How do you deal with your bad memory?

Personally I have so bad memory that I need to daily check same stuff from wiki or some other documentation. I keep forgetting words and if I remember the word I might not remember how to spell it. I do not remember peoples names unless I see the name daily, Facebook helps with this. I barely remember anyone's face without actually seeing their face and sometimes even then the person might feel like total stranger. I barely remember events from the past correctly.

For example I forgot that Finland president changed until I remembered to check who won the selection. I forgot that Finland won MM ice hockey gold last year and I still need to ask my friend was it last year or when. When I am drinking in the city pretty much every time someone comes to me and say hello to me and I do not have any idea who they are even though they seem to know me. It is absolutely fucking annoying when you try to say something and in the middle of the sentence I go, "What the fuck was the word?"

This becomes really time consuming with programming when I have to keep checking function names and parameters from documentation or earlier code.

Mindwipe, that you?

Yeah, though i would gladly mindwipe some memories I do not want to remember. =)

The modern science of Neuroplasticity says that if your brain is underdeveloped at a certain task (like remembering lists of facts, or matching names to faces), then like any skill, repeated practice/focussed training will encourage those brain functions to develop fully. So, practice!
e.g. When you read some news article, write down some dot points about it and hide them for a day, then try and remember them without looking. Once you can do that reliably, try 2 days, or a week, etc...

For example, Barbara Arrowsmith-Young was born with a learning disability that had her labelled as a "retard", and couldn't process the meaning of language properly (such as determining the different meanings between "father's mother" and "mother's father"). Even in adulthood she'd have to read sentences dozens of times to glean meaning from them. But luckily she also had a savant-like skill for remembering facts, which let her pass exams and get into college to study psychology, where she found records of other people with her language symptoms. These others had suffered brain damage to a specific area, so she made up "brain training" games related to the type of processing that scientists thought that area was responsible for, and eventually "cured" herself of her learning disability.

The lesson is - the brain's like any muscle: if there's a weak muscle, a good exercise program will strengthen it.
The unintuitive part is that most brain 'muscles' handle many different tasks -- e.g. work with autistic kids has shown that exercises designed to treat tone-deafness (differentiating pitch in sounds) also improved their reading comprehension skills!

If you don't want to make up your own exercise routine, you can use existing ones like lumosity.com

The way you put your problem it seems that your "forgetting" is getting to a severe stage.

I think you should visit some doctors (I like oriental medicine very much) and start doing some brain exercises.

I will reemphasize Lumosity.com
This website is great, the games are very helpful and fun to play. I think it is woth paying for their service.

You probably delete your pointers prematurely.

Hodgman thanks for the information, I knew the brain is a muscle, but not that I could train my memory.

Kuramayoko10 I have talked to a doctor about this stuff, but the one was an idiot and pretty much did not believe anything was wrong, but now I have been trying to get sent to another doctor.

I keep a code "book" handy were I keep code examples and explanations on how stuff works.

I understand how you feel. I think my ipad is my second brain / memory. I even FORGOT about this road just because I rarely used it - even though two years ago I actually worked there for the previous three years.

Imagine in a conversation inside a car.

** me suggesting a route. and ask my brother in law if he know that route, since i doesn't want to lead us into lost situation **
my brother in law "why don't we take this route, it will lead us to exactly where we want to go."
me "ha ha ha. how could i forgot this route. I mean, I worked here for three years..." FACEPALM.

I also bought a smart phone with a GPS for this exact reason.