Mark Carroll's Journal

Today is my first day of leave from work for over the Christmas break. This morning we sent the boys off back home to Asia to visit family, now it's just me and R. I am relaxing on the sofa with our dog L. while R. brings some sanity to the kitchen storage. I already feel my headspace increasing and have been getting some small postponed things done. Many more await.

I am quite good at sleeping. Given the opportunity, I can do plenty of it. This morning, I dreamt we lived somewhere else and I spied a sizable swirly unnatural-looking Weather Thing approaching, and turned to R. to strongly suggest that we leave the house now and drive elsewhere.

Again, I thought back to high school where one of my math teachers figured Cartesian coordinates for the vertices of a regular dodecahedron and, looking at one, I wonder what the straightforward strategy is for doing that. I like to think that enough staring and turning would help make it clearer. Now, this is where I wish I had a large desktop system with lots of PCI-e slots for used RTX 3090's or somesuch: it's the kind of thing I'm happy to try idly chatting to some opensource LLM about. It's not as if anything's riding on the answer. Perhaps they're rather better at classic book suggestions than anything analytic though.

I also got to wonder about mobile telephony. ( How might routing work? )

My mention of idly chatting to LLMs reminds me, I have three sizable pending purchases in mind: such a desktop AI system, a small laptop for use while commuting, and a cross-trainer. The interesting question is how to prioritize them though clearly the first there should actually be last while I cross my fingers for the bubble bursting. Also, I'm reluctant to spend too freely until I'm more ahead of the higher-interest debt.

In the meantime, I've found that, as usual, BBC iPlayer didn't exactly help me discover that there's recent Later… with Jools Holland to provide me with a somewhat alternative musical backdrop, albeit a considerably mixed bag of such. I've been enjoying ex-BBC's Stereo Underground recently which is also nicely varied. Given that it often plays the music of my childhood, it makes me wonder: I think of all the energy of especially some of the more punk-ish songs, and how exciting life seemed to me at the time, especially with books filling my head with new intellectual worlds to wrestle with. There's something there I'd be interested to recapture, about possibility and choice, about who I am and what I pursue. I may not quite know which destinations make sense but one of the many wonderful things about R. is how supportive they are.

I have been frustrated that I am not yet more rapidly productive at work. Yesterday was another example but my legs started off achy and, as the day wore on, it became clearer that I was coming down with some kind of a cold, and that my throat was not feeling good. Then, I didn't feel sleepy last night and stayed up late.

In the end, I slept. This morning, I woke up feeling quite rotten, especially my head, so I got out of bed in search of medicines and drinks. Having rested, I now feel a little better. I have even taken a bath and now feel up to actually dressing instead of lying around in my pyjamas.

At least we didn't have grand plans for this weekend. I expect to be feeling somewhat improved by Monday.

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.