Not the best of days

I've been hibernating, a bit. Well, hiding out, actually, working once again in preparation for today's site visit from a major funding agency. The same review for which I spent much of July writing a lengthy report. And last night was a reprise of the night of a thousand Powerpoints. Because that's what I do, I'm a Powerpoint jockey extraordinaire. I am even a master of Ye Olde Powerpointe Heade Tricke, and have taught it to my disciple, yea verily.

But I digress.

Having also completed reformatting my 105-page report for That Place Where I Work™, late last night (ok, ok, it was only 69 pages long until they asked me to double-space it; it was still long), I hauled myself out of bed at 5:20 AM, rolled in to work by 7:15, and promptly spent the rest of the day closeted in a room with what turned out to be a not-particularly-hostile review panel.

It's what we do around here, it seems.

Anyway, as Black Knight has noted, time management is not one of my greatest strengths and I probably could have gotten this all completed a bit earlier. Either that, or I'm tremendously productive within the last 5% of the allotted time available before the deadline. It really depends on how you look at it.

Returned home, tired, to a couple of hyperactive kids who are well aware that TOMORROW IS HALLOWE'EN AND THERE WILL BE CANDY AND A VAMPIRE COSTUME AND A PRINCESS COSTUME AND THE JACK'O'LANTERNS WILL BE LIT, and a not-as-tired but still overworked Mrs. R'pus.

And the news that our next door neighbour has suddenly died.

As I said, not the best of days.

There will be a short pause...

...while I chase the budgie off the fridge.

Boo!

Not much to report... just been playing around a bit with Vexer, a rather fun but almost incomprehensible graphic art tool that Mike, who hangs out over at Flickr, turned me on to. It's loads of fun to play with, if somewhat unpredictable and almost completely lacking in instructions.

Here's a photo of mine, given the Vexer treatment:



And some more crazy stuff:



More in the art set.

Everything above links through to the Flickr photos, since, once again, the Blogger image upload tool is broken.

Joke of the day, again

As a contrast to Saturday's thoughtful, tediously crafted and terribly serious post, here is another Most Excellent Joke™ courtesy of the Junior Ricardipi.*

I've told this one before, but it's an absolute classic, so here it is again.

Knock Knock.
Who's there?
Monkeysaurus.
Monkeysaurus who?
Monkeysaurus BANANA!!!

[gales of laughter]


Classic, I tell you.


*In this context, the term "most excellent" does not necessarily mean exactly what most people would think it does.

Breakpoints

In five more minutes, I leave this hotel
this half-way house
for runners and failures
where anxiety, gentle yet disturbing
as a poem by Susan Musgrave
tightens heart
constricts chest


Every day has its turning points, its critical times that signal the end, or the beginning, or some other milestone that seems so important in the middle of an otherwise unremarkable day. There are always the checkpoints in the morning - far too early to be awake, too late to be starting the shower, late for the bus. And at the other end, the day is bookmarked with ten, eleven, twelve o'clock - bedtime's well past, and those morning worries are creeping up again, not so far off now. But during the day, well, there are always those other critical times, the ones that partition the day into manageable pieces, or if you like, fragment it into innings that are too short, or too rushed, or too crowded one into the other to let you really get things rolling.

10:00 AM - it's time to stop and think - what have I done so far? By ten-thirty, things had better be well underway, because when 11:00 rolls around, the morning is almost done, frittered away most likely and there's no hope of getting anything serious started and completed before lunch.

2:00 is the analogous time in the afternoon... either too late to be finishing lunch, far too late to be starting it, or, most likely, just about the time that I realize I'd better get my skates on if I want to complete a good chunk of work before the afternoon is over.

4:00 PM is a time when I begin to feel that gloomy late-afternoon feeling: the day is almost done, it's too late to get anything meaningful started and completed, in wintertime it's getting dark. I have to think about leaving on time to catch the bus. It's a depressing time of day, when the glorious, burnt-umber autumnal glow of three-something gives way to the gloom and wintry despair of 5:00.

And so home, that ever-present little shade of guilt at not having accomplished quite as much as I might have hoped. If only the day could be made to flow, streaming round those clockwork chicanes and streaking away to its end, all sail up the mast, afterburners on, sixth gear at the redline. Just think what could be achieved.

Another Holiday weekend, continued

It seems the long weekend, which consisted mainly of work, has continued into Tuesday night with a trip to Ikea. Okay, technically, a trip to a point roughly five percent of the way to Ikea, followed by a trip home, followed by removing the kids' car seats so that there would actually be room for furniture, followed by a trip to Ikea. There was also a trip home, but that came later. I was on my own, so oh yes, there was loud music.

All of which was followed by the assembly of a new kitchen table, round this time instead of oblong. And the matching chairs, which I smuggled into the house knowing full well that Mrs. Ricardipus had resigned herself to the fact that they would never, ever fit in the car along with the table. Hah! Never underestimate my l33t p4ck1n6 sk1LLz!!!

We'll see what she says when she comes upstairs...

Another Holiday weekend

What I did this weekend:

- cleaned some bathrooms
- replaced the plug on the vacuum cleaner, and changed the bag
- washed a bunch of pots and pans
- stripped, caulked, primed and painted the woodwork around the patio door
- proofread one of Mrs. Ricardipus' essays
- supervised Junior Ricardipus #1's homework, and listened to Junior Ricardipus #2 reading
- checked (work) email on Monday, as the rest of the world doesn't know about Canadian Thanksgiving.

Just another average holiday weekend, I guess. Ho hum.


EDIT: Also, hung a clock on Junior Ricardipus #2's wall. This rock 'n roll lifestyle, it's killing me.

Johnny Cash - Thanksgiving Song

Happy Thanksgiving to all the Canadians out there.

It's all a bit slow and annoying

No, I'm not talking about the transit system, Canada Post or even me. I'm talking about the wretched wireless internetworky thing in Chateau Ricardipus, which is giving me grief. And impairing my blogging.


Figure 1. Wireless router (detail).

Usually blasting along at a laser-fast* 54 Mbits/second (say what?) and using some arcane security protocol called WPA, the thing has decided over the last few days to tick over at rates down to 1 Mbit/second (still don't know, but it seems slower, doesn't it?). My lovely laptop now seems to notify me about once every two minutes that the wireless is connected, which I interpret as meaning it's probably falling off and on with some regularity. Of course, these problems are never consistently repeated on the even lovelier Mrs. Ricardipus' laptop (which is newer and spiffier, if running Windows Vista which is indeed the work of the devil).

The old chugger of a desktop downstairs is perfectly happy, being tacked into said wireless router with an honest-to-goodness "cable". And plugging this laptop beastie into said "cable" seems to work fine as well.

So...

1) the wireless router is intermittently knackered (seems likely); or

2) the wireless card in this laptop is crap (also seems likely); or

3) the internet coming into the house via the devil's minions known as Rogers Cable is crud (more than likely to be sure, but I think not the root of today's evil); or

4) some spyware has hijacked one or more of our computers (unlikely, since I manically scan for the stuff more frequently than is probably necessary, and this computer has all kinds of pre-loaded junk that looks for it too).

Of course, the router manual is completely arcane, and for various reasons I have to log off and back on as an Administrator in order to get a look at all the configuration and setup of the wireless card in the laptop. Don't ask, I'm not telling. But it is terribly, terribly inconvenient and I rather doubt I would know what to look for anyway.

Nevertheless, it's resulted in a passable imitation of a rant for today's blog post, but has been really, really frustrating. Somehow, I managed to get the grant application I've been working on done on time (uploading the final file exactly six minutes before today's deadline), but looking up background information in the evenings at slow-to-no-speed-at-all has been a bit trying.

Just another chapter, you know, in my own little private War With Technology™.


*exaggeration

--

In other news, the lovely Mrs. Ricardipus knocked my socks off by not only identifying a Maserati Quattroporte as she dueled its Ferrari-sourced 4.2-litre V8 with our Mazda-rrific 105 horse powerplant on her way to university one day, but actually bothering (and remembering) to tell me about it. She even liked the look of the car. There's hope for her yet.

She wasn't nearly as excited as I was to see a (admittedly ugly in that colour) silver-gray Ferrari 550 (or 575M? I can't tell the difference without getting a good look at the headlights) Maranello steaming by us on Saturday. Ah well, little steps, little steps.

It's called a knowledge management system, allegedly

There is a pile on my desk at work, a nice, neat pile of papers that I have decided I need to read. Some are reports, some are guidelines, some are entire journals or trade rags, but most are reprints from genetics journals that are more-or-less relevant to what I do all day.

Once in a while, I will take one or more of these and put them in my briefcase for reading on the bus to and from home (or work, depending how you look at it). When they've been read, they get filed appropriately, given to someone else who might be interested, or recycled. Sometimes, they don't get read right away and become ratty and dog-eared. Occasionally, they get put back in the pile. Even more occasionally, they sit around in the briefcase for so long that they're just not relevant any more, and then I can happily toss them in the blue box. Which doesn't help me to learn anything, but certainly contributes to decreasing the amount of paper I'm carrying around. Ignore it until it goes away - the quintessentially Canadian solution.

The pile of papers, as you may guess, expands continuously. It never gets smaller, except by one or two papers every now and then, and tends to experience a net gain of two or three every week. It's been there for months, growing deeper and deeper as time goes by.

When I'm feeling like the office needs tidying, the pile gets straightened up, moved to a more aesthetically pleasing location, and then goes on existing just like it did before. Sometimes when I do this, it winks at me, as if to say "I'm still here, and you know it. Thanks for the new spot in the sun." It makes sense that it's developing sentience - after all, as each week passes, the amount of knowledge contained in the pile increases. In another year or two, it'll be humming to itself and reading Wikipedia when I'm off doing something else. Give it a few millennia, and it'll pretty much be running the joint.

So there you have it. Me and my pile of papers, sharing an office and slowly evolving towards achieving the sum total of all human knowledge. Or at least those specific bits that might be useful for someone like me. I suppose I could make a concerted effort to read everything and make the pile disappear, but I know it would be a losing battle, and I haven't the heart anyway. I kind of like it when it winks at me.