I didn’t feel great this morning; a possible aftereffect of drinking a bucket of Hoegaarden, half a bottle of wine and three gin and tonics last night. But I wasn’t hungover; you don’t get to be hungover when you have a small and highly excitable child, intent on proving to you that she can name and distinguish yellow, purple and blue.
The morning was a bit of a grind. My new cunning productivity plan is working, after a fashion. I’ve blocked every morning in my diary to prevent people inviting me to meetings, so I can work on actual work instead. I got to play with bigquery, which is Google’s version of Hadoop (which is Yahoo’s version of Google’s MapReduce, and if you think about that for too long your head will begin to rotate). It’s very cool, as database tools go, because it’s incredibly fast – I was tearing through half a terabyte of data in less than ten seconds – but it isn’t blessed with the easiest syntax or debugging. Some of the stuff you are used to with other databases, like waiting ages for results, you don’t have, but other things you’re used to, like being able to dedupe lists of data, isn’t quite so easy.
After a morning of that, I went to 7Cycle for a leisurely ride on a bicycle. Or rather, forty minutes of gurning and sweating on a slightly wobbly stationary bicycle, to some terrible music, in a darkened room. Ah, bliss.
I went back to the office, about to faint, then went out and bought a sandwich. Which, when I got back to the office again, turned out to be a chicken sandwich. Not a vegetarian chicken sandwich, if such a thing exists. I went out of the office again, got my sandwich replaced, and went back to wrestling databases for a few more hours, before leaving for my Spanish.
The sky was growing dark as I walked down the street. By the time I got off the train at Bugis, it was chucking it down, and by the time I got to Spanish, I was soaked from the waist down. (The trouble with the rain here is that it bounces hard enough up the ground that an umbrella becomes superfluous.) I ground my way through two hours of Spanish, still fighting to keep my eyes from rolling backwards in my head … and then headed back to the office again for a late night call. No sandwiches involved.