Matthew's Journal

I spent the day putting out metaphorical fires. Not only that, I had two new employees start, and Windstream fucked up repairing two dead phone lines for the fourth time. (sigh)

If we had any other option for internet, we would SO take it. But Windstream is it. We discovered we had two dead phone lines on 9/19. I reported them. Windstream went out to look at them and announced the equipment was under water so they couldn't do anything. They didn't go back to check for two weeks, and when they did they closed the ticket because the equipment was "still under water."

Okay, so you know it's not fixed, but you close the ticket.

(sigh)

So then they open another ticket and I ask them to busy out the lines so that calls in would rollover to the open lines.

They do that.

Two weeks later I call and say we still have two dead lines, and the busy out is just a patch. We need the two lines fixed.

The discontinue the busy out and leave the two dead lines.

So I call again yesterday and yes, they indeed closed the ticket again when they discontinued the busy over - and the lines are still dead and now the rollover is once again putting people on the dead line - so to the caller the line rings and rings and rings and no one answers.

(bangs head on desk)

That was just one of the things I dealt with yesterday.

You would think, though, that a technician would realize that the lines STILL BEING DEAD is the problem. But no. Apparently that's too complicated for them to comprehend.

Today is payroll. Yes, I need the money, but damn, payroll is a pain in my ass.

But I do have boxing this afternoon. I get to go punch things so that will make me happy.

Our plumbing is being evil, for the fifth or sixth time since we moved into this house in 2004. When our house was built, it didn't have an internal bathroom. There are remains of an outhouse in our back garden. So the bathroom was, at some point, retrofitted and its plumbing has never worked quite right.

It's been showing signs of distress for a few days now, doing that thing it does of not draining properly. We flush the toilet or run water in the sink, and the bath goes GLUG GLUG GLUG. Not good. However, yesterday when I flushed the toilet, some of the er, effluent ended up in the bath. Which is about as delightful as it sounds.

Richard did a full day at work then stayed up quite literally all night clearing the downpipe with a high pressure hose, and only went to bed at 7.30 am. He is my hero! The poor bugger couldn't eat anything until 6.30 am because he was too nauseated, and I have left Emergency Laundry running overnight else he wouldn't have any trousers to wear to work (and it's too cold to go in shorts).

The problem is not completely fixed since although the downpipe is now cleared, water running through it is not reaching the sewer. As the problem occurs on our property, Thames Water won't help, so we will have to find a professional and (probably) claim on our insurance. Does anyone have the faintest idea how to do this? I mean, regarding claiming on the insurance, we probably just have to find the policy document and ring the insurers with the policy number and details of the work which needs to be done. But where on earth do we find a good professional plumber who handles drains and sewers? Do we ask the insurance company to recommend someone?

To add further complication, our back garden will probably have to be dug up, and it is currently a jungle. I'm hoping my parents might be available in the next few days to get it cleared, although that involves Dealing With My Parents.

Sexual violence against women and girls is endemic. There's an absolute mountain of evidence that this is the case, from the experiences of my friends to any number of posts on social media to rigorous studies. A big part of the reason I decided to identify as a feminist is because women are routinely denied bodily autonomy and feminism seems to be the only political movement that cares about this.

( links and personal observations about sexual violence against women )

I absolutely believe everybody else's experiences, people I know and strangers writing brave, brave columns and blog posts. I am just a total outlier, and I really shouldn't be. So I'm signal boosting others' accounts, because I know that I needed to be made aware of the scale of the problem, and perhaps some other people reading this could also use the information.

More bits of my poem "The Ghost in the Crown":

And I showed them the script
That I held in my hand.
“I call this play Catching­-The­-Mouse.
Understand?”
...

I'll fish for the king
With a play for a net.
I said, "With my net
I can catch him, I bet.
I bet, with my net,
I can catch the king yet."

...

"My head needs a pillow!
Your lap, to be blunt,
Is soft, and to hand,
And it’s pretty vacant."

...

So I went to her room.
But I passed, on the way,
A room where my uncle
Was kneeling to pray.
This must be the moment
To cut off his head!
But as I crept closer
I heard what he said:
“I murdered my brother!
I freely admit!
Dear God, please forgive me.
I’m rather a git.”
And I couldn’t kill him.
My blow was prevented.
For if he should die
Now he’s prayed and repented,
He’d go up to heaven;
That’s all very well,
But doesn’t seem fair
When my father’s in hell.
So I went on my way
As he muttered amen,
I hope that he’s sinned
When I see him again.

...

"And here is the head
Of a person historic!"
He gave me a skull.
And alas! It was Yorick!
I looked at the bones
And I thought as I sighed,
How he kissed me, and gave me
A piggy­back ride.
And now he’s a skull
And he’s silent and scary!
Now what has become
Of your dancing so airy?
The songs that you sang?
And the jokes that you said?
Now all that you have
Are the bones of your head?

...

The Lady Ophelia
Of whom you were fond.
She climbed up a willow
And fell in a pond.
And most of her talk
At the times she was verbal
Was straight from the pages
Of Culpeper’s Herbal!

...

I'm quiet, and I'm dead,
And I’m tired of my quest.
I’m glad of the silence.
I needed a rest.

Finished a languishing application for an audio transcription job. Not sure whether I'll get it or not, but at least it's done now. Applied (successfully) for a website testing job. Both of these are self-employed, no guarantees that I'd get actual work from them but worth a try. Boggled at the adverts for 'work from home' jobs many of which are prison officers.

You know that weird feeling where your tests sometimes pass and sometimes don't, and you eventually realise they're not deterministic? But it took a while to notice because you kept changing things to debug the failing tests and only slowly realised that every "whether it succeeded or not" change didn't follow changing the code?

In this case, there were some failing tests and I was trying to debug some of them, and the result was the same every time, but only when I ran a failing test by itself and it passed did I realise that the tests weren't actually independent. They weren't actually non-deterministic in that the same combination of tests always had the same result, but I hadn't realised what was going on.

And in fact, I'd not validated the initial state of some tests enough, or I would have noticed that what was going wrong was not what the test *did* but what it started with.

I was doing something like, there was some code that loaded a module which contained data for the game -- initial room layout, rules for how-objects-interact, etc. And I didn't *intend* to change that module. Because I'm used to C or C++ header files, I'd forgotten that could be possible. But when I created a room based on the initial data, I copied it without remembering to make sure I was actually *copying* all the relevant sub-objects. And then when you move stuff around the room, that (apparently) moved stuff around in the original copy in the initialisation data module.

And then some other test fails because everything has moved around.

Once I realised, I tested a workaround using deepcopy, but I need to check the one or two places where I need a real copy and implement one there instead.

Writing a game makes me think about copying objects a lot more than any other sort of programming I've done.

This week is going to be an incredibly busy one. I have payroll, and we're closing on the USDA grant on Thursday, so I have to have all the paperwork ready.

The bright spot is that I am taking Wednesday off and going climbing.

Pat came home from his 70 mile bike ride (yes, he decided to extend the ride), and was very happy that it had gone well.

I finished the laundry.

We napped for several hours.

Then we started watching Sunday Night Football. I find that I am not enjoying football the way I used to. I know that much of that is due to the idea of CTE and what these young men are doing to themselves. The other is how I'm fed up with the way young black men are treated.

The bigotry and stupidity of old white men is ridiculous.

In other news, Pat and I were invited to see BLADE RUNNER 2049 tonight. We turned it down because we want to see the first movie before we see the new one. We saw it when it was released, which is many years ago. We decided we wanted it fresh in our minds when we see this one.

We like to maximize our enjoyment as much as possible.

The Treehouse film I made last summer is premiering at St Neots Film Festival on Wed 8 Nov!
http://stneotsfilmfestival.co.uk/
I'll be going along with my big Film Premiere coat :-)
It will be made public on vimeo the next day and I can post it here if anyone's interested.

Dish Life (short with children being stem cells in petri dish) has made New York Times' Ten Things To Do In NYC This Week list (For Children section) - the director and scientist are over there now and having a great time.

The Big Meow, Diane Duane

That woman can turn me inside out, and make me grateful for the experience. I nearly cried when reading this over lunch at work. It's in the same universe as her Young Wizards series, but focused on feline wizards (it's the third in that series, all of which are now available in a portable electron format). I love the character growth, the description of cats, the love of the Universe and so on. This also has a strong 1940s Hollywood thing going on, which I suspect is wonderful if you have interest in it, but for me was just sort of background noise.

Had my appointment with the Pain Management consultant at Parkside Hospital in Wimbledon on Friday. This is a posh private hospital, yet I got an NHS-funded appointment there. I am not complaining.

As you may remember, I have arthritis in my spine which causes all sorts of weird and "interesting" neurological effects. The actual patch of inflammation is tiny, and yet it presses on a nerve severely enough that I have a permanent numb "dead" spot in my left leg, plus additional events of screaming agony.

So every year or so, I get injections into my spine of a long-acting steroid and painkiller combination. They are called facet joint injections and I've had them done 3 times before. It counts as minor surgery because it has to be done under X-ray, since it would be Very Bad if the needle gets in the wrong place. But once I've recovered from the bruising, I have a lot less pain and a bit more mobility.

The first and third times, it was done by the consultant that I have my face-to-face appointments with and it helped for about 6 months. The second time I had it done, it was a different doctor who was in a hurry and didn't listen when I told her that my Large Arse requires two shots of the anaesthetic in order for the needle to get deep enough. So it only helped for about 3 months.

I am so glad my GP found out I could see the same specialist at a different hospital. Kingston Hospital has good medical staff but appalling organisation and/or administrative staff (not sure which), and the wait times there are horrendous. I am in no doubt that if I'd gone to Kingston, it would have been 6 months or more just for the first appointment, and then a further 4 months before the treatment. This other hospital is a train + bus ride away rather than a short walk, but I only had to wait 6 weeks to see the doctor, and then another 6 weeks for the treatment. It's scheduled for 1st December.

For our recently purchased Fiat Panda I now have the new registration certificate in hand from the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency. Today I checked that the vehicle identification number matches though it took me unexpectedly long to find it on the car as I am used to there being a plate readily visible at the bottom of the windshield or around the engine compartment or when a front door is open. Curiously, the registration certificate says European Community which I thought had ceased to exist many years ago.

On 17 May 1957, Dr King preached:

Give us the ballot, and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights. Give us the ballot, and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law; we will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the South, and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence. Give us the ballot, and we will transform the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens. Give us the ballot, and we will fill our legislative halls with men of goodwill, and send to the sacred halls of Congress men who will not sign a “Southern Manifesto” because of their devotion to the manifesto of justice.

Sixty years on, one in thirteen black men in the United is still disenfranchised. In many southern states it’s far worse: the Florida figure is one in four.

https://www.salon.com/2016/11/28/felony-disenfranchisement-the-untold-story-of-the-2016-election_partner/

https://theintercept.com/2016/12/22/a-quarter-of-floridas-black-citizens-cant-vote-a-new-referendum-could-change-that/

And yet. I was.

Pat's off to ride 68 miles. I'm doing laundry.

Yesterday we both took the day off. We napped. We watched the movie GIFTED. We had splurged and bought it for ourselves because we both loved it so much in the theater. It's definitely a movie that you can see over and over.

Then we watched the Gators lose a football game. They did a damn fine job of it. They have a very young and inexperienced quarterback, and he doesn't seem to be getting much in the way of coaching. Why do I say that? He performs whatever play was called, rather than looking to see what other options are out there. That's poor coaching. You're supposed to teach. That's what coaching is really about. Teach the skills. This is definitely not happening at UF.

In other news, I started a book called CODE GIRLS, which is about the women who were recruited to do crytoanalysis during WWII. (I probably spelled that word wrong.) Anyway, it's very interesting so far. I had it on my wish list with Amazon and a friend sent it to me. YAY! I do love my Amazon wish list.

The week ahead promises to be very busy and very hard. I've got payroll and the closing of the USDA grant. But I also have my birthday in the middle, and I'm taking that day off. That should help with things mentally.

Paperclip is less a game and more a bold experiment in immersive storytelling. Ostensibly one of those clicker/idle/management sim games where you are put in charge of a factory, set things running and then work out ways to fine tune the production of paperclips, the reality is much more interesting when considered as a narrative rather than open experience. There’s not that much actual gameplay in here in the traditional sense but there is a vibrant and immersive story told through the mechanics presented to you. It’s one of the best experiences I have had in the digital narrative space and really showcases a fascinating alternative to traditional storytelling tools. I can’t recommend it highly enough, a really unique cultural artifact.

I've been finishing up the URBAN ENEMIES anthology. I've read two stories by authors where they're bad guys were the central figures in which they illustrate how bad the person is by having them abuse children, without those children receiving any help. They were just made to suffer and that was it. Wow. Never need to read those writers again.

I'm probably particularly sensitive to this issue because of my own childhood and having the massively unhappy experience of turning in my youngest brother and his wife for child abuse.

If there had been some aid to the children in the story somehow, I might have been able to tolerate it. And yes, I know it's more realistic to say that there wouldn't have been any aid, but I'm just not okay with reading that shit.

My brother hasn't spoken to me since. I have no relationship with is children whatsoever. But I know that because I did that, the adults were put under a two year supervision by State and the children benefited. That makes it worth it. Those kids were helped.