I wake up every morning with a pain in my left foot. I got it from playing volleyball three weekends ago - the very day that I said "I don't get injured, I just have to lose weight". And so my whole exercise program is on hold until I gin up the energy to hurt myself again. But I also wake up every morning with a song in my head. I'm beginning to think that it's the song that wakes me up. This morning it was something by the Isley Brothers, but I can't remember which, that's because I'm deep into Faure these days.
Boy is much better on the piano than I ever was. Sprite is annoyingly bad. BD doesn't bother.
Work is going interestingly. I'm doing really easy and light work, and my customer can't get their act together. I basically take new tweak specs every week when they can manage to meet and agree on what to do next and each week it pushes me out another week. It's rather expensive for them - rather like the commander who is too busy fighting the enemy to understand the complexities of the weapon that would wipe them out in a day - it's all done rather piecemeal. I don't feel bad. It's not often that I have assignments where I can say 'sure beats working'.
On the other hand I've got two colossal books on my plate. Actually six. The first is Terror and Consent, which I've put down for a week or so to concentrate on my economic studies. Everybody agrees that T&C is brilliant and dense. The second is a generic encyclopedia of economics, or rather I should say 'concise' at 600 pages. I haven't read any of it yet. What's front and center is Snowball, the biography of Warren Buffett. I've only begun and gotten about 60 pages in, and it's one of those books where you get mad when people disturb you in your reading. I want to say 'shutup' this is Warren Buffett. If I am sufficiently impressed with Buffett, I mean to the point of real transformation, then I may head to the sticks. Real estate is really dropping around here and there's a good chance that by this time next year I could walk into one fine piece of beach-y property. Somewhere on the net there's the story of a house in Santa Monica that was appraised at 1.4million this summer which is now priced at half that. There's a part of me that has never trusted California real estate... Anyway. I ingest Buffett, I'll get back to everyone on that.
The other three are Java books. I've got Eclipse and I have determined that Perl and ksh are not going to be sufficient for the rest of my technical life. So I'm on a five year quest to master Java - something I probably have started and stopped at least three times previously, once as far back as 97. Not to mention Ruby and Delphi.
I've been thinking about parallelizing in-memory resident Essbase partitions. If the partitioning area of the software is reasonably efficient, that would be extra cool in grid-ifying the technical mainstay of my career. There's something of an internal project to make it happen on EC2, which should be something of a no-brainer, but still. Grid multidimensional architecture is a cool enough concept to make me go deep technically again - not that there are 10 people in the world who'd buy it.
The context of my career is thinking about how I get to Bain, or some likely joint. I remember how Arbor, my old company, used the design expertise of FrogDesign. I've been thinking about how to get to the top level - state of the art in any field - I mean the super high end. I've been close, but I've always expected to go big. Maybe it doesn't always go big. Hard for me to read. If I lived in the sticks, I probably wouldn't care how big, but I'm running a high-octane household in the big city. It's just that I'm realizing, rather Dean Kamen-wise, that there are possibilities of doing the ultimate in a disconnected, yet sustainable setting.
I'm really ready for this election to be over. I'm sick of thinking about it and I will be so glad when everyone is. People are too feverish and it obscures the big picture. It's nice to be considered, and I do get lots of offers from lots of people to do lots of things, which I would if I didn't have to work, but I'm at maximum output as it is.
I really have to get rid of a lot of extra weight, and so for the past few weeks I have been seriously considering using chemicals. I hate the idea. Quite frankly I'd feel more comfortable with liposuction, though I'm hardly a candidate. So I'm going to grab some appetite suppressants and continue with my high liquid discipline. Today I am 216.
Speaking of frugality, I have rediscovered REI. I remember the last pair of brownshoes I had when I lived in ATL. Now is the time to buy a pair of 3 year shoes.
Everybody is calling to tell me that Colin Powell has endorsed Barack Obama. There is almost certainly a time where I would have said that I would find it difficult to be against Obama if Powell was for him. So right about now I'm feeling rather ill about the whole thing. More ill than usual.
One thing I am going to do is put together some video for the Purple States project. What's rather interesting to me is the extent to which a class of Americans (not in economic class terms, but just a specific group with certain attributes) are going to ride through this downturn without much change. They are the people who are prepared - those who have been living smartly. And I wonder how many are actually working for Obama out of a genuine appreciation of his novelty. As I said, anyone of sufficient means can hedge his way through 8 years of Obamahood and the smart person would anyway, but how many are throwing the lever like a monkey wrench? In Powell's text he talks about 'the tone' of McCain's campaign... it makes me say 'ick'.
Anyway, the song in my head now is 'Sittin on the Dock of the Bay'.
Look like nothing's gonna change Everything still remains the same I can't do what ten people tell me to do So I guess I'll remain the same, yesSittin' here resting my bones
And this loneliness won't leave me alone
It's two thousand miles I roamed
Just to make this dock my home
My agenda remains the same. I will watch the tide roll in and watch it roll away again.
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