I’ve had the worst headache since early this morning. I’ve heard enough horror stories from people who have real migraines to know that I don’t have that, but that’s fine with me because what I do have is plenty.

It was bad enough to keep waking me up and then immediately make me want to go back to sleep. Which I did, several times. I’ve been sick to my stomach all day, it’s been near-impossible to concentrate on anything, and off-and-on it’s been hard to visually focus on anything. All taking a pill does is degrade it to a dull throbbing pain for an hour or two. Complaining about it helps, though.

Speaking of complaining: I’ve got to spend another whole week in LA. I’m still not a fan, but my trips down there have been relatively productive recently, so I guess it’s a necessary evil. But my easy travel karma has expired, apparently, because for this trip I’ve got to fly through LAX instead of Burbank. I’ve only been in that airport once, when I missed my flight back to SFO from London and had to re-route there instead. The airport itself isn’t so bad, it’s just not as small and convenient as Burbank’s is. And of course, the drive from LAX to Glendale is a stone drag.

Because I haven’t made use of my Annual Pass and it’s going to expire before too long, I arranged to spend an extra day down there and go to Disneyland. It’s definitely not as much fun when you go by yourself, and there’s not much new going on, although I see the Monsters, Inc. ride is now up and running. And when I’m paying for my own hotel & rental car, instead of working it into an existing business trip, the accomodations go down a couple of stars. Still, it’s Disneyland, and it’s something different to do, and I do want to see the Pirates of the Caribbean one last time before they change it to fit the movie.

Okay, my sleep disorder thing has gone from being quirky irresponsibility to being really, really, really annoying. What set off the latest round was my decision at around 10pm the other night to rewrite what I’d been doing for work. And all the problems from that kept me up to the wee hours. It only takes a little bit to upset the balance, which means I’ve been up past 6am the past couple days, sleeping into the late afternoon, and feeling generally creepy and disconnected.

I wasted a big chunk of time this afternoon writing a post on SFist about that congressional hearing on internet business in China. I first read the transcript of the hearing around 8 this morning, and it got me filled with righteous indignation that lasted until I fell asleep. By the time I woke up, I felt obliged to write something about it even though I don’t care that much about it anymore.

Now I’ve finally got my work back to a functional state, I can finish adding the stuff I need to add, hopefully without introducing a whole nother mess of problems. What sucks is that I’ve only got myself to blame; I’m not over-worked by any stretch of the imagination, and I have a perfectly reasonable set of things to have accomplished. It’s because of my poor time-management and tendency to over-engineer everything that’s got me to this state.

Now it’s up to Tylenol PM to get me out of this state. And as I slip off into pharmaceutically induced slumber, I can dream of a world in which I go into work, have a list of things to do, and finish them without my ADD kicking in or my usual tendency to over-complicate everything. And I fly the Millennium Falcon.

I was all excited at the prospect of Lego Eggo Waffles — how could any sane person not be — but in reality, they’re kind of disappointing. It’s as if they were so proud of coming up with the idea (even though pretty much every kid in America came up with the idea years ago) that they didn’t follow through on the execution.

They’re not very construction-worthy. In fact, I’ll go so far as to say they’re not any more suitable for building things than traditional waffles.

I’ll admit that I was hungry, and therefore didn’t really attempt any project more sophisticated than stacking two of them on top of each other and then eating them. So it’s possible that my hunger was distracting me from the educational fun potential of these things. But for now I’ll just voice my disappointment that these are nothing more than waffles with bumps on the top. It’s almost as if it’s nothing more than some cheap marketing gimmick.

I still want to try combining them with my Lego Mindstorms kit to make a Wafflebot, but only after I’ve figured out how to hook up a voice box to it. You can’t have a Wafflebot without its shambling up to people and pleading “Kill… me…”

Speaking of wrath-filled mechanical hybrid monsters, I wrote a review of Yokai Daisenso for SFist yesterday. Short version: it was pretty cool, but not mind-blowing. More of a lightweight comedy than anything else. And just in time, the Obakemono project added an entry for the Azukiarai that featured prominently in the movie.

I’ve got two posts up on SFist this week, one about an iTunes promotion and the other advertising the WonderCon. Which means that in just a few short months I’ve gone from any pretense of thoughtful opinion and commentary on tech stories, to being a shameless corporate shill.

As I find myself working for big corporations, and more and more often defending other big corporations online, I have to live in constant fear that I’m turning Republican. At the moment, I believe I’m still safe.

My friend and ex-college roommate John found this website recently and commented he’d read the archives, which prompted me to read the archives, where I discovered a couple of things:

1. I can be a really whiny little bitch.
2. I’ve been remarkably lucky to get the jobs I’ve gotten.
3. My last job was really unhealthy.

At the time, I wrote it off as sacrifices you have to make for the sake of working for a big corporation that gets the A-list titles the proper amount of exposure, and it’s the price you pay for working for something that you feel passionately invested in. Well, I’m working for another big multinational entertainment consortium at the moment, and I’m on a project that I’m emotionally invested in, and I’m making enough money to live comfortably. And it’s like night and day.

There are still hassles and frustrations and overtime, and the bonus of working from home has the concession of having no solid structure, no benefits, and no social network. This is about as close to a “perfect” job as I’m ever going to get, and it’s still not perfect because there’s no such thing. But it’s a billion times better, because there’s none of the debilitating stress episodes. Where you’re sitting in the dark at four in the morning and the walls are caving in and you’re wondering what it all means. Or, as the HR department liked to call it, “work/life balance.”

I haven’t really hit on any big epiphany yet, other than I really think it’s possible to have a job that’s rewarding and doesn’t totally consume your life. If I knew what it was, exactly, then I’d be able to write self-help books and leave this weblog bullshit to the amateurs.