Today my group and I presented on InsurTech to for an industry group’s free training day webinar. It went really well, which I expected because it was our second time making the same presentation. Still, I think that we all improved as speakers. We made our points more clearly and more cogently than we did the first time, and did so with greater focus and energy. We did some ad-libbing, answered some questions from the audience, and covered all of our material with only a minimal amount of rushing at the end. The best feeling for me was that I very much enjoyed listening to my speaking partners as they presented their sections.

Overall, I think the presentation went very well. Human nature being what it is, though, I remember the two very minor vocal stumbles I made during the talk more than the thirty minutes of good performance I put into it. I also second-guess whether my reliance on a script—which I was not reading, per se, but did need to remember my lines—makes my part of the talk sound like I am reading an essay, which could be exhausting to listen to. No one has ever said that to me, but I wonder about it just the same.

Working out what I am going to say out loud has always been part of my process when preparing a talk. Writing it down and editing it to exactly what I would want to say is a newer approach, which I think works out very well. It does, however, lead to an unnaturally efficient way of speaking, where no word is wasted—as long as I can remember my script. The next time I present to a live audience, with less accessible speaker notes and interruptions from the audience to handle, will put my new approach to presentations to the test. At this point in the COVID-19 pandemic, though, my next live presentation will likely be somewhat far in the future.

Over the past week I played through Shantae and the Seven Sirens, which is one of the many games I bought on sale after Thanksgiving.

Once I started it, I realized that I already played part of it. In 2019, it (well, a small part of it) was a launch title on Apple Arcade. At the time, I, like most Apple nerds, got the Apple Arcade free trial. I did not click with Apple Arcade. The only game I liked on it at the time was Shantae and the Seven Sirens. That version was my introduction to the Shantae series. After my Apple Arcade trial ended, I bought the next best thing, Shantae: 1/2 Genie Hero, on the Switch.

Because I had played part of it in 2019, I decided to play it this time using the original 2019 level of difficulty, rather than in the newer “definitive mode” with “balanced difficulty.” That may have been a mistake, because the game posed no challenge at all. Healing items and magic refills abound, and about 20% of the way through you get a heading dance (which is like a magic spell) that makes healing almost entirely unnecessary.

While not challenging, it was a lot of fun. The game has cute and colorful graphics, a funny and entertaining script, snappy controls, and runs smooth as butter on the Switch.

After I beat it, I started a new game under the “definitive mode”. Right away I found it much harder—harder than I expected, to be honest. I will likely play through it again at this higher difficulty setting and see how I fare.

Today I spent the majority of my work day creating a massive Excel template. Tomorrow I will code the data analysis bot that will fill that template with data tables and command logs that document the analytical procedures. Over time, these two days worth of work are going to save me many, many hours.

I have always automated the data analysis part of my job, but never enough of it for my tastes. Although I am not a programmer by trade, I think like one. One of the creeds of a programmer is “don’t repeat yourself.” Sadly, at work, I repeat manual data analysis procedures all the time. Certain parts of my job resisted automation for years. Lots of work I do is ad-hoc and may never be repeated, so it rarely makes sense to automate it fully or to generalize the approach for other data files and projects. Other work I do, like pulling samples, happens all the time. I get fed up when I am performing it the same way, and no better than, how I did it years ago.

I put some though into it earlier this year and discovered that documenting the work, rather than performing it, was the biggest time-waster in my day. Documenting my work in work papers has always taken a very long time. While necessary, it is the least productive time I spend on an analysis project. (In audit, work papers are critical. They support our observations and can be followed, step-by-step, to reperform our work.)

This year, I finally figured out how to create a bot that would not only run a “standard analysis” on a certain type of dataset (that is the easy part for me), but would also document the work in an Excel work paper (that is the hard part). It is not perfect yet, but it has saved me a lot of time over the past six months. I plan to keep working on it, mostly by building new work paper templates and standard analyses, next year and into the future, so that it keeps payment me dividends.

I am presenting my InsurTech slides to a new audience on Wednesday after about a month away from the material. I have to start rehearsing soon. Hopefully it will all come back to me quickly once I look at the slides again.

It puzzles me why the optimal settings for HDR and framerate are not selected by default. I always have to go to the audio/video settings and set the frame rate to “match content”. If I don’t, I get audio drift (lip sync problems). I also learned tonight that I have to set the default video output to non-HDR because the Apple TV menus look terrible in HDR, but then set the HDR setting to “match content.” That’s the sweet spot for me.

The top of the new Apple TV 4K remote looks just like the iPod click wheel. Unfortunately, it does not work anything like one; you can’t slide your thumb around the perimeter to scrub. I don’t get it. It seems like a big missed opportunity to me.

Now that my media- and backup server appears to be running stably, I’m turning my attention to setting up my new Apple TV 4K. Somehow it has remained in its box since I received it on Wednesday. I…don’t watch much TV these days. 😀

Over the past year, my TrueNAS Core server has been bugging me every few months about one of my boot failing. In this case, the boot drives are simply two USB sticks, run in a mirrored configuration. If one fails, the other one handles the load. (The reason I use a USB stick for a boot drive is that my server has an internal USB port for that very purpose, and no other place for the boot drive to go.)

This week, after yet another USB stick failed, I tried to resolve the problem by buying new USB sticks and installing TrueNAS onto them. The OS installs took hours and the server would not reboot. Eventually I discovered that I could buy an SSD drive with the form factor of a USB stick, which is what I have wanted for years. It fits inside my server like a USB stick, but contains a fast, durable SSD drive instead of slow, fragile flash memory. I installed TrueNAS onto it, which seemed to take seconds rather than hours, but I could not boot from it. I spent an hour swapping USB drives and trying to boot the server until it would not boot TrueNAS from any USB drive I had. It was a disaster.

I gave up and installed Ubuntu Server onto the new SSD drive. I knew that Ubuntu supports ZFS now and could import my existing data pool. Luckily, it boots like a champ. After the install, I found some instructions to help me set up ZFS, Samba, and Minio, and—after editing file permissions—everything is set. I didn’t lose any data during the OS switch, but I did mess up my Arm backups when I tried to move them into a new Minio storage location. Luckily, I wasn’t depending on those backups for anything, because my important data is in the cloud and I have backups on Backblaze B2 as well.

I use the NAS daily for media sharing and backups. It takes very little maintenance except once in a while when it becomes a headache and money sink. I sometime wonder if I should go back to having an external hard drive instead, now that 8 TB external hard drives are pretty cheap. The problem with that approach is that external hard drives get hot and die, which happened to me so many times that I bought a NAS.

I will miss running TrueNAS (which used to be called FreeNAS) because I have run it for ten years and used to be really into its FreeBSD underpinnings. Now, all the servers I rely on run either Ubuntu Server or Debian, and I will just have to deal with administering them via SSH rather than via a web page.

I shared the article I wrote to one of my mentors today. He said he loved it and that he would help me get it published in an industry journal. Things are looking up!

I love how Matt Birchler compares crypto to BitTorrent in his latest blog post, “Maybe It’s Just a Product Nobody Wants”:

I don’t think crypto is going to disappear, by the way. I think it will always have a place in the world, but much like bittorrent before it, it was new & exciting, people tried to use it for basically everything, and then it settled into being used for, well, nothing for most people. Blockchains likely have a more prominent future, but there’s a lot of spaghetti being thrown at walls right now, and I think very little of it will stick because it’s not actually making better products.

I’m a crypto skeptic who thinks a lot about blockchain for work-related reasons. I dislike blockchain technologies because I think that, in the real world, they would fail to eliminate trusted intermediaries in financial transactions. Establishing trust without intermediaries is the whole point of blockchain.

I believe people and businesses are too risk-averse to do away with intermediaries like governments (who offer useful things like a legal system and deposit insurance) and the technology providers, agents, and brokers who make business work today. If crypto really takes off, and the old intermediaries are pushed out, I think that new intermediaries will pop up to fill in the gaps left behind. That future—blockchain with trusted intermediaries—is no better than what we have now, and is in many ways worse.

I received a motorized sit/stand desk today for my kids to use in the family room. I assembled the whole thing this afternoon, which was not too hard but took about an hour. Once it was done, I discovered that the left side would not lift. It was a frustrating way to end up. I emailed product support and hope to get some kind of answer. I’m afraid that, no matter what, I’m going to have to disassemble the whole thing to fix it. That will be a pain.

Some days I feel like a hero just because I got dinner on the table and my kids’ homework completed.

Earlier this week I played (twice!) through Gris. It is a beautiful platformer that represents a metaphorical journey of a girl overcoming grief or depression. It is the kind of game that is meant to be an emotional experience rather than a challenge. In fact, it is impossible to lose. What struck me about it is how beautiful it is. The graphics are painterly and the music perfectly fits with the game’s themes and action.

📺 I watched the first few episodes of Hawkeye on Disney+, and that was only because I was on my iPad half the time. I think it is the weakest Marvel or Star Wars series that Disney+ has produced. The plotting is lazy and makes no sense, and at every turn it goes out of its way to undercut and ignore its title character, which is frustrating.

My wife and I had parent-teacher conferences with my daughter’s teachers. My daughter is doing great (which we already knew) and her teachers love her. I am very proud of her.

🎵 I’m enjoying “The Weeknd Essentials” playlist while I work this morning. I have learned to appreciate his music over the past two years. I was familiar with his biggest hits, but I wasn’t sold on his sound until Due Lipa’s “Future Nostalgia” came out and reminded me how cool and sexy modern 80s-inspired R&B can be.

I wonder what specifically happened this week to make “web3” a topic on every tech news site and every tech podcast I listen to.

⌨️ My expensive Planck EZ keyboard with the broken LEDs is being replaced with a new one. The customer service rep is even seeing if I can get it with different keyswitches than it originally came with, to match the set I switched to.

My main (or only) contribution to gift-giving for my kids this holiday season was a biggie: I bought them a multi-function color laser printer. (Don’t worry, my wife bought them a ton of other presents that are a lot more fun.)

I got the idea to buy a color printer because my son’s preschool prints everything in color, and the administrators there said that color printing is phenomenal for kids’ worksheets. Beyond filling out preschool worksheet, my son loves to take photos and to draw. Once he gets a newer iPad I’m sure he’ll draw more electronically and will love the ability to print out his creations in full color. My daughter will likely be printing out book covers. She likes to write and illustrate story books, and a color printer will allow her to do that with even more panache. She also makes lots of presentation slide decks for school, and I thought she might need to print them out to turn them in. It turns out that she submits everything to her teachers electronically, so that use case probably won’t pan out.

I didn’t intend to get a big, multifunction printer, though. I had wanted to buy a color printer, which was much cheaper. Due to the global supply shortage, I had to buy what was available, which meant ponying up for the next model up in the lineup, which includes a scanner, too. It cost a lot of money, and I’m well aware of how much toner and paper are going to cost me each year. I think will be worth it, though, to have a mini print-shop running in the family room from now on. My kids are both very excited to have it. I can’t wait to see what they do with it.

I had a couple dispiriting meetings toward the end of the week that killed the enthusiasm I had for what I have been working on over the past few months. First, one of my co-presenters said he thought that the lack of audience questions during our webinar indicated that everyone in the audience was just playing on their phones while we talked, waiting to collect their CPE credits. Then, later in the week, one of the partners I report to on technology initiatives seemed unenthusiastic about the automation bot I created, which took basically all year to figure out how to do.

I have started to doubt myself again. I am wondering if the presentations I give and the white papers I write are too basic to be useful. Even worse, I am wondering again if my tech skills are not the best fit for my company.

Even outside of work I have felt my creativity drop. I have struggled to think up new ideas to write about or to muster the energy to work on my writing until the ideas start to flow again. I want to start coding a lot more again but have been too tired to get into it almost every night.

What I want is inspiration and energy. What I probably need is a diet, exercise, and more sleep.

In the middle of our Hanukkah celebration tonight my wife got a text that informed us that our son had been exposed to a classmate with COVID a couple days ago. My brother-in-law’s family left immediately because my son and his kids are unvaccinated. (They are all too young.) I’m not concerned that my son is sick (pre-symptomatic) because the rest of us as vaccinated.

My son’s entire preschool class must stay home all next week, due to the exposure rules. My wife and I will have to figure out how to make that work.

The elliptical machine and the treadmill stand proudly in my basement like dusty monuments from a forgotten age.

Tonight I fell asleep in my chair in front of my whole family. I have officially become my dad. 😅

Today, after almost two months of not having any usable time work on it, I finished coding the automation project that has been bedeviling me for half the year. I got over the technical hurdles months ago; all I needed was eight hours uninterrupted, so I could rewrite my code and test it. It took me a long, long time to find that time, but I found it today. It felt great to finally get it working, and even better to remove about half of the code as I optimized it. I am relieved that it is done. I will present it to one of our partners tomorrow, and plan to turn my attention to other things after that.

Today I made my final revision to the article I wrote for my company newsletter. It is an article about Big Data, which is a term that is both readily understandable and has no agreed-upon definition, which I intentionally did not bother to define in the opening paragraph. I was asked to define it anyway, right up front, and to cite it from a source. I did so and ended up with a real head-scratcher of a second sentence. I hated it so much that I ran it by my mentor. He confirmed that the definition I inserted was awful, and he sent me over a paragraph that helped me see a new way to open the essay. I ended up re-writing my first paragraph entirely, and came up with something that I am more proud of.