A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

It’s coming damnit.

I’m on a conference call and it’s 43 minutes in.  I also just noticed I had four spam voicemails on my cell phone.

So I caught myself sitting here with a phone on each ear.

I’ve also caught myself starting to have those relatively mournful completely inappropriate hallway conversations about career longevity.  I’ve stopped each time I caught myself.  Unfortunately this served only to hit home the point I was trying tos top myself from making (i.e. if it’s important enough to have ‘caught’ myself then I’m much less likely to be merely being flippant.  Backfire.)

I can’t be made to care if I don’t, nor can I pretend thus.  This serves me far far more well than it does poorly.  Unfortunately when it manifests itself poorly the result is fairly catastrophic.

I want OUT of this industry and I want to spend an awful lot more time in a text editor or IDE.

For the first time in a very long time I spent Sunday night in nauseous anticipation of work.  Sure, part of it was due to the vacation hangover problem (which is in full swing this morning.)  But it’s not actually that ambiguous dread.  There’s a raft of things I’m dying to simply not face.

I really love the XP thing and I’ve seen the benefits both in my own coding and on small to medium sized teams (upwards of 20 developers.)  It’s interesting, painful (in that learning a new thing brain stretching way) and fun.

Dealing with management is also pretty interesting stuff.  I get to take part in some pretty high level meetings for an organizational leaf-node, and I enjoy it a great deal.  I’m a part of the decision making process at a level which allows me to be pretty solidly involved with the company.  And that’s something I’m rather good at.  Problem is I couldn’t really care less.  This place could burn for all I care.   I’ve no animosity.  But if I woke up tomorrow to an email that said my company dissolved I’d miss a couple people and my felt bat decorations.  The problem with that, in turn, is that I simply can not be made to pretend to care.  Can’t do it.  It’s not in me and it’s one of the things that I simply refuse to see looking back at me in the mirror.

So I teach, guide and coach people in Extreme Programming and in Agile practices in general, the motivation and principles behind it, the tools and technologies that facilitate it and the communication that helps business and developers actually understand each other.  I do this in two scenarios:

One, when people come to me and ask enthusiastic questions, dying to soak up information and hear what there is to learn.  That’s absolutely wonderful.  There are a couple teams of people who just can’t get enough and who are really doing things, looking all over their code and processes for improvements.  I see them out of the corner of my eye trying to decide whether or not to ‘disturb’ me, as if they could.
Two:  I’m the methodology police.  I’m the guy who comes in and says “See, you’re not actually testing anything.  You have to test your code.”  I’m the guy who says they have to have the bi-weekly meetings and this is the way to do them.  Sure, I know FULL WELL that you really can’t impose process like that.  So does everyone up the chain from me (mostly.)  But the bloodbath of dragging people kicking and screaming to better work is abhorrent.

Now #1 is a blast as you might imagine.  I love working and talking with people who are engaged.  I don’t care if it’s about ink and paper.   The irony of it is that people come to me for guidance and end up teaching me far more than I teach them and everybody goes away happy.  Sure, fine with me.  #2 is pretty repulsive.  I’m a rather fundamentally uncontentious person.  People who lust for conversational blood-baths simply have to take a long walk off a short pier.  People who insist they’re doing things the one true right way… gak.  I like this stuff because it works.  It’s not easy to get used to, so grow up and give it an honest shot.

But all of that aside,  I’m simply not DOING it.  I’m teaching it.

For years I’ve simply not been able to talk about what I do with friends.  There’s just no shared context.  I mean how do you describe the madness of writing cross platform multiplexed c++ server code with the single obstacle being the fact that the third parameter to ‘accept’ is signed on one platform and unsigned on another.  Nobody I know has the faintest idea what the fuck that means, nor should they.

So now, in addition to that, I no longer do any of this.  I teach it.

My greatest professional skills are perfectly untapped instead of being ‘mostly’ untapped, per usual.

Here we go again.

Even in my startled hypnogogia I knew that was a shaky one.

It’s not strictly inaccurate.  But it’s a thought of a kind that needs to be expressed a bit more fully.

Yeah, I’ve gotta take it.  FINALLY I feel better.  All day yesterday I was either sleeping or looking at the computer monitor drooling like an idiot.

Heading off to Pensyltucky (Where does that come from?  I love the sound of it so I keep using it.  I should do a background check on it first.  meh) for the weekend and I’m not taking the mactop so I’ll be out of touch unless I give in to the sick twisted impulse to stop at J&R on the way and buy an EEE which I fear I might actually do.

Now to answer that age old question… should I pack shorts?

As time goes on I’m amazed at how I can still make rookie drinking mistakes and get smacked down really badly by a hangover.

I hung out with the FarkNYC crowd last night; something I’m going to make a regular habit of.

We started at Croc on 14th between 2nd and 1st aves.  Free personal pizza with every drink (and it’s almost worth the price!)  Now if I know I’m going to be out for a long haul, I try not to start with liquor.

But the only cider they had was Woodchuck and frankly… yeah, no.  So I had one of those, gulped it down in inspiringly short order then ordered a Ketel screwdrivers, which I proceeded to drink all night.

Now, details of the evening aside (hmmpf) a few of us split off and went to Burp Castle where, much to my delight, they have Blackthorne in bottles.  So I decided that was the right thing to do…fool.

I ended up shutting the place down at 3 or so (having started drinking a little after 5.)

As I sat down on the floor of the union square downtown 4 platform I began to realize the gravity of my mistake.  I was able to navigate the bodega and pick up a big thing of gatorade, 2 buttered rolls and a half gallon of milk.

Put that all in a blender, then..

ok, no no.  that’s just nasty.

I drank what I could of the gatorade (which admittedly wasn’t much) and ate my buttered rolls and fell over on the bed.  Hours later I woke up rather incredibly damaged.  I noodled around online a bit (about 10:00) took a couple over the counter pain thingies, then flumped over on the couch.  I woke up again at 2, talked on the phone ’til THAT died out then flumped back on the couch ’til four.

My head still isn’t right.

Part of the issue is that I’ve been drinking with decreasing frequency as time goes on so my tolerance has dropped.  But damn.  A full-night’s worth of vodka drinks then a full night’s worth of cider.

s’pose I deserve what I got.

(Of course none of this mentions the girl, waterballoons from above, the folks, missing notebooks, a thelemite bartendress or any of the actual happenings of the evening.  I’ll save that one for…uhm… when I’m sober.)

Not this:

**Age of Conan Subscriber Beta**

Subscribers can join the beta for Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, the most anticipated MMORPG this year! Beta keys will be given out at random times throughout the week - so check back on FilePlanet daily for your chance at a key. Gameplay starts on May 1st.

Our first batch of keys has released, click HERE!

Yeah, to quote one of my least favorite bands:

“I may be goin’ to hell in a bucket, but at least I’m enjoying the ride.”

What? Link? HA HA Get your own. (The phrase you’re looking for is “Petty Tyrant.” Go read a bunch of Castenada.)

(The download is 12.56g.  Not meg, gig.  Unbefarkinlievable. started now.  we’ll see.)

day 5:  progress has slowed remarkably, cabin fever setting in.  reinforcements to arrive tomorrow.  We’ve awakened that indestructible enemy, the dust bunny.

At best the dust bunny can only ever be subdued temporarily and I fear our situation here in the very heart of the command center is far worse than ‘at best.’  The fans and filters are going.  The windows are open.

I just hope the men can hold out.

via Erica

Black & White on the Grey Matters 2 (War)

FTW!

Other Cities Just Say They’re the Greatest in the World

Frat tourist guy: Hey! I just hailed a New York City cab!
New Yorker, jumping into cab: I just stole your cab!

–Bleecker & Hudson

Overheard by: sean

(I loled)

Surgeons give hope to blind with successful ‘bionic eye’ operations

Two successful operations to implant the artificial electronic device into the eyes of two blind patients were conducted last week at Moorfields Eye Hospital in London, it emerged today.

The device - the first of its kind in the world - incorporates a video camera and transmitter mounted on a pair of glasses.

Man, when did the future happen?

Just so ya know, I have more fun being me than most people do being them. Of course, this stems largely from the fact that most people aren’t actually trying to be them, but to be someone else entirely which, if you think about it really starts to hurt your head a bit because those people are almost certainly not trying to be THEM, so who is it in fact that people are trying to be?

I however have just spent the last five minutes with the bubble wrap from my new painting balled up on the floor (yielding a ball about 2′ in diameter) jumping up and down on it with reckless abandon and I STILL haven’t made a dent in the unpopped bubble ratio.

Clearly I have my work cut out for me.

No, it’s not as much fun as it was when I was seven.

It’s more.

Ha ha I win.

Yeah it’s pedestrian fare but he’s almost got a little funk goin’ on.

Check it out:

I think I mentioned within the last week that I’ve gone back to using a desktop email client, namely Eudora instead of going to gmail (and most of my other accounts) through the web-based interface.

It’s had a pretty interesting side-effect.  Since it pulls everything down from multiple sources it’s removed entirely the ability to “oh, just go check email” as something to absorb spare attention cycles when I’m looking for a distraction.

Well duh, I know.  That’s almost as well suited a job for Captain Obvious as the last post.

But the contrast is pretty stark.  I’m amazed now that the habit is highlighted by this little rift, how often I’m alt-tabbing to firefox.

What ends up happening is there’s this moment where the mental pattern is interrupted and I get a bit disconnected as my eyes race around trying to get back on some kind of habit track.

I wonder how many more of those things I’ve got going on that would be as easy (or close to it) to abstract away.

Then comes the strange question of how else should I handle the occurrence.  Eh, that’s too much.

My couch currently sits rather squarely in the middle of my livingroom floor.  There are strange piles of stuff all over the place but most of the floor is quite bare.  My head is a bit more clear than it’s been in some time, despite the afternoon pints I had between hauls to the curb.

I’m on said couch with my mactop in my lap, my back to the open window and a soft chilled breeze is ruffling the back of my neck.

I got everything done I’d said I was going to do.  Of course this means I got far more done than I expected.

My plan for the coming week, insofar as I have one, is to spend the days on the apartment but the evenings on coding and other creative pursuits.

From that template I’m going to go see a couple movies ‘cause I can get to them without the godawful madness of primetime movie watching at the ickyplex a couple blocks from my apartment.

Now, my apartment is four steps worse than you’d fear it could possibly be.  I’m not going to describe it.  But here I am, having taken a week off to knock that shit off and I’m looking at the better part of a clean hardwood floor and it’s satisfying in a way I hadn’t accounted for.

While rolling it over in my head I remembered something from The Tipping Point about the NYC cleanup effort in the 80s and early 90s.  The aesthetics changed people’s behavior remarkably.  Get rid of the graffiti in the subways, crime went down precipitously.

And while it makes sense that there’s a correlation, if not a causal relationship, at the micro level, I’d never really given it much thought.

Previously the state of my apartment caused me to come in at night, put my stuff down…wherever, go sit in front of the computer and put my back to it.  But always I was conscious of the mess behind me, encroaching further and further on what little space I’d salvaged for myself.

It’s always seemed such an intractably immense undertaking.

We’ll see.

I’ve been saying for the last 7 or so years that I don’t have a television. In the terms people hear it, it’s true; though technically, until about 20 minutes ago I did indeed have a 29 inch CRT from the mid 80’s. It was sitting in a box, packed since I’d moved in to this apartment all those years ago.

Just now I brought it, box and all, down the four flights of stairs and kicked that biotech to the curb. Then went my old 21″ crt monitor (great dell monitor. If you’re on Henry street in Brooklyn between Joralemon and State streets, you’ll find them both if you act now.)

I’m taking a little break to eat one of those Jamaican hot pocket thingies and read some mail before I take my stereo down, and the free-standing air conditioner, the file cabinet, a computer (maybe two.) Then I can step back a sec and think about my next steps.

There are boxes to be cut down, bags of garbage and recycling to be…bagged and brought down.

Hell, I even bought a push-broom.

The goal today I think is to get most of the major crap from the living room dumped.

I don’t even want to talk about the bedroom and the bathroom is off limits. Hell, I don’t even have BEFORE pictures of the bathroom.

UPDATE: Not an hour. Not ONE HOUR after I put the TV, the monitor, one computer and a filing cabinet down stairs I came back down stairs and it was gone, but for the box the TV was in. People are funny.

That last post? Yeah, not so much.

The string has to be pretty precisely formatted. But it works.

Ya know what that means?

That means I can blast in my radio userland post archives into their appropriate time slots and it won’t be so long ’til I get the uccu posts in there as well.

Oh it IS going to be a productive evening.

I do hope the server this is running on has good cooling systems ;-)

*cracks knuckles*

Good christ this stuff is a headache. Perl has this wonderful module that allows you to build simple xmlrpc clients and servers very easily.

It looks at the structure of your request and figures out by the data type how to map it in to xml by playing data type guessing games.

Unless you pass it a date, which it treats as a string.

Now, xmlrpc has an explicit date type. So if you’re using XMLRPC::Lite to call an api method (for instance metaweblog.newPost) and pass it a date in the request structure (say, in the ‘dateCreated’ or ‘date_created_gmt’ fields), what the server gets isn’t the date field, it’s a string field, even though the contents are the same.

How to force it to call the thing a date I have no idea.
Currently I’m looking at rewriting the damn client in python.

But my eyes keep sliding over to my old (but pretty damn robust) c++ xmlrpc libraries. I could use that to generate a request and, if I was feeling lazy, just pipe the thing into curl or wget.

A bunch of words. If this works, look out :)

UPDATE: Hmm… it was supposed to back date that to april 1. back to the drawing board.

I decided yesterday to take next week off to do some much needed “spring cleaning” on my life. A great deal of it is literally that, excavating my apartment. But there are a bunch of other things I intend to get done as well.

I’d thought about going away for a couple days. But I need to fix up the place such that it’s worth coming back to. I’ve gotten the official blessing to put a bunch of stuff out on the curb for rummagers to come claim, which is something I was worrying about. That old husk of a television, a 22″ CRT monitor, an old computer or two. The futon frame perhaps (the futon mattress certainly.) A filing cabinet and on and on.

My constant complaint is that I never have enough uninterrupted time to get anything done. Of course I recognize the absolutism in there and sniff it out for what it is. But without proving it to the part of myself that insists on phrasing things that way, it will always be there as my primary bottleneck.

In fact the error is the amount of mental chaos I have to fight through to get started, to say nothing of the notion that I need to “get started” in some strange ritualistic ramp-up in order to do anything.

Plus I’ve brokered a deal with myself: If I go without lunch I can order a garlic and pepperoni pizza. Now now, I know that makes no goddamn sense from a dietary perspective. But still :-)
Ugh, what time is it again?