Cancelled

It happened as I was struggling with an extension to a wordframe. The phone rang. It was the boss. Seems next week’s meetings have been postponed for a month.

*whew*

Now I have time to do a decent programming job on this thing. Give it some polish. Make sure it doesn’t crash. Figure out why it sometimes turns yellow. That sort of thing.

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Pressure, synchronicity, and delay

It just gets worse and worse. Everything comes to a head at the same time.

I’ve got a big presentation to support next week. We need a new feature to show off in our product. I’m working like a dog trying to get it to look nice. It’s slowly coming together, but it’s taking a lot out of me.

I’m also supposed to pick up a computer for my friend and god-brother-in-law twice removed (or whatever) so I can write some code for him. Problem is, it’s been delayed so long that I’ve become swamped by other things. It always seems to happen this way for some reason. Struggling with the Indian-made software that doesn’t work and getting no technical support from its authors for weeks! Then it was a struggle to get the working machine from another company, and they delayed and dragged their feet some more. Now it’s my turn, dammit.

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Monday again? Already?!?

It’s 1am on a Monday morning. I slept for a couple of hours tonight but woke up at 10:30pm. I’m hoping to get some coding done on New Moon. I’ve already done a little, and not what I thought to do when I logged on. Guess it’s a start.

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overriding concern

My hands are still sore. And here I am typing away… I’m going to try to take it easy on the fingers today and tomorrow, and spend my mental energy on the same stuff but using a pen and paper as my working memory extension system. I can’t keep it all in my head at the same time.

Gonna see Sin City later today. Heard it’s pretty good.

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Friday!!!

So, the end of the week is finally here.

Unfortunately, my program is not yet done. Sure I have until next Friday to finish it. The Monday after that, if I want to push it. Maybe even Tuesday, depending on scheduling outside my control. Still, I was hoping for a free weekend. ;)

The hands are slightly better since yesterday. I’m trying not to push it.

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Accomplishments

It was a good day for my programming. I’ve done all the data loading, initializing, storing, randomizing, maintaining, and accessing for word problems. All I have to do tomorrow is draw them on the screen. :)

My hands still feel sore but I worked all day and they aren’t dead yet. I took lots of breaks. I also removed the shortcuts to my Micro$oft games! Those things are the targets of my reflexive “this is getting too much to handle” response.

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Even Worse

My hands hurt. A lot.

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Sore Hands, Sore Feet

Last night Sangeeta and I walked a couple of miles. My legs got tired and now my ankles feel well-used. Not bad, just used.

Yesterday I programmed a pluralizer. It takes a word and returns the plural of that word. I actually wrote the original code in LPC for my New Moon creator requirements, before I found out that MudOS has a built-in function to do that. So I thought I’d wasted all that effort and research. Until yesterday, that is. I found the old code, converted it to C++, and now I’ve got a wonderful pluralizer. The toughest part was initializing several lists of words which have unusual ways of converting to refer to multiple objects (“bison”, “cactus”, “mouse”, “child”, etc.). I’m using STL vectors and strings, and there’s no built-in way of creating those kinds of things. Luckily, another LPC-inspired tool was available to me! Several years ago I wrote explode() in C++ because it was so useful in LPC. I just converted the word lists to strings and used explode() to initialize the vectors. Piece of cake.

So, with all that coding, my hands got pretty tired. Then I kept coding on New Moon and they became even more tired. Then they got sore. They’re still a little sore, and I’ve got a lot more programming to do in the coming two weeks. I hope they hold out that long.

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The Day After Monday

It happened again.

I got enough sleep.

It doesn’t often happen, but last night it did. I slept almost 10 hours. The unfortunate consequence was that I was unable to make my lunchtime meeting. First time I’ve overslept for anything in years and years. Sorry Prasad.

I’ve lost 11 pounds in the last 3 1/2 months. Slow but steady progress and it’s been pretty easy. I just stopped eating sweets, as well as cutting out coffee and soda. Yes, even diet soda. I do drink tea though, and I’ve got a little collection of a lot of different flavors. I drink a couple of cups of tea every day. And a lot of water. It seems to be working, though to me I still look the same as I did at the end of last year.

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Monday

Alright, new blog is up and going!

Today I programmed division problems. Long division and regular inline division.

Tomorrow and in fact the rest of the next two weeks will be all about word problems. I’m looking forward to that! This problem layout stuff has been difficult because I don’t really have a mastery of the domain. I’m not sure what’s required so I’ve been doing a lot of exploratory trial-and-(mostly)error programming, but it’s sort of coming together now.

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