I was so tired this afternoon that i couldn’t talk good (er…) and stuff at my last meeting today. Thankfully it was not a meeting with a client. 😅

💉💪 I scheduled my COVID-19 booster shot appointment. I hope to be able to vaccinate my kids soon, too.

I have thought so many Big Thoughts about the InsurTech presentation I am working on that I have come full circle. I realized today that what I have built thus far contains pretty much the same information and ideas as my prior presentations on the topic, going back four or five years.

I think my current presentations slides and speaker notes are much better, and that the talk will be have better focus and clarity, but I am surprised at how much I want to say seems to be recycled from what I already had thought about the topic.

I started off trying to say something new. I hope that saying something old, but saying it better, counts for more than I think.

I have been diligently working on my InsurTech webinar slide deck this evening. I was so locked in the zone that I forgot about everything else for the last four hours. I completed 20 slides, which is probably about half of the slides I will end up creating entirely. My presentation team partners will be creating the rest.

I don’t have enough time to make my slides look perfect, which is unfortunate. While I have one good visual that I build up throughout the section, most of the images on my slides are just floating out there next to my text, instead of being full-bleed across the slide or otherwise better integrated with my ideas. At least I am using whitespace instead of bullets.

I have tons of different “extra-curricular” projects right now, mostly for my job, but also to satisfy my own desire to build, develop, and share. I have systems projects, programming projects, presentations, and a white paper to write. This is on top of my normal job and home life, and my desire to read a book or play Metroid Dread sometimes, too. I have started to break down each project into discrete tasks, and plan for only the next couple. I know my deadlines, but I don’t have hours and hours in a row to work on any of these things. I think this is the way forward. I don’t want to stress myself out when everything becomes due.

Tonight I started preparing a slide deck for a presentation on the topic of InsurTech that I, and a couple coworkers, will present online next month. I presented on InsurTech several times before, dating all the way back to 2017. This time is different, however, because I have leveled up my presentation skills. I am excited to get the chance to present again, and am embracing the opportunity to find something new to say about technology, insurance, and investments.

This year I have been presenting so much more than I ever have before. One reason, I think, is that we are not doing training in person due to the pandemic. I hope we keep doing webinars; they could be one of my specialities going forward.

It’s my birthday today. My in-laws bought me dinner and my wife baked and decorated a delicious birthday cake for me (her best one yet, I think). I am now in a post-cake coma, and will be taking the rest of the night off.

A few weeks ago, prompted by a flare-up or RSI pain in my wrists and forearms, I moved my keyboard and trackball from my desk (which is a corner desk that is apparently too high for me) to a siding drawer beneath my desktop. Now I have to sit almost a foot further away from where the monitor was, which necessitated moving my monitor forward almost to the edge of my desk. Overall, the change has been beneficial to my RSI (I stopped using a wrist rest for the first time ever), but it ruined everything else.

Now I have no room on my desk for my stuff, can no longer reach my speakers or headphone amp well enough to use them, and, because my trackball is taller than the depth of the keyboard drawer, I can’t close my keyboard drawer. The always-open keyboard drawer interferes with my main desk drawer where I keep my headphone cables. I stopped listening to music at my desk, which brings me joy, anymore because the setup is unworkable. Also, my desktop is a mess now because the monitor is in a stupid place, and I have no place for my iPad, my computer headset, or anything else.

I need a new and different setup, but that is almost impossible for me to get right now. All my current home office furniture came with my house, is glued together, and takes up two entire walls of the room, so it will take some heavy lifting, literally and financially, to make any changes.

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.

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.

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?

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. 😅

I have been emotionally exhausted from all the deep conversations I’ve been having with my daughter this weekend—mostly on account of dealing with bad behavior rather than with her wanting to sit and learn at her father’s knee.

I am not upset about these talks—I think I am good at this stuff, and firmly believe that it is my responsibility as a parent to shape my children into good, well-adjusted people—but it does take a lot of energy out of me by the end of the day. Whoever claims parenting shouldn’t be a verb is either not a parent, a lousy one, or a damn liar.

On Thursday I embarked on an ambitious project related to my job. I am writing a white paper based on the presentation I wrote earlier this year, with the goal to publish it—or articles based on it—in an industry journal. It’s about how to do a certain type of project that I specialize in at work. That’s a topic I know a lot about, but have lacked the confidence to understand that it really is something valuable. By communicating my ideas to others in my presentation, I have realized that I really am knowledgeable about the area I work in, and that I have valuable ideas that I can share.

I am writing and editing somewhat furiously now (for me—I’m not an author) on my Mac and on my iPhone (thanks, Ulysses). I can’t stop. It is great to feel excited about and energized by a writing project again. I credit my daily writing habit on my blog for giving me the confidence to tackle a bigger writing project again. Writing something like this is no sweat for me. After all, I write for publication every day.

I have been working at a more measured pace to increase accuracy at work. Hope no one notices in a bad way that I am spending more time on some tasks, because I am double-checking more thoroughly than before.

On Saturday, my nine-year-old daughter hosted a pasta party for the family that she had been planning for weeks. She created invitations that listed a schedule full of activities. She also created a menu of four different types of pasta (spaghetti, ziti, farfalle, and elbows), homemade meatballs, homemade bread, and for dessert, chocolate pudding and homemade shortbread. My wife, my mother-in-law, and I cooked. During the party, my daughter led us through telescope painting and decorating (the telescopes were paper towel rolls) and a pasta parade (we walked around the block while my kids held toy pots). After dinner, she gave each of us a goodie bag containing a thank you note and a ten-page short story that she wrote about making a new friend. She worked so hard on everything, it brought tears to my eyes. I am very proud of her.

Tomorrow is my daughter’s first day of school—in-person school—since March 2020. Thinking about the sleep schedule changes this will require for all of us has been nerve-wracking all day. Remote learning and remote work have, for the last year and a half, given all of us in my family an extra hour of sleep every night. Because my daughter and I are all night owls, it will be impossible for us to make up the lost sleep. We will just have to adapt to getting less, I’m afraid, and the transition will be difficult.

After getting very upset at our daughter’s elementary school’s plan for lax COVID safety protocols announced during a webinar last night, she woke up at 4 AM this morning and wrote impassioned emails to the superintendent of schools, the school board, and the principal. She emailed and talked to other teachers at the school, our rabbi, our pediatrician, and her doctor friend to ask for advice. She and I seriously talked about disenrolling our daughter and home schooling her. After a lot of thought, though, we decided that we have to accept more risk than we are really comfortable with, for the sake of our daughter’s mental health. It was a stressful day, and we did not get what we wanted, but I am proud of all the effort that my wife put in to try to push for something better.

As for me, my main contributions today were cogent conversation and homemade chicken noodle soup, fresh baked bread, and salad.

I didn’t get everything I wanted to do done this week. I’m OK with that. Life intervened. Stressful things came and went. I did right by my family each day. That has to be the most important thing. It’s time for a holiday weekend and then Rosh Hashanah. Onward.

My daughter’s elementary school will not require masks if the outside temperature is 75°F or over. They said that means masks will effectively not be worn on classrooms for the entire month of September, and probably through October as well. In general, the COVID measures are based on outdated conjectures about how the disease is spread, and will be ineffective against an airborne pathogen. My wife wants to pull our daughter out of school. I’m not sure what the right call is, because I’m not sure how to quantify the risk or be sure about what would be equitable for my daughter.

My caffeine experiment is almost at its end. For the past week, I have only drunk decaffeinated coffee. One funny thing I noticed is that decaf coffee is not nearly as disappointing when you are no longer addicted to caffeine.

My caffeine free (or almost free) lifestyle thus far has left me with no downsides: my energy level is just fine all day. I am not tired at all during work hours, and I no longer desperately crave an afternoon coffee each day. I do fall asleep earlier at night and more easily, which is a benefit. Instead of not being able to sleep until 2 A.M. most nights, I am ready to turn in by midnight, and sometimes even earlier, which puts me more in sync with my wife.

All in all, after a rocky start with three days of withdrawal symptoms, my experiment has been a success.

We stayed at the beach until it got dark tonight, which was a first for us. We like to go at dinner time and stay until dusk. It is quieter and cooler then. Sunset was pretty, if a bit subdued compared to the last couple times we have gone. This time, I brought my camera, though.