Silence

[ljplicease]

So I finally got my upstairs neighbor to be quiet at night and how do I celebrate? I lie in bed awake listening to the silence. It's golden, you know.

Thanksgiving several years ago I went with my family to Chaco Canyon to photograph the ruins and was stunned by the silence when I took a small hike just far enough from the road to preclude the mass of people who never venture more than a stones throw from a busy road. Real silent silence is something rarely heard. This was really special.

Megan sent me an e-mail while I was at work today, which made me smile. I was busy doing [see boring computer stuff below] and I stopped and smiled and sent her an e-mail saying "thanks MegO, it's nice to have reasons to smile whilst at work."

I've been keeping busy being a computer geek lately. I interrupted the previous task at hand, which happened to be scanning in the photographs I took this summer, to re-compile my web server software, which I refer to as slash web due to its location in the file system. I was shocked by how easily my layer of code fit in with the new version of the server software. It must be reasonably well designed. I will be rolling everything out for use on belmont [1] in the next few days. The main advantage seems to be a newer version of perl and a whole lot less clutter (there were a lot of things in slash web which hadn't been used for a long time, if ever). Things were getting messy in there.

At work yesterday Elaine was like "how do I use doublethink to do this" and I was like "well you can't at the moment, but the information is in the database, so let me just tweak the interface so that you can see it" and she was like "thanks." Then I got very excited to be working deeply in doublethink's code base...

Doublethink is this web-based application for tracking crashes of the software tools at The Company. I wrote it myself from scratch using perl, PostgreSQL and Apache. It has been ages since I did any sizable work on doublethink so I was excited to get started. Unfortunately I finished the task in minutes instead of hours and the joy was short lived. I originally designed the application a little too well :/ Elaine was all "wow that was fast."

Then today Adil was like [2] "hey how do you activate the debug messages in parallel timing / abstraction?" I didn't emit any condescending noises, but inside I was groaning. It got me to thinking that I could probably design the interface a little better, so I spent the afternoon tweaking the parallel code underlying timing and abstraction. I know you aren't supposed to fix things which aren't broke, but... even good things can be made better sometimes.

So that was a lot of technobabble, but it has a point. I don't find myself in the ruins or off early in the morning to photograph the sunrise anymore. I seem to spend a lot of time tweaking web servers and revamping programmer interfaces to things that I've already written pretty well. I hate working on the dilapidated reporting code because every time I touch it I hear a little voice constantly telling me how much better it could have been designed if sound software engineering techniques had been used. And btw- I hate software engineering, it makes programming no fun.

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[1] My production server

[2] For the fifteen-millionth time already.

Comments

[princeofsocks.livejournal.com]

actual silence is neat. when you can't enjoy that, however, it can sometimes be therapeutic to just lie in the near-silence and pick apart the individual components of the ambience you hear. my typical evening ambience (through the open bedroom window) consists of:

1) very, very distant traffic
2) sporadic waterflow through the pipes of my building
3) muffled television chatter from neighboring apartments
4) neighbors showering
5) quiet conversations (and not-so-quiet ones, sometimes)
6) the occasional cat maoww

it can be soothing.