Another week flies by
Very sleepy and meandering summary of the week:
Kam returned from Burning Man; Lola returned from Strawberry; my nose has remained half-stuffed-up; I haven't been sleeping well; I've been kind of out of sorts and off-kilter, irritable and quick to anger, generally distressed; I've continued to gather URLs, especially Katrina-related, but haven't had time or energy to put together anything coherent by way of an entry.
There was a period of several days when "Seasons of Love" (the Rent song, not the Echo's Children song) was running through my head almost literally nonstop, including when I was trying to go to sleep and while I was waking up; I've had plenty of tunes I couldn't get out of my head for a while, but this was pretty extreme. I started writing a filk that starts "525,600 verses; 525,000 times through my head," but concentrating on it enough to filk it just made things worse. Anyway, it's still running through my head about half the time, but it's taking occasional breaks now, which is a huge relief. (And no, I don't particularly want to replace it with "It's a Small World, After All" or other insidious earworm. I just want it to leave me alone.)
My couches arrived on Tuesday; yay! They're nice. I spent a fair bit of time Monday dragging heavy bookcases around the living room in preparation.
Tuesday morning I woke up too early and spent an hour or so writing an incoherent rant about hurricane stuff, which never coagulated enough to be postable. Then got sleepy and went back to bed (and missed the couch delivery guys' call that said they were available an hour early—I should've known they would be, as delivery people at my place are almost invariably either an hour early or many hours late—but it worked out okay in the end). Something similar happened Wednesday morning (waking up too early, getting up, doing computer stuff, going back to sleep after an hour or so). Thursday night got more sleep, but here I am staying up too late tonight. Sigh.
I seem to be suddenly in the mood to do lightweight programming lately (perhaps because it lets me feel a little more in control of something, in a period otherwise dedicated to general distress and helplessly watching the aftermath of Katrina). For example, last week I got immersed briefly in Processing: "an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound." It's exactly the kind of programming environment I like: the environment takes care of all the nitpicky details, leaving the programmer to use high-level constructs to do cool things. I learned about it by way of the astonishing and lovely computer-generated art at the Complexification Gallery. Later in the week, I started reading Dive Into Python. Today I had a pretty productive work day that involved learning a lot about areas of JavaScript that I was previously unfamiliar with. It's been really nice to stretch those coding muscles again; I wouldn't want to be a programmer full-time, but I like doing little projects here and there. Am thinking about trying to mock up a firespinning simulation using Processing.
(And perhaps relatedly, spent part of the weekend working on Movable Type stuff. Upgraded to 3.2, learned a fair bit about their new templates and stylesheet, worked out most of the design for my journal. Not ready for public viewing yet, but maybe soon. Also bought the paid version. Sadly, 3.2 has some annoying UI bugs in Safari; it extensively uses some CSS code to show and hide bits of the UI, but that CSS doesn't work right in Safari. (It's fine in Firefox.) I need to file some bugs when I get a minute.)
I have no idea why I'm writing this instead of sleeping. I think I'm going to go fix that.
