8 September 1997: Stopping Points

Monday, 8 September 1997:

Stopping Points

It's one of those things that just completely derails you: I was tooling along quite nicely at work on my latest project, stepped out for half an hour to consult with some folks, and came back and coded up a small storm. Then I start up the application, and BAM! It doesn't work.

And it's not even my stuff that doesn't work; it's some error in the fundamental client/server communication of our application, code which is devilishly hard to debug. So I spend an hour reading code and trying things, and then I remember: Ohhh, they're synching up the shared code in all our applications' development directories today. So I go talk to the guy who's doing that, and it turns out we have some old only-quasi-shared communications code in our directory that's incompatible with the new stuff, and which hoses our development directory. So we fix that.

And then, of course, what I actually wanted to test doesn't work. Grr.

It's a larger-scale version of one of those things that completely derails you: I'm getting used to biking to work, and I'm making good coding progress, and now we're having our annual User's Group Meeting this week, which is in walking distance of my house, and will require a day-and-a-half of my time this week. I don't generally have a lot to contribute to these things, but that's the way it goes.

Due to morning meetings and my apparent incapability to wake up before 7:30 am, Tuesday and Thursday are the good days for me to bike to work. And guess when I have to be involved with UGM? Yeah, that was a toughie, wasn't it?

So it's been just over a month since I saw Contact, and tonight I finished Sagan's novel on which the film was based. (It only took me a week; damn, I'm a slow reader.) The two are very different in the details: Ellie is in her mid-40s and a brunette; Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey's character) is a very minor character in the book; the cast is more complex. But the overall plots of the two are similar, although Sagan naturally (and thankfully) takes a very different tack vis-a-vis the religion-vs-science issue. (Like Stephen Hawking, Sagan has a healthy respect for the vastness of the cosmos; he Sagan seems to have little use for organized religion.)

I'm still disappointed that the story doesn't actually tackle relativity in sending humans out to meet the aliens to contact us, though.

My cat, Jefferson, seems to have decided one of us needs attention, so we just spent about ten minutes in a pet-fest. Now I think he wants to play. Shortly.

I got some encouraging e-mail from a couple of you in response to my piece yesterday. I haven't yet responded because I don't think I've yet absorbed what was said to me; it's too easy to write something pithy and brush-offy, and that's no good. It's too easy in e-mail to fire off a response and forget the original. So I will cogitate for a while.

Some of what I wrote was the result of being very down yesterday (heck, the very fact that I wrote it is a result of that), but (obviously) most of it is not merely a product of the moment. I just feel like I've reached an impasse, and I don't see any way out of it. Sometimes I wonder if I should move and start anew, but then I remember how hard it was to move from high school to college, and then from college to grad school, and I don't really want to go through that again; pulling up what roots one has is so expensive. Well, at least writing about it here will help me move away from doing nothing but stewing about it.

We'll see.

Michael Rawdon (Contact)