Mizblog

On the way to my parents’ house yesterday, we witnessed an auto accident up close.

We were driving in moderate traffic, in the 4th lane (the one next to the slow lane) when I saw a car driving perpendicular to the flow of traffic, heading right! The rogue car missed all the other cars and slammed into the wall to the right of us, maybe 3 car lengths in front of us, before rebounding and coming to rest facing backward in the 2nd lane (the one next to the fast lane).

It was quite an adrenaline rush! I hope the driver was okay, but I couldn’t back up and check without risking my own accident with other traffic. Farther down the road, I noticed that after me there was only one other car which had made it past the accident. The rest of the freeway was completely vacant.

Theories on what went wrong seem to have focused on a too-close lane change, clipping the victim’s car and sending it off in a new direction, much like the CHP’s chase-ending tactics. Other theories included a stroke or a panicked braking, but these only indirectly account for the perpendicular orientation of the car. Anyway, I didn’t see the beginning, so I can’t be sure what happened.

I’m still trying to get back into the swing of things. It’s been difficult.

Yesterday I had to get up early and go downtown for a project update meeting. So much pain for such little benefit. It destroyed my concentration for the rest of the day. I kept flitting from one thing to another every 2 minutes. I couldn’t even watch TV!

I’ve been reading up on relativity, quantum mechanics, and consciousness. I’m convinced that these all tie together nicely somehow but I haven’t been able to understand the mechanics of it just yet. One problem is that I don’t know how to describe consciousness in terms of physics. There’s something there though, probably in the temporal perception bit, that I believe will turn out to be central to a deep understanding of the nature of consciousness. I’ll keep thinking about it.

I just got back from Indianapolis, where I saw my friend Castor make his wedding vows. It was a good trip: a bit of a vacation. Good to hang out with old friends 2000 miles away from work.

I just spent the weekend driving up to San Francisco to attend the wedding of my good friend Ed and his beautiful new wife Charlin.

Got to see all my old friends from New Moon too: John, Liz, Sam, Leslie, Jason, Jon, and a bunch of other nice people I barely know. It was worth every second of the 12 hours of driving. ;)

I’ll be going back for Sam’s wedding next month. Should be fun. :)

Finally, it’s June.

The weather’s lame, as is usual for June. “June gloom” they call it on TV.

It’s getting me down. I’m tired.

Finally I got a real desk! Well, it’s a workstation desk and not a business desk, but that’s perfect for me.

http://img3.musiciansfriend.com/dbase/pics/products/54/546553.jpg

I had to remove the keyboard tray to make it comfortable, but it’s awesome! Both my monitors and both my speakers fit on the top shelf, both my computers fit in the right side rack space, and all my music rack gear fits in the bottom 1/3 of the left rack. I haven’t put anything on the middle shelves yet, but give me time.

The desk took almost 3 hours to build. Before that I spent an hour deconstructing my old setup, moving everything out of the room, and vacuuming where until today was behind the immovable kitchen table.

Once clean, I dragged the 185 pounds of new desk parts into the room, unpacked them, checked them against the parts manifest, and started assembling. I had heard that some of the quality control of these desks was a bit lacking so I was very careful to make sure everything was right before did anything that might cause damage.

Turns out everything was in order, and I got the desk assembled with a minimum of trouble. I spent the rest of the afternoon putting my computer systems on the desk and firing them up. Once they were hot I showered and had a short nap. My hands and back are exhausted and sore.

After the computers were up, I tore all my music rack gear out of the mobile rack and mounted it in the lower left rack. I’ve got a tiny 3′ power cable running from my amp to the back of the power sink, and it’s limiting where I can put the head. I should have splurged and got a longer cable. My speaker cables to the speakers are 20′ long and only need to be about 4′ and 8′ respectively. Maybe 5′ and 10′. Who cares? At least they reach!

Tomorrow’s going to be long and painful. I’d better get enough sleep tonight.

It always seems to happen. Once the massive pressure is lifted off my shoulders, I enter a phase of creative productivity. I also figured out how to solve a problem that stumped me for half of last week. Nice. :)

I’m also catching up on my sleep a bit. I don’t yet have a regular routine but at least I’m sleeping a lot. Note the correlation between sleep and productivity. Also note the negative correlation between stress and sleep. I need less stress. For a while it was so much that it was debilitating.

Much better now.

The weekend is half over. I’ve just posted a new software release. I feel much more relaxed now than I did before.

Sangeeta is stressing over her accounting though. I hope it’s not contagious. I think she wants to go to Thousand Oaks today to look at a new shopping center. That’ll be nice except for the drive. It’s a beautiful day.

I know it’s starting to sound like a broken record (remember those?) but I’m pretty stressed out. I’m preparing for a major business presentation of our software and it still looks ugly. I’ve got to get it looking presentable by tomorrow.

Stress!

I got a UPS yesterday. Well, truth be told I got it Sunday, but I had to charge up the batteries overnight so I couldn’t use it until yesterday. It’ll run both my computers for a half hour if we lose power. I hope that’s long enough for me to get ’em shut down properly.

My hands are still pretty sore. I still type using the eraser ends of pencils, but it doesn’t help very much. I’m feeling consequently less than eloquent so this entry is done.