My copy of Metroid Dread was just delivered. I am so excited to play it, but I’m not sure when I’ll get to start. I’ve got to help out the kids to bed and plan to watch the season finale of Ted Lasso tonight as well.

In anticipation for the new game, over the past few weeks, I played through about most of Metroid and Super Metroid to get back into playing shape for it. The first game is pretty rough, but Super Metroid is a masterpiece. I played through it on a 3-day rental when I was a teenager, and always remembered how great it was. I also dug up my old Metroid Fusion cartridge. I own it but don’t don’t think that my hands are up for playing it anymore on my old Game Boy Advance.

Anyway, Dread is waiting for me, and my backlog of Switch games (I am a sucker for sales) will have to wait a little longer.

One of my favorite subreddit names is “a boring dystopia”. It is certainly not one of my favorite subreddits to browse—it is too depressing for that honor—but its name perfectly catches the zeitgeist. So many bad things happening right now are so dreadfully mundane that we don’t even want to think about them.

One aspect of our boring dystopia lately has been the failure of global supply chains to keep up with demand. Derek Thompson wrote about this in The Atlantic this week:

The U.S. economy isn’t yet experiencing a downturn akin to the 1970s period of stagflation. This is something different, and quite strange. Americans are settling into a new phase of the pandemic economy, in which GDP is growing but we’re also suffering from a dearth of a shocking array of things—test kits, car parts, semiconductors, ships, shipping containers, workers. This is the Everything Shortage.

The Everything Shortage is not the result of one big bottleneck in, say, Vietnamese factories or the American trucking industry. We are running low on supplies of all kinds due to a veritable hydra of bottlenecks.

There is a shortage in the labor market, resource shortages, shipping problems, and all other sorts of problems due to the COVID pandemic and to climate change. It seems as if all the just-in-time logistics I learned in business school stopped working all at once. People still want to buy things, which is a silver lining economically speaking, but we are all having trouble getting a bunch of different things. The global supply system is no longer working.

I can’t get certain products for my family on a daily basis. I am thankful I don’t need a car or a refrigerator because the wait times in them are very long right now. It is yet another terribly boring way that it feels absolutely insane to be alive today. Due to climate change, I think supply line shortages and delays are going to get worse before they get better.

After hours of struggle last night on an automation project I am doing for work, I had a breakthrough today. I feel good about the project for the first tome in months.

In my experience, robotic process automation (RPA) cannot be coded in the same way as, say, VBA to manipulate data. I am very good at coding in VBA, even though it is my least favorite programming language. VBA was built for traditional programmers like me. I am used to using code to manipulate data, which is how VBA works. I am not used to using programming (not even code, but commands) to manipulate the user interface around the data, which is the most important part of how RPA works.

Automating applications and websites to work on data is tricky for numerous reasons. First, unpredictable things happen at runtime, like error messages for the application or the operating system that pop up and interrupt the program flow. Websites change unpredictably, and what you expect to be there suddenly is gone. In addition, if one step in an automation does not work right, and that is not handled appropriately, the automation will just barrel on and do goodness knows what in the wrong place or in the wrong window or application. Lastly, every action takes an unpredictable amount of time to finish, for a myriad of different reasons. It is hard to predict all of the weird things that might happen at runtime, but you have to deal with them as best you can.

The one thing that has been especially bedeviling to me is that, when an automation (or, colloquially, a bot) runs, the amount of time any task within it takes is completely unpredictable. If the bot does not wait long enough after something finishes, what it needs for the next task (typically a window, menu, or other control) may not even exist yet. The bot I am building would run one day, and fail to finish the next day, solely because my computer ran more slowly sometimes.

I found that my bot started working consistently only after I stopped trying to wait a fixed number of seconds between tasks, but instead told it, every step of the way, to wait until the control it needs to interact with next exists on screen. This leads to a lot more steps that I have to add to the automation, but also to a lot less guesswork about how long a pause is necessary between actions.

I also figured out a better way to wait for long-running data tasks and macros in Excel to finish. It’s simple, but I did not know it was possible until I looked for it today: wait for the mouse cursor to change from the hourglass cursor back to a normal one. It’s just what you would do as a user, but my programmer mindset, always focused on the data rather than on the user interface around the data, made me blind to it for a long time.

With these few changes to my coding approach, my confidence, which admittedly had been shaken by the project, has grown. I now feel that a lot more is possible to build with RPA technology. It just will be more tedious to build it than I would like it to be.

This morning, I just had to click on a news story about somebody’s kid who tragically died of COVID. This evening I just had to listen to a podcast about the Supreme Court’s capricious behavior and what lies ahead in its term. These things didn’t teach me anything, or give me any insights I didn’t already had. Instead they leached me of energy.

Now, when I read an article or listen to a podcast that I know, going in will make me upset, or sad, or depressed, and inevitably does make me upset, or sad, or depressed, I find myself asking myself, automatically, “Why did I let that in?” The emphasis in my internal self-admonishment has recently moved from that to in, and I don’t really know why. I suppose that I have conceded to myself that I cannot avoid the daily torrent of news, gossip, hot takes, and both-sides-isms that pervades the internet. Even if I did avoid them myself, my family members bring them to me eventually, because we are all tapped into it. The trick I want to learn is to be able to observe all the frightful noise of each day’s media storm, but not dwell on it and let it bother me. Whether it bounces off me or passes through me, I don’t want to let it in anymore.

My daughter learned about slavery and the Civil War today in school. We talked about both—mostly slavery—over dinner. Needless to say, it was a heavy conversation—the first of many about race, racism, and the cracks in the foundation of our country. My daughter was, rightly, very shaken up about what we told her.

It made me think of when I first learned about slavery in detail, when I was in high school. I had two American history teachers who covered slavery. One taught us that slavery was wrong, but also taught us that slaves were not beaten and tortured like popular culture had taught us, because—and this is gross—slaves were expensive and slaveowners wouldn’t want to destroy their investment in them. He would have us believe that most slaves were treated fairly well for economic reasons. I don’t think my teacher was a racist, but he drank the racist Kool-Aid: The Lost Cause apologists’ dismissal, “Sure, slavery was bad, but that was in the past. We fixed it. It wasn’t even that bad if you really think about it. Anyway, it’s over now. We don’t have to feel bad about it anymore.”

I remember discussing slavery in his class in the context of moral relativism. (Moral realism was a huge school of thought in the nineties.) We debated how to judge people, like the Founding Fathers, who expressed high ideals about the dignity of humanity while, at the same time, they owned slaves. Is it fair to judge historical figures by today’s standards? These are important discussions to have in a history class. Back then I wanted to believe that these historical figures should be judged only by the standards of their time, both because I wanted them to remain my heroes, and because it seemed unfair to hold them to a standard that they might not have been even aware of.

My other American history teacher stated to the class that slavery is morally wrong, across all time and across all cultures. He minced no words about it: there is no moral relativism when it came to slavery. It’s always wrong to subjugate others. Some things are simply verboten; it doesn’t matter what the society accepts or believes, or what the reasons are behind it. Even if we believe that most slaves were not subjected to frequent physical violence, as the other history teacher claimed, and even if we somehow believe slaver were treated very well, it does not forgive their subjugation, for that is psychological torture and is simply wrong. It doesn’t matter even if society deems such a thing acceptable; people should know innately that certain things are wrong.

His simple lesson was the one that stuck with me. It has colored my thoughts about justice ever since. Moral relativism has certain clear limits. From him I learned that we could judge historical figures by their standards and our own. We don’t have to choose, and it doesn’t even make sense to choose. There are people who created my country who did great and terrible things. To understand them, you have to scrutinize them fully as humans, warts and all.

My parents never talked cogently to me about race when I was growing up. I picked up what they, and everyone else, thought about race slowly and organically. It didn’t help that I grew up in a preponderously white and Catholic area of Connecticut. We, as a region, had some kind of race panic over school desegregation (Scheff v. O’Niell) while I was in high school. I thought then that people’s concern was mostly about differences in class between the cities and the suburbs. Now I know I was naive. White people didn’t want their kids to mix with black kids, just like in Boston. I remember everybody being angry about the issue, but nothing ever happened that affected me or my town’s schools, as far as I know.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I lived and worked in multi-racial settings. I learned a lot about how similar we all are.

Don’t mistake domain-specific knowledge for intellect.

While you’re at it, don’t compare yourself to other people.

Today, to thank my in-laws for all the help they give to my family (which is a lot), I cooked them a nice dinner—chili and cornbread, which they love—and my daughter wrote them a thank-you note for the various nice things they do for her. I am trying to teach my children to express gratitude. I’m not sure that part was completely successful, but we all had a great time.

I have two seemingly conflicting ideas in my mind right now:

• You are what you do.
• You are not your job.

You are what you do.

Annie Dillard wrote, “how you spend your days is how you spend your lives.” That thought has guided me since I read that, in an A.P. English class my senior year of high school.

Action defines who you really are, but I have learned that it does not always inform who you think you are.

You are not your job.

When meeting somebody new, It have always hated the question, “What do you do?” The question really means, “What is your job?” The answer leads to value judgments about the other person: wealth, intelligence, privilege, and so on. It is unfair and reductive. I am not my job. Knowing what I do for a living doesn’t say that much about what I do in life.

Today I listened to a lecture that Stephen Fry gave to Nokia Bell Labs a few years ago. He told stories about Pandora’s Box, about the invention of chess, about how doubling grains of rice on each square of a chessboard will eventually lead to counts of rice grains larger than the number of atoms in the known universe, about the founding of Intel, and so on. Stephen Fry’s stories were old, familiar, and, many of them, not literally true—but he connected them together to his ideas about technology and its effect on humanity in ways that were central to his thesis. The overall effect was very compelling to me.

One of the greatest things in life is to hear or read a good story, well told. When a storyteller tells multiple stories, makes connections between them, and links them to new stories and new ideas in an entirely new context, then something new and extraordinary can result from it: One can share new ideas, new ways of thinking, and easier ways for people to remember these ideas and ways of thinking. The stories can be fun and memorable. The connections between them can be intellectually or emotionally exciting.

There are far fewer good stories in the world than ways to tell them. Rather than worry about retelling a familiar tale, find an effective way to tell it, and mine it for ideas and themes that can connect to the story that you want to tell, or to the topic you want to speak about. Narratives are important because they are entertaining and memorable. Facts, when contextualized by being included in or linked to a narrative, are far more memorable than dry recitations of data. Connections between different stories and ideas are the most valuable thing you can communicate, because they are the hardest to come up with, and not everybody makes them on their own. The power of connection is to recontextualize something—or everything—in the audience’s mind.

One reason I decided to publish something (even something short, as long as it is creative) to a blog every day was to help me get over the perfectionism that has limited my creative output so much over the years.

I don’t publish because my writing or even my thoughts are “done”. I publish because it is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. That’s what I do. I do this every day.

I write for myself. I am gladdened that a few people on Micro.blog read what I write sometimes. I don’t expect it. It is a bonus. I don’t have an agenda, and therefore am not seeking out an audience. However, if I didn’t publish my little essays as blog posts, they would always be drafts, and would never be done.

Moreover, they wouldn’t be out there on the vast internet for some curious person to discover someday. My words, mundane as they may be sometimes, might help somebody out of a tough emotional spot, or get them to understand something a little bit better. They are my small, insignificant gifts to the world. I don’t care if the world accepts them or not; it’s what I have to give.

This blog post is probably not my best one. I’m not the first person to think that writing every day, with the necessary element of publishing it, is a worthwhile and rewarding exercise for the mind. I’m sure that, if I searched the web, one could find hundreds or thousands more posts just like it. That does not diminish its value to me. This is my blog post. These are my immediate thoughts—today. And if I have not expressed them perfectly, well, tomorrow is another chance to do so.

Every year, when the air starts to get chilly, I flash back to this sense memory:

I am four years old, sitting atop a hay bale in front of a farm stand with my kindergarten class, drinking apple cider and eating a white powdered donut.

I can still taste the apple cider—sharp, sweet, with a distinctive bite because, as I would later figure out, it was turning hard. I can still see the bright white of the sugar on the donut and smell the hay that scratched my skin when I kicked my legs over the side of the bale. These foods, and the whole experience, were new to me. Every bit of it was surprising and delightful.

To this day, the taste of that cider is especially vivid in my mind. Nothing I have tasted since has ever matched that first sip of cider.

I have two collections that I love but cannot justify: high-end headphones (each is sub-$500, but still really expensive and good) and mechanical keyboards (each is $240 or less). It took ten years to build up these collections, so the embarrassing amount of money I have spent is spread out over a long, long period. I was wondering today if people who spend a lot more than I do on vacations do so because they forego (and don’t care about) material objects like pricy headphones and keyboards.

Getting into these “hobbies” (if buying stuff can be called a hobby) was entirely accidental. I’m part of a product review program where I can occasionally select products I like for no money up front, and then only pay taxes on their value months later. I got my first taste of better headphones and better keyboards through that program, essentially through the luck of the draw. (I’m not in charge of which products become available for me to review.) If not for that, I probably would have no other headphones other than my AirPods, and would probably have a $100 Microsoft or Logitech keyboard that I would have to replace (because of wear) every year or two.

I think I am finally nearing “endgame” in both of these categories. I have fantastic headphones of nearly every type (dynamic and planar magnetic, open-back and closed-back, Bluetooth and wired), and they cover every situation, that I need. Similarly, I have mechanical keyboards for all of my computers, have tried a bunch of different key switches (clicky, tactile, and linear), and have even bought a “weird” ortholinear board that I never thought I would ever want until a couple months ago. Any new keyboard purchases are going to be about fixing something that is broken (my wonderful and unacceptably buggy Durgod tenkeyless) or trying out a different type of keyswitch on my new, hot-swappable ortholinear board. At least I hope that will be the case. Collecting more and more of these objects sometimes feels like an obsession, and is not something I want to keep doing forever.

⌨️ I got back to practicing Colemak-DH typing this evening. I am still not great at it, but I didn’t lose a step during my break from it, either.

I have worked from home for more than half of my career. I’m no stranger to working in an office, but I find myself wondering what people actually do at work all day. I always imagine that my coworkers are more focused on their tasks than I am, or more driven to earn a promotion, or more highly structured in their approach to managing their work than I am.

I’m pretty sure, though, that that can’t be, because no one I have ever worked with in person was much more focused that I was, with the exception of one or two workaholic bosses I’ve had. Those guys loved their job in ways I couldn’t replicate—at least that’s what I thought—and that drove them to work well into the evenings every day, after I was ready to go home.

My last office-job experience was mostly great, but there was a lot of gossip, walking around, waiting for elevators, waiting for meetings to begin, going out to grab a coffee, and so on. Half of my day was spent on actual work, even though I spent almost the entire day with my team, doing the same things they were doing. When I worked from home on that job, I got a lot more done, even though I would take break to make my coffee or put a load of laundry in the washing machine.

My job today is different than any of the office-based ones. It is more fluid and unpredictable in nature; every day is different than the last, and some of my projects are vastly different from others. The sands are always shifting beneath my feet. I would prefer my job to be more predictable, for my mental health, more than anything. I think that it is probably anxiety more than anything else that makes me think, pretty frequently, that I’m not working hard enough, or as hard as my peers, or that it took me too much time to do a certain task I was asked to do.

I am nearing 2,000 posts on my micro.blog, which is about 1,950 more posts than I have made on any other blog I started in the past. Do any micro.bloggers know how I could generate any stats, like word count, about my blog?

I have been fascinated by this anonymously published paper/series of articles about the obesity epidemic. Part I, covering mysteries about obesity that I did and did not know about, drew me in. The authors’ thesis, which isn’t presented until Part III, is that chemical contaminants are the primary cause of the epidemic (not why individuals gain weight, but why obesity in entire populations increased dramatically since 1980). I’m not sure I buy that, but it is an interesting argument to consider that I had not previously given any weight to.

I was interested this that work because I am struggling with my weight again due to the pandemic. Since January 2020, when reading the news from Wuhan caused me to have a a panic attack about the coming pandemic (I was right, unfortunately). When COVID panic hit the US, and the store shelves were bare, businesses and sports leagues were shutting down, and we were afraid to leave our houses, I started to eat sweets or drink beer (just one a day) as a way to cope with the uncertainty and stress.

I gave up the beer last September, but giving up sweets entirely has been impossible for me thus far. Sugar is a habit I have given up several times in my life, but I always go back to it when I am feeling very bad, like if I get sick or if stressful situations last too long. The pandemic has basically never stopped being stressful for me or my family. Dealing with that stress takes a ton of energy away from me, and I end up eating extra food—sweet food—for the boost of energy it gives me. I feel a chemical dependence on it now that is stronger than I recall it being at any point in my life. I want to give it up, and am trying to find the mental resolve to do so this week.

Today I did too many chores, then did way too little of anything, and ended up eating too much ice cream this evening.

I should give myself a break because our plans for today were canceled at the last minute. Still, I wish I could wake up on the weekend and just have fun, or at the very least take up the unstructured time I sometimes have on a Saturday or Sunday and do something productive with it. I have tons of writing projects on my hands, and did not work on any of it today.

I did bake bread and cook chicken noodle soup for my family, so the day wasn’t a total loss. Hopefully I use tomorrow in a more worthwhile way.

I have temporarily stopped practicing on, or changing to, the ColeMak-DH keyboard layout. I haven’t been using my new Planck-EZ keyboard at all. I am still too slow with that layout to use it for “real” writing, and I have been writing and writing and writing for the past couple weeks.

I think I am still very excited about moving to the Planck and to a non-QWERTY layout. But I am more excited about my writing projects right now.

I plan to pick up Colemak-DH and the Planck keyboard again in a couple weeks, which is around my birthday, because I believe that my need for fast typing will abate by then. The Planck keyboard was supposed to be a birthday present, anyway.

Yesterday at work I was asked to give a status update on my team’s status call, which is a Webex. I decided to create a slideshow and make a good presentation out of it. I have decided to take every opportunity, even the little ones, to improve my presentation skills.

I played too much Scott Pilgrim vs. the World this week, and have been rewarded with wrist pain in my left hand. I should have known I was overdoing it because my typing became more and more inaccurate as the week progressed.

The tree service my wife and I hired accidentally severed the internet connection cable outside my house. Did I mention that I work from home and my kid has Google Classroom-based homework?

On a whim this weekend I purchased the beat ‘em up game Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World for the Nintendo Switch. It was an impulse purchase of a game I had not heard of and didn’t know was any good. I have been wanting to play a brawler for a while, but it is a genre I have not played since I was a kid, so I was not sure I would still enjoy it. I have been eyeing, but have been reluctant to spend $30 of $25 on, River City Girls and Streets of Rage 4 for weeks now. I haven’t played a game in that genre since I was a kid, and as an adult I am terrible at a lot of the games I used to excel at (I’m looking at you, Mario!) so I was not sure if I could button-mash fast enough to play such games. $25 or more is too much to spend on a game that is too hard for me to play. While I dithered about a purchase, I spent some time playing NES versions of the Double Dragon games and River City Ransom, but found those games are too primitive to be much fun for me anymore.

The Scott Pilgrim game was on sale for a stupidly low price ($7.49 or something), so I picked it up. To my surprise and delight, it is awesome. It has a colorful pixel art style that mimics the Scott Pilgrim comics. Its level design, character design, and animations show a lot of humor and attention to the source material. The chiptune soundtrack is really catchy. Play controls are easy to pick up. It starts out really hard, but you can replay levels to level up your character (i.e., lean new moves), and earn money to upgrade your character’s stats (strength, defense, etc.), which makes the game easier. It is kind of grind-y, at least for a conservative, low-skilled player like me, but the grind is fun.

Basically, everything about the video game does justice to the source material. Playing it caused me to want to reread the graphic novels, which I started to do yesterday. Scott Pilgrim, in comics form, is weird, surreal, and a real mess—you know, a perfect reflection of the early twenties and late teens lives of its characters. The characters, plot, and themes of the book, are complex, messy, flawed, and not fully formed. Nobody is a role model. Nobody is mature. Reality itself is warped for them. It makes no sense that Scott goes into video game mode and kills his girlfriend’s exes. Is that a metaphor? Only kind of. You’re just not expected to take it seriously. It’s all problematic—like life, I guess. I don’t really think it is deep (maybe you would if you were much younger than me), but it is really good at stirring up complicated thoughts and emotions in me about how messy life is. During this re-read, I have thought about how I might judge people who haven’t figured their lives out yet, or overlook the good qualities in someone like that. My feelings about those things are different now than they were when I first read the series about ten years ago.

I also watched a couple clips of the Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World movie on YouTube, too, and am trying to find a new respect for it. I saw the movie only once, after I had read all the graphic novels, and absolutely_hated_ it because my favorite parts of the graphic novels—the ones involving character growth—are mostly not depicted in the movie. It does have a stunning cast, though; it’s unbelievable that all those young actors who became so big later on are in the same movie.

I have been busily writing a bunch of stuff for other people this week. First there were work papers for my day job. Yesterday and today I wrote three long product reviews for Amazon. Since late last week (and for hours last night) I have drafting a white paper that covers a topic at work that I am an expert in—that’s going to be a rather long project. I was just drafted into a presentation team on Friday, and I spent last evening brainstorming and I spent this evening writing an 800-word outline for it. I am teeming with ideas all of a sudden. It’s wild. But ironically I wonder what to write for myself, in my blog posts, as if I don’t have anything to say.

Two of my wife’s students went home today because they came to school with COVID. We’re doing great. 😅

“He who buys what he does not need steals from himself."—Swedish proverb.