losing weight sucks

I'm back on the Hacker's Diet. I had been below 200 for a while in 2011 and 2012, and then work got stressful and etc. etc., and I got back up to 230ish at the start of this year. But since I lost my job I haven't been eating out for lunch 5 days a week. I'm also feeling so much better about life in general, so that makes it easier to try the diet.

It's working, I'm down to 220 or so. It does hurt though :-)


classic argument

"You're deluded!"
"No, you're diluted!"

Making Legacy sometimes feels like an exercise in hubris. I've had to carefully spin a cocoon of past success, monetary savings, prototypes, and supportive friends and family, in order to be able to give the caterpillar time to reconfigure its tissues into an indie game. I worry that at any time prosaic reality might pierce the protective silk and gobble up the little guy. Just give it time, I keep whispering to myself. Time, and tons of hard work. But I was going to do that anyway.

Reading Ready Player One, reading about the Oculus Rift.. makes me so hungry. I feel very luck to be where I am right now.

tmi time

So I have varicose veins. I thought it was just a cosmetic thing, generally, but it turns out they can lead to nasty side effects like the skin on your foot and ankle breaking down, becoming horribly itchy, and eventually venous ulcers that can spray blood unexpectedly. Yeah I have all that.

I went in today for an outpatient procedure to seal off the incompetent* vein. We had to abort it 2 hours in, before we even got to the part with lasers**, because it turns out my veins are so.. tortuous? twisted? they literally look like a pigs tail?*** So I had a wire in my leg for an hour for nothing..

But it's ok. Rescheduled the procedure at the medical center, with general anaesthesia, and they seem pretty confident they can get the job done at that time. So it's fine. God I hate being special when it comes to medical matters.

* a medical term!
** bummer, right?
*** this is what they told me.

overheard in the shower

"Software Engineering is the study of predictably* achieving acceptable** results with mediocre programmers***."

>> "Nate, no-one cares about your programming snark." <<

>> "...But I have footnotes!" <<

Jared made me read Ready Player One. It was a great read, I really enjoyed it, maybe because I got almost half of the references. It think it's really aimed at people just a bit older than me. Classic Gen Xers. Are we still using that term? Anyway: fast paced, teen-oriented plot, compelling setting, a great gimmick, modern sensibilities, and tons and tons of GenX pop culture references. Good times.

I still have that problem where I can't sleep when I'm reading a book if I want to find out what happens. So I finished it 4:30AM... This is why I don't read anymore.



* predictably: for given classes of problems, standard approaches are developed and encouraged. Knowledge of these patterns means that you can almost always find a way to do what you need to do.

** "Including, but by no means limited to, radical redefinitions of the word 'acceptable'." Ha. But honestly this is fairly important. Much of the history of software engineering and high level languages is the history of making acceptable performance trade offs in the name of readability and maintainability. And then arguing about what is "acceptable."

***The thing is, we are all mediocre programmers, in one way or another.