Sick again, right around when I meet a girl. Well, I met a bunch of girls, back about...some amount of time ago. But I got sick this week. A different set of symptoms though...didn't get a super high fever, or many symptoms other than a sinus infection, I just got weak to the point of nearly fainting, especially when consuming alcohol. I'd love to get into the mechanics of alcohol affecting oxygen absorbtion (because I had to learn that to be a pilot) but I'd rather dwell on the fact that the aforementioned weakness coincided with my first...date-like thing with this girl I'm interested in. We were sitting down for dinner at her work when I took a swig of beer and minutes later felt the early warning signs of losing consciousness. There was no way I could get out of there; if I had ducked out early saying I wasn't feeling good, she would have thought the real reason was anything other than I wasn't feeling good. I spend the next hour trying to be in the conversations and look like I'm having a great time and all that all the while trying to recover and conserve my energy for the salsa dancing later. I found that not slouching seems to make my rib cage not press on my heart so much, making it easier to get oxygen to my brain. I may have imagined that. Idk, I just remember arching my back a little and suddenly feeling a lot less light-headed. Long story short, I made it through the Salsa without collapsing. In fact, I was feeling pretty good by the end of the night.
Yeah, sick again? I know. I think it was a sinus infection, and also thrush. That is, I had a sinus infection, and now I have a cough, and a few days ago I self-diagnosed myself with thrush based on...no real evidence other than I recently discovered that the food in my refrigerator that I had been eating was moldy, including the Parmesan cheese that I was going to use as soon as I got around to trying a pasta recipe that Evan emailed me. Unfortunately, half of the ingredients of that recipe were casualties. The onions and the garlic still look ok. They weren't in the fridge anyway. Maybe its the fridge. While researching thrush on the internet trying to find some evidence that a shot of Absolute vokda would have some beneficial effect (no luck), I read that you are supposed to clean your entire fridge with some kind of baking soda solution when you find some mold. I'm not doing that. I find moldy stuff in there like every few weeks. I do have some baking soda thats been in there for about a year though. It doesn't seem to be doing much good.
Anyway, the rest of the week I still felt like crap. Tuesday, I discovered the final insight to 3-sat: I now have proof that my algorithm for solving it is polynomial time. Unfortunately that proof is locked in my head, and while it is such a simple concept in my mind, it is rather difficult to explain in person, and damn near impossible to write down. Especially when I have to stop my train of thought every ten minutes to go google yet another latex command I forgot. Also, concentrating on the problem actually made me feel sicker, like my brain was overheating or something. I took a lot of breaks. I think I'm about maybe 3/5 of the way through the first draft of a paper that outlines my solution, and the proof. I have thus far explained my algorithm, Ultimatum, to one person, but unfortunately that conversation began with a lenghty explanation of 3-sat and what polynomial vs exponential time is, so the fact that he failed to poke a hole in my solution doesn't mean a whole lot.
Work continues to be not only boring, but frustrating. Our systems, at my place of business, have two states. The first state, is the magical, happy state all of the systems are going to be in just as soon as we get done with the fixing, the refactoring, the decoupling, and the migrating. This magical fairyland state is extensively documented and people love talking about it. Unfortunately, it only exists in people's minds. The second state, is the way the systems actually work, in real life, today. Comparing the magical happy state to the real state is like watching Neo wake up in "the real world" in the movie The Matrix. There is no documentation for this real state. The only knowledge of how things work is in people's heads. However people come and go, and teams get reorganized for fun it seems, so finding out who to ask about something becomes its own challenge. If that fails, you have to dig deep into some of the grossest code you will ever see. Everyone you talk to will agree with you that the code is grotesque, which makes me wonder, how did this code get written? Was there a secret team of ninja idiot programmers that threw ugly perl code in your eyes to cover their escape? By the way, I think all perl code is ugly. I only specified the adjective in case you, the reader, liked perl, in which case you might not know how ugly it is. Its ugly. I realize that telling you it is ugly is rude, like walking up to someone and calling their wife ugly. But you shouldn't be married to perl. Perl is a dirtly little slut scripting language that gets things done, and if I ever discover that you are the author of an enterprise-grade thingy made of perl that I have to dig through, you are going to wake up in bed with a perl book soaked in your own blood. And a horse head. That horse will have had a name, and its bone paste will be in the skittles I eat as I teach you a more attractive-looking programming language.
So, anyway, I've started documenting stuff. Not the way it will be. Just the way it is. My team, because of its unique (in our eyes) position, fields a lot of stupid questions. No one seems to want to do anything about the questions other than whine about them or deride the person asking them behind their back. Because thats more fun then writing some documentation. People excuse our embarassing and nearly criminal lack of documentation by saying that everything is always changing so fast that anything written would go stale. So I started doing it by myself. Let them deal with my moldy wiki pages when I leave the department.
So nothing really happened this week. My parents called me today, and I had nothing to tell them. Normally I don't even answer the phone when I'm in the middle of watching netflix but my phone (which recently decided its camera was broken) opened on me while I was pulling it out of a pocket, which answered the call, and all of a sudden I'm in the middle of a conversation with my parents but still wondering what Dexter was about to say to his girlfriend. Oh, wow, while grabbing that link I just found out Dexter's girlfriend dies later. That sucks. Anyway, so my parents told me this kid planted a pot plant in the woods behind their house. He decided a great place to put it would be right on the walking path were people would walk right by it, so that my Dad, who is into trees and plants and can probably identify every tree in that forest, would have to be blind to not find it. The story was hilarious, but it was a little worrying. Based on the news articles I used to read online, having pot anywhere near you means there is a good chance the police will serve a "knockless" warrant on your house, blowing in your door, shooting your dog and pinning your face to the ground with the barrel of a shotgun screaming "DON'T MOVE OR I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU," all before identifying themselves as police officers. Then again, those articles I read were linked to from slashdot, the same website where a bunch of geeks thought Amazon deliberately de-listed a bunch of gay (literally) books that no one read, all at once, on a weekend, as part of some kind of conspiracy involving republicans and who knows, maybe some of the g-men that pulled off 911. Maybe everyone who contributes to slashdot is a pothead. I mean, the site is green, isn't it?
Its weird...normally when I think about a dog getting shot, I don't feel bad at all but instead think of my ex-girlfriend and hope that the canine victim was a particular dalmation/eskimoo/poodle. However, when I imagine cops getting off shooting dogs in the course of serving warrants on potheads, then I feel sad for the dogs. Strange dichotomy...ugh! Dexter's girlfriend dies? WTF. I liked her. I'm not sure I'm going to keep watching this show. What am I going to do now? I guess I am mostly better from being sick. Maybe I won't need tv for a while.
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