I woke up after too few hours of sleep.
Then I delivered some software and had very successful meetings all day. There will be more business, it’s a nice story for future customers… I had every reason to be pleased. But I was too tired – in fact, so tired I just felt hopeless and sad afterwards.
After a nice Japanese dinner alone, I felt better. So now I am wrapping up today’s business and preparing for a long night’s sleep.
Erik Stattin was Karl Barth, too. 
At home. 9 PM. Working. Polishing API:s and writing docs, preparing for a meeting tomorrow. The customer isn’t quite ready, there will be more work before this is over. I am already a little behind on another project… but it’ll work out.
Meanwhile, I am listening to beautiful music and drinking the best tea. There is sadness and joy… I’m tired but the fire is still there.
Saw a new version of Markisinnan de Sade yesterday. There were people I knew on stage, behind the stage and in the audience. Great play and lots of fun.
I slept very late Sunday.
Now I’m feverishly working on the web service project again. It’s still fun, but I’ll be glad when they launch.
Christian theologians: Which one are you?
I was Karl Barth, too. Thanks, Hal!
I’m starting to get a better feel for C# and ASP.NET.
I use Google (and some good bookmarks) all the time when I design or code – it’s much more convenient than having docs on my harddisk. But after a while links I’ve already visited and things I already know won’t help me. Then it’s time to start thinking harder about my own specific problem.
I’m having fun right now. Of course, some really boring old-time stuff will probably never go away… like tweaking SQL datetime comparisons for hours because the customer’s backend sucks.
Pattern for personal websites
Useful. Makes me feel even more guilty about the state of this site, though. Link via Martin
Processing XML with Java. Elliotte Rusty Harold’s new book is available online. Worth a look even if you are not doing Java.
A Practical SQL Tutorial. Easy to read. Deep enough for a developer.
DotNet – Common Tasks. Great overview of solutions.
Pull-parsing XML for Java and C#. But for super-easy pull parsing you should of course use Python.
E-commerce course material. Lots of web architecture slides from Newcastle University. Some are simple enough.
Still working. I’ll take a break and go see some theater in a few hours. I probably won’t have time for a review until tomorrow.
I woke up early and felt sluggish… lots of work, hard training, too little sleep. Ate some muesli, went back to bed. Not conscious enough for either business or love yet.
A little later I got up and made myself some green tea with honey. I have a little collection: small paper bags with all sorts of tea and several glass jars filled with farm honey from different places.
My kitchen is clean and quiet. I drink my tea from a large and beautiful cup my parents once gave me and feel gratitude. Thank you parents. Thank you friends, lovers, everyone I’ve worked, played or fought with. And thank you for reading this right now.
I started working again. But just an hour later my parents called out of the blue and asked if I wanted to join them for a late lunch. Which I did – it was very nice.
Then I went home and worked some more. I am inspired today.
Well… almost six in the morning and still hacking. Time to wrap things up, I think. The basic functionality is right.
C# is OK and ASP.NET feels pretty good, too. But writing my test-clients in Python still makes a lot of sense – when the testing becomes complex I need compact and readable code .
Slept a few hours, then back to business. Some phone calls, some more loose ends… basically everything seems OK. Time to switch hats – I’ll get into performance, load testing and trying to break things now.
Swim training in Skärholmen. The coach says my freestyle kick needs work. So that’s what I do most of the time. We did some arms-only with weight between the legs, though – that was much easier.
Woke up, had breakfast, started up my machine and started working.
Web service debugging: mail, then long phone-calls to make the server do the right things… eventually it did, everything started falling into place. We felt good.
Make it work, make it right, make it fast… This one works. Let’s make it right now.
Everyone seems to be home with a cold or worse right now. It’s that time of the year in Sweden. I wish you all well!
Hmm… early morning in Sweden. Looks like I am getting back to my ususal schedule. I slept well yesterday, worked from home all day, made a small delivery to a customer – but tonight a phone conversation dragged on too long and after that I couldn’t sleep for a while.
I will go swimming right now, then spend the day working on the next deadline.
Had a really nice swim. Debugging web services right now. Waiting for an FTP server to come up later tonight.
The server did come up, and the files I had already mailed were installed and working. But the FTP connection is flaky and I can’t update to the next version. No one is awake on the other end right now, so I’ll wait until tomorrow. Time for some more melatonin – it does seem to help me with the jetlag.
Nice last day in the States: we rented two large cars, checked out of the hotel and drove around all the day.
Beautiful scenery around Snoqualmie Falls. And I bought some really nice honey: Mt Rainier fireweed.
OK, that was OOPSLA. I feel rested and fine this morning. Today we’ll drive around in rented cars and take a look outside Seattle, then head straight for the airport. I’ll soon be offline for 24 hours or so.
So I went to Seattle to see mr Gates… no, it wasn’t quite like that.
Yesterday’s speech by Bill Gates was a ritual thing, attended by almost everyone at the conference. And the way people were listening reminded me of Russian Cold War speeches at the Kreml – where every single word was analyzed and interpreted as subtle signals about the Empire’s future direction.
The usual geek gods (Beck, Gamma, Fowler etc) could be seen, listening with just the right air of knowing detachment. For once, they were just audience and knew it. OK. So what did mr Gates say?
Well… not much, really. The first part was all about testing: MS is trying all kinds of things to get a grip on their existing codebase. And that work will go into VS.NET. I came away convinced that eventually MS development tools will be marketed as necessary to build secure software.
There were several hints about unified storage. Translation: customers will need lots and lots of new server licenses when/if it works.
Everything is now XML Web services, of course, and using standards is a great thing. This part was really vague. The only certain thing is that MS will play to win.
And finally the Tablet PC is a cool toy, because Bill Gates has spent more time and money than anyone else would to make it so. Which may still turn out to be a good bet – but I am not buying one yet.