Waking up is hard to do

I guess today was the price of yesterday. Uff da.

Woke up at the crack of 8 yesterday morning, thanks to a follow-up call from our health insurance guy. Note to self and other West Coast entrepreneurs: although I have overall been quite satisfied with United HealthCare's service and speed (the lone exception being their tech support, who, like all tech support people these days, appear to be mouth-breathing subhumanoids who have been conditioned through electroshock therapy and perhaps threats on their close relatives' lives to be entirely unable to deviate from the script they've been given), when your health insurance provider has its offices on the East Coast, they will call you on East Coast time. Be aware.

Anyway, I was awake enough after the call that going back to sleep seemed pointless. Poor enochsmiles had been awake all night, but two Red Bulls later, we decided to forge on through the last round of revisions to our business plan, which I am proud to say is now complete as of about 2pm yesterday. It is one kick-ass business plan, if I do say so myself. I am especially stoked about the fact that we have a lucrative revenue model which does not at all rely on advertising. (We can pick up additional revenue through AdWords and profit-sharing with third-party vendors, but it's not a necessary component of the model -- so much so that we didn't even include it in the revenue projections, mostly because those kinds of projections are hard to come up with and would be wholly ex rectum anyway. It'll be an extra bennie to our investors.)

That done, I settled in for an afternoon of coding and research, and around 8pm we decided to get dinner and make a hardware store run. That turned into a hardware store run, various types of curry at a Malaysian restaurant (the first time I've ever seen curried okra, or for that matter, okra in any kind of cuisine available in California!), a grocery store run, and the last showing of Babel, which wins this year's award for fewest number of likeable characters in a movie. Don't get me wrong, it's a very good movie, but oy, really not the kind of thing I was looking for, given that I generally want at least one character with whom I can sympathise. (It prompted a stream of sotto voce remarks along the lines of "If I am ever shot in a foreign country, please make sure they give me a hit off the opium pipe before the village doctor starts sewing up the bullet wound" and "When we have kids, we are teaching them to stay the hell in one place if they ever get lost in the desert.")

When we got home, we noticed that someone had left a perfectly good IKEA CD/DVD shelf, fully assembled and wrapped in plastic as if it had just come off a moving truck, out by the recycling dumpster. Additional inspection revealed that the back was slightly banged up, but the damage isn't structural and isn't even visible from the front. There are things I like about this apartment complex, but one thing that I will forever hate is just how much perfectly good furniture gets thrown out. I've rescued a few pieces before, including a solid wood desktop letter organizer, but it pains me to see, say, a table with fold-down leaves that would make an excellent drawing desk just sitting there waiting for the worms. (I would have taken it if I'd had room.) enochsmiles guessed that somebody's movers had accidentally bashed the shelf into a wall and the owners had decided to get a new one. Fucking yuppies. Anyway, we took the shelf upstairs, and now most of our DVDs live in an eight-foot-tall shelf next to the couch, where we can see them easily instead of having to root through the inconveniently placed cabinet where I'd been keeping them. Success!

Once upstairs, I discovered that one of my colleagues has apparently gone missing, or at least semi-missing, for the last two weeks. I spent some time cross-correlating information with various other Iowa folk, and I'm sufficiently convinced that he's not dead and hasn't fled the country, but I'm still worried for him and his career. decostmj, if you're reading this, people are worried about you; please at least let Segre know you're alive, ok?

I also discovered that Milton Friedman died. I'm very sad about this. My dad handed me a copy of Free to Choose when I was about fifteen, and I read it cover to cover. Uncle Milty was a huge influence on my view of economics, and although most countries (and many capitalists) these days seem to have lost track of the notion that removing government influence over the market is a crucial component of free-market capitalism, I think his ideas, along with those of the rest of the Chicago School, will prove important for many years to come. Rest in peace, Uncle Milty; you did a lot of good for the world.

After that, I started putting together this circuit, the components for which I ordered from Jameco around 2AM Wednesday morning and picked up on Wednesday afternoon. (And can I just say how cool it is to live near a huge parts house again? I've been so deprived.) It's a serial-controller interface for my Roomba, and is now complete but for wiring the mini-DIN cable and the serial cable up to the MAX232 chip. I've missed the smell of solder; I really need to find some robotics geeks around here, or catch up again with the ones I met at Dorkbot.

Finally made it to sleep sometime around 5AM, slept the sleep of the just for a while, and then started having those sorts of odd dreams from which one wakes up, says "damn, that was a strange dream, what the hell was that all about?" and goes back to sleep in an effort, backed by half-awake logic, to re-enter the same dream and figure out what was going on. Lather, rinse, repeat all afternoon. I still have no earthly idea why I was rollerblading around San Francisco while my ex kept pace (and a running conversation) with me in his car, but I'm definitely well-rested. Leftover curry makes for a passable 5PM breakfast, too.

enochsmiles is still asleep, and I am letting him sleep, because he's more than earned it.