It is cold out and I suddenly want to sew lots of coats.

At a bar on 15th writing code. Beer, laptop, headphones, brain full of pointers. The feature I am implementing happens to be the most-requested item in our database. I’m sure it will make a number of people very happy. I’m also sure that a wave of disappointment and recrimination will follow hard on the heels of the initial surge of excitement, but that’s life in software for you.

I hear the words “life is good” coming out of my mouth so often these days that I worry they will become meaningless. Live your life. Seek joy. Don’t take this for granted.

My dad and my sister Julia drove up from California for Thanksgiving. They set about doing most of the work to prepare dinner while I chilled out and played host and tried to catch up on rest. Michael and his girlfriend drove up from Tacoma to join us for the evening. I had planned to drop by ATC for dessert but was far too tired and just went to bed early.

Adam rang up this morning to tell me that he’s made a deal with the factory in China, which will now get going on the first production run of Martianwear light-up furry dancing leggings. Yay!

After spending most of this week doing a terrible job getting enough rest, I finally feel like I’m recovered from last week’s party – just in time for tonight’s Heden mixer. Hmmm. Sometime this afternoon I had better make room for a nap.

I can’t seem to get enough time free in my work day to actually write code. My entire development schedule for the next eight months is increasingly hung up on a piece of new compiler functionality that nobody else on my team has the background to implement. There is something wrong with this picture. Maybe I should start turning my phone off for one afternoon a week.

It doesn’t really help that I’ve been distracted most thoroughly by a certain young woman who will be returning to the Southern Hemisphere in a week…

wow.

back home. everything went together. nothing went wrong in any significant way. party was more than I hoped. 350 people? all of whom seemed to be loving it. wow.

26 nearly continuous hours of work. time to sleep.

Groove Drive, tonight, 5790 Airport Way S. More information at Buddhaful. This is it – I’m excited, and nervous.

I’m drinking tea, eating tim tams, and sewing a pair of pants. I have just discovered that a pattern which works for thin, stretchy knits may not be quite so comfortable when rendered in a heavier fabric. The next pair I make will be cut a little more generously. I’m also going to change the waistband design, which is one of the only pieces still unchanged from the Burda pattern I started with. I have yet to figure out what the original designer had in mind, and my version has come out wrong every time I’ve tried to execute it.

My sister MJ is flying in from New York tonight; she’ll be here for the weekend. Time to go pick her up from the airport.

Life is roaring along. We shipped REALbasic 2007 release 5 yesterday. I took over midway through the release 4 cycle, but r5 was my project from plan to completion. It feels anticlimactic, however, since we branched the source tree and started in on 2008r1 weeks ago – 2007r5 already feels, internally, like old news.

My free time is full of party planning. I am having trouble knowing how much to worry about things. We have made a few changes to the plan that should help mitigate risk: no liquor sales, for one. There are a lot of people involved in this project and getting all of the information to the right places so that effective decisions can occur is just hard. Conflict management is hard too – lots of diplomacy going on right now. It will all come together, I’m sure, but in the meantime I am spending a lot of time thinking the plan over, trying to coordinate all the pieces and people, and simultaneously trying to hang back and let people own the tasks they’ve taken on. This is just like work.

Speaking of work, again: the organization I’m trying to build is starting to come together. We have a plan, we have a team, the team is growing, the plans are moving, nothing ever works quite as smoothly as I hope it will but we keep making progress, so: onward.

I think last month’s introspective phase is pretty well over now, and I am back in outgoing mode. I learned some things.

Too tired to write reasonably, so here’s an outline: Flew home from Austin yesterday, after a late night out. Picked up the Mars Rover: no more disturbing noise in the front differential. Got home, huge power outage. Wow. So much for running laundry or cooking dinner. We lit lots of candles and ordered Indian delivery. Got dressed, went out: destination Seacompression! Best party in a long long time, better than last year’s Seacompression, thoroughly satisfying. Great outfits, well organized, good music, stimulating but not too overwhelming. Lots of dancing. Some flirting. Seacompression ends at two – a restriction of the venue – so we headed over to Magnetic, at the Pacific Science Center, and danced for another hour. Then back to Heden for the afterparty. Very little sleep. Now off to Georgetown for hardware acquisition and Groove Drive prep work.

Brief and informative tutorial about LLVM, a set of open-source compiler backend tools.

The gOS Dev Board is a $60 single-board x86 computer, including all the usual I/O ports and a 1.5 GHz Via processor. Just add RAM and power.

The Port-O-Rotary is a working rotary cellular phone, with actual ringing bells. Plug in a SIM card, pick it up, and go. This is 100% awesome.

I am at Real Software World Headquarters in Austin this week. I decided to shuffle things around a bit and set up a desk for myself, instead of camping out in the conference room like I’ve always done before. It’s a simple thing but there is something in the act of rearranging the furniture that carries a whiff of permanence.

Driving in Austin always startles me a bit for the first day or two; Texas is the only place I’ve ever known where ordinary citizens below retirement age drive Crown Victorias.

Stuff that is currently going on in my life:
– We are at the very end of the REALbasic 2007r5 release process. The dev team is already hard at work on the next project (codename Hanna, which will probably be 2008r1) and I am scrambling to keep the schedule up-to-date.
– I am flying to Austin on Sunday. Meetings, plans, whiteboards, management strategy sessions, and sleep deprivation.
– Tomorrow, hiking in the Cascades. Not sure where yet. Suggestions?
– Lots of sewing. Last night I finished a prototype for the light-up leggings project, which we are going to send to a manufacturer in China for a quote. Today I’m working on a pair of pants – not clubwear this time, just interesting daywear.
– Planning a great big party: an old-school warehouse rave, even, with a great big sound system and half a dozen DJs to drive it. If you live in Seattle and like to dance, leave November 16th open.
– electronics: this is all basically on hold until we finish moving the Rocket Factory to its new Ballard home, but I have a next-generation LAVI circuit in mind which should simplify the project enough to make it buildable in 4-6 hours.
– music: 30-40 minutes of piano practice, every other day or so. Scales, arpeggios, exercises, and some short classical pieces. It’s nice to feel that basic keyboard technique coming back.
– random gardening around Heden, where “gardening” means either “cutting big branches off of trees” or “planting ferns”.

Here’s an excellent presentation about API design. It’s just a series of slides in a PDF, but the text is boiled straight down to the essentials, and there’s a good point on every page.

I still don’t exactly know what my Halloween costume represented, but it seemed to be a success, especially after I buckled on my Burning Man holster belt and loaded it with party supplies. I wore black leather pants & boots, red suspenders, the front and collar of a tuxedo shirt (minus the rest of the shirt), and a matador-style cropped jacket, topped off with black eyeliner and a fedora. Sort of an old-west-stripper-gangster look, which somehow made sense for a mutant superhero/supervillain party, though I’m not entirely sure which side of the hero/villain divide I was supposed to land on.

I danced a lot, though the music at the Hive Mind party never really gelled for me. My feet still hurt.

It’s a nice grey Seattle day. I am sitting on the floor of my bedroom sewing. I still don’t know what I’m going to wear for the Hive Mind party, but that’s okay.

My room needs more light. Picture lights for my Mucha prints would be nice. I have an idea for a lamp that would sit on the dresser next to my globe, and project a fan of blue-green light up across the wall, but I suspect that this lamp does not actually exist, and I possess neither the glassworking skills nor the tools that would be necessary to fabricate it.

Just when I was starting to get interested in JavaScript (also known as “ECMAScript”), out came the draft specification for the next version. Hello, kitchen sink!

I have had an idea for a halloween costume filed in the back of my head for a couple of months, but now that it’s time to actually make it, I’m just not feeling inspired. I have a lot of ideas for clothes I want to make, but this project isn’t so much a clothing ensemble as a parody thereof, and it has come to feel more like an obligation than an opportunity.

Ah, well, screw it – time is too short to work on projects I don’t really care about. I have enough freaky clothes laying around to bodge something together for the Hive Mind party this weekend. How hard is it to look like a mutant when you have a wardrobe full of raver gear?

There is something intense going on in my head that mostly doesn’t involve words, which makes it hard to explain or even to completely understand. I’m just letting that thread run, while periodically peeking in to see whether it has simplified itself enough to unpack yet. In the meantime I feel quieter, less extroverted than usual. I’ve done a lot of exploring and adventuring in the last year, and I guess now it’s time to do some consolidating and contemplating.

Most of my energy is going into work. My new responsibilities are heavy and unfamiliar, so I am spending a lot of time thinking about them and trying to learn how people keep up with all this stuff. The Art of Project Management, Debugging the Development Process, Rapid Development – there is a torrent of words going into my head and an equally vigorous stream of plans and reorganizations coming out. This is going to work; indeed, it’s already working, albeit (inevitably) more slowly than I had imagined. I look forward to the point where I can stop for breath.

JSON, for “JavaScript Object Notation”, is a lightweight structured data format which basically consists of the JavaScript syntax for object literals. It does many of same jobs XML is used for, with a lot less work, and I expect that JSON will rapidly take over what one might call the low-end data format space as the meme spreads.