Started answering email this morning around 8:45am, prior to a 9am call.  Started prep for meeting big deliverable deadline later in the day.  Tried to dial into 9am call; busy signal, co-worker did the call and clued me in afterward.  All’s well there, moving on.  Got stressed-out call from a business partner, along the lines of “please tell me there’s a way you can promise and subsequently deliver the impossible by our huge customer’s unreasonable but unyielding due dates,” and more or less signed up for a Shermanesque March to the Sea in exchange for an (even more?) lopsided bargaining position at an upcoming negotiation with said partner.

(Insert Burns tapping fingertips together and muttering “ehhxcellent…” or perhaps James Earl in Vader acoustics: “There’ll be no stopping us THIS time.”)

Continue prepping release (*cough* coding and debugging *cough*), responding to other assorted goings on, packing, 3.5 background processor hours completely backing up MBP in FW tether mode, wiping it, restoring it to a contiguous block, repartitioning said disk for Bootcamp, signing off and driving to the airport, signing back on from airport terminal for 2 hours, signing off to board plane, signing BACK on for 5 minutes to confirm receipt of cvs commit over WAN/VPN/IM, stowing laptop.

Can’t work for the next couple hours; airborne then renting car and driving to New Jersey.  While on plane, crack open PJ O’Rourke’s On the Wealth of Nations.  Pithy and gestalt-appropriate.  Spend 30+ minutes at JFK rental car counter whilst friendly attendant tries to program my hotel’s Newark NJ address into a Garmin C550.  Good times!  Car is a Suzuki Grand Vitara.  Not bad; shitty visibility though…not an ideal feature for a big car you don’t own.

FFWD 1.5 hours.  Circa 10:45pm.  Make it to the hotel, urinate, open laptop and check in on co-worker whose been pushing on today’s deliverables for about 12 hours at that point.  Something he thought was working before is totally broken; he has no idea why.  I take one look at the code, make a suggestion that runs contrary to the result of a 45 minute in-depth discussion between he and I from last week, and voila.  Sound of foreheads slapping from here to Boston.

Packaging occurs, sort of.  The World’s Shittiest Release Notes are typed, openly declaring themselves not to contain all information necessary to use the deliverables.  “You will have questions.  Ask them.” was a familiar refrain.  Package distributed to customer and business partner.

Additional email answered, discussions advanced.  Instructions for charging a Garmin C550 over mini-USB are looked up on the internet, because the goddam car charger for the GPS doesn’t work and I need to meet some dudes in a hotel lobby tomorrow morning at 8:30am.

Current local time: 2:46am.

By way of elegant analogy, TJIC writes:

There are a billion different commodities and six billion different locations that a commodity might be in, and the market is a heat engine that runs off the differences across locations.

In a sense, trillions and trillions of instantiations of the market are hooked up across every one of those commodity / location / location tuples…but the vast majority of them aren’t spinning.

For example, you (for any given “you”) and I are not currently engaged in trading apples, oranges, nitrous oxide upgrades for racecar engines, replacement peripheral boards for IBM mainframes, or valet services.

Not yet, at least.