One of the hard parts of being a professional software dude is that when you get close to releasing, your hours working tend to increase proportionally to the proximity of the ship date. In general I’m used to this trend, having gone through this countless times over the years, and now I can always tell when I’ve passed a threshold of working too hard.

I start to literally have coding nightmares:

10 print “hello world”

20 goto 15

Hmm, why doesn’t this work? I keep running it and it says syntax error, invalid line. I change the code:

10 print “hello world”

20 goto 5

Hmm, same error. Let’s try again:

10 print “hello world”

20 goto 6

Dammit.

6 Exit

10 print “hello world”

20 goto 6

Wth.

Repeat this indefinitely. I can’t quite get the code to work.

I usually wake from this dream (though the code is more complex and in c# these days) feeling like I tied one on the night before, with gym sock mouth, a roof nail in my eye, and my back all cramped up. Oh, and enough frustration to light the city of St. Louis for a week. Talk about waking up on the wrong side of the bed.

Sigh.

But we’re almost there and I can’t wait to talk about what I’ve been working on. When I take a step back and look at the big picture, it’s all very exciting. Stay tuned!

Anyway, back to fixing bugs.

Yesterday was Bunny’s birthday. Hard to believe she’s already 21!

I bought her cupcakes and put those trick candles on them that are supposed to stay lit and sang happy birthday to her while the dogs barked at me and mayhem ensued and then she blew out the candles. And they stayed out. She has the lungs of trumpeting elephant. I’m surprise she didn’t blow the cupcakes across the room. Boy howdy. She needs to blow up balloons for a living or something. I tried myself later and they kept relighting and finally I had to call the fire department to put them out.