I woke up in the middle of the night and the first thing that I noticed was that one of my baby toes hurt like it had just been stubbed. "That's strange", I thought to myself, as my mind gradually yanked itself out of the world of being asleep and into a state that could process such thoughts.

The second thing that I noticed, probably nearly full half a minute after the first, was that I was holding a broken glass in my hand. Not a shattered glass; a full glass that had a large broken chip out of it. This was odd enough that as soon as I noticed it, my mind snapped awake and began to take in its surroundings all at once.

I was on the floor.

I was lying on the kitchen floor, a broken glass in my hand, and water on the ground around me. My toe hurt. My forehead hurt. And I was most certainly lying on the kitchen floor in the dark.

As I lay there, wondering what the hell was going on, I remembered waking up in the middle of the night and getting up to get a glass of water. I remembered feeling dizzy and spilling a bit of water on the floor and I remembered aborting the drink-acquisition mission and then slipping on the water. I don't remember falling. And then I remembered waking up and that the first thing that I had noticed was that one my baby toes hurt like it had just been stubbed.

But as I lay there, what I realized was that I was very far from home.

If I'd fallen harder, if I hadn't had woken up, if the accident had been a different one and more serious, what would have happened?

The first people to notice that something was wrong would have been people who I know online. It would have been those of you who I IM every day who would have noticed that I didn't come online on Sunday. "That's odd", you would have said, when I didn't come online, but people sometimes don't connect for any number of reasons. And Monday you probably would have figured I was too busy at work. How long before it hit the serious-worry status? And then what could you have done? E-mail me?

The next wave of people to notice would have been the #joiitoians I was supposed to meet with on Monday for lunch and my officemates at work. How many days, though, would it be shrugged off to some random AWOL? Especially with a work environment as unstructured as Google. It would be a while before it was investigated beyond e-mailing me a "hey, where are you?". But what could you have done? Call me?

And the final wave of people to notice, of course, would be those of you who chat with me by phoning me from afar. But I'm horrible at answering the phone, and you know it. I'm usually out, and I often take a few days to return phone calls. If you called me on Monday and Tuesday, it wouldn't be unusual for me not to call back til Thursday or Friday. So how long before you worried?

As I lay there, a broken glass in my hand, and a bump on my forehead, I suddenly realized the difference between the illusion of short distance that technology can bring and real short distance. The illusion is shattered in situations like these.

Up until today, I hadn't felt like I was far away, not even for a minute, because I was still "surrounded" by everyone back home. We e-mail, we talk on the phone, we IM at all hours, and I chat with everyone online who I chatted with online back home. Why would it feel like I'm far away?

But when you're on the floor, and could have been lying there for minutes, hours or days, no amount of communication technology brings friends close to you.

You're far away from home.

It's an important lesson.

When I was a kid, my parents decided that in order to ensure that they raised a normal, well-rounded and well-adjusted child, that they would impose limits on the amount of time that I was allowed to spend on the computer. Every week I was allowed: one hour of computer time on Saturday, one hour on Sunday, and one hour combined for the five weekdays. Three hours a week. Three hours.

Three hours of computer time a week is approximately enough time to check your e-mail, briefly say "hey, how's it going?" to friends online, and then quit. Three hours is very quickly eaten by socializing time, and leaves absolutely no time for learning how to do something that was starting to interest me: programming.

It takes a long time to learn how to program well, which is probably why the most obsessive personalities are the ones who are so good at it. I wasn't allowed to be on the computer long enough to develop this skill, but it still intrigued me.

There was only one logical solution: I printed out code to take off the computer with me.

I have a folder somewhere that contains literally thousands of these sheets of printed out moo code and my notes on the side of it. Many of the printouts have dates on the top, identifying them as mostly being from grade 7 and 8.

The interesting thing to me was that it gave me a lot of time to just look at code. I know from watching people learn to code over the years that the main way in which new programmers approach coding is that they quickly jumble commands together and then randomly change things until it works in the way that they expected.

But most of my coding when I was younger was done offline.

...like on the margins and bottom of notes that I was taking in class. Write a little about Neptune, write a little code, write a little more about Neptune.

When I would eventually use up my precious computer time, the code would have to be right. I didn't want to spend time debugging. So I'd go over my own code with a pen, over and over, until I could trace through it and make sure that it would do what it was supposed to. It meant that I had literally hours to think about my code before I ever ran it for the first time.

Now I'm sure that by now any benefits that this learning process created has been watered down to nothingness by so many years afterwards of coding live. But I still feel that certainly this must have wired my brain at least slightly differently when it comes to programming.

Secretly, I suspect that one day these pages will end up in a museum. The Catspaw museum.

Or possibly in a psych textbook. The Catspaw chapter of the PSY101 textbook.

I'm obviously hoping for the former.

I was talking to some people at lunch today and, in my infinite eloquence, said: "Dude, your idea is hella lame."

One of the guys at lunch, who I'd just met a few moments prior, paused and said, "did you just say hella?"
"Yyyees....why?"
"Because. You're from Canada. That's a San Francisco saying. I've never heard it used outside of Norcal."

So I looked it up. Apparently he's right, it's a SF saying. It's something that I must've just picked up in the past few weeks without noticing. I glanced over my past few weeks of IM and chat logs, and sure enough, I've been increasingly saying "hella", and there's no record of me ever saying it before moving here. Huh.

Also of note, I've found that people here actually say clutch as in, "The plot of the movie sucked, but the soundtrack was clutch." I was joining fLufFy in her quest to spread clutchness (clutchosity? clutchification?) to the general masses, and it turns out all I had to do was move to Norcal.

Oh, and I've also learned the word Norcal.

Under normal circumstances, I might have felt like moving here forced me to learn a whole new set of words. Fortunately, since half of my vocabulary was comprised of personal neologisms (often coined as I first spoke them) anyway, it's not like I'm going to be understood any more or less here.

It just means that instead of saying "Addifying to language is clutch", I'll have to say "Addifying to language is hella clutch".

And nothing quite says dual-citizen like "Addifying to language is hella clutch, eh?"

....on the other hand, that's probably a sentence that's entirely unique to me.

First of all, how productive could you possibly be right now? You're reading my blog! If you really wanted to be productive, you'd be off cleaning through the piles of crap in your closet, or saving babies.

Now that we've settled that you don't want to be productive, allow me to help you out:

http://n.nfshost.com/

They gradually get harder. This may eat up your day. Enjoy!

If you don't like the weather in San Francisco, move three meters to the left.

The weather in SF in the summer months (June - August) is best described as "huh??" In this city, the hottest months are Sept - Nov, whereas the summer months have weather that could be called erratic, at best.

If you're in the sun, SF is extremely hot. I permanently sport the sunburn to prove it. If you're in the shade or under a cloud, SF is extremely cold. Sometimes even with a sweatshirt on.

But here's the weird bit ... in some neighbourhoods in SF, there isn't a cloud in the sky. But then in others, you can't get a single glimpse of blue sky under all that cloud. It's so weird. If you climb a mountain (like I do every day), you'll see that the sky kinda looks like a chessboard with squares of sun and cloud.



The above image is extremely accurate except it doesn't have nearly enough hills to be an accurate picture of San Francisco. Also, only one of our suns wears sunglasses; the other typically uses a hat. Regardless, this is still an extremely accurate depiction of SF weather.

I've been told that this is only the tip of the iceburg of weirdness which is SF weather, and to expect to be continually confused throughout the rest of the months of the year.

Clearly the only solution is for me to hire a sherpa to follow me around and carry my entire wardrobe so that I can change into appropriate attire as we move through various climate zones by crossing the street.

If you would like to apply to be my sherpa, please send me your resumé and a photo of you climbing a mountain with many bags on your back. Goats in the background are optional but recommended.

Slogs is here visiting me for a few weeks. And, as is our tradition, whenever one of us gets a degree, we celebrate by stabbing ourselves. How else could you appropriately celebrate these things?

When she got her physics bachelors, we ended up with rook piercings that made me physically sick while I recovered from the big jagged shard of metal that was stabbed into my ear. Remember that?

Well since then, I've graduated. Yes, despite my absence, the university granted me a degree a few weeks ago. Another degree, another stabbing.

We talk about these things in advance, Slogs and I, but I have a habit of not telling anyone else. Specifically because I don't want to be chickened out by everyone's comments about how stupid of an idea it is.

I'd discussed with fLufFy on several occasions the fact that if I were to ever get a tattoo, it would be of -- no, not a stickcat, that's what pretty necklaces are for -- the geek power sign. You know. That little circle and line that's on your monitor's power button and your laptop's power button and your xbox's power button etc. There's just something about the combination of the power button and geekery that just felt very me. And it's one of the few things that I'm not gonna look back on in fifty years and think "what the hell was I thinking?"

So when Slogs suggested a tattoo this time 'round, I immediately knew what I was getting.

We did all the research: where it hurts (like, say, the ankle, where we wanted it), how to get it done safely, aftercare, how much it hurts (like, say, a lot), etc. And after a bit of a false start -- ohhhh you need to bring ID? -- we got it done. Slogs got a tiny beta on her ankle, and me? I got my power sign on my ankle.



Owowowowowowowowowowowowow!!!!

It was painapalooza. Pain town, population my ankle. Turns out that ten minutes can feel like ten hours when you're writhing in agony. It easily hurt more than breaking my toe did.

But all time is finite and eventually it was over and check it out! I've got a power sign on my ankle. Wicked.