Post-Apocrypha

On Friday, I left work and headed directly to LaGuardia, so I could get home for pseudo-Christmas (Saturday) and get drunk for pseudo-Christmas Eve. Fortunately, my flight was delayed only 20 minutes, up to the point where the plane circled above O'Hare for an hour, and we made an unplanned stopover in Dayton to refuel. Despite an extended stay on the tarmac, we were not able to leave the plane. After some apparent difficulties (Pilot: "as you can see out the left, the fuel truck is right over there, [not refuelling us for some reason, those shitheads] -- it was pretty clear from his tone), we set out again for O'Hare, a mere four hours late. The reason: unseasonably warm weather. No, really, melting snow, light rain, and a fortuitous dewpoint had rendered Chicago and impenetrable gray mass.

I slept through the last leg of the trip, and when I awoke found we were maneuvering aimlessly across the taxiways of O'Hare. At least, I presumed it was O'Hare -- There were no landmarks to speak of. There was still snow on the ground, frozen in windblown drift and emitting streams of vapor, which mixed into the ambient fog. The ony visible objects were bright but hazy blue lights, and meaningless letters and numerals, which emerged inconsistently from the ground. We steered right and left among the roadways tangled roadways, with no sound but the steady thrum of the idling jets. The landscape, as far as could be determined, was achingly flat and endless, bordered in the far distance by glaring orange and yellow fuzzes of light. As this went on, I began to believe we had entered not an airport but a stange, endless, ensorcelled country, doomed to wander an eternity among snow and wind and fog, seeing just far enough to feel the vastness of the terrain.

Movin' On Up

I've been promoted, sort of. From Front-Office-Support-Understudy to Back-Office-Support-Understudy. This is an upgrade because it involves more databases and fewer quizzes about economic terms. Also more programming. Yesterday I successfully added a feature to one of the in-house programs, which ferries information between the market data feed and our trading platform. My mission: to add an error pop-ups when the program lost a connection. My mission after first contact with the code: to add the ability to detect a lost connection. Despite the resulting vast increase in scope, I was eventually successful.

A note on support: The people who make ORC (our trading platform) have certain flaws, but they have achieved one great triumph: naming the ORC administration tool "SAURON". Both of these are acronyms, of course.

A note on living: While today's shift to something more like useful work is heartening, I am still living my life at someone else's behest. This seems like an inherently unstable situation. Ideally, of course, someone would hand me a large some of money with the instructions, "Go do something you enjoy." Unreasonable though this is, it leaves open the options of research, start-up company, and music. Paul Graham is especially convincing on the startup front, and also has several essays on programming.

Also I bought a book on Erlang, a functional programming language which specializes in concurrent programming. The trend toward multicore processors makes this more important than ever -- unless specifically designed for it, a program can only run on one processor. Going to Borders convinces me I am unusual; there are plenty of books of C++ for Dummies, Beginning PHP, Java for Transorbital Lobotomy Patients, The Bipedal Lizard's Guide to SQL. My secret hope is to discover a book of Perl for Unscrupulous Lunatics or Javascript for the Dangerously Intelligent. Those books will get my money in an instant. I settled for Programming Erlang, with the knowledge that it was written by one of the language's designers (Joe Armstrong).

Also, if you are not familiar with FLCL/Furi Kuri/Fooly Cooly, well, you should be. It has been greatly enhancing my week. It is an anime about puberty, guitars, robots, and mostly about surrealism.

Unearthly

As I waited for the A-train, two men set up steel drums and began playing arrangements of Christmas carols. Slightly further down, there was a man playing a large, stringed, African instrument I do not no the name of. It was high-pitched and ringing, plucked in rapid arpeggios, and probably not tuned in a Western scale. He paused when the steel drummers began, and glanced over. Then he resumed, and began playing harmony, intentionally or not -- given the instruments, they have been bound to sync up on some perceived tempo and harmonic. The effect was poly-rhythmic, with orchestral level of harmony; all three instruments echoed off the tunnel walls as well. Hauntingly strange -- and all colliding over, for example, "Silent Night."

I had already seen the man with the African instrument yesterday. It's lovely on its own as well. I have a rule, actually, that if I have never seen an instrument before, I am required to give the musician money. Unique things should be rewarded.