Meeting camomiletea

I met camomiletea tonight, in my dream.

I was in Jungfernstieg S-Bahn station and had to go away from my backpack for a bit; when I came back, there was a damp towel there with 'CAMOMILETEA' on it and someone had added something to a journal entry I had been writing in a notebook, in my handwriting.

I decided to see whether she was still there; I 'knew' that she must be taking the U2 train towards the north-west so I headed that way.

Even though we had never met before, I recognised her immediately, and she me. She was really short, about 150 cm (4'11"), and had short blonde hair.

I don't remember what we talked about, but I think at one point she complained that she knew people were giving her support reviews when she requested them but they never sent them to her, even though she had prepared the review requests with lots of commentary on the various support requests she had touched.

( We started to cuddle a little )

Kind of strange.

Listening

You know how they say that when women tell you about a problem, they're not looking for a solution but more for a sympathetic ear?

I think I prefer that, since I don't think I'm good at finding solutions to such problems, especially mental ones such as insecurity, guilt, or depression, but I think I can listen and, to some extent, commiserate.

Finite State Machine

At work, I was recently asked to write a little subroutine in BODI script to determine whether a given string is a number or not, since we had a job that occasionally died on us and J suspected that the many database hits caused by the current function were the culprit.

I decided to implement it as a finite state machine, mostly because (a) BODI script doesn't have regex capabilities (in fact, it has very few capabilities at all) and (b) I had seen it done that way elsewhere at some point and thought it was nifty.

I drew up a little state-transition diagram on paper first to guide me; here it is:

( Cut for picture )

That was fun!

Oh, and half the fun was showing it to my cow orkers and having them go "o.O" at it since they didn't recognise what kind of diagram it was. (Upon which I showed it to another cow orker in another office who, I knew, had studied computer science; he recognised it immediately, and I would have been rather disappointed if he hadn't. All my immediate cow orkers had studied other subjects.)