Last night was the Goodrich SRS Holiday Extravaganza…  went with me, and we met up with and Michelle, as well as with many of my coworkers.  To be honest, it was kinda bogus…  It was like a wedding reception, complete with bad DJ.  It also doesn’t help that the mean age of my company is probably 55-60…  I did win a $100 AmEx Gift Cheque in a drawing, so I clearly can’t complain about that…  I just wish some of the other younger people (Garrett, Steve, the co-ops, etc) were there to even things out a bit…

We delivered a slow version of my project to the customer for a demo they are doing next week (the reason I was going to VA at one point, but I guess the customer changed their mind about having the vendors there).  They actually seemed happy with it, at least, happy enough for the demo…  But it’s going to take months for us to speed it up to proper levels, though, and so I’m not sure what’s going to happen in the end.

I have been assigned as “software lead” for my current project.  Now I feel like the captain of a sinking ship.  What really frustrates me is that I don’t view our problem as software problems, they are design problems (algorithms dreamed up by systems engineering, not software engineering)…  I’m sure I could tighten things up and make them a few ms faster, but really the problem needs an order of magnitude or two, not a few ms here or there….

Bought a few CDs today…  The new Deluxe Edition of “The Downward Spiral” and Kaada/Patton “Romances”…  I also successfully sold the Boston Pops tickets I had bought for for Christmas…  I screwed up and bought the tickets for the wrong day, and by the time I realized it it was too late, all the shows before she left had been sold out.  So saves the day and dropped by this evening to take them off my hands…  And here I was thinking I had crazy swerve coming up with an awesome xmas present…. :(

and Audra went to check out Ray but I just wasn’t feeling social tonight…  I stayed home and watched VH-1 crap pop-almanac shows and ordered expensive take-out via DiningIn.

Finished Half-Life 2 tonight, it was quite a fun game…  That game pretty much pre-empted any other game I was playing, so I will probably return to the PS2 games I was playing before that game came along.

Today was an awfully frustrating day at work…  I got in, and as soon as I got into my cube the Imaging Science guy working on my project told me that he wanted me to merge in some performance improvements I wrote early last week…  At the time we decided to hold off on any changes because we have a demo next week and didn’t want to introduce regressions.  Well, I guess last night/this morning he decided that we really needed those speed improvements so he asked me to do some merging.  I spent the first few hours of the day kicking it Vsplit style in Vim doing the merging by hand.  Apparently my “team” decided without consulting me to change a bunch of shit for no reason, like removing braces around one-line condiitonals, and frustrating things like this.  Refusing to let my beautiful code be gang-raped, I took the merge time to “fix things up again”.  Surprisingly, other than two missing semicolons, the code worked!  I had thought of a few more ways to improve speed, so I took this opportunity to implement them (which also terribly simplified a few parts of the code).  We tested it, and it showed an order of magnitude improvement in most cases, and cut the time of one particularly intensive function in half.  Pretty significant, but apparently not enough for him…  He felt that the speed up wasn’t significant enough to risk regresssions in our shipping product, and he was looking for ANOTHER order of magnitude.  So really, my work was rushed and mostly for naught.

So it’s ok to import drugs from Canada sometimes.

The Mark Hosler talk last night was great, he showed many short films that have been made for their old music, and gave a good (if abbreviated) history of Negativland. I’m really, really glad I went.

I remembered one of the major things I was talking about during the missing PhonePost in my last day in Texas.  Steve and I were driving to dinner, and we passed by this house with all kinds of holiday lights, etc.  On the roof was spelled “Happy Birthday”, and I thought to myself “Who would go to all that trouble for someone’s birthday?”  Then I realized they were wishing Happy Birthday to Jesus.  I’m a heathen.

Saw Bill Maher last night with at the Orpheum.  Was better than I expected, wasn’t much rehash from other times I’ve seen him on TV, and it was way better than the often over-cooked monologues he gives before “Real Time”.  My seat had a spring that was sticking into my ass and tore a hole in them.  I’m going to write a letter to the Orpheum.  In other comic news, Corinna spotted this in the menu for the local chinese take-out place:

Tonight I am heading out with the SNFC to catch Sex is Comedy, and tomorrow I am see Mark Hosler from Negativland give a talk entitled “Adventures in Illegal Art” with Audra and , which should be very interesting.

The Pixies were astounding last night…. I know they’ve been touring together for awhile now, but from the way they sounded last night you’d never guess they took a decade off. Mission of Burma opened, a band I’ve heard lots about but heard little of. They were pretty enjoyable, way more than the other opener, The Bennies. The lead singer was wheelchair-enabled, which evoked bad associations with South Park, but even after I got past that I couldn’t get into the music at all…. Way to whiny and emo for my tastes..

Might have to pop into work some this weekend… Feeling a bit better about this project, though.

I get to see the Pixies tonight. Suck it.

I had a second phonepost I left last night that Frank the Goat seems to have lost…  I will try to remember what I said in that post tomorrow, when I am a little less frazzled.  In the time being, it’s nice to be back in Boston.  Here is a stupid internet meme that my sisters did, so I feel obligated to participate in.

Spare you the misery