Geek Goddess

More of the same as yesterday, same project, same long hours, but the end at least is in sight. The problem with this rush project is that I'm trying to make html that matches a flash video. The biggest issue is that the flash scaled, so EVERY element I create, from a picture to text, needs to be scaled via javascript.

Oh, and I have to write the web code in javascript and render it. Bah. It's exceedingly tedious, so I feel twice as tired as I usually do. Tonight I realized it was nine and I said to myself, "That's it! Put the project DOWN" so I'm making my post and I'm going to go play Deus Ex for a bit.

Fuzzy continues to improve, he's sounding less rattley now. Hopefully by the time we get to the end of the medicine he won't be sneezing at all. I think I'll bring Charcoal in next, she's had a bit of a lingering cough from a bout with the same cold. We also have to get the not-so-kitten neutered at some point--he's indoor only and doesn't spray so it's not as pressing as if he were a female doing helium heels, but still... it's time. I don't want him to get out and go off catting around.

All the critiques are in now, and there was not ONE person who disliked the story. Most contained very constructive suggestions, and if I ever have TIME, I'll edit my story and try to get it published. I want to be a published author in 2012, but I have to actually write to have a chance of achieving that goal.

Even given the clock change, I was up at a decent hour this morning, but I was so busy that this is the first real chance I've had to post.

Today rather sucked, it seemed as though all I was doing was putting out fires and wrestling with stubborn code. There was one thing I was doing that I expected to have finished by noon or 1pm, and I was still hacking away at it at 4:30. Got it done, though, and once the customer finishes checking it out, I can take it from the dev site to his site and send the bill, which is of course the best part of working--getting paid.

If this keeps up, I'll be making the leap from genteel poverty to modest comfort!

My new books arrived today, of course I wasn't able to do any reading at all, but I am hoping I can crack the cover now as I unwind--it's really too late to try to play my game, I prefer to have a couple of hours for that.

Scraping the bottom of the barrel on the critiques, I think--one guy's critique was so minimal that I don't know why he wasted the effort. Oh well--it takes all kinds I guess. I am working on a longer story so I can submit a critique on it tomorrow evening. I really, really, REALLY want to get a plain Kindle because then I can convert these things and read them in comfort rather than being hunched over at the monitor.

It's raining but incredibly warm--we'll probably put the plants out for a few days.

Just a quick post.

Busy day today, I ended up working. I got one major thing finished on a project that was running late (no fault of mine, someone else was supposed to do it and didn't). That took up entirely too much of the day, so I very determinedly got the hell off the computer and went to play my game for a while.

Bleach is on in a half an hour, and we've already reset the clocks for tomorrow so we don't have to worry about it.

Reviews for my story are trickling in, and so far, they've been positive. I'm looking forward to polishing up the story and trying to get it published, and if not this one, the next :)

Fuzzy is beginning to improve. He's starting to have less nose gook, and he appears to be sleeping a lot more comfortably. Hopefully this trend will continue and one course of antibiotics will be enough to get him all cleared up.

And thus endeth the post of the day.

Amazing. I've gotten my coffee already and have started work, I'm posting while I wait for a site to upload.

Finally a day starting according to plan. I realized that if I can get an early start before the phone begins ringing and problems arise, the day is much more productive, probably because I've had a chance to actually do something.

I called it quits last fairly early, and I've been playing Deus Ex. It's actually a pretty good game. I'm very early into it, but I love the details--for example, there is a Final Fantasy XXVII poster on the walls of of the offices, and when I was poking around near the cafeteria, I noticed that someone had put their trash in one of the planters.

Got a good laugh at the very, very beginning, started poking around the office I was in, and apparently managed find everything because suddenly there was a blip and I was the bemused recipient of the "Old School Gamer" award. The person who gave me the game and Ben both had no idea it existed and were very surprised, which was funny.

The game has a sense of humor, when I was heading into the city to talk to people, I had one guy ask "Do you think you're supposed to talk to everyone you see? Get lost!"

I'm playing a non-lethal game and concentrating on the sneaking more, my gun has tranquilizer darts rather than bullets, but there's something that sort of made me wonder. There were a group of four guards in the room I needed access to, and I managed to pick them off one by one and hide their sleeping bodies in the office. It seemed really odd that none of the others missed their fellows--sure, it's perfectly possible that they might assume one went off to use the bathroom or something, but if you're suddenly the only person guarding the room, wouldn't that make you a little... well, suspicious?

This may have more to do with the fact that I'm in "easy" mode to start with, I'm not sure if they will be more suspicious on the normal or hard modes. Still, it's a lot of fun, and I'm having a blast with sneaking around, for all that sometimes its implausible.

Already have a review in for my story. The reader did like it, although there were a couple of comments that made me go "hmmm...." It just goes to show that what may seem crystal clear to you when you write it isn't necessarily clear to someone else. Now that the first critique is in and is overall positive, I'm looking forward to seeing others. Some people do really useful critiques, and I hope a couple of those folks are able to look at the story.

Upload is done, back to work!

Tired today, but I think the overall disaster cleanup is complete. Worst we had happen is one file didn't properly overwrite, and it only affected a lesser-used, private portion of the site--all the major stuff was fine. Only reason I didn't check it was it had a popup login to access the area and I didn't have the latest password and sure as hell wasn't going to call the poor owner to find out what it was at that hour.

One more minor bit on a site to finish, and I can wrap that up I think, and we're still waiting on the owner of the latest project to get back to us on why we can't seem to retrieve the proper data for his new graphs--there's another site that runs off a different source and that's perfect, and everywhere else we put it, it's perfect, so that tells us it's not the new code but rather the base data causing the problem.

It may be that we will have to re-download everything, I'm honestly not sure. That takes several days, so... hoping to avoid it.

The really ironic part of all this is that yesterday was the first day of my new, improved schedule. I've been sort of noting when I do things, like when I start getting hungry and thinking about lunch, and when I tend to really need a break, when is the best time for me to attack a particularly sticky problem, and so forth.

So, based on my observations, I had worked out a schedule for myself that would make sure that I was getting sufficient downtime as well as work time... and disaster happened, leading me to ask "Why did I even bother?"

Still, just as my email system is very robust and handles me getting flooded with mail and being too busy to deal with it (without my losing track of the important mails from clients), so I am hoping the new schedule will prove equally robust. Monday and today were just emergency days, so I can't use that as any kind of an indicator. I'll know the schedule is working right if I feel like I have a grip on my time, and that's going to take a week or two to find out.

Sensibly, we ordered pizza for dinner, and it was good.

Another chilly morning. It snowed enough overnight that there's another light dusting on the grass, but as the sun comes up over the hill, it's melting away.

There's a lot of work this week, but that's good. I feel much more rested than I did Friday and ready to tackle the job. I'm still struggling with scheduling myself, I think this is going to be ongoing and much like when I finally got my possessions reasonably organized, it will be one small step at a time until suddenly the day comes when I look around and wonder where the mess went.

We still get clutter, but the most important thing about getting a system for the house was that if clutter builds up, it's the work of an hour at most to get everything put away. The dishes might stack up temporarily, but it doesn't take long to catch up and make it sparkle again.

That's my goal for my time management, too. That even if I am busy and small tasks start to stack up, it doesn't take a great deal of effort to catch up on everything. I think I'm just about there with my email, I actually cleared the box and it got filled up again, but with some judicious filtering and kill-filing, what's left is a hell of a lot easier to manage.

Now off to work!

My back hurts.

Yesterday we got biblical rains, very unexpectedly. They did expect rain, they expected perhaps as much as an 3/4 of an inch. I believe we ended up getting something more like three inches. They didn't even have a chance to issue a flood watch--we went directly to flood warning.

When I went outside, the drain in the driveway was blocked and there was water flowing out from under the house. There was a lull in-between showers at that point, so I hurried to unblock the drain and then fixed what I thought was causing the water problem under the house--we have a ditch that runs off the hill that we have been in the process of straightening out, and there's a ditch that joins it that's intended to allow drips from the roof to flow away from the house.

I cleared that out and the water stopped coming out from under the house promptly thereafter.

Later on, it started pouring again and I saw water coming out from under the house. Ben and I went to fix the ditch again, but oddly, it seemed pretty much fine--there was a bit of water washing back, but nothing a quick rake didn't fix.

So I went to the back of the house to check it, and discovered such massive quantities of water running in a new spot on the hill that the ditch couldn't handle it and it was all washing under the house.

Ben cleared the ditch and I attacked the bad spot with a shovel. But why was the water running down that part of the hill when the channel should have been directing it completely away from the house?

Took the hoe and climbed way up on the hill, and discovered parts of the channel were blocked up and the water was spilling out of it and just running straight down the hill. Got it unblocked, Ben stayed at the bottom to clear any debris that came down. There was still some overflow, but at a much more sedate pace that the ditch could easily handled.

Crisis averted, I came back down the hill and then noticed that the other ditch was overflowing into the driveway. At this point my back was getting painful, but I carefully cleaned out the pipe. Crisis two averted.

Went in and cleaned up. Sat down with the intent of getting some work done. At this point, my back started to lock up. *sigh*

I ended up taking a muscle relaxer to stop the spasms and got crap-all done for the rest of the day because the muscle relaxer makes me dopey and sleepy. It's already much improved today, I have the heating pad to help keep it loose and I'll do some gentle stretching to keep it from cramping up. I suspect the worst of it will be a distant memory tomorrow.

Still, it's ironic because about a month ago I started with the exercise bike to build up my legs for the current yard work season, but it never occurred to me that I should do some exercises to re-strengthen my back muscles. Of course, under normal circumstances I wouldn't have been frantically trying to clear three ditches in a half an hour, and the building up would have occurred naturally... ah well. If this is the worst that happens, I'm doing just fine.

I have a small stack of Ace Doubles that I somehow never got around to reading. They're the Sci-Fi/Fantasy variety.

I've been having a blast, because most of them are golden-age old-fashioned pulp. There was a really decent sci-fi horror called Pictures of Pavanne, and there's a bunch of Darkover novels in there.

The one I'm working on now has two stories by Murray Leinster. I've enjoyed books of his before, but this one, "The Pirates of Zan", had a really great comment in it:

"Do you realize," he asked, "that the whole purpose of civilization is to take the surprises out of life, so one can be bored to death? That a culture in which nothing unexpected ever happens is in what is called its 'golden age'? That when nobody can even imagine anything happening unexpectedly, that they later fondly refer to that period as the 'good old days'?

I thought on this after I stopped laughing, and in many ways, it's nothing less than the truth. Maybe that's why there are so many conservative politicians who seem to want to turn the clock back to the fifties, a time that seems simpler, more predictable and less complicated.

The problem is you can't go back. Visit your hometown 20 years after you leave it, and it's changed. Even if the storefronts are the same, the businesses have changed. People have died or moved away, and new people have been born or moved in. Customs change, the language changes, life changes.

Life is a balancing act, where, if you aren't careful, comfort can become stagnation and habit can become so ingrained that it's painful to give it up. Maybe that's the real secret of people who grow old gracefully--they don't give up their capacity to embrace change.

I wonder what life will look like 20 years from now?

Day OFF.

I confess that when I first got up and sat at my computer, I found myself thinking about what work needed to be done, and it was a fantastic feeling to say to myself "You don't need to worry about that today, you're taking a day off".

I don't know if my neighbor will feel like taking me shopping, but that's really not a big deal because some of the money from all this work I've been doing has started to come in so that things aren't pinching quite so tight.

I think I'm going to do a critique and then work on my new story for a little while. I'm also going to attempt to catch up on my mailbox a little more, it got away from me last week--I had gotten it down to about 500 mails and it's crept up to over 1000 again.

Right now, though, I'm going to get that second cup of coffee.

Waiting on a client call this morning so I'm taking care of a few odds and ends, including the post-of-the-day.

It's really warm out today, it's already 50 and it's supposed to get up over 60. The low tonight is going to be 48, which is more like late spring than February. I don't know what to make of the weather, the first few years here the winters were pretty mild, but not like this!

I was reading about pomegranates online yesterday, and given that they are hardy to 14F, I may well try growing some in a sheltered spot. I looked up the local plant map, and it was really odd--supposedly my house is in the 5B zone, but my neighbor a half mile down the street is in the 6A zone, so I am not sure what's up with that. (5B is a low of -10 to -15 and 6A is a low of -10.) The lowest I've ever seen it here is about 6 degrees, but I haven't been here long enough to say it never gets colder.

Perhaps I can find a slightly more hardy variant, although, as I said, there's a couple of very sheltered areas where the plants would probably be just fine.

I swear, you could turn me loose with 100k at a nursery and not only would I spend every penny, I'd be whining that it wasn't enough money...