<stewie’s voice>BLAST</stewie’s voice>

Dammit, I forgot to bring my iPod to work again today. It’s not so much that I share a cube wall with “Chatty Katy” who appears to be organizing a volleyball tournament, or that right opposite another cube wall is the door to a conference room so I get to hear the post-conference discussions that inevitably happen after every use of the room. No, it’s this floor shaking horrendous thump that happens with disturbing irregularity. I’d estimate it to happen about 4 times an hour on average, but sometimes I don’t hear it for an hour or more, and sometimes it seems to be happening every few minutes.

This thump has been happening since I got here at this job, but if you ask other people, most of them haven’t noticed it. Some of them comment on it when they come over to visit my cube, because the rest of the development team is on the other side of a physical fire door and so maybe they’re more insulated from it.

Who’d have thought it?

We’ve had daylight savings time for how many years now? All of my life, I’m sure. So why the hell did I think that I could march my date-time classes from one day to the next just by adding 24 hours (or rather 24*60*60*1000 milliseconds)? Damn, that was a stupid bug. And I’d done it in about 15 different places in the code as well. It’s going to be hard to test it completely until April when the time goes back.

I hope it works.

Wish me luck

Generally, when my computers have failed in the past, it’s either been 3 or 4 days after a major configuration change (such as adding a hard drive) or it’s been while I was away for the weekend. It’s now 4 days since I added the new hard drive, and I’m going away for the weekend. With that combination, I figure with my luck it will probably explode and burn the house down.

One bright spot

One thing I am looking forward to this weekend: Last time, Alyssa and I had an hour to fill in between the checkout time of the hotel and the start of the movie we went to see, and so I stopped for a walk along the Ottawa River. I’ve always loved the Ottawa River – when I lived in Ottawa I’d frequently go out of my way to drive or bike the River Parkway on the way somewhere.

On this short walk, we discovered some amazing sculptures done in the river. I remember this artist from 10 or so years ago – he wanted a place to set up his easel to do some painting, and arranged the flat stones that he found in the river into an Inuktuk. He liked it so much that instead of doing his painting, he made dozens of Inuktuks, mostly in the shallow parts of the river. Well, evidently he’s still doing it, but he’s progressed beyond Inuktuks – some of the things he’s doing now are amazing. I hope they haven’t been swept away, as I’d like to document them.