A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

My stomachaches are back. The reason is simple; I stopped paying attention to what I was guzzling.

Yesterday was just terrible, and I had to chomp down lots of Pepto. Today it's down to a dull ache, without medicine. Tomorrow it'll be gone, unless I get stupid about what I drink today. If I understand correctly, what goes on here is that one's digestive system goes from its usual acerbic roiling into a gentle simmer when one is asleep, and regenerative processes take advantage of this by repairing the stomach lining from the day's abuses.

Before I knew what was going on, back when whether I had a "good" or "bad" stomach day seemed like a crapshoot, it was basically a question of whether my tum had managed to reinforce itself sufficiently the previous night. If it had caught up, I'd have a good day. If it didn't quite make it, I'd be in pain until my next long sleep. Quite simple, really.

Now that I have a clue, I will just have to pay some attention to what I drink and it will be OK. I don't think I will have to give up anything, except for the "pleasure" of having three coffees, two beers and a coke on one day just because I want something to do with my hands or whatever. If I limit my drinking of this stuff to when I actually want it I will be fine.

Wrote a monologue for Jmac's Arcade yesterday, and hope to record it today. I've had the idea for this one since March, but then I did some Gameshelf work and then the webclient attacked and I haven't done any video work since.

However, last weekend I put together an aggressive but sane schedule of webclient milestones covering the next couple of months, and so long as I stay ahead of it I finally feel like I have time for my most neglected pillar. This is very good; I hadn't been been working by any schedule other than my two drop-dead deadlines (Sep 30 for live Tic Tac Toe demo, Dec 31 for full client), and that only gets me into work-or-feel-guilty mode. More fine-grained deadlines gives me a much more palpable sense of progress, and room to stretch in other directions.

Come Monday it'll be back to the Volity mines for another few days, though...

Dropped the Gameshelf crew a note last week about all this, too. I hope that producing another Arcade will whet my appetite to pick the show back up. Been considering sticking an audio news segment onto its RSS feed, just to keep it warm. We'll see.

Urgh, also in a stickyish situation coz the song I wanna use for this Arcade's BGM is by a local band (Rat Club) who hasn't updated their website since January and whose email bounces. They have a MySpace page and I'm tempted to get a MySpace account just to ask them if I can use the song. I'm further tempted to just try using the song anyway if I can't reach them, covering it with all appropriate attribution and hoping for goodwiil. It's pretty perfect for this piece.

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Picked up Mario Strikers Charged a couple days ago, arguably the first "real" game (versus a discful of minigames and unlocks) for my Wii. It's a soccer game, and the followup to the original Mario Strikers for Game Cube that nobody heard of because it was for Game Cube. Haven't played enough to really get an impression of it yet; it's not quite as pick-up-and-go as Mario Kart but it isn't far off the mark either. The A button passes, B shoots, C fires off whatever power-up you just picked up, and everything else is an advanced technique that you can ignore at first. But it's not yet clear to me where the power-ups come from (it's nothing as obvious as running over "?"-boxes), and the action can get confusing pretty quickly.

The game encourages cooperative play, supporting two players to a side, and I look forward to doing some of that. Very interested in its internet play as well, so please let me know if you get a copy too.

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I've been making coffee again, and generally eating breakfast produced in my own kitchen. Still hitting the Starbucks across the street for my afternoon jolt, though.

Was prescribed Prilosec for my tummy troubles. (Actually a generic alternative, but because I lack Rx coverage, the druggist offered to sell me the name-brand stuff for half the price. Odd to me, but OK, since the doc had mentioned that the two were the same.) I am to take it for a month while not drinking anything that is brown, to use a Larry Wallism. This will let my abused stomach lining toughen up a bit. I will then cease the dosing and go back on the brown stuff, but mindfully.

I think I broadcast a distressed expression at this news, for he then explicitly allowed me one "regular-sized" coffee every day, and an occasional beer. "Thank god," sez I. I also must take a break from shoveling down the vindaloo, though. Sad for me.

Had a full physical, and while I have to come back for blood and eye testing, all else is well. Got a tetanus shot. Whee.

Channel 56, when it was still Channel 56, would put up a special title card between after-school cartoons every Friday the 13th, showing Fred Flintstone being alarmed by a black cat and wishing us kids a happy Ft13. Even way back then I felt oddly touched that they went through the effort.

Also it is a beautiful autumn day out and I'm going to walk to Kendall now w/piping hot Rossini's coffee that I can suddenly afford again, and enjoy every step. Cheers!

Yesterday was a stomachache day, my first in a while. As I purchased my extra-large dark roast from Cumby's I could feel the beginnings of it, but I went ahead with the purchase anyway because I had to have my one daily coffee.

But that acidic burning feeling lasted only through the afternoon, and was maybe half as intense as usual. Two or three cups of tea into the day, it was gone. In the past, it would have lasted until I fell asleep, and might have been bad enough to make walking upright difficult, with occasional spikes that would have me grit my teeth and bang my fist on the table in agony.

This low-coffee diet is definitely doing good things for me, inside and out.

I have to put in a good word for the Grand Prix Cafe. Blogging on-location now. It's a new place on Mass Ave just south of Davis Square, between the Dover and Day street intersections.

The one staff d00d here is very friendly and insisted that I taste both the coffee blends they had before I ordered one. The house blend is actually their own and it's quite yummy.

It's also a nice bright space with a nice view of, um, traffic (but hey, it fits the vaguely automotive theme - according to a poster to davis_square the owner is a retired racer) and there's both free WiFi and plentiful power outlets. Thumbs up from me.

Oh, ha, someone else came in and asked the guy (who is not the owner) how business has been, which I thought about doing myself but then didn't. He said, "...Good. It's too early to really say, you know?" There is a sign behind the counter that says "Never, Never, Never Give Up!" and there are a handful of dollar bills tucked between it and the wall. Good thinkin.

Back on my feet, more or less. Up way early coz I slept so much yesterday.

Still no coffee; I don' t think I could stomach it yet. Feeling a little sluggish, but the withdrawal symptoms lasted only one day, which is an interesting bit of self-knowledge, I suppose.

Bad news about the Harvard stuff: due to handwavy union issues of some sort, I can't quit and come back as a contractor, or anyway not without much pain & suffering. So it looks like I'm actually Just Getting Done. Still being allowed to bleed out my vacation time through August and then finish up however I want in September. It's disappointing, but more rescinding the gravy I was offered than making my originally planned situation any worse.

Was made melancholy watching a new episode of "Nova Science Now" dealing with RNAi -- RNA interference, the technique of using cells' natural antiviral hardware to experimentally shut off genes and observe the results. In theory, this could lead to treatments for every disease that involves genetic code getting mangled, which is where all the famous cancers and degenerative diseases live. It's cool stuff, but made me a little sad because it's what I'm walking away from -- this is exactly what ICCB and the Broad are working on (the show even had a Broad researcher among the interviewees).

As I've grumbled about, I wasn't doing science programming... just weenie web-work that was running next to the science. I'm still going to feel a little guilty and regretful every time I learn more about the science, but... for now, best to put my best foot forward and meet my calling.

I am almost surely gonna get myself a copy of Final Cut Pro before I start editing together the first real episode of The Gameshelf. I can get it for about 30 percent of its retail price through my .edu discount, making it still pretty expensive but cheap enough to be tempting... around the same cost as a brand-new just-released game console, maybe.

iMovie is a great piece of software, especially if you have a pile of footage and just need to make it look presentable. The trouble is, everything you make with it looks like it was made with iMovie... it's intentionally not very flexible. Final Cut is nothing but flexible, from what I'm led to believe, and also makes things like cuts between multiple video sources a snap, and apparently even helps with logging. It sounds to me like a much nicer fit for helping me achieve my mental image of what the show should look like. Even given the fact that I'm still a wriggling newbie at all of this, I think I've already hit a level of sophistication that's cumbersome to bear using only iStuff.

You know, I can't tell you what a kick in the pants this TV stuff is for me. it continues to offer just the right mix of novelty, challenge and intrinsic look-what-I-made reward to keep me going, even months after I've started getting seriously involved. In a lot of ways it's just what I needed. I think I'd been long overdue to break into a new creative medium. It's playing the same role that cartooning did for me 10 years ago, or computer programming 7 years ago.

It will be a challenge to continue balancing it with everything else goin' on, but I'm gonna try.

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Heading into work now, which is crazy-early for me. I just happened to get up early this morning... shrug. I was outside to get my coffee and couldn't get over what a weird angle the sunlight was shining in at! Because it's not 11:30! La!

But the sooner I start, the sooner I can finish and start my weekend & Volity mode. I have ants in my pants plenty about getting some stuff done in that sphere, since I've been all talk for weeks now.

What's this "outside to get my coffee" business? Yes, I confess... I ate up my stockpile of coffee beans a while ago, and keep forgetting to get more, so I am back to my old routine until I can remember to pick up a bag next time I'm at Diesel.

OK, just glarmfed in all the changes I've made throughout the Book over the last month, and declared that to be The Second Draft, Dammit. Erik is now busily prepping it for production. This gives him no additional stress, since this is what he does all day long with other books, anyway.

Last night I went out for coffee at 10:00 pm after declaring to Carla that I was going to pull an all-nighter. Upon my return, I messed around on the Net for four hours and then went to bed.

(Truth: I don't think caffeine has any appreciable effect on me after a certain point in my daily cycle. But that's not really the point of this story.)

I have done all I can with this thing for now. It will be a good book, and yet I take frustration from the fact that it won't be mine, not really. It's half-or-more Erik's words, in the end, and it's not on a topic I feel really impassioned about. I'm too tired to be proud of it yet.

Maybe tomorrow.

For now, hum. I should go watch a movie or something. On second thought, it's too cruddy out. Movie tomorrow. I go to Micro Center again and buy extremely time-wasting game. Mm: and tell Arcus that I'm ready to work again. $$$.

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My entire opinion of the Superbowl thingy:

While walking around outside and thinking about stuff, I realized that the Rams' helmet design, with the stylized spiral on either side, suggests that the players' heads are actually horned, as per their team's eponymous animal. I find that kind of neat, and shows a level of subtle totemic identification that I haven't seen elsewhere in professional sports.