Lack of Blogging

Lack of Blogging

And what little blogging I do from Bend is all the energy that I have at the end of ten hour days. I had this illusion that I would get a lot of work done on the next book and a novel that I am starting to write (a kind of time travel, mystery thriller that takes some subtle jabs at deconstructionism)--but I'm just too tired by the time I get back to my unswinging' bachelor pad.

Bend is a beautiful mid-sized town (about 80,000 people) in the high desert of Central Oregon. It reminds me of what Boise must have been like ten or fifteen or years ago. There isn't a lot of weird facial piercings, and when you see someone with "sleeves" (the tattoos that cover most of an arm or leg), it really stands out, because it is a bit unusual. If there wasn't anything holding us in Boise (like family and a spectacular house that we could never sell right now), I could see moving here. It almost doesn't feel like Oregon, it is so unliberal.

I have been working off the stress of the ten hour days by going to the Juniper Swim & Fitness Center, which is a City of Bend Parks operation. I neglected to bring a swimsuit (and even finding gym shorts in stores here was a struggle, much less a swimsuit), but they have two indoor pools, one of them Olympic sized, and a very complete gym. I've been working on my upper body exercises and using the treadmill--and it really does wonders for my attitude and for reducing my appetite. (Being all alone over here, I'm doing a bit too much eating for comfort, so anything that brings this under control is a good thing.)

Don't get the wrong impression: I really am enjoying the work that I am doing. Writing unit tests involves learning how a particular class works, then figuring out how to test all of its methods, then writing up bug reports that describe what I found that is broken.

And this isn't difficult--even code that works often has significant errors in it. For example, what happens if you pass in invalid inputs, such as null? A lot of coders simply don't think about these possibilities--and if you don't handle them, you open up the possibility that someone calls a method with a bad input and produces unexpected results.