I don’t journal anymore, and I think…”what am I hiding from myself?”

🎵 I can’t wait to listen to Adele’s upcoming album, 30, which is coming out on the 19th. I have been looking forward to it for weeks.

My wife and I brought her car into the dealer tonight because its passenger-side-mirror lane-checking camera stopped working. I wonder if the global chip shortage is going to make a repair pretty much impossible.

I started playing Shantae on the Game Boy Color last night, and was blown away by its ambition and the technical prowess it exhibits. Although its resolution is indeed very low, it still offers every bit of the charm of the recent Shantae games, along with satisfying gameplay, great music, and fun character designs. It is hard to believe it was written for an 8-bit system, because it exhibits tricks like parallax scrolling backgrounds that I know were possible until the 16-bit era began. It is a gem, and is another reason I’m happy I got into retro gaming this fall.

I gave my presentation today. It went very well. It was all I achieved today, though. As soon as it was over, I couldn’t do anything for the rest of the day.

My next presentation for work is tomorrow morning. I am really looking forward to it. I think I created a solid concept and structure for my team’s talk. I hope good things come of it.

🎮 I beat Metroid Zero Mission tonight. It is a fun game, and much better than the original game (Metroid) that is is a remake of.

When I cut somebody off in an online meeting, I now apologize to the person I spoke over and say “I’m just excited” about whatever it is we are talking about. It may be a lie (because how exciting is my job, anyway?) but I think it is usually appreciated. After I do this, I shut up and listen.

I almost never mean to cut people off in meetings, by the way. I find it hard, especially during conference calls or WebEx meetings, to know who should talk when a question is thrown out to all attendees at once. Sometimes I start talking at the same time someone else does, and I think we both feel embarrassed about it.

Two reasons:

1. Culture. The Puritan work ethic is one of the foundations of our culture, and has been since colonial times. Work is righteous and cleansing to the soul. Of course this is nonsensical, but it is baked into the culture. People are brought up hearing that our ancestors pulled themselves up by their bootstraps (itself a nonsensical idea if you think about it), and that when times get tough we should do the same rather than reach out to others for assistance. This idea can be termed rugged individualism.
2. Economic uncertainty. The US have a poor social safety net, and about half of all voters consistently vote to strip more and more of it away. I have it pretty good, economically speaking, but I feel like I am only a few months away from losing my house if my wife or I lose our jobs and can’t replace it incomes and our health insurance right away. Also, income inequality is such that there is always someone vastly richer than you to compare yourself to. That drives a lot of people to work harder, even though a lot of the very rich inherited their wealth (seed money at least) and/or the connections needed to grow it.

My Instant Pot beef stew came out very well. I didn’t use a recipe; otherwise I would share it. I simply dumped all the ingredients in raw, cooked it under high pressure for 40 minutes, let the pressure naturally, and let it sit on the warm setting for 40 more minutes. It was nearly perfect.

I’m attempting to cook a beef stew in the Instant Pot right now. I’m not sure if it will come out right. I don’t make stew that often, and when I do I usually use a slow cooker or (gasp!) my stove and oven. If it works, though, it could be a game changer for me. I both need to use the Instant Pot more often, to justify its place on my counter, and I need more convenience in my approach to cooking big meals.

One thing I didn’t expect when listening to Taylor Swift’s honest-to-goodness money-grab re-recording of her album Red is how good it is, and how many songs she added to it. Hell, Red (Taylor’s Version), even sounds better. The engineering and production are amazing, and I very much enjoy listening to it on my best speakers and headphones.

Now I am very much looking forward to Swift’s re-recordings of 1989 and Speak Now, which are my daughter’s favorite records. 1989 in particular already sounds fantastic, from an audiophile perspective; that’s going to be a tough act to follow.

🎮 I am enjoying my retro handheld very much. Yesterday I played through Super Mario Land for the first time since the 1990s. I also got through about 50% of Metroid Zero Mission, which I don’t think I ever played before. Some of my enjoyment is nostalgic, but most of it is because I have been playing some fantastic games.

I don’t know what I want for Hanukkah or Christmas. I feel like I’m letting down the people in my family who want to buy me a gift. It makes me sad to think about it.

I have a corner desk that is connected to a second, straight desk, which looks really cool, but is a pain (literally) to use. While it offers me enough space for two desktop computer setups: a necessarily sloppy-looking windows laptop-and-monitor setup for work, and a more streamlined Mac mini-and-monitor setup for home, it causes a lot of problems. The desktop is so high that it puts pressure on my forearms when I use the keyboard, which leads to wrist pain. The desktop on the Mac side is not level and there is no way to adjust it, so the monitor is always tilted slightly, which drives me crazy. The desk drawer and keyboard tray are too low and bang into the top of my legs. Lastly, the keyboard tray, when open, blocks the desk draw, which is super annoying.

There’s a lot more to it than just the desk setup. There are low cabinets and high bookshelves stretching across two walls of my office, all connected into a big L. You can see that it is made up of many different components, but they are all stuck together with no space between the seams. For the past eleven years I thought it was glued together by the house’s prior owners, but my father-in-law pointed out to me tonight that I was mistaken. The furniture is screwed together; it was designed to attach. Therefore, it will be a straightforward (though physically demanding) process to separate it and get it out of my house. I could even keep the bookcases and low cabinets that aren’t bothering me especially, to make room for a new, completely separate desk.

I am relieved to know that something can be done that falls short of hiring a demolition crew to break all this stuff apart and haul it away. I can get rid of the desk portions only, which I didn’t know was possible. That would leave me with 68 inches of space for a new desk. It will be more difficult to figure out how to accommodate both my Mac and PC setups, with all the USB peripherals and so on, but that is a problem that technology and money can probably solve.

In college, one of my humanities professors, Prof. Klein, told me that genius is being able to look at the same things everybody else does but see something different. She told me a story to illustrate:

One time she had company at her house—a friend and her kids—and they needed to find a place for three little kids to sleep for the night. There was only one bed, but it was a queen-sized bed, which she thought would only suit up to two people. The friend, however, knew right away that it would work. The friend realized that, because kids are short and small, they could be fit onto the bed, just not in the normal, expected way. The friend put three pillows on one side of the bed, arranged down the long way. Then she adjusted the sheet and blanket so they opened up on the side of the bed where she had put the pillows. Then the three kids slept in that bed, arranged sideways, and had plenty of room.

I always appreciated the simplicity of this story.

One fun thing I did with my daughter tonight is to compare the slide decks we are developing. I’m working on an InsurTech presentation for work, and she created a Civil Rights & Women’s Suffrage presentation for school. I think it’s fun for her to see that we are doing a similar thing.

Tonight I walked her through the concept of a build slide using one I created for my talk next week. On a build slide, the content pops in one element at a time, which allows you to step the audience through a step-by-step process without overwhelming them by showing all the steps up front. (If overused or distractingly animated, build slides are annoying. Judiciously used, they can be very effective.)

I also showed my daughter how I use different and varied visual layouts to make my slides visually appealing. I showed her that good slides tend to have only a few things on them—six or fewer, usually. I tried to explain how to incorporate icons with text, but my business-y examples of icons meant nothing to her, so I don’t think she grasped it.

She was most impressed to see that I write a lot of text in the speaker notes section, which is displayed below the slides. She said that they didn’t teach her to write speaker notes in school, which surprised me a little, because she is giving live presentations, not just turning in completed slide decks.

I use speaker notes extensively because I prefer to script my talks and revise the scripts as I rehearse them out loud. That process helps me cover my points in as few words as possible. It also helps me fit the words to my mouth, which is how I describe editing my text to sound more natural when I say it.

By the time I’m done, I have practically memorized the script, so I do not have to read it, and it feels very natural to say what I have prepared. That method requires writing skills that are beyond the fourth grade level, I’m afraid, but hopefully my daughter will be ready to learn how I do it someday.

I have been writing for an hour and forty five minutes tonight and have come up with, maybe, one paragraph of useful text for the Big Data/Data Calls article I am writing for work. I am not blocked. I am not distracted. I am pushing sentences around like a kid pushing peas around on a plate. The right way to connect my ideas and my sentences together is just not coming. Time to bail—at least for tonight.

One of my coworkers called me today and, before talking about business, he praised me for my presentation skills, based on presentations I gave weeks ago. 😊

This is my music find of the week.

I asked my Amazon Echo speaker to play “cool music” while I was making dinner and had no idea what I wanted to listen to. (I was hungry and tired, and couldn’t even name an artist of a genre at that point.) Alexa starting playing a “Cool Jazz” radio station on Apple Music, and it was actually perfect background music for making and eating dinner. Now I have an alternative to “lo-fi hip hop” which the rest of my family hates. (OK, to be fair, my kids hate the jazz music too.)

Writing for three hours at night sure makes me hungry. It’s nearly 11 PM. Do I risk eating a snack so late? How could I even avoid it?

One of the disheartening but more interesting things you learn in business school is that most of the growth in the stock market can be attributed to inflation. That’s why I’m not that excited that my retirement portfolio has been growing quickly lately as the stock markets keep reaching new highs. I know that there’s a catch. Those dollars aren’t worth as much, and that’s part of the reason that markets are rising.

My wife and I started watching The Americans this weekend. We stumbled upon it when browsing Amazon Prime Video. It’s good to have something to watch on Prime Video, because it is criminally underutilized in my house. The last thing I watched on it was Invincible and I don’t even remember how long ago that was.

Looking back on last week, I played a lot of video games. A lot more than usual actually. It’s a sort of thing I do when my brain is so tired I can’t do anything else, not even focus on a TV show. I have been working really hard writing system walkthroughs or performing data analysis during the day, and working on a presentation and an article for publication in my company’s newsletter during the evenings. I realized that I have been staving off mental exhaustion by escaping into the world of Pokémon or Metroid in the late night hours before I go to bed. This might keep happening for the next few weeks. It is an absolute sprint for me until December 3, I’m afraid. At least at the end of the year we get the last week off.

🎮 I finally beat Metroid Dread! I thought it would be impossible, but I persevered. What a cool game!