It's not a sure thing yet but the client sounded quite enthusiastic about me.
They're my usual sort of client, they have some windows products and they want them to work on the mac.
Google "mac os x device drivers". When I try my company is the eighth hit.
The great SEO is due to the "Tips" articles I provide. Link Popularity "flows through" from linked page to linked page. Those articles are very popular.
I'm under NDA so I can't say much about it. They're a hardware vendor. They have three projects for me so I could be working for them for several months.
I told my doctor that the imipramine that I've been taking for depression is not working as well as I expected it to. I told him I was bored all the time, that I knew plenty of things that would relieve the boredom but that I didn't want to do any of them.
He told me to discontinue the imipramine and put me on Latuda. This is a new medication that is said to work especially well for Manic-Depressives.
I've been taking the Latuda for a few days, but I know very well that all antidepressants require a long time to take effect.
However the other night I did some drawing. I'm quite good when I'm in practice but have not been in practice. I could see that I drew better than the last few times I tried.
More importanly I found myself absorbed into the work. Not bored at all not noticing the passage of time, it was a good experience.
I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder. That's much like being manic-depressive and schizophrenic at the same time. For a little less than a year I've been beset with depression.
I asked my witch doctor to prescribe imipramine, which has worked well for my depression before, but it is not working as well as I hoped. While I don't feel sadness or despair, I am bored all the time yet cannot bring myself to do anything to relieve the boredom.
There are plenty of things I could do, I am well aware of them but I cannot get motivated to actually do any of them.
I was working on my own software product. It's "mostly done" with lots of little things left to do. I cannot bring myself to work on it.
But manic-depressives have a cycle. Bipolar mania is like being high on laughing gas. It doesn't make sense to me just now that I could ever be like that, yet I know from experince that I have been.
I take Trileptal to prevent the mania. It's worked so far but I've only taken it a little over a year. It doesn't really work to take it just when the mania is coming on, because the early incidence of mania is quite subtle.
I'm going to ask my doctor to change my antidepressant, either to increase the dose or give me a different one. There have been plenty of times that I've been far worse than this, yet antidepressants got me back to normal.
If the new medicine works I am confident I can finish my product.
I've been taking imipramine - an antidepressant - since December. I don't feel depressed anymore, but I sleep excessively. I had some plans for yesterday but instead I slept all day then late into the night.
The only way for me to be up in the morning is to stay up all night.
Once I've been up for a while I don't feel sleepy, I feel just fine. But when I do sleep it's often for twenty hours or more.
My witch doctor prescribed Welbutrin with the aim that it would make me sleep less. It has had a very modest effect, but not enough. He seemed surprised at this, and clearly didn't know what to do about it.
I do know that this won't last. I don't know how long I'll be sleeping like this, but eventually the other phase of my manic-depressive cycle will kick in, and you'll have to peel me off the ceiling with a spatula.
I was most active at Kuro5hin but its server's entire data center was decommissioned. Lawrence Calvin Foster III promised to put up a read-only archive of the site but it's been long enough that we are all convinced that he had no off-site backups.
https://dontsuemebro.com/section/Diary
dontsuemebro is intended to replace kuro5hin but so far it's just a few of us diehards.
http://advogato.org/person/MichaelCrawford/
I journal only rarely at Advogato these days but I was quite active during the zeroes.
http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/vancouver-diaries/
I was intending to publish a dead-tree book of these when Bonita finished school and moved out West to join me. What I actually got was informed that she was divorcing me on my second visit home.
That refers to the Canadian Vancouver but it includes some of my time in Sunnyvale and San Jose, California.
I've been tasked to modify some Mac OS X printing software. The client says "There is some cruft that has built up so don't be surprised if you find some code that's not used."
I figured it was going to be a rat's nest but it all looks quite reasonable.
It's not going to be a big job. Possibly I'll be able to buy a MacBook Pro when I'm done, but I'm not sure it's even that big a job.
Really what I want is a happy client, someone who can provide a positive reference to other potential clients.
I would be writing Mac OS X security software. That is, if I get the job.
A recruiter contacted me on LinkedIn quite a long time ago. I don't check LinkedIn very much at all. I apologized for my late response then asked her to email me. She and I spoke on the phone a few days ago, then I emailed her my resume this morning.
The manager responded just one hour after she submitted me. She said he was very enthusiastic.
She called to ask when I could interview on-site. I said "anytime". She must now ask the manager when he wants to see me, but she expects it will be late next week.
Happily I just bought a new dress shirt at Nordstrom Rack. It looks really sharp with a tie. I'm going to wear blue jeans with the dress shirt and tie; I used to have a suit, a really nice one that I enjoyed wearing, but I donated it to a thrift store because I got the impression that no one believed I was really a coder.
Real coders don't wear suits, see.
My shoes are thrashed. I'm hoping saddle soap and shoe polish will make it less apparent that I live in poverty.
My new apartment is working out well. Happily it is close to the best bus line in Vancouver. I can stay out late in Portland, then get home at one in the morning.
I've developed a problem with sleeping excessively. I'll be up for one day, sleep round the clock the next day, up for one day then round the clock again. In part it's because I have no commitments of any sort, in part it's because the bus doesn't run during the early morning.
If I go out after waking up, I have no problem staying awake, but if the bus isn't running there's no where to go. Eventually I go back to bed.
A friend is going to lend me a bicycle. That would enable me to go to a 24-hour restaurant if I wake up early in the morning.
I don't know yet but the kind of work I'd be doing, I expect they'd be cool with me working at night. It's uncommon that employers object to that, but sometimes they do.
I have grown weary of eating rice and beans.
I've been interviewed on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio twice, the first time in 2004 for The Infinite Mind, the second for Wiretap.
In both cases they found me through Living with Schizoaffective Disorder. (I was also on CNN in 2010 but that one didn't concern my mental illness.)
Of the two, the Wiretap interview is far more interesting. It's archived online somewhere but I think it's in RealPlayer format, at least it was the last time I looked. Someday I'll dig up the link.
The above page concerns my experience of being interviewed.
The Vancouver Diaries concerns my time just before, during and after my time in Vancouver British Columbia - yes I've lived in both. The American Vancouver with the first, but that's off-topic here.
Vancouver BC is an incredibly beautiful, vibrant city but I was very lonely there as I left Bonita behind to finish art school.
Most of The Vancouver Diaries is offline until I adjust the markup to fit the design of its new location, as well as fix broken links.
Now this is embarrassing.
Just now I discovered quite a serious bug in the software I'm working on.
I'm quite certain the general concept is valid, but my implementation is buggy.
This is something I can fix but that twenty grand I thought I made last week just flew out the window.
I will give you one little taste: in 2001-2002 I worked on a database kernel for a Bahamian hedge fund. It's now a core component of a huge windows executable that trades a basket of 1000 commodities futures on the Chicago Board of Trade. It's consistently able to beat the best funds managers.
My invention isn't trading commodities but it's a conceptually similar program.
(I don't know how they fared with the 2007 subprime meltdown. My guess is that the fund's owner would have known to get out of the market, he's a real shrewd guy.)
My ship isn't at the dock yet but I think it's still headed in my general direction.
In any case I'm doing something more mentally challenging than reloading SN all day long.
I invented something about a year ago, and have been tinkering with it most of the time since.
I abandoned it in November when I concluded that it could not possibly work. But in December I started taking imipramine for my depression.
At first only one other person knew about my invention. I discussed it with him a couple weeks ago: "Which is truth and which is delusion? Will my invention work or not?"
"It seems like a reasonable idea," he replied but even so I was unsure as he is not an expert in this area. He only had my own explanations to go on. However I decided I really had nothing better to do so I continued my development.
I made twenty grand in just the last week.
Starting a week or two from now I confidently expect to make ten grand per day.
I apologize, I really do, but the value of my invention depends on secrecy. If I were to explain it to you, it would be very easy for you to build one. I've often puzzled over why no one else has done this before, eventually to conclude that others already have it, but are keeping a very low profile.
I'm going to donate every last penny of my money to homeless shelters, rescue missions and soup kitchens.
Last October or so, a drop-dead gorgeous woman said to me "That's a really nice shirt you're wearing." My reply?
"I bought it because I sleep under a highway overpass. The dark red doesn't show the dirt."