Documenting error messages. Most people would add it in there with, "No, I cannot make it. I have some belly button lint to sort, some paint I'm watching peel, and a few thousand error messages to document." Initially, I aimed to get a standard comment format for which I could write a little parser. Then she wrote a shell script of sed and awk tidbits to process the error message IDs.

In France, say the cross-cultural researchers, the rules of conversation tell you to keep it alive, don't hog it, kick it back and forth like a hacky sack, keeping it up in the air. It feels so good just to talk with her, I'd agree to the conversational equivalent of hacky sack with a haggis, discussing the difficulty of getting good black market child care today, kitchen remodeling and associated price gouging, grandmothers moving to nursing homes, the two phrases she knows in German.

At a trough of depression last week, I felt that even paradise would let me down. What if even paradise involved sitting around in the jewelled city on hard pews, droning hymns to the Lord? Lifelong misery, unfulfilled longing, all comes to an end after judgement day, at which point either you ascend to heaven or you descend to hell.

Perhaps I can cobble something together, but I often fail to determine in any reasonable amount of time why something isn't working. Not systematic enough?

This past week, I wrote a draft JavaHelp 2 system. Doesn't work at all. And yet it's based on the existing system, as in I copied, pasted, hacked, and then tried.

The config files appear to conform to the DTDs. It doesn't even recognize them. Took a quick look at the source were the exception popped. Saw nothing.

Another weekend. This Wednesday, the depression just rolled in and crushed me. By today I had nearly recovered. So when she had some free time I scrambled around for an excuse to talk about nothing for 15 minutes. Reminds me of Burroughs, in the sense that I keep going back for the fix, and it never suffices.

What would suffice? A couple of years, a couple of kids? Kids, yes. That would take the edge off this feeling I get from her merest glancing glaze. What a strange payback.

Pain relief seems like the answer to this question, pain relief of the kind that greys out both pleasure and pain, blanks out desire and discomfort. Would she go away if the outside world disappeared?

Yet another night facing the computer, and I'm writing nothing. Some people have nothing to say. Reminds me of Granddad sitting there across the table from Grandmother. They used to tell us stories about what they went out and ate some night after WWII. They told us this in a dry house, dry meat, dry vegetables. Sometimes even the water in their condo felt dry.

This was a bad couple of weeks if you go by my status report. I started off okay and went downhill from there.

My concentration feels shot. You don't get too much done if you sit around thinking about how to have an excuse to get near someone.

What the heck is going on here? Disruption.

Lusting after women is one thing. That's just normal, the sort of thing that happens to you because you're a guy. You can be more or less contentedly married, loving your wife and family, but still having these blips where you entertain some silly possibility for a few moments, then get on to something else. As long as you don't act out these ideas, is there really anything wrong with them?

Writing the RefEntry servlet was a good excuse to do some development while getting my BS in computer science. On the other hand, it's not going to be good for much else. At some point, I realized that complex problems only need be solved from scratch by exceptional problem solvers, or in exceptional circumstances. By now, it feels like I should've written something tiny for an existing framework, like Cocoon (which I still haven't learned to use,

My wife says I make too much noise in my chair having fun with the Quake 3 demo on Linux. It's been years since I'd played any of this silly stuff, but must admit it's getting better, though there's not the same level of humor Duke 3D used to have.

She's choking again.

When you're that small the slightest hint of mucus fills up your lungs and coats your throat so well, you just start choking after each cough.

You don't even need to be very sick. What horror. Parents lie awake all night listening to that. We should be able to sit in a quiet room without people the next day. Like the office?

When everything is in good hands, you are free to go. That seems like a reasonable way of summing things up. What does that mean, right after you say things in the east collapsed because everyone was dealing with false data? Are you tripping over what you just said? Are you telling the truth?