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.

So I wrote a parser for the output from *her* script. It might have been easier to maintain a parser just for the comments plus the subsequent log API calls, from which I could extract the error message IDs and format strings. But it would also mean I'd have almost no reason to go back and ask her repeatedly for help.

I did not plan it that way at all. Sometimes the world can be a wonderful place, however. Two smiles today.

She seemed to have lots of bugs to fix, so I could not figure out a good reason for it to take much time. In many ways, if we had time we could take it, because from an architectural point of view we really ought to scrap the entire existing log API in favor of a single, localizable file, build mechanics to generate unique IDs, and a simple parser to read the single file.

The work sounds terribly boring, but I wouldn't mind under certain circumstances. I'd just be waiting for the bugs to break it down again.

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.

One of which she told me goes, "Ich liebe dich." (The other, "Du bist eine grosse Scheisse," sounds like a literal translation from the French.) Of course, after she said the first, with me hopefully reading levels of meaning into it she doubtless never intended, just keeping the hacky sack airborne took all I had. She left soon thereafter to go back to her desk, but I sort of floated around the rest of the afternoon, not wanting to come down.

"Ich liebe Dich."

Ich auch, obwohl ich es Dir niemals sagen werden kann. Und wenn Du mich nicht liebst, aber es einfach als Beispiel Deinen Sprachkentnissen gesagt hast, und nicht damit etwas sagen wolltest, also warum bist Du als alle anderen weggegangen sind geblieben?

L'espoir va m'ecraser un jour. Je ne pourrais jamais te dire o combien m'est cher chaque sourire ravageur que tu m'offres, naturellement, sans savoir ce que tu fais, sans intention aucune de reduire mes entrailles de nouveau en puree, et de faire flageler mes jambes...

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.

Google defines paradise as "any place of complete bliss and delight and peace." Bliss: "a state of extreme happiness;" delight: "a feeling of extreme pleasure or satisfaction;" peace: " the absence of mental stress or anxiety." How can bliss, delight, and peace mix together at the same time? I can imagine paradise, then, gazing into her smile, lying down, after having made love to exhaustion. Complete bliss, delight, peace. Right before we fall asleep together.

Paradise then exists in contrast to hell. "Three basic ideas are associated with the concept of hell: absence of righteousness (Mark 3:29), separation from God (John 3:36), and judgment (Matt 8:12; 25:31-46)." Can I see paradise more clearly now from the pure contrast of 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.

Tried the viewer with the JavaHelp 2 examples. Some work, some don't. CLASSPATH? I don't know what the heck I'm looking for.

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?

On the other hand, that sort of solution brings enough of its own problems to put it right out of the question. The end result sounds particularly hideous. A human being reduced to a machine without humanity left, just a calculating system to get more, sounds like the contrary of what I look for now in people. I go strictly to thinking on when I get angry, right?

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.

Today was another attempt to fix the stupid little parser to read what she generated. After she'd actually generated some partially garbaged output, I still tried to write a parser to wade through it. By the end of that effort, it was becoming clear even to me they could get me to sweep out the toilets with my toothbrush if they could somehow make me think of her while I do it. Infatuation can make you stupid(er).

At this point the right thing to do seems to consist in waiting. This too shall pass. The feelings must eventually just go away, since they cannot be acted upon.

Perhaps people who feel extraverted somehow bring it out. Would they ever get into such a silly situation as to sublimate their desires into lex and yacc? Maybe I never left high school.

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.

Last night for some reason Naked Lunch jumped out at me on the shelf. Hadn't picked that one up in a while. Borroughs goes on and on with the addiction to junk idea, nothing happening until the hourglass of junk runs out. That somehow parallels my own trajectory over these last two weeks, especially this one. It's like I constantly need a fix, and especially that one. But I never get much, just a contact high.

Thursday, we sat side by side in the project meeting. This is the sort of thing where I sit where I never sit and think and observe and try to figure out, strategically and statistically speaking, which chair is the right one.

I was taking notes, not for that meeting, but to try to draw my scattered thoughts together from another meeting. At one point I set my pen down to listen to somebody. Soon thereafter she picked up my pen, rolled it over and looked at the label on the clip. You could've heard my heart beating. That fleeting, fraction of a second contact she made with a small plastic pen felt like she'd slid her hand down into my trousers and gave me a squeeze.

She has small hands, even, it seems, for her size. She feels judging and decisive to the point of feeling almost stubborn. Her way of smiling does it to me though. If they really wanted me addicted, they've got it. All you need to do to get me to do whatever silly job you want done is make it lead to her, to some excuse to talk with her, be with her.

What an embarassment. Everybody probably knows but me. They feel embarassed, too. Drooling and farting in public, asking stupid questions, snot nosed, trailing toilet paper from a brown shoe heel.

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?

But what does one make of that sort of fixation that only seems to get stronger and keeps pulling your attention back to her. I thought that had gone away. During adolescence, you can feel overwhelmed by that sort of thing, but it doesn't really matter because given the minimal attachments you have, and given that society has prepared itself to deal with this and channel your infatuation, you're more or less fine.

Later on, however, you have children. Perhaps you both have children. You got married a while ago and feel contentedly married. She's even more contentedly married. Obviously, you both have too much at stake even to let on about how you suffer to anyone. Inside, you feel nearly out of control, hoping that you don't accidentally say her name in a half-dream because your wife would never understand.

Incidentally, simultaneous infatuation with multiple partners may not work, but you can love your wife and love your children -- love: a strong positive emotion of regard and affection -- all the while disintegrating progressively into desperate infatuation.

The pressure to rationalize some possible resolution mounts. This could cause you to develop heartburn, maybe even cancer. You advance in a rising fog of confusion, your fantasies recurse into their own scaffolding, upward and upward without resolution. Even the tiniest morsel, a smile you see as conspiratorial, a glance you interpret longingly minutes long, deepens your condition.

You act like an addict. Every pretext serves to get your fix. It'll all end in tears. Or worse.

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, by the way). Maybe they already have olink support. Maybe I should hack something together to add google search support to Coocon. Maybe it's all been done already.

At any rate, I'm not much of a designer, yet, and my tiny little project at sourceforge is already too much for me to do much with. I suppose I could learn a little more Java that way, but what the heck. I could also learn JNDI and write something perhaps useful to someone.

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.

The most satisfying part of Quake 3 is the exploding bodies. This is clearly a huge improvement over exploding bodies in Duke 3D years ago. Processors are now fast enough to render a sort of haze of blood. The body chunks also look almost realistic, given the amount of 3D detail a recent PC can render.

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?

Maybe you're telling the truth. It's only in the last couple of years that I stopped believing any of them knew any more than I do, any more than anyone does. Maybe I'm now wrong; my earlier optimism more accurately explained what the real situation is. Why doubt it?

What struck me today at the office was not that we're "letting some people realign with our current strategy" or however they put it. What struck me was not that, knowing the situation, they couldn't really be expected to do anything else. What struck me was that the top guy knows what he's pushing, but not what he's "deemphasizing" in order to push the things he wants.

So obviously these guys believe in Capitalism, and wouldn't publically consider Participatory Economics. I guess Nik is right. They're actors. Pretty well paid actors. But they don't have to believe any of it. They just have to spout their lines, and think quickly on their feet.

So am I jealous? I never think quickly on my feet, but instead respond like -- which president was it, Truman? -- somebody who needs to read it and think about it. And clearly I'm taking much less of the pie. The Ponytailed One is going to be able to take it all to the bank if the economy ever comes around.

But back to the real idea: ignore what doesn't impress you. It's a trait JP showed with me. Ignore what doesn't impress you. Let someone else clean the toilets, fire the staff you no longer need (because you made strategic mistakes), delegate. Rien faire, rien laisser faire, tout faire faire. Et ne prete aucune attention a ceux qui ne gagnent pas.

Schwartzy is running for governor of California; Schwartzy is running software. Their both actors. They're both well paid. It's an act.

The category could've been politics.

Management, like politics, consists of positioning oneself or one's organization with respect to people's perceptions in order to create more favorable perceptions affording the manager more financial power or the politician more power (tout court). Science reflects an attitude by which one makes guesses, then examines observable evidence and existing conclusions to attempt to determine whether a guess appears to hold true for a statistically relevant quantity of evidence.

Scientific management, or scientific politics, would thus involve use of the scientific method to improve one's ability to induce favorable perceptions, thus gaining more power. This I misunderstood initially about the reason for doing Six Sigma.

Had I understood it that way earlier on, would Six Sigma have had the same dark, Machiavellian cast it now has?