Random thoughts on the weekend

Not the most productive weekend I’ve ever had, but a nice balance of doing and not doing.

– I started a “pain diary”. Actually, it’s another category on this blog, and I’ve excluded it from the main index page and the RSS/XML feeds. You can see it on the category index over on the side there, or by going to http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/pain.html. I’m sure it would be too damn depressing even for me to see how much of my life revolves around pain. Although at least you’d be able to see why that line from somewhere about being “an organic pain collector hurtling towards oblivion” has so much resonance for me.

– I also put together a tach slip entry system for the flying club. Many months ago, I started doing an all-singing, all-dancing mega system and got bogged down by the sheer enormity of it. So I decided to just keep it simple and get it done. Of course as soon as I did, the club officers came up with a billion enhancement requests that would have turned it back into the all-singing, all-dancing system that I’ll never finish. Oh well, I guess that was a waste of time.

– I started planning for our trip to Mt. Holyoke for parents weekend. I’ve got the plane booked, but I haven’t decided yet whether to fly to Barnes Muni (BAF) or Springfield/Chicopee (CEF). Barnes is a tiny bit closer to the hotel (like maybe a mile), and doesn’t have the military traffic and regulations to contend with like CEF, but the user comments on AirNav about BAF are all over the map from good to horrible. The user comments for CEF are much more biased towards the positive.

– I deposited some checks that had been sitting on our fridge, some for over a month. They totalled over $500. It just amazes me some times that we’re so free of debt and earning so much that we’re not desperately shoving checks into the bank as soon as they come so that we can pay the last credit card bill. This contract gig has been a life saver, I hope it lasts for years.

– I got a chance to eat at the Chinese buffet place. I know it’s not the lowest carb food in the world, but it’s something I really like and Vicki doesn’t. With her out of town, it was a perfect opportunity to get a fix and get it out of my system for a few weeks.

– I did some work on the project. We’re currently working on some code that’s going to a “smoke and mirrors” trade show next week, but still building towards a release which is scheduled for just before Christmas. There is no way in hell we’re going to be ready for that release, but I’m still trying to get as much overtime in as I can without hurting my health and/or burning out. I’m getting dangerously close to burning out, but slow weekends like this really help. Anyway, one of the things I worked on this week was an ingenious (if I do say so myself) dual-level cache system so that any subsystem which asks for a particular object will get a pointer to the same one as all the other subsystems get, and yet it will get refreshed from the database when circumstances indicate that it needs to be.