I have been working all evening on my InsurTech presentation and totally blew through my self-imposed blogging deadline. No worries. My mind was engaged and my time was well spent.

I mailed in my request for a mail-in ballot for all future elections. (My state has an off-year election cycle for state-wide offices, so this is timely.) I did not do so before because I had thought it would be better to take my kids to the polls to show how voting works. I realized that I can also do that from home. Really, we should all be voting by mail. It would expand the franchise, and give us more time to consider the down-ballot candidates, like school board members, who are not covered by the media and can have a direct affect on our lives in ways that governors and presidents cannot.

My daughter’s iPad wont take system updates because over a third of its storage space is taken up by “Other”, which I cannot delete. Hooking it up to my Mac and doing the update from the Finder is working a treat. Who knew?

🎮 I have been loving the new Metroid game and it has been kicking my ass. 😂 It is the toughest and most fun game I’ve played since Hades and Hollow Knight.

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 spent some time today trying to set up my new Retro handheld gaming system. I flashed ArkOS on it and copied some games over. I had to find YouTube videos to help me configure it correctly. I hope to figure it out well enough to give the cool, inexpensive handhelds to my kids someday.

This video from University of California Television hit close to home (literally) for me:

Follow a team of UCLA anthropologists as they venture into the stuffed-to-capacity homes of dual income, middle-class American families in order to truly understand the food, toys, and clutter…

Watching this video was like watching a newsmagazine segment about my own house.

My house is a mess, my kids won’t pick up their toys and have taken over the entire house, and I spend so much tome tidying the same few messes every day that I can’t seem to move forward on any projects that would actually make my home better.

It turns out that I am not alone, and that the problems I have with my living space are uniquely American and uniquely modern. My wife and I are trying to crack this problem, and talked about it at length tonight. We are going to try a couple new things to crack it, though I am not sure they will work.

Today’s new MacBook Pro models are the first in a very long time that seem too “pro” for me. Their processor specs make my M1 Mac mini—which is fantastic—seem pretty pathetic by comparison. I’m not in the market for a new machine, but I look forward to reading the reviews.

After a long time it feels great to be a Mac user again, because there are really good products up and down the line.

I was very excited early this month for the release of Metroid Dread so I watched a bunch of videos on YouTube of gamers playing through classic Metroid games. Eventually the YouTube algorithm led me to learn about retro handheld devices. These are emulators that can play games from many older systems. I quickly got obsessed with them and ordered one, an Anbernic RG351MP, despite my history of not really liking many of the classic games available on my Nintendo Switch. So, it may be a waste of money, or something I can eventually give to one of my kids, or it will be something I really love. I am looking forward to setting it up, tweaking its firmware, and playing some classic games.

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 learned about something new today from three separate podcasts I listened to, and a New York Times article I stumbled upon: popularism. It’s an idea that David Shor wrote about that apparently boils down to this: To win voters, Democrats should talk about what is popular rather than focus on racial tensions, identity politics, and calls to dramatically alter government and social systems (“defund the police,” for example, would be out).

What I wondered about this idea is this: Who determines what is popular? What if what is popular is not good? Plenty of popular ideas are amoral and destructive. Isn’t having principles, and now bowing to public pressure, valued in American politics, too? Or is that just posturing?

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.

My wife and I have been watching Sex Education season three. True to its title, the show actually does weave sex education into its stories and strives to impart sensible information to its audience.

In one of the episodes, a trans student acts completely confused about which of the two sex–specific (boys and girls) sex education classes that the school’s new, conservative principal set up that they should attend. Because the trans character is new to the show, this scene seemed like a zeitgeisty political statement that the show’s writers crammed in, rather than a story beat that grew organically out of the characters and themes of the show.

In this scene, I thought that the trans character was being obtuse. After all, gender isn’t sex. Bodily organs are not identities. I would imagine a transgender person would understand that better than I would. I thought that the character should just go to one class or the other without making a political statement about it. I’m sure the character could just blow off the class without coming to any harm.

My wife and I discussed this scene after the episode was over. I was annoyed by the scene’s apparent politicism, but came to a conclusion about it that probably aligns with the trans character’s thoughts: Segregated boy/girl sex-ed is pointlessly gendered. Bodies have sexual organs, both external and internal. It would be good to know how they work, whichever ones you have. In fact, because of this, it makes sense to teach everybody, all together, how everybody’s sexual organs work and how reproduction works, too (pregnancy, childbirth, the whole thing). Perhaps that isn’t done because kids are too immature to handle it. I bet, though, that it isn’t done because adults are too embarrassed to do it.

One of the more memorable books I read in college was assigned to me in comparative literature class: Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly. It is an exploration of human folly, written during the Renaissance by Erasmus, who was a philosopher and theologian, as an elaborate inside joke for his friend, Sir Thomas More. Folly is personified as a particularly vain goddess who praises herself (which is itself folly) for all of the great joys and accidental discoveries that folly brings to our lives.

It was memorable to me because, while folly is ubiquitous, it was something that was almost never well explored in my English-major coursework. (It was discussed in my Shakespeare courses when it came to Bottom and Fallstaff, but that is about it.) Little did I know when I was a twenty-year-old college student that understanding and appreciating that I, too, would be capable or folly, succumb to folly, and see folly in others on a daily basis. Life experience, far more than schooling, has taught me that folly is inevitable and inescapable in life, for both good and for ill. As Erasmus’s essay cheekily suggests, if folly is inevitable, you might as well find something to enjoy in it.

My folly, as a very young adult reading Erasmus for the first time, was thinking that adult life, which I was heading into apace, was going to make sense once I got there.

I have been practicing typing on Colemak-DH on my Planck keyboard regularly all week, after a two week hiatus. Keybr still has not enabled more than the initial six letters in its typing practice. It assesses my confidence on each key, and it still is not high enough for me to move on to the next letter.

It is slow going, even though I have memorized the layout 95% at this point. Looking at my history on the site, however, shows me that I have improved greatly since I started. I keep going, little by little, each day. I tonic it will be worthwhile in the end. The layout makes so much sense to me on my little ortholinear board, because with it I barely have to move my hands to type, which is pretty cool.

I never knew there was an ISO standard for numbering document sections. I kind of love it and kind of hate it.

I am the sort of person who developed a deep preference for the ISO 8601 date format, so it may be inevitable that I end up adopting it.

🎮 Metroid Dread is really fun. I spent a couple hours on it last night. It is really fun. It is weird not having the morph ball right from the start, though, and you pretty much have to figure out wall jumping is possible on your own.

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.