So I Walk Into This Shop...

Well, almost like that. I was walking around in the shopping district here in Almere-Buiten this morning with Pieter prior to doing grocery shopping when a woman who was putting some merchandise in racks outside a clothing store said something to the effect of "interesting to meet here as well for a change.", apparently recognizing one or both of us. We couldn't remember who she was, though, and continued walking.

After checking out some other stores, we walked back past the clothing store and I just had to satisfy my curiousity, unlike Pieter. So I walked into the store and saw the woman there, she recognized me again and we started chatting, during the course of which I learned that she is the wife of the house painter who lives in my street and who we say 'hi' to once in a while. She thought I was the new wife or so of Pieter, on which point I had to correct her :)

I also told her that I have my own company, doing software development, video game development and web development, the latter leading her to ask whether I could maybe work on the site for her husband's business. Score. I gave her my contact details and I hope to hear soon whether she's got some work for me. It's also a great way to meet more people around here :) All that from walking into that store because I just had to satisfy my curiousity, even if Pieter got disgruntled at me taking so long chatting and such. Men will be men, I guess :P

All in all it's an interesting and fun diversion from the events in my life lately. It'll be nice to work on a quick project which will involve contact with other human beings and a financial incentive in weeks time rather than months or longer as with my other projects. I do hope Trevor and I can show some results with the ECD game soon, once we get some details sorted out surrounding creating the actual levels for the game. He's been having a rough time last month with some personal stuff happening and surgery a few days ago from which he is still recovering.

As for me, I have been pretty sick from a bad cold which had me knocked out for most of this week. Yesterday was the first day I finally got some work done again. Thursday I suffered another paralyzation attack while walking up some stairs, resulting in me nearly sliding and/or falling down them. Fortunately Pieter arrived home in time like the proverbial knight in shining armour to save my bacon. I must say that it's not fun to lie on a flight of stairs for what must have been 30-45 minutes or so.

Yesterday my emotional side came up with an alternative version of the paralyzation attack, the repetitive motion attack, in which I found myself standing, unable to exert any conscious control over my limbs, yet caught in a hypnotic kind of motion involving my arms swinging back and forth, back and forth... though it was good exercise, it's still not my idea of fun. What triggered this was the sudden and more pronounced realization that the UMCG hospital really isn't going to do anything for me because otherwise they'd have done so already a year ago when I first came there.

What irks me most is that few people seem to be able to understand even a little that without the answers I'm seeking, even just a few of them, it's downright impossible to participate in life, at least from a social perspective. What it comes down to is that of not knowing what I am. I do present myself as a female to the outside world, in the knowledge that I am not, even if it's pretty close. I can not tell myself or others what I am if not female. An intersexual woman doesn't quite cut it either. In the end I just don't know what I am, what this body is and what I should think about it. I have had over 20 years to think about this issue, so it's unlikely that any comforting one-liners will help me here.

Moving on to a less dark topic, yesterday I managed to fix the last showstopper bug in Lilium M1. I did however find out that the M1 prototype lacks a crucial feature I missed when I put the original list of requirements together. Next up therefore is to add this relatively minor feature to M1 and retest it. After that I can move on to M1.5, with the fun work on the VHDL compiler which may either be a piece of cake, or a new form of torture invented in the lower levels of Hell.

Regarding the Wild Fox project, I'm still stuck on building the actual code, as pkg-config seems to be hopelessly broken on Windows, leaving me with possibly no other option than to add the GStreamer libraries directly to the Mozilla source tree. I'm also toying with the idea of foregoing the 3.6.x branch and focusing on 4.x instead, as this one is about to hit Beta phase. It would allow me to avoid any backporting of features to an old branch, as this is usually a relatively painful process.

In other news, I don't mind a bit of warm weather, but 30+C weather is ridiculous.


Maya