An errand day.

2012-02-27: Day +77.

I took an extra day this weekend just to be with my sweetie after her three week absence :).

We did a bunch of chores in the AM, the most interesting of which was to take a look at married student residences at the UofC. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I'll be doing nothing but school full-time from May forward (April is half and half). So, we thought it a good idea to check them out and see if these would be a good fit.

The initial impression was pretty favourable. For two people, there is a good amount of space, including an actual basement. (Quite a bit better than what I lived in in the 70s at the UofA). So, we sat with it for the day and sat with it and ....

At supper, we made this fantastic salad (Big bowl of greens, veggies, feta cheese, avocado). After supper, we loaded the dishwasher and talked it through.

It just would not make sense.

The initial thought was that it would save us a bunch of money and we would be walking distance to all of the UofC (including the gym, library and bookstore). The thing is, though, it doesn't really save us that much actual money. Cash flow would be better, of course, but at the end of the year, our asset base would be pretty close either way. So, no advantage there. Secondly, I already live a 25-30 minute walk from the UofC. So, yes, a bit further and less likely to do it for a casual gym visit. Definitely not a clear win.

The clear loss, however, was the kitchen. They are quite small. Having just completed a 4 week course in chef school, that doesn't appeal to either of us :).

Final nails in the coffin:

• No laundry in the units. (UofA had those).
• Moving costs and hassle
• Putting items into storage
• Moving hassle
• Less comfortable surroundings
• Moving hassle

So - we're staying put for another year. (This is about the 10th time we have made this decision....)

Sleepy Sunday too!

2012-02-26: Day +76.

"Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise"

Well, we certainly lived that last night / today. Asleep by nine, and woke up at 5:30AM. Again, a lovely day inside away from the cold. Visiting, reading and catching up.

Sleepy Saturday

2012-02-25: Day +75.

With my sweetheart arriving after midnight, we didn't get to bed/sleep until after 3:00 AM. We had a bit of a sleep-in — to about 9:00, but I was wasted pretty much the whole day. Tea helped.

It was a lovely relaxing day. We stayed inside as it was bitter outside and just visited and caught up on life.

For supper, I was treated with a mushroom dumpling, using rice wrappers. Man, did that perk me up. They were delicious! Marie made them up on the spot, loosely based on the ones she did for her graduation.

Bella Nocé!

2012-02-24: Day +74.

This is it!

Sweetie arrives in about an hour. Heading up to the airport to get her and then disappearing in the house for the next few days. I'm taking Monday off work so I can be with her. All the dishes are clean, all the clothes, towels, floors etc. are clean. I bought groceries. We're good.

One more sleep!

2012-02-23: Day +73.

One more sleep and my sweetheart arrives!

I worked from home today. As I've said before, I always get a bit amazed at just how productive I am when I do that. I get through emails, I get things crossed off my todo list, I get a better sleep and generally just feel like a lot gets done.

I did some more work on the cucumber with uispec4j. Works very smoothly ... except... it won't terminate. Sigh. Always something. I've tried dispose on the main interceptor, dispose on the main window, getting the frame of the main window and disposing that, reset the environment and nothing works. Of course, java.lang.System.exit(0) does the trick, but it then cuts out of cucumber as well.

That is really the strangest thing. Cucumber finishes and gives its stats and so forth - but the threads just keep on running. Hopefully I will find something simple that handles that eventually. For now, I'm just going to proceed with actually doing some BDD/TDD on this program.

Swingtown!

2012-02-22: Day +72.

I finally took the plunge and tried uispec4j with cucumber for BDD on Swing. A little fussing and a little pushing and it seems to be doing everything I need.

It is different from jemmy in that it doesn't bring up the screen as it runs through the clicks. I actually like that as I find it less distracting. The other good thing is that it actually does work with menus.

I'm sure it has some things I won't like but that's ok, nothing is perfect.

Only two more sleeps until my sweetheart returns!

Caffeine withdrawal going ok. Most of the day without a headache, just body aches — primarily the leg. Thank goodness for tiger balm!

Caffeine free....

2012-02-21: Day +71.

Back to work after a nice four day weekend.

Today, I went caffeine free (at least, I think I did - I had a decaf Americano in the morning.)

Tough day. Depressed, lethargic, a headache all day and my leg hurt like fire. I managed to get in a full day at work, even with all that to complain about.

Once nice I was able to do at the end of the day was catch up on these blog entries. Finally. Blogging days after is rather useless. I remember bits of the day, but nothing is fresh, nothing is vibrant or has the same meaning as the day it occurs.

I had wanted to do more exploration with Cucumber and jemmy or uispec4j once I got home, but I just felt wiped. Instead, I watched a couple of episodes of Eureka and then crashed. I was in bed by 8:30 and slept through to 6:30.

Go see drogar.blogspot.com

2012-02-20: Day +70.

Wrote / published the blog post monkeybars-with-intellij-swing-designer

Back to programming

2012-02-19: Day +69.

Spent a fair amount of the day writing my blog on monkeybars with IntelliJ. I like to get these things as readable and sensible as possible. My sweetheart helped tons — as usual.

I actually had her do the same when I wrote my Master's Thesis (1Mb PDF), and it showed. (If you like, compare to my 1981 Thesis from the UofA.)

Struggled to get cucumber working with testing Swing - more on that in a couple of days.

Shopping, cleaning and chores

2012-02-18: Day +68.

Although I had intended to spend all four days of the weekend doing nothing but programming, a day off from that kind of thing is good.

So, today, I went around doing shopping, getting a couple of things, cleaning the house, doing laundry and generally just doing all the things that keep life livable.

Talked to my sweetheart lots today. (Sometimes every few minutes :).

Friday off!

2012-02-17: Day +67.

Tweeted today that I had monkeybars, IntelliJ, JRuby and Forms Designer working.  From that, I had very nice encouraging comments suggesting a blog would be in order.

It seems to me the twitter brings out the best of the web.

IntelliJ is quite the IDE

2012-02-16: Day +66.

So, IntelliJ has support or plugins for Cucumber, Scala, JRuby and on and on. Nice stuff. The only issue I having is the keystroke stuff, so I may switch it over to the emacs keys and upload/update my emacs plugin.

Cucumber support is quite nice - as long as you make JRuby the default in rvm. The JRuby cucumber task can not seem to find the cucumber gem, but the standard cucumber task just chugs along fine.

There are a couple of things that would be nice to have — for instance if you add code to lib/ruby and load that in env.rb, the steps within it are not found by IntelliJ, leaving them with a warning. No big deal as the execution just rolls along.

Decided on monkeybars

2012-02-15: Day +65.

I finally found the most up to date version of monkeybars, downloaded it and started trying in out in IntelliJ.

(BTW - typing monkeybars on the Mac has been over a week of frustration as it continually wants to put a space between the 'y' and the 'b'. Sigh)

Anyway, it seems to work really quite well. I've spent the afternoon just "spiking" code (read - playing around).

Happy Valentine's day.

2012-02-14: Day +64.

I'm in YYC, my sweetie is in OKC. Not what the best Valentine's day is made from.

Monday monday.

2012-02-13: Day +63.

As I write this, I am 8 days behind on my blogs.

Today was an uneventful day at work. Catching up a bit and doing Win7 stuff.

I've also finished reading all my testing books and now thinking about how to approach the quantum emulator interface.  I did a bit of research in JRuby interfaces to swing and the more I look at Monkeybars, the more I like it.

The 3D Phantom Menace

2012-02-12: Day +62.

I went to see the 3D release of the Phantom Menace yesterday with my daughter and Grandson.  I was one of those strange people who actually enjoyed the first release :)

It was good.

I had read a review on wired the day before that was so-so and I did agree with a couple of his points (Young Annikin's acting a bit uneven, the 3D didn't add a lot).  The only other big point was that the glasses definitely darkened the picture quite a bit.

Yummy yummy yummy

2012-02-11: Day +61.

More food photos of the dishes Marie is learning to do!

A working Friday

2012-02-10: Day +60.

One of our few Fridays that I had to work. Rather straightforward day, various meetings and so forth.

Up to the UofC in the afternoon to listen to Jonathan and more info on derivatives of computations.

Work work work

2012-02-09: Day +59.

Tuesdays and Thursdays seem to be my most crowded days at work. Typical T/Th is meetings from 9:00 AM through to 4:00 PM. Sometimes a break for lunch, sometimes not.

Wednesday == School Day

2012-02-08: Day +58.

Wednesdays I head up to the UofC late in the afternoon. Today I got to attend a seminar and then chat about development environments with some people. Nice stuff.

I've finished The Cucumber Book, Rails Test Prescriptions and most of The RSpec Book now. Now, to see how to apply them to my quantum emulator front end.

Good food going to be coming my way!

2012-02-07: Day +57.

My sweetheart is currently taking a course in RawFood Chefing. Here are some of the dishes she has been making:

Back to Work!

2012-02-06: Day +56.

As I got into work today, I had over 180 unread emails in my inbox. Yikes!

By 2:00PM, I was down to a dozen. good stuff.

Got home, still pooped from the cold, had a supper and just watched some shows then off to bed.

There are shows besides Bond.

2012-02-05: Day +55.

At least today, I thought about going to try to program a bit.

More TV.

Bond continues

2012-02-04: Day +54.

Still tired from the cold and all the travelling. More Bond.

Bond. James Bond.

2012-02-03: Day +53.

Still sick with cold - more James Bond flicks.

I hab a code

2012-02-02: Day +52.

I woke feeling sick as a dog with my cold. So no work, cancelled meetings, changed my voice message and cycled between drinking juice and watching old James Bond movies on Blu-Ray.

Fly, fly, fly away.

2012-02-01: Day + 51.

Had to fly back to YYC today. Interesting route - first from Oklahoma City to Houston, then Houston to Calgary. Hmmm.

Will Rogers World Airport and Houston airports: NOT FRIENDLY WIRELESS!!!! Intelligent airport operators offer at least a couple of hours of free wireless. These two cheapies only give you 20 minutes. Like that's useful.

I tried to upgrade to Business class from Houston to Calgary, but because I was booked on United and it was an AC flight - that was a no-go. As it turned out, no biggie. This was a 2x2 plane and I was able to move to the back and get a duo to myself. One thing I will give Air Canada — their in-the-back-of-the-seat entertainment centres are quite good. I was able to listen to almost 4 hours of baroque music through the flight.

Arriving at customs was a bit long. They must have had a couple of flights arrive all at the same time. I picked a wrong line, switched and then made it through quickly. Ah well - at least the luggage is out and waiting when you do that.

Then home - with sniffles....

A day like any other in OKC.

2012-01-31: Day +50.

Worked, ate at whole foods, added RSpec tests, spent time with my sweetheart.

First day of sweetie school!

2012-01-30: Day +49.

This was my sweetheart's first full day of raw chef school. Yes — creating raw food dishes. They got a new knife which doesn't fit her as well as the other knife, but also a gorgeous jacket and head wear. Maybe some pictures another time.

My leg / hip hurt like wildfire today after all the walking. So, we finally got a car for the next while. Much better. Two 25 minute walks a day is OK, but 5+ is just too much for the arthritis.

Worked today while sweetie was at school. As usual, working out of the office seems 5 times as productive as working in the office.

Further work on using Cucumber. I managed to get a complete scenario of an administrative user logging in and viewing a variety of pages. This is one of the most fascinating tools I have seen for development in a long time. I may see how it can be integrated into a Haskell development cycle.

Walked and walked and walked

2012-01-29: Day +48.

Walk from the hotel to whole foods, 25 minutes, buy some stuff.

Walk back to the hotel, 25 minutes, total 50.

Walk to Penn mall, 20 minutes, total 70.

(Cab to the hotel and then to whole foods — great cabbie accidentally gave him a 50 instead of a 20 because this !#^$!&#£ American money all looks the same, and he gave me change and showed me it was a 50.)

Walk from Whole foods to hotel, 25 minutes, total 95.

Walk from hotel to Matthew Kenney OKC, 27 minutes, total 122.

Walk from Matthew Kenney OKC to hotel, 28 minutes, total 150.

2 and 1/2 hours walking is enough in a day.

Oklahoma City - Relaxed people

2011-01-28: Day +47.

My sweetheart arrived just after noon today. Nice.

After a quick bite at the hotel, we wandered over to Matthew Kenney OKC to see the school and map the route there. From there we wandered kitty-corner to the Whole Foods to check it out.

We went through the store, then settled down to drink a Kombucha and just people-watched.

People watching here was fascinating. No one looked stressed. Everyone is polite. Husbands bought flowers to take home and walked out smiling.

The parking lot is clean. The cars are clean. There is space between the cars in each parking lot.

We are beginning to think OKC is just one big well-kept secret. No one tells you how nice it is here so they don't get too crowded.

A final minor note - Some long lost relative opened a clothing store here.

I took the TRAIN

2011-01-27: Day +46

The Heartland Flyer from Fort Worth to Oklahoma City.

I haven't been able to do this (a real - for transportation!) train trip since I was 18.

My dad worked for CN when I was a kid, and then retired. Because of that, since it was the days before Via Rail, i could get a free ticket to go anywhere.  Typically it was from Salmon Arm or Kamloops out to Calgary or Edmonton to visit my sister, but once I took it all the way from Kamloops to Tilbury, On, just to visit a girl.

Amazing rides in those days. The cars were single deck, separate dining car etc.

The Heartland Flyer was great. Just over $20 to go between the cities, easy boarding, had a duo seat to myself. It would be even greater to do it in the summer when you could see the scenery for longer.

Here are a couple of pics from the station and on board:

A work day in Denver

2011-02-26: Day +45

Work was definitely the focus once again today. Lots of meetings with people in Denver, one great success - we started getting people to agree the way the term "RAD" was being used was not correct. Up to now, the term meant "Develop in MS Access or Excel".

This has frustrated a number of the technical folks because RAD is really a process of development, not a technology. The big thing is that there is the (perceived) need to have a local developer available to create some Access and Excel solutions for end clients — and then either just turn them over to clients or possibly make them an IT supported item.

Quite a few of us have wanted the option to develop the latter kind in something more robust but still quick. (e.g., JRuby on Rails :).

Hope continues!

After that day, we all flew to Dallas. It was a bit frustrating for me as I had been unable to book a seat on the flight. Although I am a calm flyer, I am a nervous boarder :).  Being a biggish guy, I need a bit of space to feel even half-ways comfortable. I like to be sure I have an aisle seat and get on early enough to make sure I can put my backpack in the overhead.

Turned out to be just fine, got there, got a seat at the back of the plane and ended up not even having a person beside me.

Presentations work better when you are not tired

2011-01-25: day +44.

Long day again today.  For work, I had to prepare and give an overview of JIRA and how it is used where I am currently working. Preparing the presentation was pretty straightforward - just a few key points, a link to the Atlassian YouTube video and some screen shots.

The issue was that I had not done a run-through of the presentation (i.e., practice) before that. Normally, that isn't an issue as I do think quite quickly on my feet. However, with only 4-5 hours sleep last night and gut-wrenching cramps, I felt my performance was less than sensational.

Luckily for me, the audience was quite forgiving and things were OK. I just don't like feeling like I didn't deliver my best all the time.

A long day.

Actually, yesterday was day +43.

This was a loooong day. I got up at 5:30, got ready for work and plowed through a ton of things. I managed to catch up on a lot of email (down to 33 in the inbox) and then had to go out to supper with a bunch of people from work. That meant getting back to the computer and work at 10:30 or so. Yikes.

Then, a quick restart of some services and adding about 30 people to JIRA for the training tomorrow.

Now - Bed!

Life, the universe and everything.

Technically, yesterday was day +42. (The Answer!!)

I say technically, because in is 12:20 on the 25th, but I still haven't gone to bed yet.

It was a Monday. I did no research. I worked. I packed.

What can beat a brunch with friends?

Yesterday was day +41.

We had a lovely day yesterday other than both waking up with migraines from the Chinook.

We met our friends for a leisurely brunch at Bolero's and had a great time together with great conversation.

That was followed up by a bunch of running around and more chores at home. The evening was nice and relaxing, but we both found it a bit difficult to sleep.

Chores feel good

Yesterday was day +40.

Today, while my sweetie was at a course I focused on chores.

Book-keeping, year-end filing updates, dishes, stove cleaning, vacuuming, bathroom cleaning.

Sounds like not much fun, right?

The reality is that I always find days like this immensely satisfying.

Outlook 2003 ical to Mac

Yesterday was day +39.

Like many unfortunate people, I have to suffer through using M$ tools at work, including calendaring on Exchange and Outlook (2003).

Within their own domain, they are fine (not great - but serviceable).

When it comes time to try to include someone (i.e., me at home) that is using iCal, they suck.  Nowadays, anytime I try to send a meeting invitation to myself, it comes as this garbage winmail.dat file.

Luckily, a good text editor (e.g., Textmate) can fix the issue. In your mail, right-click the winmail.dat file and open it with your text editor.

The first umpteen lines will look like garbage (they are :). Look for the characters BEGIN:VCALENDAR. Delete everything from the beginning of the file to there. Then, look for END:VCALENDAR and delete everything from the "R" to the end of the file.

Save that as whatever.ics, double-click it and voila, your meeting is added to iCal.

In other news, I was at the U all afternoon and I now have the LQPL server able to return the current quantum stack in XML format. YES!

JRuby really rocks

Yesterday was day +38.

I actually got to do a tiny bit of programming at work yesterday!

We have some reports running in Confluence using JRuby as the programming language. As part of the plugin in Confluence, we have put in a fair bit of common code, including an old version of ActionView.

In some of the source data for the report there are these really long internal links, which mess up the column spacing. I first tried to get auto_link working to replace the link, but eventually gave up by the fourth module include. So, I wrote our own version of it. Short and sweet and solved the report format issue nicely.

Felt Good.

Over to drogar

Yesterday was day +37.

Being that it was (another frigid) Wednesday, I went up to the UofC in the afternoon. So nice.

More activity on LQPL, refining the code to pass all the tests I had and then modifying the specs slightly (by changing and adding tests) to get more of what I want. For details, see my blog on drogar.blogspot.com.

55.1

Yesterday was day +36.

Still amazingly cold in Calgary. I took the bus in as it was just too cold for the car and my sweetie was still feeling the effects of the migraine.

Work was OK. I'm really starting to consider what do I need to do as part of my exit to ensure it is smooth.

The funnest part of the day was doing more work on LQPL. I've been quite strict with myself in doing the behaviour driven development with HUnit. The fascinating thing is I spent about 40 minutes writing tests and then wrote the code to pass most of them in about 5. The even more fascinating thing is how comfortable I feel with the result of the code. The tests are really working like an example based specification, so I can easily explain exactly what is acceptable input to the parser.

I'm now one-tenth of the way through being 55.

Work Effectiveness

Yesterday was day +35.

This was the first really cold day of the year. At the same time, my sweetie got a weather induced migraine, so I decided to work from home. Other than a few startup issues because I hadn't enabled the Java plugin for Safari, it was so smooth.

I always find it fascinating how much more productive I am when I do this. My availability is the same as when I am at work as I get email, IM, and phone calls. The difference, of course, is no hallway conversations and no drop-ins. Because of this, emails and tasks fall like flies.

Migraines. This has been the worst season ever for them in Calgary. One or the other of us is affected by one practically every week now. Some times they are just bad, sometimes they are debilitating. This is really going to influence our decision about what we do / where we go at the end of this year.

Blizzards can be nice...

Yesterday was day +34.

... at least when you are indoors.

A lovely day - lots of RoR programming, writing tests and relaxing. My leg/hip has been sore for two days in a row, as we woke up to a bit of a blizzard this AM. I'm becoming a bit like the old-timers who can tell when the whether is going to change because their Lumbago is acting up :).

I'm a bit frustrated that I haven't been able to catch up on the daily blog here. I think this makes three days in a row that I start off with the "Yesterday" disclaimer. Perhaps tomorrow.

A relaxing Saturday

Yesterday was day +33.

A nice lazy Saturday - characterized by sleeping in and taking it easy through the day.

Some work done around the house, but mostly just kicking back and relaxing.

Templar's WATCH OUT!

Yesterday was day +32.

So, more than a month of being 55. I thought of doing a retrospective of how the first month was, but I don't really feel like it. Maybe later.

I had quite a good day. I started of with doing a review of an upcoming course I am helping with at the end of the month. It felt like a real accomplishment, as opposed to all those soft airy-fairy management accomplishments I normally have to satisfy myself with. :)

In the afternoon, I made it up to the U. Started off hearing Jonathan Gallagher's talk on Left-Additive Turing Categories, which was a run-up to his thesis defence next thursday. GOOD LUCK JONATHAN!

After, I had a chat with my prof, talked some more about getting the LQPL program going and set up for people and he gave me a paper, "From Reversible to Irreversible Computations" to start looking at. Then, I did some actual Test Driven Development in Haskell for LQPL and the work day was done.

My sweetie and I had a lovely supper and then off home.

JARD

Day +31.

Just Another Regular Day.

Meetings, Bloody Meetings all day long at work.

Yesterday, though, I forgot to mention I had the first meeting of the year with my thesis supervisor. Nice to get back to it. He concurred with my three month plans in general, although we will talk about a few mods (of course! That is why he is my thesis supervisor! ) One thing he is considering getting me involved in is a message passing language that is founded on linear logic. Could be quite cool. We also talked about some possible extensions and improvement to LQPL, although those are likely to be longer term. The biggest mod, which actually requires an update to the plan, is that he thinks it would be best to handle the coproduct case at the same time as the product case in inverse categories. One without the other is like peanut butter without jam. It just doesn't leave you satisfied.

That's actually quite cool as I really prefer to have something complete (hmmm - perfectionism perhaps?) before saying it is ready to go.

Well — off to write more HUnit tests!

HUnit rocks, Cabal rolls

Day +30.

Woke up with a headache today, which was exacerbated by fasting for blood tests this morning. Ah well.

I did get to do some programming and got to add my first unit tests to the LQPL server. My coding to this point has been a spike just to make sure I had what I needed in socket libraries. So, I've done the set up and checked in my first test. Now, on to the standard do the test, refactor to green cycle.

I'm using HUnit which is quite straightforward and lovely to use. As I use Cabal for my build system, my first thought was to use the declarative test system with the cabal configuration file. Sadly, I just could not get that to work (although I shall try again later). Happily, using the cabal defaultMainWithHooks method worked perfectly, other than the deprecated warning every time it ran :).

More on Osteoarthritis

Yesterday was day +29.

I think the diagnosis of "severe osteoarthritis" has thrown me for a bit of a loop.

I seem to be somewhat numb (or in denial:) about the effects of this diagnosis. In reality, this likely means no more marathons and possibly no more running. I immediatly thought of:

• Get a rowing machine (e.g., Concept2 type E)
• Do deep-water running.
• Losing weight to reduce stress on the hip.

The emotional aspect of the diagnosis is kind of complicated. My dad was 55 (ha - my age now!) when I was born and just never seemed healthy. I remember him always talking about his arthritis - including painful hands and as he got older, less and less walking. So — perhaps he had this issue as well. One currently big difference between the two of us was that he was quite skinny. He was 6'4" tall and I think most of the time I remember he weighed under 170 pounds. I, as noted in my fitness blog, am 6'0" tall and currently weigh just over 200 pounds.

A lighter, brighter note... My sweetheart got her first engagement through Adopt-An-Artist and will be placing a number of paintings in the Calgary Liberal Caucus offices. Yayyy!

Osteoarthritis

Day +28.

My diagnosis came back from the doctor today. "Severe left hip osteoarthritis".

The interesting thing is that with the exercising I have been doing and the walking with my feet straight, the pain has decreased significantly. Apparently, it is not uncommon for the X-ray findings to appear more severe than it actually is (or a person's self perception of how it is).

I'm going to see if the UofC has deep-water running available and add rowing soon as well.

Work was cool. Nothing exciting, reasonably busy.

Wasted Days

Day +27.

After two very late nights in a row, there wasn't a lot of vim and vigour in the day today. Being in your fifties may mean you need less sleep than in your twenties, but I think it means you actually need more regular sleep.

I did manage to get one main thing accomplished today — a rebuild of the 15" MacBook Pro.

I initially made an OSX Lion bootable USB drive, as per these instructions or these. That worked fine, up to a point. Since it is a laptop, when I re-formatted the drive after booting off the USB, I decided to make it encrypted. Unfortunately, the OSX Lion install doesn't work on that. Then, when I re-formatted and tried again with a non-encrypted format, it still didn't work. I'm not exactly sure why — nothing really showed up in the logs and the error message was the rather useless "An error occurred - please try again" variety. Sigh.

So, I ended up reinstalling from my Snow Leopard DVD and then upgrading. Simple, and a bit time consuming, but at least now I have a working Lion Laptop.

It's been practically all weekend without programming and I miss it. Not fun.

A final note — we continue to be plagued by the &^%$*))(*%$% chinook winds. My head feels like a balloon and the migraine this AM was not fun.

Belated Christmas

Day +26.

Today we had the oldest daughter and family over for Christmas. Very nice, with Tacos!

Unfortunately, some indigestion has ensued.

I've also missed two exercise days and my left leg is really starting to hurt. The strange thing though, is that it is the lower part of the leg that is painful, rather like shin splints.

54 days to go

Day +25.

As the title says, I have 54 days of work left before School goes full-time. 

I am just friggin' excited about this. I am really looking forward to being able to focus my energies primarily on the research, with no work issues to distract me.

My office at home is now fantastically well set up, as I just got a new MacBook Pro (17") and Thunderbolt display. All on it's own, the thunderbolt display is great — the added bonus is that the thunderbolt connection makes it work as a FireWire and USB hub. So, as I take the laptop between home and University, I only have to unplug the power and the thunderbolt connection. Doesn't seem like a big deal, I am sure, but to someone who has been plugging and unplugging almost daily for the last two years, it feels big to me :).

At the U, I have a MacMini, so if I am just going in for an hour or so, I can just leave everything. I also have a spare display that I may bring for the laptop, or just use it's beauty of a 1920x1200 display.

I got to do a bit of Rails programming today. Always nice to move tests from "Error" to "Fail" ;). I think, however, I will have to curtail that soon. I've been working on a proof of concept for a friend and it has been quite a bit of fun. The issue, however, is that it takes away from the little bit of time I have for programming and research related to the PhD.

On that note — status check of the goals:

• Started the LQPL server - loads programs and single steps through code
• Did some "flow" documentation of the main modules created due to separating the server and client code.
• I've been exercising lightly and regularly the last week.

So, progress is happening (yay!)

No Coffee

Yesterday was day +24.

Days 22 and 23, I had 2 grandé coffees each day. While that certainly upped my manic energy level, I crashed by the time I got home.

This day I resolved to only have my white tea. The results were great. More than sufficient energy for work and at home. Also, things that irritated the hell out of me the day before, seemed of small import when not on the coffee rush.

This coffee thing is a real bugaboo for me. I often go for days without it now, and then I'll find myself at the Starbucks counter ordering a "Grandé Dark, Light Room, please" and not even be sure why I am doing it.

Then I have that first sip and the rush comes.

I wonder if there is a coffee-drinkers anonymous? :)

What do you do when...

Day +23.

What do you do when a company's actions seem calculated to make your job harder?

Fairly frustrating day at work, I think I'll leave it that for now.

Fitness Tracking

Day +22.

Today's blog is on runbrettrun.blogspot.com

Plans

Day +21.

Today's blog is at drogar.blogspot.com.

2012

Yesterday was day +20.

The strangest thing happened to me at the new year's eve party. Part way though the night, I started experiencing an overwhelming sadness. Each stranger at the club seemed to just accentuate it, as did looking at people while dancing.

In my past, I've had times when I have experience "free-floating anxiety", but this is the first time I can recall having "free-floating sadness".

I woke up just feeling like I had a hangover. I thought not drinking was supposed to be a cure for that ailment :). Obviously, eating a large rich meal and staying up to 2 in the morning allows you to have those again. Oh yay.

We had a nice visit with my brother and his wife, hanging some of Marie's paintings and chatting about the upcoming year.

Finally, I found that a night of dancing and an hour of vacuuming do not make my hip a happy camper.