Mizblog

Today I tried to convert a Sun workstation to act as a DHCP client and ended up corrupting the boot sector. I remember reading the instructions for doing this on the Sun website and thinking “this doesn’t seem too difficult…”.

Heh. Yeah.

So after that Sangeeta and I went to Melrose and looked at all the alternative clothing stores. Then we went to The Grove/Farmers Market and looked around there for a while. Forgot all about computers for a few hours.

I hate computers.

Today was a typical day in my life. I woke up at 11:30pm last night. I had crashed at about 7pm the night before because I was tired and I wanted to escape the stress of my wife and sister-in-law arriving from work at the same time. Not that they’re all that bad, but I’d spent the day in solitary tranquility and they were little bundles of energy and industry. The stress was all in my head.

I was pretty well rested. I sat down at the computer(s) and started reviewing what I’d missed the previous evening. Lots of work to do. I fired up the coding environment and started in on some of the stuff I’d been working on yesterday.

By 3am I’d made some very good progress, and Sangeeta was up, so I took a break and went to the gym for about 45 minutes. It was raining hard, so my car got cleaner.

After that, work got harder and I burned out. Around 8am Sangeeta went off to class and work, and I went back to sleep until around 10am. I started cooking some ground turkey (so I could make some chili). At around 10:30am I smelled it burning. 1.5 pounds of ground turkey burned to a crisp. My apartment smells awful now.

By 1am I’d not managed to accomplish much more than the turkey fiasco and reorganizing some files on my HD, so I showered and went to the post office to mail something for Sangeeta. Now I’m back and getting tired again. It’s 4:30 and I’m going to take a nap. I’ll try this programming stuff more after dinner…

I had a strange dream last night.

We bought a house on the side of a hill. At the top of the hill our street was crossed by a road that led to the highway. At the bottom our street ended in a T, with the left side road descending a curving grade toward the beach.

A few doors up the hill from our house, someone had put some wheeled dumpsters next to the curb. I went to examine them and found that they weren’t properly blocked from rolling down the hill. I accidentally set the first one rolling and it crossed the street and destroyed a parked car.

I deliberately sent the second one rolling. It crossed the street too, swiped a different car, and then went back toward my house! It went up the driveway and (because I shared a driveway with my neighbor) smashed my neighbor’s car. It bounced off and went back into the street, so I ran and jumped onto it. We got to the T intersection and it turned left and started rolling down the hill toward the beach.

That’s when the country music started playing. The singer was going on about how it’s so crowded nowadays that the only ones who can see past all the trucks are the other truck drivers, and so on. I recognized the song by name: “I Don’t Know If It’s True, But It Sure Makes A Great Song Title!”

At the beach the dumpster and I ended up in the ocean. I waded to shore and eventually climbed up the rocks to see what was going on. Turns out that the ocean was just a stream, but it was washing some really big trees down with the current, and they were knocking down other trees alongside the stream.

And that’s when I woke up. It was 3am.

Today (Monday) started too fast and too furious for me! I woke up to the sound of my wife talking to my boss on the phone. It seems there’s some problem or something, I don’t know. I had to try to figure it out before I even really woke up.

Then my wife needed MS Word technical assistance so she could print an invoice. She’s going to rent some jewelry to a company that’s filming a Cingular commercial. She’s also stressed because she has a midterm tomorrow and her sister keeps coming over to check her e-mail and use up all our printer supplies. Not to mention she locked up Sangeeta’s cart yesterday using an old padlock that Sangeeta lost the key to! What a pair. Anyway, the stress is overflowing onto me at a bad time.

It’s too much for a Monday morning!

Update:

And now! NOW! Now I finally get a chance to take a shower, and as soon as I got my head all shampoo’d up the hot water turned off! Then the cold water slowed to a trickle! Gnnnnaaaarrrrgggghhhh!

Typical Monday, right?

Though I can’t go into any details yet, I can say that the work I’ve been doing on New Moon lately has come to the point where the whole system is working and being tested by other creators. So far so good. Yesterday I had to redesign the way things were laid out, and it involved several edits to dozens of files, for a grand total of several hundred edits. It made the system better integrated into the game though, and that’s important. I worked my butt off yesterday and got it all runnung. I’m so proud. :)

I’m starting the burnout process. I’m just not interested in hurting myself in order to get work done. Guess it’s time to cash in that overtime I’ve been logging and take a day off.

It’s late. It’s Africa late. Tarzan couldn’t take this kind of late.

I can’t sleep so I’m testing and debugging my code. Refining the design. Feeling really bad inside, like I’m going to fall apart. I need sleep but can’t have it.

I hate this.

It kind of sucks when your boss calls you and wakes you up in the morning.

I’m getting into conflicts with General Electric through one of their contracts. We’re subcontractors under them, working for LADWP. They let the H1B visa for their key employee expire and he had to go back to India for a couple months. Meanwhile, the guy who replaced him went ahead without knowing about our prior development agreements, and now they say it’s too late to go back and do what they agreed to do to support our work.

Progress is happening on our new arithmetic learning software too. We’ve added word problems to the mix, and it’s going pretty good. The project is finally at the stage of “alpha testing”, which means it runs but it’s easy (trivial) to find the bugs in it. Joel is helping me enumerate and document them, and I’m fixing them.

Fun fun fun.

So, time to wrap up the weekend’s activities.

On Friday a Sun Ultra 10 was delivered to me. I got it set up and running on Saturday, and bought a network cable for it on Sunday.

I spent a good deal of effort programming. I made all sorts of progress. Many of my projects are nearing completion at the same time. How exciting!

I went walking with Sangeeta yesterday. Saw all the nice houses near our neighborhood. I’m hoping the impending global economic collapse won’t affect me negatively (haha, yeah right).

My hands are getting used to being a little sore. It keeps me from typing too much. Putting the games where I can’t reflexively retreat to them has increased my productivity as well as sparing my hands some pain.

The code I’ve been struggling with over the last couple weeks has been tidied, bundled, and uploaded. Finally! A moment’s peace while the testers flood me with bug reports.

Come to think of it, this is all I’ve really been doing since I started hosting my own blog! Time for a change of pace, I think…