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Sleep: 8 hours, Mood: ok

My wrists hurt a little today and yesterday. In the past when this has happened I've followed the wear-a-brace-and-hope-it-goes-away strategy, which has worked so far. I'm afraid though. If these critical joints are already so limited at twenty five, where will I be at forty? In other news, I'm a hypochondriac.

Work was OK. Our fix last night for the segmentation fault on the batching utility I wrote seems to have taken; only one failure since then. I also spotted a bug that turned out not to be a bug. So, good. I added a little argument-storage feature to the same batching utility, did some performance testing and some other code reviews. Oh! And I did my first phone interview today. I guess it would be too much if I told you what I rated the guy, but he wasn't bad. I have heard stories.

I didn't think about much today except that I'd like to put more pictures on this thing. So, as a bonus, here's something weird: me and one of the other guys on my team were pondering why it's gotten so dark in this hallway recently. It's hard to tell if the lights in this hallway have just gone out and through diffusion of responsibility nobody has notified the authorities, or if this is one of our company's misguided attempts to be more green. Either way, this hallway between buildings 43 and 40 is pitch black at night. But there's a light at the end of the tunnel.

Sleep: 7 hours, Mood: ok

Ate dinner with Matt at Coconuts today. That's the third time there in three weeks. Almost two weeks. I am addicted to their jerked salmon. So perfectly cooked, with the white sauce with tomatoes on top. And I've never had green beans like that anywhere. Matt was feeling wound up but a martini cured what ailed him. It was a good dinner.

We spent the meal talking about which product at Google is the most "fucked." No one is reading this to see the language I'm using right? That might be Matt's favorite subject when he's trying to get his mind off things, and I'm all too happy to hear the stories. Well, I won't kiss and tell, but there are exciting stories of fucked-ness going on all over the company right now.

We also talked about promotions. We believe, perhaps because of inexperience or external signals, but we believe that our company is less dysfunctional than most. Yet he sees a lot of ladder-climbing going on where he thinks it might be less than earned. I have no complaints about might team; everyone above me on the totem pole is there deservedly so. But from what I hear this is the exception, not the rule. Imagine other companies.

Anna was feeling down about being out of the loop with respect to our impending move to the Cave. It reminds me of how I felt in high school. It was like, someone would be down, and I'd ask someone else why, and they'd say, "Oh, X broke up with Y." Meanwhile I didn't know that X and Y had been hot and heavy for the last six months. I commiserated.

When I tried to make a cappuccino today, the foam came out thin. Boo.

Sleep: 8 hours, Mood: Good

It was fun writing code today. I got to do a some cleanup, which is nice, launched a new server (god, don't we have enough already?). Matt called me tonight to tell me about some crazy things that happened to him. I feel honored to be a go-to-guy on this. I hope it all works out for you my friend.

Radhika came home bearing bad news. Apparently, we're to move desks down to 43-1. Where I sit is right now is the best place in all of Google to sit. You got the Bigtable team just down the hall, the founders, and Ken Thompson. We're talking Turing award winners right around the corner.

Apparently the infrastructure team needs some more seats, so we've been demoted to the cave. There are some upsides, like we'll be further away from No Name cafe, so it might be a little quieter. But we're also losing the sunlight, the open space, and the pride that comes from sitting so close to the heart of the action. It is a pride thing, and it hurts a little: we've been told how important we are, and it's not what we wanted to hear. At least that's what it feels like. Everyone was a little downbeat at quitting time.

Listen to me complaining. You'd think running the fifth biggest website in the world would be joy enough.

* Sleep: About seven hours? - Mood: good

Went to church down in Mountain View today. Didn't see Matt or Tiffany, the only people we really know down there. Still could not shake the feeling that worship at highway is more like a performance than a communal event that focuses on God. Maybe it's the tinnitus inducing rock-show musical aesthetic? How do you talk to people in leadership about stuff like this? The only response I can anticipate is one that goes something like, "Everyone else seems to like it." But the sermon was good.

Sie Deen is sleeping on my lap. 

I managed to call Chan and chat for about two minutes on the phone (it was her birthday). I've been thinking about Florida a lot recently. It's weird how the places you've been take on a unique feeling as you look at them in your mind's eye. I can't imagine that life there was as magical and pleasant as I seem to remember it. In fact, I know that I lived constantly under the strain of a lot of social anxiety and a bad case of the inferiority complexes. Maybe that nostalgic tint is your brain looking back at memories of a time when it was different, a time when you were a different person. It has trouble processing those thoughts, like a computer processor looking at opcodes meant for a different architecture. Forgive me for that analogy.

Work tomorrow. I know that our database is slightly broken right now. I'm addicted to checking system status on Sunday so I can worry for the evening. One of my colleagues checked in a change that modified the database, but didn't update all the programs that needed to read and understand the data. As a result, another program's input validation is broken and it refuses to do anything. Challenges for the morning.

Good night.

I'm going to try keeping track of my hours of sleep and mood. Like many things I do, this could peter out before it gets anywhere. I don't know if I've ever written "peter out" before in my life. I'm going to stick to a three-state rating of days ("good," "ok," and "bad") because anything more is just too much to keep track of.

Last night I was so exhausted I fell to sleep around nine. I woke up at eleven and couldn't fall asleep again. I tried everything, but there was this feeling of sweat and hot and cold at the same time. Eventually I took some Nyquil to knock myself out. That was around 1:30 AM, but it did the trick. My feeling was, "I've been so good and gone to sleep so early, it is not fair for me to get less sleep than I did last night." I felt no guilt over drug-assisting that when my body would not comply.

Work today was pretty good. Some things broke, I helped fix them. Still debating about what to do with the versioning thing I mentioned yesterday. There's such a chain of dependencies but they're not organized in any way that's easy to systematize or program against. They did not think of us when the system we're relying on was built.

I'm pretty excited about Go language. I have become a contributor, but it's really just to the elisp config file for emacs' go-mode.

Sie Deen is coming home tonight. I write with my eyes closed so I won't be tempted to edit as I go.

If I have an addiction, it's that. Addiction is something you do that you wish you wouldn't, right? Social news sites, that's what it is for me. I don't really enjoy reading them, but I have a lot of trouble stopping myself. I think I'd be a happier person if I'd just sleep, or read, or play video games, hang out with Sie Deen, even work, anything but read social news. But through all my resolutions and attempts, I've had a lot of trouble stopping for more than a month or so.

Work was slow (too tired to focus). Writing some code to help migrate to a new way of versioning the index. Got maybe 50% of what I should have done done. I will go to sleep earlier tonight and maybe it won't be that way tomorrow.

I've had an idea for a while that I should measure how much sleep I get and rate my mood the next day and see if they're correlated. I think they probably are.