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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.

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.

Photo courtesy of a certain water-flinging, icecube-tossing partner in crime - why yes, it was a good night out, why do you ask?

I’ve been writing lots of posts lately, but only in my mind and never when I’m near a keyboard. When I am near a keyboard, I have work to do.

So.

1. Yes, I’m working, busting my butt with a handful of the usual suspects in a startup, a real one with funding and an actual honest-to-god customer. We’re at alpha 3 and aside from the usual crumbs in the bed, the product is looking pretty cool indeed. No, I’m not going to link to it or talk about it. But it’s COOL.

2. Sooo fat.

3. Got myself a KICKASS, let me repeat, KICK ASS pair of New Rock boots. They only arrived a couple of days ago and we haven’t gotten off to the best start, but once the blisters heal I think we will be very, very happy together. Yes, they are as heavy as they look. Heavier. And dangerous to those around me, as an unfortunate soul on the other side of the restaurant table discovered last night.

4. New laptop is great, the consort is great, the cats are great, yadda yadda.

5. A new camera is heading my way (eeeeeeeee! EEEEEE!), so I’ve been trying to get back into the picture-taking habit with the old one until this baby arrives, maybe sometime in the next month (it’s a gift so I’m waiting on hand delivery. As it’s a gift I can’t complain about waiting, although the giver of the gift is getting far too much enjoyment out of taunting me about the wait). I’ve put a couple of new photos up on Flickr, more to follow as I find myself increasingly using photoshop as stress therapy during crunches (this is a startup, it’s crunches all the way down).

6. Life is good. Aside from the intolerable fatness of being.

Reading: Peeling the Onion, by Günter Grass. Sumptuous, honest, lyrical. Grass at his best.
Watching: lots of Miyazaki, thanks to an Amazon gift certificate. Yay!
Playing: Killed the WoW account - I was playing because I was used to playing, not because I was having fun; three years is an awful long time to be doing the same thing over and over. Currently dabbling in Guild Wars, CoH/CoV, DDO. I like Guild Wars and DDO but haven’t had much time to devote to them; CoH/CoV I hadn’t played in four years, and really don’t feel myself being drawn back in. Bought Bioshock despite DRM annoyances; loved it but finished it in 25 hours (two days) and haven’t played again, though there really is a lot of replayability. Good game. I haven’t really found anything to engage me yet, so I’m still in the market for a good new game. Someone at EB Games recommended F.E.A.R. (his description of the AI was intriguing), which I picked up and will install when I have a free moment.
Listening: to everything. Curse iTunes for making it so easy to spend money on music!

To close, the single best riposte I’ve come up with all year. I’m so proud of myself:

Friend: I went to a single-sex school.
Bill: “Please sir, I can have some more?”

Friend: So you might be crazy?
Bill: My invisible dinosaur attorney advises me not to answer that question.

- iPod being replaced in toto, new one on its way from Shanghai now, bliss approaches.
- Luggage found, laundry washed, bliss.
- New laptop arrived while I was away, using it now, BLISS.

The new laptop is teh sex. That’s all I have to say.

And… um… well… I’ll just spit it out: I LIKE WINDOWS VISTA.
Confirm! Continue! Permit! Deny!: The permit/deny stuff is annoying, but it only comes up when I’m setting up programs or modifying things; in normal use it’s not really an issue. And there’s something to be said for knowing when anything on your system is trying to change.
Yellow OS needs food: It’s a resource hog, but I have a dual-core processor and ram out the wazoo and so far my CPU (as monitored on the pre-installed Google sidebar) is showing about as much activity as a granny dozing in a lawn chair.
Get out of my underwear drawer: I opted out of most information-sharing options where possible, but the OS came preinstalled so I didn’t have full control. I do note definite areas where info is being sent out - for example, the games tab, which cleverly and cooly noted every new game I added to the machine, has pictures of the product box and product details such as publisher/developer for every game I installed. This is hella cool, but also means that at some point my machine communicated what games I had installed in order to get that extra info. Privacy vs cool… some people will always love the extra, some people will always feel violated. I’m on the fence for now.

Altogether I’m having a better time with my Vista experience than I expected. I still have some reservations about information being shared, and worry a little about connectivity being thwarted for my own good, but so far so good.

… Although it’s not where my luggage is. Wheeee!

There’s no bedhead like airport bedhead.