mcpantz.org

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you’d know I hate mornings.  We’re not talking cutesy Garfield grumpiness, we’re talking it’s-sharp-objects-time distaste for life.  College let me cement a lax schedule in my life, and working from home lets it continue.

Over Christmas break, my sleeping schedule got completely discombobulated, since I had about eleven consecutive days.  For the next week, it was difficult for me to get up before noon, and was getting worse.  Finally a couple weeks ago, a couple naps aligned my sleep schedule in such a way that I was getting up between 5 and 7 am; something I haven’t done since my high school days.

So far, the major difference is how I use my time.  I usually spend the hours between midnight and 4am doing a lot of nothing.  It’s me time, but I’m usually surfing the internet or watching TV.  When I get up early, I eat (something I used to not do as well), relax online for a while, then get to work.  The relaxed pace of the morning has helped me concentrate on my tasks a lot better than before.  This also lets me leave my afternoons open to socialize or work on my own projects, which I’ve been lamenting for quite a while.

However, it’s harder for me to stay up late.  During the week I’ve been going to bed at about midnight or so, but on weekends I rarely get to bed before 4am.  Yes, my social life is just that draining.  I’m worried about flipping schedules again, but I think I’ll be able to maintain it.

I did unintentionally crash from about 5pm til midnight this past Sunday after a particularly draining night and a brunch with friends that didn’t leave me but five hours of sleep.   This is probably also a result of sleeping only about 6 hours a night; and my body wanting to play catch-up.  Either way, I’m going to need to find a balance, what with work and play once again coming into conflict

So here we are in 2009, and in between the hangovers and days off people are considering what they’d like to achieve this year.  I already accomplished my major goal (see last post), but there’s still much I’d like to do before I feel like I’m living a completely sane and productive life:

• I’d like to start working out again.  I don’t specifically mean getting pumped in the gym, but to get back into martial arts or somehow train myself  physically.  I’m not wasting away, but I want to make sure I still am in good shape.
• I want to be more of a polyglot, both spoken and computational.  I want to pick up Python and Haskell in the coming year, though using darcs, haskell’s community-standard revision control system, isn’t all that appealing to me.  Beyond that, I want a good excuse to start practicing my spoken languages again, as my German’s always been abysmal and my Spanish could use some polishing.  If I’m feeling particularly ambitious, I’ll pick up French; but that’s got a snowball’s chance right now.
• In addition to adding new languages, I’d like to expand my toolkit.  I worked as a web programmer for half a year a while back, and I’d like to re-vamp those skills in Perl so I can put things together myself, and actually work on the web projects I’ve had in mind for a while.
• While it’s certainly not a major issue now, I should be putting 15-20% of my take-home pay into savings.  I’ve got a couple recurring withdrawals set up to do that right now.

All in all, my goals are relatively modest, but I feel like that’s what makes them achievable.  Call me back in a year, and we’ll see where I am.

When I turned 18, I was staying with my aunt and uncle in Champaign, IL; soon on my way to college.  The first thing I did that night was go down to the nearest convenience store and bought a pack of black and milds.  That didn’t quite strike my fancy, so I switched to Marlboro Reds.  Since then, I’ve been a pretty hardcore smoker.

I did manage to do a really good job of cutting back for about three months in the fall of 2006, where I was only having one cigarette a day.   Smoking was primarily a social activity for me, and my coworkers at the computer lab I was working at would often cut out about noon to re-center ourselves.  However, the stress involved with the last year of college compounded with a rather intense breakup plunged my addiction deeper than it had been before, and that’s where it’s been since.

I found that smoking is more often a psychologically fulfilling activity for me, and that was reflected in my choice of tobacco.  From Black n’ Milds, I switched to Marlboro Reds, to Djarum Blacks, and then to Lucky Strikes.  Cost & convenience switched me to Drum rolling tobacco in the end, which I’ve been smoking almost exclusively for the past three years or so.  My choices were often motivated by image, and I often relied on smoking as a fashion accessory as much as anything else.

Every time I get sick, I’d get nagged about how my revovery period is on the order of weeks instead of days, and that i should see a doctor.  I never considered it a major issue, because I knew what to expect.  However, recently after an illness, after I had recovered, I noticed that every time I laughed, I’d cough.  Every time.  It was violent enough to the point where i noticed myself subconsciously trying to stop laughing.

For someone like me who enjoys my sense of humor in life, I found this unacceptable.   So as of Sunday night, I have not had one cigarette.  I’ve gone cold turkey.

Today marks the sixth day since my last smoke, and so far I’ve resisted the temptation many times, between going out to Neo, where at any point about 20% of the patrons are outside smoking, to simply being around people who leave the main group, and missing the change to express my usual cynicism and wit in a more relaxed, one-on-one context of sharing a mood-altering substance.

I’ve also noticed that without the sweet, sweet nicotine coursing through my body, I’ve become quite irritable and a bit more misanthropic than is usual for me.  However, this is usual and expected, and is supposed to end after a month or so after hating everyone.  Hopefully, I can get over being an insufferable dick to everyone, and thinking that everyone is the same, and reclaim a much healthier lifestyle.

Because I’ve never had one. Frankly, most poetry that gets handed off to me, I have a very low opinion of. However, a bit of googling led me to this highlights collection, and refreshes my opinion of the beauty of brevity of words. Can anyone else recommend poets that are capable of delivering the full value of their words without making it feel like a laborious, overwrought exercise? Just like coding, music and every other subjective field I’ve come across, there is beauty to be found in minimalism.

…I left my combat boots in San Francisco. Seriously, when I was out in Sunnyvale for work for the week.

To clarify, my job shipped me out to the Bay area for a week, and a couple of long weekends. A couple coworkers of mine are spending their time off camping & climbing, I decided to hit San Francisco and stay with Christian Perry of SF Beta and Room Full of People fame. I’ve had a fun time cavorting in the SF social scene, and met some very interesting movers and shakers in the web world. In a twist of irony, I spent my week working down in Sunnyvale in an industry older than a PDP-11. Hardly what is to be expected in the Web 2.0 Mecca.

I suppose I haven’t’ clarified exactly what I do, so I’ll go ahead and run it down; since it’s a lot of fun to talk about and I’d like people to know. For the past couple months, I’ve been working for a startup backup software company called Zmanda. We’re currently a leader in open source backup technology, and a fair portion of our engineers work solely on open source software; myself included. I am heading up an effort to analyze & improve BackupPC, and potentially integrate it with our other offerings. This has led me to some really nitty-gritty systems level concerns, which are always fun to deal with; along with a unusually clever storage engine.

However, I’m talking about San Francisco, primarily. I had a great time. A bloody awesome time. The city always seems to have something to do and I am there to enjoy it. The people are awesome and welcoming, and I got to go see a lot of what the city has to offer. My first weekend I spent clubbing and spent time with my cousin Will, who took me out to see a few bands and then off to a bar with a Depeche Mode cover band. Some people may call that heresy, but it was a lot of fun.

The next weekend I got to hang out with a bunch of college friends, and got to see such wonders like an Absinthe bar, complete with lit ice cubes and pixies fluttering about. I also got to reconnect with a bunch of other alums that I hadn’t met before, but were second-degree friends.

Either way, it’s a really rough decision on whether to stay in Chicago, or go out to the Bay area. We’ll see what happens in the next few weeks.