It's been so long!

Well, I think it's been almost six months since my last post and quite a bit has changed.

I guess the biggest change would be that I am now the proud owner of a one-bedroom apartment in Sydney! Finally getting out of my parents place has been quite a change, there's so much freedom now that I don't have to worry about getting the bus home anymore. A night on the town is always on the cards now! The unit's actually right in the heart of the city so it's easy as pie to get here. The best part about it is the 15 minute walk to work, it means some days I get home at 5:45 p.m. which is just ridiculously early - I even catch the end of deal or no deal(what a terrible show) sometimes!
I suppose the down side of living here is that when I don't have anything to do it does get a bit lonely. My girlfriend does come over from time to time which is good, I wonder if married people get lonely? Everything does tend to become a bit monotonous, go to work, come home cook repeat. The week turns into blur just waiting for the weekend, they usually come quick which is good but then so does the end of the year which is probably bad.

On the plus side, my wrists have managed to hold out so far. The RSI that I was suffering from last year hasn't come back so bad as to make me take any more time off work. There are good days and bad days though, think I've learnt how to manage it a bit. I basically try not to flex my wrists very much and it seems to be okay.

Another thing that's got me a little stressed is that the smoke alarm in my unit doesn't work, next week all the smoke alarms are getting tested. There's some kind of fine for those that fail. The problem is the model that I've got is no longer in production so I can't simply get a replacement and plug it in. I need to get a different model and get an electrician to wire it up. Anyway I should get the smoke alarm tomorrow and hopefully the electrician will come later in the week which will save me from getting any fines. Money is a bit tight now with the mortgage payments.

I think I'm going slowly crazy, for some reason now everything seems to make me angry. I'm not an impulsive person by nature so it doesn't show on the outside but I can feel it on the inside. I'm wondering if this is a natural consequence of getting older, old people always seemed to me to be crankier than everyone else. It could also be result of developing a bit of an ego. People challenging my ideas at work tends to annoy me a lot more now than it used to. I'll have to keep an eye on this, don't want to wind up as a grumpy old man. I've been meditating less recently, perhaps this has something to do with my growing anger.

Work has been really busy lately, I am basically working on two projects at the moment and both of them want their stuff done before the other one. Management hasn't allocated me enough time to work on both so it means the quality suffers. It feels much better to write good quality code so I've decided from now on that I'm going to do my best not to put any hacks in. It's very easy to get lazy and hack the shortest possible solution to a problem but actually thinking about it and solving it properly is much more interesting and satisfying. We'll see how long I can keep that philosophy up for though. I've always considered myself to be a reasonable code but lately I feel that no matter how much I do it's not enough. Hopefully the work eases up before I go completely mad.