This Fortune Intentionally Left Blank

My life is a mess right now.


Ok that's not true. I'm not sick. I'm still married after five years and the relationship is still improving. I'm financially better off than a lot of people right now (one advantage to renting over owning a home: no mortgage). I have a Betta fish (surely a sign that I am a successful person).

But I don't do anything.

If you were to ask what my interests were I'd say: computers, the Internet, programming, cool technology, learning about cool technology, getting technology to do cool things, reading, video games, etc.

If you were to ask what I actually do in my free time I'd say: reading, video games.

Now, you could argue that my interests don't necessarily involve doing stuff,but I've never claimed to be a very active person. The point is not that my interests don't lend themselves to doing things, but that even though I'm interested in a variety of (technical) things, my actual activities don't involve anything of that sort. I never blog, it's been a couple of years since I programmed for fun, and despite a preponderance of technology I rarely use it for anything more than its basic functionality. It's like I've reverted to being a college kid who does nothing but classes and Halo. Actually that's exactly what I've become, although my drug of choice isn't Halo. It's something far more insidious.

True confession time: I play World of Warcraft. And it's taking over my life.

Now I'm not blaming my problems on WoW. It's certainly my fault for not balancing my life. Although if the game weren't really fun then it probably wouldn't be much of an issue. I have friends who play WoW. Possibly they do a better job of not getting sucked into it. But I, alas, have failed. Rather than spend time on my other interests I find myself logged in to WoW. There's so many things I'd like to explore but I don't.

Therefore, effective immediately, I've canceled my subscription to World of Warcraft. This is no guarantee that I'll get back into blogging or programming or anything else, but I can guarantee that as long as I play WoW I won't be getting back into those things.

And so I direct the words of the bravest little hobbit of them all to my friends in World of Warcraft: "I regret to announce — this is The End. I am going now. I bid you all a very fond farewell."

And humble too.

Ok, that's not strictly true. I mean, it's true that it's a Friday. It's not strictly true that I didn't talk to anyone. I talked to three people. I don't work with any of them, but I did talk to three people.

My Fridays tend to be like that. And I kind of like it.

So I rode to and from work today. Here is the route I used:



It wasn't bad. Not a ton of traffic and in the morning it was cool so I didn't sweat very much. It took me 45 minutes on the way in and 50 minutes on the way home. That's an average speed of 12 mph, which I'm pretty pleased with.

In other news, I fixed a bug in the CSS style sheet for my website. It was causing an annoying glitch in the boxes around my blog posts. The weird thing was it only showed up in Firefox, and not IE (I didn't look at it in Opera). I don't know if it was a standards issue or just something weird. But it's gone now, so I'm happy.

So, it's the day after Memorial Day, and incidentally the last day of my five day weekend. I hadn't used any vacation time at all this year so I decided to take some time off to keep from going insane (well, to keep from going more insane). And since its the day after Memorial Day (I keep wanting to write Labor Day for some reason, I have no clue why) it means that summer is in full force in New England.

That of course means that it is ∞ degrees out and (∞ - 1)% humidity.

I used to think that winter was the worst season in Massachusetts, but it turns out I hate summer even more. At least during winter you can always put more clothes on. There's only so naked you can get in the summer time. Which means you have to resort to some sort of external cooling system. Fans sort of work, until you leave the direct path of the wind. I suppose you could turn your entire house into a giant wind tunnel, depending on your zoning laws.

"But wait Ian," you say. "Why not just use an air conditioner?" There are three good reasons why not:
1. It costs money
2. It's not environmentally friendly
3. Man was not meant to live in a climate that requires AC

Regardless of how rich and/or uncaring towards the earth you are, I don't think that you can argue with me on that last one.

Here's the ride I did today after getting home from work:



After riding for four days, I have covered exactly 26.0 miles. Interestingly enough that's the distance Katie rides in one normal day.

It's been a long time since I last blogged. Lots of things have no doubt happened. Fortunately Katie has probably covered most of them so I don't have to (after all, marriage is about team work).

Back in February somebody stole my bike. Normally this would be a big deal, but 1) It's the same bike I've had since I was like 12 so it was way too small for me, and 2) I had been pretty cavalier about leaving outside unlocked. So someone jacked it. Whatever. The only really annoying part was that I was going to donate the bike to Bike's Not Bombs. So instead I donated money. But I want whoever took it to know that they ruined the chances of some poor farmer in Ghana to have a better life. Shame on you. Shame on you.

If you haven't noticed, Katie has gotten quite into biking. For a while now she's been subtlety trying to convince me to get a new bike. Well what with the price of gas and the nice weather and a nice bonus from work, I decided that a new bike would be nice. After much research I settled on the Gary Fisher Nirvana. It's a nice bike. It fits me. It has 24 speeds. It has front shocks which really smooth out the road. I can tell you what kind of parts it has but I can't really say if they are good or not. Katie could probably tell you. It seems like a good bike for me, high quality without getting into the range of cost where I wouldn't be able to tell the difference. I ordered it three weeks ago but when it first came in there were some issues but it was finally taken care of this last week. So this weekend I was out testing it out. You can see the rides I've taken here:

Friday's Ride

Saturday's Ride

Sunday's Ride

Of course, compared to Katie's rides I'm barely going out to get the mail. It'll be a while (i.e. never) before I reach Katie's level.

In February my project is starting the integration phase, where we hook up the hardware and software and get it to work together. In the final overall huge system, there will be software that drives our software and hardware but it will not be ready when we need it, so (like so many programs in the past) there will be a simulator written for test.

I am writing that simulator.

And it's going pretty well, except that I keep getting sidetracked with other tasks that are more important (like the deliverable code). But I've got a working shell, it really just lacks polish and advanced functionality so I'm not too worried about it. Although I will be if I can't work on it soon.

No what worries me is that in order to do its job, the simulator needs to run on some fairly hefty and expensive hardware. We were hoping to borrow it but two months ago my boss's boss said, "no one will commit to giving us this hardware. So we need to buy it." That was all, no instructions to me, just that he needed to buy hardware. Ok. One month ago he said "we need to buy hardware, get me a list of what we need." So I scramble around that day, compile a list, and email it to him. And hear nothing back (which is normal). This morning I find that I have been invited to a meeting involving testing our product. That's all I know. Fifteen minutes before the meeting I find out we are talking to people to see if we can borrow this hardware. Now, while borrowing it is the optimal course of action, I thought this avenue had already been explored. Maybe he didn't really talk to them before. Maybe it wasn't a definite "no" like the way he made it sound. Maybe these are new people. Maybe I'm going crazy. So I have 15 minutes to psych myself up for what seems to my like a major begging session.

AS it turns out these guys are happy to let us use their stuff. They practically want to give us this stuff. All we have to do is work out a schedule that is compatible with everyone but even during times when other people need this hardware there are still things they can do for us. And here I was worrying for a whole month that we weren't going to have the hardware we needed on time and that I was going to be blamed. Fortunately this kind of problem is not typical of my company, just my boss's boss.

Now if I can just finish unit test (HA!) I can finish the simulator.

Work was horrible today. Not that it was worse than any other work day, but it felt particularly bad after my three day weekend. Apart from the game night on Friday, and of course church on Sunday, we didn't do a single thing. Well, we did watch three episodes of Smallville and read a lot, and I played video games, but nothing like the biking weekend we went on a couple of weeks ago.

Speaking of church, this was the first Sunday with Marty Holman as the head pastor of Fellowship Church. It's also the first Sunday without Ruth Snell (the former pastor's wife) leading worship. She was a very good worship leader, so of course it's hard not to be disappointed by the change. The band was still as good but the singing was, well it was different. Not necessarily bad, but different. There was a guy and a girl leading (I do not know their names). The girl had a really good singing voice. The guy had an interesting singing voice. I couldn't tell if it was his voice or if he had a different sense of rhythm, but it was hard to sing along to. I won't really know until we sing some more of the usual songs. The preaching, on the other hand, was excellent. In the past I've found that, for me, Marty's sermons have been hit or miss. I think they've always had a lot of potential, but sometimes they've been a little bit disorganized or in need of some tightening up. Sunday's sermon (on people, money, and God) was very good. Very organized and concise. I think he really focused on some good key issues without drifting off. I'm excited to see where the series goes from here.

Our friend, Dave Smith, had a party last night to celebrate his birthday. He and his wife Sharron invited a bunch of friends over for a game's night. Katie and I stopped by for a few hours.

The thing about the Smiths though, is that they enjoy games that have the complexity of managing a world economy. It is truly astounding to me that games so complex actually exist. Now, I enjoy thinking games. I like games where you have to plot out a route carefully, or think about how a move now will affect you at the end of the game. But I don't like games where you get one kind of point that you then have to trade in for a different kind of point at an advantageous time. That's too much for me. Also I've decided that any game that can't be explained in 30 minutes or less is not something I'm going to be good at. I'm not talking about the strategy of the game, or subtle nuisances, I'm talking about the actual rulebook. No board game should be as complicated as D&D.

It was fun though, because fortunately they have more normal board games. One of my favorites is a game called TransAmerica where you build train tracks between cities. The second game we played was Ra which Katie won, despite being really tired by that point.

I have a lot of trouble believing that it is now November. It seems like only a week ago it was September. I really do think time is accelerating. Unfortunately it would be impossible to actually prove that since I can't exactly time the passage of time, given that they are both, well, time.

In other news, now that its November Katie is starting up NaNoWriMo. This year she's tackling a new genre and it has a lot of potential. It could be hard to top last year's romance novel but no doubt she'll try. I tried to do it one year, but right after I started my grad classes assigned big projects. That and I preferred to play video games during the day. This year I'm doing NaCoABoMo (feel free to pronounce that however you want) which is a little thing I made up on my own. It stands for National Coding And Blogging Month. I've been meaning to get back into blogging for a while now and I've wanted to start programming. Granted, I program for a living but I also have some projects kicking around in my head that I want to do for fun. I realize that might sound pretty weird to some people, but I'm a pretty strange guy. While Katie has 30 days to write 50,000 words, the only goal I'm setting myself is to blog and program every day for 30 days (or at least blog about every day). I'm doing this in the hopes of developing some discipline.

Ok, well now that I've blogged I'm going to go code. Well, I might do some chores first. It's ok to put off coding for chores (at least I'm sure Katie feels that way).