The Mandelbear's Musings

Somehow it doesn't seem as though much happened. A quick look at the house shows that this is not entirely true -- huge progress has been made on the improvements, tens of thousands of dollars have been flung around with abandon (including a 50% down payment on the landscaping, and starting a household checking and savings account), the front yard, massage studio, and lower front bedroom have been torn apart, several new holes have appeared, and so on.

None of this was my doing, of course, except for the financing. I have merely been plugging along at my job, filing the inevitable extension on my taxes, and generally muddling along considerably more slowly than I would like.

This week's quote/self-observation comes from Friday: "Middle-sized bears are extremely timid creatures, but are occasionally so oblivious that it doesn't matter."

Meanwhile, Seattle has been declared #2 among the 12 best places to live in the U.S.. San Francisco is #1. I think the Twin Cities cheated, with Minneapolis nabbing 12th place and St. Paul coming in 10th. (The differential doesn't surprise me -- St. Paul is a university town.)

Other good links amongst the notes, as usual.

Colleen came home this evening, after 12 hours shy of a week in the hospital. It took until nearly 5pm to get her discharge paperwork, and then we had to stop off at Walgreen's to get her new prescriptions filled. Some high-powered anti-hypertension stuff in there: ACE inhibitor, beta blocker, calcium channel blocker, and a diuretic. Gleep.

But she's home, with normal blood pressure and with the PRES resolving, the UTI cleared up, and the pneumonia taken care of. Gleep gleep.

I can haz Colleen. That's the important thing.

... so I can start work at Amazon tomorrow. Tired bear is tired! Gleep.

Good grief! I need to do these more often. Geekfest! New laptop at work! Fire alarms from burnt toast.

Gotta say more about that last one. Somebody in our apartment building burned their toast, then opened the door to the hallway, setting off the building's fire alarm. I was already on the bus to work; the YD and Colleen dressed hastily and headed downstairs. Elevators don't work in fires. So Colleen parked her scooter and, with a neighbor's encouragement, walked down three flights of stairs to the door, and plunked herself down in a conveniently-placed half-barrel flowerpot.

Well, she is the Flowercat, after all. I'm extremely proud of her.

Probably ought to mention the new lappy, too. It's a top-of-the-line 15" macbook pro, huge, fast, and impressively quiet. What it doesn't have is a place to attach a lock cable, so I have to take it home every night. Which, in turn, means that I've had to work out a way of using it that doesn't involve having to re-establish all my multiple desktops worth of context every morning. The best thing I've hit on so far is to set up a virtual Linux box, and run it full-screen on my large monitor. Outlook and a small number of other things run on the mac screen.

We've also had guests in the apartment. We like having guests -- ping if you want to come over; it's usually possible, given a little notice.

And among other good news, my handicap parking violation was dismissed, since I was able to prove that I do have the placard. Stupid thing had fallen off the mirror.

And the Mayan calendar rolled over, with even less fuss than when the Gregorian one rolled over a dozen years ago.

A few annoyances, mostly health related.

I've been sleeping a lot more than I want to. Annoying. I've also been gaining weight; that may be due to my going off my diuretic. Also annoying. The ongoing dental work is also annoying. And expensive.

Some -- many? -- of the annoyances are self-inflicted. I've been applying so much of my attention to work that pretty much everything else has suffered. At least the need to clear space for guests and a tree has forced me to clear out some boxes.

Links and details in the notes, as usual. Some pretties, some very moving stuff... The usual. This is your mind on the web.

OK, a weekend short of two weeks. Too much to summarize. Elections happened. (You'll find a bit of analysis in the links.) Work happened. Looked in several of the local stores for a Nexus 7, and didn't find one. Guess I'll have to order online. Upgraded my netbook to Ubuntu 12.04, and Colleen's to 12.10 because .04 was a disaster. .10 isn't perfect, but at least it supports the Dell's stupid Poulsbo video. Sorta. Still doesn't suspend properly, which sucks.

There also seems to be something majorly wrong -- it can take up to 20 minutes to boot! I suspect disk, but it could be something even more serious. We discussed options; she may be better off with an Android tablet or chromebook. I forwarded her email to her gmail account, which pretty much takes care of the only reason for connecting to the in-house network. That's still flaky, probably because of interference.

Last weekend also included a massage from N, who is studying massage therapy at Cortiva. She's *good*, and I especially enjoyed having her talk through what she's doing and observing. It also started me off on a week's worth of link-chasing around anatomy, and especially muscles.

I ran out of my morning BP pills (lisinopril/HCTZ) on Sunday, so have been watching my blood pressure. Unfortunately I didn't get a couple of baseline readings last week. It's marginally pre-hypertensive now, but not worrisome; I'll see what happens in the next week. By which time the supply I mail-ordered from Kaiser should be here, assuming they ship to ex-members. One reason I'm not particularly worried is that I'm still on doxazosin for my BPH, and was noticing occasional dizziness on standing up. Which suggests that it may have been too much before.

Noteworthy quotes:

"Hmm... my panic attacks feed on fear, they lie all the time, they try to control me, they threaten me with dying and going to hell, and they don't care in the slightest for logic. They can be defeated by ridicule, because for all their bluster they aren't very bright, but they don't admit defeat; they just regroup with another dirty tactic and try again. Maybe they're Republicans?" --Nora Rivkis in Facebook

Colleen: I hate it when my Kindle freezes.

Me: Speak sharply to your little toy / And boot it when it freezes. / It only does it to annoy / Because it knows it teases.

All the horrible details, plus bonus links, in the notes below. Feel free to give them the tl;dr treatment. I need to start doing this more often.

Well. This was my first week at work in six months. It'll take a while for me to get the hang of it, and for the stress to go away. It's demanding, and promises to stay demanding, and I'd gotten very used over the last 6 months to having lots of free time.

The whole week was mostly paperwork and setup. It's my first encounter with development using Windows, Eclipse, and Maven. Plus Rally. Confluence is familiar, at least, and along with the two other new guys I've made a few edits to the "new developer setup" page. So... yeah. Steep learning curve. I hope to be writing code next week. I'd better be.

I like commuting by bus. This is a good thing, because as a contractor I don't get free parking. I don't get a lot of things. Like paid vacations. Orycon is going to be a weekend blitz this year. Fortunately it's only a 3-hour drive; we'll be able to drive down after work on Friday and come back Sunday night.

My stupid body seems to have decided it wants at least 7 hours of sleep every night. Do Not Have The Time! I especially miss having an extra hour or two to myself in the morning. One hour (if I get up at 7 and leave at 8) is barely enough for the usual round of drugs, nose-watering, tooth-brushing, and a quick breakfast. A shower is pushing it. Well, maybe I'll get into a stable schedule eventually.

Apropos of tooth-brushing, we went to Costco and I found a two-pack of Sonicare teethbrush (that's the plural of toothbrush, isn't it?). They'd been strongly recommended by my new hygienist. We did end up spending quite a lot more there than I'd intended.

I also spent more than I'd intended at the Container Store, getting tracks and standards for the living room. I finally decided not to try anything fancy. I have one, 4' shelf up, for the guinea pig cage. It's a huge improvement. I also got a pair of stacking bamboo shelves to go between the chairs - the stack is low enough that it fits under the overhang of the arms, and I've clipped a pair of drink holders onto the end. Big win.

Today I may have time to buy wood for the bookshelves.

Colleen had wanted to check out Bellevue Square, which is next door to Lincoln Square (where the Container Store is), so we did that. Ghastly. It's laid out so that you have to do a lot of backtracking if you're on a scooter, plus it's noisy and crowded. We didn't even bother with the first floor -- there was a long line for the elevators. If it wasn't for having the only Container Store in the state I wouldn't go back there at all.

I did some cooking -- Polish sausage with beans, carnitas soft tacos, ... The really huge thing this week was that Colleen cooked dinner on Friday! That's wonderful progress -- it's been a really long time since she was able to do that. The fact that our kitchen is almost an ideal layout for scoot-through cooking helps. She only needed help a couple of times; getting a hot pot of pasta between the stove and sink for draining is still well beyond what she's capable of. So far.

Some links. Watch out for the first one -- it's going to be very triggery for some people. Harrowing and heartbreaking, but you need to see Amamda Todd's video if you can handle it.

A strange day. Expected, of course. I spent the morning, and a couple of hours in the afternoon, wrapping things up: final backups, setting up email and voice mail forwarding, writing my farewell letter, taking the boxes and my desktop computer out to the car... Then the two rounds of goodbyes, in Cupertino and Menlo Park. I got a nice card, and an expense check for some USB microphones I bought last year. (16-bit. Don't want them. I kept the cables and stands.) Abandoned a fair amount of nice hardware that I don't have room or an immediate use for.

Goodbyes bittersweet, of course. Got hugs from several long-time coworkers; one (our IP person) seemed on the verge of tears, though I could have been reading that wrong. Alexithymia and citalopram have their uses; I stayed upbeat if not always cheerful.

I realized, somewhere in the course of the day, that although I've never had to move a whole house before, I've moved my office four times over the last two years, and our two remodels counted for almost a move each. Still, it'll be rough -- there's a lot of attachment here.

I found out, going over one of the brochures I picked up at the Social Security office, that if I start collecting before my full retirement age (66, next year) my payments will get reduced to almost nothing because of the money I've already made this year. So I'll go back to plan A and fire up the Ricoh pension, which doesn't have that problem.

Added "master toolmaker" to my LinkedIn profile; I'm going to spend some time today tweaking my resume to reflect the fact that I consider myself a writer, craftsman and toolmaker rather than an engineer or scientist.

Of the items added to my to.do file over the last three weeks, I appear to have flagged 55 as completed, and 40 unfinished. It's actually a little better than that, since some of those 40 are categories, and about a dozen are WIBNIfs. I'm reasonably satisfied with my progress.

A couple of links in the notes. I was looking for images of me on Google, and ran across this cartoon that mentions "Vampire Megabyte".

I have finished my penultimate day at Ricoh Innovations. Yesterday I was grieving. Today was more... I don't know. It was exhausting, but there was a certain lightness after boxing up and handing off my notebooks, and putting the last three boxes of accumulated files -- 19 years worth -- into the recycle bin and the secure destruction bin.

I ran out of space in the shredder bin just as I was finishing the second box of files. Then I remembered the ones in the desk's file drawer. Then the man came in and emptied the bin, and I finished my task...

... and did my last backup. Yes, very odd.

The signs are auspicious. The Spring equinox, with the sun rising higher in the sky with each passing day. The weather going from cold and wet to sunny and almost warm. Green hillsides, and leaf-buds. A renter for the house, found on the very day we mentioned that we were looking for one.

I'm not saying it's all going to be easy. We'll have to use a lot less money, and fit into a lot less space. It'll be great if I find a job right away, but I'm 65 years old and have to assume that I might not. It won't change our plans.

As of Saturday I'll be retiring for the first time. Maybe not for more than a couple months, this time, but it's the new steady-state for a bear who is no longer middle-aged. I'll be back. Maybe not for another five years, but maybe sooner.

We'll be moving to an apartment in or near Shorline, WA sometime this summer. Leaving a house we've lived in for over three decades. That we've gotten comfortably stale in. Getting rid of or storing most of half a lifetime's accumulation of stuff. The Buddha had a point -- you get too attached to stuff, and it weighs you down. Time to lighten up. Time to get moving.

Maybe it sounds like I'm trying to talk myself out of a depression, and maybe I am. But I'm also trying to say that I'm basically okay. It'll work. It's an ending, sure, but only the end of a chapter. I'm looking forward to the next one.

Hmm. Doesn't look like much, does it? It was actually a very productive day at work, hustling to triage my files, document my directories, and set up a couple of servers before I go. No walk; the weather was cold and threatening, and it was in fact raining by the time I left.

I also played travel agent (I'm not a travel agent, but I play one on the web), extending my Norwescon trip to return on Wednesday 4/11 instead of Monday, so that I can look at apartments. And moving Naomi's visit to the first weekend in May to accommodate a suddenly-full April.

And my new social security card arrived, though it turned out I didn't need it immediately.

So... not a bad day. Busier than it looks from the notes. One link, on Feminist Characters in SF/F.

Yesterday was a going-away lunch for me and fellow laid-off coworker rowanf, at Rowan's favorite Indian buffet. Yum. Apart from that, not much done at work.

I was able to request a password on the pension website, so that's progress. They were supposed to get in touch with me if they got my SS# straightened out, but I'm not counting on them not to screw that up too. On the whole, though, I'm not being as productive as I need to be.

My last day at work is a week from tomorrow. Ya think that has something to do with it?

Checkin at my Avoid Avoiding group was, of course, considerably longer than usual -- the last two weeks had been cancelled, for different reasons. But that took me from the Consonance concert, through the layoff, to my birthday. Um... yeah. Interesting times.

Colleen has been triaging cookbooks. She found dust rhinos lurking on the shelves behind them. Quite a few found new homes last night, but we still have huge piles. Colleen reads cookbooks like novels and, as with novels, not all of them are worth re-reading. We still have to do the fiction. And the books in the office. And the art books. And the boxes of my late mother-in-law's books in the attic. And the CDs, videos, and vinyl. And...

Eeep! Here's a review of Robots Around the House, but I don't see any that would help with moving. We need a packing bot.

So... I guess the main thing that happened yesterday was the idiocy with my pension, which you can read about in the previous post or in the notes, so I don't have to repeat it here. Which is just as well for my blood pressure; it's already too high. That started around 2pm; I spent the rest of the afternoon pretty much a basket case.

Maybe I'm a little bit fragile right now? Oh, right.

After having tried my monster 1600x1200 monitor on the desk, I decided to take home the 17" Samsung, which is now sitting comfortably atop the mac mini and its backup drive. Its first task will be running the application formerly known as TaxCut. Since I have no intention of running it on the Windows partition of my netbook, thank you very much. Not going there.

As for links, how about Out of Reach 2012: National Low Income Housing Coalition, wherein it is shown that there is *no place in the country* where one can afford rent on a minimum-wage job. Just what I needed to know right now.

OK, go look at S. J. Tucker's music videos. Much better.

Not bad; I actually got in a very short walk, just before going home. It was still drizzling, but not very much at all; it was cool and moist and pleasant.

I spent the morning working on my resume and website; when I finally looked up it was 11:15, so I stayed home and had lunch with Colleen.

My "Avoid Avoiding" group was cancelled for this week; disappointing, since I had a lot to say. Next week...

I spent the afternoon doing file cleanup, and installing software on the old MacBook (which I had cleverly cleaned up after getting a new one). I also cleaned up and gave back the new MacBook, with the excuse that I didn't want to get too attached to it. It's more complex than that, of course; I never did much with it and probably wouldn't have even if I'd stayed on. I think mostly I just want to start disengaging. These things take time.

Disengaging from the house will be even harder, of course, though I've already started thinking about it. I'd been worried for a couple of years, actually, because many of the doors and passageways are too narrow for Colleen's scooter -- she can't get into the laundry room or the front bathroom, for example -- and of course the entire upstairs is inaccessible to her. If not now, soon.

Links, as usual, in the notes.

It was a weird but basically good weekend. Basically, I hit the ground running after receiving my layoff notice on Thursday. Somebody at our party on Saturday (you probably missed it) asked me whether I was planning to take a couple of months off before I started job-hunting. My answer was a very cheerful "Hell no! Would you like a copy of my updated resume?" I can't afford to gather any moss.

Because of the combination of a rather large refinance and a serious drop in the housing market, I am no longer planning to stay in Grand Central Starport after I retire, whether that's six months or six years from now. That realization has been extremely liberating (can you say "albatross"?); I am now looking for work both in the South Bay and in the Seattle area. The ideal, of course, would be finding someplace near Seattle that's willing to pay for relocation expenses. Many thanks to my dear sister-of-choice, pocketnaomi, for the conversations that helped me realize what I had to do.

The selfsame moment I [let go]
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.

Link of the day: House of Cards - James Keelaghan - YouTube (via philkmills' comment on my S4S post).

Wednesday was a pretty good day, though I didn't take a walk. I drove home toward a gorgeous full moon rising, with wild geese flying overhead. You know, I should have been suspicious at that point.

In the evening, jilara brought over the yukata that she had taken home to hem, and I found its belt tucked away at the bottom of one sleeve. It's lovely.

Thursday morning I got in to work and was greeted by $BOSS and $CFO, and the news that I'd been laid off. Along with two other researchers in my building, and at least two three people in Menlo Park. Plus two from Japan who decided to leave the company rather than go back.

Public service announcements:

• New tag: 8.3%
• Party tomorrow at Grand Central Starport. I will have copies of my resume.
• I am currently looking for work in the San Jose and Seattle areas. Please address job-related correspondance to steve@savitzky.net or ssavitzky@gmail.com.
• I will be available to start work any time after April 1^st

Felt very restless yesterday evening. Should have taken a walk.

It's a bit of a grab-bag today. I found myself needing to finally learn the melody to a couple of songs that I'd so far only played guitar on, because I want to do them in my upcoming concert at Consonance. You know that thing about dominos? That.

So the only recordings I could find were back in 2009. And, for some unaccountable reason, I hadn't put up the audio for that concert. It soon became clear that one reason I hadn't was that the performer tags in the audio files were wrong...

... and once I'd fixed that, I decided to put my concert index into a sensible, most-recent-first format. (It had been most recent year first, but most recent last within each year.) So that's done now. And Baycon 2008 didn't have an index.html file. It does now.

So here you go:

• my concert index
• Tempered Glass at Consonance 2009
• Naomi Rivkis at Conflikt 2009
• Steve Savitzky at Conflikt 2009
• Steve Savitzky at Baycon 2008

... and if you're still with me, there's a somewhat off-the-wall bonus. You see, this week the R&D lab I work for publicly announced a subsidiary in India called Ricoh Innovations Private Limited (RIPL)

So what was the first song that popped into my head when first I heard about it? Right. The Grateful Dead - Ripple. I've been waiting five months to post that one...

I must be getting old. {No, Dad, you've gotten old. Get used to it.}

Wednesday I left my bifocals at work and wore the computer glasses home. The prescriptions are close enough that I didn't notice until I went looking in my bag for the computer glasses. And yesterday I forgot both my usual bill-paying session, and my Thankful Thursday post. I haven't done a Songs for Saturday in weeks.

So much for momentum.

Nevertheless, I've been sleeping better, taking care of myself more or less, and getting quite a lot done at work. We went out to lunch Wednesday to mark the end of R and P's contracts; a tasty Indian place called Tandoori Oven. It seems to be a Bay Area local chain. Tasty and inexpensive. I still like buffets, though.

And R finally "got" what I was trying to explain to him yesterday about PTYs, with the result that everything is now working. Go us!

I also started work on thinning Plink's neck a little. I'm trying to get it down closer to where my other guitars are, to make the thumb barre on D and F a little easier. I think I'm about halfway there, mostly using a scraper.

Back to forgetting. I spent almost all of yesterday evening out in the living room with Colleen; it's possible that I was distracted by her food porn TV, and perhaps just by being away from my familiar desktop. It's definitely easier to work on the large screen, and I'm more likely to pay bills when I can actually reach out and touch them.

Some links, including fan "mail" for Wheelin' in comments to ysabetwordsmith's "Hard Things" post. Yay!!

Odd day. I had an extremely satisfying morning at work, building the pjsua command line SIP user agent/softphone and verifying that it actually works with the hardware we're planning to use for our demo in late January. $BOSS was my assistant; he's thrilled. I'm relieved -- this close to retirement age I kinda have to keep pulling miracles out of my hat to stay employed.

I also noticed a newish (mid-2010, as it turned out) MacBook on $BOSS's desk; it had been intended for the new hire who turned us down and went to Microsoft a few weeks ago. Since my old one is ancient and obsolete, this was a major win for me. I spent the afternoon configuring it. Which was tedious in the extreme -- see the notes for details.

Macs still feel somewhat toy-like to me. Apple's keyboards have always been pretty horrid compared to IBM's, and the one-button UI gives the impression of having been dumbed-down for newbies. I mean, it's great marketing, but if you've been using computers professionally for the last half-century, ...

I spent most of the evening splitting up Tempered Glass's next-to-last practice session, so we'd have something to remember it by. I still need to do the last session, and I think there may be some concerts back there that need work. Note that the practice sessions will not be going up on the web -- at least, not yet, and maybe not ever. Nostalgic bear.

After that, I let the kids introduce me to Munchkin Cthulhu. Fun! I can see how that can be an addictive game.

When it finally wound down around 1am I did a little more Perl hacking to fix problems in the concert rendering, and remembered somewhat belatedly that pseudoephedrine is a stimulant. Well, it's better than not breathing.

A pretty good day; productive if you consider a long group meeting and an interesting talk to be productive in the work sense. Also some singing and work on rescripting some of the songs in the Conflikt set.

No walk, of course.

The talk? WIMM Labs' Android watch. $299 for developer preview.

If you prefer music to gizmos, check out moonvoice's 'feel better' playlist.

If I think about my finances or the state of the country or our stupid politicians I get depressed. Denial -- it's not just a river in Egypt anymore. See links in the notes.

My coffee cup has a hole in the top.

Went up to the Menlo Park office, early (for me), to interview an applicant for our embedded systems job, which left me with less time in the morning for music. I made up for it some during the hour-long power failure last night.

The gateway machine lasted only about half an hour; I strongly suspect that the extra power drain was coming from the UVerse modem, since my Linux router is only using about 17W. I'm going to move the DHCP server down to the fileserver, so at least the internal network can keep going if it happens again.

Go read sweetmusic_27: November 19th is International Survivors of Suicide Day.

A pretty good day at work yesterday. Pretty good day in general, though I forgot to turn my alarm back on and ended up sleeping until 8:15. Do Not Like. I really need that extra hour or two in the morning before work. I can't deny that it feels good to get the extra sleep, but still... Grump. Need a 28-hour day.

I spent some time following the twitter stream from #occupywallst, #occupyoakland, and #occupyseattle, which were hit by coordinated police actions. We're now well into the "then they fight you" phase.

I don't believe I mentioned it in my previous post, but Monday evening I ordered a Thinkpad X120e from Welcome to Abe's of Maine (which is located in New Jersey -- go figure). They called while I was at work to verify the shipping address, and I let myself get talked into an extra 4GB of RAM and a 4-year warranty extension.

I spent much of the afternoon happily googling up the answers to three of the items on my to-do list from the morning's group meeting (all three were of the form "figure out how to do X and tell Y", so I didn't have to actually write any code for them. The rest of the items will involve real work.

Looks like almost all the notes below are links, mostly about the early morning police raids on the Occupy camps.

A good day. No walk, but I at least got out -- I went to Guitar Center looking for inexpensive USB microphones to use for VoIP conferencing. Settled on a pair of CAD U37s -- $70 each (under $50 online, but I didn't know that at the time) and worked fine when I tried one in the conference room.

I also picked up a coat hook and pipe clamp at OSH and rigged a purse holder for Colleen's scooter. It works just as well as I'd hoped: loop the strap over the handlebars and down, catching it on the hook. Easy.

I skipped my "avoiding" group, but had a great IM conversation with pocketnaomi that was dead on topic. Basically, she thinks that I associate the "reality" -- you know, that big room with the blue ceiling, and by extension any other place outside the computer -- only with unpleasant chores like laundry, dishes, and garbage. I should go out and do fun things, as a way of breaking that unconscious association.

It sounds like a good idea.

The main reason for skipping Avoid Avoiding was that I was expecting deborah_c to come down from Sunnyvale, where she is traveling on business this week. And indeed she did; violin in hand -- we had a lovely evening of conversation and a little music. I called Naomi for the latter, and also because I knew that she and Deborah were friends and hadn't talked in a long time. So that was very good.

I also made our plane reservations for Orycon.

Links for the day include CHARTS: Here's What The Wall Street Protesters Are So Angry About... and 15 Mind-Blowing Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America, via ysabetwordsmith. A couple more in the notes.

A pretty good day, though I have the feeling that I'm being less productive than I should be. Want to be. I'll have to work on that. Um... Is working on being productive actually being productive, or am I being metaproductive as an escape from being productive?

I went out for a walk again, but turned around after only 15min or so because I was getting rained on. I must have just walked under the edge of it, though; it was still sunny and dry at work (though the rain did reach there eventually). The Monta Vista high school's LED sign said "School Cancelled Today" -- I didn't find out why until I got home. Just roll over the link if you don't want to read the story, which might be triggery for some.

In other news, Steve Jobs is dead. He died of pancreatic cancer, which killed my father a dozen years ago. He was 56, eight years younger than me.

Is it ok to feel mortal now?

Kind of a mixed couple of days -- a memorial service and a post that gets me all teary-eyed can do that. So can a defunct disk drive. On the other hand, I have a final determination on my current job title: Sr. Software Architect.

"Architect" makes me happy and comfortable, both because I consider programming to be one of the Useful Arts, like architecture, rather than an engineering discipline like civil engineering or a scientific ones like physics or materials science. Also, because I'm not really all that good a programmer anymore. I don't think I ever was. Sure, I can get programs written, but lots of other people are faster and more accurate at it. What I'm really good at, IMNSHO, is designing software systems in the first place, stringing existing programs together Unix-fashion with scripts and makefiles, and debugging (especially debugging other people's code).

The memorial service? Paul Metz (kshandra says it better than I could). The article that made me tear up? DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #44: How You Get Unstuck.

As an experiment, I'm putting the notes at the bottom so that if you follow a link directly to the post, you won't have them at the top of the page. Let me know what you think of that.

It was a pretty productive day at work -- an all-hands meeting in the morning, and a successful installation of the open-source software I'm testing. I'm not complaining.

I can complain all I want to about the flaky right knee; it seems to be better this morning, but I know better than to trust it.

Link/quote of the day: I refuse to believe that corporations are people until Texas executes one.

... and moonvoice has finally finished The Bronze Forest. Go look -- it's amazing.

Other links in the notes, as usual.

It didn't feel like a very good day. No walk, and a lot of... something: stress? anxiety? don't know -- in the evening. I think it was brought on by pure physical stress, changing the bed and running a load of laundry. I seem to get tired very easily these days, and I don't take walks nearly as often as I once did. But which is the cause and which is the effect?

{It's a feedback loop, of course! Each is both. Silly bear, just take more walks.}

Between the tiredness and the misery I spent an hour or so flashing back to what felt like every damned stupid thing I'd ever done, with special attention to the financial trainwreck. Not fun.

Work went ok; I ended up spending most of the day re-installing Debian after my attempt to fix the (nvidia) display after the upgrade screwed it up even more. Works great, now.

Links in the notes, as usual.

An interesting first day at the new location. I came in after my physical therapy appointment to find my new office full of boxes. Almost completely full. My office affords comparatively little privacy -- the front is all glass, with a wooden sliding door. But the desk is a huge, U-shaped thing that lets me position the monitor between me and the door. First time in ages I've been able to do that.

I spent the morning unpacking, saying hello to people (and mostly not remembering their names), and looking for a usable chair. My trusty Aeron doesn't go up high enough -- it's meant for a typing return, and this desk doesn't have one. They'd just acquired some Steelcase Think chairs, which seem to work pretty well.

I went to Whole Paycheck for lunch-like stuff, since I'd cleverly left my desk munchies at home.

The afternoon was taken up by a long and fascinating but somewhat hard-to-follow meeting, mostly about a customer study of $PRODUCT and the main competition. It's going to be fun, I think. But busy. I also got my first assignment.

I have to remember that some people -- most people? -- with horrible problems that won't go away prefer not to talk about them or be reminded of them. (My own tendency is to talk about my problems, perhaps to excess.) {Perhaps? Silly bear!}

On the gripping hand, this preference is part of why the economy, the US health-care system, and the environment are in such horrible shape. And even I get burned out on those, and get tired of thinking about things I can't fix. So I don't really know what to do about all that.

Only one link; must have been a busy day.