Night Moves

A road ninja...

drives until there is no road left

runs until there's no land left
fights to the end of a contest
sees until there is no light left
drinks until there is no rum left
sings until his voice is a mess

 dances until there is no night left

does some things I can't mention here

Kansas City Shuffles...
and flees with the heart of a countess

-- The Road Ninja Creed

First night with a private salsa instructor.  My partner bailed, but fortunately the instructor was a girl so we just did a solo lesson.  It was very ego bruising.  I may have to re-learn everything from the ground up and change most of my habits.  However she was a great teacher.  I see a way back in the game.

Focusing on people is tought...for example, last Friday we finished a designed meeting at work around 4pm, and I started cleaning up this mess of a codebase we have.  I left at 6 am.  I reduced maybe 2,000 lines of code down to 1,000, but my skiing plans for opening weekend were shot.  It was addicting...I think I'm going to start describing the sensation I felt as a coding high.  The time flies by, and you type furiously, your hands trying to keep up with your brain.  I think this only happens when I am refactoring out redundancy.  When you are writing new stuff, or fixing a bug, you have to do a lot of thinking.  When you are looking at existing, poorly designed code, and see a giant pattern and repetitive coding that can be reduced down to something better--once you see that--there is not much more thinking.  You just become an artist.

We (the royal we) are spinning up settlers again.  I think I am going to try to make it bi-monthly, and maybe look into any games that are simple enough to have a real conversation while you play.  Or, keep the game complicated, but just have people over for drinks first, or whatever.  There's got to be a way to make settlers a better social event.

Moving forward...I have to figure out a way to plan christmas.  I really really suck at making plans ahead of time.  For years and years I existed socially by drifting along the edges of many social groups at once.  I think in Seattle I need to create my own...somehow.  I suppose the sort of goal is to get to a place where we can have fun parties, and it is not difficult to throw a party.  I mean, its nice to have goals.  Some guys are currently trying to figure out how to sleep at all while caring for a newborn and holding a job.  I'm learning how to throw parties.

Legos are a constant distraction.  I've thought of a hundred Lego-related business plans that are not profitable and only appealing because I could pretend to make money while playing with Legos.  I think, if I want to have friends, I need to disable the entrepreneurial circuit in my brain while I try to make trains, and just treat Legos like an addiction...buying a set here, and a set there just to stave off the cravings.

Although, see, I do have this one great idea right now.  I would get people to use ldraw to fabricate virtual lego buildings, and we would construct a single massive city that I would curate, perhaps by putting better-looking buildings on main streets and more amateur-ish buildings on side streets...idk.  And this would be navigateable on a website with Myst-style navigation...then maybe later more of a second life thing.  And you could click on a building that someone made, and buy directions for it, so that this virtual city would sort of function as a medium of instruction manual purchases, and the real sets sold by the Lego Group would be there, and there would be referal links to Amazon, and etc.  Oh and then, maybe we'd do a kickstarter and actually create the physical version of the city in a big warehouse somewhere and try to get enough people to come see it so that we pay for renting the warehouse and all the legos we bought.

Also my apartment is fucking overflowing with the damn things.  In the end I may die cold alone and childless because I got cock blocked by little plastic toys.

Shit...anyway.

Anyway.




[edit]
Christmas:

1. message people, or something
2. find out if anything good for actual new years night
3. decide when flying back to seattle
4. fill in calendar with salsa, karaoke, parties
5.  figure out where to sleep

[edit]
Current carry-on:  2' x 1' 3.5" x 9.5"

Smaller?