Entries this day: a-few-things-in-my-brain-at-4am sweet-now-i-can-blog-from-my-phone

a few things in my brain at 4am

##06:11 Wednesday 06 February 2013

It's 4:17am as I start this entry; it was 30 minutes ago that I went back to bed after waking up to pee and note that it's not snowing outside.

Lin's news sources said it would snow tomorrow.  Her mom's news sources said it would snow between 10 and 20 cm tomorrow.  My weather app says it will rain tomorrow, and so far, my app is right.

I'd love a snow day, not that I get the day off, but I like watching the snow fall, the footsteps, tire tracks, shovels all smush, squish, or whoosh the snow out of the way, and then watch the dirty snow slowly melt from its piles.

I noted that the weather forecast on the news showed a cutesy picture with three panels, making extremely clear the plan for people tomorrow.  The panels showed a car with tire chains, one more I can't remember, and a guy waking up early.  I complained to Lin that Japanese culture is too cutesy, and too caretaking.  Why make such a point to tell people that they have to wake up early tomorrow?  I can imagine a newscaster in the US closing the segment with ".. might have to wake up early tomorrow." before moving on to the next story.

I was like, "yeah, in the US they wouldn't spend 5 minutes showing an info graphic of what time people should wake up.  They'd spend ten minutes telling who had killed whom, and, um, nevermind."

• - - -

Lin and I have been doing extremely well; I know we've only been married 18 months or so, but we're still in that giddy "no, I love you more!!" phase, and I'm really enjoying that.

She's just gotten a new job that does not require forced, unpaid overtime, and even allows 30 minutes of break in addition to an hour lunch!  Wow what an amazing concept of keeping workers happy.  In her two previous jobs, people were so stressed to the point of being sick (not just sick, but like ulcers and doctors orders to take time off) that I was like, "yeah you should probably quit."

Now, we're on day #22 (or so; it's been a while, but I don't think it's been a month) of saying, "dude; let's move to Taiwan," so the plan is to keep working here a bit, save some money and then start looking to change countries, esp. to one her mom will also enjoy living or at least visiting.

Every time we greet each other, we bark up a storm (why'd I use "up a storm" here?  weird) and are just so _happy_ to see each other.

• - - -

For the past month or so, I've been nearly daily reading Hacker News, and at the bottom of one of the stories, I saw something like "rilakkumaaaaaaaa likes this."  I thought "oh, that's from リラックマ," some bear character whose name comes from the combination of "relax" meaning relax in English, and "kuma" a transliteration for the word that means bear in Japanese.

I translate their names as "yellow bird," "baby relax bear," and "relax bear."  I guess the names are as good as "big bird," "cookie monster," and "oscar the grouch."   (But not as good as Snuffleupagus.)

But so anyway, I clicked the link to Rilakkumaaa...aa's page, and I liked its content enough to come back a few times.   The author seems to post stories that have been posted by others (of stories that have been posted by others (of stories that have been posted by others (...))).  I clicked around in the group of cross posters and found an interesting style of animated images that I had not previously seen.

I'm not sure if I can capture them here in the same way, but I'd describe them as multiple panels of the same scene, taken from (slightly) different points of view, in slightly different points of time.

Because a lot of the sites had a lot of these types of animation sets, I wonder who produced the animations in the first place?  Okay, yes, obviously they gifs made from videos, but who takes the time to clip out slightly different time segments possibly from different cameras and paste them together in an easily posted format?

Here's the apparent source of one photoset that's been reposted more than a few times: https://sarangtaeyeon.tumblr.com/post/31577460442/tiffany-mirror-mirror-who-is-the-prettiest-in

While downloading them to post here, I noted the tag #akb48, which I assume means these girls are in the currently popular group AKB48, of which I know very little except they've got a lot of fans.  One or more of them must have created these images.   Thank you, people, for making an interesting visual effect!

• - - -

At work, we've been migrating our dev boxes and some smaller client sites to AWS.  I've been updating to our latest style framework the back-end website for sending newsletters to people.  The system now uses Amazon SES.  We plan to test-move our larger clients to AWS within a couple months.

I had a client request conversion of a field from a text field to a dropdown list (because she prefers mouse over keyboard).   I looked at the data and found over 200 different values in the database and advised against such a change.  "I don't think you'll be very happy with a 210-item drop down list, esp if you have to visit a different page to add items."

• - - -

I've been using trello to keep track of little "next steps" in my projects both at home and work.  These may include notes to self to help my brain get back on track in the morning, and to protect against memory loss when being interrupted. My list to start "tomorrow" (it's now 5:30am on said day) looks like this.

• - - -

Why haven't I been blogging a lot?  I guess because it takes a lot of time to write a lot and post accompanying pics.

• - - -

Tariq and I have been dealing with a memory issue in our latest (which is also our first) game.  I was like, "it's gotta be because of the blocks"  (it's my first time to use blocks in a project.  He was like, "it's gotta be an error in some of the assets."   I wrote a version to load all the assets and it didn't always crash.   Then I compared the block usage in my app to the block usage in Snap!, from which I based some of the core code.   Oh snap, it's totally different!  I almost certainly need to completely redesign the underlying structure of my classes.   sigh.

• - - -

Well, last night, when the news assured us it would snow today, we went to bed early so we could wake up early and go get breakfast near Lin's office so she'd be at work on time for her fourth day of work.   We planned to leave at 6:10am, which is now, but there's no snow, so the trains will be on time, and no reason to try to go early.  So I'm going back to bed for an hour.

I wonder if I will meditate for 30 minutes when I wake up.

sweet now i can blog from my phone

##20:56 Wednesday 06 February 2013

Thank you, Wordpress!