fractalnavel

how many stupid thanksgiving post titles can i come up with ?

still sitting at home right now, need to make my way north.  still have to pack.  had that discussion last night.  “what time is dinner?” “four o'clock; where are you at?” [in disbelief:] “in an office!”

i'm hungry.  good thing it's thanksgiving.

other news: amazing what little things you can get away with that no one will call you on.  well, not to your face, anyway.  like wearing paisley with plaid.  or driving around in a jeep in twenty degree weather.  with the top & doors off.  one guy in the coffee shop parking lot laughed about it.  even though he didn't “get it”, at least he participated.

which reminds me, i've gotta put a top on for the long drive.

i'm hungry.

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consultants bring a different perspective to the job.  we've been around, and seen a lot, if not quite all.  we look at clients and shake our heads, “what are you getting so excited about?  it will all work out fine.”  which i'm sure is greatly annoying.  the converse is as true: “people!  your walls are crumbing around you! wake up!”.  i'm not sure if this is even more annoying.

so the current undertaking is of the first variety.  they are fine, they just don't know it, and this lack of awareness contributes to their growing pains.  which is all part of it at their early stage of the game.  the details don't matter much, you can imagine them for yourselves (if you were consultants; if not, you don't care anyway).

i think the funniest, most unique aspect so far is bringing in a person for coding help, then two weeks later the rest of the development team, including the customer / sponsor, all disappear for two or more weeks.  two weeks after some return, a deployment is scheduled.  so here is this new guy, me, left to hold down the fort.  can't even get upset about it, it's downright funny.  i haven't even been around long enough to feel any burden of respnsibility at all.  i will do what i can do, but it doesn't reflect on me at all.

brought on the project to code.  sure would have been nice if that's all it was.  but circumstances required a business analyst, and some project consulting, and some group therapy.  i have spent maybe a quarter of my time programming.  sigh.  not much choice, really.  gotta jump in where it's needed, at least as a bare minimum.  but that sucks me into areas in which i did not want to participate, for, although i am very good at them, i have some shortcomings in those areas as well, of the “people skills” variety.

on a more practical note, i got my first paycheck in almost four years.  1099, eh?  so it looks far bigger than for a w2 employee, but it also means i need to keep enough for taxes myself, and do things like quarterly estimated payments, i think.  but having it all up front, that's a good thing.  even more in line with some analysis i did that tells us we should aim not for refunds, but the largest legal end of year tax bill we can manage.  as for this year, though - well, you never know, i may not owe enough to matter.  and how does that “income averaging” thing work ?  sure wish i could average in several years of no income at all.

still need to be frugal(ish).  no guarantees about duration of engagement.  although i'll gladly take whatever breathing room i can get.

all is what it is.  om mani padme om....

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geez, i'm outa shape.  a few hours of yard work and i'm sore all over.  that's what i get for playing couch pilot almost exclusively for so long now.  i even have a blotch on my leg below where my laptop's cpu is.  i'm slowly getting cooked.

this is all reversible though.  i don't consider this aging; this happens to kids as well as adults. at least winter is here, skiing & stuff helps a little bit.  but i haven't heard a thing about any trips this year.  and i know that if it depends on making it happen myself, i just don't get very motivated.  so we'll see.

but back to the yard work.  after a few flurries this week it was clearly time to get the leaves off the lawn and do the annual fall trimming of vegetation.  it's not going to happen on its own.  some people look at me funny when i say i need to do yard work, sorry, can't work that day.  a saturday.  people who have others to share the work with.  life alone is somewhat different.  there's only one person to point to if things aren't the way they need to be.

so i'm getting the piles of leaves together, and the neighbor's dog is watching me. he looks like a slightly smaller version of a chocolate lab.  he's just standing patiently on the other side of the fence, thinking doggy thoughts.  curious ? waiting to be noticed ?  after he notices my glance he gets a bit more excited.  i shake my head, thinking no time to play, gotta get this done before dark.  he runs off - and comes back with a stick.  come play! shakes the stick. come play!  that gets a grin.  but i continue to rake.  a minute later he runs off - and returns with what must be his favorite ball.  this gets a laugh.  gotta stop this time.  is this better? come play! growl. come play!  sorry buddy.  i feel a little guilty; it's not you, dog, it's me.  so i keep going.

as i move on to other parts of the yard, he continues to watch as the piles of leaves grow, get kicked together onto a big blue tarp, then dragged and dumped under the pine trees for mulch in a great noisy display of rumpling plastic.  must be quite a show.  what great piles! why aren't you jumping in them? yeah, like that! can i play?

dusk falls before i can finish.  i stagger off for some leftover pizza.  the couch has been on autopilot.

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the quieter it gets, the quieter it gets.  time to stop a spiral into silence.  i haven't heard much from people lately, and they haven't heard much from me, and that seems to be fine all around.  something to think about.

me, though, i have an excuse, sort of.  a friend has been working at a place down the street for the last couple of years, and i've told him if they ever need a hand just give me a call since it's so nearby and i'm not likely to be doing anything else.  but there has always seemed to be various roadblocks to making that work.

well, a couple weeks back some hurdles were apparently cleared, so he was asking if i could help out.  and then one of their people was leaving, and the need became more urgent.  so i'm like, sure, why not. 

i have been feeling a bit antsy the last couple of months anyway.  i have a high tolerance for doing “nothing”, having had almost four years of practice to date.  but it took most of that time for me to even realize what could have been done with that time.  regrets ?  well, their is a tendency to “what if” in all of us, but i've tried to stay pretty conscious of the (non) choices i was making, and why, knowing i would look back on them someday and wonder “what was i thinking?!”.  and basically the answer came down to needing about half that time to realize what i should not be doing, and the rest of the time discovering the wide variety of options available.

baggage is a big issue with me.  physical (me & my stuff), emotional, and even intellectual in the sense of a somewhat blindered worldview that we all have through no faults of our own; we are all creatures of our pasts.  this time i've been blessed with has allowed me to take care of some of these things.

sometimes i feel like i should be writing an essay entitled “what i did on my midlife vacation”, but what teacher would i turn it in to ?  and that also implies some sort of conclusion. which brings me back to the original topic of this post.

so i've been somewhat more absent than usual because i was, um, working this last week.  ugh, even hate to say it, feels like a sort of self-betrayal (“did you call me?” “no, go back to sleep”).  weird thing to do after this long of a time.  with it's share of anxieties, both about my acceptability in the workplace, and the acceptability of the intrusion of that big of a time-sucker into my life.  interesting - so i have a life ?  anyway, it feels best if i just keep reminding myself that i'm only doing this to fill time and a depleted bank account and to help out where i can, since i'm in the neighborhood, although i'm sure they see it as “employment”.  that way i can keep hold of what i gained in these last years, and perhaps put the “work” in it's proper place in my life, which is the primary existential reality.  or so i hope to keep it.

i wonder if most people had already figured this out.  i went through a crappy two or three decades, no one to blame, really, even you-know-who.  so although i haven't used my resources these last few years to do anything spectacular (although the yearnings are there), i had a lot of other ground to cover first.  as for those dreams of adventure, well, i understand that this has been necessary preparation time, not time lost.  for whatever reasons, this is the way things are, and making giant leaps wasn't part of it.  but it wasn't until very recently that i even recognized the possibilities until they were just about gone.  i also realize that noble leaps into the unknown are all well and good, but so are proper preparations.  you've gotta love the trail even more than the destination.

i guess i have more regrets than i thought ;-)  getting back to the employment thing: it does take up a lot of time out of life, and having a schedule to adhere to is strange. now, i only have a “commute” of a bit over a mile, and they've even given me a box so i could work from home.  that kind of feeds into my natural tendency to just sit here and code, which i've sort of been doing anyway.  and it's nice to update my skills.  the original intent was for me just to come in and backfill on migrating some old-tech stuff to other platforms, but things went beyond that due to the staffing issue i mentioned.  and there's the usual array of project nasties to deal with.  things haven't changed much ;-)

there's only three of us at the moment, soon to be two, and both people i have worked with years ago (craig, jon - poornima says “hi”  ;-)).  and the location - it's next to a gorgeous recently renovated park, and the cusomer is an old orphanage with a large mature campus of their own.  while leaving friday night we saw deer next to the parking lot.  this place is close enough that i can ride topless in the jeep all winter long if i want.

there's a mom & pop coffee shop on the way to stop in at (hey - “the coffee underground” is now “keegan's”.  bummer. but they look to have a cafe now.  cool.)  but i don't really get to take advantage of this stuff since there's a lot of stuff to do and little time to do it in.  at least i have pretty scenery to drive (or walk or bike) by.

and this is only an “as needed” engagement, so could go away at a whim.  on the other hand, i could just work the hours i want if i was so inclined.  however, it's such a nice little arrangement, and well, thinking in that “just helping out” mode, they really need some stuff done, so this will be time consuming for a few weeks.  and that's ok, once i get the “employment” stuff out of my head, and just think about the coding.

i can tell i really don't want a “real” job.  this is very different - working with friends at pretty place in my own neighborhood.  something to think about.  i'll take advantage of this while i can, then. 

as for life in cincinnati, it'd be nice to leave it on my own terms, instead of feeling like i dragged myself off of a battlefield.  something else to ponder.

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moral politics test: it's correct as far as it goes.  but it's important to note the specific definition of terms used on the site as well, as they probably don't correspond well to popular notions.  plus, of course, there are a lot of specifics that don't match.  that's what you get when you design a test to look for only a single result.  perhaps using a agree-disagree scale for each proposed answer (resulting in 64 instead of 16 questions) would lead to more acccuracy, plus also relay distribution information as well - as in, don't plot just the single balance point, plot a shaded distribution corresponding to confidence interval or standard deviation or something, and also plot the individual answer points themselves.  i know that for me i have a couple of interesting outliers in each of the other quadrants.

Your Score Your scored -5.5 on the Moral Order axis and 3 on the Moral Rules axis. Matches The following items best match your score: System: Socialism Variation: Moral Socialism Ideologies: Activism US Parties: No match. Presidents: Jimmy Carter (85.18%) 2004 Election Candidates: Ralph Nader (90.89%), John Kerry (75.29%), George W. Bush (41.66%) Statistics Of the 125850 people who took the test: 0.7% had the same score as you. 9.6% were above you on the chart. 85.9% were below you on the chart. 83.7% were to your right on the chart. 11.5% were to your left on the chart.

take the test yourself, post the two axis scores in a comment.

the other thing that seems evident with some thought is that using a square grid misrepresents the realistic possibilities somewhat.  for example, the upper left and lower right corners are unusual combinations of non-conformity / socialism in the first case, and conformity / individualism in the latter.  conversely, political expressions along the other diagonal (lower left to upper right) could be considered more “natural”.  so what we have is more of a leaning oval of possibilities.  this also points out that systems along the edges of the oval, instead of the square, are the extremes, and this is where we find the form of conservatism common in the u.s..  in this analysis, u.s. democrats actually have a more natural mainstream political expression.

interesting observations may be made about other off- and on- axis situations as well.  for example, it seems that the social democracy common in the world is not exactly “natural”, but the novel combination of traits seems valuable.

but - when you look at the website's maps of the distribution of test results, you find most people aligned along the “unnatural” diagonal.  however, i think this is actually an artifact of the mis-shaped grid in the first place: if you compress everything into the oblong, it becomes more clear that the variation is fairly evenly spread along the “unnatural”, while opinions are generally centrist in terms of group/conform vs. individual/non-conformity - a seemingly healthy result.

i guess it's to be expected that the two variables used in this test have a high degree of interdependence.  there should be a statiscal method of determining the degree of this correlation, and then perhaps normalizing for it.  and it occurs to me that the scale used along each axis, and away from the axes as well, will vary in a non-uniform matter.

yeah, ok, overthinking things yet again ;-)  

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aww, that's too bad.  we recently moved all this stuff over to a new server (10/18), then tested it out for a couple of weeks before rebuilding the old server.  everything seemed to be going fine until the rebuild, then zap!, there goes the weblog. 

i had noticed it last night, and still happened to have the home page up, so i saved it to a file, in case the database was corrupted or what have you.  good thing too, as the browser shortly crashed here too, losing whatever was in memory.

turns out what i thought had happened had happened: we forgot to change the settings to point to the database on the new server.  so when the old one went pfft!, so did the blog ;-)

i can smile a bit about it now since i had taken that precaution above, and i haven't been posting much lately and so didn't lose too much.  the casualties:

• my post summaries, which appear on the archive and post category lists; i tried to fill them in with somehting reasonable, which isn't too hard, since this is the one place i try to be briefly descriptive rather than “clever”;
• five comments were lost, but at least three of these were very short.  no way of that i know to recover these;
• a record of post / website hits and referers for the last couple weeks, not that this is critical.  it could be rebuilt laboriously from the server logs, but there's no point;

anyway, there's a lesson to be learned here - more than one:

• test the new server with the old one disconnected first, before wiping any information.  so our “test” was invalidated, since the old one was online all that time.
• be more complete in documenting configurations.  but we were really pretty thorough about this, so i can't complain here.
• take a final image / backup(s) of the old server immediately before any rebuild.  this would have mitigated the problem that did occur.
• personally, maybe i should have taken more responsibility to check on things.  then again, i wanted to stay out of craig's hair, this stuff can be enough of a pain in the ass without someone second guessing you.

good enough, though.  now, to go rattle craig's cage about it ;-)  and document what was missed.

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