Journal
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# Chicken Soup for the Belly
I made chicken soup this week. For want of anything better to blog about, this is how I made my chicken soup.
- Go buy a big honking1 chicken.
- Roast it2.
- Eat the chicken, or at least the meat bits. Probably also the skin. If there’s any meat left on the chicken, remove it and save it for chicken sandwiches.
- Put the rest of the carcass in a pot of water with a chopped carrot, chopped celery stalks, salt, pepper and enough water to cover it all. Bring to boil then let it fester and bubble for…ehh…awhile. I let it simmer for a few hours, turned it off overnight, then started it simmering again in the morning and then had it turned off again at lunch-ish.
- Remove the carcass. Probably with a slotted spoon. Dispose of it. Thoughtfully.
- Add chopped parsley and thyme – about a tablespoon of each – and an ear of corn chopped into sections. Bring to the boil again, then let it simmer for a few hours.
- Add some macaroni maybe 60-90 minutes before you serve.
- Serve.
I’ll take a picture next time. Or you know…make it, then you’ll have a picture made of chicken soup.
Meanwhile as I type this, there is a show on Foxtel that appears to be ten to fifteen minute long segments of a strict format: “Could x happen3? Followers of the Seven Signs prophecy say yes!”
1 Note, in this case honking means big. Not actually honking. Not least because that would mean you’ve got a live bird and we live in the 21st century, you can pay other people to kill and clean your meat products. Also, that would be a goose.
2 Roasting left as an exercise for the reader.
3 Where x is something so unlikely to occur that you’d have to be an absolute fucking moron – specifically reared to be as gullible as all get out – to even consider the possibility that x could occur.
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# Several days ago, we were all Argentinian...and Dutch
I am disgusted with myself, simply appalled at how out of it I am, the depths into head and my navel that I have sunk to and led me to not be aware how much I needed my country to have territorial dominion over a cold, windswept shit hole.
Still, I do, and shall forever more, just like to see them lose.
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# Here come the drums
Under performing pace bowlers ; an unexpected short format tournament loss ; English fans, previously maximally pessimistic, now sneeringly gloaty and quietly hopeful.
I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
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# I guess the lesson for today is...
Some of Ds commenters said I looked calm; perhaps living in a house of females – even the bird is a chick – had given me practice…
I was going for Che Guevara. Camera angle was all wrong though and it’s not like I stand in front of the mirror trying to get my celebrity impersonations right.
Queen’s Birthday weekend was boring for a variety of reasons, not least because I was unable to go to Canberra to engage in the detonation of low explosives. This may have been a blessing in disguise. I do, after all, have a professional responsibility to retain all my digits…even if I do have an uneven ability to use each of those digits. Still, it would have been a good catchup with my good friend in the nation’s capital, and I am sure if the worst had happened – and I should point out he has all of his fingers – I could have fashioned a prosthetic with nearby kindling.
Been playing with NHibernate a lot recently1 and wish I’d had it at my disposal in 2005. Which is to say I wish I hadn’t succumbed to NIH Syndrome in 2005. In 2004 I and a co-worker set about inventing our own persistence framework and it did blow mightily, but we persisted and so did it2, and it ended up worming it’s way into a few projects, not least of which was the one I am still employed to maintain and develop. Been through a rewrite or two, and there is a complete end-to-end rewrite that has never been used in production code. Which is kind of ironic because it is the version with the most extensive testing framework and the version that requires the least amount of scut work to get setup. Just that it still involves scut work and I no matter how many unit tests I have, I still have a framework that has met the most definite of tests, it has been deployed for years and it does not throw exceptions.
My framework – teh most current one, I mean – is unashamedly based on ActiveRecord, the M in MVC as implemented by Ruby on Rails. NHibernate…ehhh, not so much. It is a port of the Hibernate framework for Java, and the roots are there for all to see because they are a selling point. I’ve learned lessons, such as the wrong way to support transactions, so the Java way as showcased by [N]Hibernate appeals right now.
So now I am furiously, and possibly against the clock, working on reimplementing the entire Models assembly using NHibernate, trying to keep the interface the same3 so that I can seamlessly – other than the persistence calls – replace the existing assembly.
But it reminds me of a question I was asked in an interview some time ago. I was asked what Agile development means to me. I froze up at the time, and staggered through an answer. At the time, it didn’t mean much to me. I wasn’t consciously trying to follow it. But right now, Agile means
twoseveral4 things to me:- Don’t code something if somebody else already has.
- Code ugly if it helps to get the feature out. Gussy it up later.
- Get something, anything, in writing about what you are working on.
- Avoid doing things.
- Remote team members might as well not exist.
If you code something, its something else you have to maintain and test. If you can find someone else to take on that responsibility – and you have faith they can do so – then its so much less for you to do. The more code you write, the more bugs you write, so you are best sticking to just the code you really have to write and not taking on extra stuff just because it sounds like fun.
The next-to-last is just a superset of the first, really. I don’t want to have to run tests, compile, and then copy the compiled code somewhere. I want to click a Go button and then have a coffee while everything is done, because the more steps I do, the more steps I can forget to do, or do badly.
The last is the number one lesson I have learned from my current job. I’m the only developer on my project, but also I am the only one in my project in the Sydney office. There are some users and they are probably the more clued in and motivated users, but they are users who are lowest on the political totem pole. The rest of the project team is in Melbourne and so are most of the rest of the users. Puuting aside how lonely, isolating and demotivating it is, it is very difficult to communicate effectively. When the company flies me down to Melbourne I am usually tired and wiped out from having to get up so early to catch an early flight, but even in that numb state it is remarkable how much better coordinated the project direction is after a few hours of face-to-face planning.
In the future I’ll go all out to avoid being a remote resource, and if I ever lead my own team, I won’t have one if I can avoid it.
1 Yes, that’s right. It is one of those rare posts in which I display an interest in my profession.
2 But that premise won’t.
3 To be clear, there aren’t any formal interfaces for many of the classes since I Wasn’t Going To Need Those and really, I still don’t.
4 I was thinking agilely, so there. Not my fault Constitution is my Prime Requisite.
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# Game One
I don’t have much to say on the game; unfortunately I didn’t enjoy it much, I was too distracted to sit down and focus on it. A lot of stress and self-doubt and low self-confidence roiling around in my head, I kept moving around, working on some code for work, trying to do some cramming about some technology. I can only clearly remember a few moments, so how about I talk about them.
I thought Jarryd Hayne went into touch in the eighth minute. I thought so at full speed, I thought so on the first replay and continued to think so throughout the constant review by the video referee. Granted, he was scoring against my team and I was always going to hope he had stood on the touch line. I think that I am objective enough to get beyond mere parochialism1, so I maintain that he went out, the video ref knew he had gone out, but was looking for anything in the tapes that would cast reasonable doubt and allow him to give a Benefit Of The Doubt try.
Perhaps Jarryd will learn for next time that it’s better not to have to put the referee in such a position. Someone said in the Sydney Morning Herald today that Hayne “Flirted with the left wing more than an old wharfie” (h/t Shaun C). One of the other moments I have a clear memory of is Greg Inglis’s try down the left wing. It was eerily similar to Hayne’s: he got outside his man and ran past, shaped to pass and then just ran right past the fullback to score. The difference was, he was well inside the touchline. It was an awesome run; if he’s been doing anything like that this year I have missed it, but it recalled for me just how fast this guy is. He’s a big guy but he doesn’t look it when he gets the ball and then when he puts on a burst of speed, he barely even looks like he’s exerting himself. Old macho writers last century uesed to wax lyrical about boxing and bull fighting and the like; Greg Inglis, in moments like that, evoke the same sense of awe.
Inglis also put a big fend on Jamie Lyons in the last play of the game and it was a thing of beauty. Jamie Lyons is hardly a small man but when the hand came out and shoved, he opened up like a door.
The last moment I remember – chronologically the second actually, but there was segue back there, so I segued – was Slater’s try. I remember it because it came in the play right after Hayne’s try was disallowed for stepping on the sideline and I initially thought that there was no way, he had to have put the ball down over the dead ball line. But he didn’t, he got it down well inside. It was crazy good, and it highlights the difference between the two teams. NSW had a comeback in the second half. For a long period they were making ground at will by exploiting tired defenders around the ruck; but despite that, the two tries they scored were jammy. Both tries were scored off kicks and both kicks were much too strong, they would never have been retrieved by the chasing player, except that both kicks deflected off a Queensland player. All props to them for being able to exploit good fortune and retrieve the ball to run in the two tries. They should, however, be careful in the wash up not to put too much emphasis on those tries. They should note how effective their up-the-middle running was and then go away and practice their kicking, because you can’t rely on deflections and falcons every game; their kicks were made to look good but they could just as easily have been highlighted as the major failings of the NSW attack.
On the flip-side though, they made ground at will running up the middle past tired ruck defenders. Dare I say it, but Petero and Price may be playing their last series. Like a stopped clock, eventually the NSW barbs about “Dad’s Army” will become true. Ben Hannant should be planning for his future as a starting Origin prop with an eye to next year.
1 I may have suggested in a chat room at the time though that Bill Harrigan is an anti-Queenslander cheat, but that remains unconfirmed and anyway, such is all just part of the spectacle. But he’s an anti-Queenslander cheat!!
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# The want of thought is death
If I was so lucky as to be given three wishes, my third would be able to fly at will1. No wings, no antigrav devices or planes and so forth; to just lift off the ground – I can accept having to speak a command phrase even if it is something stupid like that catch phrase – and flit around the air. Think Peter Pan but without having to cozen up to a bi-polar fairy. I wouldn’t use it to rob high rise apartments, or whore for attention with dramatic rescues and such. At most I would use it to get away from the train, to get home on my own…well, whatever it is that allows me to fly. Let’s call it my wings of mind.
Peter Pan, eh? Is that what the desire is all about? Being able to fly is being able to get away. Escape the bonds of social constraints; to be able to fly, to soar over the roofs, the cars and streets, and particularly over the heads of other people is to be able to get away from them, and to be able to get away from all the tiny acts they do that individually are nothing, but piled up over the course of a single, quite normal day, are maddening. If I can fly, I can be alone. I don’t have to listen to them talk, their inane conversations that if I should join they’d be appalled at my presumption, but their conversations they rub my face in by speaking as if they were alone, and not in a metal tube with five dozen people. I wouldn’t have to have their phones trilling in my ears, their music buzzing like a bee from earbuds set too loud. No more sniffing, snuffling, coughing, pushing, pressing, climbing over me and stepping on my feet.
You believe I am a crank, or maybe even a misanthrope? Maybe I am at that. What is a crank? Someone dissatisfied with the way they have led their life and would rather bring everyone else down to the same level instead of crawling up out of their whole mind. That’s not me. Either I’m too self-critical or too self-aware for that; if I am unsatisified with the momentum of my life, the fault lies entirely with me and it is my responsibility to redirect. I don’t wish to be prone to mauvaise foi, bad faith.
In any group I feel alone. I don’t fit in. I’m awkward, I’ve never acquired the methods of interacting socially. I can’t make small talk. I’ve always and likely always will be an outsider, at least in my own mind. To fly is a manifestation of that isolation. If I am flying, I’ve isolated myself through choice, a choice with temporal immediacy rather than the long pattern of prior choices that have led, like a trail of breadcrumbs, to this point.
My second wish would be the retroactive removal of the avocado from the time stream; that the plant does not, will not and has never existed. I don’t even know what that’s about beyond loathing it.
1 If I suspect the wish granter is, or has ever been, a D&D Dungeon Master, I will of course apply as much elucidating detail as possible to avoid, say, suddenly experiencing a massive gravitational attraction to the nearest William. Or discovering that the verb form ‘fly’ doesn’t just mean ‘to move through the air’ but also, in certain cultures on certain planes of reality’, ‘to polymorph into Musca domestica’.
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# Links for 2009-05-07
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# Links for 2009-05-05
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# Links for 2009-05-03
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# Something something
It’s been a long time.
The last four months have been difficult. Hence, my already slow blogging rate crawled to a near halt, with only scatterings of links to show that I had not slipped into a coma. Sorry about that.
Am I having a midlife crisis? Already? Maybe. I certainly seem to have no sense of purpose. I have things I want to do but no drive to do them. I can’t focus on anything. Nothing really interests me, I can’t make decisions, I can’t think. When D and tWM aren’t around I feel adrift.
You know something has to be wrong when you can’t even bring yourself to deadhead in front of the television or throw time and life into a black hole like World of Warcraft.
Obviously blogging is a complete loss; a past time that suffers from both my general sense of disinterest in basically everything and my inability to focus on anything for thirty seconds.
It’s not my job that is to blame. I don’t really enjoy my job but I don’t enjoy my job because I can’t focus on anything, because I’ve lost interest in my project along with the rest of all human endeavour. It’s certainly anything to do with D and tWM; I only feel alive and happy when I’m around one or both of them.
What does all this mean? Cino knows. If there wasn’t a recession and I wasn’t employed by an industry – travel – prone to suffering in a recession I’d make them hire a second developer for the project to alleviate the sense of being overwhelmed by what I could be doing with the project versus what I actually have the time and resources to do. If I could get my hands on some ritilin I’d be popping it like a gimp doctor on vicodin just to try and find some focus.
Yeah, that’d totally fix everything.
