One Monkey, Eight Years

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That New Job
I was hoping to have some code I wrote in use by actual people by the end of my first week. Didn't happen. I do now, though.

Yay!

*sigh*

Maine.

*sigh*

At least it was a close loss for civil rights, and not much more than half the people who showed up wanted to oppress a minority?

Nope. Doesn't help, really.

That's not even as comforting as "they meant well, in a horrible, intolerant, patronizing way."

Now *that* is a thought-provoking horoscope...
This week Brezsny tells the Gemini:

Nature's rhythm is cyclical. Everything alive waxes and wanes. If you're smart, you honor that flow by periodically letting parts of your world wither or go to sleep. If you're not so smart, you set yourself up for needless pain by indulging in the delusion that you can enjoy uninterrupted growth. According to my reading of the astrological omens, Gemini, this is your time to explore the creative possibilities of ebbing and slackening. Ask yourself the following question, which I've borrowed from the Jungian author Clarissa Pinkola Estes: "What must I allow to die today in order to generate more life tomorrow?"

Relatedly, he says to Leo, my moon sign:

It might be tempting to turn your home into a womb-like sanctuary and explore the mysteries of doing absolutely nothing while clad in your pajamas. And frankly, this might be a good idea. After the risks you've taken to reach out to the other side, after the bridges you've built in the midst of the storms, after the skirmishes you've fought in the Gossip Wars, you have every right to retreat and get your homebody persona humming at a higher vibration. So I say: Be meticulously leisurely as you celebrate the deep pleasures of self-care.

These things, taken together, suggest that maybe it's time to slow down on the whole six technical tasks a week task that I set myself back in April, and am suddenly having trouble continuing at full bore with the new job.

It's like my desperate scramble to ferociously learn new and interesting things is harder now that I'm doing that at my job too...

Alternately, maybe some of that but less than six. Six a week felt unreasonable when I made the goal, and probably was. But I did it anyway, so I'm glad I picked something unreasonable :-)

So yeah. It's probably time for me to back off on that kind of self-development for a bit, and treat work as being a lot of my allowance for it. Because realistically, it will be.

But that only answers some of the question. I'm sure that's not the only thing in that category, even if it definitely qualifies.

Sensible, harsh, nuanced - a comment
There was a comment on an online article which was substantially better than the article itself that I felt like passing along. Like the commenter, I think it sounds a bit more elitist (against other elitists, amusingly) than it is. Read to the end before you decide he's just stuck up.

( Cut for length... )

Day 2 at job: done
I've now been at the new job for two days. I'm definitely still getting stuff sorted out - accounts, other computer-y and developer-y stuff, garbage can for my cubicle.

But I've made one code change and half of another so far, so it appears that I can make good on my brag -- that I'm likely to have stuff I did actually get used by the end of my first week.

Oh, hey...

msde reminded me that I didn't actually post about this.

The offer from the new employer was definitely acceptable, and I accepted it. My last day with the previous employer was Monday (the day before yesterday), and my first one with the new one will be this coming Monday.

I'm looking forward to it.

Dell: Nope
I don't think we'll be buying from Dell again. I'm glad they produce a Linux-based laptop -- most companies won't, at all, full stop. It's a Microsoft licensing thing that's pretty certainly illegal, but happens with every large hardware vendor anyway. However, things have just hit the "yeah, no" point.

I bought the laptop, and the wireless card promptly failed. That's not great, but is probably excusable. I had to call and get forwarded a few times to get to somebody who would do support (including "yeah, the hardware failed" support), because Dell doesn't directly do that for Linux. That semi-excusable-ish, though *very* inconvenient since those phone numbers don't come with the machine and can't be found easily from the Dell web site.

The tech support guy was very competent, and had me do several things that should probably have voided my warranty to make sure the hardware genuinely didn't work. It was a pain in the ass to do with Shanna around (think of tiny little screws, opening up a laptop and a toddler, all in the same few square yards of space), but it was respectfully and competently done, and I can see why they do it. He didn't make me reinstall the OS and all updates a second time after I'd already done it once, which is, sadly, above average for tech support. And hey, now I know how to re-seat the wireless card in that laptop.

I thought he was calling at weird hours and annoying Krissy and Shanna repeatedly after the laptop had been shipped back to them, including asking questions like "when will the laptop be shipped back" (i.e. questions that Dell tech support should know better than Krissy, and really shouldn't be asking her rudely and randomly). Somebody with an Indian accent identifying themselves as Dell tech support was doing so, and it saddened me that the competent guy I had talked to was also a rude pain in the ass -- except, as it turned out, he wasn't.

Instead, Dell has guys claiming to be technical support calling and asking if the computer is a little slow or if it has any other minor complaints, probably to sell you an upgrade, possibly to just sell you the solution of removing all the shovelware they put on the computer before shipping it to you (I always reinstall any computer, from anybody, before using it).

Of course, whatever solution they're selling doesn't run on Linux. So after repeatedly, rudely, pushily calling many times (the most recent at 9pm), he found out the computer Dell sold me doesn't run Windows -- and it never has, they shipped it with Linux -- and he's stopped calling.

It's hard to overstate just how crappy a customer experience that is. Repeatedly waking up my toddler to sell me useless stuff that Dell already knows won't run on my machine is... special.

At the very least, guys: having your sales personnel identify themselves as such rather than claiming to be tech support, and have a separate list for Linux purchases so you're not trying to sell them Windows crapware. There's plenty of room in the market for Linux crapware if the Windows kind is working well for you.

This is all weird for me. My last Dell purchase, about three years ago, had fabulous customer support. The only serious problem I had was a spurious claim on their web site that my machine would support the intel VMX instructions. And given what a pain in the ass it is to figure that out, I'm okay with the fact that Dell was confused -- it took me several hours of sustained digging to figure out why my processor didn't have them.

Then again, my last machine cost noticeably more. Maybe I just need to not buy cheap stuff from Dell.

Last day at work...
I'm still waiting to see if they're going to do an exit interview. I'd kinda like to go home now, but maybe they'll get it in gear? My manager's checking.

I've cleared out my browser stuff -- bookmarks, cookies, saved passwords and whatnot. FireFox makes it reasonably easy, which is nice.

I already took home everything that was mine. Looking around, I'm reminded of just how much crap was in here when I got here. Most of it hasn't moved an inch in that 2.5 years. The guy who had the cube before I did works here again, but he apparently didn't want it even after coming back. I guess the next guy will feel similarly about me.

I was kinda tempted to snag a technical specification that they had printed out here. Nobody here is ever likely to use it, and it's commonly available, so I wouldn't be stealing intellectual property by taking it. And then I thought, "hey, do I really need more random crap in the house?" The JPEG and PNG specs don't really cut it as stuff to leave laying around. I won't use them much, big impressive binder or no.

[Edit: the figured it out, and I got my exit interview and last check not long after 3pm. So not bad. There was just a scramble at the end -- apparently my email slipped through a crack somewhere and people needed prompting to get started.]

Cookery
This evening, the wife and I made a daikon, cabbage and sausage soup with sour cream. It turned out fabulous, though the sausage wasn't as good as it should have been. Better yet, it was an adapted from an old French recipe, and so you can use potato instead of daikon and get good results. From how it tasted, you could also use turnip, beet, or most other root vegetables and get good results.

But if you use sausage, use good sausage. It'll be worth it. We didn't, and paid the price -- a basically really good soup with disappointing sausage.

They're right -- the first boil for the cabbage makes for a much nicer soup.

Also, in the process of making my God-damn pumpkin curry (recipe unremarkable and not linked, results decent but not exceptional), my wife's fingers began to hurt rather a lot from chopping chiles. She feels this should be mentioned.

That same guy...
In case you liked the previously-linked essay on music theory, here is the same fellow playing a composition of his own on piano.

arbus at least seemed vaguely interested, so maybe other people are too :-)

Musical Theory
An old friend recently wrote a guide to music theory called Western Music from First Principles. It's a great summary that goes from the underlying physics of the notes and pitches through basic tones for compositions, up through modern scales and how they work.

Neat stuff. I play a couple of instruments and hadn't known a lot of this. It's worth a read.

Brezsny
This week, Brezsny tells the Gemini:

One of my New Age friends says she has it on good authority that the Seven Lords of Time will reconvene in their Himalayan sanctuary on December 21, 2012 and reinvent the nature of time, as they last did back in 3114 BC. I have no idea if that's true or not, but if it is, I say "hallelujah!" We would all benefit from some big-time reinvention of time. But that happy event, even if it actually does come to pass, is still more than three years away. What to do in the meantime? Luckily, you Geminis now have major personal power to do some time reinvention of your own. To get the meditations rolling, ask yourself what three things you could do to stop fighting time and start loving it better.

Well, I've explained one thing in detail already this week. I want the 40+ hours I spend weekly on work to start pushing me forward instead of backward. Time looks better from that perspective. And I'm well on my way to that one.

There are five or more kinds of balance I'm hurting for lack of right now. I should work more on that. The job thing will help, but there are other kinds that it won't. I'm not sure if that's achievable or not. But if I could do some of that, it would help me love time better.

And to end on another achievable note: exercise. With it I'm more energetic, I sleep better but need it less, and I have an easier time getting started on the stuff I need to do. Exercise will help me love time better if I get off my ass and do some of it.

There's a Leo horoscope this week too, and it applies to me, but I don't have anything terribly interesting to say about it. Yup, that's a good idea.

Sliding backwards
My wife, in response to a recent bit of LJ-age, excerpted a bit where I'd mentioned that working at my current job felt like losing ground, and asked what I meant by it. Here's my response to that:

( Excerpted for length )

That's also why I'm intentionally trying to jump into a relatively new technology. Jumping from one old, established technology into another is even harder, because the competition is with more senior people, and the supply of competitors is well established. Rails is still young enough that it's rare to have three years of experience and they're scrambling for people who can do it.

Positive Reinforcement
After I stopped working on my MUD library, and after I stopped working at PeakStream, I pretty much stopped having anybody except coworkers use the code I wrote. My current stuff at ACCESS may eventually have real users, but not right now. It's part of why I kept working on the MUD library so long -- somebody was actually getting use out of what I did.

Today, I got this message about RailsGame, one of my projects:

Thanks Noah. Your project looks almost improbably relevant :) Time to
sit down and read some of your code - many thanks.

I hadn't realized just how good a feeling it would be when somebody looked likely to actually get some use out of my Rails stuff.

[Edit: and the guy submitted a minor patch on something I was doing slightly wrong. Awesome!]

Lotus honey mead
A long time ago, I bought a fair bit of lotus-blossom honey with the intent that it would make good mead. In case you've never tried lotus-blossom honey, it has a sort of tingly feeling like peppermint on the back of your tongue and a nice floral flavor.

Back in August, the girl and I finally turned it into must to make mead from it. Today, we racked it.

I think my greater experience with wine-tasting is going to be very good for my meadmaking ability. I've tasted mead very much like that and thought "ugh, that's awful." Whereas today I tasted it and thought, "that's young, harsh, and definitely not done fermenting. But there's a really good mead hiding in there if I can avoid spoiling it."

After the initial slightly bitter, unpleasantly zesty taste of yeast still doing its thing, the aftertaste is very much like the honey itself, but slightly alcoholic. I like mead because I like the taste of honey. There's a mead hiding in there that's very true to the taste of that honey.

Now I just have to not do anything too wrong and mess it up :-)

The other mead that we started at the same time is good too. I just don't have anything especially interesting to say about it :-)

Randomness
A guy emailed a meetup mailing list I'm on. He's a professor at the local Silicon Valley campus of Carnegie Mellon. I graduated from their Pittsburgh campus, back in the day.

He was asking about Ruby on Rails and after I'd replied to his question, I emailed him asking him about a Rails-based class he mentioned teaching.

Oddly enough, turns out that I know him, but by a different last name. He's somebody I remember going to college with, and once saw randomly, briefly at a Gaskell's. His name was then Todd Turco, in case anybody here knew him. He's teaching for the Master of Software Engineering stuff at CMU-SV.

Small world. Always nice to know that people I remember are doing well.

Brezsny says...
This week, Brezsny tells the Gemini:

Novelist James Patterson has signed a deal with a publisher to churn out 17 new books between now and the end of 2012. (By comparison, it took me six years to write my first book, nine years to write my second, and five years for my third.) According to my reading of the astrological omens, you Geminis will have James Patterson-like levels of fecundity for at least the next four weeks. I suggest you employ that good mojo to create a masterpiece or two.

And to my moon sign, Leo, he says:

What exactly is a "wild goose chase," anyway? Does it refer to a frenetic and futile hunt for an elusive prey that's never caught? Or might it also mean the meandering pursuit of a tricky quarry that after many convoluted twists and turns results in success and generates a lot of educational fun along the way? Either definition could apply to your wild goose chase in the next three weeks, Leo. Which one will ultimately win out will probably depend on two things: 1. how well you detect the false leads you get; 2. how determined you are to be amused rather than frustrated by all the twists and turns.

Those seem to dovetail nicely. Given the amount of stuff that isn't basically my forte that I'm doing lately, there's plenty of room on both fronts.

New laptop
It turns out that I can get a discount on an already-cheap laptop through work, and my old PowerBook is finally dying. So I'm now posting on a new Dell, running Ubuntu.

Oddly enough, it even shipped with Ubuntu. I figure I should encourage that kind of thing, especially if I can do it cheaply.

Geekery
I forget whose idea I'm stealing, but somebody came up with a great metaphor for kinds of programmers -- commandos, soldiers, police.

When you're taking a foreign country by force, you start with commandos who make a beachhead. After them you can send in disciplined, professionally trained soldiers to take more territory in conventional combat. Finally you need police to keep everything ordered after you've taken it all over.

These three types of armed workers have very different dispositions. In general, a good commando does not make a good policeman and vice-versa.

Today, I received a proposal at work which, translated into these terms, might read:

"The problem is that we have a high crime rate in these neighborhoods. Especially problematic is the high flow of undesirables between them. So to fix it, we're going to set off shaped charges near the cliff on the south side of town. When it's done, there will be a thirty-foot-high rock wall between the neighborhoods. We'll do the demolition in the middle of the night -- four, five civilian casualties at most, which you'll make back on the murder rate alone when things are better. Dude, I've totally got the charges here in my bag."

The problem isn't the programming or analytical skill of the fellow in question -- both are quite good. The problem is that the kind of enthusiasm he brings to the table isn't really conducive to us settling down and getting this thing fully stable.

I'd feel more condescending if I didn't share his same attitude problem.