At Least I Never Slept with Lumbergh

My life continues.

Recently I made moves to switch teams at work.  I have a technical interview.  Started brushing up on "bits and bytes."*  Then I started looking at something else to prepare for the interview, and got distracted by an idea for an exponential, but still fun, 3-SAT solver, which I day-dreamed about all day, and went home and coded.

Since making moves to switch teams, I have discovered that my current manager, Boss1**, whom I don't get along with all that well, is getting promoted off somewhere to do some cool shit, and me, and my entire half of the team, is getting split off and sent back to my old boss, Boss2 that I really like.  Though I have learned a lot from Boss1, I am excited to work with Boss2 again because we get along so well and he is awesome.

So.....now I have a difficult decision within my company, all the while I am trying to tackle the bigger decision:  move to Philly.  Or Southern California.  Or London.

I finished the design for another mosaic.  I don't know if I wrote about it before...it is a picture of the Penny Arcade characters;  its yet another copyrighted image that I can't sell, but I couldn't help myself.  In the process I wrote a Lego mosaic editor program while listening to Damn it Feels Good to be a Gangster.  This program I wrote cut the design time from twenty hours down to one or two, prints out an exact shopping list of how many of each piece to buy and lets you optimize piece selection to reduce cost and tells you exactly how much it will cost before you even order anything.  Felt like a badass when I wrote it but I'm still waking up alone, so I guess its not the best thing ever.

Saturday, I slept in and did not go skiing.  Then, because of the enormous amount of money that I spent on Legos around christmas time, I had these...lets skip to the epiphany.  I was standing in the lego store, in the mall, wearing crappy shoes (girls care about shoes) because the laces of my nice fake cowboy boots broke and I don't know where to buy shoelaces, and I was staring at a wall of containers holding individual Lego bricks for sale, wondering how the Lego company could possibly let me fill up a small plastic container for only $15 because those containers hold hundreds of bricks, and each brick costs $.1 online...I can stuff way more than $15 worth of bricks into this thing.  And then my thoughts are interrupted by the realization that I am surrounded by oodles of small children whose parents are all explaining to them the basic concepts of how to pick out legos you want and put them in the little plastic box.  I glanced outside of the Lego store, in the mall where all the normal people were, and told myself that somewhere, somehow, my life has gone horribly wrong and I don't know how to fix it.  And all I could think about was how excited I was to get a good price on these Lego pieces that I could use in the mosaic.

Yesterday, in an effort to be friendly, I tried to rally some people at work to go see a movie.  No one wanted to go, and then someone reminded me that I had a conference call with India at 7:30pm.  So that's how my social life is going.


I have been trying to eat healthy, and to pack.  For this reason, hunger is a new and nearly constant companion.  I am like hungry all the time now.  Today I ran to Taco Del Mar between meetings and bought 4 tacos, which I ate too fast and regretted about an hour later.  Then I brainstormed ways to make "side income."

I came up with a few video game ripoffs, a How to Memorize the Guitar Fretboard book that I started and lost interest in, a book called How to Cook Cheap, Healthy Meals for Lazy People That Live Alone which you will shortly discover I am unqualified to write, some video game related things that would make no money whatsoever, some kind of program involving a cartoon robot that would teach people how to be programmers, a fantasy novel about wizards or maybe a guy with a talking cat,  some kind of fake vitamin product marketed towards software developers, a fictional novel like Mad Men but with programmers fixing robots like Dr House,  and then this video game that would be a cross between Lemmings and Tower Defense.  Those were my ideas for making money on my own.  And then I wondered if you could make a naughty version of that video game, and that is how I realized that brainstorming time was overrated and returned my attention to a CPU issue that keeps happening in Europe that I don't want to fix.  Raise your hand if you don't know what a fucking C2 Compiler Thread is.  Yeah, you with your hands raised.  I want to be you.


I came home and tried out a pork chops recipe that I got from Dan.  It involved using enough brown sugar to give every child in Africa a cavity.  I checked on the pork chops while they were baking.  The switch for the oven light radiated heat, reminding me that I have a very old oven.


Have you ever seen the special effects in an old B movie?  Like maybe the poop monster from that movie Dogma,  or maybe the gelatinous villain of the movie The Blob?   Or maybe Gremlins?  That is what I saw when I turned the oven light on.  It was clear to me that something was going wrong so I immediately turned the oven light off and went back to playing video games.  Then the buzzer sounded and I took the pork chops out of the oven.  That set off the fire alarm, so I put the pork chops back in the oven and held a towel over the fire alarm speaker until it switched back off.  Then I ate the two giant pork chops by myself and without anything else to eat while watching three episodes of 30 Rock, and then I felt sick.

It is gym night, so I am now sitting at my computer and writing in my blog, trying to figure out if enough time has passed to assume that my digestive tract has forgiven me and will let me go to the gym.  Not like it matters much.  Four days ago I did less than 30 bicep curls with some 25 pound weights.  My biceps are still sore.  I'd like to go running though.  I like running, even though there are mirrors everywhere and it is really awkward to look anywhere but the ceiling the whole time.

Since the Lego mosaic, which according to my personal schedule I wasn't supposed to be working on anyway, is finished design-wise and the first batch of Lego bricks have been ordered, and since I have, I feel, mostly accomplished incorporating "going to the gym" into my lifestyle, it is on to my next project.

...And I think we are going to interrupt the regular project backlog and insert a new, surprise project:  meeting new people.

 Somehow.



*Saw a page on the internal wiki at work preaching the word that those awful people who think bits and bytes don't matter that much are the kind of people that don't remember a lot about bits and bytes, as if this is some kind of clever revelation.  Oh really?  Well the kind of people who think the average chemical composition of name-brand tampons also happen to be the kind of people who don't know what tampons are made out of.  Look how clever I am!


As evidenced by my attractive personal assistant email, I am the kind of guy who likes to find the line, and then cross it.  I am also the kind of person who likes candor.  Direct, aggressive, eviscerating candor.  However I am also trying to grow up, so I resisted the urge to add something colorful and sarcastic to the wiki page.  For the record, though, I think that guy is a jackass.  I don't want to mention his name, because I don't want to be found by a google search, but here's a hint:  it rhymes with Yeven Steggar.  Jackass.


Anyway, in an effort to prepare myself, I looked up two algorithms for counting bits.  One is a three line for loop that right shifts every bit and increments something, which I am pretty sure even a first year programmer could come up with.  Another, is also a three line piece of code, but it is very clever:  you subtract by one and then AND the result with what you have--it knocks out the least significant bit.  Really clever.

**in programming, making up names for things is called "Assignment."  I'm not even kidding; this is what we do.