The Mandelbear's Musings

A good day. The morning was bright and sunny, and I took a half-hour walk. So it's almost certain that light levels have a lot to do with my mood; I'm going to look into full-spectrum lighting over the weekend. Hopefully I can find standard-base CFLs without having to shell out extra for fixtures. It does shed a different light on "mood lighting", though.

Colleen and I were both unusually cheerful as we went out for our weekly date night. We went to Sneha, which has a very full Indian buffet for dinner as well as lunch. The name is Hindi for "love", BTW.

The tension seems to have decreased over the course of the day, also. Still have no good idea what that was about. Or is; there's still some there. Work?

Some good links. I'm especially intrigued by the idea of social steganography.

Another productive day at work, plus a good walk around the pond. I'll miss that little park after we move; there's a park in the Cupertino area too, but it doesn't have koi, or very many trees. Ah, well.

ETA: it's my work group that's moving, not my family! The Starport isn't going anywhere.

We went to El Torito for our date night, and took a drive afterward, out San Thomas Expressway to the end of Camden, and back via Almaden Expressway and Blossom Hill. Nice. We both went splat around 11pm. Might have been just a little too early for me; I woke up at 2:45.

The pedometer seems to be gone for good. It was useful, but I'm better-calibrated now and can probably get by without one.

Lots and lots of good links, many from LWN.net. Plus another of kaath9's healthcare myth posts: Myth #5: Those systems are too “foreign” to work in the US.

A pretty good day. Reasonably productive at work, except for the hour or so in the afternoon when I was too sleepy to do much.

A good walk. My Keen boots arrived.

We were originally intending to eat at home, and go out for a family dinner tomorrow. But the YD wanted to cook for her gamer friends, so we went out and checked out a new Indian restaurant: India Gate. Good food, though not quite up to Spicy Leaves. Slow service. Looks like it has a great lunch buffet, though.

Links up above behind the cut, as usual.

Odd day; something of a rollercoaster. To start things out, the coffee maker failed halfway through the pot. One cup for me, one for Colleen, and that's it. Time for a new one, I guess; I'm tempted to get one that grinds the beans...

There was an all-hands meeting at work; big news but not bad news, about how our lab is having an impact on the company. The only part that affects me is that one of the four people in my group is one of the two people moving to a different group. Fortunately, his part of $PROJECT is nearly done, so the timing is good.

I walked down to the pond, but with two stops. Stopping or slowing down while I'm out for a walk is usually a sign that something is wrong -- that's me and my inability to feel emotions except from their physical effects, again. This time it closed the loop, with the question "if I can't detect emotions directly, does that mean I may never experience happiness? Joy? Are those even meaningful concepts for me?"

Or, on the other hand, are those even meaningful or useful questions to be asking? Probably not. That's just where I'm starting from. So I was discouraged and disappointed, but mostly puzzled. I was mostly back up to calm and neutral by the time I got back to the lab, but the puzzlement remains. It's going to take some research, of a sort that I don't really know how to do.

On the gripping hand, I came up with a new affirmation: "It's perfectly ok to be an introvert. It may sound as though everyone is an extrovert, but that's because we introverts don't talk as much."

Transcribing my notes from the walk, I ran across two more: "I am an interesting person" and "People enjoy talking with me."

I also remembered that N. had told me on Wednesday that she didn't think I looked particularly fat, or old. So obviously my self-image needs a lot of work, along with my self-esteem.

The evening was much better: we went out intending to try a new restaurant that turned out not to be open yet, so we diverted to Arya because we were close. Yum. For an appetizer we had a plate of little rice crisps with three different sauces. Gluten-free and delicious.

Took a drive on the way home.

I spent much of the morning moving directories around to put things like River drafts, my to.do file, and my new private journal all in one directory under version control. I spent some time in the evening, though not much, deciding on a name for my Dell netbook and putting it and Colleen's Eee into DNS. (The naming theme for mobile devices at the Starport is "stars with high proper motion"; the Dell is barnard.)

Got a reasonable start on sorting out the piles in the office that combine financial stuff (which I'm going to need for taxes) with the latest charity mailings. There are also two or three boxes of earlier charity mailings that I'll have to at least glance through before I toss them, and a big pile of cards and calendars and so on.

My walk, like Wednesday's, was twice around the pond, with a 20-minute meditation break. Reasonably focussed. I spent some of the walk time thinking about the new directory organization and scripts I could write to help manage it.

For Date Night Colleen and I went to Tony Roma's; I had mahi-mahi, and she had steak. Lots of things there for Callie and Naomi -- their spinach dip appetizer is based on corn chips, not the more common sourdough bread. After dinner we drove back the long way, through Saratoga and Los Gatos.

Yeah, a pretty good day.

Spent the day deep in the code mines, and finally determined that the reason my new feature wasn't working was that something earlier in /etc/rc.local was failing. Moved it to the top and it worked. :( Learned about logger(1), which was useful. In any case, the machine in Japan can now tell me its IP address every time it boots, so I won't have to ask for help.

On the other hand, I've spent about 2 days more on this than I intended to. I may have to do some work over the weekend, depending on how things go today. The demo is Thursday.

The last couple of days I've been making about 2/3 my usual amount of coffee, since I've developed a habit of taking a cup to work and forgetting about it. And it's not an insignificant expense.

For our evening out we went to El Torito; service was unusually slow, but I'll put up with that for enchilladas de pollo con salsa mole. The YD came along, having cancelled her usual game night because she wasn't feeling well. A short drive afterwards; just as well as I was getting sleepy. Which reminds me: leftovers for breakfast. :)

Link sausage:

• Gizmodo and Engadget both pointed me at www.eternaleds.com, where I placed an order for a couple of LED lightbulbs. They're the only place I've seen that has LED replacements for halogen bulbs.
• Wired Magazine: How to Behave: New Rules for Highly Evolved Humans. Most of this "advice" should probably be taken with a few tablespoons of salt, but it does point out the kind of etiquette issues one should think about these days.

My morning routines seem to be taking about 2 hours these days. Grr.