Weather broke today, thankfully. Feeling much better, all in all, thankfully.

Hand better today, but little else is. The heatwave has me so incredibly off it was about all i could do to lie in bed almost all day, and slept much of that. Fortunately, the temperatures are supposed to drop significantly tonight and through the first parts of the week. Finally ate and that has helped a bit with the nausea, but it still seems like bedtime again shortly.

What a spectacularly wretched day. Managed not to break any bones in my hand, though. Don't ask.

It doesn't rain but it pours. The car which had been in safe running order is now over at the shop after overheating on the way back from picking the eldest up from camp.

Alas, life, a fatal disease. Finis.

Tags: writer's block

I think this should qualify as one of the best error messages ever.

From an error encountered as the result of an unexpected software in the Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5:
"Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation."

Well, if that's the case, i'm not going to ask for blessings for anyone anymore.

Well, got the thing i mentioned Monday done. Now the waiting.

You know it's not going to be a particularly good day when you meet with a stakeholder, reach an agreement as to the scope of the work to be done by all three of the participants in the meeting, and walk the ninety seconds back to your desk only to find that the agreed-upon scope has been thrown by the wayside and what's now expected is easily three to five times the effort required. What's worse is even after going that extra distance in the interest of getting something resolved once and for all to have that same requestor ask for even more.

Finally, after spending the better part of four and a half hours of work to not only deliver the ten-minute fix agreed upon as the initial scope, i ended up referring him to the person in charge of the master project schedule because i had work of my own to do and was drifting beyond the limits of my range as both software developer and graphic designer, and was approximately four hours and fifteen minutes beyond the limits of my patience. Today was one of those days where personal defenestration sounded like a good course of action, and mere self control was keeping me from rampaging in the halls, yelling, Samuel L. Jackson style, "Agreements, motherf*cker. Do you keep them?" and slashing at people with a hockey stick.

Gah, what a day. Not particularly good nor bad, but just... bleh.

In cryptic matters which have nothing to do with any of you, it's time to be not nonconfrontational. No, not going to explain. Deal.

This was a nice sight last evening. I don't think i've ever seen a triple rainbow before (and it's tough to make it out from this picture- there's a secondary immediately inside the lower one and the third outside).


triple rainbow

Just a little checksum on the local news coverage: yes, there is something of a regional war going on in South Ossetia right now. What's getting blurred or conveniently overlooked is that the region has declared independence twice in the last two decades- in 1992 and again in 2006, and had been an autonomous oblast (think state or administrative region) since the 1920s. There's probably a great deal of sabre-rattling going on on both sides, and tensions are nothing new in this area

If it hasn't happened already, it's probably just a matter of time until moesmith88 and his lovely wife L. will become parents of a brand-new ex-patriate Newfoundlander. My bet is that L. and TLF hold out until after midnight, and the new little one shares a birthday with Kristin Hersh, rather than before midnight where the wee one will share it with M. Night Shyamalan.

Best wishes go out to all three of them.

Dead tired again. Broke down and picked up an inhaler yesterday to try to help with the shortness of breath. I haven't needed one since i was about fifteen, but it seems to help a little. I'm so annoyed at needing to rely on it though, even if it's just for a short time. The annual block party was this evening, and i just was out of sorts- as opposed to last year's version, where i felt all social-butterfly and stuff. Not sure why, but it was ok to hang out and chat with Julien a bit, even if my people-overload threshold was low ( i think it was about four tonight), which made the twenty-plus attendees even more enervating.

Today, I had a presentation to give at work to the CTO, the design-side product architect and a few colleagues about preparations for product internationalization and a proposal for initial regionalization, focused on one initial feature set as a starting point.

Seems i've learned something about i18n and picked up a little bit of the Steve Ballmer edge in positioning a software package to dominate its target market. At risk of sounding a little arrogant, i killed. I know my stuff, had things thought through and presented clearly, got to showboat a little (my sample elements for the presentation included Sir Samuel Cunard and Lord Governor-General Anthony van Diemen- go-go history geek powers) and present international best practices, and just in general owned the presentation.

Hopefully this will be the start of being empowered to do more of this sort of work, because i don't think the company who has anyone else with any significant experience in l10n and i18n stuff, and i'm pretty certain no one gets as excited about it as i do. Properly, i think, internationalization should be handled by a director-level position, because it's going to touch everything in the application scope, and not necessarily all in the same way or to the same extent, but it's going to be really visible if something doesn't get implemented correctly.

With a few minor edits, this presentation (and probably the next step as well- it'd make sense to do them together) is ready to go to the CEO, and the CTO seemed really excited about getting it before him. Wheee!

I've been playing with Pandora Radio lately, and with mostly positive results.

One station, though has been a bit confusing. Back in the day, I used to regularly listen to a radio show from Tampa called "Sunday Simcha" which played all sorts of Jewish music. I've had a long-lived affection for klezmer music, but discovered a fondness for Yemenite music as well. Finding klezmer on Pandora is fairly difficult, but Yemenite music has been even more difficult. I can't find my favourite- a chanteuse named Adina Orazi (or possibly Arazi), who had a voice i can only describe as liquid sensuality; but can find the somewhat similar (and much better-known) Ofra Haza. Unfortunately, i've yet to hear even a single Ofra Haza song on Pandora's Ofra Haza channel. I've heard Sarah Brightman, Dido, a bunch of Björk sound-alikes, even Annie Lennox, U2 and Duran Duran (!?!). No Ofra Haza. Nothing even resembling Yemenite- or even Jewish- music yet. Weird. Anyone have any suggestions which might unlock a world of Yemenite vocalists?

I could go back to bed and not get up until tomorrow. This after sleeping in until nearly eleven, and napping in the afternoon.