A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

I’m terrified of this:

Whups

So I botched up pretty bad the other day. Then yesterday I went home sick at about 10:30.

At 10:45 the emails started coming in (I found out this morning) about a really bad careless problem I’d caused on Wednesday night (it was actually the fact that I’d fixed a bug that caused the problem, what with 2 release packages showing the same version number as I just slid the change in under the wire.)

It was really bad. Some people got the good package, some people got the bad package. They didn’t know there was more than one (and I didn’t know there were multiple distribution channels.)

I really don’t get it. I’m not being … I don’t know, whatever that would be.

How do people focus on things that they don’t care at all about? How do you work up the energy to pay attention to something that just numbs your soul?

Where does that come from? Because I feel like I just don’t have it. If it doesn’t affect me, if I’m not personally invested in the outcome, I have no energy for it.

I can’t pretend to care about production problems here. Nor can I pretend to care about the features that sales and marketing are dying to show clients. It doesn’t matter to me in any material way aside from what work gets put on my plate, which is little more than the programming equivalent of filing. Sometimes it’s blue folders, sometimes it’s red folders.

yes yes, it’s important. Things need to be sorted. It contributes to the smooth running of the company and affects it’s ability to provide a service quack quack quack yadda blah blah.

What kills me is that I do care about the fact that the process has critical systemic flaws. We don’t have any way to perform deep testing on the infrastructure.

But I don’t want to get away from the issue here: Where do you get it from? I really don’t understand.

What happens to me on a job is that for 6-9 months it’s interesting. I’m engaged in learning my way around the thing, understanding the code, it’s repercussions, sometimes even the business surrounding it.

But then I predictably start leaning back in my chair and looking around. The work itself becomes rote. I start banging it out without thinking.

Then I start failing. I get careless. Bugs get introduced and I try to clean up after myself hastily and make things worse.

But it seems like a one-way trip. By the time a year comes around I’m spending far too much of my energy in damage control from what seems to be my own flippancy. It gets worse and someplace between 18 and 24 months I start looking for something else.

If it’s not interesting then I just can’t pretend; and yet people have the same job for years and years. It bewilders me. On one hand it seems utterly revolting. But on the other hand I really envy that someone can do that.

So I’m bored to tears at work (well, ok. not to tears, that’d just be pitiful.) As a result, my attention is slipping and I’m making stupid mistakes.

The net effect of course is that I’m coming across as a screw up who probably shouldn’t be trusted with anything more interesting.

Bit of a catch 22 there.

I know I’d feel so much better if I just walked.

WTF with skype phones?

The reason cell phones look all little and blocky like that is because you need to carry them around with you, so they’ve gotta jam everything in to the smallest reasonable form factor. Skype phones aren’t necessarily bound by such constraints (unless of course they’re wifi phones, then maybe.) So why on earth would you design what is essentially a corded phone like that? I’m looking for a skype phone I can actually use. But it’s really only ever got to sit at home on my desk.

*grumpf*

I almost let it happen again.

It’s almost 1:00 am and I was just about to go to bed (well, to couch anyway.) I looked at the clock and said “nope. too late to start anything now.” and I thought I heard something making a “hmmpf” noise. So I looked over and my laptop was staring at me accusatively and shamed me into picking it up.

I’m in a little bit of a backslide over the last week. It turns out the job thing is really getting messy. I put a few more of my chips on the table than I’d planned on and, while they’re not quite ready to call my bluff, it looks like that might be the way it goes. Problem is I still have to decide if I’m bluffing or not.

Should I give up the notion of working for someone else on software that’s complex and interesting? Of being required to actually solve problems?

Sounds kinda stupid perhaps. NYC is the center of the financial universe. I’m working in Algorithmic Trading for chrissakes. Of course, I was originally supposed to work on the actual algorithms and not some piece of crap c# gui application that feeds them. I just need to have some pride in my work again. Sure, a job well done is a job well done. But a fucking monkey could do this stuff.

The hardest thing about it lately is making my bosses understand that it really really is a junior level project. It’s not my imagination. There’s just not really anything going on in it. The most engaging part of it is recovering from the design nightmare spewed out by the original programmers, one of whom is still on the team and the other of whom is now the business-level owner of the project.

Oh goodie.

So now I’m feeling lame duck about the whole thing, with nowhere to go. Do I really want to start this process over again? I brought the suits to the dry cleaners in anticipation of it all. But I’ve rather fucked off the updating of my resume that would really take spark to the fuse. Being prepared for it all can’t really hurt anything, making that the right choice.

At least if I doll up my resume, pick up a couple ties and maybe a nice pair of shoes, then at least I’ll be agile enough to jump on something if I keep one eye open and catch an opportunity as it whizzes by instead of stomping around like Rumpelstiltsken having blown a perfect gambit.

That’d be a nice switch

Now if only I could do that with my relations ith members of the fairer gender, I’d be in pretty damn good shape.

;)

I was just musing on “Made To Stick” which I’m about 75 pages in to, and what utter complete tripe it is, when I came across this:

Shallow lesson of business books

The mistake both authors and publishers of business books make is to confuse a book about “what I did” with a book about “how to do it”. Whether you are successful because you are skilful or successful because you are lucky, you can easily, and mistakenly, convince yourself that your own experience shows that anyone can do it.

It’s a cute little post, worth it’s 90 seconds.

These things make me angry, for the irresponsibility and utter rudeness of the authors, who think they can pass off 50s “testimonial” collections as informational nonfiction, for the culture which will eagerly lap up anything with some catch phrases and quotable phrases, and most of all at me for continuing to believe, against every piece of legitimate data that “best seller” has ANYthing to do with quality.

Made To Stick: isn’t

I’ll post a bit more on why later on. The little serendipity of finding that post pushed me to just drop something in the mean time.

Gamasutra - From God To Cock: Mike Wilson On GameCock’s Publishing Party

Game biz veteran Mike Wilson is best known, perhaps, for his work co-founding and running independent-minded ‘developer conglomerate’ publisher Gathering Of Developers, or G.O.D., which was formed in 1998 from founding developers including Epic, Ritual, and 3D Realms, and was eventually acquired by Take-Two. But he’s been in the business since the early ’90s, helping id Software with distribution and working as Ion Storm CEO in 1997.

I should really have some smart ass comment about this. Something glib about the mistaken identity thing and the title “From God To Cock”. But yeah… I got nuthin.

So here’s a bunny with a pancake on it’s head…

I just had my day made by interviewing a … “completely unfit candidate” for the position of my new boss.

“So, from your resume it looks like you’ve had the exact same job at your last three positions.”
“Yes. They were very similar.”
“No, I mean it looks like you copied and pasted the descriptions.”
“No, they were different.”

It only went downhill for the poor guy after that.

Note: It doesn’t matter how much you smile if you’re an idiot. I’m not gonna like you any more. In fact I might like you less… So yeah, scratch that, I was wrong. It does matter.

I probably linked this back when it came out. But that was 4 years ago. This is still one fo the best things on the internet:

The Other Side of Kim du Toit - Essays

We have become a nation of women.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time when men put their signatures to a document, knowing full well that this single act would result in their execution if captured, and in the forfeiture of their property to the State. Their wives and children would be turned out by the soldiers, and their farms and businesses most probably given to someone who didn’t sign the document.

Anyways, first go read then go read his wife’s post on the topic, posted on Saturday: The Other Side

While drinking an entire case of diet mountain dew in one sitting does indeed enable you to:

• clean the bathroom sink
• bag up a bunch of garbage (4 bags) and get rid of a few hundred hangers from the disaster area
• make serious headway on your automated research application
• do most of the dishes
• make a really yummie egg & cheese sandwich for breakfast
• coil up no less than 30 different cables and wires of sparsely identifiable variety
• write a “hello ruby on rails” application
• clean your computer desk
• stay away from MMOs for the day

in about 5 hours.

It still kinda makes you jumpy and go to the bathroom alot. So maybe you should think twice about doing it again.

or

you know…

uhm…

not.

Oh and hey, I’ve changed my account on Yahoo Messenger to something that should probably be REALLY REALLY EASY to guess.

If you have trouble with that then… phew… then you’ve got bigger problems.

Ok, so the new box has vista ultimate installed on it, with all the cpu thieving memory hogging ridiculous eye candy crap designed for 12 year old girls and marketing managers who spend their days reading “info world” they could pack in there.

Yes it’s a bunch of crap. I’m assured the underlying architectural changes are worth it and it does seem more stable.

But I want my UI back.

Somewhat more articulately stated, these are a couple-few things I want that I was unable, in an hour of searching around, to find:

- STOP this crap about assuming I want a different explorer interface to a directory containing files of mostly one type. Videos, music. You shouldn’t care as an OS what the hell is in there. It’s files. I haven’t for the life of me been able to figure out how to shut that crap off.

- I need WAMP to start on startup. I most certainly do NOT need it to be blocked for “my safety”. Yes I acknowledge the yummie security features presumably designed to stop your machine from becoming a node on a botnet. But give me the override you EEDIOT! (Yes, it’s probably there. Dunno how to get to it.)

- In the same general category: Stop asking me if it’s ok to run the fucking application I just ran. YES IT’S OK YOU SMACKTARD! I RAN IT!

- Let me disable the goopy screen effects. They were cute for about 3.47 minutes. Time to go. Plain windows, plain transitions, no stupid animations. Nothing. I’m not a marketing manager in charge of business development. I did not go to SVA. I don’t care. How much cpu goes in to that damn transparent window border? It’s stupid. And while I’m on that, what’s with the damn 8-10 pixel border. Stealing my cpu and memory wasn’t enough, you feel the need to chip away at my screen real estate too?

Design is wonderful. It’s an unsung hero of technology (though less so now that Apple has brought it kicking and screaming into the forebrain of the modern western technologist.)

But good design means that things do what you expect them to do, without you expecting them to work that way. Good design removes barriers between what you really want and implementing that vision. That’s all.

It’s not flashy bells & whistles. It’s not funny noises and different shaped start buttons.

Yes, windows need to look like SOMEthing, audible indicators have to have SOME sound. There’s no such thing as “no” design, so yes, you might as well make it look good. And don’t get me wrong, these things do look good. They’re pretty slick.

But if all I see when I sit down at my box is the glare of my “up all night long” old navy coffee mug pajama bottoms and the desktop icons peeking through the border to firefox as I type this, then the computer is no longer serving my purpose. It’s totally diverting my attention from what I’m doing, which would be writing some innocuous blog posting about a couple vista tweak questions and forcing me to concentrate on and evoke some no-longer-so-latent anger about software bloat, “flashy and ineffective” architecture, and why I have a near pathological hatred for doing gui development work.

Uhm…

yeah…

so, if you know how to tweak those Vista settings that would be great.

And if you can send me a tarred and feathered Monkey Boy that’d be nice too. I’m rearranging my apartment and he’d make a great sculpture.

miserable prick.

UPDATE: Jesus I just figured it out. Windows Vista’s security and incessant confirmation dialogs make it the Alan Alda of operating systems.

This man is responsible for more smiles, laughter and lightness of spirit in my life than most others put together:

Well they went and done did it:

OMFG! iPhone Officially Unlocked, This Time for Realz : The iPhone Blog

Yes folks, this is the real deal. Remember that shady website that claimed would release a fully software based iPhone unlock solution within 48 hours? Well, they did. So far I have already received reports from users claiming to have iPhones unlocked and functioning on T-Mobile, Rogers, Vodaphone, and Orange networks.

Cute post over at Chicago Boyz:

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