I’m running into just about everything all at the same time. Work has been, as expected this month, absolutely insane busy and I’m finding it impossible to disengage myself in the evening. It’s hard to think of anything else when I know that if I get more done now, there’ll be less tasks when I come into the office tomorrow. My work-life balance is pretty far out of whack, but it’s not going to get better any time soon.

I have this sneaking suspicion that my immune system is fighting off a virus and is working overtime to keep me up and running because it knows that if I stumble, things won’t go well. I’m keeping it reinforced as best I can with sleep and vitamins, but I just hope it can last out until I can pay proper attention to myself again. On a normal workload, I usually have one mug of green tea in the morning. Now I’ve switched to multiple mugs of black tea and coffee a day. It’s not a good combination.

My lease is up at the end of July, and I’m already freaking out about finding a new place to live. I know I’m going to be moving out, but the prospect of searching for another place is terrifying. It’s one of my least favorite activities ever, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to fit that in. Cancelling sleep, maybe? Weekends?

I’m supposed to be planning vacations, concerts to go to, and try to do normal human things to try and get away from work and de-stress. But it’s almost impossible to get myself up to the task, and when opportunities do come up, our upcoming project schedule have already nuked plans. And even if those are clear, my co-workers have already planned things for the same days and I’m stuck covering their loads. And, of course, once I do find something, everyone else I want to go with is completely socked up and unavailable.

As per usual standard operating procedure, dating is going terrifically terrible. Whatever I can get scheduled usually results in awkward interactions followed by a lack of any further correspondence. I’m not looking for anything serious or long-term, but I would like something at least resembling a relationship. Clearly I must come off as a complete jerk with the personality of some primordial ooze, and I have to admit: my self-confidence is starting to take a hit.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that please don’t take it personally if I’m not very responsive or unusually terse, even for me. I’m just trying to save some sanity. I’ll be back soon to the world of the living. I promise. Right after I flee to Alaska for a week. Or Vancouver Island. Or anywhere. Eventually.

This is shaping up to be one heck of a month, and I don’t feel like being creative nor verbose. So we get to see one of my awesome “throw things at the reader” posts that everyone loves!

April will kill me

Work is just super busy and filled with projects this month. I’ve known that it will be a fun April, but there’s an issue when I’m already burning out and turning to coffee and it’s barely the second week.

Ruby

My first Ruby script is in production use! I was looking to replace an aging Perl script at work that basically sends bulk email in a handy way, and keeps nice logs to track it all by. It’s certainly not a complicated script, and I know that there’s a lot I can improve, but I always feel like the first working script from scratch is the hardest. Sweet.

Emitown is AMAZING

The new comic I started reading after ECCC was Emitown. And it. Is. Super. Her seemingly random observations about life really let you get a glimpse about what’s going on inside her mind, and her drawings are adorably awesome. This is my new favorite thing.

Android 4.0

After finally getting completely fed up with Verizon being buttholes and not updating the 4G Xoom to Android 4, I got around to learning how to unlock, root, and install a custom rom on my tablet. 4.0.4 is running silky smooth, and ICS looks beautiful on a tablet.

Cool Story

I rate this post two out of four stars.

Wee Rex!

I got a bunch of awesome comics at ComiCon yesterday, but perhaps best of all, picked up this guy:

Battlestar Galactica (Re-imagined) Was a Disappointment

I know this is doing to disappoint some folks, and I’m sorry. But I don’t like BSG. I tried to like the new series. I really did. The first season was, for the most part, great television. The special effects were spot-on, the plots had healthy doses of science fiction elements, the characters were well done, and the cinematography was wonderfully gritty. Then the second season started, and the writers basically admitted that they were totally out of ideas. The awesome idea that their ancestors left behind relics to help their race eventually go back home was blown to pieces in favor of some religious adventure. Baltar was an embarrassment, Starbuck’s character development was a utter joke, and the story eventually spiraled into a cylon hunt. And not even a good one. First season? On par with the great Sci-Fi series of our generation. Seasons two through four? A drama that just so happened to be set in space.

Dogs + Cats

While walking to Trader Joe’s today, I noticed a few dogs leashed up outside restaurants on the Hill while their owners were presumably inside. The look on their faces led me to conclude only one thing: our canine friends are completely and utterly sad when they aren’t with their owners. Cats, on the other hand, don’t seem to really care who or where the owners are.

Chris Jude is an Asshole

At the Emerald City ComiCon yesterday, Serene and I made it an absolute goal to see George Takei, so we went to the room where he was going to have a panel plenty early. And by “early” I meant “arrived at 4:10 for a 5:00 panel.” The current guest was Christopher Jude, who was in Stargate. Now, I’m not a huge Stargate fan and only watched the first few seasons, but I respect the show as a good science fiction series and it did a lot of really cool stuff. I just never really got into it, so I didn’t really have any vested interest in SG1 or his reflections on the series. However, I thought that listening to him may have inspired me to pick up the series again. Turns out I was really wrong. He came off as a swarmy jerk who insulted his fans and tried to play it off like he was kidding. It takes a lot of courage for nerds to actors of their favorite shows questions, and to totally belittle them was an absolute disgrace.

George Takei is Awesome

Takei is just a righteous dude. He’s intelligent, insightful, and it was a real pleasure listening to him.

Flowers

Flowers are awesome. If you don’t like flowers, you’re not a human.

Strawberries

The best food known to mankind are organic Strawberries, and I will fight someone if they say otherwise. YOU HEAR ME? IT’S ALL ABOUT STRAWBERRIES.

Quote I’ve been Thinking about Today

“I’m not afraid of pain anymore. It’s the days I don’t feel a thing I fear.”

Notwithstanding my foray into TI-BASIC programming on my TI-83+, I got started with coding in the glorious language known as Perl. There’s no real particular reason for this choice, other than that it seemed cooler than PHP at the time. With its esoteric mannerisms and increasing levels of disuse in a technological culture, I started shifting away from my Perl-maintained sites and scripts. The natural successor was PHP. I’ve always gotten along with PHP relatively well, but after doing procedural work in it for so long, shifting to the new OO paradigm in PHP hasn’t been as awesome as I would have liked it to be.

Post-Graduation Project

Realizing that I’d quickly become bored after graduation, I decided that it would be a fun and useful project to start picking up a new language. For consideration I looked into Python and Ruby, but for various reasons that I won’t go into much detail: Ruby was the winner as it was elegant and seemed to be a worthy successor to the strong text processing abilities that made Perl relevant for so long.

Unstable Progress

Whenever I have a free day, I’ll pick up a Ruby tutorial and start going forward on learning before quickly hitting a wall known as “something else to do” or “I need to do this now, so I’ll use PHP/Perl instead of learning Ruby.” Clearly this needs to stop and I should get my head in the game. I was always distracted when working on my desktop, and one of the main reasons I went for a new laptop that has such a high screen resolution is so I can easily have multiple terminals and a reference document open at once.

The laptop is here, and it’s time to begin the journey for reals this time.

Bug Me

I’m keeping a repository of whatever I’m working on with Ruby on my Bitbucket account. Eventually it will be cooler, until then, annoy me if it hasn’t been updated in a while. I’ll respond to annoying things.

A major water leak on C3 at the UW Tower is forcing the temporary move of
Service Center (“help desk”) operations to the 4545 ERC.

I didn’t think too much of it at the time. We’re located across the hallway from the service center, and they’ve had problems with localized leaks before that have disrupted their operations. After hopping on the bus and silently entertain myself by watching people get their umbrellas blown inside out, I amble through the rain and into the tower. Making up to our floor, I see that the problem was just a tad larger than I expected. There were large pools of water of water spanning across the aforementioned hallway, and there were ladders, fans, pumps, and maintenance workers everywhere. You know that scene from Office Space at the end, where the building is on fire and everyone is outside watching it? I was distinctly reminded of that. Except with water instead of fire.

Poor photo of the corner of the water source.

Seems the issue was a little worse than I anticipated. The sender of the email was like “oh hey Nikky. Looks like you’re working from home today. Check your equipment and get out of here.”

I wonder in and check on my plethora of equipment. It seems someone stacked my footrest/server on top of my desktop, and both were placed on a side table. My switch was suspended in mid-air, and cables were all over the place. Yet somehow they were still powered and networked. Hunh.

So I left.

Followup

We were out of the office for two days for cleanup and recovery operations. The office area across the hallway, where the flood started, sported about 4 inches of water at one point in time. It seems a radiator burst at around 7:00am and it took about 2.5 hours to safely shut off the heating system and stop the leak: otherwise the entire pressurized system would have burst. My systems weren’t impacted, and minimal water actually entered my castle of awesome.

A few favorite photos, in no particular order.

View the Full Photo Album on Flickr

Nikky Discovers the Seahawks Win

“WOAH. Who replaced the Seahawks with a good team?”

“I see we’re trying really hard not to win the Andrew Luck bowl this year.”

“Too bad we still suck.”

“Seahawks? More like Seahonks.”

Nikky Discovers the Seahawks Lose

“Seahawks are dead to me.”

“I wish I got paid to play football as poorly as we did.”

Conclusion

I only have room for one team in my heart, and that’s the University of Washington Huskies football team. The Seahawks are but a poor substitute. With colors that aren’t as awesome.

I’ll admit it: I can sometimes get too involved with work and my own life that I can forget that I’m not just one person in this world, but a being living in a collective establishment known as a city. And not just any city, but a population center in world-class city.

When this happens, I get something I call “Nikky Vision,” which is almost self-descriptive in nature. Everything else–societal ills, class warfare, and confused politics–all blend in the background as only what I want to view comes into the forefront.

Two things today forced me back into reality.

Lament of the Subway Employee

Making my weekly visit to Subway in the U-District today, a converstation between the customer and the employee behind me struck a cord. It was as resonating as it is simple. After they went through a few pleasantries:

Sandwich Orderer: “So do you go to school?”

Employee, with a hint of sadness: “I wish I could.”

And that, my friends, is basically all that’s wrong with our society. Where we are incapable of sending willing and able young adults to college. And instead we waste their talents and enthusiasm making sandwiches for those lucky enough to be able to go to school. Disgusting.

Encounter on the 49

On the way home from work I usually get on one of the first stops of route 49, so I’m almost guaranteed a window seat where I’m perfectly content with staring out the passing cityscape as I try to empty my mind of terminals and web publishing.

Instead of looking out the window, today I was dinking around on my tablet with a new magazine application. After settling on reading a blog about video games, I noticed that someone got on next to me. I don’t know how or why it struck me, but I sensed that they were someone who was down on their luck and was around my parent’s age. As they glanced at me, reading about gaming, I suddenly felt a overwhelming sense of guilt and shame.

I give as much as I can to a multitude of local charities that all do exceptional work, but I felt like no matter how much I did and supported, things could never be perfect. There would always be suffering and many very well-meaning and nice people are worse off than me. And there’s nothing I can do about it. That’s a sobering concept, and a tough one to swallow.

And it was good. MGS4ing it up while starting to consider my proto-living room home was a good first step in adjusting to the idea of actually decorating and filling an apartment rather than just a room. EXPANSION OF THINGS AND STUFF COMMENCING.

Exactly a week later, I got back from the Apple Cup to discover something odd: my apartment door was unlocked it was certainly cool and drafty inside. And what is this? Oh, there’s a hole where one of my windows used to be. Interesting.

I suppose someone else wanted my TV more than I did. And take it they did after busting out one of the windows (which is rather hard to get at from the outside, so they must have certainly wanted it) with a brick and climbing through the non-safety glass and wounding themselves quite a bit.

They certainly took a particular path. My TV and HDMI cable were gone, but the PS3, Blu-Rays, and PS3 games were all there. My laptop from 2006 was missing too, but my desktop, monitors, and DSLR WHICH WAS JUST SITTING ON THE FLOOR were all untouched.

My large hiking backpack, partially filled with really awesome things, was taken to presumably stuff the laptop into. Brown Argyle sweater from high school? Gone. Merlino Wool Purple sweater? Gone. MY FAVORITE TEA INFUSER? Gone. One of my gloves? Gone.

In a calm and collected manner, I called our friendly 911 and a nice SPD officer showed up about an hour later to look things over and take some fingerprints. It was a fun converstation when I mentioned that my hammer was also stolen.

Me: “Oh, and they took my hammer.”

Officer: “Your hammer?”

Me: “Yeah, I keep a hammer in my bedstand in case this happens when I’m home during the time.”

Officer: “And they took it?”

Me: “Well, it isn’t there now!”

Officer: “Hunh.”

So anyway, I have Renter’s Insurance that doesn’t include depreciation, so things should be pretty good. The residents around me were cool and were pretty shocked about what happened. They haven’t had another incident like that in recent memory and we figured that there was literally nobody around Thanksgiving weekend that probably let them scope out the places a bit. I didn’t have curtains in my living room yet (which actually was on my to-do list), but I certainly do now.

After half a decade in Seattle, I suppose this was bound to happen sooner or later. And Capitol Hill is still super cool despite this little incident.