Caught

Hooray! I made two catches this evening. Admittedly they were pretty shonky -- the first one especially would never have held if instructor Pauline hadn't yanked the flier up on the lunge ropes so I could get a grip -- but still, it felt pretty good. There was a cute boy in the class as well, though I didn't catch him; or he didn't manage to be caught. And I snuck in a bit of swinging practice afterwards too: my half-turn is coming along, but even with palm guards it was rather painful on top of Monday's abrasions. (I can't be bothered to provide photographic evidence of these, so here's one I prepared earlier; and oh, how entertaining it was to read those comments again while looking that up.)

Um.

Did a bit of work on the Windows version of Pollen today. I already had a build that worked, roughly, but the performance was pretty poor on Ian's (otherwise fast) laptop. Some of this, I suspect, is down to GL_POINTS being very low on the list of optimization priorities for the writers of OpenGL drivers ("Does Quake use it? No? Sorry, we don't care."), but rather more is down to the fact it was running (rather optimistically, and also very lazily, but it was just to get it going and I knew I'd be coming back to it right away... and other typical programmer excuses) in the default display mode rather than switching to something better suited. Changing the display mode manually made a dramatic difference, and I noticed that all the Microsoft OpenGL savers (3D Flowerbox et al) make rather aggressive mode switches on that machine (sometimes so aggressive they just crash the blasted thing).

Since the graphics hardware is more or less interchangeable, the fact that this was never an issue for the Mac version suggests the OSX OpenGL drivers are pretty fucking sharp. But I digress.

I coded up all the stuff to do more intelligent mode switching, but I haven't tested it yet because the ol' job search thing intruded.

Apparently I'm over-qualified. If companies appoint me to positions where I'm obviously smarter and more experienced than my superiors it will cause internal political problems. Those superiors might take it as a shot across the bows and leave, taking their all-important business knowledge with them. Worse, according to Ian, they might even sue the company for constructive dismissal.

For fuck's sake! I don't want to make trouble. (Well, maybe a little.) I just want a job! I'm starting to feel like Yosser Hughes. (OK, possibly not. You have to hand it to Bernard Hill, btw: Yosser to Théoden in 20 years. There's a thought to make one feel old.)

Of course the jobs I actually want are ones I'm hopelessly under-qualified for. It's in the nature of these links to be pretty short-lived, but this, for example, sounds pretty splendid and is just down the road, while this would be even better, if it weren't for, you know, the doctorate, the image processing research and the fluent French.

Fuck. I want to go back to school.
Posted by matt at April 1, 2004 12:19 AM