I’m spending this rainy morning listening to jazz and reading The New Yorker.

I enjoyed Jill Lepore’s recent article on burnout in The New Yorker:

Burnout is a combat metaphor. In the conditions of late capitalism, from the Reagan era forward, work, for many people, has come to feel like a battlefield, and daily life, including politics and life online, like yet more slaughter. People across all walks of life—rich and poor, young and old, caretakers and the cared for, the faithful and the faithless—really are worn down, wiped out, threadbare, on edge, battered, and battle-scarred. Lockdowns, too, are features of war, as if each one of us, amid not only the pandemic but also acts of terrorism and mass shootings and armed insurrections, were now engaged in a Hobbesian battle for existence, civil life having become a war zone.

Lepore argues for cultural and economic origins for burnout, which make for a useful lens through which to study the phenomenon. Personally, I think the burnout really is a manifestation of depression, specifically of high-functioning depression coupled with exhaustion. Lepore touches on this, too.

Burnout still feels like its own thing to me, because I experience the feeling at my desk during the work day. Fortunately, I have learned (or am still learning) to slow down and demand less of myself, and of those around me, when I am feeling burnt out.

🎮 I have been very much into playing Good Sudoku again lately. I am trying to master its Pro level, where the puzzles start to get very tricky. I am trying to learn how to spot the Y-wing pattern, but still need to resort to hints quite a lot to find them in the grid.

Today was a good day because I got to spend all morning outside with my kids, and because the family all shared a nice meal together in the evening.

Republicans Block Independent Commission on Jan. 6 Riot. It’s shameful. I don’t think we need an independent commission to know and understand what happened, though. It is no secret what happened. It is no secret what went wrong. Everybody knows who is responsible.

Micro Camp sounds like it will be a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I’ll be traveling during it, so I won’t be able to attend.

I am on Zyrtec, so I don’t get many allergy symptoms anymore, but I think this is the longest and the worst allergy season in many years. I read somewhere, years ago, that climate change leads to increased pollen levels, and I believe it.

I have the day off to spend with the kids today. 😀

The washing machine is installed and running an empty load as a test. After that, it will be deluged with all the laundry that has piled up since our old machine broke. I feel sorry for it.

I am waiting for a new washing machine to be delivered to my house. Let’s just say that my family really needs it ASAP. 😂

I don’t drink that much coffee each day, but I missed my afternoon caffeine dose yesterday and felt completely awful until I had a coffee at dinner time. It was scary! Now I’m looking into strategies to reduce my dependence on caffeine.

🎵 I love the new Bleachers single “Stop Making this Hurt.”

I just learned that I get Friday off as a “bonus holiday” before Memorial Day. Now my schedule is in sync with the rest of my family’s, which is fantastic. I look forward to letting them know at dinner tonight. 😀

I actually achieved all my objectives at work this week. I am still floored by that! 😅

It is starting to get hot outside and it is not even June yet.

Apple support came through for me again this evening. I brought in my iPad Air 4, which appeared to have a faulty region in the screen (it was really minor, but I thought it would get worse over time), and came home with a brand new iPad.

This week, I programmed for many, many hours. Often when I do this, while I wait for builds to complete or unit tests to execute, I pick up my Rubik’s Cube and solve it (or scramble it, if it is already solved). For the past three days, I could not solve my Rubik’s Cube anymore. I couldn’t remember how to do it, and I kept making mistakes even in the earlier portions of my solve. I worried that I had forgotten how to do it overnight, and the implications of that scared me.

Fortunately, I solved the cube again today again without an issue. It was a great relief. I think that I was so deep into technical problems for so long that I lost the plasticity of mind I usually have.

The latest episode of Accidental Tech Podcast has a great discussion about lossless music, which is coming to Apple Music next month.

I am a little too excited to be getting Office 365 installed on my work laptop tomorrow. I have been on Office 2016 for so long it is absurd.

I am going to try to not do any programming today. It has been a huge part of my job lately, and I enjoy getting in the zone when I do it, but it has taken a toll on my body. I have spent way too much time typing, and I feel it in my wrists, forearms, and even my shoulders.

This morning I decided to add one more feature to the app I’m developing for work. Twelve hours of coding later, I have rewritten the entire app, and am just now getting to test if that one new feature is working right. 😅

Google wants to build a useful quantum computer by 2029. If it does, I’m sure it will cancel the project by 2030.

I look forward to reading the 2021 M1 iMac reviews later, even though I will likely never buy that computer. It’s the sort of thing I would want if my family were structured more around, say, a central computing location in the family room or something. We all have iPads instead.

A software update at work pushed out the virtual backgrounds feature for WebEx. Since my home office—at least the part of it that is behind me and not under my control— is a mess, I enabled it.

Sadly, it looks pretty awful. The background mostly leaves a halo around me un-obscured; sometimes it clips portions of my face or shoulder off. I have a very high-end laptop and a “very good” Logitech webcam (all webcams are terrible, I think), so I have concluded that WebEx’s technology is way behind Zoom’s, which does the virtual backgrounds flawlessly. I think I will leave virtual backgrounds on, for privacy reasons, and hope no one minds the weird visual side effects.

I’m up late coding. I have been up late coding many nights in a row now. I’m trying to get some of my projects completed (as much as software can be completed). I feel like I am inching uphill day after day. It’s not a bad feeling, though. I feel peculiarly tenacious lately.