Ford: "Brace yourself. This will feel a lot like being drunk."
Aurther: "And what's so bad about being drunk?"
Ford: "Ask a glass of water."
    The Hitchiker's Guide to The Galaxy

You know what? You really don't get to keep all the free drink here at Microsoft so much as just borrow them for a while. I'm beginning to feel like a very expensive filtration system.

"What day is it?"
     The Guy on The Couch, Half Baked

Ungh... Today was a 11 & 1/2 hour coding bender so forgive me if the wit is dry and sparse. Before you feel sorry for me you should know that no one is cracking a wip over my head but myself. I'm trying to make myself feel OK about taking this Thrusday and Friday off.

Speaking of which, I am TWO measely days from having the pleasure of Gwen and Heather's company! I'm so stoked. I looked at the weather forecast and the its going to rain for the entire time they're here, but that doesn't matter one bit. We're going to camp out in a yurt (whatever that is), AND I just learned that this weekend is Bumbershoot Something to do with and umbrella I think so maybe the rain is apropos, but certainly some decent music.

I'm certain I'll have fine things to say on the far side of this upcoming weekend, but its going to be quite a grind until then. In the meantime I'm learning what software is REALLY made of: caffine, sugar, and stress. G'Night...

"Time keeps on slippin', slippin', slippin',
 Into the future.."
    Steve Miller Band, Fly Like an Eagle

Its not the fact that time is moving that bothers me. Its that it moves so FAST! This Friday marks the end of milestone one for our next release, and I will never finish all my deliverables by then. Its at times like this I wish I could simply take off my glasses and change from Scott Gardner, mild mannered computer engineer, into SuperGeek: Faster than a Alpha processer, more powerful than an SGI workstation, and able to plug memory leaks with a single keystroke!

Anyone interested in being Lois Lane should send me their resumes.

Anyway, there is an upside to time's acceleration. Gwen and Heather shall be gracing me with their presence in about one weeks time, and when you take into account the time's speed up that really only feels like a day and a half!

I'm shoveling through my arsenal of Things To Rant About, but I think I want to end the day on a high note: Nick has staked his claim on the Blogging frontier. If you're curious about what he's been up to you should pay him a visit.

"Why do we always come here?
 I guess we'll never know
 Its like a kind of torture
 Just to have to watch the show."
    Waldorf & Statdler, The Muppet Show

Wow, having a guestbook has really helped me gain persepctive into who my audience is. Cats, folk singers, religeous figureheads, and english teachers are all reading my site and providing me with valuable feedback. I love the Internet.

So Friday was an interesting day. I've been stuck on a particular problem at work for so I finally got one of the more senior engineers to sit down with me and look at it, and while he DID help me solve it the whole ordeal left me in need of a drink (several actually, more to follow). To put it in layman's terms: an innocent AND PERFECTLY LEGAL change I had made to one part of the project was breaking another part that is the code equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine. A good analogy would be getting an angry call from you neighbor because the plant you just placed on your windowsil is obscuring their view of you while you're getting undressed. It was as scary as it was bizzare.

Shortly after this meeting there was some big to do in the courtyard outside my building. A couple of minutes later I was explaining my frustrations to a couple of interns over maraguritas. A couple of beers later none of us cared :-) So I ended my work week a little early, had a most excellent dance lesson, and went to bed early.

This weekend I had every intention of going into work both days to atone for my drunken Friday, but somehow after an hour in the office on Saturday I just couldn't staredown my computer anymore. So instead I broke out my cell phone headset that I've been itching to try, called Alissa (who was stuck in traffic), and began hiking around the campus taking pictures with my digital camera. These pictures have been dutifully posted in the photo album. Have a lovely week :-D

"Well, I atteneded Julliard. I'm a graduate of the Harvard business School. I lived through the black plague and had a pretty good time during that. I've seen the Excorcist about 167 times and it keeps getting funnier every single time I see it. Not to mention the fact that you're talking to a dead guy. NOW WHAT DO YOU THINK?!? Do you think I'm 'qualified'?"
    Beetlejuice, On being scary.

I got my first cell phone bill yesterday and I was... a little upset. The promotion I signed up under gives me 500 bonues night and weekend minutes per month for a year. So that's how I've been using my phone. Let's just say that my bill did not reflect this. I call up AT&T and ask what-up, and they tell me to go back to the vendor. Fine. I grab my phone and my reciept and head out to the mall. The problem is: I am SO not good at confrontation. I would be the last person on earth to send a meal back at a restaraunt or leave a substandard tip for almost any reason. So the whole way over there I'm trying to make myself angry, and trying to convince myeslf that I am going to really get what I want out of this.

Then I get to the store, walk up to the counter, and suddenly turn into an Idiot with a word retrieval problem. The salesman was smooth as silk and I wound up leaving with a credit on my account and 1000 night and weekend minutes per month for a year. This is of coarse exactly what I wanted, BUT THAT'S NOT THE POINT. I wanted to be angry and lay the smackdown! Why can't I do this? Maybe I should just accept the fact that I'm as threatening as a chipmunk and hire some thugs. Where do villians find all their hired muscle, anyway? Do you think Jaws and OddJob from the Bond movies are looking for work?

"I'm not sure, but I've got a hunch."
    Quasimodo

Posture. Mine is terrible. Always has been. My dance instructor is trying to get me to improve my posture, and its is really, REALLY hard. Mostly because there seems to be a conspiracy to give tall people bad posture that I've only uncovered through my efforts to improve my own. For example, when I'm driving I slouch forward (even more so than normal). So I make a conscious effort to sit up straight and what happens? My hair brushes the top of my car, and I can't no longer see traffic lights that are less than a block away. Car makers oppose good posture.

Regardless, its probably something worth working on for its own sake. I'm sure there are studies linking good posture to things like heart disease, high colesterol, and being abducted by aliens, but I'll take my chances.

Things are going pretty well at work too. I'm still WAY behind schedule, but I AM making progress and that feels good.

I'm re-reading Microserfs, and for those of you who have read it here's some interesting truths:

    Most of the characters work in Builidng 7. There is no building 7.
    The building I work in is mentioned, and it is described as a "Notoriously gloomy campus local".
    Steve Balmer, the VP that Dan had a shrine to, is now president of Microsoft
    We don't make Office for the Mac anymore

As for the marketing meetings they talk about... we don't have those per say, but we do have these Spec reviews where people from design, development, test, help, international, usability, France, Area 51, and The Moon all come together and nit-pick the spec. As the developer it kind of sucks becuase you realize that YOU have to make whatever THEY decide happen. Thank god my manager comes with me to keep things from getting out of hand. People are so sneaky with what they way. Someone will start with an innocent enough part of the spec and somehow turn it into the entire universe.

Example:
Person from Department X: I was thinking... this button in the dialog that brings up the webpage where useres can select more smart tags? Why don't we also have ANOTHER button next to it that does the same thing, but also have it turn off gravity in the room, mix a Strawberry Daquiri, write a middle east peace accord, and cure cancer?

Me: Uh....

Person from Department Y: Well if we're going to do that then we should also have a third button that freezes time and sings "Life is a Cabaret" like Liza Mineli. You know for Backward Compatability?

Me: Um...

Person from Department X: Great idea! If we tie the two together development should actally take LESS time than without either! So we'll expect this to be implemented, say... MM2?

Me: "!"

Person from Department Y: Sounds Great! And with the time we save we can add...

(Usually at about this time my manager arrives at the meeting and regulates)

Scott (My Manager) : Hi, I'm reality. Have we met?

And things look brighter from there. My only fear is that someday he won't make it to one of the meeting and I'll be thrown to the wolves. Let's just hope that day never arrives.

"Time may change me,
 But I can't trace time"
    David Bowie, Changes

And so with the pending closing of my Viginia Tech account my website has migrated here to Angelfire. They've been around long enough that I trust them not to disappear anytime soon and their ad banners don't seem to include any pornography. :-)

Not much has changed as a result of the move. The Angelfire counter in the lower right corner of this page is now working though most of the hits are from me :-) I've added a guestbook, and it has somehow been signed before I even told anyone where my new site was! Blogger keeps a list of the most recently updated web logs, and people will often browse them just to see what other people are doing. So thanks for visiting, Reggie!

I went into work today to make up for some of the time I lost this week to Hunting Stupid Problems. Yes, that does suck on a beautiful day such as this, but it is actually avery productive way to work. I used to go in for half a day almost every weekend when I was at Nortel. I crank up my music, drink way to much caffine, and just tear into the code. There is absolutely no better way to really get your nerd on!

"And from this chasm with ceaseless turmoil seething,
 As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
 A mighty fountain momently was forced:
 Amid whose swift, half-intermitted burst
 Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail
 Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
 And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever,
 It flung up momently the sacred river!"
    Samual Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Kahn

In working with software there is a concept known as "churn". Yes, as in butter churn, but instead of making delicious butter software churn usually only creates frustration. Big pieces of software are really, really, really, really complicated. I mean take the most complicated thing you've ever had to assemble. Something that you spent hours doing incorrectly, figured out what was wrong, and spent another dozen hours doing it incorrectly again. Well that's just peanuts to software. Often the most simple and inoccent chenge to a single (unimportant) file can mean disaster on a biblical scale, or at least a lot of swearing. For the last three days every time I've built Access (a process which takes a good hour) it finishes building, and as soon as I try to run it I get a whole mess of rude pop-up boxes telling me that things are <Jerry Lewis Voice>not good at all, in fact they're bad!</Jerry Lewis Voice> I've had my mentor look at this. I've had my boss look at this. None of us can figure out what in the heck I did.

Then on this, the third morning of my stalemate with my code, I stumble onto something. Something I did weeks ago that seemed simple enough at the time, but in light of my current frustration and hair pulling suddenly looks decidedly sinister. Something that basically screams "You are a Hopless Moron, and I'm a Living Testamant to that fact!". You can only find things like this in the magic hours before 9:00am. I guess that's why I prefer to sleep until well passed noon. Anyway, I fixed the little bug(ger), and I'm currently rebuilding. Keep your fingers crossed...

"C'est La Vie say the old folks
 It goes to show you never can tell."

I was working on swing with my dance teacher tonight. We were going over some tuck turns which I've know since 1998. I've never lead them much because they always felt sort of strained. After ten minutes of instruction they made perfect sense, and they are SO much fun. I still advocate that you don't HAVE to take lessons to enjoy dancing, but I have to say that taking them certainly does have its merits.

Life keeps moving faster and faster. If it keep accelerating at the same rate as it has been since High School I'll be dead by the time I'm thirty. When I co-oped in the mines I remember thinking that life was flying by and that it was lean and unsatisfying. I would lie awake at night and think 'If this is all there is to life then I'm not really interested.'

So I'm not looking for a drudgin routine, but I think I would like to settle into some sort of routine for a while. Leave myself enough room to mix it up and try new things, but build them on a framework of something comfortable. That's what my co-ops at Nortel were like. Towards the end I would collapse into my bed at the end of a day of work and whatever feeling happy and completely exhausted. I recall stepping back from it all and thinking: I could do this for a living.

I feel like what I've got here is a seedling of the latter sort of life. Let's hope I can live up to my name.

"In the bone-colored dawn
 Me and Gypsy Scotty are singing
 Radio was playing
 She left her shoes out on the bed"
    John Melloncamp, Key West Intermezzo

Everything always looks better on the far end of a good nights sleep, a shower, and a couple of pop tarts.

I got a letter from my friend Neely yesterday. She's in Gabon, Africa with the Peace Corp. This Spring she was on a farm in White Lake, SC and we used to have some pretty clever online discussions. I miss those. I think I'll send her one of those America Online Free Trial CDs just to be a funny. :-)

"Sometimes I think its a sin
 When I feel like I'm winning
 When I'm losing again..."
    Gordon Lightfoot, Sundown

My program team lead, Scott, came to see me Monday morning. Like all other Scotts I've known he's an easy going and cool. Well almost all of them are like that. Anyway, he came to see me and asked me if I knew out group was getting another intern. At first I thought he was going to tell me that he wanted me to be this poor kid's mentor. "The Blind Leading the Blind" starring Me and some Poor Intern. No, actually he came to tell me that there are no more free offices, and since I'm the low man on the totem pole I get to share my office. Great! I loved being an intern. Plus it'll be nice to not be the only totally new person.

He finally got out of new hire orientation very late in the day. His name is Gustavo and he's from Mexico. He seems very nice and very smart. Actually he seem a bit too smart. We got to talking and it became quickly apparent that he knows way more than I do. This is not unusual at Microsoft, but it just came at the wrong time. I left work feeling very down on myself. Bought some Burger King and watched the sunset over Lake Washington from a park in Kirkland. Funny how little things can pick you. up. Thank you Angie.

"Is that what you think?"
"I don't think; I KNOW"
"Well I don't think you know either."

I take back what I said yesterday about working in this code being fun and interesting. Working in this code is like trying to find your way around a very huge and very think jungle, but instead of a compass and a machete you have a yo-yo and a spork.

"A face in the crowd
 Unsung, against the mold
 Without a doubt
 Singled out
 The only way I know"
    Green Day, Minority

I have had that song stuck in my head all day. If you're not familiar with it then you probably imagine it to sound maudlin and depressing, but its actauly set to a really energized, toe-tapping beat. Imagine Aaron Coupland and John Souza in a garage band.

It is absolutely awe inspiring how much stuff happens whenever you do ANYTHING on your computer, but you really can't appriciate this until you go step by step through the underlying code. Every character you type and every movement of your mouse run through dozens of lines of code. Every window, menu, and dialog opened goes through HUNDREDS of lines of code. When you actually choose and action from a menu... Foh-gettaboutit! Working in code like this is as interesting as it is confusing and as fun as it is frustrating.

So here's something new. I just learned that most of our computers here have dual-headed video cards. (I'm betting you are having the same reaction to this infromation as I did yesterday. It was like someone told me Microsoft had electric weasels). What this means is that you can plug two monitors into your computer and have your screen span accross both of them. So when your mouse leaves the right edge of your left monitor it comes up on the left edge of your right monitor. Its actually really fun and quite useful. Programmers often need to see a lot of information all at once, but it sucks shuffeling through windows. Its much nicer to have a primary screen for whatever you're doing, and then shove refernce material (or whatever) off to the other screen. Geek is Chiq.

"And I knew if I had my chance
 That I could make those people dance, and
 Maybe they'd be happy for a while."
    Don McClean, American Pie

Happy Birthday, Guido!

Yeah, my little sister is turning 21 today. Why do siblings always seem so young in your mind's eye? My friend Desirea turns 21 at the end of this month, and I feel like she's at least three years older than Catherine.

Speaking of Desirea, she and I took a YMCA ballroom dance class this past spring, and I've finally made up my mind to follow up on it. I think I'm going to take the plunge and actually take a full ballroom program through a local dance school. Its a bit expensive, but what the hell. I bought my first CD today (the interest bearing kind) so I'm feeling pretty good about my finances. I really do love dancing, but I'm still not totally comfortable dancing in public. I usually have to be feeling very outgoing (or at least a little drunk) to go out and dancing by myself now, but I always have a good time and feel great afterwards. Its like you're temporarily posessed by Fred Astaire on the walk back to your car :-)

Everybody wants to dance. Most of them just can't get passed the incorrect belief that other people actually care how you look doing it :-) Perhaps you should think about taking some classes yourself.