The Ghost in the Serif

So do, I warn you
I see things when I hold you
But I’ve whispered: "it’s alright"
It is you and me and a long night

You're a ghost in the doorway,
I can see through, but I hold tight,
I’ll just stay on holding until it hurts,
I just want you to know you're lovely

Kryptonite is an amazing song.  My band started playing it, and for once I'm doing the riffs and not just playing rhythm.  Something came over us--at least two of us--when we played that song.  I experience a pronounced, special sort of feeling of pure joy the first time I played a song with other people.  It was Gambler, and it was months ago with mostly the same people I play with now.  When we played Kryptonite together last practice, at just the moment the song started to mesh together, I experience that feeling all over again.  Some songs are more fun to listen to;  some songs are more fun to play.  Kryptonite is both.  And I can play the solo!  But no, back to "something came over us."  It was probably measurable empirically, because we noticed it while playing the next song, "I'm Just a Girl" by No Doubt.  Typically I have difficulty playing the riff up to tempo, but when we played it will all of the energy we had just after playing Kryptonite, something was very different.  I didn't have trouble with the riff at all--not until I started thinking about it.  My fingers were flying over the strings, and everything felt very...light to the touch.  It was as if previously I had been smacking trees with a bat, and now I was just tipping strands of grass over with a feather.  I've been excited before, but in this particular case I experience a marked improvement in my skills.  Oh, and so did our drummer.  Our vocalist and guitarist didn't say anything;  they probably thought we were crazy.

Doctor Who is a show that I am watching now.  Sometimes the faces of all the past lives flash on the screen.  Sometimes the faces of all the girls I've loved, or nearly loved, flash in my mind.  I have a new one to add to the list.  I have no ill will towards her--I hope that she goes on and has an amazing life and that everything she hopes for comes true;  I just wish it hadn't ended the way it did, and that I could have been a better boyfriend, and that I wouldn't feel the way I do now.  I realize, once again, probably, that feelings of sadness for that person don't completely go away.  They just become another ghost in the corner of your eye that you pretend you don't know is there.

My Research is at a standstill.  Actually its not, but it feels that way.  I'm not generating or solving 3-SAT instance right now.  I'm acquiring hardware and figuring out the most boring of details involved in generating a trillion instances.  I have been pretty hairbrained since my last post, going back and forth about which way to do it--my hardware? ec2? azure, since I work there?  Should I write another generator in Ruby so its easier to run in linux--oh wait, theres mono?   For now, I've settled on playing with a some new toys I bought for myself, and we're gonna see if I can get some generators running 24/7.  Then, I hope to investigate running a SAT generator on GPUs.  Then, once I have all that worked out, I'm going to start reading the existing SAT research.  Actually I already started, but I'm going to put effort into it.  All I know so far is c/v = 4.26 and something I don't understand about c = v^(3/2).  After that, when we get to the last 700 million instances or so, I'll spin up EC2 or Azure instances.  And then figure out a proof?  Or prove myself wrong.

[Edit]
Fun fact:  this post has been classified as "pornography" by the genius web filter installed in the offices of a certain large software company.