gym, more dancing, work

The NeedForSpeed sprint last week was quite fun. In my paying work I often feel like I'm doing the same thing over and over again, so it's rarely deeply interesting. It pays well though. It was also a change because I'm rarely writing code I use directly. (I am not a pharmaceutical chemist.) This makes me think more about branching out into other work where I can do something more than write wrappers to binaries and (yawn) parse additional ah hoc file formats.

Instead of working on DAS I finished up the patch for Python's getargs.c. I went to a cafe this afternoon and worked from there until I ran out of battery power. It was a nice sunny day and a lot of people were outside the cafes. The high school students graduated recently so they were all out in their white caps, in cars and making a ruckus. It looked like fun. I finished the code and tested it, only to find it had about 0.5% speedup, instead of the expected 3% or so. I dropped the older prototype code in and got the original 5% boost.

The only real difference was I used a function instead of a macro. Even though the PyArg_ParseTuple is called a lot of times, I find it hard to believe that an additional function call causes the hit. Still, I rewrote it again, this time using macros. Indeed, I got the speedup. Kinda. The benchmarks weren't that repeatable so I can't tell. I got nearly 6% faster pystone numbers and a bit better than 2% stringbench times. I used a lot of gotos in it. Gotos located in macros. Scared yet? :)

Yesterday I went to a nearby gym. I didn't work out that much over the last year, in part because of all the traveling. I decided that since I'll be traveling for at least the next 5 months I might as well sign up for a month (more expensive) and get back into it instead waiting still longer.

Went to the gym in Landala, which is about 5 blocks from here. That's a bit closer than my old gym in Santa Fe. (Which I really like - Carl and Sandra's in DeVargas mall.) I did work out some last fall but chose a gym closer to where I was studying. It looked good at the start but I decided I didn't like it. This one feels better. I'll find out. At worst I'm only there for a month.

The two things I want to work on are upper body strength and intensity. I started going to the gym after Thanksgiving 2004 in part because I wanted to improve my dancing. I wanted to do dips and have a decent safety factor, in case something went wrong. It turns out you don't need that much strength - but only if she knows how to dip. Now I'm back because I would like to work on aerials, that is, moves where I life the woman. It's not so common in tango or salsa but quite common in swing. Which is why I'm looking into the swing scene here.

When I signed up for the gym yesterday I mentioned that I do dance. A woman who leads the dance exercises at the gym was there and invited me to her classes. I went today. It was a mix of salsa, funk, and ballet (I think she was trained in the latter). They had been working on a routine for a while, and she lead it in Swedish. I managed most of it by careful observation. Didn't have the form, especially in the upper body (my hands expect to be holding someone, not up in the air!), but did managed to follow along for most of it. I was the only guy out of a dozen or so. Energy-wise I thought it was about a medium. I'm looking for something more intense.

I got my tango events mixed up. Yesterday was the milonga nearby the apartment and today is the practice on the other side of town near the hospital. I got my days wrong and, surprise, no one else did. Wednedays is salsa at Oceanen, which is the best time for salsa dancing in this city. Despite my increasing love for tango, Wednesdays is for salsa. Besides, there are several other opportunies for tango in this town.

I submitted two talked for EuroPython this afternoon. This being the last day to submit. Oh, and I need to look into the BOSC deadline to submit something about DAS2.