Work
Work has been crazy. I'm in charge of (technically) leading a mixed team of consultants from our company and product engineers from a partner in order to develop an application on my company's software. Success criteria: working application and the partner developers feel they can (and want to) continue to work with our software. But, just for fun, I also have development tasks in addition to making sure everyone is okay technically.
This is not a comfortable position for me.
This week was pretty frustrating: I wasn't getting that far on my tasks (which others depend on), one of my co-workers was having trouble too with the API we are integrating with, and just for fun ... the shared development machine (brand-spanking new Solaris T2000 box with 32 virtual cpus!!) was dog-ass slow. We still don't know why and it was really bad yesterday when ... the kernel panicked and it went down hard. I had to debug (read: mdb) the kernel core dump just to find out what process attempted to destroy an invalid mutex. It was the scheduler process ("sched"). Thus I really have no idea what really caused it. Oh and just for additional fun, there are no bugs or forum postings that seem relevant or similar.
But I sort of got one unit test for my component working today, so hey, it's not all bad.
Personal Issues
I had called to get an appointment with a psychologist and it was today. It went well, but I imagine I'll be going back a few times before anything is really resolved. :) Meanwhile, I am continuing on my "make myself feel better" by doing various things that, um, make me feel better!
I also went to the eye doctor for more contacts. Is that a personal issue? Well sort of because I was avoiding it due to my general malaise. The doctor I randomly chose turned out to be the best one I've had from the "does this person really know what they are doing and is he actually being diligent" perspective.
Biking
I biked to/from work everyday this week (sometimes including caltrain). Summary of bike riding usage since I got the bike:
- Sunday: 5 miles home from bike shop
- Monday: 16-ish miles just for fun on the nifty day off
- Tuesday: 13 miles
- Wednesday: 11 miles.
- Thursday: 11 miles. (Note: I seem to have fallen into bike+train mornings, just bike afternoon).
- Friday: 18 miles.
Furthermore, I am actually stopping and shopping on the way home!! This is like all environmentally conscious and shit. Of course, a backpack with a laptop is not meant to also have a sack of groceries in it.
The wind in the afternoon though is KILLER. There are a few places where on the single-speed this is really painful because I'm going into the wind and I feel like I'm biking up hill because the wind is so heavy. Then there are the north-south parts where if the wind whips up, it is actually hard to steer straight. But this is kind of fun too, even if it is hard work. But there are some really nice sections in general -- part of the home route follows "shoreline" aka marshy slough. But it's neat. I even have to take the bike onto a dirt path for a bit ... for like 30 meters. ;)
Tomorrow I plan to caltrain to SF and go to a bike shop (about five miles from the station) that actually carries the laptop-compatible pannier I want. I looked at several other models in person so far and they all had problems (one I didn't trust the mounts, another wasn't big enough for my laptop, etc.) A coworker has their briefcase model, but I want something less business-ey looking that I wouldn't be odd to use for non-laptop stuff. I will also probably buy some kind of grocery pannier. And, yes, I could buy it online, but I can't seem to find it much cheaper than list .. and this shop has it for less than list (and of course no shipping charges). In any case, even though I am mostly decided, I want to touch it first.
After going to the shop, I'll probably wander up to the golden gate bridge or something. Maybe go to a museum. A little leery about locking my bike up in SF after reading all the scary stories online, but oh well.
It also turns out I have like a bazillion and one things to buy for the bike. Well, I don't have to buy most of them (although lights unfortunately will be coming sooner rather than later). Oh and pedals. I must get some other pedals. These ones are crap plastic (as expected) and keep scraping my calves in an annoying fashion when stopped or when my foot slips (thankfully rare).
Random Linkage
- xkcd #266 thru #268 seemed scarily apropos to my current situation. Maybe I should go fly some kites up on ocean beach in SF?
- Japan Brand!
That is all.
| < Note to self before ISP time runs out. | BBC White season: 'Rivers of Blood' > |
