At some point, everyone wishes to be seen and heard. Giving people the attention and consideration they deserve takes focus, patience, and a commitment to preserving their dignity.
Sometimes the person wanting to be seen and heard is a victim; other times that person is a bully. It can be very difficult to see and hear them both.
I tend to minimize good things that happen to me, but am trying to change that. To that end, here is a list of small wins for me this week.
It is actually pretty easy. From the Finder, you drag the package’s folder to your Xcode project (in Xcode). ↩︎
The worst part of memory is its selectiveness. I can remember, in excruciating detail, every embarrassing moment, every incidence of social awkwardness, every chance I should have taken but didn’t, every blunder or pratfall, every mistake on an important exam, every poorly written paper, every taunt hurled at me, and every dressing down I ever received. I wish I could say that I remember all the successes and great things in my life just as vividly, but it simply is not true.
From what I gather, the way my mind works is entirely normal. I wonder if all it takes to remember all the winning moments in life just as well as the embarrassing ones is to make the effort to do so. For some reason—human nature, I always figured—it feels much harder to celebrate the wins than to mull over the losses.
One thing I never planned for in adulthood is developing a strong preference for trailing punctuation to remain outside of quotation marks1 unless the period, comma, or other punctuation mark itself is being quoted. I wonder if the people I work with, who read my emails and technical writing every day, think I don’t know how quotations marks are supposed to work in American English2. No one has ever called me out on it. Either they don’t know that trailing punctuation is supposed to go inside quotation marks in most cases, they don’t care about it, or they don’t notice it at all.
One of the bad parts of moonlighting as a programmer1 is that, at the time of day I can code, I am often a terrible inefficient coder.
The time I have available for coding is very late at night, typically 11 PM to 1 AM. For the most part this is fine. I can’t get to sleep until 1 AM or later most nights, no matter what I do, and going to bed before I feel tired is counterproductive. Rather than staring at a ceiling in bed for hours, it is far better for me to stay up doing something I enjoy, like coding on my Mac while listening to music on my headphones.
Lately I have noticed that I am getting very little done in these coding sessions. The night before last I fixed one tricky bug, then decided to quit coding (but not yet go to sleep) for the night. Last night I wrote about half of one feature. To be fair, I wrote several implementations of the feature until I found one that would be most compatible with Apple’s frameworks. Still, I quit for the night before finishing it because the other part of the feature seemed too tricky to tackle after midnight.
Fortunately, when I brain is tired, I don’t end up coding a buggy mess. I have the sense to slack off for the rest of the night, so I don’t spend my next evening throwing away the garbage I coded the night before. Still, I get very little done compared to the time I spend on it. At least I enjoy the time I spend doing it.
To be clear, I am a hobbyist and don’t have a second job. ↩︎
Tom Brady finally retired today.
For most of my adult life, I was a football fan. The whole time, my love of the game sat uncomfortably beside my real concerns about how dangerous it is.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was some false controversy about whether the NFL was dangerous to the athletes who played in it. I never got caught up in it: I was always certain football was a dangerous sport. As a kid, my parents said they wouldn’t let me play tackle football. (They didn’t have to worry.) My high school fielded no football team (at least in my first one or two years), nor did my college for the same reason: Back when both schools fielded football teams, kids died of injuries on the field.
Still, a combination of learning about the strategy of the game from Madden games and John Madden broadcasts with his telestrator and the fact that almost everybody around me was a football fan led me to become a fanatic myself. As a New Englander, the Patriots were my default football team. It was not much fun watching them, though, until Tom Brady took over as quarterback. Watching the Brady/Belichick team outsmart and outplay opponents was a little like watching an expert play Madden: thrilling if you are a fan, and boring for everyone else. Football games catalyzed house parties, bar nights, conversations with friends, minor holidays, and generally acceptable excuses to eat junk food, drink beer, and do almost nothing on the weekends.
I promised myself I would stop paying attention to football when Tom Brady retired. I actually gave it up a few years ago, before Brady even moved to the Buccaneers. At some point, I could no longer ignore the dangers of CTE or the horrible physical toll that professional football puts on athlete’s bodies. Watching the big hits on the field became dreadful rather than exiting. Seeing injured players carted off the field became so upsetting I could no longer shrug it off after the inevitable commercial break.
I fell out of love with the sport entirely. I no longer want to watch any sport where people intentionally hurt each other. Instead of helping me have a good time, seeing people battered on the field—or long after they stopped playing the game—now makes me sad.
I love chess now, but I am not very good at it. When I first got into it again, however, I thought I was hot stuff. I beat a bunch of bots with higher and higher ratings until I reached what I thought my level was (Elo 1,000). I thought that was a pretty good rating for me, considering I hadn’t played in 20 years.
When I started playing humans, however, I discovered that I am not a 1,000-level player at all. It was humbling. Since then I learned that I am not along. There are players at every level striving to learn the game and get better. Despite my early hubris, I am still a beginner. There is nothing wrong with that. We are all beginners at something.
I am having fun learning the game, and think that I am establishing basic competence. That alone is something to be proud of. I have also made an internet friend (or chess rival!), have introduced the game to my son and daughter, and am playing online games with my father-in-law, too. All of these things have made my life better than it was before.
I hope that my interest in the game remains high enough to play a little each day, and to continue to develop my skills. While I will certainly never become a grandmaster (Elo 2,500 and up), perhaps I will become a level 1,000 player someday. I may even remain a beginner for the rest of my life, and that’s OK.
For now, I just want to learn the game and have fun playing it. In broader terms, I want to use the skills I have—however meager they are—to participate, contribute, and have fun.
I have been converting my high school essays from their borked Word .doc format to Markdown, to preserve them for future readability. So far, I have converted my ninth grade work and half of my tenth grade work.
As I go, I don’t read each essay in depth, but I have read some of them and found them to be incredibly, unmistakably me. I could have written them yesterday—even my very first high school paper. Sure, I would have made fewer spelling mistakes and would have employed the em-dash (which I did not know how to type at the time) a lot more, but, for the most part, I would make the same writing decisions now as I made back then.
It has been unnevering to see that I already knew how to write pretty well as a newly minted high school freshman. It makes me worry that I have not grown that much as a writer since then.
I am certain, however, that I have grown much as a thinker and as an organizer of information. Writing long papers in college and grad school (20+ pages) encouraged me to prioritize structure over style, to plan my writing process, and to organize the work and pre-work that goes into writing each section. In my career I developed technical writing skills that built off these concepts and techniques. Lastly, as I shifted more into non-technical work in my career, I also developed an intense focus on clarity, which can only gained through experience writing for many people over a long time period.
I have played most of my chess games against the bots found on Chess.com. When playing against a bot, it will make its moves instantly. It is tempting to keep pace with it. You shouldn’t.
Unlike bots, humans—especially those of us who are not chess masters—need time to look at all the pieces on the board, weigh different moves against each other, and consider both the good and the bad outcomes that would come from each move. If that sounds like a lot of things to do for every move, that’s because it is. Chess is a complex game, which is what makes it so fascinating.
My worst mistakes on the chessboard have been due to hasty decision-making: I want to capture a piece or put the king in check so badly that I don’t bother looking at what moving that piece might do, or without figuring out all the ways my opponent can escape or counter it. I play with haste mostly to match the tempo of my opponent. Maintaining the pace is not important at all—at least at the beginner level I am playing at—and is impossible against a bot anyway. It is a habit I am working to outgrow.
If you are a chess beginner like me and want to improve your game, don’t be hasty. Stop and think before you make a move. Consider what effect that move will have on the future. And weigh multiple options if you have them. These are good rules of thumb not just for chess, but for life, too.
The last two days I have been busy doing work for people and myself, busy achieving things, and have gotten positive feedback from my coworkers, my family, and the world. Things are going pretty well.
I have been so active doing things that I have not been reading the news, engaging with politics, or thinking deep thoughts all this time. Maybe that’s why things are going well.
Last week I started using FancyZones, one of Microsoft’s PowerToys for Windows, on my work computer. I think I love it.
FancyZones lets you create a tiled window layout and snap windows into pre-defined zones (or areas on your screen) via drag-and-drop. It makes it easy to divide your monitor into halves or thirds and arrange multiple windows neatly. Compared to manually sizing and placing multiple windows, it is much faster to snap them all into place by dragging them anywhere onto a zone or by typing a keyboard shortcut.
A tiled window layout is useful for arranging multiple apps for drag-and-drop, or for keeping multiple documents or apps visible at the same time. While it does limit where you can place windows on your screen, it is flexible and easy to adjust the layout. At any time you can call up a zone editor via a hotkey (Shift+Win+`). You can set presets for the different arrangements you like, and switch between them quickly.
FancyZones really clicked for me when I figured out that it can be configured to take over for the default window snapping feature’s keyboard shortcuts. Now I have windows shuffling between zones set up across my two screens using Win+Left and Win+Right key commands. I can still maximize with Win+Up whenever I need to, and then restore down with Win+Down as well.
Another neat feature of FanzyZones is that every zone represents a stack of windows. You can cycle through the windows in the currently-focused zone with keyboard shortcuts (Win+Up and Win+Down). These shortcuts are very useful because they operate on a smaller set of windows than the Alt+Tab or Win+Tab switchers do. It is much quicker to page through three or four windows within a zone than to go through all ten or twenty I have open system-wide.
If you are curious about tiled windows layouts, and you are a Windows user, I recommend checking out FancyZones. It is free, published by the platform vendor (Microsoft), and is even open source.
Last night I started converting the essays I wrote in high school from the old Microsoft Word .doc format to Markdown, so they will be readable as long as plain text files are readable. My process is simple:
Strangely, many of my essays have no titles. LibreOffice displays a blank page and some random junk at the top of every file. This leads me to believe that my paper headings—which were required, because I wrote them for school—have been lost in file format translation somewhere. I have been adding titles to my old papers, which is challenging sometimes because I have no idea why I wrote some of them.
I found some interesting files in my archive that are actually worth preserving: humorous essays from my freshman year; serious papers about nuclear power and Chernobyl; and brief biographies I wrote of my father and grandfather, which are now treasures to me because they died years ago. I also found a some topical essays full of ten-dollar words and purple prose that I no doubt learned how to write by reading syndicated newspaper columnists every day. The teachers who read them must have thought I was precocious and possibly insane.
Overall, converting these files has been a rewarding diversion from my normal computing tasks. Unfortunately, between high school and college essays, I have hundreds of these Word .docs to convert, so I will be at it for a long time.
Last night when I fished a high school essay out of my archives, I was dismayed to find that all my old word processor documents related to school are still saved in the antiquated Microsoft Word .doc format. The file format is now so old that none of the word processors I had installed—not even the online version of Microsoft Word—could open them. I was pretty sure for a moment that all my old work, which I have retained in my document folder for decades, had been lost.
I was especially dismayed by this because I thought I had already solved this problem for myself years ago. Several times in my life I have converted all (or at least large amounts of) my writing from outdated formats, such as WordStar and WordPerfect 5, to more modern ones—just so I could continue to open them. All the .doc files I am complaining about were actually converted from WordStar to Word format by a Windows app called WordPort.
Eventually, I figured out that I could open the old Word doc on a PC using the desktop version of Microsoft Office 365. Of course, the document looked like trash when I opened it. The left margin was nonexistent and Word’s automatic hyphenation messed up the spelling of a bunch of the words. At least I could read it. (While writing this post, I realized that I could have installed LibreOffice Vanilla on my Mac, which still has support for opening Word .doc files, instead.)
When I first started converting my documents to current formats, open formats and plaintext markup languages like Markdown did not exist. The second time I converted some of my documents forward I used OpenOffice, and stored the new files in OpenOffice .odt format, which is an open standard. I am now considering doing a third and final conversion, and moving as much of my old writing as possible to the lowest common denominator file format: plain text. Markdown exists to preserve all the formatting I need for most of my school papers. OpenOffice’s .odt format will have to suffice for the long, complex, overly-formatted and paginated papers I wrote in college.
When I find myself struggling to be creative or productive, I always think of a story I read in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. It was about a rower who was pulled out to sea one evening by the ocean tide. He rowed and rowed all night and kept being pulled farther and father from land by the ebbing tide. In the morning, however, the direction of the tide reversed, and he was pushed back to the shore to safety.
I remember this story so vividly because I had to write a very short essay about the book in my A.P. English class. We had to answer three specific questions about the book in one paragraph each. The teacher stressed how important it was for this assignment to be brief; only one page and three paragraphs.
I chose to answer the last question by writing about the story of the rower. Unfortunately, my explanation of the rower’s story stretched to two whole paragraphs, making my essay far longer than the one-page limit. At that time in my life, I had no idea how to pare down my writing even if it meant cutting parts of it I liked. I agonized over how to cut it down, but decided, uneasily, to turn it in as it was, despite it exceeding the one-page limit.
Happily, my overlong essay was a big success. I may have I understood the story of the rower better than even the teacher did, because the day after I turned it in he began the class but projecting my essay—all two pages of it—onto the classroom’s pull-down screen, and asking the whole class to read it. He seemed genuinely touched by it, too.
This evening I pulled the essay out of my archives to reproduce below. The last two paragraphs are about the rower. I think about the ideas expressed in them on a weekly basis to this day.
An Approach to The Writing Life by Annie Dillard (20th century [1980s])
Michael Descy
AP English
10/26/95
A main theme of Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life is the importance of overcoming all the difficulties faced in the fulfillment of one’s dreams. The life of a writer can be dark and lonely, demanding much introspection and many late nights alone with an unruly manuscript. The writing process itself is difficult beyond most people’s conceptions. It is so harrowing, so haphazard, and so time consuming that most people that have one burning idea for a particular novel or story are never able to actually follow through its capitalization. Most never really even start, and the few who do often form such an attachment to their work, because it was so hard for them to accomplish, they will not allow themselves to alter it in any way, even to tie up loose ends or discard the beginnings of dropped themes and plot turns. Thus, their piece is never perfected; their dream is left to waste. Despite all these trials, however, writing is a very rewarding activity. Writing is like a passion eating at you, an aching, a hunger that can kill if not satiated. Only persistence, slogging through the murk and endless toil of the process, will enable one to fulfill his dream.
A dominant tone of the work can be described as enthusiastic. Dillard is intense as she explains the writing process. She describes writing in exhilarating terms, comparing it to playing tennis, lion taming, and stunt flying. Her metaphors are powerful, zesty. She shows your work as a line of words pulsing through your bloodstream and shooting across the universe. She tells us committing a vision to paper is a futile fight with the jealous, tyrannical page, the forces of time and matter working against you. Her chapters are choppy, broken down into many vignettes and tiny observations. There is a break on almost every page. They are so frequent each seems to be a gasp of breath between her quickly blurted images.
A strong scene that feels as though it will provide a good doorway for thoughtful attention to an important aspect of the work is the story of Ferrar Burn, which her painter friend, Paul Glenn, told her. One evening, years ago, Ferrar Burn caught sight of an eight-foot log of Alaska cedar floating out in the channel by his house. It was high tide, the water slack, so he rowed out, tied the log to his little eight-foot pram, and proceeded to tow it in. The tide turned, however, catching him, pulling him farther and farther out to sea. But Burn kept rowing against the tide, stubbornly, obstinately towards his house. He strained against it all night to little avail. When the tide finally changed the next morning, it finally pushed the still-rowing Ferrar Burn back home.
This scene connects very well to the aforementioned theme. Through persistence against terrible odds, the rower Burn was finally able to succeed. Had he given up, stopped rowing, he would have drifted so far out to sea that the tide change which eventually pulled him back in would not have helped him. A writer too must pull against opposing forces to accomplish his or her goal. There is much about the process that pushes people away. Most would just assume go along with the tide, take the easy route, and be led far away from their dream. But the few with the dogged insistence to stick with their craft, pull through their troubles, and never lose sight of their objectives are able to ride out the tough times and sail swiftly and smoothly through the good times. These few are steeply rewarded in the end. Their prize: accomplishment of a dream.
I have been having trouble lately coming up with something to say each day on my blog. I am feeling somewhat uninspired. This lack of spark probably stems from spending many hours this past week (far more than usual) writing software. The many hours spent programming have taxed my brain so much that the acts of writing, doing chores, or doing my other day-job work have felt exhausting and unrewarding for the past few days.
The reason I have a blog is that I want to write every day, even when it feels impossible to put anything down, even when I feel I have nothing to say, and even if nobody else reads it. My goal is to practice explaining my ideas and opinions, developing ideas, and telling stories. Doing it every day is important to me because I have given up my creative endeavors too easily in the past. Stories seem impossible to end. A good song seems impossible to write. A buggy app seems impossible to fix. No one really cares about the things I create anyway, so why bother finishing them?
I have a different mindset now. A blog is never “finished” so I can’t fail at completing it. Conversely, a blog post is very short, so it is easy to finish. More importantly, it no longer matters to me if anyone else reads it. If someone does read one of my posts and leaves me a comment on Micro.blog, I am very flattered, but it doesn’t really matter. The blog is a kata. Practicing the forms is key. Nothing matters more.
My son can play a reasonable game of chess for a four-year-old. I have to explain to him how to get out of check sometimes, but he is getting a knack for the game. I am proud of him and more than a bit amazed.
I got a raise today. It’s off-schedule—a total surprise. I feel it is uncouth to take a victory lap, but I did promise myself last year to celebrate my wins. Right now I feel happy, and think my hard work and change of attitude last year paid off.
Earlier this week I played through Steamworld Dig on the Nintendo Switch. I bought it for a song during Nintendo’s New Years sale, and I found it well worth it. It is a high-quality game with a fun—and brief—game loop. First you explore the mine and collect treasure, then you return to town to sell the treasure and purchase upgrades. There isn’t any more to it, unfortunately, but the gameplay is fun nonetheless.
A while ago I played through the sequel, Steamworld Dig 2, which bests the first game in every way imaginable, including turning it into a full-fledged Metroidvania. If can pick up only one of the two, Steamworld Dig 2 is the one to get.
Back in 2006, I bought a Nintendo DS and was fanatical about the game Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day. It was a game that promised to make you mentally sharper, as long as you did solved simple cognitive training puzzles every day.
For several months I played it daily, for five minutes or so, before I watched TV or played a more conventional video game. I told everybody about it. My best friend was a fan, too. After several weeks, I became blazingly fast at most of its puzzles, which included performing simple arithmetic, memorization, and doing a Stroop Color and Word Test. (The Stroop test was the hardest for me, due in no small part to my red/green color-blindness.) At the time, I thought that the daily training was making me smarter. Aside from being able to calculate restaurant tips more quickly, however, I noticed no other intellectual gains.
After some time, I stopped playing Brain Age—at least the brain training part. I had read that it didn’t really improve your cognitive abilities, and had come to the same conclusion myself by that point. Despite that conclusion, I still believe that playing games can make you smarter. That’s why I picked up Sudoku (which was included in Brain Age), the New York Times crossword puzzle, and, more recently, chess. I also do computer programming as a hobby, which is a little like playing a game against the compiler sometimes.
I play all these games to stave off what I fear is inevitable in my old age: mental decline. It think it is inevitable because I watched it happen to my father. At the tail end of his career (he worked until age 75), his mind started slipping away, little by little. I thought it was because he no longer had challenging work to do. Eventually, he developed dementia, and it became clear that the cause was medical in nature.
I realize now that I played Brain Age at the very start of his decline. Perhaps it was the trigger. I also realize that I still want there to be something I can do—mentally, that is—so that I don’t end up with the same fate.
I taught my four-year-old son how to play chess a couple days ago. It was his idea. He was curious about it because I have been talking about chess with my wife, and because our chess board is on the underside of the Chinese checkers set we have been playing with as a family.
He and I played a few games over the holiday weekend. This afternoon, he played with his grandmother and grandfather, which was his idea. This evening, when I suggested we play checkers, he cried because he wanted to play chess. (Of course we could play chess instead of checkers.) He learned how all the pieces moved (except for castling and en passant) in one quick lesson. I am trying to teach him about checkmate now. It is great fun to have something new to do with him. I look forward to teaching my daughter now to play, too.
I spent all day coding in VBA for work. I’m creating Excel templates for data submissions. These templates need (at least I think they need) data validation routines that the people filling them out can run. Those routines will help prevent some data quality problems down the line.
The only tool for the job to code those routines is VBA, which is bar far the oldest language I code in on a regular basis. It is creaky, feature-limited, and its runtime is rather unstable. But if it works well enough for federal agencies (I have seen some data input forms in my time), it will work for me.
I used to think VBA was a trash language, and only trash code could be made from it. Once I learned I was stuck with it for certain tasks, though, I tried to make the most of it. Now I treat VBA like the proper object-oriented language it is. The result is that I have a lot more fun writing it, and I think that the code is easier to debug and modify in the future, too.
I keep my code clean. I keep methods as short as possible. I use long, descriptive names for methods, classes, and variables. I structure the code into classes extensively. I create classes for intermediate data structures to make other parts of my VBA code easier to understand. I refactor my code into numerous smaller classes when I find I am writing too many, or overly complex, private methods. I create and use factories to create and set up objects. I apply the principle of least privilege everywhere. I am pedantic about whether arguments are passed by reference or by value. I even use interfaces sometimes, too.
The result is code that is rigorously structured—perhaps hilariously so to the next person who will look at it. It is unlike any VBA code I have ever seen before, but it is probably a lot like many VB6 applications written in the early 2000s.
Several days ago, @canion challenged me to a game of chess—basically correspondence chess—on chess.com. I’m pretty sure he is beating me right now, but we are just in the middle of the game, so we will have to play it out to be sure.
Tonight I played a real-time game against someone else on chess.com for the first time. I won! Except for the one, slow game with @canion, I haven’t played against a real person in chess for about 20 years. Humans are less predictable than bots, which makes things interesting.
I also found the post-game statistics on the chess.com website to be very interesting. Apparently in my game tonight I made 4 mistakes and 8 blunders, and had 3 missed wins. That means I’m pretty bad at chess! That makes sense to me, considering I just re-started playing about a week ago. To get better, I should probably play more games and then analyze what went wrong in them to figure out what my weaknesses are.
Today I ordered a chess set today—a nice, wooden set with weighted pieces that completely outclasses what we have know and the chess set I grew up with. The board has labeled ranks (1-8) and files (a-g), which will be great for teaching my family how to play. It folds in half and has internal storage for the pieces. It also has two extra queens. No chess set that I’ve ever seen had extra pieces to account for pawn promotion, so this set feels luxurious to me. I promised my wife I will use it to teach her how to play. My kids may be interested, too; I don’t look forward to losing to a four-year-old and a nine-year-old, though!
I’m pretty sure I re-learned long division tonight as I helped my daughter through her homework assignment.
That was a skill that bedeviled me when I took the GMAT twenty years ago. The GMAT, at that time at least, did not allow for the use of a calculator. To make it worse, none of the figures on the math problems divided evenly. Many of the math problems were painful to get through, not because I didn’t know the math, but because I could not remember how to calculate the final answers with long division. At the time, I was a recent college graduate, and I hadn’t done long division since the seventh grade. I’m pretty sure I got a bunch of questions wrong because I had forgotten how to perform long division. In the end, my math score paled in comparison to my language score, all due to me not remembering, or at least reviewing, long division.
I got A’s and A+’s all throughout business school. I concentrated in finance. Never once did I have to perform calculations without a calculator. Sometimes life—or at least the typical qualification exam—is not fair.
I have been thinking that my goal to replace my work keyboard with the Planck EZ Glow—a 40-key ortholinear keyboard—has been a bust.
I tried to learn the Colemak-DH layout and customize the heck out of the board. I was fairly successful at both of those things, but not successful enough to feel comfortable typing in Colemak-DH all day long. I stumble on some of the letters, like B and K, and otherwise make a lot of mistakes. I also find the
Today I decided to change the layout back to the Planck EZ default, which is a QWERTY layout, and then tweak the “adjust” layer into a navigation layer. What I discovered is that my mind defaults to Colemak-DH when I use it, which means I can’t type in QWERTY on it anymore, and I can’t type on it well enough in Colemak-DH, either!
I am not ready to throw in the towel yet. I’m going to try to soldier on with QWERTY this week and see how it goes.