Grump

For a while there it looked as though my weight had dropped to solidly below 180. Maybe, but it turns out the bathroom scale is broken. So I won't know for sure until we get a new one. It's an old Healthometer balance scale; we've gotten more than 20 years' use out of it, so I'm not complaining.

Experience

A recent conversation made me wonder just how many "relationships" (by some definition) I've had over the course of my life, and how many ended in "breakups" as opposed to just quietly drifting apart (or, in one case, staying together for over three decades).

So let's define a "relationship" as something lasting more than a month, with some non-trivial level of romantic involvement ("love" by some definition), mutual physical attraction and physical contact. Define "breakup" as an abrupt, major decrease in the closeness of the relationship.

The answers turn out to be seven and one.

The corresponding numbers for Colleen, who is 5 years younger than me, are four and zero.

Notes from $work

My performance review yesterday seemed to go pretty well. No numbers until $boss goes to $grandboss and things grind through the mill, but... On average, my income has not kept up with inflation; I don't expect that to change. $boss had some good suggestions about my next project; it's starting to come together into something coherent. And useful, which is always good.

There was a group in the lunchroom this afternoon (or maybe it was yesterday; everything runs together these days) discussing code readability. Somebody remarked that my Perl code always looks like I expected it to be read by somebody else. I responded that I know damned well that when it comes back to me in a year or so, I'll be somebody else.

... but that doesn't always help. Our form-handling system was written nearly a decade ago, by $boss.previous, on top of an old version of the world's third-ugliest programming language. Which, to my lasting embarassment, I designed. (Aside: PIA is basically a stripped-down Lisp with XML syntax. HTML, in the beta version. Just for comparison, the fourth ugliest language is INTERCAL. Trust me, you don't want to meet ATLAS or the Advantest IC tester language (the name of which I have mercifully forgotten) which are in second and first place respectively. Syntax by H.P.Lovecraft; architecture by Sarah Winchester. There are things you're better off not knowing.)

Anyway, our intrepid system administrator was trying to get it running on a modern Linux box so he could pull out the historical records. M. is fscking brilliant (fluent in five or six languages, degree in CS, ...) but let's face it: mouldering code, dead language, written by people who should have known better... Took us about an hour to find both places where an absolute pathname was hard-coded in. Just because it was my own stupid design didn't mean I remembered it: thank goodness for find, grep, and man.

Could probably have done it in half the time if it'd been me at the keyboard. Nice to know that, even with my brain mostly turned to mush from old age and chronic caffeine addiction, I can still out-debug a bright young whippersnapper half my age.

My Baycon Schedule

Friday     	5/23/2008 	22:00  	Concert: Tres Gique 
Saturday 	5/24/2008 	13:00 	Every OS @%*^& 	
Saturday 	5/24/2008 	16:00 	Filk for Kids 	
Sunday  	5/25/2008 	14:30 	Recording Music