Waiting for the Leaves to Fall

I didn't end up getting a lot of sleep last night and today has been spent in a rather detached frame of mind. It was frustrating not to have been able to sort out all the issues before the training and presentations today, but I've been looking on the difficulties as a kind of blessing in disguise. I've been in a surprisingly happy mood despite only just now (at 7pm) sorting out the most stubborn of the bugs in my code ... more of which at the end for the couple of people who might be vaguely interested!

I'm getting better at heeding my own advice so late morning I went for a walk up to the Lower Tarn to sit and clear my head. I was hoping to watch the leaves fall, but it was such a still and misty day that the leaves were entirely inert in the trees, stubbornly refusing to give me a focus for my meditation (unfortunately I don't have Running Backwards' command in this department). Snow flakes are best, of course, but leaves work too, especially on a really windy day. You pick one out and follow its Brownian trajectory to the ground. It has never ceased to amaze me how good we are at picking one object out from thousands and tracking it through a field of essentially white noise. It's a bit like being able to follow a conversation at a party among tens of other simultaneous vocal threads. Computers really struggle with such things, but the human mind excels at them.

Despite the lack of falling leaves it was still good to take a slow walk and think a bit. Often, being tired makes for poor decision making but I'm sure the decision made yesterday is a sound one. It certainly felt good today. Now, something else has been brewing in my head for the last week, nothing to do with work, and I think I've made a decision about that too - although I want to see how it sits in the morning before I reveal what I'm planning for myself. It's completely mad and I think I need to give it one final sanity check following a good night's sleep. It could just be like one of those crazy things you agree to when full of booze which you come to regret deeply once sober! All I know is that I feel a sense of excitement that I've not felt in a good couple of years.

So, finally, for the technical boffins out there, I've lost many hours today to an issue relating to parsing numeric strings in Javascript. There were times when I thought I was losing my head completely such was the bizarre results we were getting out of the software. In the end it all hinged on the slack way I was converting a month to a number in order to perform calculations. Just be aware that parseInt("07") = 7, but parseInt("08") = 0! The js compiler assumes the strings are octal unless you tell it otherwise! So everything worked up to the end of June, and from September onwards, but odd things happened in July and August. I was beginning to think it must be a switch on the mean temperature of the month! This is a glimpse into the world I have lived in for way too long. I did get quite a buzz when I eventually worked it out - and I've been in a very happy mood since - but it has still sucked far too much time out of my life!