Dispatches from a happy Hullian

It turns out, Bell, when I cancelled my account, charged me $2.68 for "tolerance". Yes, I know what it means, but still, it's a nice illustration of telco manners.

I got to sleep until I was more or less naturally awake with my beloved last night. Not being a slave to the alarm clock feels very good.

Lots to do as usual: coding, administration-y stuff, studying... the end of the term is coming, though. I'm a little exhausted, but stuff is falling by the wayside a little more gracefully than it has in the past.

I'm having a funny relationship with the future right now. It's pretty unreal, even though I'm looking forward to, dreading and just acknowledging some fairly real things.

Did my Abstract this morning... yes, this morning. I thought it was at two, and was ready to breeze into the Hall building at 1:30 or so, get settled and write about rings and ideals for three hours. But this morning at ten, Sylvain asked me why I wasn't writing my exam — we have some mutual friends in there — and it didn't take me too long to realize that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time and bike like hell to the exam room. They let me in to write, so I wrote I think about 85% of the exam in 50% of the time. Not bad, but something of a waste at the same time.

What's done is done, I guess. Two more to go.

Slipped in the shower this morning, landed on my hands and butt, slicing my big toe on the tap and popping the shoulder out for the first time in three months or so.

Such a waste. I hope I'm not officially back to square 1.

I want to punch something, but I know that's asking for trouble.

Lookie here (more or less suitable for work... unless you work for Bill)

Teaching workshops is always that combination of fun and crazy-making... had a little syntax hangup in front of twenty students today, scrambled around until I realized that @import exists in CSS, @include is a perfectly reasonable figment of my imagination. Are those grey hairs poking into critical neurons? I like this group, they’re flexible, they understand when little snafus are pointed out to them, they bear with me and ask good questions. But they probably all did have time to get a coffee while I bashed away, incredulous at the browser not @include-ing the code I was demonstrating.

One more pair of workshops to go... I think these have, in conjunction with the lecture-hall stuff on images and linking, given them a good flying tour of how to think about the Web as data.

I’ve given up on approach #1 to snapping and straightening in the quick-and-dirty interpreter (which has so far taken two months to drag, kicking and screaming, into partial existence)... so, I’ll blow it down and start again. It’s all about picking when to intervene and when to let things be. Kind of like real life (half of what I know about real life has been driven home by programming and formal math :P)

I’ve got to get better at knocking down and restarting... and at doing stuff in little pieces. It’s too easy to get overwhelmed or overcommitted otherwise. This week’s looking a little better for that, though.

I wish I were back on October 14th or so. Everything looked crazy but on the cusp of being over the hump then. Then again, I’d probably still be back here, blowing stuff down, burning up precious think time, chewing over @includes and wondering how I was going to sleep in the bed I’ve made.

Went to Krispy Kreme with some friends last night and overestimated the demand for coffee. Got one of those boxes of coffee, for what turned out to be four people. Got very wired on caffeine and sugar. Didn’t sleep. Felt stupid. Came into work seemingly very early, but actually very very late last night. Documented. Coded. Propped eyelids open. Will make it to lunchtime before staggering home...

We don’t do very well keeping regular hours here, no...