Brian's World

Holiday Travels

Over the past few weeks I’ve felt a bit like a metronome bouncing from one coast to the other and back again.  I originally flew back home the day before Christmas Eve, which is the last possible day I could have arrived home since Christmas Eve is the day the polish side of the family celebrates.  Leading up to to it I really didn’t have any desire to go home at all.

My holiday spirit was severely lacking this year, probably due in part to the high environmental contrast.  As an example, at RPI I’d be surrounded by holiday decorations (even if I had to put them up myself last year) in the Student Government Suite,  there would be ample holiday music to play, and since I was on the northeast it would be both cold and snowy (or at least appearing like it might snow).  This year the extent of my holiday decorations included a 3? foot pre-lit tree in the corner of my apartment that I was too lazy to plug in most nights.  At work I displayed my circuitry tree as well which impressed everyone, but that was about it.  There was no holiday music except when my iTunes accidentally started playing the free Holiday Sampler they gave out a few years ago and the weather out here was no where close to feeling like winter.  It actually was just starting to feel like fall, with brisk mornings and leaves coming down.  But yes, I mustered up the energy required to fly home and spend some time with my family for the holidays.

My parents briefed me in advanced that I wouldn’t be getting much at all for Christmas, and I was OK with that because I really don’t need much stuff.  It’s also a pain to travel with things, and I like to keep my apartment pretty void of stuff.  Let me think, notable gifts family this year include sunglasses (expensive ones that I don’t need), a GPS (returned to store), a camera for my Google TV (which logitech / Google have failed to release drivers for :-(), and some pants.  My brother got me a DNA testing kit thingy, which I look forward to reporting back on in a few years.

One of the things I dislike about the holidays is that things have broken down into lists.  At least for me, people usually don’t like to risk being wrong so they avoid trying to guess what I might like / enjoy.  While I can appreciate a logical and conservative gift-giving stance, it’s not as exciting to be the recipient because you’ve essentially written your own prescription for the pharmacist to fill and give right back to you.  Personally, I’m also of the mindset that if I want / need something I’m just going to go out acquire it, so populating a list of things “I’d like to have but can’t” produces items that are nearly impossible to find (and often programming related, like modules of code).

On one of my flights back out to California, perhaps the one after my holidays at home, it occurred to me that perhaps one of the reasons I ended up out here taking the job that I did was to get away from everyone who cares about me and those I care about.  That ended up being a pretty depressing plane ride while I pondered that, but I’m curious if on some subconscious level I was itching to get in an environment where I could more completely focus on work.

As an example, normal people my age  would be doing something on a Friday night like watching TV, hanging out with other people, etc.  Even if Friday isn’t your thing, there is some probability that over a weekend you’ll physically interact with someone classified as a “friend” in some way shape or form.  I, on the other hand, will likely spend my weekend working on a variety of programming projects and that will generally be the end of it.  I’ve never been really good at having fun, and being far away from most people who enjoy fun makes it easier for me to avoid those awkward situations.

The plus side of this is, like I said, that I could spend all weekend submerged in Concerto or working on work-related stuff without feeling like I’m really disappointing anyone.  If I forget about dinner there’s no one to complain about being hungry, I’ll survive and make it up as I go.  The downside of all this comes when I’m not feeling motivated to work at all so I stare at the empty screen or pretend to watch something on TV.  Going places and doing things would require me to motivate myself, in turn evaluating the value of said experience, which is always really low if I’m the only participant.  Any depressed / neglected mood I find myself in is only likely to be amplified by the emptiness of mutually occupiable furniture.

Good night moon.

Glamour

It’s worth noting that my last blog was redacted after being posted for just a few hours.  I made the mistake of conflating two completely separate ideas into the same post and the result was doubly unpleasant. Conflating is a word I picked up at work, I use it when I want to inform people that they are stupid for confusing ideas but not sound so harsh about it.  “I think you’re poor;y conflating the actual use cases of X and Y” sounds much better than “No. You’re wrong.  X and Y have nothing to do with each other”.

I’ve also just deleted the majority of an earlier draft of this post, which would be summarized by one character: Scrooge.  I’m don’t want to be opposed to the holidays and the spirit of the season, but maybe I’m caught up in this over-commercialization of the whole thing.  I don’t need a particularly reason to get someone a present, and this season is putting unnecessary pressure on me to figure something out.  As an example, lets say I know I will be getting a gift from person A.  Coupling that knowledge with my desire to not look like an idiot, I need to have a gift on hand ready to reciprocate when the time comes.  If the gift that I’d really like to get person A isn’t available for whatever reason for a few months I’m in a bind, I don’t want to appear to be shirking my responsibility when in fact I have a completely genuine idea at the ready, it just cannot be acquired at the current time.  It would be much easier if I could be like hey, here is a happy 3rd of February gift and surprise someone.  Everyone sets expectations for the season, as with any expectations the higher you set them the easier they are to miss.

Today I was in the store buying some holiday greeting cards.  It was a fairly depressing experience.  I have a handful, literally… a number you can count on one hand… of people I have a strong reason to send holiday greetings cards.  Unfortunately, the store doesn’t sell any good cards in handful sizes.  All the cards that come in 5 packs or smaller are stupid pictures of cartoon snowmen made of fat ovals (opposed to pretty snowmen made of circles) or some modern art angel atrocity with what appears to be a multi-colored dance floor background.  These are not the type of casual greetings I would like to send people.  All the good cards are grouped in the 12+ range where you get a pack of 12 or something cards for a few dollars which means I’m left with like (12 – handful) of holiday cards with no purpose.  I have considered addressing them to coworkers, but 50% of them are Jewish I believe and nothing says Merry Christmas like a card to someone who doesn’t celebrate the holidays.  I’ve considered sending them to people who’s addresses I have but then they’d likely ask a) why does Brian have my address and b) what does he want that he’s sending a Christmas card to me for.  I think I might just mail them to myself over the course of the next few days, or maybe to strangers.  Don’t get me started on the abundance of holiday wrapping paper I have, and by abundance I mean 1 40 foot roll that I needed to use like 4 feet from.

Perhaps I’ll send a card to my dishwasher, I always enjoy falling asleep to the sound of it doing it’s thing.  I’m actually not sure if I enjoy the specific sound of the dishwasher, or if I enjoy the sound of something as a deviation from the constant silence around this place.  I’m sure it’s not something specific to the West Coast, but I feel that out here there is a lot more silence.  I talk much less than I did back when I was at RPI and hanging out with people, and some days I spend a small amount of time talking out loud to myself just to make sure my voice still works (those are usually the days that work consists only of saying “Good Morning” in the morning and then “Have a nice night” as I leave).  I’ve considered falling asleep with the television on, but it’s in another room and has no purpose for being on.  The dishwasher has a reason for being on so I don’t feel it’s a waste to use it like I would the television at night (not that there is a limit to the amount of television, but there is this thing called the electric bill).

Weekends are usually the most extreme, when my interactions with other people in person are solely limited to ordering at fast food restaurants.  I made friends with the folks at KFC one night, unfortunately the next week they changed shifts and I never saw them again.  KFC also took lettuce off their menu so I stopped patronizing them.  Now I look forward to Wendy’s.

Good night moon.

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.