Month: July 2004

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Last night, the Good was that Vicki and I went kayaking. I enjoy it so much – being closer to the water than in a canoe, it seems like you’re just flying along. Vicki was a little pissed at me because every time I tried to do a succession of 5 or 10 good technique paddle strokes, I’d end up 20-30 metres in front of her. Towards the end I think I figured out how to do good technique without pulling too hard, so I could paddle well but not too fast. I feel a good sort of pain afterwards – muscle tiredness, but no untoward joint pain that I can detect.

The Bad was that my TiVo recording of the Alpe d’Huez time trial cut out just as Lance Armstrong was about to catch Ivan Basso and Ullrich was still out on the course. Dammit – I wanted to see Lance’s climb on the upper parts.

The Ugly is that after a few hours of feeling that my glasses weren’t working out, I tried a few hours without them, and the net result was horrific eyestrain – not sure if the eyestrain came from the time I had with glasses or the time without them. I know that this morning my eyes are all gunked up, which seems to be happening because of the dryness I feel when wearing my glasses.

Still not enjoying these glasses

Ok, I’ve had the glasses, what, five days now? I still notice a big improvement in my ability to read small type on my computer screen or a page in front of me. But I can’t wear them if I need to switch between near and far, because they don’t work as well in the “down on the nose” position, and if I look far through them, it’s like my eyes grind their gears as they try to switch. And when I wear them for long periods of looking at the screen, my eyes get very dry, as if I were staring. And if my eyes get dry, they seem to get gunk in them and get cloudy until I rub them.

This sucks. I want my young eyes back.

Cause and Effect

I’m listening to two guys in the next cubicle discuss boolean logic in our product. I’m innately interested in this topic, because I wrote the logic engine. The two guys talking are the guy responsible for presenting the choices to the user and generating the appropriate XML, and the guy responsible for taking the XML after it has been transmitted to the remote sites and stuffing the values into the database so that my logic engine can use that information. Two computer scientists, probably with degrees in computer science, discussing something that is at the very core of computer science. And like everybody else in this office except me, they’re getting it wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong. And I’m wondering if I’m going to have to run over there and smack one or both of them until they get it right.
Continue reading “Cause and Effect”

Good weekend

Well, that was fun. Harry and Vicki and Emily have already written about it, and I attempted to write something as a comment in Harry’s blog, but the registration system on his blog stymied me.

Anyway, I enjoyed the weekend immensely. I have to confess, however, that the abundance of kids overwhelmed me and I had to go off by myself to recharge a lot. Fortunately my work project is horribly behind schedule so I had a ready excuse to sneak off into a quiet corner to ponder the wonders of the Observer/Observable classes and the “fireContentChanged” methods in AbstractTableModel classes.

The highlight of the weekend for me was the Saturday evening discussion, mostly because it’s good to find people who are far more politically aware, astute and active than I who are not totally paranoid about the election. My personal feeling is that dirty tricks are going to give us at least 4 more years of this crap (and a good possibility of the complete destruction of democracy in the process), and it’s good to know that Angus and Harry and Misha aren’t totally convinced that this is a done deal. (But I’m not giving up my Canadian passport, either.)