Off By One

I’ve got only three days before Ms. Charlotte and I take off into the blue yonder, across the pacific (a first, at least as far as reaching the other side goes — Hawaii doesn’t count) to Japan, where we’ll be roaming around and posting pictures (over at Morruz), as per SOP).

I’ve got just about everything taken care of, on this end; I’ve finished (as far as I’m going to) my paper for Cmput 401, I’ve got most of the written assignment for 414 finished, and a deferral on my 3000-word essay to a week after I get back.

On the work front, I’ve been putting in a bit of time off the books because I wanted to get some coding done, which wasn’t happening with all of the container management stuff I was doing. Oh, it pays the bills, but struggling with IBM’s toolset was one of the least fun things I’ve ever had the … pleasure … of doing.

So, that’s it.

I’m taking one of the few real vacations I’ve had in my life, since leaving home. Oh, I’ve been unemployed, and I’ve been off for a few days here and there, but this type of thing is rare, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to travel with Char; we’ve never done this together. Wish us luck!

Although it might appear to the casual observer that I am dead, or perhaps comatose, I assure you that neither is the case. Rather, I have been swamped with a combination, familiar to some of you, of school and work that has left me with little time even to prepare for my incipient travels (to be catalogued, as M&M’s are, at http://www.offlineblog.com/morruz).

Here’s a capsule summary of the last couple of weeks:

School. Work.

Really, that’s all.

I’ve been trying to exercise a bit more lately, which is probably a good idea. Char’s heavy into the yoga, and she’s had me join her a couple of times, which I have found relatively pleasant, and should probably get into more consistently. I’ve also actually used the gym that comes with our apartment, which is revolutionary in itself, and even more, I’ve actually worked up a sweat by choice. Will wonders never cease?

Uhm…

Well, nothing else.

How are all of you?

Oh, man, it’s been a while.

Yeah, I’m still here.

I’ve been working on school a lot, and work — I’m pretty stressed these days, and my time is at a premium, so I haven’t been writing as often as I want to. I’ll try to remedy that, but this won’t be the post that does

To all of my assorted friends, book time while you can!

It’s been, and will be, an interesting couple of weeks. I’m creating some genuinely nifty things at work these days, and I’m going to be assembling interesting code for school.

The former has been an introduction to the general concepts of LDAP; I’ve had to get at least a bit familiar with it in order to put together a critical piece of functionality for our client. The latter, well, I took the hard part of the project, as is my wont, and it’s been nifty, getting it all working.

So, there’s that.

Plus papers..

Plus presentations…

Plus finals, upcoming…

Mind you, none of this is on the scale of Simon’s workload. Congrats on the thesis presentation!

Sitting here, alternating between idle web browsing, reading Amber novels, and dozing on the couch…

My life is pretty easy this weekend, despite the lingering aftereffects of a nasty cold that I’ve had all week that has left me with headaches, poor sleep, and a sense that the world is passing me by in a grey haze. I got some housework done, although not too much. I’m lazy, after all.

In school-related news, I’m working on a Perl CGI app for an assignment. It means that I get to write code in what is effectively a write-only language — Perl is legendarily difficult to read — and generally do a bunch of web-hackery in an old-fashioned sort of tool. I’m more of a Java fan, myself, but this does the trick, I guess.

I didn’t get to go jumping today, because the fog outside combined with a sense that I needed to get some laundry done to keep me home.

I want to build something, damn it — I want to have a project to put together that has a defined scope, a real purpose, and is small enough that I can make a realisitic start to it. I had idle dreams of remaking a game, but I’m not that hardcore, and can’t be arsed to become that hardcore. My other project ran up against limitations in the known information about the iTunes library format. All of which leave me with a periodic need to have an itch to scratch.

Grr.

Well…

I just learned how to pack a parachute.

I’ve jumped from a plane twice in the last five days (yeah, not too much).

I’m turning in my second assignment of the school year.

I’ve survived my first ever round of layoffs.

I’ve got to start my project work.

I’m laying on a couch typing this.

I’m going to eat chili this weekend in the company of geeks.

I’m going to miss Char while she’s away this week.

I ate a lot of turkey last night.

I wish I was working full time.

Getting the last few courses out of the way is, strangely, shaping up to be somewhat unsatisfying. I can’t seem to shake the desire to phone in the last year of my education, skipping the hard parts and concentrating on just getting the official documentation of my education.

This isn’t, obviously, a constructive sentiment.

Still, it’s nice to be in the visible homestretch. I have eight months of part time coming up, four months of the real world in the summer again, and then one last, lazy semester to nail down the last of my requirements, and then, in January 2008, at the age of 30, I’ll get to graduate.

2008.

Damn me.

Well, no news on the legal rights front — my queries to Ask.Metafilter went well-answered, but the message I sent to the CCLA didn’t get me any response, so I’ll be sending something again, in the hopes that someone there will answer.

Not a lot new — getting ready to end the internship, mainly, and return to the academic life, poverty and all. I’ll be part time anyway, but it’ll be interesting, being back on the grind.

Saw Valerie for lunch today, she’s in town only briefly for the Folk Festival, and then she’s off to Sechelt, near my cousins’ place, where she has a short-term teaching position. All over the place, she is. I miss having her around for epic theological debates, but life moves us all, I suppose.

How’s everyone else? Anyone care to touch base, let me know what’s going on in your lives?

Well, short-term at least, this blog has talked more about hockey than anything.

Not to say I’ve been verbose, or anything like that.

But what a game, again.

On schooly notes, I’ve got a final exam tomorrow that I expect to do… poorly at. If I had known that Philosophy courses deliberately eschewed clear english in favour of meaningless jumbles of ten-dollar words, I’d have passed on the course. Now, I’ll be happy to simply pass the course.

Bah.

I’m posting this, slacking, from my ethics class. Frankly, regardless of the degree of interest I have in the content in itself, the presentation (didactic, lecture) is not my cup of tea. It gets good, when we start hitting the discussion aspects of the course…

Anyway, I’m bored. Char’s outta town, for those that aren’t paying attention, the local hockey team is sucking it back in ways that resulted in my being mocked by the AppleCare support folk I spoke to this morning, and work was… if not completely useless today, competitive with it.

Blah.

If the weather gets good, at least I can go skydiving this weekend, having been unable to last week (sorry to disappoint, Dad — I was at the library getting books for the Phil250 paper that was due, well, today).

We’ll see.