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Blearrrrrrgh. Most of my day so far has been awesome, a blur of productivity and high-speed brainstorming and codeslinging and modeling, et cetera. After my 2PM meeting (which was supposed to only be an hour but ran to over twice that), I ran around the corner to Quantumbooks (the resident technical bookstore on campus), tracked down two good books on AJAX and hurried back to my office to launch into a test of a new course-tracking system…
…And promptly plummeted into an energy vacuum. Several of the cars that I’ve driven lately have faulty fuel gauges, so that when the needle hits the quarter-tank mark it abruptly drops to zero and the engine dies. Yeah. It’s like that.
Zoomzoomzoomgogogowaitomigodwheredmyenergygobleeeeargh.
That old cliché about the simplest things being the hardest? Absolutely true. Earlier this week I spent hours working on a “version 1.5” redesign of the GAMBIT site, only to discover on the seventh draft that the best solution was a streamlining of my previous design. Subtle and elegant takes the cookie again – but getting to subtle and elegant is, as always, the hard part.
This weekend I:
- Got a refund on The Wrong New Apartment.
- Put down a check for The Right New Apartment(?).
- Dinged level 29 with my new Dranei mage in WoW.
- Went to the midnight release party for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
- Started reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
- Finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
- Basked in the afterglow of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
If it weren’t for one staggering thing, it would have been a perfect weekend – Misty, the pony that my parents acquired when I was 2 or thereabouts, passed away late last week. She went peacefully, passing in the night, and in pony years she must have been nearly 100, but it still doesn’t seem quite real. Later this week I’m flying home for Talon’s bachelor party (a Jimmy Buffett concert in Cincinnati) and it’s going to feel deeply odd to see that big, empty pasture.
Aside from that, though, life right now is really excellent. I can’t wait to move into the new place (I love our current apartment, and it’s been a great home for two years, but the new place is really charming) and my job is fantastic. I’m in the middle of a list of great books at the moment (White Night, the latest Harry Dresden adventure; Neil Gaiman and Michael Reaves’ Interworld; the second Bartimaeus book, The Golem’s Eye; and I’m anxiously looking forward to the new novels by Warren Ellis and William Gibson) and movie season this summer has been absolutely delightful – and Stardust, The Bourne Ultimatum and (for me) Live Free or Die Hard still have yet to be seen.
I still owe several dozen people several hundred emails, or so it seems. I hope you’re all doing well out there and enjoying the summer – I’ll try and catch up with you individually soon!
I’m writing this on my iPhone while waiting in line with Laura at the Harry Potter release at the Barnes and Noble in Burlington, Massachusetts. We’ve been here since around 9:30 and there’s gotta be about 1500 people here. It’s insane! There’s a bunch of girls in full garb near us that are singing bizarre Potter-related cheerleader-style songs, a bunch of little kids zooming around on those sneakers with built-in skates, and two high school nerdy guys and a girl dressed kinda like a hoochie mama in line in front of us. A weirdass crowd, but inarguably a crowd, what some people are calling a once-in-a-lifetime book event. I suspect this is what it was like when the new Dickens books came off the docks… And I wonder what the next literary-lineup event will be.
Wow. I wonder of there’s an article in this?
I was about to write something along the lines of, “Oh, poor weekend, we barely knew ye,” but then it dawned on me that no, actually, this weekend was incredibly productive. This weekend I got a price quote on the new glasses and contacts that I need, ran a batch of Singaporeans back to Costco (and bought four cases of Red Bull on the lab’s dime, niiiiiice), whipped up a batch of Butterbeer (one part butterscotch shnapps to seven part cream soda, mmmmm), went to see Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (which was quite good but felt more like an extended TV episode than a film of its own right, which, I suppose, isn’t that different from the general feel of the book), went out to Sunday brunch at Bruegger’s Bagels in Belmont Center, looked at ~10 apartments, dropped a realtor’s fee on one of them to get the ball rolling (grateful that perhaps this hellish process can stop anytime now, kthxbye), and went out to dinner with Laura and the Fords at Maggiano’s downtown.
Why does it feel like I barely knew this weekend? Because it was so jam-packed, that’s why. I could have done with a little more downtime, but I ain’t complainin’.
I’m settling into my new office here on campus, and it’s freaking amazing. Now, of course, my mind is turning to optimizing my workflow here in this new environment, and I’m contemplating using AIM as an interoffice communications tool. iChat is surprisingly evolving into a real staple of my day, much faster and friendlier than email, not to mention having the potential to reflect my general state of mind and availability.
That said, I now need to prune down my list of status options that I’d been plunking into iChat while in thesis mode. Rather than just whisk them off to oblivion, I thought I’d share some of them with you.
Available Messages
- Bang bang, hammer hammer
- Writing like a mad bastard
- The Venn diagram of my geekiness is huge.
- zomg coffee gooooood
- Storytelling.
- Miscellaneous
- NINJAS IN SPACE
- get back jojo
- gambit.mit.edu
- yay, work time
- sweating like a stuck pig
- teh tired
- I don’t like Mondays
Away Messages
- Clients only, please
- Artsy-fartsy
- Car wrestling. Be right back.
- zomg zzzzzzzzzzz
- BANG! BANG! HAMMER! HAMMER!
- Just playin’.
- Fearing the crow of the cockadoodletron.
- Foraging for sustenance
- Rub-a-dub dub
- The Jack Bauer Power Hour
- Henry Jenkins: Seedy Fringe Theorist.
- Cranky
- Not cranky!
- Meeting
- Rollin’ with Clooney
- Working
- o god it’s morning
- Mondays need to die
Thesis-Related Away Messages
- BACK, HELL-THESIS, BACK!
- THESIS SCORE: 9,192
- THESIS SCORE: 9,481
- THESIS SCORE: 10,161
- THESIS SCORE: 13,603
- THESIS SCORE: 17,897
- THESIS SCORE: 20,979
- THESIS SCORE: 22,944
- THESIS SCORE: 23,190
- THESIS SCORE: 24,302
- THESIS SCORE: 26,855
- THESIS SCORE: 28,129
- THESIS SCORE: 28,172 or 19,789…?
- THESIS BAD. HATE LIVING.
-
- Dante must’ve gone to MIT
- Birthing Athena.
- THESIS SCORE: 40,649
- THESIS SCORE: 44,558
- THESIS APPROVED!
What I love about that list of thesis-related away messages is how it serves as a mile-high diary of the process: plodding away, working in reasonably small increments, and then having the total panic attack of Henry and William’s intervention, followed by the abrupt addition of an additional 30% of new content… Heh. I thought I had another one in there to the tune of “Committee tested, thesis approved!”, but I suppose it fell by the wayside already.
All right. Back to work-work…
Well, this is representative of the state of things in my life recently: I just grabbed five minutes to update my homepage. Now it actually says 2007 instead of 2006.
Sheesh.
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