Month: September 2008

Kill me now. Or better yet, kill him now. With fire.

A guy moved into a nearby cube a few weeks ago. Just now I had to go over to tell him to “keep the humming down a bit”, because it was getting increasingly loud and atonal. So now he’s started drumming.

How long do you think it will be before he starts using his speaker phone to talk to somebody two cubes over?

I’m getting flashbacks to Blue Lobster and Global Crossing.

Sleep Study

I had a sleep study last night. I very nearly had two at two different centers, but we got that straightened out and I only had to be in one place at a time.

I arrived at 7:30pm, and was shown to world’s most boring and utilitarian hotel room. It had a TV with basic cable, but no WiFi, so StackOverflow was deprived of my brilliance for the night. Around 9:30 the technician came in and started drawing on my head and attaching electrodes. As well as ones around my head, there were ones under my eyes to measure eye movement, ones on my legs to measure “restless leg syndrome”, ones under my chin to measure teeth grinding, a couple of straps around my chest to measure breathing, and others on my chest for the ECG. The wiring bundle was about a 2 or 3 centimeters in diameter. And then, just to make sure I couldn’t sleep, they hooked up a nasal cannula with another tube that sat on my upper lip to measure my breathing, and a pulse-oximeter for my finger.

With all that on, it was time to try to sleep. And believe me, I tried. Besides the wires that pulled every time I moved, and the hoses in my nose, I also had to contend with a narrow single bed and a not very comfortable mattress. I was actually surprised when I woke up one time during the night because I had thought I wouldn’t sleep at all. Turns out I did, just not well or long.

They kicked me out of bed at 6am, and here it is 7:08 and I’m using the WiFi at Panera to try to catch up, but what I really want to do is go home and sleep. Unstudied.

Busy day (Busy? I just spent 4 hours burying the cat!)

Let’s see, today I

  • Fixed a bug that I’ve been working on for over a week (which I would have fixed in a day if the China team hadn’t put in a kluge to hide the most visible symptom). Oh, and the root cause was a module that the China team had written violating a basic assumption of my pre-existing gui code.
  • Had a job interview at Paychex which went pretty well, but included a strange little math test at the end which was fun but I’m not sure how relevant it is.
  • Went for a paddle – I meant to make six miles, but I only managed four because my shoulder is bugging me.
  • Got a call from the sleep clinic at Sleep Insights “reminding” me that I had a consult appointment at 11:20 am tomorrow, which is kind of strange because I had a sleep study at a completely different sleep clinic tomorrow evening.

I thought about writing more on each of those things, but I figured my blog is boring enough without the help. So if you really need more details, comment and I’ll inflict more detail on you.

Another long paddle

Today I did the same paddle as I wrote about in Rants and Revelations » Blog Archive » Long Slow Distance training.

The bay was pretty calm, and I started off with a bit of a following swell and an almost imperceptible tail wind. At the one mile point, the wind started to turn to my face, and it was pretty much a side wind the whole time.

In spite of the new paddle, or maybe because of it, my total time wasn’t much better than the last time – about 1:05 instead of 1:12. Since adjusting my technique, I seem to be using a muscle in my shoulder that I haven’t been using before, so I get very sore up there and have to keep stopping and resting it. Here are my splits:

End of the channel (about 0.5 miles): 0:05.12
One Mile Point (about 1.0 miles) 0:12.21
Two Mile Point (about 1.8 miles) 0:22.24
Bridge (about 2.7 miles) 0:32.41
Two Mile Point (about 3.6 miles) 0:42.00
One Mile point (about 4.4 miles) 0:52.03
End of the channel (about 4.8) 0:59.41
Finish (about 5.3) 1:05.00