Two Problems

In my world of software development there’s this interesting little thing called a regular expression. Without going into too much detail, a “regex” is highly structured and very flexible method for finding text that matches a given pattern. At its simplest form, the regex “rib” could be used to positively match the strings “rib”, “ribbon”, or “this blog is horrible.” At its more complex form, well, there’s this one:

^((?>[a-zA-Z\d!#$%&’*+\-/=?^_`{|}~]+\x20*|”((?=[\x01-\x7f])[^”\\]|\\[\x01-\x7f])*”\x20*)*(?<))?((?!\.)(?>\.?[a-zA-Z\d!#$%&’*+\-/=?^_`{|}~]+)+|”((?=[\x01-\x7f])[^”\\]|\\[\x01-\x7f])*”)@(((?!-)[a-zA-Z\d\-]+(?)$

Believe it or not, that will pick any email address out of a sea of text. So what’s the point of bring this up? Well, we have a saying in this world: if you have a problem and you decide to solve it with regular expressions, you now have two problems.

Funny I should mention two problems. Because that’s how many I have.

Problem One
The last diet has completely crashed and burned. It’s time I just come out and admit that. I can’t blame this on holidays or work or anything in between. What I can blame it on is hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and the other elements that make up my machinery. They all got together and decided they wanted some snacks and didn’t ask me if it were okay first.

On the upside, I’m only up a couple pounds. So I haven’t completely fallen apart. But, alas, The Switch is off, and everybody knows what that feels like.

For everyone who climbed on board and is still on board, yay to you! There’s an empty spot up in the engine if you’re interested. For anyone else who fell off, you can now join the former conductor as he stands just to the left of the tracks. And for everyone involved, I apologize for being a sucky driver.

My best hope now is to simply maintain until The Switch turns back on. That would be a first, but hey, there’s a first time for everything, right? (Yes, I realize “time travel” and “fat free potato chips” both fit in that same category.)

Problem Two

Problem Two, odd as it may sound, will probably be a lot harder to fix. Problem Two is this blog. It’s boring. “Blah, blah, blah, I weighed this much. Blah, blah, blah, I weighed that much. Blah, blah, blah.” I look back on the Good Ol’ Days and think, “Wow, I wrote me some pretty good bloggery back in the day.” Of course, I easily spent twenty hours a week or more on it, and never did get any huge amounts of traffic out of it. Most writers (I assume) write to be read. If no one’s reading, it’s difficult to stay motivated to write.

So I keep thinking, “If I just put some more effort into it, it could probably be worth reading again.” But then I think, “I did that once already. Am I ready to do all that again? Or should I invest that twenty hours a week into something more meaningful, like catching up on the last fifteen years of television?”

I guess what it all boils down to is just that: time. I have to work and I have to sleep. That pretty much takes up twenty hours of each day, which leaves little time for dilly-dallying. I’m still working on the novel writing, which should be done in as little as two months or as much as fifteen more years. And there’s also the million little things which take up the other twenty hours each day.

What to do, what to do. Well, I don’t have any answers right now, but I thought I’d at least give everyone this update. I owe you that much. Now just look for my next post sometime in the next twenty hours. But probably not twenty consecutive hours.

p.s. if you’re still wondering what I weigh, it’s about 219. Still down fifteen pounds from last August.