In the middle of a bitter winter, the sun came out and melted the snow, evaporating it to a fine mist which then hung icily in the chill air, wizarding the ambient light of the streetlamps into an ethereal glow.
I ran outside in my pajama top and winter jacket, wandering around with a camera in one hand and hitching up my gravitationally inclined house pants with the other.
Having finally begun the long and messy process to change my name to Bill f’reals, I’ve got a big stack of paperwork that I have managed to avoid dealing with for the last couple of months. Name changes in Quebec require a bit more work than in other places; you can’t just want to change your name, you have to have a “serious reason” along the lines of “name of foreign origin or too difficult to pronounce” or “serious harm or psychological suffering” (quoting from the forms). The last, which is my category, requires a signed affadavit from a psychologist/psychiatrist attesting to my trauma. This shouldn’t be a problem, but thinking of what to say to them, going over old ground in my head when I should be falling asleep, has caused me enough nights of bad or no sleep that I’m determined to get that step out of the way soon so I can stop thinking about it.
So, sleepless, going over the forms to check all the forms and notifications and what-have-yous I have to line up for the application, I notice what has to be one of my favorite governmental typos ever:
“Submit [the form to the department], after signing it in the presence of a person authorized to administer an oat”
My government’s devotion to fibre is truly heartwarming.
For the first time in a month and a half, I have an evening without obligations. All the demos in all the languages are done and a preview version of our product made its way to a roster of current and potential investors just after midnight last night.
I’ve been responsible for getting the demos (which are basically the real product in various stages of development) built and making sure they were reliable and of good quality, as well as QA and some editorial work. When you consider that the product didn’t exist six weeks ago and the first demos were a month ago, you can imagine what life has been like. 10-20 hours a day on the couch with the laptop, kicking and integrating and testing and finding the loose bits and the missing connections and the knobs that needed tweaking… but we made it at last and finally I can sit here and write a post and play a little WoW with no lurking pressure that Something Needs To Be Done.
The demos were well worth the sweat and tears and ridiculous lack of sleep, eliciting amazingly positive reactions from the VCs we saw up to and including dollar amounts bandied around the table during the demo, which I understand is a rare phenomenon. We’ve already gotten support and relationships with some frighteningly powerful players, and January is going to be hell as we work to get the last bits of functionality in and prepare to open for a small public beta, with a general release to follow a bit later. A lot of work left but we really have achieved miracles. I can’t wait to be able to share the app with you all! It’s already proving distracting to the internal employees who find themselves playing with it instead of working. :D
Happy holidays to you all. Drink and relax and stuff snow down someone’s back and get thrown in a snowbank and then drink some hot chocolate with little marshmallows in it.
In case anyone thought the picture from the other day was staged or contained a doll… behold. This is what the cat does when I work, when he’s not the other way around and washing my mouse hand.
This picture has obliterated my cute threshold.
It’s a small company and we’re all friends, so I have some latitude for self-amusement.
Today I had to make a test set for the developers to work out a data clustering function. I named it “Cluster Duck”.
It’s been a week of 16-20 hours days for everyone in the team (more than a week for many), so I have been permanently installed on the sofa with the laptop, getting things done.
The cats like my new daytime accessibility:
At least he’s stopped trying to wash my mouse hand.
This is an autumnal leaf:
The new camera is so, so beautiful.
Ye new camera arrived on my desk this morning. I don’t really have time to spend with it right now, but I did manage to fool around with it while picking up lunch:
(accidentally deleted this during maintenance, reposting)
I stood under the narrow lintel of the office door, waiting to see if the rain would let up a bit… This morning’s forecast was “a chance of light rain”, so I left my lovely new umbrella at home. The outcome? Trapped in the office while streets flooded over the sidewalks, underpasses so deep in water that cars were wading through water over their axles if they made it at all.
While I waited I watched; there was a lake in the road from the yellow line to just above the level of the sidewalk, and I was immoderately amused by watching the pedestrians leap for cover every time a speeding car sent a tsunami up over the pavement.
Photo courtesy of a certain water-flinging, icecube-tossing partner in crime - why yes, it was a good night out, why do you ask?
