My wife Missy loves children. We don't have any of our own, but we're aunt and uncle to several kids both through our family and our family-of-choice.
We're down visiting with our friends Kevin and Kacie and their little boy. He's completely adorable, and we haven't seen him since he was just a few weeks old.
Missy loves him, and it's mutual. Watching them interact makes my heart get all melty. She has so much love to give.
Missy and I drove down last night from our house in Virginia to visit our friends Kevin and Kacie in South Carolina. There was a huge storm coming through the area as we drove, Hermine.
We were prepared. We had good rain jackets in the car, plenty of snacks, a full tank of gas, and most importantly, a shared sense of adventure and patience. We knew we wanted to get there, but it didn't matter how long it would take.
Missy started us off, letting me rest for the first leg of our trip. At a certain point, the rain was very heavy, the traffic slow, and visibility poor, so we got off the highway, and pulled off on a dark country road to switch places.
As we drove, we listened to a great audiobook, John Scalzi's Old Man's War. We talked about all sorts of things, everything and nothing, in that way that only people who love one another very much can do.
We stopped for french fries.
We talked about our dreams.
It was long, tiring, and entirely great.
Missy and I have been together for almost twelve years, married for almost nine of them. There's a Lao-tzu saying I love, "a good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent upon arriving."
I'm loving the trip so far.
This is a video of porn casting couch auditions. No, actually, it's not.
What it is, is one of the funniest things I've seen in a very long time.
I stumbled across it on reddit this morning, and laughed myself silly. See for yourself.
I've been a programmer for a long time. I had a long career working as a Lotus Notes developer (over a decade!) during which I got really damn good at it. I made Notes do things it's just not supposed to do. During that time, when I'd run into some new bug or programming challenge, I'd often quip to my boss/client/aardvark/whatever, "No software problem denies me for too long."
Many years ago I first got exposed to working in Java, and got excited by it, but didn't really get the chance to dig in and do stuff with it. Then about four years ago, I made the transition to really work in it, as well as serious web development using Groovy/Grails, javascript, jQuery, and a host of other technologies.
I was excited, but often hesitant, unsure of how to do some things. There's a really big difference between working in a walled garden like Notes, and something as wide open as enterprise web development. It's a vast ocean of technology and technique.
But lately I'm feeling that same sense of being undeniable again. I had this challenging user interface task at my day job recently, to create a UI that showed in the front, progress of a job running in a task on the server, in the back. I knew what I was after, but not exactly how to get there.
I dug in.
First I recalled some javascript commands I knew loosely (specifically setInterval and clearInterval) and looked them up online, to know them better. Then I tinkered, creating AJAX calls, checking the js console, hitting some stumbling blocks, and working my way past them. I consulted with Spacey, bouncing ideas off him, asking his expertise too. Part of being a good developer is leveraging your resources, and that includes seeking advice.
Late yesterday, I got it. I've still got some testing to do today, with a bigger set of data, but it's looking good. At a certain point I sat at my desk, running my test code over and over, and feeling really damn good about myself.
For the first time in a while, I said it out loud, again.
"No software problem denies me for too long."
I knew it was true.
Poetic license that is.
I had a really good day yesterday. I was up on hours, meaning a short day at work. I was making great strides on a tech thing I was working on, making the day move along nicely.
It was pleasantly warm out, instead of the searing, punishing heat we have been having all summer.
Everything was perfect.
And I was chatting with my girlfriend about it, and some spontaneous poetry broke out.
Me: I'm sitting outside having just eaten lunch out here.
Squee: What was lunch? How's outside? in 5 words each
Me: Swai, roast potatoes and veggies. A quiet bench, shady trees
Squee: so lovely and effectively communicated
Sometimes, life is just perfect.
