I heard the announcement of
Joey Ramone's death on
FMU, at the beginning of a hastily-assembled 15 minutes of
Ramones tunes. I'd like to think it's a mistake.
By the time of Leave Home, I thought, "I can do that". By the time of Rocket to Russia, I thought, "I will do that", and so, instead of being some unhappy math professor today, I'm an aspiring renaissance scoundrel and tired coder. As the years went by, Joey revealed himself to be the R'n'R version of "a gentleman and a scholar", a passionate historian and valued co-keeper of the nebulous flame of le rock and roll, as important for the intelligence behind the noises he made as for the noises themselves.
But I
am a tired coder, even fixing bugs in my dreams on occasion. I carry a company
beeper these days, and if one of our servers even sneezes, we on the beeper list get an automated message announcing the cold. It
(uh...) inspires you to make sure the code is bulletproof and the servers' properties files glitch-free. I was awakened at 2 AM a few days ago by a steady series of alerts from the beeper, as our sites went kaput, one by one; to make it worse, I discovered it was my fault -- an
EJB of mine was failing to load (for an obscure reason that I've yet to smoke out; it didn't need to be on the servers anyway). I logged in and fixed it (by removing all mention and trace of the EJB), but instead of going back to bed, did some work on resuscitating my own site, part of the neverending struggle to make it operate on its own -- as a bunch of bots, in a sense, freeing me to do things like sleep and cavort again. No sleep and no cavort makes
Homer something something.
The finishing-the-move-to-
Nueva-York index is up to 80 (on a scale of 100). It's now almost possible to walk from one end of the apartment to the other without tripping over a box or pile of clothes. Someday -- this year, I think -- I'll think about getting furniture. And a TV. At least I've got
DSL ...he said, as he surveyed his domain from his flat, linoleum throne.