Anotherblog

In Brisbane

I arrived in Brisbane at 7:30 this morning, wandered down to the mall, and was sketched.  I was sitting there, drinking my stupid energy drink (the conversion to coffee is not *quite* complete yet) and a large elderly gentleman sat down next to me.  He was wearing a kilt and an Australian army uniform, complete with medals, and had a tattoo “JESUS” across the back of his hand.

“That’s a very nice hat,” he said.  I get quite a few comments on my hat (a fedora) - when I’m travelling, at least one comment a day.  I’ve never been in a position of having people comment on my appearance before.  My hair attracts occasional comment as well.  Unusual!  I realised a few months ago that the hair and hat are simply an easy conversation starter, social lubricant to get past “Hello,” a niche previously held (for me) by exotic t-shirts.

“Do you mind if I sketch you?”

“Sure,” I said.  He got out his pencil and sketch paper.  “I’m going to try not to talk too much,” he said.  “I talk too much.”

“That’s fine.  I don’t mind.”

“How long do you have?” he said.  “So I know how detailed to go.”

“I’m not doing anything,” I said.  I am currently, more than ever, in an accepting frame of mind, more inclined to say yes and less apologetic about saying no.  I actually had about four hours until lunch with Ev, but I figured it wouldn’t take that long.  He posed me and started sketching.  I was delighted to see that he was at about my level of skill - not a professional street artist, but someone genuinely interested in sketching and having a go.  We chatted about tastes in art, hobbies and music, and compared Christmas plans.  His were somewhat oriented around his church, of course.

We took a break at the half-way mark, and ended up going for about 45 minutes, attracting an occasional crowd.  Finally, he was pleased enough with it, and we shook hands and went our separate ways.

My experiment is going very well.  Every time I’ve said “Yes” where I would normally say “No” I have had a good experience.  I currently have a daub of $70-per-jar red sea moisturiser under one eye, after saying yes to a cosmetics sampler (I did not, however, buy a jar).  I’m going to see whether people can tell the difference.

Back from the US

I got back from the US on Sunday, and didn’t get jet-lag at all, though the flight back and Sunday afternoon were dreadfully boring - too tired to do anything, not tired enough to sleep.

It was a pretty decent trip.  We got a lot of work done, and I ate much good American food and put on two kilos, and then lost it again over the next couple of days.  The Mexican restaurant was probably the highlight of the food - they had a savoury chocolate sauce that went really nicely on the enchiladas.  Culinary lowlight?  American beer.  People were pleasant and friendly and I didn’t once see a firearm, though of course they were probably just concealed.  Doug S.’s place was lovely, and I got to play with his Wii (man, that’s just never going to get old).  I’ve always enjoyed my US trips, once I get past the bloody customs/visa form.  And I didn’t catch a cold.

Published!

Hooray - published the 1.1 Test suite.  Nice.  Of course, people are complaining already that some tests aren’t right.  In this case, I think they’re wrong, but even if/when they’re right, I’m content that we’ve done the right amount of work to ensure correctness.  This release of the test suite has taken a while - several years - to get out, and the complaint is “You took this long and it’s still broken?  What the hell are you doing?”

In general, the longer something takes, the harder it is to finish because of this additional weight of expectations.  In my personal projects, this leads to dreadful procrastination, the very worst and most resistant to attack.  The only way I’ve gotten through it is to power through it and finish poorly.  Fortunately, I wasn’t as emotionally invested in the test suite - I was never responsible for it - and so were most of the others working on it, so we were able to put a good thorough job into it.

Testing

It’s testing times here at Raleigh.  We’ve been working towards getting the SVG 1.1 Full Test Suite released, and it’s agonisingly close - we’re all very glad we concentrated on it so much at the face-to-face; there was quite a bit more work that we expected to get the tests up-to-date and accurate.  Even so, there may well be mistakes in the tests that we haven’t caught - it’s pretty big - but at least we’ve had a thorough review.  Satisfying.

Surviving better today

I’m not quite so sleepy today. For breakfast, we had the very excellent local cuisine of chicken biscuits. This is not, as you might imagine,chicken flavoured biscuits. They are chicken burgers, except instead of bread, you use a scone. And it’s just the chicken and the scone. One chicken biscuit and a coke later, my insides go from “not talking to me” to “get the hell outta here!” Totally excellent. We had an Indian food buffet for lunch, which was considerably lighter fare.

No Firearms, No Soliciting

Outside Doug’s Office

Jetlag

I got to Raleigh just fine, only 22 hours of travel.  Luxury!  Went out to Indian last night, got to bed at a normal time, woke up this morning feeling OK, and kinda felt like the whole jet-lag thing was going to slip me by.

Not so.  This afternoon (after a very hearty American lunch) my stomach has claimed my entire blood supply and the jet-lag stepped in and has been offering enough daydreams to qualify as microsleeps.  Or possibly, sleeps.  Bloody hell.  This afternoon session is going to be hard going.  At least it’s interesting work.

Also, there’s a sign outside the building: “No firearms.  No soliciting.”  Welcome to the USA!

Archery & Golf

Excellent bit of shooting this morning at archery. Despite getting very tired and shaky by the end of it, I posted a score of 715/900 for a “Darwin” round. I did the same set last week and got 700/900, and I was pretty pleased then - this is a big improvement! I think my arms are finally beginning to adjust. Two weeks ago I was missing the target every so often (albeit at different ranges and target sizes.) Last week and this week, my lowest individual score was 4.
I took off for golf straight after archery, hoping vaguely that they used different muscles, because if they didn’t I was going to have a pretty bad afternoon. Good news! Archery and golf use completely different muscles (or, more precisely, the muscles that were very tired from archery weren’t vital to making good shots in golf.) Richard A. started playing recently - he’s the friend who became a professional Beer Baron - and he joined Owen and me for this round. He’s good! Disturblingly good for someone with just a few month’s practice behind him.
I discovered an important new thing about my golf: I’m no longer getting frustrated with bad shots. My archery experience has made me much more calm about such things; every shot is separate, no shot needs to make up for another shot being poor, preparing in precisely the same way for every single shot is a good thing, and there is great enjoyment to be gained from being very deeply in the moment. I beat Owen and Richard by a point, and had a very consistant round, though there was nothing spectacular (Oh! Except for that pitch that almost went into the hole. That was pretty cool.) What really made the round notable, though, was that I didn’t get frustrated and sulky. I didn’t rush through shots that I knew were going to suck; I gave them the same attention as other shots, and sometimes they didn’t suck.

Off on another work trip

I’m off to the US for a week on yet another work trip. I’m not feeling particularly ready, but at least the work this time will be fun - we’re concentrating on testing, and writing SVG tests is always fun. Almost as good as coding. I miss coding.
Which is why I’ve been doing a lot of coding in my spare time - working on a Magic: The Gathering online draft database (for the games we play at work) and on my online archery database. Online databases are fun and easy. I’m getting the hang of PHP and web forms and using bits of javascript in html. I’m used to using javascript in the ultra-friendly world of SVG, where if you want to do it you probably can, and it’s taken a bit of getting used to wanting to do something and realising you just can’t (generally something graphics, animation or event-based, of course).
Anyway, I’m glad I just checked my flight details: they got changed at the last minute, and they’re two hours earlier than I had mentally pegged… but it’s still tomorrow, so all is well.