(Phaysis)

First week of the new year. 51 more until the next.

Sitting at Epoch having some much-needed caffeine. Yeah, you heard me…I am at Epoch. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s something about every coffee shop that just bugs the shit out of me, and over time, it all evens out. Every place sucks. So much so that I bought a french press, but even though my apartment has fucking awesome wireless, great seating, killer music, and absolutely no problem with parking, it’s practically empty. There’s nobody there. So over the holiday break, I got epically bored out of my mind and decided to break my personal ban on Epoch. Now it’s just another humdrum option out of a handful of other humdrum options.

So anyway, I’m having coffee. I think it’s starting to kick in. Usually some time around 5 o’clock my head just caves in and I feel like all my sugar and will and concentration and vision just goes away like wet ashes. And that’s when I need coffee. Usually, by the time I leave work an hour or so later, I’m at wits end trying to concentrate on the road home.

I’ve got a big project at work, and it finally started after three days of false starts. A coworker has spent the past year writing on a suite of tools to allow the automation of some of our hardware data collection efforts. We finally had a reason to apply his software to our setup, and after several fits and starts while trying to fit the hammer to the nail, it’s finally up and working.

Right now, it’s banging away in the lab and doing nicely. We got it running at 5:30, and I decided that instead of letting it run for part of its cycle before killing it when I leave for the weekend, I would go ahead and let it finish its full run since the data is so important to those who deem it so. I would’ve done that regardless except the actual testbed setup needs to be shut down afterwards. There are parts of the equipment that don’t need to be running idle all weekend, so my plan is to return to work tonight at 10 and shut it down when it’s done.

Which is why I’m here having coffee and a slice of pizza. I got time to kill, and a need to fill. Sucks that I have to go back to work on a friday night, but I’ll be there for, what, half an hour.

Speaking of work and billable time, I got an extension on my contract. My manager has been pressing Human Resources to get me converted to permanent for the past few months, and now that the company’s on hard times, the economy’s in the dumps, blah blah blah, HR has frozen all open requisitions company-wide. So I can’t get converted, at least not this quarter. So instead of hiring me permanently, they extended my contract another six months…which puts me over the company-standard 24-month limit on contracts. So, if anything happens in May (the 24th month), it happens. Elsewise, I finish the contract extension and see what happens at the next end.

I’m glad that my manager was able to impress upon HR how important my position is. I just hope that I can live up to that.

So yeah, I’m sick. Thanks.

My year, 2007, was punctuated by eleven days off; holiday work closure encompassing seven working days and two weekends. I planned to use this time for loafing, for projects, for doing what the hell pops into my mind; then my mother called to tell me she was coming down for a visit, to which I agreed. It was nice having family come visit me for a holiday for once; enough of going to visit them every year. I love that woman to death – I mean, c’mon, she’s my mom. But I don’t know how to tell her to not stay so long. Seven days. I asked around trying to divine what kind of protocol there is for telling family that they are welcome but only for a certain time. The answer comes back, resoundingly, that nobody knows how to do it. There is no protocol.

She says she’s a homebody; she’ll be fine just sitting and watching TV and that I can go out and do whatever. I can come and go as I please because it’s my house. I say bullshit to that. If I were to have done just that, I would’ve heard no end of it. “I come to visit, and you hang out elsewhere.” It won’t work. When I have a guest, my sole duty is to entertain the guest. I’m always on set. Little down time. People don’t understand that about me. If you’re in my house, I am your host. What I have going on has to be suspended. Maybe that’s an immature way to look at it. Maybe I’m taking the role of servitude. I don’t know. But that’s how it happens.

I learned an apt phrase a decade ago. “The hardest thing for a man to do is to disguise his feelings as he puts a load of relatives on the train for home.”

So she left friday morning, travelled safely, and got back home. I rested. That evening, I sat at Epoch and had coffee. Tried to get some work done; tried to pick back up where I had left off a week prior, and had no luck. I couldn’t think clearly, got a little angsty. I left there around 10 and started driving because I clearly didn’t want to be in the four walls of my own apartment. I drove around town, ended up on Highway 290W, and drove out to Oak Hill. I kept driving.

Seventy minutes later I was in Fredericksburg, Texas. I had no suitcase, no toiletries, no change of clothes, but I rented a room and spent the night. It was really nice to get away. To punctuate the stressful week with my own diversion. Complete seat-of-the-pants. I didn’t care. That’s the kind of shit I wanted to do the entire break; completely live without schedule, without demands, and finally I was able to do it, but damn did I do it big.

I got up that morning and did the tourist thing. The downtown area was kinda neat, but in a 1960′s crafts fair kind of way. Tons of middle-class white people dropping money everywhere. I had a nice wurst sandwich, got a taste of the local German culture, walked around and took pictures. Sort of went around as a floating eye and soaked it in. I left after it all got too white and made it back to Austin at 3pm.

Spent the remaining days of 2007 just doing what felt right. Completely relaxed, turned off to necessity. Tried to regain myself and my own initiative. Took a right turn on my main website project and decided to backtrack and retool, but it’s still not so successful.

I should learn by now that I can’t get any work done at Epoch. It’s fucking impossible. I can sit down, open the laptop, and hunker down for work. And then someone will stop by the table, say hi. Someone will walk by and decide to chat, or join me. And out the door goes my attention. Programming is a tough task; takes focus. And there is no focus when someone visits; it’s broken and not so easily retrieved.

So last night, I got called out to a New Year’s Eve party at a friend’s place. I obliged. Took the remains of my rum bottle, a bottle of cola, and headed out the door. Had a great time at the party. It was quiet, mild. We had a ton of fireworks but because of the red flag warning we chose to stick to firecrackers and roman candles. Well, the roman candles were a bad, very bad idea. It took two stray flaming balls to prove to us what a tinderbox the tall grass next to the road actually was. No sooner did the balls land in the grass and start going out, the grass burst into flames. We were sober enough, luckily, to stomp it out and decide to not do roman candles again.

I didn’t get drunk; didn’t even get buzzed, but I got relaxed. That’s what counts, really. About 4 shots of rum, a lot of water, and a glass of champaign and I was still sober. Went to bed around 3. An alright night indeed.

But this morning; fucking hell. Now I’m reminded why I shouldn’t drink. The alcohol was just enough to kill off all the germs that were keeping the bad germs at bay. When I woke up, my throat was on fire. I’m all scratchy, phlegmatic, and getting stopped up in the head. Fucking hell. An ok end to the year leads me into the lair of the illness dragon to start the new year off in the worst of ways. And now I have to go back to work tomorrow morning. Damn.

Happy effing new year, dammit.

So yeah, I’ve had a dumb weekend. Friday was ok, but saturday found me in a hell of a bad mood. Sat inside most of the day going between snoozing in my chair, cleaning the house, reading documentation on the Ruby programming language, and feeling bad about my life. Moody McGivesafuck. Brooded over myself as I changed venue; left the house at sunset and ambled over to Epoch where I absorbed myself in journal writing and reading more on Ruby. In one weekend I’ve read nearly the entire manual. Finally, my friend Jonathon came around and we discussed things; felt better about my current state.

By this morning, I felt fine. Took my time getting out of bed. An hour of reading the Internet did its job on distancing me from my snoozy feelings of a pure morning. Did laundry while making lunch, then read some more Ruby docs. Got dressed and went to Epoch. More reading. It’s my goal to learn enough Ruby to proficiently use it with Ruby On Rails to build a site for a friend of mine. After several hours there, I started walking; took the long way home in the crisp air. Autumn is approaching, and this full moon is making things nice. I haven’t driven my car since I got home from work on Friday; it’s a weird feeling. As long as my car’s not up to snuff, it’s in my best interest to let it sit in the parking lot whenever I can. It’ll still drive decently, but the smoke, the smoke.

So I’ve still got this outstanding dental issue. There’s the molar that needs a root canal. That’s still gotta get done. I’m fine with that; I’m fairly certain I know where I’m going for that. But just an hour ago I discovered something else that may’ve happened this week since my recent dentist visit: I noticed in the mirror that my crooked incisor tooth is broken. There’s a crack right across it on the front; may’ve happened while eating, since the tooth has a filling on the backside. This scares the shit out of me. I don’t know what procedure is done for cases like that. Bonding? Patching up? Removal?

I’m becoming a poor man, and my bad teeth are to blame.

Scary shit.

Addendum:
Ok, so what I thought was a crack in a tooth was just the edge of the tooth-colored remnants of dinner. After brushing, it’s no longer there. I feel like a fool. I still need the root canal though.

Haven’t been doing much with the site lately, as you may notice. Got several projects going on, mostly just development work. It’s all hobby, so take it for what it’s worth.

One thing I’m working on / was working on is a simple note tool called Raganotes. It was intended to be a tool to allow me to take quick notes, give them a title, and make them available. It’s a small experiment in pulling together some functional Perl building blocks: CGI::Application, Template Toolkit, Class::DBI, and Apache::Session. It’s a way to get my head wrapped around using these blocks in the assembly of a larger Content Management System for my site, a way of getting experience in doing so, finding methods that work, dipping my feet in the pool. It started from my overriding frustrations in building my CMS, a fast-and-loose attempt at coding something before I lost interest. What resulted was something that was kinda quick, I mean in the grand scale of things the month of building time was quicker than my past years of working on my site. I lost interest a few times, got stumped many, but I got it functional. Just not complete.

I think what I ended up with was something with way too much functionality to it. Instead of letting the user log in, make notes, add titles to them for quick browsing, publish them, search, edit, delete, undelete, copy, etcetera, what I got was a mashup of features that overall seem really cludgy. I had a vision, lost it during development, and then gained a vision that was hazily similar to the original, and now I’m stumped again. It’s mostly a user interface thing. So I’m letting it rest for a while.

My most recent project is my game, Chrontium. I started this back in 2004, some time before AJAX was an internet buzzword. It uses some advanced javascript, images, and realtime communication with a server to provide gameplay for users. At the time, it was fairly groundbreaking, yet I had only shown it to a handful of other people and promptly sat on it for months, years.

I’ve since gotten a new fire for Chrontium, and now, in the past 2 weeks, I’ve polished up the engine, redone the graphics, went from using GIFs to PNGs for true transparency (and much faster rendering in Firefox, et al). I’ve also done some cleaning up and changes elsewhere in the game code, I’ve rearranged the development file tree, and I’ve optimized the stylesheets and code to work in IE and Firefox (others forthcoming). Things are working rather nicely, but there’s rough edges. I also still need to build the server-side stuff, the database end, the user management, the scorekeeping, the game parameter controls, the message boards (which might come later), and all that. If it’s worth a damn, and gets popular after I post it here, I might relegate it to its own domain. We’ll see.

An associate of mine asked me why I didn’t simply use Flash instead of Javascript. My first answer was simple: I hate Flash. Really, I seriously do. My second answer: I want to prove to the internet community at large that Javascript, and the browsers they run in, are coming of age for realtime gaming applications. Anywhere you can use sprite graphics, you can use Javascript and images. I can’t wait until my first public release to see what issues, comments, or praises come my way. Will be interesting to stir a buzz.

But I’m not even finished enough to be concerned about these things. Really. Until then, I have my head down in the work.

Hello again. Time for your bi-monthly dose of new site news.

Things are moving slowly as far as stuff for the site. Nothing new there. I have the usual Big Ideas that I’ve had since the inception of Phaysis that haven’t been brought to fruition. But some of those ideas I’m getting new ideas about. Since I am now prone to imbibe a daily intake of coffee, ideas are popping and I’m making little touches to some code here, drawing some designs there.

I’ve set up a portable test server on my laptop and am experimenting with different content management systems, trying to find one that will fit my needs best. Some months ago I took a hard look at my history of glacial progress and decided that if I’m to have any luck with my site that I should stick to learning and using a prebuilt CMS instead of rolling my own. Well, I tried that track and found a few that fit what I needed…kinda. But the knowledge, code snippets, and concepts I’ve gained from examining them, hacking them to work on the limited setup I currently have Phaysis on, I’ve gotten new notions about writing my own CMS. We’ll see how it all fares.

On a negative note, I’ve been getting more spam than ever, and I have a feeling it’s from unsubscribing from a mailing list provided by a local radio station. Where I was once getting 12-ish messages a day I’m now getting 30+, and that was since unsubscribing. So the moral to be learned here today is that you can’t even trust the ones you can trust; they may be in a “business partnership” with other companies who aren’t bound by the first company’s privacy policy. Keep that in mind.

For shame, KROX-FM/101X. For shame.