As Steve, my ever-well-muscled roommate, reminded me - I have not spewed forth on any number of topics here since almost half a year ago. A friend of mine once remarked to me that when you are actually busy living life, there is npot much time to write about it.
I will see if I can knock off the more interesting parts of those months in short order.
In the working world - my old company, Iron Mountain, sold off its digital division to Autonomy Corporation, a real, honest-to-goodness software company (rather than a 'services' company like Iron Mountain is...which is just a fancy word to stand in for the phrase "we are unable to realize that storing paper records is a soon-dying business") based in Cambridge, UK. There's been a lot of to-do - people leaving and swooping out of nowhere with new directives and infrastructure changes and all that. In the midst of this I somehow managed to finish the piece of software I'd been laboring on for about a year and a half, and so the Good Ship Outflow has finally taken its maiden flight. Things continue to be busy on that front.
In all things running - I didn't quite reach where I wanted to be this year, despite the somewhat drastic change in training during indoors and the extra endurance that most certainly gave me. I ended up running 3:58.65 for the 1500 at New Balance Boston's third home meet - when at the beginning of the season I had said I was looking for 3:54.
In arenas musical, I haven't had quite the time to devote as I've wished. I managed to get past a significant roadblock I'd erected in one or two songs, so I now have 2 fairly complete tunes (out of the 8 I'm shooting for). Unfortunately for me, the fact that the songs are written is almost meaningless, as recording tends to be the real bitch of the process.
In the wide world of text-based video games, some 4000-odd people have now downloaded NWBD and I have earned something like 2 dollars and 89 cents. That equates to about a dime for every hour I put into it. It's been fun to do something else in programming besides fix ever more esoteric bugs involving the stupid characters you can insert into a Mac file name. Did you know that in Mac OS you can have a file named by only a space character? Or a carriage return? How about a bell character? If you have no idea what those mean, rest assured, it means that Mac OS has made my life a little more miserable.
It seems like for the most part my job revolves around the 'data structures' part of computer science - how to formulate information so that you have what you need in a given situation, no more and no less. Games, on the other hand, have some algorithmic complexity - how to get from point A to point B with the shortest parth ossible if some points in between are not traversable, and if the landscape may change while you're movng..for example. It tends to attract my attention a little more.
Last, but certainly not least, the Bridgestone Potenzas have made their way back onto my vehicle, and with summer tires comes smoky burnouts and autocross. I got my ass out to Devens-Moore Airfield a few weeks ago and had a pretty damn good time. I beat a mid-80's Corvette on time (which is saying something) but lost to a Honda Fit (ok...so it really isn't saying anything at all). I definitely sucked less, though. It helped that I had a lot of good instructors from the fine folks at NER...and I think just being more aggressive with the car aided a ton, too. I am actually a little scared to throw as much at my RX-8 as it can take - it handled supremely throughout and it's pretty clear that I am the biggest limiting factor in the car. That's reinforced by the fact that one of the perennial top-10 drivers in the region drives the same car without any serious modifications.
Other than that, my summer has consisted of watching the Pittsburgh Pirates actually be a respectable team again, getting into swanky clubs in NYC wearing shorts and sneakers, hanging out with friends and family, occasionally putting some poetry up on thefircoat.com, and drinking a humongous Tom Collins whenever the hell I feel like it. Not too bad.
