Brian's World

Context Switching

At work, I pretty much get paid to be really good at context switching.  It’s not only what I can do that counts, or the fact that I can do it fairly quickly, but I need to be able to very very efficient switch from one subject area to something completely different given the correct external stimulus.  This isn’t something I’m incredibly familiar with, and the learning / adjusting process has been slightly frustrating.

During college I could very easily dedicate blocks of time to task X or project Y, like just about everyone one.  You allocate yourself an hour to work on this homework, or an afternoon to focus on this project, or even just a few minutes to go through your email and catch up on stuff.  When I was at RPI I was “on-call” for a variety of servers that could send me text messages reporting outages/ downtime, but I never had to completely drop everything and run to the Union more than a few times a year.  It was good exercise at the time.  Every now and then I’d get an urgent looking email from a student or someone else out there needing something from me and I could decide to respond or ignore it for a bit, usually something I’d determine based on how involved my response would be.

When I’m working I don’t feel like I have the luxury to ignore things to give myself time to “wrap things up” with whatever I’m working on.  This leads to a process scheduling implementation that looks a bit like a preemptive priority scheduling system.  This is great for those high priority things that come in I need to address, but stinks for the low priority projects which are often the most interesting and personally rewarding.

As an example, I’ve been writing a piece of Python code that would have probably taken me at most an afternoon if it was just me, Ruby, and my computer.  Perhaps a can of coke in their as well.  So far it’s been 2 weeks and it’s maybe 80% done because I can’t seem to work on it for longer than 5-10 minutes before something comes up.  Ok, that was a bit of an understatement.  I usually have less preemptions  from 8am – 10:30am, but I’m not the most creative at my programming during this hour (readas: I have motivational difficulties most mornings).  I’m also usually done being preempted at 5pm, but at that point I’m fairly upset that I’ve produced 10 lines of good code over the last N 5 minute breaks.

I’ve yet to figure out any good tricks to context switching more effectively.  If I leave all my Chrome tabs open in another window I can usually pick right back up where I left off on the internet, but my shell tabs don’t have the same mental resilience.  Perhaps I need to work on a better mental process scheduling algorithm, but a lot of them rely on the ability to estimate the time required to  complete a task and when I’m programming that’s directly correlated to how motivated / inspired I’m feeling which isn’t easily quantized.  More thought required, that’s for sure.

Good night moon.

The Best Thing

Usually I try not to take any stock in any single lyric or phrase captured from a song, you can really manipulate things to serve just about any purpose.  I’m going to make myself a special exception tonight, so pardon me if this ends up being a gross misjudgment.

I think it’s fairly depressing if the best thing about any night is the fact that one is not fighting, a lyric I’ve borrowed from Secondhand Serenade’s Fall For You.  Unfortunately some nights that seems like the only thing that you can consistently take stock in.  It doesn’t get better to realize that the fact that a dispute is not occurring is actually a result of no (or minimal) interaction at all.

Sledding seems like a very good way of picturing it.  While you’re sledding you’re always going downhill.  You can stop yourself or slow down, but anytime you are in the act of sledding you are moving in a downward motion.  Perhaps I could have been a bit broader and expanded that analogy to any activity influenced mainly my gravity, but the point is that if almost always feels like there is just one direction of travel.  At the end of your sledding experience you get off, grab the sled, and walk (in my case run) back up again to repeat the process.

I remember when I was younger and of a more commonly accepted sledding age, I would often pause for a while when I had completed my decent not really looking forward to the trip back up.  It would have been so cool if there was a conveyor belt to reset me to the top without having to get up and walk all the way up again, but that may be what makes the experience enjoyable; you have to work for it.  The ease of travel is also worth noting, it’s significantly easier to travel down the snowy hill than it is to walk up it, and the further you walk the further down and more enjoyable the trip there will be.

There’s a bit of a trick involved in figuring out how high up to walk if you hill that seems “impossible” to climb to the top to every time.  In my neighborhood this was the street that went up a hill, it was fairly long and boring to walk all the way to the top, and the higher you went the higher the probability was that you’d have trouble making all the way down (the road curved a bit).  Optimally, most people identified and used the longest possible path that minimized additional work (walking up, steering, slowing down, etc) while descending; you have to balance that additional work required with the thrill provided by the additional segment.

The one downside to this system is that sledding is fun usually, and that’s not really what I’m trying to convey at all.  It would be better if the walk up was fun, and the sledding part was unpleasant but you had lots of trouble stopping when you started.  I don’t think there’s anything actually wrong with fighting from time to time, I think it can be a useful conflict resolution tool to approach issues parties are often guarded on, or to quickly air out some dirty laundry that might take weeks to dry on the line outside.

Personally, I have a high tolerance for repetitive unpleasant interactions but I don’t think most people react that way.  I don’t usually think “this is unpleasant, I don’t want to do this” but I try to focus on it as a learning experience to figure out how something can be avoided or improved in the future, however distant or unlikely that future it.  People also say the darn-est things when they’re fighting, at which point I  LOL (actually out loud) , often when something that’s intended to be highly offensive at me.  This reaction probably started as a reuse of some nervous laughter, but I’ve adapted it into a way of adding a spool full of sugar to help the medicine go down.  This might be worth trying sometime if you haven’t, think of most experiences in life as medicine as medicine and don’t forget to add a spoonful of sugar if you can’t otherwise swallow it.

Goodnight moon.

Raindrop

I won’t talk about the fact that it never seems to rain out here.  Two weeks ago it drizzled for maybe 10 minutes, by the time I realized what was happening and got outside it had already stopped.  Today it was very cloudy (which reminded me of RPI a bit), and I think I heard a rumble of thunder off in the distance… but no actual rain or real weather happened.  I guess the sunny weather is great if you like being outside and stuff, but it all seems just a bit too perfect and controlled for my liking; almost like the Truman Show… except they had rain.

No more talk of rain for now though.  I spent most of this weekend thinking to myself about motivation and the purpose of life or something like that.  I don’t really like thinking about the purpose of life at all, but it was “one of those weekends” where I didn’t have anything pressing to do and I found myself wandering in my own thoughts a bit too far.  Among other conclusions I’ve reached, I think that everyone would be best served by deciding their own purpose for their life, but you need to be careful not to try and define that as an explanation for your existence or something really even connected to being alive.  Again, I’m wandering down the wrong path here.  Let’s course correct.

I’m having very broad trouble with motivation these days, characterized by staying up watching “classic” movies until 1-2am, sleeping the day away, and spending too much time surfing the internet (aka reddit).  These are all good in moderation, but I really had no good reason to watch The Transporter 3.  It ends the same way as the first two.  It occurred to me that college, and studying at university in general, serves as a really good underlying motivation for doing things… grades help too.  No one goes to college for the sake of going to college, meaning you don’t go there as your end goal.  You want to experience academics or social life or something else… and then when you’re done with that experience after a few years you build on that and move on to life.  College, and the broader educational field beforehand, offer a very very clear feedback system.  If you do well you get an A, if you don’t do well you get an F.  You’re often evaluated on a weekly basis, which I think is a great control for motivation.  If you receive quantitatively poor feedback, aka a poor grade, you know that you need to work either harder or better (or both) for next time.  You can also count on that next time being around to try.

In le workplace I haven’t found that to be the case very much.  Once a week I sit down with my manager and she reminds me that I’m doing a good job and should keep doing what I’m doing.  As much as it’s nice to hear that I’m doing a good job and stuff, that’s not the most motivating way to supply me with a status update.  To me, keep doing what you’re doing, implies that I shouldn’t seek to improve or optimize whatever it is that I’m currently doing and that I should keep performing the tasks as I have been.  Every once in a while we chat (or I think) about improving / optimizing things and there are some small scale things I can do here or there… little patches and tweaks perhaps, but the broader improvements I’d be interested in making require me to stop doing what I’m doing and probably require an OK from someone N rungs up the ladder from me.

On my outside-of-work projects I find myself similarly positioned.  I know that it’s not a question of writing the code of rmaking something that technically functions quite well, I don’t have the skill or competencies to make it look decent or worthwhile to interact with.  If there were plenty of interface-neutral problems to solve I’d be all over them, but unfortunately lots of my exciting ideas are heavy in the fields that I’m less experienced in.  I guess I could turn this around and say that I should use this as an opportunity to learn / practice some of this…. maybe I will…. ok I’ll be honest I probably won’t.

I will try to be as vague and obtuse as possible for this next part.  If you’re usually off-put by my complex analogies I suggest you wait until you’re… well maybe you just shouldn’t.  Dedicating you full brainpower to it may not be a good investment of your time.

As much as I had hoped the day that I desired to never come would come it seems that it’s surprise arrival has caught me a bit off guard.  I’ve been constantly reassured that what I long ago convinced myself was most likely to occur was the least likely outcome and I made the mistake of buying into that illusionist mindset.  Perhaps this all falls back on some fundamental desire to have a fortune of my youth be something more than a terribly short term solution to mask a long term problem.  I was too easily conned given my lack of knowledge of exponential functions at the time.  I won’t blame myself for being so easily deceived though, I was what, younger than a (years) bakers dozen  at the time.  Perhaps I haven’t come that far after all.

Good night moon.