Bicycles

I'm still dreadfully sick with some kind of nasty cold/flu/alien infestation. I haven't been this ill in quite a while. I lost my voice over the weekend although I'm recovering somewhat from that. I hope I get better really quickly - I'm due back at work tomorrow.

I did a wee bit of coding today. I haven't done any spontaneous fun coding in a long time so I was a little surprised that things went as smoothly as it did. I wrote a quick, tiny little utility app that would help me solve a small crypto problem I've been thinking about. It still needs some optimization but so far it seems to run tickety-boo. I guess coding is like falling (sic) off a bicycle; once you know how to do it, you'll retain that knowledge for the rest of your life.

Sometimes, I miss the good old days when I was still writing Z80A machine code trying to get smooth scrolling to work for my games. Or poring over well-nigh indecipherable pure math textbooks on transformation matrices left behind by my brother, trying to figure out hidden line removal for my wireframe flight simulator. I can remember that surge of satisfaction when I finally got it working, derived from first principles. Not too shabby for a 14-year old. Of course, I've never heard of rounding errors accumulating every time I called a trig function, so all my objects kept shrinking with every iteration. It was a very short-lived flight sim as my virtual world quickly shrunk to a point source. I didn't figure it out until I got to university. Oy.

Wow, I've been at this for a quarter of a century now. I feel old. :(

Y'know, if I passed on from this world tomorrow, I wouldn't say that I would be terribly content about it but all in all, it hasn't been a bad life, not this one anyway. Mmm.