sometimes a week is about survival and i'm having one of those weeks. it's a race to the finish line as i have two deadlines on friday. i just finished off the code for client P, a particularly nasty bit of lingo involving a sliding timeline. i almost wanted to give up and let them know i wouldn't be able to get it done this week but i kept working at it until i got it finished. if you like solving puzzles then programming is the job for you. unfortunately i've never been one for mental games but i feel a tremendous sense of pride when i finally work out a brainteaser. i wonder if there's ever been a study done to see if programmers are less prone to senility?

one done, one more to go. the other one, that's the tougher assignment, the one for client B. they wanted to see a sampler which is weird because the deadline itself is just in 2 days. if they really wanted to see something, end of last week or start of this week would've been a more logical time. unfortunately i couldn't honor their request because i'm still behind in the coding. more like bug fixing, more like 10 pages of bugs. i just want that project to go away. maybe i'd have more incentive to work on it if they ever get around to paying me.

to make matters worse, i woke up this morning with this terrible shoulder-back-neck pain, must've slept on it wrong. why does that happen? you figured with 30+ years of sleep experience, my body would instinctively know to keep away from certain sleep positions that cause pain the next morning. or maybe i've been sleepwalking and been going out at nights fighting crime, come back home at the crack of dawn. if that's true i'd prefer to be doing some sleepcoding, wake up and find all my projects finished.

some leftover macaroni and cheese for lunch and a microwave pot pie for dinner. my roommate came home in the evening, said it was getting pretty cold outside. past two days he's switched to a thicker coat (versus the white windbreaker he was wearing last week) but it still won't be enough once actual winter arrives. he left his broken laptop at the office, the one i said i'd help him fix. he killed his windows OS by contracting some viruses, i told him i could install a fresh system on there. tonight we chatted about how people in china are rude and how america - because it's a nation of laws - feel more restrictive than in a country like china with its authoritarian regime.