Oh, look! Apparently, I'm not the only one to throw recycling in the little trash can. Given that I don't drink Coke often (I've had six sodas total this year so far), and didn't have any yesterday for sure, the can isn't mine.

Good thing I'm the one getting heckled for "hating the environment."

I wonder if my coworkers expect me to clean out this recycling, too.

I spent waaaay too much time sitting on my butt, plowing through email this weekend. One of my ongoing, hits-every-tenth-card tasks is "clean out my inbox." So, I went back 140 emails in my inbox of 1642 emails, and started dealing with each one. If I needed to do a task, I did it. If I needed to respond to someone, I hit reply and wrote to the person. If I needed to archive the email, I copied the information where it needed to be, and deleted the email. If all I needed to do was read the email, I read it. One at a time, I started dealing with the emails.

After about eight hours of email processing, I came across an email from Dad, so I hit respond and answered his email. Dad and I have been talking more often than we have in years. I think we're up to four hours of phone conversation in the last two months, which is more than the previous two years total.

Needless to say, these conversations make me really, really happy.

I meant to call him today, to continue our trend, but (always the Hodsden "but"), I wanted to continue cranking through my email, I wasn't sure what his schedule was like, and at that point, I don't know why, I wasn't up for talking. Emailing, sure, talking, not really.

It's a funny "but." I want both to know what's going on in Dad's life, and for him to know what's going on in mine, but, the timing was off.

So, I told him about this site.

He replied back before I was done processing the full 140 emails, and his response:

I was reading some of your blogs. I don't see where you get the time to sit
down and do what is literally a diary of life's events, but I like it.

So, Dad, here's where I find the time: the ten minutes waiting for the train, I type notes on my phone (my phone has a full, though not full-sized thankfully, QWERTY keyboard); sometime before bed when I'm relaxing on the couch, I'll post events of the day; if I have a few minutes, I'll write something at work. When it's an important event, I'll stop what I'm doing and just start writing - because sometimes you just need to get it out, lest the thoughts consume you.

In the end, though, I write here because I want to remember what happened today. Each day, I want to remember what happened today and yesterday and the day before, how I felt, what I did about problems I've been facing, how I responded to good fortune, what made me laugh, what made me cry. Not everything is here, sure, some of it I can't write about because it's too painful, or generally socially "unacceptable" to talk about. so I write somewhere else, or post it so that you have to login to read it, or talk about it with friends, friends who know because they listened, they saved my life. For the most part, though, the important things are here. They're here because I've spent far too many years trying to forget, and I'm done trying to forget.

So, Dad, mostly, I find the time to write because remembering is important to me. I write here for me.

But if I can share it with you, too, it's worth it.

Way worth it.

I'm starting to settle into a nice routine with Velocity Sports. I can leave work by 4:45, walk to the train station, curse the 4:53 bullet, board the 4:58 train, arrive in San Carlos and walk to VS in time for class. I've had to run only once when the train was late, and that run doubled as a good warmup, so I'm good with the routine.

If only I could wake up early enough in the morning to manage a full day of work before I leave, instead of finishing it up at ten in the evening.

I'm not so sure I should be working out just yet, with my nose not quite giving up on the illness from Monday. Wednesay's workout was ridiculously hard for me, but trivial for Kris. I blame the congestion in my chest.

Tonight, after the instructor lead warmup, my nose continued where my lungs left off on Wednesday. As most people were having a quick drink of water, I started blowing my nose. As the snot accumulated in the tissue, I wadded it up and pulled it away from my face to throw it away, only to realize when my hand was four inches from my face that the snot in my nose was still attached to the tissue in my hand.

Mortified, I smashed the tissue back onto my nose, thereby increasing the snot surface area by the area of my nose, while reaching for another tissue.

As I hid the first tissue with the second tissue, I turned to see the instructor looking at me quizzically. Great, just great. He saw the Flying Spaghetti Monster lose a tentril out my nose in an infinitely divine revelation before I could cover up my prophet status.

I spent the next minute shooting snot wads out my nose into the rapidly growing pile of tissues in the trash can. Of course they have no hand sanitizer, and I'm about to go fondle a small assortment of medicine balls. Great.

The workout ended up being remarkable easy. I wore my ankle brace tonight, which helped considerably. The workout was do-some-exercise with a medicine ball, sprint 20 yards to your other medicine ball, monkey shuffle back to the first ball, do some other exercise with said ball, and continue. We did 16 exericises and 12 sprints total. There were only three of us there, Kris, an older woman and me. I say, "older woman," but she's probably my age. Tragically, the instructor catered to her.

Almost.

The last set of exercises we did involved core strength exercises. Which meant torso exercises. Which meant, time for suckage.

I have a long torso, which makes finding clothes particularly interesting. Standing up, I'm 67 inches tall. I am also in the automotive industry's 95th percentile in torso length. My legs are as long as a friend who is 53" tall. When sitting, I am the same height as a friend who is 74" tall. I'm all torso.

So, that sideways plank I'm supposed to hold for 30 seconds? Yeah, I'm getting my hips all of 2" off the ground and I'm thrilled for that height, because it means I'm straight.

With long torsos come short limbs, am I'm quite the T-rex when it comes to arm length.

Rowr!!!

Kris made the whole set of plank exercises worse by laughing at me, which made me giggle, which only made the ab exercises even harder.

Of course, the more I do, the easier it'll become.

Now, I just need to get the snot monster out of my nose.

Much to my surprise, I realized a day late that I've been writing (bah, blawgging) here for three years.

Three.

Years.

In those three years I've quit my job, married, had three children, bought four properties, built a dozen remarkably successful websites, started two companies, fought through one of the worst depressions of my life, won a national championship and earned my doctorate degree.

Oh, wait.

That wasn't me.

Screw the kids, didn't have any of those. Haven't bought any real estate. Not sure if the websites have been successful, but I built them. Started only one company. Did win the national championship, but I didn't actually play during that series. And, I haven't taken more than a class here and there for a long time.

But, I did win that depression battle.

And that's a victory in my book.

That, and I have a much better record of what the heck I've been doing these past three years than any other part of my life. Some of it bad, some of it good, some of it absolutely amazingly fantastic.

All of it me.

Happy three, NoaSI.

Over the last two years, I've developed a series of tricks, rituals and processes that maximize the battery on my laptop. The current laptop, being all shiny and new and cool and number three in the last four years, is a MacBook Pro, thanks to Kate and Mike and their Apple-y ways (just close enough to Linux that I really like it, but all pretty and bee-you-tee-full, blah blah blah).

The MBP, named fuji, has a battery life of around 3 hours, 4 if I'm not running many other programs than a text editor (which happens rarely, because I need the webserver and database server going to check the website I'm usually developing, and the browser to actually view said website).

The previous laptop was an iBook, recently renamed gala (see the theme?) when the name fuji went to the new shiny MBP), and that thing could last for-ev-ver. When I first started using it, I could work comfortably for six hours on one charge, longer if I turned off what I didn't use.

The long charge required several adjustments: no videos, no iTunes, turn off the wireless (recall, I'm developing locally, so this is fine), turn down the screen. I considered all of these steps incidental to the fun of being able to program across the country, non-stop.

Towards the end of my daily use of the iBook, however, the charges stopped lasting as long. Instead of my expected six, four if I was rough, hours of battery, I started getting two hours, then one hour, then half an hour. As the length of the charge dropped, I started turning off applications, watching the Activity Monitor output to see what was causing the drain.

Eventually, I tracked the problem down to Firefox.

Sorta.

I use the new tab feature very heavily in Firefox. I rarely close the tabs, they just accumulate until I realize, whoops, I have eighty tabs open on four lines and they're taking up real estate on my browser. Then I'll bookmark and close the tabs. What I really want is a plugin to save pages, like furl.net does, but to my Drupal website. This will go nicely with my mirror module (that's still not done - grrrrr....). Until then, I'll tab-bookmark-tab away!

When the iBook started losing charge quickly, and Firefox seemed to be culprit, I assumed the problem was the kabillion tabs I use. If I needed to be low-energy-consumptive, I'd dim the monitor, turn off the wireless, close Firefox, and use Mozilla or Safari to test pages. Easy enough.

So, imagine my shock when, just today, I open up my Firefox javascript editor and saw a new error popping up on the console more than once a second (but not quite twice a second). I looked at the error, realized it was for some annoying ad network, and immediately set out to find the tab that had the offending HTML in it.

I had to close 40 tabs before I figured that one out.

The problem was that I used FlashBlock and AdBlock to block flash and images from the offending ad network, but AdBlock didn't block the javascript coming from that ad network, also. As a result, the javascript loaded, and accessed the missing image and flash elements at a retardedly high rate, causing the javascript errors.

I believe this (general issue, not the specific page I was viewing before) was the cause of the high CPU usage from Firefox on the last box, and the cause of the fast battery usage rate.

Well, that and the ridiculously large number of tabs causing Firefox to hold a lot of content in memory.

Another aha moment, and yet another mystery solved.