This year on the 1st of Feb, I was running short on sleep and spent most of the day feeling slightly stupid.
I swear, I didn't accomplish a single thing yesterday without major assistance from someone else. I barely managed to make the coffee, and all we have to do here is put a fresh filter-pack in the bucket and hit a button. Sheesh.
The morning started out slow, and I decided to take things easy and put together a sketch of what I thought the best organization would be for the program I'm supposed to write. Some of it may be too ambitious for my current talents, but I'm trying to work on modular design. If I wind up having to slap together something that isn't modular in order to meet the deadline (which I highly suspect will be the case) then at least I know how it ought to be fixed later.
At any rate, in the process of breaking the program apart into modules, I realized that one of the layers I'd built was something I didn't know how to do. So I thought I'd take a stab at it - see whether it wiggled or played dead.
It not only played dead, but it killed a few things that had previously been wiggling.
I've been a programmer for several years now, and I know that whatever was wrong, it was probably something stupid. So I did what I always like to do in these situations - pull out all the junk and strip everything down to its lowest possible denominator, and then add bits back in until I figured out what was broken.
Except the lowest possible denominator was broken. Took me all the way up until lunch and finally begging my officemates' help to figure out what went wrong.
Since I was getting the lowest possible denominator straight from a book, this probably would've been pretty hard on my esteem, except that it turned out that the book was wrong. How annoying. I need a new book, now, I guess, except that this is pretty much the only book on the market that explains how to write Windows programs with plain C code - all the other books are using various flavors of C++, which I'm not allowed to use. Hmph.
Anyhow, I inched forward all afternoon, finally getting hung up on the second-to-last step right around four. So that's my job for today - figure out the second-to-last step. (Once I figure that out, the final step should be fairly straightforward.)
I apologize, by the way, with boring everyone with work stuff. But one of my biggest problems with work is that, when my year is up and it's time for a performance review, I can't remember what I've done for the past year. So I'm slipping it into my journal. Of course, because at least two people from 3GI read my journal and 3GI is sortof a competitor, I can't really say precisely what the project is. But I'm hoping that a year from now, when I come back and re-read all this garbage, I'll remember what it was.
Maybe I should steal an idea from The Book of Rob and Tracing and make little icons to indicate what I'm going to talk about in a particular section, so if you hate reading about my job, you can just skip to the next section. Thoughts?
I actually walked again yesterday! It helps that Becky comes with me. We talk the whole way around the circle about various trivial things. It's kindof odd - I'd always been told that the right level of aerobic activity is when you have enough breath to talk, but not sing. It's precisely the level that I'm at, walking around the circle with Becky - I'm slightly breathless, but not so much so that I feel the need to shut up to save my wind. This is less activity than I was expecting. Maybe - just maybe - I've finally found the level of activity necessary to keep me from getting discouraged. We'll see; Becky's going out of town on business this weekend, and she'll be gone for at least three weeks.
Yesterday we both decided that our lunches hadn't really been very satisfying, so we stopped at the little food store that's around the corner from the office on our way around the circle. I stopped in front of the rack of small bags of chips - the "Big Grab" sizes that are actually enough for a snack, but would keep me from having to confess that I'd eaten an entire bag of chips in one sitting - and my eye was drawn by bright lettering: "New! Flavor Rush!" the bag exclaimed. Flavor Rush! chips came in two flavors: Sour cream and onion, and BBQ and cheddar. I decided to try the sour cream and onion variety (I'm a little dubious about the combination of barbeque and cheddar flavors) and promised Becky that she could feel the rush, too.
We got back to the office and I opened the bag, and offered it to Becky. She took a chip. I took a chip. We each carefully took a bite...
FLAVOR RUSH! It was like those old Starburst commercials, where biting into the candy would cause a small flood to crash through the ceiling or wall, only intead of being fruit-flavored, this was sour-cream-and-onion flavored! Becky stumbled back a few steps under the onslaught; my chair was flung back with the flood! My officemates got up and started doing a dance, and the Kool-Aid guy burst through the wall...
Well, okay, it wasn't really that exciting. In case you're curious, Flavor Rush! is marketing code for "We put extra flavoring powder on this batch."
When the radio turned itself on this morning, what the disc jockey said in the time it took me to find the snooze button was "If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all."
Now I have that damn song stuck in my head.
You don't have the slightest idea what I'm talking about, do you?
Oh, some of you probably do, and if you do, then you're going to get the song stuck in your head, too. If I'm miserable, everybody's miserable. So there.
But for the rest of you... I grew up with three television shows, if you don't count the kiddie programs like Sesame Street. Oh, there were more than three, I'm sure, but most of them had limited runs. The three I most remember, though, are: The Muppet Show, Star Trek, and Hee-Haw. All three of these were my father's picks. My mom watched intellectual things like The Paper Chase which I simply didn't understand. But my dad had two big loves, really: science fiction shows and movies (he hates to read, or he'd be a huge sci-fi book junkie), and really, really bad jokes.
I'm pretty sure I don't have to explain The Muppet Show or Star Trek. Both of those are pretty much cultural icons for anyone my parents' age or younger - even if you don't like them, you know what they are.
But I don't know how many of you know about Hee-Haw, even if it was on the air for over 20 years. (A quick internet search turns up the dates: 1968 - 1993. Wow.) It interspersed country music with bad jokes. Lots of bad jokes. My dad loved it, though I don't think any of us cared one way or another about the music. (I remember being fascinated by this lady playing a bright blue fiddle because she was fast and the sawing of the bow was almost hypnotic, but none of the music actually stuck.) Lots of bad jokes, though.
It had one often-repeated segment where the jokes centered around what bad luck the characters had, and it had a theme song:
It was my favorite segment, actually. It got to where we'd all sing along with the song. Even my brother and I, who when this started weren't sure what big words like "depression" and "excessive" even meant. And that's what's stuck in my head this morning.Gloom, despair, and agony - oh, me
Deep dark depression, excessive misery
If it weren't for bad luck, I'd have no luck at all
Gloom, despair, and agony - oh, me!
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