Baroque Repositories and Izzards on the Borders

The time is now 12:05 AM, as I begin to write this. For the purposes of recording history as it happens, however, I'm going to ignore the past six minutes and pretend that this was written squarely in the timespan denoted by December 30, 2009. Another post will be forthcoming tomorrow, December 31, 2009.

That's right, bending time is as easy as that.

So work today was relatively uneventful, save two occurrences:

1. Lunch at PF Chang's with MGK, DR, SP, and JMcF.

2. A lovely, most of the afternoon discussion with MGK and DR (why, the same two gentlemen as above!) about the structure of our development repository and the versioning of our various units of code.

It's always a pleasure to discuss things with those two; a couple of good, calm, open-minded heads on their shoulders. When discussing such things, I tend to follow some sort of common sense, intuitive trajectory of exposition and problem solving, which, sometimes, people actually understand and vaguely appreciate. This is complimented by their spot-on sensibilities and levels of experience, the likes of which generally far outstrip my own. Excellent.

I took a lovely Christmas gift back to Borders today (alas, I already own and love Snow Crash. Thank you, though, KD!). In it's place, I found myself New Spring, by Robert Jordan (prequel to the rest of the Wheel Of Time, written after the 10th book), and Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. I've read neither (or I would be unlikely to have purchased them), but have a great appreciation for both authors. I've heard the Baroque Cycle can indeed be somewhat baroque (I can't possibly be the first one to make that joke - perhaps it's named that way intentionally?), but I find myself looking forward to sparring with it.

Upon arriving home (post Borders trip), Mr. EO and I sat around and watched roughly 3-4 hours of stand up from Eddie Izzard and Louis C.K. Both excellent in very different ways. I laughed harder at the latter, but the former is much more clever.

And now, here I am, continuing in a new tradition. Excellente numero san. Oh, look at the time, I finished at 11:59, how splendid! Yes. 11:59. Definitely not 12:18.

Expenses and architecture

Today was extremely frustrating and exhausting.

I was reminded, within hours of each other, both how I'm still young, inexperienced, and make really dumb mistakes, and how my youth works against me when I do have something good to say.

As I wanted to say regarding the first: I am most suitably shamed.

As I wanted to say regarding the second: ARGH! What the HELL!

That's about all there is to say. I think I accomplished very little, but at least I'll get reimbursed for my expenses this year on behalf of the company. I think I'm going to spend the rest of the evening reading Crossroads of Twilight (The Wheel of Time, Book Ten).

I've ordered Vietnamese from Le's tonight; pho and lemongrass tofu. I can only eat one of those, but ordering the other for later was the only way I could meet the minimum delivery charge of $15. I feel like I've been missing vegetables the past week, so the pho is wonderful. The lemongrass will have to wait (though I did sneak a few bites).

Where are your parents?

Today was fuzzy.

I woke up more or less on time, got to work more or less on time, got some stuff more or less done, and went home more or less at the end of the day (more, in this case).

Around 3:00 PM I went with an expedition of co-workers over to CambridgeSide Galleria to hit up the Apple Store; I needed to pick up my (brother's) computer. Apple was pretty cool about the whole thing - the battery was borked and potentially hazardous (there was a recall), and the logic board in the machine was, apparently, dead. The computer is out of it's 3 year warranty, and I don't have Apple Care.

They replaced the battery and did repairs on the machine, all for free.

That's right: free.

I hear that Apple is trying really hard to get some sort of award for customer satisfaction, and I'll be damned if they didn't satisfy me with that one. They got me - that could have cost hundreds and hundreds o' smackers, but they did the whole thing gratis. Awesome. Hooray Apple!

After work, lugging around two laptops, two power bricks, and whatever else, I headed back to the mall to find myself a keyboard. This whole external monitor thing at home doesn't really work all that well unless you can set the computer to the side. Unless you want to get a crick in your neck, that tends to require an external keyboard as well. I started out by heading to Best Buy to look around there. They didn't really have anything outside of the Apple keyboards which I've always been kinda leery of. They seem... too... low profile. Because of that, and the fact that they didn't have any of them out for me to try, I decided to head back to the Apple Store for the second (2nd) time today.

To get from Best Buy to the rest of the mall, you have to go up their escalator and exit on the second floor (why, I don't have a clue - it's not really straightforward). So after a few moments, I found myself descending an escalator into the mall. As I'm heading down, I see this little boy staring up the escalator nervously, standing at the bottom. He even goes so far as to whine a little and turn away.

When I get to the bottom, I look around... and there's just plain nobody with him. He was perhaps 4. I look around some more, keeping an eye on him. Nobody.

He starts to wander a bit.

Swell.

Now, being a young, tall, scary male with a big bag, scarf, and coat, I decide that perhaps I should enlist someone a bit less imposing to help figure out where this kid's family was. Catching the eye of one of the girls working in one of the center aisle booth things, I ask her, "Hey, have you seen this kid with anybody?"

She, being a nice, short, unimposing young lady, comes out of her booth and asks our young vagabond where his parents are. He shies away from her (I wouldn't have had a chance), and I tell her I'm going to go back up the escalator really quick to see if there's some mother up there freaking out about her lost child.

Eventually the two of us end up bringing the kid over to a plainclothes mall security/administration dude, who, after the kid tries to run away from him, hoists him up practically on his shoulder and starts to parade him back the way we came.

Suddenly, mom shows up. "Oohh! There you are!! Thank goodness!" she says, grabbing the kid unceremoniously out of our chivalrous security dude's arms. She then begins to berate what appears to be her sister, saying, "You were supposed to watch him!"

As we walk off, she thanks the security dude. He and I exchange a nod. Booth girl goes back to her skin care products. I head round the way to the Apple Store.

I'm now a proud owner of one of those little, understated Mac keyboards. It has a cord, and a number pad. It has a delete key. It feels, all told, almost identical to the keyboard on my laptop. It cost roughly $50, including the Apple Tax. Still cheaper, I think, than Logitech boards for about $60-90. It is indeed small, and takes up very little room. As Worf would say, "Delicious."

Delicious.

So, little keyboard, meet your new family: Daddy 30" UltraSharp monitor, momma 15" MacBook Pro, and cousin Axiom 61 Midi Keyboard.

The Long Ride Back to Normal

Drove back from Connecticut with JW today, got in around 6:30 PM or so. We took a trip through the Yale Art Gallery while we were in New Haven, and had lunch at Claire's. The gallery seems to have a pretty small space, though we only visited the first floor. On display: Several dozen freaky clown face photos peering out through frosted glass, a film of a dapper gentleman literally kicking some peasant in the ass over and over, a bunch of sculptures of what appeared to be College Spray Paint Rocks (i.e., RIT: The Quarter Mile's Rock, Tufts: The Cannon - or is theirs an elephant?), drawings of hand-turkeys cross-cut with strong lines to fool you into not noticing their true nature, a sketch-book-animation of a woman pouring water between two cups, and a number of paintings featuring three buses traveling through a town square (with different Photoshop filters applied to each).

Classy-tacular.

This evening involved a very low key dessert, wine, and conversation evening at some friends' of JW's place. We talked about mortality rates during pregnancy, tuberculosis, stockings, cookies, champagne, and pediatrics. It was a medically themed evening, indeed.

We've decided that next week, we'll start up with our exercisamacation again, after using the remainder of 2009 to repair our upheaved lives. I believe I don't have any more lessons this year until next semester. Something like that; I'll have to talk to DZ.

Every so often, when learning to play an instrument, you come back to it to discover that you can do something that you couldn't do before. On Saturday I made such a leap, solidified today in my brother's living room. It's a little jazz line that I picked up from Duke Ellington's C-Jam Blues, off of Takin' The 'A' Train (trumpet, I believe). It's the solo from the first four bar break. I used to have trouble playing it properly in time, as I wasn't capable of playing a down stroke on one string (D, for instance) immediately followed by an up stroke on the string below that (A, for instance). I'd have to pause for an instant to get my pick up over the D string, back to the A string. I seem to be able to do this now, which makes me quite happy.

Progress can be made, and it's glorious when you can see it happening.

Tomorrow's my first day of work after this week long break - the office ought to be pretty quiet, I think, and I might finally have an opportunity to file my expense reports from the year. (Two from May, one or two from... October or so?) That, I think, will be my first order of business.

I should find out if I have class tomorrow. (Update 30 seconds after writing that sentence: I don't!) This may give me an opportunity to head to the mall to fetch my (brother's) laptop, and perhaps pick up an external keyboard to compliment my new, spifftacular 30" monitor. Oh, yes, you read that right boys and girls: 30 inches of monitor goodness. My computer can't even run WoW at that resolution - it chugs away at around 9 fps.

I think it's probably high time I start a fourth blog (followed by a fifth) for technical topics. I realized that I should probably find somewhere to record all the things I learn at work, trying to do my job. Often I spend hours scouring the Internet looking for information on this or that, and it might actually be useful to the world if I could aggregate and consolidate that information gathering into a form that will save other people time. Not a bad idea.

Blog number five will be for random works of fiction. How I intend to have time to write in all these, I don't know, but it should at least be a good time.

2009: Basically Wrapped Up

It's the day after Christmas. I'm awake, for some reason, at 2:30 AM (so technically it's the 27th, not the 26th). I'm sitting in bed at my parents' house. I'm getting up in the morning to drive over to New Haven, prior to picking up JW and driving back to Cambridge. It's raining steadily outside. Andrew Bird is telling me how he's getting ready to be a threat. Volume on 2. This screen is the only light I can see.

The other day I read back through all the things I've written here, such as they are. There aren't so many, but what there is, feels good to re-read. It makes me want to continue to record; if I don't, how will anyone ever know what this was like?

So if I were to make a New Years' resolution, it would be to maintain a record again. I have at various points in the past; LiveJournal is still there, somewhere, recording all the good, bad, and ugly from my Internet-enabled youth. Perhaps I could copy those over sometime, just to maintain the record before LJ destroys it somehow.

It's strange to me how life swings back and forth between chugging along in an orderly fashion, and complete chaos. 2:30 AM has become regular during the past few days since I've been on vacation. Tomorrow I'll (somehow) need to go to bed at around midnight so I can get up for the last week of 2009.

I think this year has been one of steady, but unremarkable, personal growth. I'm better at what I do, and I've learned a lot about myself and how I do (and should) live life. I think the next year should be one of small, remarkable leaps. I'm feeling a lack of experience and worldliness which I'd like to correct. The notion of being somewhere I didn't speak the language used to scare me, I think. Or make me nervous, at least. That seems to be fading. 2010 should be a year of doing something to crush that discomfort.

I have this idea that I should write something here every day next year. Short, long, whatever; something. I find myself creating multiple blogs on blogger (it makes it so easy!) for the various things in my head. Should they be public? Does anyone care? No idea, but from the great deal I got out of reading the 17 prior entries in this one, I can just imagine what I'd have if I recorded another 365 days of mundane and glorious life.

Call that a goal. For now, perhaps I'll let the rain hitting the window lull me to sleep. Until tomorrow. Or, well, today, I suppose. I still maintain that tomorrow isn't today until you've slept. I don't know how to reconcile that idea with all-nighters.

you look so defeated lying there in your new twin sized bed

Crazy day.

1. drove to brighton to pick up E, A, and C.

2. drove to Dennis cape cod.

3. had lunch (or everyone else did) at Captain Frosty's.

4. Went kayaking for an hour and a half.  thoroughly enjoyed it.

5. went to dinner at the Swan River Restaurant.  had a salad.  didn't eat most of it.

6. went for ice cream at Sundae School.  vanilla with hot butterscotch, whipped cream, and a cherry.

7. drove back to brighton.

8. hung around at A's for a bit, went to Victoria's Seafood for a late night snack at 11 pm.  had hot & sour soup, bok choy, and part of a scallion pancake.

9. went back to A's.

10.  Stood around and got really tired.

11. came home, listened to Narrow Stairs on the way.

all dead white boys say god is good

The temperature today was over 90 degrees.

I was sweating by the time I got to the office.  I walked from Central, and it didn't help that I forgot my iPod at home and had to go back for it after about three blocks.

I spent the morning doing tech research for our design project.  I spent the afternoon coding up a integration prototype.  The second half of the day went much faster.  I've discovered that if I try to write a document for eight hours straight, somewhere around hour five I start to get really tired.  Somewhere around hour seven I completely lose the ability to get anything done.  

At lunch, I went to Darwin's with EP - it was the first time in over two years that I'd been there.  The Brewer was still there, and I decided that I wouldn't get it a second time around.  The place has changed.  Their menu has improved.  It now appears to have more vegetarian options.  It's also prettier.  I got the special vegetarian sandwich, which was a veggie burger, tomato (watch out for the salmonella, boys and girls) , lettuce some sort of mayo/salsa sort of dressing, and whatever else.  Black beans in the burger.  Red onion.  It was worth going back for.

During lunch I played Ricochet Robots for the second time in two days.  It's also the second time I've played it in months.  I'm still not so bad at it - I think I tied someone for the win.  Or maybe I won.  I wasn't really paying attention at that point.  Regardless, once I got back into the groove, I did fine.  EP, LG, DM, TW, JL, and DR were playing.  Good people.

I still don't know where I'm going to move.  I've told my landlords (perhaps a month ago) that I'm going to be leaving.  I think I can do better.  The new kitchen looks great and makes me wonder if I'm making the right decision, but I've complained for so long, I don't see how I can be wrong.  I'm going to move, and I'm going to like it.  I just need to find a place, and that doesn't seem to be that easy.

I think I might like to stay around Central.  I like it here.  It's dirty enough and busy enough that it makes you feel like you're really in a city.  I met DM on the T yesterday, and he suggested I look at Davis.  He said if he were going to move again, he'd go back there.  I like Davis... maybe I should consider it.