life

[kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker)]

Well, today I feel good for a change, so I feel like posting here.

I spent the weekend alone while Marilyn was out.  I spent essentially
all of Saturday in front of the computer, not even bothering to get
dressed; by night, I realized I should have gone out a little bit,
because I was feeling exercise-deprived.  I couldn't get to sleep; I
spent about half an hour pacing the living room, solved a problem of
how to make normal-order evaluation reasonably efficient in the
lambda-calculus, and felt much better.  I got to sleep immediately
after that, although I had blisters on the soles of my feet from pacing.  :)

It often seems that motion helps me to think.  I'm reminded of Francis
in _The First Million Dollars Is Always The Hardest_, who thinks best
while he's driving 90 mph down curving two-lane roads.

I tried to call Marilyn, leaving a message with the voicemail of her
niece (whom she was visiting), but got no reply.  (I still haven't
gotten a reply, in fact.)

I think I'm going to try some kind of medication for this Attention
Deficit Disorder thing; I want to stay away from Ritalin and such
things, but I've heard there are a remarkable variety of drugs
available now that seem to help some people.  My psychologist talked a
bit about selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which also might help
the bit of depression I've felt lately.

I'll be making an appointment with a psychiatrist today to discuss
prescription options.

On Friday, I came in to work around 14:00; Doug was disappointed that I
missed our lunch date, which I'd forgotten about.  We talked, and came
to the agreement that I would spend at least 10:00-16:00 here each
day.

This morning, I finished a project I'd been procrastinating for a long
time, the NITF translator.  I originally started the C part of the
project in early August; wc tells me that file is 319 lines.  All that
was left was the simple, boring part; I procrastinated until today;
tomorrow we have a program review, where I describe and demonstrate how
great my code is and how well it solves our customer's problem.

diff -u | perl -ne 'if (/^@/..undef) {print $1, "\n" if /^([-+])/}' |
sort | uniq -c tells me that this morning, I deleted 106 of those 319
lines and added 281 more, implementing the boring part, for a total of
494 lines.  The program appears to work properly on both Unix and
Win32; my programs usually do work the first time after they're
compiled.   (I prefer to develop on Unix, porting to Win32 at the end
of the project.  In general, this works very well for programs that do
simple things like open and close files.)

I'm not sure why it is the programs usually work once they compile, but
take a couple of iterations to compile.  In this case, I forgot to
declare a couple of variables used in code I had moved to a different
function and forgot to include some header files.

I'll be spending most of the rest of today testing it and gathering up
stuff for review at the meeting tomorrow.


I had miso for breakfast again today, for the first time in a long
time.  We're out of green onions, so it wasn't quite as tasty as usual,
but it was still pretty good.

It takes about 10 minutes to make, which is why I hadn't eaten it in a
long time.  McDonald's breakfast is quicker.


I got up this morning at 7:00, but didn't get to work until 10:00, due
to reading and writing email and netnews in the morning.  I need to get
better with controlling this crap.


I spent some time last night writing email about a friend-of-a-friend's
program and why it wasn't working on SPARCs.  Both the friend and the
FOAF seemed quite confused about basic C concepts; I don't understand
how people can write C code for years and years and not understand an
expression like *(char*)&tmp[10].  Maybe you really only understand
these things once you've worked in assembly?  But the FOAF didn't even
have that excuse; he's been programming since the 1970s, so I assume
he's had some assembly experience.


Corresponded with a guy in Thailand about Burmese government this
morning.  It is truly amazing the kind of shit people have to go
through in this world.  Especially in some parts.


Got my whiteboard in my office this morning; I am hoping that it will
help me to become more organized.  I have written the pending tasks
down on the left side, with little checkboxes next to them: NITF
translator, TR, tidy closet 304.


Also got my CD-ROM rack in my office today.  Along the bottom, it says,
"TENEX".  I hope DEC and BBN don't get upset that I'm using it to store
mostly Unix and WinNT data.  :)


Asked two colleagues to do a code review with me to help me find bugs
and unreadabilities.  Neither has time at the moment (not surprisingly;
most people, if you ask them to spend an hour with you today with no
prior notice, won't!) and I don't expect they will find bugs, even if
they are there.


My office is looking much tidier since last week, when I cleaned up
*everything* in order to find all the receipts for my travel report.
Doug came in this morning to drop off copies of his travel report so I
would have a better idea of how to do travel reports.


Marilyn was unhappy this morning; my psychologist had asked her to
write down each time I do something that bothers her.  She complained
at me several times this morning about different things, most of which
I can no longer remember.  I asked her to write them down so we could
discuss them with Donna the next time we went.  She said she didn't
even know if she wanted to go back, or if she even wanted to live with
me.  No surprise, I guess, but I still wish she'd make the effort to
help me cease doing things she finds annoying as long as we are, in
fact, still living together.


In order to help me finish the code this morning, I went to Wendy's and
got a biggie Diet Coke, no ice, which is about a quart.  According to
http://comp.uark.edu/~tdsteph/page3.html,
http://www.edusainc.com/ezine/sum98/looking/l_june.html,
http://www.cs.unb.ca/~alopez-o/Coffee/caffaq.html#HowMuchCaff, and
http://crystal.biol.csufresno.edu:8080/projects97/62.html, 12 ounces of
Coca-Cola has 45 mg of caffeine; so 32 ounces has about 120 mg of
caffeine, about as much as a cup of coffee (with 135 to 190 mg,
according to those pages, or about 75-80 mg, according to
http://ificinfo.health.org/brochure/caffeine.htm, which is a
food-industry mouthpiece, or about 70-100 mg, according to
http://ace.ace.orst.edu/info/extoxnet/newsletters/n44_84.htm,).  LD-50
of caffeine is roughly 10_000 mg, or more accurately 150mg/kg (thus
about 15_000 mg for me) according to
http://www.cs.unb.ca/~alopez-o/Coffee/caffaq.html#WhatHappens (also
available at http://aomt.netmegs.com/coffee/caffaq.html.)

I didn't experience any of the symptoms of caffeine poisoning described
there, and after all, only consumed half the usual minumum for caffeine
poisoning, but I did get a mild nosebleed shortly after that -- as I
frequently do when I take caffeinated beverages.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Mon Sep 27 1999
42 days until the Internet stock bubble bursts on Monday, 1999-11-08.
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html>