Mark Carroll's Journal

My sleep has not been great. Today, I awoke before 5am then was distracted by a tedious work issue with Discord and crypto wallets and suchlike. Unusually for me, I went back to sleep later in the morning, on our drawing room sofa. Our dog L. pawed at me sometimes, R. wonders if because worried by snoring, but I fell back to sleep each time.

What awoke me properly was what seemed to be a good few hundred Sikhs, we have quite a centrally located flat and their nagar keertan, with walking and music, passed by outside. I had not realized that Vaisakhi has come so I got up to see what was going on.

While I slept, R. had made lunch. After that, we took L. walking on Glasgow Green where there were even a few people sunbathing. We have been enjoying quite the unexpected consistent bout of sunny weather. Sometimes there is a cold wind too but today we were spared.

My programming at work recently has mostly followed a familiar sequence. For each component,

1. figure out how to make it work


2. for a missing piece, write its code, rinse and repeat


3. test and debug it.

Having finished that third step on Wednesday for a new page in a webapp, I am now in the midst of the second step for a related backend service.

The second step is hardest on my sleep when I think about detail of what to do next and just want to get up and do it. It is also the most interesting with its rinse and repeat in that, even if I do not start with a complete picture, if I keep filling in the next piece that I see that I need then eventually I end up having done them all. Sometimes, I find myself building a scaffold of increasing abstraction, such that I build pieces that enable other pieces to be built more easily: earlier pieces make the shape of other pieces clearer and simpler. Fortunately, it always seems that if any pieces remain to be done then at least one of them has a clear path forward, so they all get done in the end.

It made sense to complete my work on the webapp component first because the product and user experience people can test and improve it while I work on the less visible and interactive facets of the project. Further, the component I am working on now isn't strictly required for launch as long as it follows soon afterward. I expect to be able to finish it this coming week.

I have been sleeping a little too late, falling asleep after midnight and rising after 9h. My schedule is more naturally more like a rather early 22h to 6h so I have some adjustment yet to do. I shall get there, especially as, next month, I'll have a child here to help get out to high school in the mornings. I'll have to figure a way to designate the various kids in this journal, I had my other two over yesterday.

Anyhow, I overslept this morning and R. helpfully called me and I managed to get the car in for its booked recall work in reasonable time. Oddly, they didn't call me back for pickup, I guess it's running into tomorrow. I did remind them to actually note my telephone number. The loaner is a Honda Jazz of the same generation as mine so it required no introduction.

I attended to three work tasks and am glad to have gotten them done: I sorted out some diagrams and their generation, I adjusted how database configuration responds to command-line options, and I addressed a couple of unrelated issues that had been making continuous integration fail on that previous.

We also turned further attention to relocation preparation, such as the acquisition of warmer attire for arrivals from the tropics.

I ran three laundry loads and caught up on rather belated washing up, which isn't as bad as it sounds because I at least rinse the dishes promptly.

Feeling rather busy, and finding that frozen fish may not have survived too many months in the freezer, I opted for an easy, quick lunch of canned chicken jalfrezi with a piece of toast, followed by a Fry's Turkish Delight.

Typically, I am unusually emotionless in my dreams. At most, I will feel tension while infiltrating one of the facilities of the alien invaders. To take a couple of recent examples from dreams, when my passport was stolen shortly before a trip, I was simply irritated and made a mental note to call the consulate about emergency travel papers. And, when the curtains closed before I got there to close them, I merely wondered if I were unexpectedly telekinetic and had a go at consciously trying to remotely close the curtains in the next room as I approached those, which didn't work. However, last night, in a dream that involved my helping to keep some practical issues straight with our time machine, when we were a few decades back in the past, I was briefly overcome with emotion when asked if I might wish to contact anybody in that time period.

I may be remembering more dreams because my sleep has become irregular. I suspect that I am coping worse with external influences on my schedule. I fall asleep easily but don't sleep the whole night, instead taking a supplementary nap rather later on.

This morning, I wondered if the UK Conservative leadership are deceptive or^* ignorant; I concluded that, despite Hanlon's Razor, they probably share the current US Republicans' tendency toward the former. Having often felt somewhat to the right of many of my friends, I surprise myself in also feeling even somewhat left of Labour these days. My father opined that people move rightward as they grow older. If they do, the parties seem to be outpacing me.

Decades ago, I had the sense that, politicians may get it wrong but at least they were often at least trying to find their way to good policy. Recent decades have made it increasingly difficult to extend such benefit of the doubt. Well, I'll credit much of the US Democratic Party with that I believe they genuinely want impoverished minorities not to suffer then die, but that feels a low bar.

Maybe I just need a bit more sleep, I awoke somewhat prematurely this morning. Things may seem rosier then …

^*One may suspect and.

Over the past couple of days I went through the long inventory from the letting agent, provided feedback accordingly, and submitted a maintenance request for the more serious issues with the flat; they'll stop over tomorrow to take a look. I also unpacked and set up the printer and scanner I bought, enabling various other administrivia like finally getting my 2021 taxes ready for submission, also my overseas voter registration. I feel silly for having arranged things so that, once my shipment arrives, I shall have two scanners and printers, but it's difficult not to have either with all the things people want me to sign and suchlike, including another form from the movers. Other chores included minor matters like sorting out my final account with the Oak Ridge city utilities, canceling the insurance on my sold house, trying out the laptop computer from my new employer, etc.

At least I am moving on to the less urgent tasks, things like registering with the doctor, dentist, library, finishing up the remaining address changes, etc. I still notice good things about being back here, everything from that retail stores quote prices inclusive of tax, to that I am again welcome to give blood. However, I am still working on getting to bed soon enough, my current plan is to close the curtains earlier, even though I love to see outdoors. The latitude makes the evening far lighter than it should be this late and I think it's fooling me into staying up late, just as the mild Tennessee winters fooled me into not lighting log fires.

My home telephone and cellphone each respond to both a US number and a UK number. Of course, there is always somebody who doesn't read the note about what these are and when to call. Having had days of recruiters calling before 5am, I now move on to letting agents doing likewise. We shall see how many of these need to be told repeatedly. In these trying times, the sleep would have been especially welcome.

I do not welcome the arrival of daylight saving time. Actually seeing some daylight helps human brains to wake up in the morning, and I get up early enough to shower, eat, commute, etc. in time to park at work at around 8h. Now I get to do that early stumbling about when it's wholly dark outside and year-round daylight savings would make that even worse for winter. A darker evening is good if it helps me to become sleepier earlier. I hope not to have to shift my arrival at work into even more darkness as campus repopulates in the apparent aftermath of the pandemic that isn't actually over, we'll see how the queue of vehicles at the security perimeter develops in length.

I look forward to this year with my house being in better shape, bringing me nearer the things I want to do in it. I am most eager to do various software (outside work) and music. I would like to indulge in board games, foreign languages, reading, writing, drawing, but I don't right now see when, I must be realistic about having to push at least some activities aside. After all, it may be more important to make time for exercise and meditation, also finally sorting and sharing old family photographs. How people fit in much at all outside sleep, paid work, food, chores, correspondence, personal hygiene, I still don't know. I have the annual treat of my tax filing coming up soon and, now some time into winter, I have yet to split the firewood. Further, for over an hour before bed, I need to unwind and relax, just watch some television or something, not even read anything too stimulating, else I shan't be able to fall asleep quickly.

What is clear is that my most precious resource at this point is time. I am already variously capable, I should be sure to do things with that rather than just preparing for future things. It's partly a case of making priorities that I can genuinely embrace and of summoning the willpower to make the habit of doing the things I want to, and that's easier if they are mostly things I truly care about. Thoughts drawn from few different sources make me suspect that I should work on being consciously engaged with my environment and circumstances, not just drifting through life passively on autopilot, killing time with my head in the clouds.

A few years ago I mentioned how I side with the minority here in placing the start of fall at the start of September. Again, it fits: lately the house has been mid-seventies, the air conditioning hasn't much cut in. Still, it was pleasant and sunny. I may even have mowed the yard had I slept better last night, or not eaten too much pizza for lunch. My weight had again dipped enough for me to briefly indulge in unrestrained consumption which, today, included a spinach feta pizza from Domino's. They're reliably quite good and my local branch is walkable, though not such that I want to walk there for carryout. I also ate a small butterscotch meringue pie. They are a little sweet for me, and I do rather like lemon, but I am also partial to butterscotch and those were the meringues significantly discounted.

Progress on the house is painful. More urgent issues involve leaks and drainage, for obvious reasons, also finishing the floors, for livability. With my now paying out of disposable income, everything else with the house, and there is yet plenty, probably has to wait for next year. I am coming to terms with this, it still gets me down. I think it is part of why I have not been getting much done lately on the domestic front.

Work is coming back under control. Practically, I am settled into a routine, with desk setup and meals and the like. My attention is mostly on three projects, on all of which I can try to make progress this coming week. The C++ project involves instrumenting existing code, the Java one is a web portal, the Python one is on deep learning. Soon I expect to be down to two on-site days per week. Recently I attempted to use an evolutionary algorithm, mutation guided by biases, to optimize spiking neural networks that I was using as classifiers of input sequences; they worked on easy problems but not on harder ones, so more investigation is indicated. I find that my work laptop has two USB C Thunderbolt connectors and the monitors provided me have, more or less, a dock built into the back of each. Linux support for such now seems decent.