not helping 

a long lunch prepping my poem

facepalming to my previous team deploying broken code

gd's cryptic midday message

leaving late and tired with a pinching nerve and blurry vision

...

quick shopping and peaceful welcome

<silence>

wednesday:

a good morning, if a little slow, running into an old gym-buddy / new co-worker on the metro while trying to learn my new poem

really? sql injection emergencies? why do we bother performing code reviews?

star fluxx is AWESOME.

<embarrassing bathroom incident>

learning - at the end of the day- that i'd spent a day doing the wrong thing, but at least learning a lot on the way

a new illustrator on board! perfect timing ^_^

joe rogan - live from the tabernacle

the 11.30 homeless phone call

thursday:

complaining about 6.30am and thinking about four months' time

rushing to the wrong wing of the hospital

...

the most sublime, psychedelic ultrasound experience: we have a little man on the way! seeing him formed, from his brain to his heart to his tiny toes, his posing and his reposing...

... unreal. amazing. beautiful. exhilarating.

...

firefighting while high on the morning's experience, facebook ghost-writing for hac, awesome amba group pushap lunch, manager daddy-lecture and nerf wars, working late but methodically getting stuff done

home late, short rest, dinner and nutrition inspiration, fly swatting

starting my son's email dropbox, being touched by the first hour of the intouchables

friday:

a violently sudden wakeup realizing that i needed to go to the passport office, straightforward procedure, slow but good work progression, godmother dropoff

even as a joke, don't accuse a manager of cheating at fluxx :(

long day, ending late, big compliments

gd's brother's surprise, shopping, family planning, the century of the self and being too tired to eat

saturday:

a great night's sleep but waking up from disturbing, tedious dreams involving people trying and failing to be decent and a dungeons and dragons mission that involved a LOT of spiders and a cherry bomb under the grotesque corpse of a fallout-style alien.

a social media morning, a little stressed about things in general (why can't the world just be cool for a minute?) and skipping what could have been my last opportunity to snowboard this season because it's too expensive and we're about to travel...

a short day resting, chilling, adoring the end of the intouchables (magnificent!), going to bed early

-- kicking rls in the legs --

sunday:

good start mailing the future, warshaw curtains fail and walmart desperation, all while tightening up my new piece and preparing to record

hanging curtain-rails, lunch, shopping, first-world problems, saying goodbye to the old apartment, sudden exhaustion before packing, walking the dog, packing

monday:

sleep of the dead, long coffee and flight comics

rushed morning at work, closing down my sprint, stupid rush to finish packing (i'd done my part) - nothing like having to hurry to wait for many hours because gd's brother wanted to "do us a favour"

flight cancellation on a two-leg trip when travelling pregnant: wow. but the reroute through london is at least a chance to see some family...

linkage! and fat rants.

apple's losing it.

robert downey jr.'s winning it.

guitar solo faces explained.

earl sinclair IS notorious b.i.g.!

tanyer's rules for jiu-jitsu are spot on

america's making strides in the war on the war on drugs! they're now starting to get the message on a federal level. well done!

speaking of backwards things, rick scott is an asshole.

ooh - a tattoo pain chart.

---okay, so i think abby howard's AWESOME. but she did this comic on body image recently that upset me. why did it upset me? because being healthily large is NOT a problem, but being obese IS. it's unhealthy, and it puts a load on our health services and increases our resource requirements when we're already beyond capacity. it's not offensive unless you're sharing space on crowded public transport which isn't designed for obesity, like in economy class on planes; if somebody doesn't like the look, well, that's their problem and they can keep it to themselves.

but my real frustration stems from the fact that she's apparently into science, and she talks about how she's tried eating healthy. really? like, whose idea of healthy? was it a fad diet, like low carbs or paleo? or the "i'm not eating dessert" diet? because if she'd actually bothered to do a little research, she might have come across the huge body of literature that shows convincing evidence that the only "healthy" diet is a whole-food, plant-based one. if you're eating the western-consumer diet, where "healthy" means eggs and bacon for breakfast, red meat and chicken salads and lots and lots of dairy... well, that's not healthy.

show me a picture of an obese person on a whole-foods, plant-based diet. not vegan, because not eating animal products does not equate to eating healthy. whole-foods, plant-based. you wouldn't be able to keep your weight up if you tried.

apocalyptic

has it been a week? it feels like a lifetime.

last saturday:

a disappointing morning, a good lunch and nap and a groggy wakeup

snowstorm!! awesome stuff, coming down apocalyptic

rls on the bus home

a quiet night in the nothing box

...

when it comes to jokes, timing is everything... so it's unfortunate that this suddenly popped into my head a few months too late:

to all computer geeks, i *do* listen. people kept telling me to go fork myself, so now my girlfriend's pregnant.

last sunday:

a proper start to a sunday, gd's-going-to-be-a-mother's day

"there's no smothering without mother"

tax anxiety, cleaning stress but surprisingly quickly reclaiming a room, landlord disappointment, heavy shopping and a long, fun evening with horseman

monday:

revenu quebec and reading lists and krs-one on mainstream hip-hop

slow morning, fluxx flurry, introduction to a new project and google's ingress

system shutdown due to extreme exhaustion 
python studies, shadowrun planning

leaving late, learning that gd's passport WASN'T being processed and they never bothered to inform her when she'd called last week when we would have had time to re-apply without paying the express fee. later, after much suppressed frustration, learning that they *had* bothered to leave voicemail that hadn't been cleared.

a remarkably crap night.

tuesday:

a remarkably crap morning.

calling in sick. resting. passport canada *almost* pleasurable. resting more.

wednesday:

dreaming of weather-controlled arcologies, a pleasant morning and a good start to the workday. my old boss walking a full circuit of the office wearing the custom panties we bought him

an enjoyable and confidence-building end to the day (impressing the guy who built a wickedly smart system by fixing one of its features)

buying the wrong mounting stuff and not being able to put up the mirror, being inspired to work on a new poem, shopping and chilling and going to bed early

thursday:

a great, early start to the day, the cleaning lady coming in at 8 and us all having a good talk until it was time to leave the women to their thing and get to work

i don't really get how ingress works.

forgotten keycard shame, strategy and bull meetings pride, green team meeting satisfaction

post-lunch investigations, then a long, relaxed afternoon not really making much progress but learning a little along the way

chatting with the guy i'm replacing, discovering that my teammate whose seat i've moved to is an illustrator and arranging a lunch meeting

home, pharmacy, relaxing

yesterday:

bad dreams gone wild: camping and being chased by a tenacious bee only able to defend myself with an unwieldy bag and running for ages, sexually assaulted in bogota and then ripped off by an angry sales clerk

gd's rush-to-work whirlwind, post-tidy loss of all my gear

a slow day with a boring auditing task, cancelled illustrator meeting

cold fingers from ingress training

transferring from 000webhost (who are utterly abhorrent) and spending my evening improving my phone control system, minus a short sugar mission

today:

early up, stabilizing my phone control software

have i been in that starbucks enough that they remember my name? [oh, she simply overheard gd's friend greeting me]

a painful laser treatment, quick shopping + breakfast and chatting with my mum

an afternoon on phone control, with a good nap (with joe rogan live in the background - brilliant) and a visit from horseman and a chat with SxS during which i discovered a huge screw-up with our return flight... our stop in new york? two different airports. %#&$.

sunday:

dreaming about being bullied and fighting back. dreaming other weird dreams and struggling to get up and talk about them without being sucked back deeper into the rabbit hole.

starting the day with biblical stories.

summary report: groovy

monday:

big shopping

amazing pushap lunch

the my-new-team's-in-trouble meeting

six straight hours of bash-hating

in a rush and urgently using a public toilet while wearing a sweater and jacket, which gd informs me is what women usually experience in winter

geriatric evening at walmart, on both sides of the counter

helping a slow crutchwalker home

gd's delicious dinner, homeless o'clock at the dep

gameloading: rise of the indies is awesome! i'm very glad i backed it ^_^

tuesday:

tough getting out of such a comfortable bed, a good start to the day and then getting hit with a fine for jay-walking right outside the metro. with a little tension from asshole-cop...

how romantic, we each got matching fines...

a good start to the workday, long but productive

is the c++ team manager trying to recruit me too?

discovering that 78% *is* complete when the original estimate is bad

spring thaw: the temperature's risen and it's almost mid-march and i pretty much missed out on the snowboarding season :(

a pleasant start to an utterly shit evening with an old apartment pickup

luxuria superbia is highly addictive, and very, very awkward in terms of how it makes you interact with a device. the sound and the visuals are amazing, worth the money all round.

wednesday:

a great start to a stunning spring day that i enjoyed in spite of myself, scripting level up, judaica mission


leaving later than planned, but discovering that a few of my teammates are neighbours and into wall climbing 

weirdness synchronization, dinner, luxuria superbia and then suddenly crashing

thursday:

trying to sleep in, battling online, my first day without bandaids since the laser surgery, feeling a good morning on the way to work

good progress (i learned cake), good fluxx, a simple and constructive afternoon, finishing all my tasks and working on a personal project to improve a really dodgy setup

being lectured about overtime by a pregnant teammate who was thrilled to hear about gd and is full of advice

a really nice, chilled evening with exciting news from my mom ^_^

RIP terry pratchett: someone's playing dice with the gods tonight. reading the colour of magic to gd in his memory

yesterday:

an early, but grand morning. the cic dude recognized me and was really cool. taking a long starbucks detour so i could speak to an aerospace recruiter, but he didn't call back so it became an excuse for a very pleasant walk before work.

my manager's so excited and impressed by my performance that he really doesn't want me to try for his other team! and i'm enjoying myself too :)

so it's official, i'm now an "infrastructure developer"

a great afternoon, connecting with the gamers from our QA team, finishing strong and leaving early while the sun was still up!

apartment cleansing with mezuzot and candlelighting and vfmp's housewarming gift of carcassonne's winter edition, which CAN be treated as an expansion pack, even if doing so for only two people was a bit ambitious

today so far:

a short night but a good rest, gd waking up a little before me for pre-snowboard coffee. leaving late but still not too bad considering how much nearee we live to the metro now

*a heart filled with gratitude*

not a bad rest on the bus, taking my time for coffee before hitting the slopes and being floored by some of the feature articles in wired's "sex in the digital age"

ice and powder, a little awkward at first but feeling smoother as the morning progressed

linkage!

i mentioned the wankband recently, but what was really weird was seeing this under the "related" section... could the connection be stronger than mere genre?

from realistic cartoon characters to cartoon characters as humans, this artwork is gorgeous!

security experts want you to know this stuff. it's a good idea.

now, for a different kind of security: an analysis of the 2014 gaza action.

a lot of take-out

thursday:

a long, emotional day but filled with interesting challenges. joining the new team for drinks (but without either of my managers), great fun! awkward goodbyes to a thankfully not-awkward team

p.m. mission. back home with a sulk to receive a bloody good talking to.

friday:

a long night, forgotten dreams, difficulty waking up, johnny macrae's love your weird making my morning

a long, tough day with some light at the end of the ten-hour mark; awkward but satisfying team farewell  lunch and forgetting my thawing lunch in the fridge when i left for the weekend :/

walmart running out of doorstops and it taking me three sections to find someone to confirm it

a relaxed evening, getting to bed early 

saturday:

waking up early too to go shopping for stuff that nobody sells any more and to learn how simple bank transfers don't work in canada. getting a full box of the wrong protein bars - i HATE dates! - and needing a rest before returning to sort out the old apartment 

the very friendly but disturbing woman who thought she recognized me (i was wearing my ski mask)

washing machine with hot and cold switched and weight training with a bloody heavy box of goods

getting the heating switch confused and slowly cranking it up because i was suffering from it being too high

i was about to take a nap when i heard... water dripping from the bathroom ceiling. or, after speaking to the neighbours, what i *hoped* was water.

storming around until the landlord finally responded and gd got home, a busy but good evening and an early night

yesterday:

waking up early in anticipation of the cleaning lady coming in (but daylight savings change, so really early). thought for international women's day: "we're celebrating by cleaning our apartment. i'm kinda helping"

a furiously energetic clean and tidy, good music and good vibes and a habitable apartment.

exhaustion, sling blade, the maroon 5 lighter and a great night's sleep.

a painful move and a long week

saturday:

copper branch with vfmp, shake powder run and coffee - dizzy and tired and an uncomfortable moment of tacitly agreeing to leave an understanding unsaid

feeling like shit, lying down and then greeting gd with a difficult conversation that resolved a few important issues

an evening of packing and self care. and freaking out about not having packed in time, and a rushed, highly successful mission to steal a fat stack of newspapers from the metro

sunday:

early up to move

vacuum weight training , -15 and overheating 

a knot of cables

indoor slush, frantic confusion, a nightmare whirlwind of good spirits, scrapes and bruises, hormonal stress and a neighbour antagonizing gd's 6'11" brother and his hired hand who're serious brawlers

i'm quite pleased with myself for the kind of shit i can carry

desperately needing the pizza and a proper break... the BEST nap but very short. returning with gd for the bathroom, then returning alone a few more times.

the mind-bogglingly bad decisions gd's brother made while helping us pack (not only did we start too late but our old apartment is so small that we ran out of space after three boxes)

the curious incident of the shelf foot lost in the snow in the nighttime - calling gd to help me identify a possible match, giving up and the finding it two meters further on.

monday:

after almost 18 straight hours of physically demanding effort and high stress (not including the previous night's frantic last-minute newspaper stack stealing and packing), i was surprised to put myself to bed in our new bedroom around 1.30am feeling exhausted, but otherwise pretty darned good.

i got up six hours later in the body of a geriatric. with little strength, a sore everything and a slight shake. just in time to meet my new team at work. happy monday!

...

finishing why men don't listen and women can't read maps, which should be updated and then be set as mandatory reading in every junior high / high school on the planet

a buyer for my bluetooth keyboard, a super-awkward interview with two potential managers vying for me

finishing minimum requirements, being kicked out early, a walmart run in gorgeous post-snowglobe weather, a bookshelf purchase and urgent pizza and a nap so great i woke up stoned

quick shopping (a successful draino experience), and being overwhelmed by the amount of crazy shit in my news feed, from the horrific photos of the fire in cape town to ISIS pulling off a real-life titus andronicus moment by feeding a hostage to his mother, from a weasel on the back of a flying woodpecker to a man freaking out and attacking his whole office...

facebook survey irony

tuesday:

fresnaye dreams, back in the house i grew up in; my uncle cooking and his guest leaving the toilet in a sickening state, k-twang around but we're avoiding each other and then meeting a strange family on a lawn where our backyard used to be.

getting on a shuttle flight with a torn ticket, huddled in a small cabin. wire's in front, hands me a giant sketch book he's been scribbling in and invites me to collaborate - i complete a crappy but readable comic strip and then learn that the book belongs to the girl next to him and she didn't authorize anyone touching it, she's mortified and the rest of the cabin (including my team's QA guy, though his eyes are tiny green emeralds set inches deep into his face) jump on me. i wake up moments before my alarm goes off.

there's a 24 hour stompie hotline, cape town? use it!

i love our shower, i don't love that we're not yet ready to make breakfast but gd's got friends coming to help out today [or not]. stepping out into a brilliant sunny morning still yawning but looking forward to the day.

back to bash scripting, and then delving deep into apache territory. it looks like at least half of my new position is going to be fun and challenging and not at all what i signed up for

an evening of shopping, simmering, step-by-step unpacking

yesterday:

going to bed in a blackout, jumbled dreams, cracking open the window to combat the extreme dryness

DAMN. i've never been so relieved to see so many status updates about rain before... i pray it's enough! [it wasn't]

http://view.vzaar.com/2900141/player

some morning frustrations, but a great start to the workday. presenting our manager with his "beloved tyrant" shirt in front of the boss (for whom we had nothing) was pretty awkward. even more so when he said "*i* didn't get a shirt", so now we're ordering him a personalized thong.

a long, tough afternoon chasing my tail and growing more and more tired by the minute 

1. lessons from why men don't listen and women can't read maps might have been absorbed mentally but they're not so easily put into practice

2. purim sameach: reading bible stories to gd

3. titan ae

and passing out early, in spite of really bad rls

today:

waking up to brush teeth, then flop back down into long, strange dreams

no need to rush every morning

half moving desks

event horizons - part iii

thursday:

working through a daze after officially hearing about the restructuring, staying late because i was so excited about sorting out the cross platform custom authentication issues i was dealing with

getting home to a warm awkwardness, going to clean a bit at the new pad which gave us plenty of time to talk; the new place is fantastic, but the previous tenant's stuff is still there so that was a wasted effort

yesterday:

a lot of good sleep, could've used more.

i'm deeply impressed by the potential for pornhub's masterful device design, it's gonna be great for charging phones at festivals!
oh, 2015: when "stop or you'll go blind" became "stop and you'll be sitting in the dark".

speaking of festivals, i have a deep and desperate need to dig.

a good morning, including my teammates taking advantage of my unlocked computer to invite everyone for donuts. i'd just gotten paid*, so i used the excuse for a pleasant walk to draw cash and buy vegan desserts from pushap which everyone thoroughly enjoyed. then the CTO came over and asked me if i was willing to move with my current manager, who i'm sure i've mentioned before is one of the best i've had. so that's confirmed :)

i'll be sorry to no longer be working directly with sasquatch, though.

* finally! i was worried my payment would be late and so we had to slum it the whole week to make sure we had cash for rent and the movers

we're definitely getting more and more into the spirit of pirate fluxx :)

it was a long afternoon (i worked two hours later than i was supposed to) completely absorbed by the complexities of what i originally believed would be fairly trivial. i could only leave once the mission was complete, which gave me an opportunity to chat with my boss without anyone eavesdropping - i appreciate his candidness in those situations. i also appreciated learning that big junior will be moving to another team.

steaming green dinner, nursing a beer, comic publishing (and managing the forgotten fourth panel all by myself), purchasing great games through humble bundle and struggling to rank muse and placebo albums.

today:

a much better morning, i purchased origin of symmetry and finally, five years later, read through the transcript of an interview i agreed to with a journalist / researcher connecter to tpj. looking back, there are a few things that i definitely didn't need to mention and it's mortifying to see how much of my speech she garbled. clearly she couldn't understand my accent. having said that, there were plenty of me-isms that i recognize and am a little embarrassed about. at some point i will clean it up and publish it.

i'm supposed to be preparing and packing and stuff today. but we'll only be able to start tomorrow morning because the new apartment's not quite ready yet. one thing i urgently need to do today is find is a slip of paper with my new SIN - i need that to update all my services with my new address and i seem to have misfiled it :S

event horizons - part i

the rest of sunday:

mostly resting, a lot of grinding through stupid security issues with openshift (but i'm finally ready to get started) and a great haircut.

monday:

it's tough to get enough sleep when you can't breathe properly
a morning full of fail - backing up my keepass db but not realizing i had a key file attached... which was also backed up! but not with the correct name, so we wasted two hours trying to find it.

very serious pirate fluxx

pc speaker fail: checking out midnight rescue, putting on my headphones and only realizing a minute later that i was actually hearing the sound considerably softer than everyone else.
major vm networking fail wasting hours that i simply didn't have

braindead in front of the telly, trying out shitty comedians (notably, snoop dogg's female comedian special started so badly we couldn't bear to continue) before finding a not-bad [oh, crap. thanks netflix for no longer showing what i've recently viewed] [oh, jay mohr - funny for a girl], the stepdog shedding sticky-roller fail

the itch! this healing is taking ridiculously long...

an asshole who wants to buy the bluetooth keyboard i've been trying to sell for ages motivated me to get my sms relay operational. i have a feeling that after the moving stress of [this] weekend i'll be grinding out some real progress.

tuesday:

gd and i both slept better, but i woke up a few times from disturbing dreams with an unsettling internal shiver that might well be anxiety. in the morning, i saw the face of cabin fever and understood why so many montrealers commit suicide at the end of winter... climate change is making the winters destabilizingly erratic and pushing them further back year by year, and when all you want is spring it just seems like the universe is teasing you. meanwhile, i haven't been snowboarding enough so i want more winter which infuriates everyone, and i actually had to remove my gloves for a minute in -19 weather to prevent overheating...

...

thought for the day: even if electronic cigarettes are harmful (all the evidence being to the contrary), they're significantly *less* harmful than smoking tobacco. if you take the "follow the money " approach to things, the only people who would benefit from smokers staying with tobacco due to safety concerns are the tobacco companies, who we all know are *completely* ethical and honest in all their dealings. playing the "better the devil you know" card is a cheap ploy.

...

more upgrade frustrations, no development until the afternoon. a very controlled run to walmart, more an excuse for a walk and fresh air than anything. great fluxx, then finally sorting my computer out (more or less) around 3pm, then over five straight hours making significant progress in three different directions but not doing nearly enough to rescue my sprint. leaving around 8.30 with a mixed sense of satisfaction and doom.



wednesday:

lots of strange dreams that i can't recall, a super slow wakeup.

thought for the morning: western women have every right to be freaked out by hijabs, they're used as part of the suppression of femininity and it's incompatible with western values. i saw a bit of honor diaries the other day: if you can accept that kind of shit (genital mutilation, child brides, honor killings etc.), there's something deeply wrong with you. if you think it's okay because it's cultural, then your culture's gotta go. or maybe "gotta grow". i guess that'd be good too.

sorting out the mess, but learning that our team's being collectively punished for the loss of productivity caused by my upgrade... later learning that that wasn't the real reason, there was a restructure looming - suddenly i found myself urgently trying to sort out official vacation authorization

mind-melting debugging attempt that dragged out until the end of the day

mortified nation is inspiring, intriguing and cathartic.

obsessing over open

yesterday:

6am, waking up for the case of the missing inhaler, unable to return to sleep and eventually getting up to head over to comfort gd after she learned that the doctor she needed to see doesn't get to the clinic until 10am after she needed to get to work, when she'd been instructed the evening before to arrive at 8.45.

...

dear google, you're supposed to be the greatest when it comes to searching: so why is it that whenever i desperately need to find an email use your mobile app, it can't be found? yet when i enter the same query into my desktop browser... whoop! there it is.

...

it's hard to be excited about contributing to an open source project when 99% of my effort is directed to setting up my dev environment so that i can run tests locally that are only failing because nobody bothered to document how the meta-comments are handled. i feel like my inability to find the project owners in real life and slap them upside the head is only contributing to the problems our entire industry is plagued with.

passing out from hunger and exhaustion while reading while waiting for gd and her friend to be ready for lunch. awesome copper branch bowls! wasting away while gd did some emergency shopping.

straight into bed for a wild nap and a half, waking up, chatting with my mom and putting on austin powers 2 while making dinner (it took me that long to do the dishes, chop and steam the veggies and mix it all up), then trevor noah's you laugh but it's true, which is interesting, amusing and decidedly cathartic.

[a sore tooth to go with my healing itch to go with wondering if it'll be possible to fix things with k-twang*]

today:

3am dragged out of bed to shower and switch bandaids
a night full of weird dreams that bled into a semi-awake state, so in and out of confused consciousness. a beautifully relaxed morning, slowly but surely chopping down the chore tree.

* i almost sent k-twang an apology this morning, but the more i looked at it the more i felt like i was simply placating... everything i wrote about his wedding was absolutely valid and correct, even if it wasn't nice and could have been (slightly) less scathing. i will not apologize for my honesty, for responding reasonably in the face of someone i cared about forcing me to make sacrifices to feed his and his not-yet wife's egos. he's bloody lucky i found out in time to back out, because if i'd arrived in south africa and *then* found out he might well have found himself in a hospital.
no, i do believe that they owe me an apology - which i don't expect they'll ever see. do i need to be the bigger man to keep family together when they're particularly inconsiderate family? should i be forgiving because it's not his fault he was badly raised? to what end?

---why i'm moving back to south africa:
his description of western loneliness is on the mark, in south africa you're forced to pay attention to other people and your surroundings, and when you realize that most people in the west are basically walking dead with so little to complain about that they create weird problems - sometimes very large, very real weird problems - it's hard to get a handle on your new environment. both professionally and personal security-wise i'm glad to be in canada, but it's very tough to make real connections with people here because almost everyone in north america is conditioned to keep their heads down, avoid eye contact and look out for number one. there're a lot of wonderful people here, but it's such a controlled society that they're desperate for simple, honest contact and they often don't know what to do with it when they find it.
i don't know how coherent that is, but at the end of the day south africa has a very social culture. i believe that the all-round craziness brings people together and sets better priorities and perspectives.

---getting rid of cyclists: great attitude!

ooh, look - moderate muslims ARE capable of taking action! that inspires hope :)

utah homeless problem is being eradicated: it's nice to see that someone did the math and came out with a win for everyone! welfare needs to be done right, though, it's unfortunate that this is a rare situation.

story point estimation: no, i didn't think this would be that exciting either, but a method that considers environmental factors and spits out reliable results? estimating software development time is a nightmare, and this looks properly helpful.

good beehive design: honey on tap.

free online cartoon streaming!

con-end drum

sleeping well, being woken up half an hour before my alarm to a whispered worry (fortunately, it looks like we'll be fine but our finances are a little tight this week)

a very, very cold morning and it only took one asshole taxi driver to ruin it by ignoring his instructions and simply not picking us up... and of course, i got on the metro just as it broke down. and then later received a call from the taxi rank to inform me that the guy who finally picked us up needed to be paid because he couldn't accept credit... 2015, no? at least gd handled it.

lunch vegan confusion forcing me to speak french

a talk on bootstrap because there wasn't anything more interesting, a really interesting talk about unit testing, then a "for me" talk about game dev: a bit disappointing, and the man behind me who wasn't listening but was coughing a lot really irritated the shit out of me

elementaryOS impressed

rushing home, shopping on the way

an evening of christopher titus - man, that dude has fantastic payoffs! - and the intense agony of thirteen slowly healing nevii excisions. no, tiger balm is *not* good for the band-aid irritation. oh! gd's right, it *says* not to use it on irritated skin.

realizing just before getting into bed that i actually can't afford to snowboard this weekend, which is fine because i have a list of other stuff to do. and sleeping late is on that list.

booking

passport? the bureaucratic run-around. leaving gd to handle the rest and arriving late for the second talk. interesting security talk, discovering nexmo, awkward public-speaking talk with no authority about project management

learning that gd's passport's on the way! ^_^

good lunch, good presentation but sleepy even with the coffee...

fun api horror stories, followed by falling asleep to boring symphony best practices that are all available online

awkward drinks, then being accompanied to my metro station by a guy i didn't really feel like talking to

pampering, the nap, the crazy nevii itching

booking tickets! taking a while to find cheap ones, but totally worth it ^_^

contributing to a node project from windows demands dedication - i eventually threw in the towel after starting from scratch. i'll have to wait until monday when i have a linux box again.

crossing eyes and dotting tees

saturday:

stupid AM being reminded of just how crappy a design my respiratory system is; a stuffed sinus and blowing my nose only making it worse and swallowing leading to choking...

... so much focus on my breathing that i didn't need to actively wake up at 5.20... an easy morning taken one step at a time, leaving a little late (at dawn) with the words "dawn patrol" infusing me with a sense of accomplishment

i knew it would be a great snow day, but *damn* the bus was packed, and delayed :/

first run slow, and my neck was a bit tender for the first few even as i started to warm up and speed up. it was so cold after the fourth i had to run inside to de-ice!

a great set of speedy runs, not feeling adventurous enough to do the snow park alone. *i* find that weird and silly.

i understand now why i need a go-pro: not for the action so much as for the pictures i would take if only it wasn't too cold to remove my gloves

a woman skiing her husky? very cool.

- down the fluoride rabbit hole -

[it's not healthy to add it to the water supply, but it's not *as* dangerous as some people make out]

a beautiful afternoon, really relaxing at breakneck speeds with enough adrenaline and close calls to be whooping for joy! i really should have a partner in crime, though.

calling it a day for coffee and wired, taking it easy

not letting the music from the back of the bus bother me, the beggar with the big story following me to his disappointment

getting home to an angry, hungry gd and two wasted pizzas

sunday:

not the best morning, but not the worst either

midi 6: the final straw, finding a nice place with zero vegan options instead (but they did have almond milk latte)

serious shopping (with a hilarious but unrepeatable embarrassing moment)

lunch, horseman's visit and him giving us a ride to the cinema

the incident of the tumbling popcorn

jupiter ascending: stunning visuals, interesting conceptually and fantastically cool as far as tech and fashion and alien design go. having said that... the 3D wasn't done well, the dialogue was often shameful, the sound mastering was an absolute disaster, the basic premise and a lot of the story elements were remarkably amateur, and overall there was a general sense that something was "off" and it was nigh impossible to suspend belief and be immersed. in short - fun, but far from being a great theatre experience. if you're going to watch it at all, though, the big screen's definitely the way to do it.

the case of the broken ladder, and i think i understand why so many people here die utterly alone. self-absorbed apathy is bad.

futurama

monday:

a full range of morning, a frustratingly unproductive few hours at work then rushing home to comfort a scared gd along with my stepdog before going to see the doctor.

gd's doc is the sister of a guy i'm friendly with at work, everything seems okay and we have our first ultrasound image and a recording of the heartbeat! very exciting ^_^

triple taxi fail in the freezing cold suggesting that i *do* need to get sorted with a car2go / communauto account

great dinner, an early night after being surprised by a reminder for an early osteo appointment

tuesday:

5am garbage day mission

deep dreaming and almost impossible waking up from it

taking a big risk to pass a smoker on a narrow icy path so i wouldn't have to keep breathing it in

i only understood why i needed the osteo appointment when i left and realized how much better i felt

searching for an atm: wasting time when you're in a hurry to find something that you couldn't have known that you'd walked right past, and seeing it only on your return after withdrawing from a machine with a penalty fee

finally! a Getting Stuff Done morning, including more open source contributions (or not, the automated testing failed) and cancelling my dentist appointment in french.

fluxx for lunch, oddly enough enjoyed more than lunch money

focused afternoon working hard and smart, ultimately successful to the point of elation in spite of a significant distraction by a mysterious system failure

getting home to a super relaxing evening

yesterday:

confoo! which means going to bed early to get up stupid early to register before breakfast (which i wouldn't eat). rough dreams.

worst hotel / conference entrance without any signs, getting the wrong "p" in "jp", the missing keynote so i could've slept in

first talk good, second one pirate!

edible lunch, then horrifically dry and excessively detailed italian talk

a surprisingly interesting look at accurate story point estimation

team building by a woman who really doesn't understand male engineers and who actively rejected work ethic from a list of guiding principles (everyone i spoke to appreciated mine*)

* 1. do what you can with what you have; 2. make it better; 3. be flexible; 4. don't be more of an asshole than you need to be; 5. you are not your results.

lightning talks were mostly meh but with a couple of gems

another relaxed evening, finally sending in my first health insurance claim and being blown away by christopher titus' norman rockwell is bleeding.

this morning so far:

half-asleep waking up early for passport form filling, grateful that the -11 snowstorm was relatively warm and cozy