Anotherblog

Busy week

With Anna away for most of the week, I settled down into a bit of a work frenzy - 9:30am - 10:30pm from Monday to Wednesday. The work was very satisfying, though, because I didn’t get stuck on anything really nasty in that time, and I got a lot achieved. Nice feeling. I got some significant work done on “Fork”, too, and I’m ready to start transcribing my notes tomorrow, hopefully thereafter sending them off to Evan and fulfilling my part of the bargain we did all that time ago. If I really want to fulfil my side of the bargain, though, I’ll need not only the plot summary, but also a first chapter - and I’ve thrown out the work I’ve done so far as being irrelevent. Still, I’ve got all day. Who knows how much I’ll achieve?

HP
Tried to get into Harry Potter last night, but it was already sold out well in advance. Anna came back from her lovely trip to Hamilton Island, at which she had bunches of fun, learned to windsurf, and got sunburned. Anyway, she arrived back at about 6:30pm so we figured we might have a chance at the 9:00pm session. How naive we were. I’m going to book the moment the bookings open, for December 26th for Lord Of The Rings - I’ve got my eye on the Fox Studios luxury cinema, as I have a feeling several other Sydneysiders also do…

Yeah, but it’s a damp, sticky heat

It’s hot. Damn hot. The office is now a sweatshop, as the air conditioning has either failed completely or is struggling feebly against seeming insurmountable loads of angry, steaming tenants. There is a sheen of sweat on my forehead, and all I’m doing is sitting here typing. It’s difficult to concentrate on the work, as the heat saps all our energy. Yesterday was stinking hot as well. I was at work for most of the day, but couldn’t turn on the air conditioning. Even then, it wasn’t as bad as it is now.

Wedding
Winnie C., one of my workmates, got married on Saturday, and Anna and I went along. We were late (but not too late) for both the ceremony and the reception - we went home in between the two, as Anna wanted to have a snooze. In the end, I had a snooze and Anna didn’t, and we were late because I slept in. The wedding was suitably Catholic, and the reception just as suitably Chinese - both Winnie and her husband are originally from mainland China, though now both with broad Sydney accents. Anna was sitting next to Fotini (also Greek, though the seating was coincidental) and as it turned out, Fotini was vegetarian as well. There were about a dozen courses, and Anna and Fotini could only eat the last one, noodles and rice, which were the only ones not to feature fish. I ate all the dishes, including the shredded jellyfish (which looked like noodles) and felt mildly sick afterwards - very, very fatty. There were about 250 or so people there, and it made me feel quite a bit more optomistic about our wedding, which will have to be half again as large unless we elope. We’ve decided to start organising it when I get whatever new job I get next year.

Hamilton Island
… yep, I’m pretty sure that’s where Anna is right now, doing aerobics, playing golf and swimming. Apparently those water traps are precarious. She’s taking a three day holiday away from her business. I wish I could go along too, but I’ve got this work…

Pinata

I was walking towards the cinemas with Anna last night (figuring we might see Harry Potter if it had started yet, but it hadn’t) and noticed Ted’s model robot, as a pinata in the window of the Woolworths Metro on George Street, near Town Hall. Cool! Exploding robot!

Embarassing Moments
OK. I once swore I would never reveal this anecdote, but even then I’d already told so many people it was a hollow threat. Then, later, I swore that I would not let it affect me any more, as the lessons it tought were well-learned, and that thinking about it would merely make me depressed. Now I look back and kinda giggle, so here it is, for the few people in the world at whom I haven’t babbled all (and I’m not even sure if I’ve mentioned it in this very blog before!)

In Grade 7, we all went on a lengthy field trip to the Atherton Tablelands, a lovely pastorial landscape insterspaced with mountains and rainforest. On the second day of the trip, we had stopped off for a morning tea break in a park. I had no real idea of where we were, except that I needed to go to the toilet and there were none evidently about. Naturally, as a twelve year old boy, I was extremely reluctant to ask anyone. Asking where the toilet is would be almost as bad as addressing the teacher as “Mum”. So I just hung about until I really, really needed to go, and then asked somebody who looked like they were coming back from the toilet, ’cause then I’d have the outstanding comeback that, well yeah, maybe I don’t know where it is, but you *just went*.
The name of the boy I asked was Rodney Dorian, an obscure detail that has stuck, for some reason. Anyway, he described it in detail - left down that dirt road there, turn right at the first turning, and so on, because that’s all I can remember now, and all I could remember then. I seem to recall a small crowd converging to offer me advice, but this may be unconscious elaboration. Anyway. I set off, took the left up the dirt road, took the first right, and couldn’t see the toilets. Wandered around a bit. No luck. Got desparate. There was some bushland just off to the side, so I snuck into it, looking for snakes, looked around, crapped on the ground, and wiped my bum with leaves. Walked back to the park, where, of course, everyone had hopped back onto the buses and taken off.
Awful dropping sensation in the pit of my stomach. Most of my really unpleasant childhood/teenage memories are of being left behind or excluded, and this was one of the doozies because - after waiting for an hour or so - it started getting dark and it became apparent that they weren’t going to come back. The park started to look sinister. I hadn’t memorized where we were actually going, but *very fortunately* had remembered the name of the campsite where we were stopping for the evening, something that was particularly unusual given my poor memory.
Anyway, a stranger came up and asked me if I was alright, and I said I was just waiting for my bus. He wandered away, smoked a cigarette. Came back and said, well, I’m just going to pick up my daughter from something-or-other, and I can give you a lift if you’re still around when I get back. And that’s what happened. I figured that since his eight-year-old daughter was in the car with him, that it’d be OK. He dropped me off at the campsite, where nobody had arrived yet, and I explained what had happened to the manager who told me I could wait in the garden area and read comics from the newsagency.
I went outside to the garden area to read, and the *other* person there saw me leaving the shop with a comic and demanded I pay for it, which I meekly did. Then, apparently, he told the manager that he’d apprehended a would-be shoplifter, realised what had happened, and came out to apologise and give the money back. I was embarassed too and wouldn’t take it.
By the time the buses arrived I was happily sitting in a hammock, reading. They still hadn’t realised that I wasn’t with them, and when the teacher found out what had happened, he was furious with me. I got shy and told some stupid, pointless lies that I thought would ease things up, and which only made it sound worse (”Did you know that there was a telephone around the corner?” “Yes, of course.”) The rest of the class mocked me, which was fair enough, I guess, but it got me angry and when one of them interviewed me with a tape-recorder (which I didn’t realise was on…) I said some even more stupid things, which were then played back ad nausium for the remainder of the trip. I can’t even remember what I said, except that there was some attempted sarcasm.
Anyway, that’s it.

Tired

This week has passed very quickly, in a flurry of work and very little else. I’m getting home at 11:00pm to go straight to bed exhausted, then waking up past 8:00am to madly rush to work again. Only six more weeks of this, folks, then some very long holidays… on the good news front, my bonus is not in serious danger, so when the break comes, I’ll have approximately five months where I don’t even have to think about work, and then I’m burning cash reserves. Of course, that’s just one way of thinking about it.

Still, the work is progressing well. It’s nice doing something creative at work, because I feel more creative outside of it. I’ve had some bursts of inspiration for Fork recently. Unfortunately, some of them are mutually exclusive, and still other brainwaves make me realise that some of what I had planned simply wasn’t logical. I’m still puzzling over the physics of it all, trying to make something up that sounds vaguely plausable if you squint a bit, and doesn’t have too many rules so the stuff you *do* have to swallow is relatively quick and painless. It’d be nice to have something with the ferocious logic of, say, Greg Egan, or the wonderful fantabulations of Tim Powers or Bob Shaw, but all I’m hoping for at the moment is something that doesn’t look too embarrassing next to Douglas Hill. Ah, ambition…

TMBG

I still haven’t book my ticket for They. Anna isn’t interested in going, despite me playing They at her, day in, day out. Lulling her to sleep with the gentle tones of “Birdhouse in my Soul”, waking her up with the bright, feisty energy of “I’ve got a fang”, every meal accompanied by the strains of “Dinner bell”. Rather than play the original music, however, I have been interpreting the songs using a variety of mediums - tapping out “Fang” on my teeth, burping “Dinner bell”, and so on.

And yet, she will not go.

Pool
I held off a challenge against Richard A., and then tried to rise above 7th place by challenging Debi again. And lost, of course. Still, I had some remarkable games - against Donncha, he broke, I potted six balls, then he potted eight, winning the game. I only had the one turn, and I almost pantsed him.

Work
Both work and Fork have been very productive recently. With help from Kate, who is trained as a biologist, I got some wonderful material for Fork. I’m even more excited about it than ever before - I reckon it could be a cracking good story at this rate. Work has been progressing well, too - I’ve hit a patch where there have been only easy bugs. May it long continue.

Oomph
I was over at Jon & Kate’s last night, talking about their tropfest entry for next year. They’re doing a little humorous piece featuring an “Oomph”, Kate’s naked hand-puppet, which she does with alarming regularity even in regular conversation. It looks like a lot of fun - we’ll do the filming one of these weekends, and I’ll bring over the tripod and dolly for some track-and-zoom shots (our first). Fun! Also, Jon showed me how he’d integrated the extra footage into “Timeless”. It really does raise the level of the film a lot - the f/x are terrific now, and they actually add to the story very nicely too.

Fantavision
A milestone - Anna finished Fantavision on Expert level. She is the Fantavision master.

Pool

New record: 17. Donncha had a quick practice game and mentioned that he potted three balls on the break, giving him his first chance at a sub-fifteen score, but blew out and got 19. So I wandered down to the lunch room - nobody was playing - racked it up, and potted one ball on the break, which was a nice start. So I played carefully, choosing the shots to best allow a setup for the next shot, and taking every opportunity I could to get balls away from the cushion and out of packs. I can only remember the second missed shot, a fairly tricky down-the-cushion shot when there were about seven balls left on the table. After that, there were no misses. I’m excited!

Lord Of The Rings
I bought the official LOTR movie guide while waiting for the tram this morning - it was raining, the tram was late - and started gawking at the pictures. Lordy lord. I’ve got to start cutting back on this kind of thing - by the time the movie comes out, I’ll have seen it all. I saw the second trailer at the movies before legally blonde the other day, and it was a tremendously more involving experience than on the computer at work - the level of detail was spine-tingling, and some of the shots that hadn’t looked like anything in particular before, were now highlights. Wow.

Pool

I don’t ever get sick of it, no. I went to B&B Billiards on Sunday and bought a good-quality pool cue, a short cue, a spot-ball, and some spare cue-tips (all for less than $100). The cues at home have needed replacement tips for a while now. Anyway, it made a very big difference - the new cue is marvellously smooth and straight and well-weighted, and I did a couple of practice games and got 18. New record! And it was almost 17, too.

Fork
More excellent notes on the weekend, and I’ve started to develop some of the auxiliary characters better. I’ve set a deadline of 1 December for getting the first-chapter and plot summary to Evan, but even with the good progress, I don’t think I’ll manage it in time. One of the things about writing this kind of thing is, the odds of it being accepted are so low that it’s quite discouraging. It’s like my position in work at the moment. I’m working on a toolkit that I’m not sure will ever be used.

Anna is better
Anna’s shoulder is entirely better now, and she’s been slowly getting back into massaging people. Her sleep patterns are still disturbed, but that may have more to do with her continuing obsession with fantavision. She’s finished the game in easy mode, and *almost* finished it in hard mode now. I’m slightly in awe - I’ve played the two-player game against her, and seen just how quick she is.

Legally bland
You remember my comments on Zoolander? Actually, this is a little bit further sub-par. Zoolander wasn’t as lazy as LB, which dutifully rolls out every misunderstood-girl-does-good plot twist in the book, in a very perfunctory way. The courtroom scenes are written as if the writer wanted them over with as quickly as possible, and so it only takes two examinations of witnesses for everything to fall apart. Yawn. Still, Reese Witherspoon was good, and the tickets were free.

Raining
And I’m feeling a bit down. Headache.

Zoolander

Anna and I saw Zoolander last night. Normally, movies are neither sufficiently good or bad for me to comment on them. This is one such movie.

Writing
Hey, this writing stuff is still working! That’s three days in a row in which I’ve actually looked forward to the train trip so that I could make some more notes on Fork. Fun, fun, fun.

Anna’s shoulder
I’m not sure if it’s still her shoulder, but Anna has been getting very irregular sleep lately - she’s stayed awake and playing computer games/tidying/writing for two nights of this week, which is especially a worry because she’s perfectly fine the next day too. I would be completely dead after 24 hours of awakeness, but Anna’s been coping remarkably well, except for dealing with the inevitable mozzie bites. Where are they coming in? WHERE? Anyway, Anna has become extremely good at “Fantavision”, a fireworks game a bit like Tetris, with some truly odd cut-sequences involving small children phoning each other up across galaxies.

Bud

Bud’s farewell lunch at the casino today, he’s leaving for another company. Bud is one of the very rude people in the company, and is quite charismatic as well - I put him in a small role in “Equinox”, and he had fine camera presence so I’d like to write something more substantial for him later. Of course, “later” being “when I have a bunch of time” which will probably only happen if I’m made redundent, so who knows when.

Carlos
…and I had lunch with Carlos yesterday and he described the amazing job prospect he had a second interview for - Canon Research Group, who are hard-core researchers. Carlos aced the first interview - which contained an exam of staggeringly difficult C++ questions - thanks to a skill that I like to call “luck”. The luck, that is, of having programmed in C++ for a long time and being an expert in the language, far beyond most other people I know.

Bastard.

Anyway, he’s doing very well, otherwise. Relaxing at home a lot, writing, all the things that I want to do.

Writing
I bought a notebook and started doing some writing on trains again. It’s actually remarkably successful. I’m having trouble getting all the ideas down before I come up with new ideas, and they’re actually progressing the story rather than diverting from it. I found the same thing when I was writing “Once Upon A Time”. The first lot of ideas for OUAT were written in a tiny notebook, while going to and from work. I think the reason it works so well is that I’m not sitting down specifically to work on it, and concentrating, and thinking that I must come up with ideas. That kind of scenario always drives me screaming away from the desk to find a good book to read for the fifth time. But procrastination doesn’t really come into it when what I’m really doing is sitting on the train waiting to go to work, and the writing is just something to do while I’m waiting.

Party!

I always enjoy a bit of the old political and philosophical debate, and there was no better time than last night, when we ended up discussing artificial intelligence and the sense of “self”. It was at Chris’ birthday party, with myself (note: typically Irish mode of speech, creeping more and more into my vocab thanks to working with Donncha and Elanor), Chris, Amanda, Andrea, and Amanda’s parents present, besides the obvious other two.

Meanwhile, Anna, who had piked out thanks to work, was rather annoyed that the client had cancelled - particularly, because she wasn’t the one doing the massage, but was just there for safety’s sake - so she had a *four hour* massage from the therapist - they both lost track of time, apparently. She didn’t get home until about 2:00am, but on the bright side, said she feels fantastic now. Shoulder pain much reduced.

Pool
Pool playing has improved hugely, though not enough to beat Debi in a challenge. I managed 22, 21, 23 today, and almost managed 18. I think the improvements may be due to the reduction in stress levels, which in turn may be affected by my experimental banning of caffeine (except for small amounts of chocolate). Seems to be working so far.

Share options
We had a visit from the chief accountant/lawyer for the company who explained why we should turn in our share options in the company for a new share option scheme that has the following disadvantages:
1) They won’t vest for another three years, whereas our current share options are already vested.
2) We only get half as many.

The reasoning goes as follows:
1) The current options, at 45p, are worthless, given the stock price is at 17.5p.
2) The new options are at 16p instead, and are worth something. They may be worth something in a year too, who knows.

So we worked through the options, and it looks like it’s a better deal, though I suspect it’s going to be comparing two big piles of nothing.