No, that game you saw, AdVenture Capitalist, that’s not mine. Despite promises of finishing things…not me. I started it, obviously; twice even. But I sure didn’t finish it.
Assuming Jason sees this post, it may amuse him to know that while looking for that tweet, I had to scroll back through all the Ashes matches. le sigh!
Assorted rambling starting with music
Possibly you recall a “study” that came out in April suggesting that if you are 33 and up, you are statistically unlikely to encounter new music. You may even recall that in the game of telephone that is clickbait media, it was presented as something it was not. Which is to say, it was presented as a study. Anyway, I thought of that yesterday after I, a forty year old man, introduced the child to a new artist (Halsey[1]. I started thinking back over all the new music I’ve purchased this year.
There was a push at the beginning of the year to persuade people to only read books authored by women and writers of colour. I…did not do that. Sorry. But, turns out, I have almost done that with music. About 75% women at any rate. It was partly a conscious decision, partly because there hasn’t been much I heard from men that resonated. The Royal Blood album and a few Hudson Hawke tracks. A Saints track - the Saints track actually. It started in 2014, amplified by August 2014, and has carried on into this year. It might actually go all the way back to Steubenville. A switch flipped and I was repulsed by the world. With that, a realisation that I no longer wanted to be part of the problem by way of passivity.
So affirmative action, and all. Preference my money going to women and/or non-white people. Re-broadcast more women. Really think hard - do you really need the opinions of yet another white bro in his twenties.
If I ever get to recruit again I’ll follow some advice I received at a talk recently. Women read job ads and if they find a few points they don’t match, won’t apply; men find a few points they do meet and apply. So interview all the women, don’t even look at their resume. Hell, interview all the women anyway if you’re in tech. We’ll never get 51% women to men if we don’t.
“I’ve been over here a long time and I like watching the football - particularly how England go out in the big tournaments.”
Google and Facebook
The less of both of them in my life, the better. I am now down to a single Google service in my life, Gmail, and even that is mostly just a spam drop. Facebook hangs around solely so I can talk to the captain of the Australian Volley Ball team when I need to score tickets.
Apply at Google? No. Even if I were good enough, double no.
I particularly like Track 9 on Badlands, Control. Al Swearengen’s Vile Task monologue followed by this song is my pre-arrival-at-the-office psyche up soundtrack.
Several years ago, perhaps more years than I care to actually count, I worked at a marketing agency with a man. Several, really, but one in particular. Nice guy, was dating a dancer who was part of the crew of So You Think You Can Dance. He’d had some trouble earlier in his life and was picking up the pieces with what seemed like a job that was kind of beneath him. I could have learned a lot from him if he had cared enough to be a mentor or if I had been a little more engaged. He left after a year, more or less.
I ran into him again about six months ago in North Sydney, because eventually everyone working in North Sydney runs into each other on Miller Street or in the Greenwood. He told me I am a people person.
I had worked with another man - quelle surprise - at the same place. One day, after a couple of years, he vanished. Just never came back to work. The boss asked me if I had heard from him and at that point I hadn’t really even noticed he wasn’t there. Turned out he had been doing ice for the past couple months with another human, also working at that agency. I didn’t find this out until much later after he reconnected. I don’t fully know what actually transpired; maybe his wife found out, maybe he just checked himself. But he never came back to work at that job and so far as I know never officially resigned. I don’t recall if the leadership of the company ever managed to reach him. The man who called me a people person was hired to replace the man who just never came back.1
The human he was taking ice with? He was not an ok guy or a nice guy. He was, in fact, an arsehole. I don’t know what happened to him. Might have quit, might have got the sack.
The man who vanished was working on a product for this agency we both worked for. It was a big dream of the company’s leadership, this product. Or rather it was the big dream of some men that the company’s leadership met one day, agreed to do business with, fell out with, and unashamedly stole the big idea from. There were lawsuits. The company I work for now would be all over this product, and to some extent are, but in 2004-ish2 it was right on the ragged edge of doable with the kind of technology and resources at the fingertips of a small digital agency in North Sydney constantly on the precipice of no longer being a digital agency of any size anywhere. Which is why they were all for it. It was software as a service back that was merely a thing rather than a Thing. If they could have got it going it would have fueled the true big dream of all agencies, revenue-to-expenditure growth mapped by an exponential function.
They didn’t have the revenue to fund the development. It wasn’t really going anywhere because of the lack of investment but they had to have something to justify their rank theft. They had to beat the idea’s originators to market. So they applied pressure on my friend to perform a feat that was beyond a single person at that time. Cracks began to appear: he loathed the people directing the work; he was frustrated with his peers; ice. Then he bailed. I was a little hurt at the disappearance. With hindsight I completely understand, and if I dwell on it too long and am filled with empathy and a little shame3.
It was vastly unfair what happened to him. But that’s what employers do. Because they don’t care about you. What are you gonna do?
Escaping is a logical outcome of the pressure and one that you should choose. I have chosen it before and am awfully tempted to do so again. Not disappearing though; disappearing is an extreme expression and one that while I find emotionally soothing to ponder in the abstract, would find emotionally searing to ponder after the implementation.4 Leaving that kind of situation behind by gracefully exiting with notice is the act of a rational human. You have to ask yourself, just what are you getting out of the relationship. Yes, you’re getting paid. Just getting paid is fine when you’re a kid. When you grow up, you need more.
Your employer will never willing give up more. You have to take it. You have to treat them like you might a demon you have summoned up from hell. You have to bind it and then extract a bargain for which you must offer something in return for what you want. So make sure what you get is worth what you’re offering. Don’t over-commit in return for a pittance. Because your employers don’t care about you. No, not even in your hip little company where there’s only two layers, the boss and everyone else, and you’re going round to his place for dinner on Saturday night and even if she’s your mum. When the ROI from you dwindles and ceases you will be put onto the ice floe. Your boss is a servant of a legal construct designed to limit the liability of its directorial body while feeding from society. Banks are not the only vampire squid5 and your manager is Renfield.
Me, I’ve got some of those symptoms I mentioned earlier, except for the ice, mum. To a lesser degree. I’ll never win awards where I work because I suffer fools poorly. I’m not brimming over with respect for the management team. I can be very snippy with peers if I don’t make an effort to chill.
I’m where I am still because of the possibilities it offers: working at scale; riding the leading edge of new mediums; thought leadership on something big. Those possibility ebbs and flows in my perception day to day as I observe the flailing attempts of the inept cowards executing the company6. I think the best you can hope for is being proud that the thing being exchanged is valued by the victims, and even then, you really should value it as well.
I help provide companies send SMS notifications to you when your commercial exchange is about to get to the point of personal interactivity. Your taxi is almost there, you’ve got a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. On the other hand, I also help attention leeches send you SMSs you didn’t want.7
Anyway, the guy who I ran into several months ago, he told me “You’re a people person.”
My neighbour across the street, who I’ve never actually met but was the recipient of a gen-u-wine knitted cap from D for her 2-months-premature daughter, she smiled and waved at me over the weekend while backing her car out of the driveway. I had to ask D what our neighbour’s name is, and you know what…..I have forgotten again. People Person of the Year right here.
And seriously, fuck that human who gave my friend the ice. Hope he’s miserable.
1.Turned out okay. Runs his own company now. Great guy.↩
I stopped at that point when I realised I probably could have gone on for days with ever diminishing returns. Like Modern Day Harry Potter except @girlziplocked found a seam of great, and I’m just being a snark.
I start projects semi-regularly. About ten percent of the way through things I have started, I start questioning their worth. And shortly after, I’ll stop working on them.
I started GEB and got about a quarter of the way through but then I had a week and a half of insomnia. My commute is when I read and instead I was too tired to take in what was on the page. By the time I got my sleep patterns back on track I had just let the book slip aside.
I lost sight of what I was trying to achieve with Adventure Capital and stopped to re-plan. The plan never really got done and then weeks had gone sliding past and I never picked up the work again.
Maat is my current project that is beginning to slip its ropes and drift off into the mists.
If I include 2012-3 I started and failed to finish
Reading House of Leaves.
Writing a messaging platform.
Writing a blogging tool.
Writing this blog, kind of.
Writing a novel.
I was really only working on the messaging platform in reaction to frustrations at work. Once I realised that I killed that endeavour in short order. The blogging tool I was writing because of the one or two frustrations I have with octopress but knew if I started I’d reach a good enough point and be left with dozens of frustrations. The novel I managed to write about 12,000 words using pomodoro, but lost momentum after a pause of a couple of days after re-reading them and never got it back.
There are some common threads in those recollections that, while obvious, are worth restating. Sometimes I re-evaluate my motives, realise they are bad, and stop. But generally I lose momentum because of a pause and never get it back.
Why?
It isn’t just that these activities are hard or time-consuming. They are all one or both of these things. Writing a novel is near the hardest thing I have ever attempted. It’s difficult to even just write a profoundly terrible novel let alone a good one. I almost wrote one fourteen years ago, in public no less for eighteen months. I bailed right before the ending, an ending I had had in mind from the beginning, because of a childish temper tantrum1. My tertiary degree was hard because I had no idea what I was doing or wanted; I completed that, took me seven years, the last three and half years part-time. I can be distracted, but each of those efforts suffered many distractions and periods of inattention, but I always recovered enough to keep momentum going, to keep picking up and carrying pebbles to the pile.
I started doing the exams for the Microsoft Certified Developer merit badge a few years ago. The books you are supposed to study are bricklike, and there was only a single copy to go between five of us doing the work. So I cheated2 I found copies of the questions and answers, and memorised them. I did two exams (of four) that way, both times only really starting a couple of days before the exam but spending every waking moment reading over those questions and answers. After passing two exams, it no longer mattered because the Microsoft Certification we were after had been won. I stopped caring as much, stopped working on it for a month and never went back.
If I have learned nothing of myself in the last five years, it is that I am ultra-competitive. Sometimes. I can drift in a comfortable malaise for days and weeks. Bored but unfocused. For whatever reason though, one moment something will hit a spark, my game face will go on, and I’ll smash down walls to get it done before you, better than you. I was trying to get the MSCD because it was an opportunity to compete with others. Then we got the MSDN licenses, everyone else stopped doing the exams as no need any longer to get an MSCD, and I lost that focus. There was no one left to compete against.
I don’t understand people who can just do things. Is it that they can just do the thing for the thing itself? For the doing? Are they competing against someone that’s just not visible to me, someone in their corona? Maybe they’re like Bruce Banner at the end of The Avengers movie – they’re always competitive. I can’t do that. I can use tools like Pomodoro to assist, or I work with or against someone. I can make gains that way, running ahead of the wind. I had someone working with me on that novel I almost completed, reading first drafts and making suggestions on changes. I had someone I was working with on another story effort that ended sooner than I wanted, but at least got finished. In my professional life, my best gains were made when I was competing with a team member, but the last person I felt competitive with has since moved on from the company and interstate.
But I don’t relaly want to talk about work
I attended a training course for leadership through my employer this year. Learned a lot, and if I internalise it well and regularly re-examine what I am doing, I should become a much better leader. One of the things I did learn is that I shouldn’t complete with other members of my team. My peers, absoultely; but not my team. So compete is the wrong term. It’s really about being proud of what you do and what the team does and wanting to show off and show it off. I haven’t built that culture in my team. Building that culture is how I intend to spend my social capital on using this training.
But I don’t really want to talk about the company I work for, at least not in the context of this blog. It’s boring and some people I work with, but not all, read this blog, I wouldn’t want a scenario where only some people know what’s going on in my head because they know where to look.
Know thyself
I could find people to work with. There was a woman who wanted to become writing partners back in 1999. I’ve not really stayed in communication although I follow on Twitter. I could write some pieces, then throw them away and write some better pieces and ask if she could help. I could do the same on Reddit. Probably on more than one subreddit. I could do the more traditional route that Pomodoro is just one flavour of, and stop being such a pissant when I fall off the wagon.
Planning out what I want to do is also important. The projects in which I am creating something - as opposed to consuming something - founder when I lose sight of what I am doing. I get lost in the weeds of small problems and spend too much time on them rather than taking incremental steps along a path to a goal. All of the doubts I experience, whether in the project or in myself, are instigated by this.
The Meta-Project
Life is no good unless you’re leaving something behind. Something other than a carbon footprint and a pile of trash. That’s all I ask, that I leave a dent in the universe. Doesn’t have to be big, just so that this time next year I can look back and point at something and say “I did that.”
I won’t set public goals. I don’t do New Years Resolutions anyway, because I am too much of a unromantic to believe in artificial renewals like that. I don’t even know if they offer and sort of psychological aid. I’ve read that that doing so can help and I have read that it can harm. By setting the goal I will feel that I have taken a first step, rather than a zeroth step, and then relax. However, I do have the meta-plan worked ot for 2015, the goals and projects that require their own planning.
You’ll know if it works when I say “Look at this.”
Updates
03 February, 2015
I continue to want to be Anil Dash, amongst others, when I grow up
1.I’ve gone back once or twice over the years and tried to write that ending, once working with the stupid cod-ending I let drift onto the shore back then, and once ignoring the rotting jelly fish corpse I’d left behind.
↩
2.I have no shame here because the MSCD program is worthless in the face of a) Stack Overflow and b) the wider community of open source libraries. However it would have scored us free MSDN licenses.↩
The death of Phillip Hughes is one of those things that just fails to be processed. I’ve spent the better part of the year outraged at rugby league for the reckless indifference of the ruling body and the players towards safety. Ever since Alex McKinnon was left a quadriplegic as the result of a tackling technique that the sport tut tuts at, but then drives itself to distraction to excuse and ignore. I expect further life-altering injuries while a culture of false masculinity rules within the sport, from the influential voices in the media, to the ruling bodies, to the player themselves who treat any attempt to protect their long term health and safety as a unmanning. I expect one day in the near future we’ll discover the same wide spread brain injuries in NRL players as they are finding in American NFL players. I expect one day a player will be killed from a dangerous tackle.
I did not expect a cricket player to be killed, even to a bouncer.
Maybe that’s naive. Helmet manufacturers used to proclaim the impossibility of fully protecting a player from a cricket ball moving at pace. Batsmen always seem to manage to get, if not their body then at least their heads, out of the way. Except when they don’t. As little as a month ago another player had his jaw broken by a ball getting under the face guard. And of course the celebrated menace of Mitchell Johnson in the 2013-14 Ashes series resulted in one injury - albeit from a yorker not a bouncer - but was lauded for it’s intimidatory effect on the English.
It was a tragic accident that befell Hughes. He was struck in the back of the head at the right location to cause such an internal bleed into his brain after failing to connect with the bat. How many thousands of balls have been delivered without something of the likes of this occuring. People have been hit, but protected by their helmet. People have been hit, but with just bruises or broken bones. People have swung and missed and been struck in the body or had a near miss. It was an extremely unusually uncommon pattern of events. But it wasn’t freakish. It was an outcome that a relatively serious observer could predict or fear, even if imagining the chances of it happening were vanishingly small.
But. They call it chin music in some places, because we all know the bouncer is by design intended to pass right in front of the batter’s face. It’s impossibile though to ask a bowler running at pace to place a ball in the right spot from 22 metres away with an indirect action. Even if they could, the unpredictability of a ball bouncing off a pitch is one of the defining characteristics of the game, what makes it so different to baseball. Modern professional players can hit a single stump reasonably accurately at that distance, but they are throwing, not bowling, and they tend to be hitting on the full, not the bounce. Bouncers are menacing not because a bowler intends to hit a batter, but because they cannot possibly promise never to hit the batter. That’s the raison d’être of the bouncer; if the bowlers could make such a promise, they wouldn’t bother with the bouncer. Because it is intended to intimidate by its threat to hit the batter. So the batters where padding and helmets and generally make very quick decisions about when to play and when to duck.
I didn’t for a moment think Phil Hughes would die after he was struck. I thought he would recover, perhaps with a fractured skull. Perhaps he wouldn’t play again and I certainly wouldn’t have judged him for gaining a healthy respect for the risks after such an injury. Perhaps he would play, but be so haunted by the bouncer as to become unable to focus on anything for fear of it. Perhaps he would have come back and overcome it all. We’ll never know. When I heard the news I was struck to my core. I couldn’t properly process it. I was able to carry on as if nothing had happened for a few hours, as if I hadn’t just heard that someone was killed as a result of the sport I was so eagerly anticipating watching a again in a matter of weeks. It wasn’t until later that evening that I even questioned what it might mean given my all-but-abandoning of rugby league.
It’s not entirely fair to make this comparison, because of course Alex McKinnon didn’t die, he was merely crippled. The NRL wouldn’t have cancelled fixtures, wouldn’t have juggled an entire schedule, in reaction to McKinnon’s death. There would have been black armbands worn, and some speeches. Channel Nine would have aired a five minute piece during halftime, featuring McKinnon’s highlights reel and some community figures, Tony Abbott, Gould and Sterlo, and some random Channel Nine personalities delivering a few sentences each on what whatshisname meant to them. But in the end, the competition would have continued, just as it did. In the weeks afterwards the usual suspects in the media, including some of those from the testimonial piece, would written their columns denouncing efforts to modify the rules to safeguard the health and safety of players, calling it a freakish accident as if hoping something won’t happen adequately protects against the inevitable. In other words, the death of Alex McKinnon would have been indistinguishable from Alex McKinnon crippled.1
You can certainly bet the farm that there would not have been a repetition of Teddie Roosevelt calling from the bully pulpit of the American Presidency, for a game to check itself2. Not with this Prime Minister, not with this government. Not with a “professional” game. They would never have dreamed of telling a private company how to run its own affairs, despite all the privileges offered it. In any other industry, any organisationconstantly exposing its employees to constant danger would be fined out of existence.
I’m bitter towards the NRL.3. There is not the same poisonous culture in Cricket Australia. Obviously the risks within the game are not so often taken as they are in rugby league. And efforts are made to mitigate those risks. Bodyline still haunts the game despite the liklihood the modern player could play against it. The bouncer wars resulted in restrictions on how many times the ball can be bowled. Protective gear has progressed from the rudimentary helmets of the 70s. I’ll wince when I see the likes of Johnson’s intimidation tactics and I’ll never derive cheer from seeing it utilised even against the English4. But I remain confident that I’ll never look back at a life of watching cricket and feel that I have contributed, however indirectly, to the sacrificing of young people’s health and lives for entertainment.
1.Except for the grotesque spectacle of Alex McKinnon actively defending the actions of an organisation that willfully contributed to his injury through negligence. But he’s in his early twenties and thus clearly immortal; what’s their excuse? We all know what their excuse is.↩
2.
“Brutality in playing a game should awaken the heartiest and most plainly shown contempt for the player guilty of it.”
Did I ever mention that D and I bought property? Cause we totally did. We even built a house on it.
Honestly, I can’t remember if I mentioned it here. I’m not very good at blogging. I made that joke in the precis on Twitter, or at least one very much like it, and I probably mentioned it on Facebook while I was still using Facebook1. But I can’t see it in my archives here, so I guess I never did mention it.
We lived in our previous rental villa for fifteen years. It was small and pokey, too small for a couple with a teenager, really, let alone one with a young adult. The kitchen was cramped, the carpet and walls were tired and worn out when we moved in, so imagine what they were like after fifteen more years. The backyard was a failed renovation by the landlord’s son. We’d out-grown it. So we decided to buy a house. We’d paid our dues, it was time.
As if it is that easy. We saw a bunch of properties that were either knockdowns or grabbed sooner than instantly. I walked through a house with holes in walls, filthy washing in the sink, tenants moving around ignoring the people viewing the property complete with a sullen teenager glaring out her room. I tried to view properties that had already under contract but not taken down off real estate sites, presumably because the contract might not survive the cooling off period. Which I understand, intellectually. The final straw was a property I tried to view on the day of the last federal election, but was under contract before the open house could occur. The agents were apologetic when I arrived, and good work them for selling the property so quickly, but it was so deflating and emotionally draining.
But what about building? We’d been dismissive of the idea before hand, but as D and I drove to Canberra that afternoon2 we decided that we needed to give a new house and land package some serious consideration. D being D did a ton of research on the road, and picked out a few possibilities not far from where we were already living. We actually looked in on a display home the next day after returning from the smoking wreck of our nation’s capital before we even went home. It was definitely a thing we could do.
Almost a year to the day after that trip to Canberra, we moved into our brand new home. It’s fantastic. D did an amazing job doing the interior decoration. It was completely her, all I did was not find a reason to object to particular choices. She insisted on certain upgrades and she made all the right choices. Even the value appraiser from the bank cooed over our kitchen top. We also replaced almost all of our old funriture, and again almost to the item, D picked out that as well. My sole contribution was putting it together.
It’s such a massive change to our lives. So much space; now when I lose my keys it takes two, three times as long to find them again. The day our new furniture was delivered, I got up early because the truck was scheduled to arrive between 7am and 3pm. I was waiting in the front room, D’s craft room. One of the smaller rooms in the house. I was sitting on the carpet looking around and it struck me - this ‘smaller room’ is as big as the living room in the villa. D and I need to be careful these days or we could both drift into different rooms - formally or informally designated as her room or my room - at either end of house and not see each other. In the villa, you couldn’t breathe without the other person hearing you wherever you were in the house.
Every night I come home to a house I own3, that I can choose to do with as I please, that allows me to stretch out. Things I don’t want to see are hidden away, because there is a place for them, not a place they occupy because there is nowhere else. Really, I’m pretty pleased with myself right now.
1.Did I mention I stopped using Facebook? Yeah, I did that too.↩
2.It was clear Tony Abbott would win and we were going to pre-emptively burn down the joint rather than give him the satisfaction.↩
I did a short - 5 minute - presentation at work on Swift. It seemed to go over well. I uploaded it to the cloud.
Meanwhile, TIL that two of the slide deck sharing sites I knew, slideshare and slides, are just The Worst. 200 char limit for speakers notes? I’m sureprofessional speakers have no interest in sharing a transcript of what they said, but I do. 200 characters? Pah!
I’ve done some posts on interviews, which I more or less still agree with. I’m not working in Google or Microsoft, I’m in an agency with considerably fewer engineering standards. Still, there’s a lot here that still works outside the mileu of 7 or 8 1 hr interviews in a day per candidate.
In particular asking questions that can be drilled down into. The Number Swap question really is a Junior Dev kind of question - despite the depressing number of people who couldn’t give even the naive/best solution.
Meanwhile, Etsy, eh? I was vaguely aware they were doing a lot of developer community outreach - I’ve seen a lot of Code as Craft fly through my feeds - but it has taken some time for it to dawn on me they are just an interesting dev shop as Facebook/Google/Amazon. More so than the first two, I suppose, from a ethical point of view.
Meanwhile, I did watch the first game of the State of Origin series. Oh and look, a pair of fucking dickheads lifted another player into a dangerous postion and dropped him. I’m biased though, right, because it was a Queensland player and I support Queenslander. Oh, but it’s all okay, because Wally Lewis - the Queenslander’s Queenslander in the 80’s - said mid-game there was no malice and he’s a one-eyed Queenslander.
And, and the guy escaped suspension with sufficient downgrading of the grading of the offense. So yeah, fuck the NRL. I don’t see myself staying away from the Origin games, but I won’t be watching the NRL competition itself any more.
Swift
WWDC tends to leave me reasonably buzzed anyway, but I almost paid the $99 to become an Apple Developer just so I could pull the XCode beta just to play with Swift.
I didn’t, because the chances of me doing anything more than playing are vanishingly small.
D&D
Won’t buy. Will download the free “basic” intro PDF. Still want to play Original or 1st ed again. Still not looking for a game, because I still have a very jaundiced view of Skype+computerised-tabletops.
I switched from using Sublime Text to Atom for a time to try it out.
One thing was annoying the hell out of me - no package to add footnotes with a key-chord. I had gotten used to shift-cmd-6 to insert footnotes in Sublime Text.
It’s the usual open source story. I waited for one to show up, and it never did. So I wrote my own and published it1.
Search for ‘footnoter’ if you can and wish to use it.
