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I can pretty easily summarize the average day of my life. The following things happen during the 24 hours.
8 hours or work. This includes the work done to earn the money to pay everything.

8 hours of home. This includes the household chores, like cooking, cleaning, going to the store to buy necessities like food and clothes and so forth. Also, taking care of the baby is part of this. Changing diapers, feeding her and so forth happens within this 8 hours. Then there’s also the maybe 1 to 2 hours (maximum) that I can actually spend with her. Like playing and going outside to play and walk and such things.

Then there’s the last 8 hours, which goes to sleep. Or should go to sleep. If I want to do anything extra, like play a game, write some open source code, watch a movie or read a book, it’s away from the sleep time and it’s not possible to do for a long time since at some point the lack of sleep catches you.

I’m pretty certain that this can’t be it. The content of life I mean. I also consider myself being lucky enough to have a work that every now and then actually feels like it makes sense. I couldn’t imagine what it would be if I just spend my working hours doing some repetitive trivial bullshit.

Many people say that after a while it all gets easier. I wonder if they mean like it gets easier like you accept it as a fact that this life only gives you so few hours of fun time and rest of it is just work. Or, do they mean, that there starts to be more good hours. I wonder.

Anyway. I would not like to live my life like this, really. I mean the ratio of fun, even if you count sleeping as fun, is just not good. I think I should write a facebook application where people could record their ratio and we could compare. If people constantly score the same figures as I do, let’s commonly agree that the world is royally fucked and call the UN.

Now that our daughter is starting to move by herself more, the nights have gotten more restless. On average I think that I barely get 5 to 6 hours of sleep per night and surely my wife gets a lot less. By all standards this is not enough.

I do know that lack of sleep causes a lot of problems, apart from general bad feeling, that is. Basically weight control becomes problematic, learning and general cognitive capabilities are affected, one is more prone to accident and so forth. Depression being one that I fear the most. I am perhaps not the most cheerful person but I have been also quite far from depressed. I have now started to see the tell-tale signs of sleep deprivation in myself and it’s really worrying.

I would like to believe that this is only temporary, but I would like to know if there’s any academic research being done of young children’s parents and their sleep. Are we above or below the average? What’s the mean age, in months, when an average baby starts to really sleep full nights. Don’t know how much the information would be worth to me since the variance is probably quite high, but it would be interesting to read the stats.

And like always, it’s not the absolute amount, it’s the relative amount when comparing to others that matters. It does not feel so bad if everyone else is in the same boat.

Start with logic gates created from transistors.

Continue towards boolean algebra operations.

Too difficult? Try representing integer and float values and basic arithmetic operations.

Now code that in assembler.

Hard to follow the flow of the program? Move to a sequential programming language.

Hard to write correct code? Maybe some functions and scoped, automatic variables?

Hm, still quite difficult since you can access all the stuff in the program and create unexpected dependencies?

Should we try to do a object oriented program to protect access to object or component internals?

What, now you need to actually still reserve memory (and most importantly, free it when there’s no use for that particular data)?

How about running the code in container and have the code managed by a virtual machine?

Ok, but now you still have that nasty code you need to compile and change.

How about making a generic code framework on top of the virtual machine engine that you can dynamically command using a higher level language that you specify from standard building blocks?

Ok, now you still need to worry about the underlying hardware resources like having enough memory and disk space. How about virtualizing that?

Sigh. Now we have everything virtualized and you can add hardware resources to your virtual system that’s running virtual machine-managed script code. How on earth do you know what piece of virtual code depends on other piece of virtual code? You need to capture that as a standard metadata that you can again use to know what’s really going on.
How on earth do you now make sense to all this metadata? Let’s standardize what are the pieces that make up the virtual system and expose that logic over a standard layer and call it service orientation.

Hm. Seems like a lot of services… We surely don’t want to make those services be called from sequential or object-oriented programs, we need to make higher level “processes” that can be dynamically configured and run in another container so that you can actually relate those to the processes that organizations are made of.

… and this is pretty much where we are now. Automating processes which call services organized into strictly governed building blocks and use standards-compliant interfaces. All running on virtual machines on virtual hardware.

Good enough for you?

No, think not. Next we make the data itself virtual and standardized so that you are not restricted to doing calls to it from any particular (virtual of physical) location but you can just call it by name and the underlying framework locates the data, the process that needs the data and services which actually operate on that data.

Next step would be to virtualize the data generation logic so that it finds it’s right standard and virtual call handle so that the creator of the data doesn’t need to anymore know the data.

At this point we can probably hand it all over to semi-intelligent virtual software layer which can do all the stuff we tell it to do starting from the data generation to the actual usage.

Next, only logical step is to write and artificial intelligence layer using quantum computing on top of the stack to know what we want to actually do with our systems before we even know that.

At this point, you don’t need to calculate how much money you will have on your bank account the next week after all the bills because every possible scenario is already calculated.

Maybe then I will have time to develop that game I have always wanted to develop. Oh wait. It was already developed by our ultra-virtualized, standards-compliant quantum AI overlord. Nothing left to do anymore. Doh!

I have to say that the last thing I am interested in is the global economy. I find the theoretical side boring and the practical side very distant. When it comes to investing to stocks and soforth, I am not really doing it. Partly this is because I’m paying the mortgage more agressively back whenever I have loose money and partly this is because I just don’t have the energy to invest and then aggregate a solid base of knowledge aroung the investment to actually maintain the investment.

This can be pretty stupid and surely it is against the principles of market economy. I already know that I’m the worst consumer there is (I don’t really consume that much because I don’t need that much) and I don’t invest my capita efficiently, which probably in few years will be counted as an act of terrorism.

Still currently I have been listening to the world’s finance news more closely. Typically I ignore the “OMG the nasdaq has fallen/risen this much and that much” type of news since I think that most investors and analysts are a bunch of control freak monkeys whose blood pressure is directly linked with market tickers. And I found the “Jump You Fuckers” comment hilarious. Anyway, it is looking like this one can get pretty nasty and since I work as an IT consultant, my work is quite sensitive to economic hiccups.

While it would be quite bad to get fired (I don’t think it’s very likely currently, although working for a US-based company can be problematic currently…) but also that would be my first time ever. Well, in the case that I would get sacked, I think I would use at least some of the time paid by the union to actually do some serious introspection and career moves. Personally I would be very interested in starting to work with only open source products. I am currently quite sick with the problems associated with commercial software. I would like to code, but with the way the current consulting engagements have gone, It’s been powerpoint only. This makes my coder heart cry in pain every time I need to “restructure” or “fix” or “generate” another slideshow to explain some topic. Granted, some of the things I work with are conceptually quite hard and since it’s the customer who pays the bills and has to live with the solution, it’s only fair that I explain what I do. Anyway, this probably deserves another posting.

But the point was, economic meltdown may actually be a good thing for me. I get to go back to the basics if shit hits the fan in a big way. Of course this would mean that there’s a way to feed the family and stuff but I don’t really think that shit’s going to be hitting the fan so hard that food production stops. And if it will, then I can become a part time farmer. That would be kind of cool too.

For a long time now, I’ve been meaning to do an entry or two about my feelings and thoughts on being a father. I have many times thought what are the areas I want to cover in the entry and what is best left unsaid. Turns out that there’s surprisingly many things that actually need to be left unsaid. And this doesn’t seem to be a cultural thing, it’s more like an evolutionary thing. I intend to make a list about the things that are best left unsaid. I know this has the potential of making a lot of people pissed off. Nevermind, it tends to be so when you criticize things that are better left unsaid.
In the first part I want to mention the lack of freedom of expression. No matter what you do, you can’t speak about feeling bad, at least in public. A man is supposed to take care of the family no matter what. It’s a completely binary thing. You either are a bad father (meaning that you express any negative thoughts publicly) or you are a good father (if you keep your worries to yourself and never open your mouth). Society has advanced enough that it’s ok for a mother to say that she’s tired or is feeling down or downright depressed. This is fair and ok, after all, this is healthy.

The same does not apply to fathers. It’s ok to sigh and say “Wow, I have not slept in three nights. Man, I’m tired.” However if you say, “Wow, I have not slept for three nights, because I keep worrying whether we can make the next payment of the mortgage and I worry constantly about work. For the last three months I have spend either working in the office or at home and I don’t think most of the people I once held dear even remember me.” NO you cannot say that. This would make you a bitch whiner who is not a man and as such not suited for a father. It actually goes beyond this. This is where evolution comes into play. It’s not ok to say this at home, at work, at the doctor’s office.

It’s not that I personally feel all these negative things. But what I gather from observing the environment is what makes me argue the point of part one. It’s quite obvious really. The age-old “stop whining and be a man” argument applies to being a father more than to anything else. It’s hard to point the finger who is to blame because it seems to be an evolutionary thing, so I wont even try.
Nevertheless, it’s good for others to understand this the easy way. For me, since I have always bit naively thought that being a man is not such a binary thing, it has taken a while to realize this. It’s really that easy. Never speak negatively of fatherhood, mothers, children, family or anything related to these. Don’t believe in equality or that anyone would understand your pain. In the end, you are always alone with that since you can’t fight evolution. If you are lucky enough to have friends with whom you can talk freely, they will listen and understand, but the problem is that they can’t do anything about it. Talking may help, but so may the realization that this one is something that you just need to take and be happy about it. Even if you are not. Or then there’s the other side of the coin. You don’t take it - and then you need to face the music.