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Contrasts.
Sep. 10th, 2007 11:54 pmStrange how after weeks of overwork and stormy weather at work and in the middle of unresolved problems-to-come a tiny little thing can give me a warm glow. There's some data about a client I've been trying to pull from the database, but our database being what it is, a sprawling inconsistent unnormalized thing with lots of legacy columns that make simple questions unnecessarily hard to answer, I was stumped for a bit. Until I solved it, remembering ... bit-wise AND. The first time I've used bit-wise AND in a professional capacity! Wow!
(Just try it: "select 288 & 32" ... )
So I went home feeling ridiculously proud of myself and with a spring in my step. Still do, a bit.
But then...
But then I was catching up with my blog reading. There's this French blogger friend. Who I admire quite a bit -- she's a sweet person, pretty reticent, smart, an engineering PhD student and science educator in a museum. I also owe her a lot, because in those chaotic days when I moved away from Paris she put me up for a few days, and stored a small bag for me and my cello. I could just drop in at her place, 15 min from where I lived on foot, take a shower (mine was already turned off), and crash on her guest bed. Did I have a crush on her? You bet.
She'd never been a very assiduous blogger, and I was too self-involved to realize she had fallen off my newsreader, and my radar, and my attention.
And then I read on other blogs a reference to a meme she'd started, and asked her blog-comrades to take on that involved questions about MS and linking back to an MS group blog and organisation. Because, wrote this other blogger, she had been diagnosed with MS a few weeks ago.
So I went back to her blog, and there was the post, in July, a long and very poetic one. She's fine at the moment, it appears -- the event that triggered a lengthy medical inquiry happened a year ago (and I didn't see that post either... it sounded like a bit of a fluke because they originally misdiagnosed her as having suffered a type of stroke, which turned out to be obviously wrong).
And I hadn't paid attention and only heard about it now. I'll do what she asked the blogosphere, of course -- not here, where I whinge about myself, but in one of my other net spaces. And will write her. But what a bad occasion to get back in touch with someone. I guess I'll find the right tone, somehow, but I feel like a bit of an asshole.
(Just try it: "select 288 & 32" ... )
So I went home feeling ridiculously proud of myself and with a spring in my step. Still do, a bit.
But then...
But then I was catching up with my blog reading. There's this French blogger friend. Who I admire quite a bit -- she's a sweet person, pretty reticent, smart, an engineering PhD student and science educator in a museum. I also owe her a lot, because in those chaotic days when I moved away from Paris she put me up for a few days, and stored a small bag for me and my cello. I could just drop in at her place, 15 min from where I lived on foot, take a shower (mine was already turned off), and crash on her guest bed. Did I have a crush on her? You bet.
She'd never been a very assiduous blogger, and I was too self-involved to realize she had fallen off my newsreader, and my radar, and my attention.
And then I read on other blogs a reference to a meme she'd started, and asked her blog-comrades to take on that involved questions about MS and linking back to an MS group blog and organisation. Because, wrote this other blogger, she had been diagnosed with MS a few weeks ago.
So I went back to her blog, and there was the post, in July, a long and very poetic one. She's fine at the moment, it appears -- the event that triggered a lengthy medical inquiry happened a year ago (and I didn't see that post either... it sounded like a bit of a fluke because they originally misdiagnosed her as having suffered a type of stroke, which turned out to be obviously wrong).
And I hadn't paid attention and only heard about it now. I'll do what she asked the blogosphere, of course -- not here, where I whinge about myself, but in one of my other net spaces. And will write her. But what a bad occasion to get back in touch with someone. I guess I'll find the right tone, somehow, but I feel like a bit of an asshole.
