Meat, metal, moneh, etc.

Awakened by hunger. Washed. Optimising my route for the day.

"Noooo! Don't buy companies to fill business gaps! You need meat first!! People you can retain," is what I said to my friend, who asked about buying a software company to fulfill his company's enterprise IT infrastructure.

Love is a hacking cough, on a cement floor, in the rain.

Rainy day at the cafe. Meditative hour before the next meeting. Clicks and clits. That's geek life, I guess.

Traffic and coffee. And raindrops in the air.

To do unlikely things with doubtful tech, you run a tech startup; to do unlikely things with doubtful meat, you run any startup.

"You can't retain people in the long-term by paying them more - you have to get them to love you," is what I told my client at our first meeting today, with an emerging member of the local scene.

I still find it cute that many spend their lives pursuing difference. I don't have a choice about being different, and regularly flee it.

Which puts me in the strange position of working for a third-wave coffee operation... via the motivation of wanting to be more ordinary.

“How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.”

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is full of great quotes for software developers.

Also find it cute when ageists associate priorities with age groups. I've been complaining about juvenile peers since I was 15.

Pleb humour cracks me up... so long as I'm not trying to hear myself think... but if I am, I guess it's annoying.

Done with some majorly gunky refactoring. Heading home, to break, then back to coding.

Ah musicians - I haven't listened to people who can discuss theory in years, perhaps. Maybe need to get out more.

Dear cafe owners with loyalty apps using QR codes.. you do realise that I can photograph the QR code and reuse it infinitely thereafter?

I find that pretending to be an introvert is a great way to hide the fact that I'm bored.

Running around with a measuring tape. This is so much more stimulating than desk jobs :P but contracts later. :(

Module structure officially refactored to the point where even I don't understand it. Hopefully, in good time. Meanwhile, good night.

Sleeper branding

Maybe Whatsapp isn't such a bad medium for discussions for what counts as an on-brand marketing tactics. As long as the marketing communications function is fulfilled, and the tactic is on-brand, I really don't care what we do. Having the number-one product does not fulfill the function of marketing communications. The end. Fix it, or deny yourself the opportunity to run a serious business. Move in parallel. Business functions aren't supposed to be fulfilled in sequence. That's why there are so many people in the room.

Oh, and #protip:

If you're a new partner in a venture, don't use Whatsapp to joke about being a double agent. No one can tell if you're kidding.

Studying MongoDB in TTDI... till closing, till closing, then home again, home again, jiggity jig...
Tired. Could be all the coffee. Napping at the keyboard.
Mentally preparing myself for a month of munging through the nuances of mongodb.
Having spent several years studying humans, and now spending several more studying machines... what if at the end, nothing?
Righto... MongoDB empty strings as keys: bad idea.
Dear god, I need to learn now to skip the pseudo-coding stage.
Home sweet home after a midnight run. Oranges. No violin, or I might wake the neighbours...
I use FB mostly for work, but I guess the recent Boston news got me on a college-mate adding spree. Also code takes forever to compile.
Groan. There are TWO ways that HTML form data can be encoded? Will have to parse the second tomorrow...

Work

Looked at cabalising Hell. Documentation too sparse, & Hell is probably not ready until it can programmatically initialise projects.

Meanwhile, let's try cabal-dev. Ah, I need to cabalise it first. Let's try cabalising again then.

ok.............. we're doing it... descent into #cabal-dev hell...

Some useful Cabal noob references:

• www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/How_to_write_a_Haskell_program
• http://www.haskell.org/cabal/users-guide/developing-packages.html
• http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/Cabal/Cabal.cabal
• http://www.yesodweb.com/blog/2012/11/solving-cabal-hell

Cabalisation seems to work, as far as the cabal-dev sandbox for Hell is concerned. Now, to figure out how to runghc it.

Later, to figure out what cabal-src and cabal-meta do.

Blew up cabal. Reinstalling GHC and Haskell Platform not working. Trying again after supper.

While the only thing between myself and the women I love is cashflow, I guess I still prefer an interesting life over an easy one. :-s

Adding loads of acquaintances to my FB account for work... while waiting for code to compile at home...

Accidental deletion of $HOME, bad idea; deletion of UbuntuOne account after discovering that it is practically useless, good idea; blocking mother from Facebook account, very good idea.

superfuckingstressed #Hell-in-cabal-dev-hell

Periods of stress are good. Forces pruning of commitments. Those who don't prune, face emotional panic. One day I will grow old too.

Right. I think I've figured out how to cabalise both Hell and the app directories. It's an ugly build system that leaves files everywhere. One day, perhaps I'll get to write a prettier one.

I guess I have dismal tolerance for irrational complexity. The complex gets rationalised, the irrational gets simplified.

Friday.

For the sake of routine. Going to TTDI to drink more coffee. Bringing the code with me. But first. Breakfast.

On 900 voters name Fatimah Ismail. Since I'm registered, but not voting, and since my vote may be stolen, I guess: I, too, am Fatimah Ismail.

Design decision headache. Wrapping up at TTDI. Going home unless anything pops up in the next hour.

I'm trying to decide on how to integrate Hell and MongoDB. I already have formed the idea that while circle 1.0 is rather rigid, like CakePHP, circle 2.0 will be more a flexible collection of libraries. (Yeah, Hell will have circles, not versions...)

Off to bed. need to read more about (Read) ing from strings to other types in Haskell.