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I have not been able to sleep through the night for the past month or two. I would get tired, but would wake up 3-5 times a night for no apparent reason. Was it worries or stress? I cannot tell.
Lay off situation at work is making me tense. The company gave them two months notice before their last day. Meanwhile, they are free to work on resumes, talk to recruiters, and go on interviews as needed. How nice right? I heard one person having phone interview one time, another had gone to interview a few times. While they are being productive, I am buried in writing docs and feeling less productive. I miss coding, miss intense debugging and finally come to the “I got you!” point. I even miss solving problems in my dreams. If I only had dreams nowadays.
Violin has been lying at the exact same spot for a month without being opened or played. I have been either getting sore from workout or pulling a muscle here and there. And I am behind in all my favorite TV shows by at least a month on DVR. With so much not going on, how could I still not being able to sleep?
I wish it would rain more at night; it drowns out my thoughts and sooths me somehow. Even if I am awake, at least I could tell myself there’s a reason to, to listen to the rain. I am tired, I just can’t sleep through the night. Something is happening, I just haven’t figured out what.
When under stress or feeling overwhelmed, people do strange things. I went to get a hair cut. I let hair grow for 3 years without a trim, didn’t think much about the lack of style or what impression people have of me. IT is a very conservative place; I do not see a lot of women dressed up or have fashion accessories. Actually, there just aren’t a lot of women around.
I got a fobby cut, with bang, and got a highlight as well. Gee, I haven’t had a highlight for years. While sitting there with foil still in my hair I wondered how the color would turn out, if it would be too obvious and, too out of the place for work. The whole time “toasting” my hair I kept my teeth shut and prayed…
Turned out not too bad I thought. It looked like the haircut I got a number of years ago. But, it sort of made me look a few years younger, too. I have a training to present in a few weeks. I wonder if people would take me seriously with non-traditional haircut.
Thinking too much about the haircut? Of course. It’s like haven’t danced ballet for years and now I gotta perform. *sigh. Dreaded.
Another random thing I did under influence of lack of sleep, was to post 25 random things about me on Facebook. I thought it was a silly idea when I read some of the other people’s. but turned out, I got comments about them. People actually read these kind of stuff? Really? Unexpected…
It’s Friday nearly 6pm. 60% to 70% of the folks already left work to enjoy early start of the weekend. I am still in office, battling with tool limitations and various manual steps of compiling/deploying/testing. It’s a life of a developer who’s starting to get behind schedule. Yup. That’s me.
I was washing cups in the break room when a family of 3 walked in. A dad, mom, and a little boy who’s probably 3 or 4 years old. Dad said, “Wait, I am getting a water bottle”. Mom repeated, “Daddy is getting you a water bottle.”
We have the vending machine type of soda dispenser, with brightly lit and larger than palm size buttons to push for selection. People use it daily, pushing with their palms, a couple fingers, elbows, robotic like. When the water bottle drops down, it makes a bit of rumbling noise, like a drunk person walking down the stairs I imagined, then the bottle gets to the bottom opening.
Suddenly I heard this chuckle turning to laughter. The boy probably thought it was a magic, or a big toy. It was loud and clear and heart-felt. The mom looked at me with a smile, a little embarrassed I assumed. While they were walking out, I thought of how happy that boy was, with the magic of the big vending machine 10 times of his size.
His happiness is so simple, laughter so true. Oh, how I envy him.
That’s the part I don’t get growing older, why we just lose it. It becomes inappropriate to be simply happy of little things around us. When we say we are happy about something, it usually is something big, like getting married, buying a new car, new job, promotion, vacation, etc. Why can’t we just say just because the flower bloomed, the sky is beautiful today, the trees putting on new colors, the peacefulness of a night? Nobody talks about those any more. And fewer and fewer people are noticing them.
To me, everyday, surrounded by people demanding and disagreeing, machines fighting against, stress from deadlines, tired. But when I share food and goodies with friends, I sometimes find a little simple happiness in me. Smoothness and richness of the dark chocolate, the smell of expresso, the after taste of green tea, the wonderful texture of mochi. Oh, they are enough to make me smile for a while, until I am surrounded again by the busy schedule, broken AC, strange errors…
If you have allergy, you know how annoying it is to get watering eyes, sneezing, running nose, congestion and so on. I used to carry pocket-size Kleenex with me all the time because of it.
I tried taking Claritin-D, but that stuff takes a while to kick in. Later I tried Zertec-D and loved it for a while. Because it kicks in fast and stops almost all of my symptoms. No more congestion! Yay! Then I started to get insomnia. My congestion is the worst at night time. Without allergy medicine I cannot sleep. But with Zertec-D, I would be just staring at the ceiling the whole nigh. *sigh
A friend recommended Benadryl, said it helps to sleep. It did. The first night I took it, I was getting drowsy the 3rd hour or so. I crawled to bed and was unconscious within minutes. Then the next morning came. I woke up feeling equally drowsy as 8 hours ago. My legs were wobbling and my head spinning. I couldn’t even walk straight. I crashed right back to bed and was unconscious for another 4 to 6 hours.
So that’s my story. Zertec-D makes me all hyper (almost mania). Benadryl makes me drowsy, unable to stay awake or concentrate on anything (even my favorite knitting!).
Now what? 
A few months back I blogged about making a baby blanket. I actually finished it in September, but had been too lazy to transfer the pictures to my computer. =p But here it is, two pictures of the finished project, my very first soft and cuddly baby blanket. Yay!
Actually I think I made it a bit too loose, so though it’s soft, but it might be too “holey”. But Oh well. Yak. :’( And yes, I am darn picky…
I finally got my ChumChum! I have been waiting for days for it to arrive and there it is at my doorstep today! It’s so adorable!
Wait, have I mention what my ChumChum is? I guess I have skipped that part. =)
As part of my birthday presents this year, along with a John McCain birthday card, I received a Chumby. =P But on my birthday, I think it was still in transit somewhere above the Pacific Ocean. It took a few days for it to be shipped from China to California. Meanwhile, I was already checking out the widgets and costumes. It just felt so natural that I started calling it ChumChum. Finally, today, it arrived safely at my doorstep, in one piece.
When I was opening the box, my first impression of it was how earth friendly the wrapper was. There’s no fancy box, no hard plastic cover, just a simple yet sturdy cloth bag. The Chumby Charms and AC Adapter were in two smaller, and equally simple pouches. Nothing complicated. No scissors involved, no trash to throw away. You would think cloth bags and pouches must feel like cheap wrapping. But quite the opposite, it feels special, because it reminds me of hand-made bags that friends would make as little gifts.
The setup was simple and straightforward. A thin “get connected” booklet with large and clear fonts provided all the information I needed to get ChumChum setup and start loading widgets. The booklet’s recycled-paper-cover gave the same earth friendly message.
I just started loaded some widgets to it and cannot wait to find out more use about it. For now, check out my ChumChum page to see my virtual pet. =)
My dear friend Tracy is pregnant and is expecting her first baby girl this October. I thought, what a perfect chance for me to make a baby blanket! So I set out the mission to make one.
Once I made the decision, I realized that I have never made a baby blanket before. Strangely, I have done two or three adult size afghans, but never a baby one. I guess I just never had a friend having a baby before.  So I went for a quest to find a nice and easy pattern…
Boy that proved to be hard. I don’t particularly like the granny square ones. I prefer something simple and clean looking, at the same time pretty and practical. Am I asking for too much? *sigh… I spent a few days digging online to find the “perfect” pattern.
At the end I set my eyes on a teddy bear one. Oh it is so cute! I picked Bernat Softee Baby yarn in pink to do it, but it just looked too pink for me. So after trying with 3 or 4 other yarns and colors, I ended up using one strand of white and one strand of pink. The color looks girlish but not too pink. I kind of like it. Here is a picture of what it is supposed to look like.
 Teddy Bear baby blanket While working on this blanket, I discovered another pattern that I just LOVE.
 Knit baby blanket I am starting on both patterns now. How I would love to get both of them finished this month. I just can’t wait.
Here are the links to these two patterns:
- Teddy bear pattern: http://www.knittingonthenet.com/patterns/babyafbear.htm
- Baby blanket pattern: http://andreatung.blogspot.com/2007/08/baby-blanket-pattern.html
And here are all knitting and crochet patterns I have found online: http://www.evernote.com/pub/sandyq/KnittingAndCrochetPatterns/
I haven’t been blogging much in the past year or so. Well, nothing major happened! I have not been as silly as before (so I hope), and I have not been traveling at all. So really there is nothing worth blogging about.
But I managed to keep myself quite busy at home, very busy indeed. I got hooked on cross stitching most of last year, especially Margeret Sherry’s designs. There are so many adorable cat designs! I simply could not resist the temptation to collect all that I could get my paws on. And where else could I better find them than eBay, I say. So I did quite a lot of bidding and receiving few packages almost every other day for about two weeks. Then I stopped completely and quite suddenly. Why? I had just collected enough patterns that would take me years if not my entire life time to stitch! I got to upload pictures of some of the finished projects here. They can make any cat lovers go “OhhhhHHH” and “AwwwWW” in a second.
I’ve been using log4j for years. Viewing those long files have been a pain no matter what projects I worked on. It’s not the format itself, but just long long lines and even longer files…
Windows by default opens .log in NotePad, which isn’t designed to handle large text files. Try opening a 5mb text file. NotePad is going to hang. What a pain.
I’ve been using NotePad++ and TextPad for quite a while and have grown to depend on them quite a bit. NotePad++ is light weight and fast. I highly recommend using it as replacement of Windows NotePad. It has syntax highlight and can handle large files. TextPad has syntax highlight as well. But biggest advantage of it is the ability to do automatic reload when the file is changed from external sources. That works very well with log files. I have yet to find another text editor that can do auto reload as well. Both software can do file edits (trim line, convert tabs to spaces and vice versa), find ASCII values of characters, number conversions in hex, oct, etc.
Having NotePad++ and TextPad definitely beats opening logs in WordPad or NotePad. Sometimes I prefer to read the logs from within IDEs. This, surprisingly, has a lot more options. There are a number of plug-ins for Eclipse and IntelliJ to read (and tail) log files. These log viewers work the best when you are running/debugging the application from within the IDE.
But still, imagine having to scroll 10000 lines just to find the part that you are looking for. No matter how good TextPad and NotePad++ are, the log is still in black text white background (actually you can change the colors and fonts, too). Every line looks just about the same as the rest! I get dizzy having to stare at them.
Just yesterday, I found my new best friend with log files: LogMX. It’s not free, but it’s a much better tool to view log4j logs. Just specify the pattern that’s in the log4j/log4net config file, and open the log file. You can let it reload the log, or suspend it any time. Different levels of severity are in different colors, so any warning or errors REALLY stand out. Not to mention the ability to filter the log for just certain packages and certain severity level. Man I fell in love with it so fast and so hard that I was was telling my teammates about it the very next day!
Maybe there’s something even better out there for viewing logs, especially for log4j and log4net logs because they are so common in the development world. Anybody knows any? I would love to try them out.
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