That's Life

Goodbye Teithe Din Din / Teith Yr Ewin / Teith yr 拧紧

Always in our hearts.

Teithe Din Din was a poor translation of “Journey of the Nail” or “Journey of the Screw.” It is a combination of Welsh and Chinese. The dog came all the way from Taiwan as a rescue, with a pin in her leg, so her foster family in the US named her “拧紧” which, to a Western ear sounds like “Ding ding” so she became “Ding ding”.

When we adopted her on April 16th 2011, Joyce and I pondered for a while and decided on “Taith Yr Ding Ding” as her name. But when you talk to a vet, they don’t quite get the nuance in the pronunciation, so on the veterinary records she was “Teithe Din DIn” and that just kind of stuck after a while.

When she arrived she was thin and scrawny, having spent almost six months in a tiny, cramped cage – she was our “Size 0 Super Model.”

She ate fried rice, so she was our “Number 37 Takeout Special with Fried Rice.”

She was Joyce’s heart dog, and I got to borrow her on occasion when Joyce wasn’t around.

And then 11 years later Din Din got cancer.

And then she was gone.

And I miss you.

And it hurts.

 

It was a hot and rancid day in the workshop.

“Call me Sisyphus.” I said as I took the first steps in a seemingly unending repetitive task ahead of me.

A drawer. A study in wood.

Number one in a series of 86.

Foonote: I really should have invested in that CNC. And an assistant to help with glue up.

It never rains, but it pours.

Today has been an end of what can only be described as an expensive week.

Monday started with a “minor” plumbing issue (are they ever?!?) that translates in to a new section of black water line, and $3,500 being billed, to remove a sharp turn that has been consistently clogging every couple of years, for the past decade.

And Thursday rolled around with a bulging lithium battery in my wife’s Microsoft Surface Book laptop that threatens to crack the screen that 18 months outside of the extended warranty. So that’s $710 to repair/replace because it is still a pretty good and fully functional laptop that has a couple more years of life in it.

And over sushi, Friday evening rolled through and the conversation turned to new laptops with Saturday afternoon wrapping up on the Microsoft store website, ordering a new $3,400 Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio with 4-year warranty.

Welp, time to upgrade the UPS (uninterruptible power supply) that protects my workstation. My smaller, office-sized UPS devices from APC just aren’t keeping up with the demands of a dual CPU and dual GPU workstation.

The power to the office outlet is adequate, but if there is even a minor sag in the power delivery, my video monitors switch off and my workstation reboots.

Which is never fun.

Especially when I was running an overnight or even multi-day neural network model training session for my deep learning work overnight, only to find the machine has restarted and lost all my progress.

You know, if I want that kind of “mysterious restart in the middle of the night that destroys days of work” I can run Windows 10 with its auto-update feature enabled.

I am kinda brand loyal to APC and am contemplating of the following model:

 

When your wife is clearing out the dishwasher and hands you two sauce pan lids of equal size, it is de rigueur to place said equally sized sauce pan lids firmly against your chest and immediately launch in to Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song in German at as high a pitch as one can muster without suffering a physical injury.

“Aaaaaaah! Ah! Aaaaaahhhh! Ah! Wir kommen aus dem land der eis und schnee…”

Well that sucks.

Little storage boxes for my Festool systainers.

Time to re-run the print.

Installed new garbage disposal after our 12 year old one developed a nasty crack.

Installed new over-counter microwave after our 12 year old one fell apart. One of those “tap the start button and run out before you’re irradiated” situations.†

“Would it be easier if you took the cabinet doors off either side?” she asked innocently.

In my naievty I took the cabinet doors off either side to make it easier to install.

“Would it be easier if you took the upper doors off to reach the fastening bolts?” she asked innocently.

In my naievty I took the upper cabinet doors off to more easily reach the fastening bolts for mounting the microwave.

And…

Now we’re sanding the cabinets.

And picking out paint.

And new handles.

And deciding on what kind of Euro hinges work best.

And deciding between a Miele and a Wolf cooktop.

Do we want walnut or cherry end grain countertops?

I _just_ wanted a four-day weekend to play with my 3D printer that has sat in my workshop, barely used, for goodness knows how long.

In Project Management we call this “client feature creep” and why I don’t do project management.

So… how’s everybody else’s Sunday going?

† Yes, I know that’s not how microwaves actually work.

I was becoming anxious and getting worked up about an upcoming dental appointment.

“Is there anything I can do to calm you down?” my wife asked.

“Not that I can think of. I just have to be an adult about this.” I replied.

“What would your Mother say to you in this situation to help you cope?”

I pondered that for a couple of seconds and replied “Calm down or I’ll give you something to really cry about.”

I miss her so much. My Mother. Not my wife.

Why don’t I drive a Tesla or other vehicle with fancy sensors and situational awareness that will warn me of stopped vehicles ahead, or pedestrians in the road, or cars backing out of parking spots?

I don’t need one. I have a spouse in the passenger seat that will not only point them out to me constantly but also perform a sharp intake of breath as an early warning system before anything could possibly happen.

“Oh it’s not you I don’t trust, it’s the other drivers on the road.” she said to me today.

Uh huh, sure. Nice save.

I’ve run in to a lot of people that opine “I don’t know what to write!” My problem is, I don’t have enough time to write all I want.

How do I come up with stuff to write about?

I either trawl through my notebooks for pieces I can use about personal projects I am working on, e.g. buying a 3D printer or constructing a cabinet in the workshop or prime number theory.

Or I scroll through social media until I find something that makes me annoyed that makes me want to shake my fist at a random passing cloud, or someone asks, again on social media, a thoughtful question, and then I form an opinion on either of those two subjects, and then I write about that.

And for every one post on my public journal, I probably have five or six more pieces in my private notebooks that probably shouldn’t ever see the light of day.

Today I made notes on Anchor Hocking storage containers, a math problem, some computer vision research, storage in my workshop, how to write journal entries, rubbermaid container storage options, and the car maintenance schedule.

Read social media. Get annoyed or answer a question. Write a journal entry.

That’s it. That’s my entire method.

This is one of those times where you say “What a week huh?” as you pour yourself a drink and your colleague says “But Captain, it’s only Wednesday.”

Monday: Meetings. Meetings. Meetings. Meetings.

Tuesday: Meetings. Running around for materials. Building props in the workshop.

Wednesday: 18 hours building props in an unventilated workshop in 90F weather.

Thursday: 16 hour day, 14 of them on set until midnight.

Friday: “So could you do a 6AM early morning call to catch up?”

Stress levels somewhat lowered today, which is surprising for a Monday, thanks to Jeffery “Jeff” Buchanan and Kenton DeSanti for their amazing ability to step up and get shit done.

I mean, I am still 12 espressos in by 3:30PM in the afternoon, but overall, I’m not bouncing off the walls and contemplating slapping an earlier version of me from 30 days ago for saying “yes” to a crisis project.

Here’s to a productive week, and maybe a few less takeout meals and a few more showers.

Two hours in and third coffee of the day because this week has been fueled by nothing but caffeine and stress.

I know when work is on top of me because this week I have ate takeout for four separate meals. I rarely order takeout food.

I joined a company on a short-term contract, “for a month or two”, to help out a friend and solve a few problems. Which became a four year engagement.

I became “the go to guy” for anything and everything related to a particular project, and the DevOps for that project, and eventually the DevOps+CI/CD guy company wide. But I also had to work on an assigned project as Lead Programmer, but never got any other programmer assigned to work with me.

I shipped two company critical products by myself, front-end, iOS & Android mobile app and backend infrastructure. I made significant contributions in the form of code to other teams, I ensured the company wide build-systems kept humming along and was 24/7 on-call DevOps for two years straight with no backup. At one point I literally had five separate managers that I reported directly too that each had their own competing needs.

Every couple of months I had a conversation with a higher up, and every couple of months I was told “there’s no budget, it’s difficult to hire, you do it so well, and we don’t trust anybody else to do it, and nobody else wants to do it.”

There was no promotion, no prospect of advancing, didn’t receive a single pay increase in four years, “but you’re so well paid already, there’s just not the budget for that this year, we see you as more of a cost center than a profit center.” And every time I was ready to quit, a few “friends” at the company talked me down off the ledge, who I later learned were being prompted to do that by upper management. It was a classic abusive relationship. I realize that now. And I fell for it.

When I started to have issues with shipping a product as both the Lead Programmer (mobile apps, fron-end, admin interface, backend infrastructure and API) and also be project manager and interface directly with a demanding client, including doing on-call 24/7 DevOps with no backup, and wrangling the company-wide CI/CD system, the project I was building, that should have been a five person team in reality, I was assigned a “tough manager” to set me straight and get me back on track. This was literally the conversation I had when the manager sat me down in a conference room, “I’m here to make sure you do what you need. I’m giving you some tough love. And I’m going to ride your arse until I see improvement.” Now this manager was not the project manager, he was specifically assigned to manage my output, and after a month he went back to the execs and said “Justin isn’t the problem.”

This manager put up signs at the end of the cubicle row that said “If you need to speak with Justin, talk to X first.” And people would ignore the posted signs, ignore that I had headphones on, and still interrupt me, and then my Manager and whoever was interrupting would get into an argument, right at my desk, over how urgent their request was. I eventually got moved out of that area to a “quieter area” near the IT guy, which unfortunately meant then people would come by his desk and have loud conversations about an IT issue, and when the IT guy wasn’t around, would interrupt me to ask if I knew about how to solve problem X on their computer.

When the stress is so bad, and I have an outburst where I am screaming at my tech director to go fuck himself in the middle of the hallway, and they still won’t fire me, an outburst I am not proud of and would never ordinarily do (I’m kind of a Mr Rogers & Ted Lasso until you hit the wrong button), you kind of get the idea of how indispensable they viewed my position. The outburst was over five people having a meeting directly at my desk, that didn’t actually involve me, that was very loud and racous, and when I repeatedly and politely asked them to move their meeting elsewhere I was informed that I need to be more understanding and empathetic towards people’s needs.

Coronavirus came along, everbody gets to WFH, which gives me breathing room to think, I start looking for a new position, the company hits a financial tough spot and decides they can do without me, which is like a great weight that lifted from my shoulders. I took three months off and built a few side-projects and was so much more productive than I had ever been in the past four years. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-months-side-projects-ju…

I was still getting messages and urgent emails from people at the company four to six months later, on an almost daily basis regarding the DevOps and CI/CD pipeline. Everything had been documented, nobody wanted to read, it was easier to send me an email even though I no longer worked at the company.

I used to love being “the go to guy” but I’ve since learned, “don’t ever be indispensable.”

Unfortunately, the indispensability part is starting to repeat.

The guitar strings I normally pay $7 a set for, are currently being scalped on eBay for $35 a set. Sold out everywhere else.

My wife: “Talk dirty to me. En Francais. Did I say that right, en francais?”

Me, with my broken French I have not used in 30 years and having hastily googled key phrases a few years ago that I can now barely pronounce: “Oui. Viens ici ma petite lingette humide. Fascinons-nous avec des fromages affinés à pâte molle.”

My wife: “That’s hot. What did you say?”

Hard to believe I spent more than a year during my 20’s living and working in France with a non-English speaking team, isn’t it?

Goodbye to our cat Jeffrey. Our brave British cat. We’ll still look for you greeting us from your tree each morning.

2003 (probably) – to August, 27th 2017 @ 4:15PM PST.

Today our dog went to the vet…

I need to figure out how to get my Kinect to recognise and process the input from the paws of a feline.

To put this in context, my wife won’t let me re-purpose one of the huge touch screen computers we have as an interactive cat toy.

*grumble* *grumble* *grumble*

So now I need to see if there is any research that has been done on recognising touch input from a feline using the Microsoft Kinect and then figure out how to do that myself.

Life would be so much easier if my wife didn’t give me “that look” every time I wanted to experiment with my cats.

At the start of 2016 we had 9 computers (laptops/desktops) in the family household, 8 of them running Windows.

We are now up to 12 computers but down to only 4 installations of Windows.

By the end of this year, it will probably be only one, maybe two installations of Windows due to a desire to play certain games.

When you are in business and you act like an arrogant prick towards your customers, they vote with their dollars.

I fully expect Microsoft to go through the same shit they did in the 90’s with the anti-trust and wrist slapping because some companies are just pathological in their abusive practices.

Eventually you give up trying to teach the dog not to shit in the house using positive reinforcement and instead resort to negative reinforcement.

“I’d like to invite you to coffee. I’ll pay. I want to pick your brains about my start-up idea and I’m looking for a CTO. But I have to insist you don’t write about any of this on your blog. How does this afternoon sound?” said the unannounced inviter for coffee from New York City who found me through LinkedIn.

“I can only promise that if you promise not to say anything any reasonable person would regard as foolish.” I replied in an email from San Francisco.

I never did hear back.

I have refused to do business with at least three people over my career because after having lunch with them I realised I couldn’t stand to watch them eat, or worse, listen to them eat.

If you see me pop up in your “who viewed your profile” list it is a safe bet I was just tagged your profile with a “Facebook drivel” tag because you “liked” or commented on… well, on Facebook drivel.

“Well take care of yourself huh? Because that’s what you’re best at.”

I did not realise I was channeling Star Wars when I said that.

Beaver Builder and WP Types have suddenly become my two favouritest WordPress plugins.

Throw in Underscores theme and I don’t think I need to spin up Drupal instances for “those sites that don’t quite fit in the WordPress mould.”

Paying your web host for regular data backups of your server is like paying for insurance.

It’s only expensive until you need it.

Which is why I just quoted someone $25K to recover their malware infected web app server.

Because taking off and nuking the site from orbit with a known good backup is no longer an option.

It will entail weeks of painstaking work of picking through the rubble looking for things that shouldn’t be there.

There are some questions in your life that you should never seek an answer too.

Should I have invested in Apple at the time?

Should I eat that three day old taco in the refrigerator?

If you had to do it all over again, would you still marry me?

Yesterday I received a notice from a collections agency for an unpaid bill which I know I had paid months earlier.

I diligently called the number and after much fussing around I said “I can prove I paid the bill, I have the credit card statement that shows the amount was paid and the date it was paid on.”

“You would need to send us a copy of that statement.” said the collections “customer” service representive at the collections agency.

“Okaayyyy,” I said exasperated, “I will have to download it from my credit card’s website, print it out, redact other information, and…”

“We only accept unaltered, original documentation.” interjected the CSR before I could finish.

“Well I’m not going to contact my credit card company and have them mail me a physical copy of my statement and then mail you that statement with all the other information on it.” I countered.

“We’ll take it as a fax.” added the CSR.

“You absolutely require the original documentation?” I asked.

“Yes.” said the CSR.

“But you’re willing to let me fax it to you?”

“We’re not set up to handle physical mail.” clarified the CSR.

“I did some research on your company whilst we’re having this conversation,” I said, “it appears that your company is bogus and there are a number of investigations against various company directors.”

The telephone line went mysteriously dead.

And I never heard from that “collections agency” ever again.

“You’re quite the prolific influencer.” said a chap I met at a networking meet-up in reference to my writing and blogging and networking.

“Me? An influencer? I can barely get my wife to make up her mind about what she wants for lunch.” I quipped.

There was a game design mental exercise I used to do quite regularly. And I did this mental exercise on-again, off-again for about eight months total.

I would spend two or three hours drawing simple graphic assets, select a palette of limited colours, and a font, and a dozen sound effects.

I would then try to make an interesting game, and actually implement the game in code, out of only those assets I had available.

The mental exercise had a tendency to strongly focus the mind on what was important.

Sometimes you wound up with something interesting.

Sometimes you wound up with nothing at all.

But you always wound up with an interesting lesson in game design.

Yesterday I closed the door on my apartment in Mill Creek, WA and started the long drive South back to Los Angeles to stay with a friend whilst I recover from the roller-coaster of insanity in the past six months.

Hours before I am leaving, a little tortoiseshell kitten showed up on my front porch.

She cannot be older than 8 or 10 weeks.

I looked all around the apartment complex to see if anybody was missing a cat, but couldn’t find anyone. It was the middle of a work day.

I had resolved to take her to the shelter, but then thought better of it.

The hour had gotten late, I had just exhausted myself putting almost all of my belongings in to a storage locker, and I still had a long drive South to Los Angeles ahead of me.

Me, Cat, and my new kitten named Cath, are in the Land Rover, along with essential possessions such as clothes and computers, and are on the long road down through Washington, Oregon and California.

 

I don’t take work home from the office because I like to do somebody else’s work.

I take work home from the office so I can actually get the work done that I was being paid to do at the office but couldn’t due to the interruptions and the social distractions that are foisted upon me.

Website responds: “Thanks for uploading your C.V.”

“Now fill in all of the information from your C.V. by hand in to this multi-page form.”

Seriously. WTF!? This is like giving me a job before I interview for the job.

My C.V. is basically a list of things I hate to do.

I wish my clients’ finance departments would respond to my emails as quickly as my clients expect me to respond to theirs.

My new laptop (which I love) I picked up at Sears has a buggy video card driver.

The screen freezes periodically and you cannot recover from it.

Every time I have to shut down the computer (because it froze) feels like I am smothering a friend’s face with a pillow.

I have learned of this thing called “Thanksgiving” and apparently the entire fucking country shuts down and goes off to visit other people.

Thanks for letting me know you arseholes.

This would be like showing up on Christmas Day (without knowing about Christmas) in a new country and trying to figure out what the Hell is going on.

 

My calendar: You have a 30 minute meeting in four hours.

My brain: Not really enough time to get fully focused on work. Might as well grab an early lunch and fire up a game until then.

I’ve always held that if I do not stand a good chance of winning then I will refuse to compete.

And if I am forced to compete, then I change the rules to make sure I stand a good chance of winning.

The problem with people acting like an arsehole around me is that they get really upset when they find out I am a bigger arsehole than they could ever be.

You merely affect being an arsehole. It comes naturally to me and I practice, deliberate practice of course, every day.

You tinkle the ivories whilst I close out Carnegie Hall on a daily basis.

P.S. “Hell of a nice guy” in my Fido.net email signature block is a truism so long as you don’t push the wrong button.

So I learn that testing for infinite loops is actually called the “Halting Problem.”

Ah well, 40+ years late again.

The reason I do not hang out with people very much is that I find myself to be annoying.

I have very few friends but I seem to have an awful lot of acquaintances.

I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.

I fear the day when computers start thinking for themselves, not because computers will be thinking for themselves but because on that day people will stop thinking for themselves.

My personality reflects who I am.

My attitude reflects who you are.

So I just read that the Japanese people write their dates backwards, year, month, day.

Smart people.