on a tear

I had been coding like a tiger for a few weeks, chasing a deadline arbitrarily set at Tuesday, and in the end pretty much got there. I lost some impetus on the weekend when I realized that I'd gotten the implementation pretty much to where I wanted it. What remained was building a convincing example, which was less than inspiring as a task, and thus I didn't pound out the LOC like I had beforehand. Anyhow, its in a state where I can write some examples for my thesis and justifiably claim that it typechecks and works.

To be fair, Tuesday wasn't entirely arbitrary as a deadline. I had a meeting with Jean-Marc scheduled for the afternoon and an MRI scheduled for midday, meaning that I was going to lose half a day anyway, making it a good candidate for thinking about direction rather than trying to write or code.

The MRI went pretty well. I was called only 20 minutes or so later than the appointed time, and from there was treated to an amusing parody of an old Seinfeld sketch I remember about doctors and hospitals. I was called and taken by someone into a small room, where I was told to remove my pants and wait. After 5-10 minutes someone else came and got me and escorted me to another small room for another 15-20 minutes of doing nothing. OK, to be fair, this second small room had a million-dollar MRI machine in it, and although I was doing nothing, I was inside a tunnel and the machine was going clunk-clunk-whirrr, so I guess it wasn't entirely time wasted. From there it was back to the original small room, pants back on, and another little wait. I then met the esteemed photographer in a third small room where he showed me pictorally how my ACL is, as suspected, not what it once was. Too subtle? It's torn, and my surgery will go ahead as the specialist had predicted. Anyhow, in all, I was back at work by 2:30pm, which was reasonable.

My meeting with Jean-Marc went pretty well, too. He had been watching the CVS stats, so it was no secret I'd been churning code pretty hard, and we had a good chat about the paper we have planned for the ECOOP deadline in a month's time, which will hopefully also cut-and-paste itself in as a chapter of my thesis.