It doesn't work

  Dealing with another thing at work that just doesn't work. Simply changing the compiler to a new version has created all sorts of problems. Kind of annoying but the kind of thing that you have to deal with above and beyond just getting the code to do what you want. Standards change over time, compilers themselves are pieces of software with bugs of their own and even the hardware CPU you run on sometimes has a bug in it. Kind of hard to fix that last one but getting software to run cleanly is so much harder than it sounds, especially when you just change something outside that piece of software that you have no real control over and it breaks.

  It takes a lot of thinking about and fiddling with. As my wife put it, it broke because it doesn't work. That is the easy bit unfortunately, the working out the exact details why is so much harder and something people come to me for quite a lot. I've spent a lot of my career working out why things don't work.

  Oh well, today has been good anyway. Payday, half naked wife walking around, sausage rolls for a snack and now I get to finish work for the day and do what I want for the rest of today. Not a bad deal for letting people use my brain for a bit of time.

Plaintive mewling

  Got woken up again this morning by desperate meows from Lucy. That is got woken up for the second time after being woken up an hour earlier at 4:45 am by one of the cats in order for them to be fed. Still it has become a repeating theme that Lucy gets so anxious about having one of us up and about so she can go back to sleep she will not give up trying to get us up. Even water bottle spraying didn't dissuade her. In her own way it is her method of getting what she needs. A very annoying way but there it is. All of the cats have there own thing about getting what they want, Boots whines until he is followed, Fudge just barges in and sits down and Daisy will barrel through and climb her way at high speed in order to go where she wants.

  Still it does show how much they rely on us. Sure they go off to do their own thing but they cling to us like little children. They really are small fluffy kids at heart that never grow up and leave. Strange to think the oldest cat is 14 this year. That is the longest I've ever had any pet, 5 years being the most before in my childhood. Having a companion for that long is going to make it so different when they are not around. Hard to think about that moment. For now though even the annoying parts will be remembered and enjoyed in their own way. Even when they are being a nuisance our cats are so great.

Pictures in my head

  I've spent the day working today reading code and making pictures of code flow in my head. Quite a lot of people seem to be able to learn by reading a document and looking at diagrams. I find those pretty meaningless since they are so disconnected from the actual code that does the actual job of what the software is meant to do. Something about sitting down and reading through code in an overall level makes it so much easier for me to visualise how something works. I'm not sure why I seem to be so different from other software people in that way. Maybe they get lost in the details of each line of code without being able to just get an idea of the overall flow from the higher level view of the code.

  Maybe that is why I've gotten to where I am in my career. I can look at some actual code, of which there is a lot already written by other people, get an idea of what it is trying to do and how and then make it do something else. Or make it do something properly. Or even just make it do the same thing but in a better way that is invisible to the end user. I can sit and read code all day sometimes, I've done it most of today uninterrupted by other work people, and then it sticks in my head. I can still describe code flows from software I worked on almost two decades ago. Argh, why do I remember these things and not others?

  Still I'm glad I have this ability and can use it to earn a living for me and my wife. It allows us to live a decent life and not worry about things generally.

Crazy cats

  The two girl cats, Daisy and Lucy, being still quite young like to play a lot. Unlike to two older cats who are now both 13 going on 14 soon. Because of this they are particularly susceptible to the laser pointer. Even more so than the boys were when they were younger. Take this video as an example

  Sure Lucy doesn't run around as much after the pointer, her sister Daisy is much more of a chaser, but they both go nuts trying to get this little red dot.

Worry wart

  My wife had her first appointment with her new GP doctor today. For some reason I was nervous again, as I can be quite often when it comes to my wife's health. After the usual delays and getting through the appointment it seems my wife is pretty healthy but might have something else wrong with her. At least that is the explanation of a complaint she has had recently. We shall see once prescriptions, tests and other stuff is gone through.

  Still even with all that I do worry about her. She has had more problems than I have and I don't want her to have problems. I try my best to make her life easy but obviously can't directly control her health. The best I can do is make sure she has what she needs and has access to anything and everything. I know my wife noticed my worry, I was quite flustered as we got ready to go to this doctor appointment.

  So there we go, that is my instant worry wart moment. When it comes to my wife's health I will instantly worry about it. It matters to me so much that she is healthy and can enjoy life.

Savouring the experience

  I'm playing The Last Of Us every night at the moment, basically ever since it arrived Friday. It is turning out to be one of those games where I want to know what happens but don't want it to finish. Therefore I find myself playing a bit of it and then leaving it at that, maybe a couple of hours at a time. Inevitably there will come a point in the game each night where I reach a point where I get stuck as it were. Not stuck as in I don't know what to do but more in the challenge presented by the game to get past a certain encounter. I then realise that in order to not get frustrated by the game and to continue to enjoy it I leave it at that for the night. Playing this way is really working for me, I'm thoroughly enjoying the experience and getting the most out of it I feel.

  Kind of weird that most games I can plow through getting as much out of them as fast as I can but with this one I want it to last. I know I'll be sad when I finish it since the game won't be fresh to me any more, just like the first time you experience any new form of entertainment. Still I'm glad it is turning out to be one of games that I can really savour.

No stress

  Today I realised another thing living in this new house. Pretty much zero stress. I still deal with work, the bills and all that stuff but I don't stress about it. Just being somewhere more relaxing makes it all a doddle. Grrrr to all the people who made this a hard thing to do in the first place, our lives would have been so much easier so long ago if we could have done this sooner. I suppose work is going to stress me out sometime but I'll deal with it and at least here I don't have to deal with it face to face I can do it over IM, email and VoIP calls or some other form of online communication. Having an idiot standing there in front of you, trying to get them to understand what they have to do or why they are wrong really doesn't help the situation. As long as the potential new neighbours are quiet (since two houses near us have sold recently) this place is going to work out fine for us.

  In other more important news, a Lego film guys. All is right in the world with more Lego in it.

Rest of the world?

  I've found the one great advantage of living where we do now. The rest of the world doesn't exist for the vast majority of the time. There can be so little interaction and interruption from other people here you can just live how you want in your own world. That is exactly what we moved for and we seem to have found it here. In fact it has taken me until now to fully realise it since living here you really don't notice it if you like peace and quiet.

  So it has been what 3 weeks now? Other than the initial teething problems and getting around to having everything set up and in place it all seems to be great. It feels like home now and the rest of the world can stay away from us. Other than the odd UPS/Fedex delivery truck turning up to deliver the latest amazon delivery really nobody comes around here. Even the road at the edge of the property is quiet most of the day, just the occasional car going by to the few houses further up.

  So with all this quiet I've been catching up on my game playing, several good ones right now. I've nearly finished Borderlands 2, a definite improvement from the first one that gets rid of all the niggles that were there. Then The Last Of Us turned up and that is turning out so well. I'm about 40% through before I decided to try another game and I really want to see how it finishes. For once it seems that the characters seem like actual people than and the game play takes some skill to do well. Finally I picked up Bioshock Infinite, which although you can see similarities to the original Bioshock, manages to actually be a fun game to play unlike the first which felt like a chore some times and led to me not finishing it. Plenty of game playing time in my future with just these 3 games. Not to mention the literal foot high pile of blu rays to watch by the TV right now.

Sleeping in

  An advantage of working from home full time now, I get to sleep in. The cats wake me up to be fed before 6am every day so getting up to work at that time is really easy. Considering I used to get up at 4:30am this is a big plus for me. It also means I don't need to go to bed at 9pm each night I can stay up a little bit later and get more game playing time in. I've probably played more games recently than I usually do even though it isn't that much. I could play so much more, especially since I'm playing Borderlands 2 at the moment which has a lot of content in it.

  So after 3 hours I'm now back writing this blog, took a long lunch break with my wife and did some errands. Not bad for working from home and it seems nobody missed me. Just means I need to work a little longer and get what I need to do work wise finished now. All this working from home also means I get to have lunch out with my wife more often as we did today. Looking around town there are a few places to try for sure and so far everywhere we have eaten has been half decent at least, some of them actually pretty good. Nice for a little town like this one is.

  Anyway, going to finish my work now as my wife plants a whole bunch of new plants in the garden to make it less bare. Trying to spruce this place up a bit.

Fitting in

  Going through a period of fitting in to this new house, learning its quirks and finding the best way to live day to day here. After a couple of weeks now we are mostly settled down, slight mishaps and breakages ignored, and back in to a rough routine now. It is feeling like home and not just somewhere we happen to be. Sure there is still that newness to it as we do things for the first time and that thing you get when you realise you are not sure where something is since you haven't memorised the place where everything goes yet. Even with that though it is somewhere we are going to enjoy being for quite a while. The quiet surroundings and wildlife only reinforce that notion. Heck we even had a deer with two tiny babies go through the garden this morning, how many people can say that?

  In other thoughts on my mind, I'm being quite productive with my work at home. Nobody around to take my attention away or interrupt me. It is also surprising my wife how much I just sit and think about something. It is strange to think that me just working something out in my head is something I get paid for. The actual act of putting that in to physical movement to make a computer do something can be quite small.

  One final thought for today, Microsoft is making the same mistakes every other console maker that was in the "lead" is making so it is going to be interesting to see how sales go come the holiday season. Personally obviously I've preordered the PS4, especially given the $100 price difference (no required camera/kinect crap). Can't wait to see how some of the games coming up for it turn out, no more memory restrictions holding things back and they will actually run in 1080p not 720p with some internal rendering resolution that is actually lower. Always fun when a console generation rolls on.

I can deal with this

  Well with the internet outage we had this week I've only actually been able to work 2 days. Yesterday I did more hours than I normally would do to make it up and today I've got quite a bit done already. In fact if you think about it I've already managed to get what most people get done in a week in two days. Speaking to my boss yesterday and he was elated to get me back and happy with what I've got done.

  So working from home, seriously good thing to do. Especially when you can be efficient with how you do your work. You get BLTs for lunch with a warm cookie, work in your PJs in the morning, talk face to face with your wife when you want to. Pretty damn good.

Made it

  Well we are settled in the new house and through all the teething problems, getting things setup and installed and all that fun stuff. So far so good it seems, we got exactly what we wanted and barring any more internet outages working from home is going to work just right.

  Still the amount of effort it took to get to this point is quite astounding, I don't want to have to go through that again until I'm ready to retire me thinks. I can see us living happily here for quite a long time, probably even longer than the 12 years we were in our last house. Money has been coming in and out like a whirlwind with all the things that happened, refunds from some stuff, final bills on the old place, unexpected bills on the car, more money refunded that we were not expecting. Been fun watching all the amounts fly around in the bank account, not sure what the bank think of all this right now.

  Still other than a couple of minor annoyances this place is exactly what we wanted. Really quiet and out of the way, nobody else around, wildlife just wandering through the garden out front, a more modern roomier house, plenty of room in the basement to expand once we do it up and no chance of anybody living right next to us given the over 5 acres of land we have now. It feels really strange to also have a "workshop" that was a house while this one was being built that we have no real use for. No idea what we will ever do with it but it is sitting there at the other side of the property. It is nice to know that it is almost as large as our first house in the US and the basement is larger on it's own.

  That's all for now I think, need to get back in to this writing stuff in here thing. With all the activity it kind of took a back burner position since there was literally just so much to deal with. Most days these last couple of weeks it has been a case of WTF has the time gone.