stuffed and drained
I am feeling pretty full of beef satay and rice noodles. Today we went to lunch in celebration of Louis’s birthday, and it was good. A few weeks ago, Louis said (of my Thai red curry) something like, “I can’t imagine food much hotter than this.” We sort of gaped at him, and I think we have established as an ongoing objective, “make Louis eat spicier food.”
He had some pho and pad thai today, and John made him put some chili oil on it. He thought it was very hot, but I think we can definitely get him to enjoy spicier foods than that.
Anyway, I mention this only because I ate more than I should have. After a lot of hemming and hawing, I am going to start going to the gym again, and doing some cycling. I was down to a long-time low of about 178 pounds in April, and I’ve been up around 190 since OSCON. Starting tomorrow, I will get some more regular exercise and stop eating so much crap at lunch.
Overeating isn’t my main problem today, though; it’s more a general malaise. I got to feeling grumpy yesterday, when I spent most of my work day trying to get pro-rating billing working, only to realize that what I had gotten working didn’t really address our biggest need. The lesson here is that I need to get my user’s stories before I start developing. I stayed grumpy through the evening, and it wasn’t helped by the rain or the news that our car had died.
This morning my mood was better, but my gut got to feeling pretty lousy after I got a slice of pound cake at Starbucks on the way to Philly. I should have known better; yogurt is enough most days, it would have been enough today. Once at work, we got some useful decisions made, but the victory was quickly spoiled when svk decided that my out-of-date copies were newer than the master repository’s copies and undid a day’s worth of work. Sure, I just had to build a backwards diff, apply it, and commit, but it took me a couple minutes, broke my pattern, and filled me with a surprising amount of anger. What should have been a nice little task to get going in the morning turned into a real pain.
At the end of the day, after doing some more hashing-out of the pro-rating problem, I stuck around too long, waiting to see if things were working properly. They weren’t, and I only made my bus because it had stopped at an intersection and the driver saw me waving my arms.
After some thinking, phone-calling, and box-and-arrow-drawing on the bus, I figured out how to do what we wanted; unfortunately, it turned out that there was a small bug left in the code that prevented it from actually working.
I’m finding that our billing project becomes more obnoxious as we get closer to completion: the problems become more specific and more tied to the ways in which Freeside doesn’t fit the way we work. Still, while some days I get upset and feel angry at having to deal with some of the internal ugliness of Freeside, I still feel better about this billing project than what I’d been doing at my last job. Here, I feel like I’m working on something that someone really cares about and will use. There, despite some enthusiastic noise-making, I felt like my work was basically destined for a black hole.