Stained Glass Wings

3:13pm: minor things which would not happen in a more perfect world
- users sending data with 57-character filenames to fit in an application that takes 50-character filenames.
- having to put the recycling out between 2100 on the day before and 0700 on the day of pickup.
- series of novels drastically changing their physical appearance part-way through.
- biting insects getting into my bedroom and biting me.
- Sacha Baron Cohen's entire career in the entertainment industry.

1:13pm: ah
The difference between "thunderstorm" and "severe thunderstorm" on the weather-for-Montreal site would appear to be that the latter comes with thunder loud enough to make me jump like a scalded cat in my well-within-a-large-building office, though fortunately not spilling anything on myself in the process.

However, that was a really nice chocolate cookie just now.

12:32pm: will the world stay standing still, at least for me
That was a truly excellent weekend.

Friday evening met livredor at the airport, came home via dinner in Soba and Sushi, and hung out for a bit.

Saturday got up at a reasonable hour, went to the time travel bookshop, took a bus into town with the intent of seeing the new-since-livredor's last visit Inuit art room in the Musee de Beaux Arts and while so doing discovered that there has been some rearrangement, particularly that there is now more cool pre-Columbian Mesoamerican art out in a much better space. Then after some effort we found Cheap Thrills and got more books, and then had a sizable brunch in Reuben's (yay another person on for sharing a spinach-artichoke heart-cheese dip) and browsed books in Indigo, and then went up to the Word on Milton, and got even more books, and then walked over to Suite 88 for ice-cream. This turns out to be really rather a lot of walking. Also, the day was full of storms. Once we had got back home we were able to watch one of them being spectacular with lots of lightning from the back balcony. And then we stayed up chatting and enjoying being together until really stupidly late. (livredor did most of the book-buying; I limited myself to gleefully pouncing on David Wellington's 23 Hours which is just out.)

Sunday morning we got up at a reasonable-ish hour, went out to Diogenes for yet more excellent food (livredor safely off in a taxi and then pottered about vaguely, also taking photos of windowboxes and mailing them to papersky, some of which were nice enough that I may put them on flickr, which I have not updated in long enough that there are still photos from Oxford waiting to go up.

daharyn gets here tomorrow, yay ! The place is nice and tidy and ready so the plan for tonight is to finish rereading "Paradise Lost" in preparation for seeing the stage version again on Friday.

Even work is looking up a bit, at least on the processing-new-Ant-stuff front. Though flooded tunnel meant not being able to get to the patisserie for breakfast this morning, which was irritating. I hope that has drained by Wednesday.

4:07pm: more fun to lose on the roundabouts
++: Succeeded not only at two sizable lots of laundry yesterday in the pleasing heat, but also at general kitchen-cleaning and other house-cleaning stuff.

-: Running a little short on sleep because that took rather a while to do.

+: large envelope from the government of Quebec was "here is a form to send in to get your updated medical cards before your current ones expire" rather than the ever-dreaded "you have buggered up something in the labyrinth of taxation and you owe us more money."

-: Sodding "schools tax".

+: potato salad with pickle.

-: mildly earwormed with "The Worst Sex I've Ever Had", which is up there with "Every Sperm is Sacred" and "Springtime for Hitler" as things one does not want to find oneself singing in public.

?: $former_grandboss, who is involve with the new data coming into Ant despite that project being over for three years, only clarified today that when he said "we have new data for X and Y" what he actually meant was "we have new data for X and Y which we want processed as completely separate datasets and also combined with the existing data." Which is not a problem, we have done this before, save that for reasons of integrity checks we can't actually do both of these in the same database at the same time. Which means we need to establish a new database and process everything twice. And will take ensuingly longer.

++++: Leaving shortly to go meet livredor in the airport. *bounce*

-: Being in the airport to meet a flight from the US probably means I need to add "The War of 1812 Song" to the above list.

+: a spam claiming to be from a bank headed "statement" making me smile at the reflexive reaction "Fifteen-love."

3:34pm: interestingly strange archaeological claim
Three thousand years of glorious revolution at Catal Huyuk.

Seen on kenmacleodblog.

Even attempting to filter for the site's clear political predilections, this is intriguing; I'd appreciate any input anyone might have on where the more heavily used references in this paper fall on the reliable<->crank scale as it's not a field I know anything about myself.

2:11pm: film review: Moon
This was interestingly different.

The premise is that, in a base on the Far side of the moon engaged in helium-3 mining (pause for growls from james_nicoll), the single astronaut, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), is coming to the end of his three-year contract. Going out to investigate a problem with one of his robot harvesters he has a rover crash; Sam then wakes up in the infirmary with some memory loss, the explanation for which turns out to be more complicated than initally appears.

Moon is very much Sam Rockwell's film, and he is utterly excellent in it, getting the chance to show quite a wide range in a pleasingly low-key and realistic way. The feel is more than anything else reminiscent of the early travelling-to-Jupiter bits of 2001, it has a sense of this just being a guy doing his job who happens to be on the far side of the Moon, and the Kevin Spacey-voiced computer GERTY really can't be seen except in the light of HAL 9000, but holds up well both in being aware of that and in being its own solid thing. Everyone else in it is barely more than cameos. It's a very intense character study, distinctly and effectively creepy in places, treating its characters with respect and assumes they and the audience are both intelligent and decent, and very nicely unfolding its world and set-up in ways which hang together really rather well. Recommended.

1:00pm: today would be a good day to dry
The sun is out, for the first time in ages. If I had woken up an hour earlier I could have done a pile of washing this morning; as is I will do two this evening. I ended up playing Civ rather than writing last night, so we shall see what focus allows after I finish house-tidying; leaving a number of small irritating things to the point of building up momentum to do them all in a rush may or may not be sensible, but it is how I have done things this time.

Before we proceed with the new Ant data, we need to back up what we have got; which is a pain when the relevant backup script appears to have been erased late Tuesday night for no explicable reason and $sysadmin is lacking in helpful ways to restore it. Feels like the first chapter of Mostly Harmless around here today.

4:06pm: home alone again
The Infernal Workbench is a project I inherited when the group who assembled it moved on to other things. It consists of three major layers of software plus other auxiliary bits and bobs. It is complicated in Lovecraftian ways and has only ever been fully understood by its first group leader, who left several years ago; its second group leader spent about a year mostly asking me how it worked and being told that I had no clue, and then left. What it is technically supposed to do, and does rather well when it is actually working, is provide an interface and environment for running a whole lot of disparate tools and getting them to play nicely together. (The $bosses are prone to giving interns summer projects of the form "integrate shiny new tool X into the Infernal Workbench.) What it actually does, most of the time, is fall over. Our technical response to this normally consists of restart the machine, restart the database, restart the web server, and so on. $programmer has this down to something closse to a reflex action.

Of course, the day after $programmer leaves is the day when the Infernal Workbench falls over in a different way to its standard mode. $sysadmin says the machine is fine so it therefore must be a word software error and hence entirely mine to fix. When I look at the blasted thing, and what the user has said (not one of our more civilised users, either) it seems that what's happening is that the proxy server is balking and I need to go kick University-level IT people. *sigh*

Meanwhile, that "vitally urgent" task for $boss2 got completed yesterday; as of today, he has had no time to look at it. *sigh again*

Also, it is due to storm again tonight. A couple of sunny days would really help me with the clean clothes situation around now.

Also also, it is a bad idea for me to get twitchy about house-tidying late in evenings because it becomes "start task A in room 1, go to room 2 when task A requires it, notice something in room 2, start into task B, repeat", not in a getting-distracted sort of way but in an "I am teetering on an overly high priority stack which I must remember how to navigate back down" sort of way.

Also also also, I love the trailer for 9, but won't somebody think of the children who see it, love it, and next time they go to the video store try to rent 10 ?

3:39pm: a single chance prevails
This weekend I had a visiting redbird, who arrived on Friday evening, which did not quite give me as much time as I would ideally have liked for house cleaning post-papersky and zorinth's departure for Britain on Thursday, but redbird was tolerant of me boringly doing washing-up. Otherwise, sushi was consumed, good company was had, it continues sufficiently rainy and non-summer-like that the plants out back have needed less watering than I would have expected, and I found a copy of Somtow's Light on the Sound in the time-travel bookshop yesterday. Have been very oddly tired, including falling asleep for some significant time in the middle of the day Saturday, and seem to be so again today, damn it. And we went to Kam Fung for dinner yesterday and there should be enough leftovers to feed me tonight too. Workwise $curator is back and progress of sorts is happening at last.

12:28pm: like a weekend in the middle of the week
The plan to go see the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition downtown was foiled by much the same circumstances as foiled the plan to buy the new VNV album last week. We had breakfast in Reuben's, saw a bit of the Canada Day parade, the strongest descriptive adjective for which would come to mind being "multicultural"; the Gazette today says there were forty thousand people at this parade. We also saw about a dozen people marching behind a Canadian flag and a Union Jack on what appeared to be a "grumble about excessive Francophonicity" platform. The relative numbers here are pleasing. We also went out to dinner at Diogenes, more of the best calamari and doner in the world, during which there was a fair contender for the most intense storm I have ever been in the same place as; I have seen rain fall so heavily as not to be able to see the other side of the street here before, but usually for five or ten minutes at a time, not half an hour. All in all an extremely pleasant relaxed day of hanging out with family. Home internet still not reliable, but I played a little Civ instead.

And this morning I got my ATM card back from the bank, and we would seem to have a battery for the UPS for my development server. The only real downer about a weekend in the middle of the week is effectively having two Mondays.

12:31pm: further things that do not help
Being so wound up and so focused on trying to be calm and not stressing out than one forgets the bit where one takes the ATM card out of the ATM after withdrawing the money.

3:09pm: also
$programmer now has no idea at all whether he will be going away for a long holiday at the end of this week, at the end of next week, or at all.

This does not help. Nor do recurring nightmares about working for my father and having my teeth fall out.

1:41pm: better to light a sandal than to curse your blisters
papersky is back from 4th Street, I met her in the railway station Saturday evening, the train was a mere hour and a half late but having cunningly equipped myself with Queen's Play I was entirely capable of taking that in my stride. Also, we had a visiting rezendi Saturday evening and Sunday during the day, which was fun. I spent most of the weekend reading, listening to new VNV and swearing at slow internet. Also, Z and gf are now moving out for September 1 rather than August 1, due to medical things with the flat they are moving to's previous tenant.

$boss2, after making a huge fuss about getting things urgently end of the week before last, has not come back to me on some of them since; he has been busy every time I have gone to look today so far, but am hoping to catch him on this supposedly-urgent stuff some time later today.

11:21pm: books for May
( books May 2009 )

1:10am: writing: Armageddon Dreams
IX.3 (Xandryn): 2662 words. Done.
IX.4 (Apollyon): 1538 words. Done.

IX total: 12,142 words.

That was something of a surprise; what I thought was IX.3 became IX.4 and what I thought was a brief intro to IX.3 became an entirely new chapter; and this still leaves me with half of what I thought was IX.3 to do, and some reshuffling of the next few bits will be needed to handle that. It is however flowing and feeling good to do and I am learning yet more new stuff - another scene that goes between what I thought were the last and second-last chapters, which may or may not be a chapter of its own. And I have now got one secondary thread resolved completely. Yay endings.

8:30pm: consider a cubical monkey.
The new VNV Nation album is awesome. Furthermore, unlike every previous album of theirs, I am finding it awesome on first listening.

In news which might not be entirely unrelated, daharyn is a Hero of the Revolution.

I am going to stock up on a bit more awesome cheer and then go try to translate it into wordcount.

12:59pm: "...the recurring arguments between Sally and Ayn made Rand family dinners somewhat tiresome..."
It would be really nice if the severe thunderstorm watch would turn into an actual thunderstorm, because it's been pre-thunderstormy for longer than there's any need for. (Z said there was a storm yesterday afternoon, but I missed it.)

We just had a power cut which took down our development server, because $sysadmin has not yet got a replacement battery for its UPS so the thing is just plugged into the wall, and hence have had to go back a step in the population of Louse for the nominally end-of-August release.

I have just eaten probably the most boring chocolate-oatmeal cookie I have ever had in my life, and a strong contender for the most boring cookie of any description; it was most like unto something with which one would stick wallpaper to walls.

I am rereading Lest Darkness Fall. This at least is cheering.

11:58pm: *growl*
Transformers 2: among the five worst movies I have ever seen, way below bad enough to be enjoyable.

New VNV album; according to the computer in HMV released in Canada on May 28 and already sold out.

Home net; still a pig, if slightly less of one.

The only not-online moments today worth having were being in the right place and time to hold a heavy metro door for a particularly small and frail-looking old lady and being complimented on my thoughtfulness, and poutine in Reuben's.

1:40pm: magic internets, make up my mind for me
Do I want to go see Transformers this evening ?

Bearing in mind that what I really want is to go see Transformers last Tuesday when I was in the perfect mood for it, and time travel is not an option available to me at the moment.

12:10pm: wail of summer
Yesterday's happy joyful trip downtown to take advantage of the public holiday to go to HMV and buy the new VNV Nation album (released on Tuesday) was spiked by HMV being closed for the public holiday.

Yesterday's attempt to get writing done was not just a failure to produce anything useful, but a failure of the sort that leaves one seriously doubting why one does this in the first place.

Yesterday's arguments with Z on the continuing theme that there being a clean glass and a clean plate in the house does not mean washing up does not need to be done was also not mood-helpful.

Yesterday's total unusable slowness of home internet connection very much also a minus.

Yesterday night's drastic lack of sleep also did not help. Nor did not being able to find my metro pass this morning. Nor does $programmer being out sick today.

I think that bids fair to have been the single most useless day's "holiday" I have ever had. I did some washing up myself, and washed a load of clothes, and that was it.

2:29pm: work: internal communication oops
To simplify more than a little, one of the things I have been kicking in work recently is a complicated query function, with which three different things turned out to be wrong, one of which is "hardware is old and getting a bit finite for rate of growth of dataset". Some of the classes of result this function returns we have been texting and fixing on a case-by-case basis.

The opportunities for misunderstanding brought on by writing "all fixed" meaning "the option for retrieving all of the things you have queried is fixed" rather than "all the possible query options have been fixed" will probably be funny in retrospect.

1:18pm: weekend, Fringe and stuff. Lots of stuff.
Friday night I went to two Fringe shows. At 17.45 in the Just for Laughs studio space, Berkoff's The Secret Love Life of Ophelia, which is a slice through Hamlet as the correspondence between Hamlet and Ophelia, before and during the play; with Hamlet's rejection of Ophelia and antics at the play-within-the-play as both of them acting for other people's benefit. The text is wonderful, Berkoff's blank verse and playing around with some of the imagery from the original really feels like it could fit in the interstices, and it does very effective Shakespearean eros. The actors, Alicia Novak and Darren Boquist, were generally very good, modulo a couple of places where NorAm pronunciations threw the scansion off. The staging... was unfortunately reminiscent of the bit in Jesus of Montreal where they parody the Comedie Francaise. Lots of slo-mo and exagerratedly stylised gestures; how much that's in the text I don't know, it was certainly a feature of the Berkoff-directed Salome I saw in Dublin in the early 1990s so it may just be Berkoff's thing, but I did not like it then and I do not now; also, background music should not drown out the actual lines.

It turned out that the street fair on St. Laurent was this weekend, and in poking around in various of the stalls I found myself a copy of Hudson Hawk on DVD, yay. Now all I need is the first McG Charlie's Angels and my collection of great bad movies will be complete.

Then at 8 pm at Mainline there was Dracula in a time of Climate Change, a play unfortunately lacking in programmes so that I am scraping other reviews off the net to find out who the actors were. This is a surprisingly faithful, at some levels, contemporary comic redaction of Dracula, in which Lucy Westenra is an environmental science Masters' student going to Romania on an exchange program, welcomed to the creepy old house of Mr. Dracul, who greets her offer of an organic smoothie with "I do not drink... celery", and who is motivated by the sweetness of her vegetarian blood to come to Montreal. Scott Kettles' Dracula and Susannah Jones' Renfield make a wonderful double act, the former eschewing excessive camp for a perfect straight man, uncomprehending at all the right levels, and the latter brilliantly combining manic glee with a puppyish unrequited yearning for "the Master". The environmental activism stuff teeters on the edge of too unsubtle, and mostly works; the local references are to the point but not to the extent that it wouldn't travel. (Taking Renfield to the Insectarium; bad idea.) All in all, a very great deal of fun.

Saturday, then, I had a long phone conversation with my mother, mostly about the sudden forward motion on my parent's complicated two-house situation which appears to involve having made the houes on what was my grandmother's land a great deal closer to livable in (since I was there in March) and carrying out major floor-ripping-up-type structural work on the house they have lived in this past nearly thirty years. Also chatted with daharyn, yay ! And later that afternoon watched Ang Lee's Hulk again; I definitely think the infelicities (if you have a perfect origin story laid out in the credits don't spend the next half-hour redoing it; tantalisingly too little inside Banner's mind; and let's just forget the gamma-mutated poodle entirely) are outweighed by the virtues (Eric Bana; Nick Nolte; the Sam Elliott part actually played by Sam Elliott; understanding the scale at which to put one's cameos; Ang Lee's knowing how pacing works; and while it may not succeed at being Sophocles for superheros, at least it is trying something different.) Then Saturday night was Prairie Fire's Burlesque Unzipped, a discourse on the history of the burlesque show in a form approximating to a burlesque show; rather much for one person to tackle, but it had its moments, particularly the bits about the social context of the can-can.

Sunday I was up and out early for me to meet inamoratakitsch and friends for dim sum, which was a lot of fun; and then went back home and did some of the occasional cleaning jobs best done in papersky's absence, such as moving the dryer to clean the accumulated fluff out from behind, and moving the bed to brush underneath; wrote all afternoon, watched Shoot 'Em Up again in the evening, and got to bed relatively early for me which was A Good Decision. I may or may not go out and do something with inamoratakitsch and company again tonight depending on whether I hear from them; the impression I have is that they are very much improvising their way around but having a great time anyway.

6:36pm: writing: Armageddon Dreams
IX.2(Malcolm): 4046 words. done.
IX.3(Xandryn, still adrift): 1553 words, not done.

IX in total: 9495 words.

3:30pm: it is a curiously settling thing...
...when one has not done any serious programming in too bloody long, to take something on and get it done and tested and working in half an hour less than one's own estimate of how long it should actually take.

10:28am: mixed bag
Good: Obama administration does another heartening thing, but one that's more personally so to me. Link c/o prince_corwin.

Bad: one of the problems with having a congestedy chest is that a dream about a friendly hug from a person one cares about and misses too easily morphs into a dream of said person unknowingly leaning their entire weight on one's chest and one wakes up more than a little short of breath.

Ugly: the guy talking into the phone as I was on the way to the Metro, repeating in increasing frustration the number he wanted the person at the other end to take down; which he was saying as "quatre-two-eight-huit". That does not seem to promote ready comprehension no matter who is on the other end.

Just Plain Weird: it appears that being overtired and faintly sick is one way of kicking the putting-the-plot-of-the-end-of-the-book-together bit of my brain into overdrive. I think I have noted down every idea that's come to me in the past twelve hours or so, and I hope they stay good when I look at them again.