What Fresh Hell Is This?
Not exactly a banner work day: I was informed that higher management wants to hold off on the project I've been setting up to start working on over the next few months, that I'd been looking forward to, because they want me to work on more critical stuff. Although this was accompanied with some (I believe) sincere comments about how I'm pretty much one of the more valuable programming resources at Epic - and certainly on my team - it was quite a downer, and I expressed my unhappiness about this in no uncertain terms to my boss.
My boss and I get along quite well, I think liking each other and respecting each other, despite having had quite a few disagreements about management style. I think he is pushed to micromanage a little more than he feels comfortable with, for various reasons. Myself, I chafe under too much management (especially since I think there are several company-wide management practices which I think are no-ops) and I've been working to try to have a little more latitude, at least in a few areas of my work. It's very frustrating to have this occur on my first day back.
I've also been preoccupied by the Big Life Decisions looming ahead of me, such as the prospect of buying a house in Madison, or of moving to California. A friend of mine who lives down the hall is buying a condo, and informed me as to some of the restrictions regarding getting out of my building's lease before the termination date. It pretty much boils down to the fact that I probably won't be able to get out of it during the winter months, which is sort of a limiting factor as to all these decisions, unless I buy a house in the next three or four months.
I dunno. On the one hand, having eight months to turn everything around in my mind is probably a good thing. On the other hand, my work frustrations make me wonder if I might just snap in (say) November and decide to bug out if things don't improve. On the third hand, I have a fair bit stashed away in savings, so no matter what I decide and when, I can probably swing things.
Obviously, there's a lot of frustration talking here, and I still haven't really plugged into my non-work life in Madison since I got back last night. So there's a lot that could happen.
Whether anything will happen is not entirely within my control.
Also bought groceries, new bulbs for my halogen lamps (can you believe these $20 lamps cost hundreds of bucks when they came out?), and some bread at the co-op, which I snarfed down for dinner.
When I got home I watched the new Babylon 5 episode, "Movements of Fire and Shadow", which pretty much brought to a head all the activity of the fifth season, in an episode that should have occurred about eight episodes ago. Even then it was strangely humor-heavy (although the humor was of low grade), and seemed to lack the biting kick that other landmark episodes like "Severed Dreams" possessed.
And then I worked through an hour's worth of The Anubis Gates. The back cover description contains such a hodge-podge of disparate plot elements that I can see why I never bothered with Tim Powers before (what may be a selling point to most people is, to me in this case, a warning sign). However, Powers' facility with the vernacular is among the more arresting instances I've seen in SF&F, and the book is highly entertaining. If it keeps it up for the other 300 pages, I think it'll be a winner.
This one was tricky. I eventually solved it when I inadvertently repeated the puzzle out loud to someone. Specifically, I spelled out all the digits. It turns out each line describes the digits of the line before it: The first line is "1", and it contains one 1. Hence the next line is "11", and it contains two 1s. Thus the third line is "21", and it contains one 2 and one 1. Thus the fourth line is "1211". It contains three 1s and one 2, so the next line in the sequence would be "1231".
The sequence does eventually converge:
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