spent the first hour of my morning doing some hardware specs for client NL before spending the rest of my day trying to crack a bug for client C. since i basically blew off a half day of work yesterday, i was a good boy today and kept focused. unfortunately the bug was impossible to solve, a glitch with the xtra more than anything lingo related. i tried every conceivable fix i could think of and still got no closer. i tried getting in touch with the developers of the xtra, but they're based in brazil and i imagined them all at the beach on a friday afternoon. the client started asking about my progress, and finally in the end i posted two versions, one using an older xtra (with less functionality), the other with full functionality but with the bug still intact. wouldn't you know it, as soon as i delivered, i heard back from tech support and they were quick to give me a solution. i haven't tried it yet, but it's probably going to work.

i was pretty deep in code, so deep that i didn't even eat breakfast or lunch, and at one point i turned off the music so i could concentrate better. i wore nothing but my boxers the whole day, occasionally pacing the house when i had a mental block. amanda came online with a brand new username; we had several chats about who's the bigger racist, me or her, and all the things she was buying with her student loan dinero. a long time ago we used to be crazy AIM buddies; i think i still have some transcripts from 5 years back, off-color conversations with large chunks of the funnies.

in the evening i went to belmont for dinner. suhan, the son of family friends, just arrived yesterday from taipei. i didn't meet him when i was in taiwan during the spring, but i did talk to him on the phone and had lunch with his parents. i'm not quite sure what he's doing in boston, i think he might be looking for work (now that he's graduated from college), or maybe trying to improve his english, or following his girlfriend (who's going to graduate school here in boston). in the meantime he's living at my parents' place. he didn't bring a computer, but still managed to reformat a used PC my father had lying around the house (he brought his own set of bootleg system discs), install XP, and have it stream video news from taiwan. after dinner suhan went straight to bed, still trying to get over his jetlag.

gary called me at my parents' place and came to pick me up (he had just gotten out of work from a nearby autobody shop). even though i already ate, i told him i could probably eat a little bit more, so we drove to the porter exchange to get some food. we grabbed the both at the far end of the eatery corridor, the one right next to the public bathroom. a cute waitress greeted us in japanese; gary said she probably thought i spoke nihongo. i felt bad for her, a pretty girl working on a friday night, but i didn't mind the eye candy, watching her sashaying in the periphery. i went with a seaweed salad and a bowl of miso soup. gary had some kind of eel dish. when the check came i quickly grabbed it out of the waitress' hand so i could get the bill; gary paid the last time we went out to dinner, but he still seemed hurt that i didn't allow him to pay for dinner.

afterwards we just drove around in his minivan, cruising around somerville/cambridge going no faster than 20mph. he flirted with some girls who pulled alongside us and they waved good-bye as they drove off. we pulled along the charles river and got out to chat a little bit, the boston skyline in the background. i've never been much of a talker, so i'm surprised when people want to hear my advice and use me as a sounding board. i didn't get back to belmont until almost midnight. i came back to cambridge a bit cold with the temperature in the 60's. summer feels like it's starting to be over.