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The Attention Gift Hypothesis
I sat up all night long last night to compost my very latest Wall Of Text.
Don't feel the need to read it all at once.
Or at all: I have just as many if not more Haters than Fans not just of my websites but as well as my great many articles, essays, rants and manifestos.
It's time for a Totally _Righteous_ Reuben Sandwich from one of Downtown Portland's Pioneer Courthouse Square food carts.
Off to lunch!
I Have Been Coughing Up Phlegm For Six Solid Hours.
Is that bad?
At least it's not green. Green is bad.
A two pack a day friend I once had denoted his own phlegm as "Lung Cheese" yet strangely uncritically accepted such Cheese.
I am otherwise awake enough and functioning mentally well enough to write code.
I got to work at Midnight Monday night. I spent less than five minutes staring at my source then quite grimly quit Xcode then hung out on the Net until the trains started running again about 5:30.
What I regard as "today" but no one in their right mind would actually so regard led me to arrive at work at nine Monday evening.
I've been able to somehow extract from deep within myself the Moral Fibre required to Deliver Value to my client for six hours or so.
For me, that's a good day but for a whole lot of really good reasons I promised a delivery "today" for various values of "today".
In my own particular internally-consistent system of Postulates and whatever Gödel Escher Bach calls the means by which one can start with some postulates, apply some operators to eventually arrive at an item that is contained within any particular internally-consistent system - Help Me Out Here, I'm Begging You! - all possible values of "today" commence when I somehow drag my sorry ass out of my beloved warm, comfortable bed right up until I pass out on the sidewalk while waiting for the MAX Yellow Line from Pioneer Courthouse Square to North Portland's Delta Park / Vanport Station.
While it often slips my mind, despite my Totally Whacko sleep/wake patterns I really do have a completely normal Circadian Rhythm. It's just that my Circadian Rhythm has very little influence over when I feel the need to sleep or when I'm ready to wake up and start my day.
I actually sleep far more than anyone I have ever met but when I actually do so is all over the map.
I have no understanding of why I sleep or awaken without correlation to my otherwise-normal Circadian Rhythm nor have any of the many Medical and Mental Health Professional I have quite desperately begged for insight from.
The one thing I can say is that whether I'm able to focus on my code as opposed to my great many Walls Of Text quite closely tracks my Circadian:
I always feel totally trashed as well as freezing cold starting around 6:30 AM until 8:00 or so. Just now at Midnight I'm at my mental peak so I would do well to stop composing such a great many Walls Of Text that I may Deliver Value to my client...
... just after...
... I submit to SN...
... what I regarded as...
... what for me is an uncommonly concise...
... as well as effectively argued...
KTHXBAI!
I Just Feel On My Sword
To: the-boss@client.com, his-coder@client.com
Subject: This Is Very EmbarrassingI just a couple hours ago realized that my code was A Multitude Of Sins.
I'm now making rapid progress and will stay at the office until I have a meaningful build to deliver.
(Attempting to salvage what's left of my repution.)
I'm now feeling a whole lot more confident that I can reliably do what you're paying me to do today.
Disconcertedly,
Mike
Do Yer Worst.
Soggy Jobs Now Has a Cafes Section
Both in Washington State.
My Cafe section is only a prototype. I'm going to build out Clark and King - Seattle and Redmond - Counties, Washington, Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington Counties, Oregon and Alameda County, California (for Peets).
Then I'm going to ask Peets' and Starbucks' MIS people to work with me to set up automated data feeds. That way when a new cafe starts hiring, it will appear on Soggy Jobs that very same day. In the unfortunate event that one goes Tits Up, it will disappear into the ether. Fall off the edge of the Earth. Stop phoning home.
It's common for cafes not to have websites, but many of them have either Facebook or Twitter. I could link those but then my table rows would be two wide to fit on smartphones.
Is there a way to make table rows take up two lines without embeddeding a two-row table in a table row?
Some have neither website, Facebook nor Twitter. If there's just one location I plan to provide their street addresses.
I'll be going to breakfast at the Portland Rescue Mission soon.
In other news, late tomorrow morning I'll be setting out QR codes for BitCoin, Ether and LiteCoin so I can accept crypto tips when I sing on the street.
Just yesterday I added Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" to my Set List. Please to be suggesting folk songs, show tunes and American patriotic songs that I could sing. I do it A Capella, so whatever I sing can't have long instrumental sections.
I Was in the Emergency Room Again Last Night
"If you're not sleeping, it's an emergency."
-- Psychiatrist Darryl Chagi MD, Soquel, California 1997
I stayed up quite a lot longer than I really had any reason to be
awake. At ten last night decided to buy some ice cream at the corner
store but didn't check for my keys before I shut my apartment door
behind me. Happily I realized the problem before walking out the door
at the bottom of the stairs, left it unlocked, quickly went to the
store, bought a can of Campbells Chunky Soup then right back.
The landing at the top of the stairs is big enough to stretch out on
so I figured I'd be OK until I could get my apartment manager to help
me climb into my bedroom window this morning. Eventually realized
that I wasn't sleeping because my Happy Pills were inside the
apartment.
Had no cash for a cab, busses not running this late. Dialed 9-1-1, as
I attempted to speak to the dispatcher I realized I wasn't just wide
awake but actually Manic. Another day of that and you'll need
butterfly nets and tranquilizer rifles to stop me from lighting up the
whole town with my contagious enthusiasm.
Ambulance comes, took me to a very small ER in Salmon Creek called
Legacy. I'd been there before, figured they'd get me the right kinds
of meds then have a sort of "Wingnut Limousine" - really a Buick but
with a bulletproof window between the front and the back - to a mental
hospital that I'd been in before, Telecare at the VA Medical Center in
Vancouver in the back of the building immediately opposite the lobby
in front.
I made plain to the entire ER staff that I could not _possibly_ sleep
until they gave me Elavil but it was only around 3:30 that I realized
they'd overlooked it. They did gave me a fast-acting Zyprexa tablet
that I dissolved under my tongue. While that stopped the onrushing
Mania, without the Elavil I would have no hope whatsoever of sleeping
so it would not be long at all before I was Manic again.
Elavil (amitryptiline) is an antidepressant which I no longer need but
it's _highly_ sedating so one must gradually increase one's dose at
first to build up a tolerance to the sedation, then after one is sure
the depression won't return, taper back off of it over a period of two
or three weeks. To stop suddenly and I simply _cannot_ sleep until I
can take some again. Three days awake and I'm hallucinating. Five
days awake I'm hallucinating so hard I can't see where I'm going when
I try to walk.
They discharged me with a taxi voucher. In the lobby waiting my cab
to arrive, realize I was having vivid visual hallucinations, got
readmitted to the ER, apologized for not having been more clear I need
_Elavil_ too.
The ER doc who gave me the Zyprexa had just gone home so they assigned
me a new doc. Waited a couple hours, he went home too. Third doc
shows up while generally friendly he was quite argumentative. I was
unable to make him understand that I really _did_ need to be in a
mental hospital. _Nothing_ the ER could possibly do would make enough
of a difference.
He agreed to prescribe my Elavil.
I was able to listen to YouTube for another three hours but still
unable to sleep. At 9:30 finally got my Elavil but they never gave me
any food when I asked for it. To take Elavil on a totally empty
stomach is quite painful.
Five minutes later, nurse tells me my cab is here and I head home.
I Was A Piece Of Work when I got home but at least Bob agreed to park
his pickup under the awning over the front of the first floor.
Climbed on cab, onto awning, very easy to get into bedroom window.
I'm no longer Manic but also no longer sleepy. Many psychiatric meds
are toxic to your liver or your kidney so it's not safe to take
another dose of Elavil yet.
I'll make some pancakes, shower, shave then hang out at Taco Bell -
not for the food, rather the air conditioning, Internet, a restroom
and they'll be cool with just giving me a cup of ice water - until
5:00 or so then will take more Elavil and...
... Sleep The Sleep Of The Dead.
This gets really old sometimes. I Mean It Really Does.
Lucidly,
Michael David Crawford
$ svn commit --message "Make Doug Happy"
$ tar cvfz ~/Desktop/make_doug_even_happier.tgz ./trunk/
I'm copying trunk to my other box on a stick because I can't be bothered to figure out how to make Subversion work over NedSpace's WiFi.
I'll be stepping across the street to Peet's Coffee And Tea where I shall make Doug even happier than he previously was.
Here's How I Can Tell That I Really _Am_ An Expert
Whenever I google for the solution to some problem that I face I just about always turn up my younger self asking that exact same question on a list or on Stackoverflow.
Quite commonly _nobody_ has answered my question, so that younger me had to figure it out for himself. Sometimes I'm happy to find that my younger self posted the solution to the problem he faced then and I face now, but not always. Sometimes I'm left to solve my problem - without anyone else's help - a second time.
Desiato
When you guys hear of Desiato you most likely think of the dead rock star at the restaurant at the end of the universe. I think of an old online friend from a couple decades back, Tim Poesch. I got an email from him a couple weeks ago, unfortunately when all my equipment was screwing up.
The March Win 7 update disaster hit both of my laptops. It just kept the big HP from seeing my other devices and vice versa, but the little Acer was crashing often. I reinstalled the Acer’s OS and apps, but for some reason I couldn’t get Thunderbird to get to my email account.
My nearly decade old Kyocera phone was likewise acting up, telling me its storage was full when it was actually nearly empty, then its apps started crashing. I’d been checking email with the phone until I could get Thunderbird working right.
I saw Tim’s email but couldn’t read it. I was finally able to read it a couple of days later. He said he’d run across Random Scribblings during a random Google search, and it made him nostalgic for the old days, so he ordered a copy from B&N.
Tim was part of a small world-wide group of us with popular web sites. His was a realaudio/shoutcast/podcast (why do they keep changing the neme?). Others in our group were Yello There and his hilarious parody of Blue’s News, Dopey Smurf who got slashdotted after he posted an explanation of how rail guns work (his site was down for a month), Flamethrower, who was actually a bunch of British college students pretending to be one guy, with another podcast of hilarious British vulgarity. We all had a LOT of fun!
As soon as I read Tim’s email and before I could reply the damned phone’s email crashed and it wouldn't come back up. A week later I discovered the stupid mistake that kept Thunderbird from connecting—I’d had Wi-Fi shut off.
Duh!
With Thunderbird working again I looked for Tim’s email so I could answer it; I’d gotten nostalgic myself putting Random Scribblings together.
It was gone. Apparently the phone’s email client had eaten it.
Tim, if you happen to run across this post, please email again!
Just Doing My Job
I'm using Tor Browser to listen to YouTube.
Not "watch": "listen".
This because after I started The Seekers' 25-Year Reunion Concert, I minimized Tor Browser then came her to SN with Chrome.
Have A Nice Day! :-D
The Hell Are All These Coders Actually _Doing_?
No wonder they still can't make a profit.
The Mind Simply Reels
I will credit Twitter for this:
By listing every last one of their coding shops at Soggy Jobs, Twitter enabled me to identify Jakarta, Indonesia as a tech hub.
Next Up: Find some locally-owned Jakarta software or hardware firms.
