First time at Forecastle

Thanks to volunteering for the Denny Crum Foundation, I got to spend some time at Forecastle. Having known nothing, this is what I would tell myself in the future:

There is plenty of space if you’re willing to not be near the music. Shade can be found
Sunscreen, definitely.
Bring an empty water bottle or Camel Bak (or buy a souvenir)
Bring a thing to cover up your nose and mouth if you’re at a dusty stage.
Yes you can bring a backpack.
I personally did a Lyft in, can also bike in, and I’m sure that parking garages within 15-30 minutes walking distance were available.
Lots of food choices
Pay $10 for 10 tickets to the Bourbon lodge, and use their A/C and better restrooms. Hang on to one ticket as a way to get back in whenever.
People were very nice!

What I would expect to pay for a day:

$65-ish for a day pass.
$20 for a meal. So $40 for two, Lunch and Dinner. That’s assuming you love food like me and don’t just get one thing. (LOTS of food choices omg)
$10 for the Bourbon lodge (or spend $30 for the mug if you are there multiple days) for the better bathrooms and occasional AC relief
$15-$40 in parking / Lyft
$10 for a fancy water bottle souvenir
??? for alcohol, sorry, i didn’t do that.
$20 for a locker with charging.
Grand total: $170 for a day.
I probably wouldn’t go for VIP the first time around. Granted, I didn’t see the VIP areas, and maybe for headliner bands you’d want VIP to get close. But for a first-timer who doesn’t know any bands, I wouldn’t.

What I would pack in my bag / on my person, assuming its not raining:

Sunscreen
Hat/Cap
Bandana / face guard
Shades
Favorite water receptacle
TP, hand sanitizer
Wallet (only need ID and card and cash)
Cellphone
Battery pack and cable (if not getting the locker)

I would dress in:

Cargo shorts with at least 1 zipper pocket
Athletic moisture wicking shirt
Sandals or Sliders – best for sweat control. (but I’m pretty good at walking in those, you may want to upgrade to shoes for lots of walking)

============

I had a blast. I stood in the shade, and old-man-danced, and carded people and lovingly put wristbands on them.

Standard line: “1973 .. Great year!” “Why?” “Because you were born!”. (watch person melt)

I could hear music from two stages from the Bourbon tent, and it was some good stuff. Jonathan Israel worked tirelessly .. 13 hours each day on his feet .. directing the volunteers and being the guy to direct all awkward questions to. Once I learned the 3-5 pieces of info that people needed to know, it was very easy to engage my inner extrovert.

Will definitely do again. July 13-15, 2018.

Miscellany 17.7.0?

Sometimes, I feel like I’m failing this blog. This blog was supposed to highlight all the awesome new stuff I was learning .. on my job, mostly.

That is not what I’ve learned from, lately.

Its only been 15 days or so since my last miscellany post. In those last 15 days, my work has been:

Images and CSS and javascript, small changes.
“Why did X happen?” .. let me check the source code that we didn’t write .. trace it through 3-4 layers … here’s why that happened. Your options are A,B,C.
How to route network cables neatly (Actually.. this is huge. My 20yo self wishes he knew this).
Lots about door security systems. I might have covered that in another post.

The rest of life has been interesting –

Refining my Rubik’s Cube skills. I’m considering memorizing the Ortega method. It brings back some magic.
Arranging a Disc Golf outing with some friends. Researching form, practicing, getting better at it. We have 3 courses to choose from!
After way too long off, went out for a run again .. this time in FitKicks. 2 miles. Maybe not such a good idea, i think i need a size smaller maybe. Next race in less than 2 weeks!
Considering signing up for the triple crown and Derby Half-marathon for 2018. Because Goals. Also, a membership to the YMCA.
My grandson does just about anything and I melt.
Bose QC35 Headset. Forking expen$ive, but yet… the best tool for its job? I was in a loud urban environment, and I could participate on a conference call without any problems. Connecting to two devices at the same time really works for me (laptop + phone), and .. I find myself no longer dreading phone calls. I’d rather do a phone call with these on than any other way. Here’s a negative review for some contrast.
Mozza Pi – new place in Anchorage. Worthy of a visit. They’re not open for dinner yet, want to get their process honed before they ramp up.

I’m getting pretty excited – past the 50% mark on studying for the AWS Solution Architect Associate exam. The last course on VPC’s really dialed in some stuff that I was wondering about.

I don’t know that I’m going to get any time for my personal projects .. not for a while. I think “exercising my body” has taken over for the summer. And that’s okay.

Cheers

Miscellany 17.6

Busy busy .. we’ve had a house getting interior painted, and interior carpeted, and most of my home time has been spent tearing down and putting things back. Not much time for projects.

At work, though, several new skills. I’ve done a lot more infrastructure stuff, which has included:

SSL stuff

Dealing much more with SSL certs. I now know PFX vs CRT vs PEM vs CSR, etc. I had to rekey a cert because the person who requested it didn’t know how to get me the private key they used, and .. AWS Elastic Beanstalk builds CPU’s on the fly, so you have to shove the PFX in after the build.
Using openssl to move these things around.. running from bash under ubuntu under windows, the official one.

Building and Network stuff

Dealing with a Card / Fob / PIN system for building access. They break it down to:

The doors (and readers)
The “timezones” (actually sets of T1..T2 timeslots unioned together)
The Access Levels, which are a combo of DOOR: (Readers) x Timezones
The card, which is a union of Access Levels
And there’s other shit like multi-panel transfers, and web admin accounts, and stuff.

Helping with an office move .. odds and ends. I’m the backup to the main sysop.
Figuring out easy ways to do patch cable management. And cleaning up cables in general. My 20-y-o self would squirm, but I finally have the patience now at 45. Or am I 46? I forget.

AWS Stuff

The learning curve continues. 40% of the way through the course. I’m delaying taking quizzes till several days after listening to the material, to verify that I’m doing things from long term storage.
I really want to program with the stuff, but that’s not my scope right now.

Billable Work

Nothing terribly exciting. Except the ones in bold. Its been a splattering of things —

SSL Certs in an AWS EB site
MVC website carousel updates
Tracking down why some stuff blew up (in code we didn’t write)
Some lost source code. Decompilation to the rescue! Updated some SQL that has started to fail.
Some .Net custom code for Peak21 ERP system – testing and rewriting and proving that an API was broken.
Oracle ERP system moves, changing connection strings and testing things
Adding Fedex shipping to a website instead of UPS, via Shippo. Some refactoring to get things more configurable.
Using Feature flags a lot more, because that way the code can get out there, and then await other configuration to catch up. FSGD!

This deserves a full callout. https://leankit.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/2015.08-FSGD-Webinar1.pdf

My biggest challenge is not feeling rushed, feeling the weight of everything in my list bearing down on me, along with the craziness of learning things on the fly.

Changing Schedules

I’m trying to wake up earlier .. so that I can spend time at Starbucks .. do a little journaling, keep track of bills and fiscal transactions, write an email to my recovery sponsor.. start my day off right. Hit rate: 60%. Benefit: 200%.

Diet Experiments

https://www.jimmyjoy.com/products/plenny-shake is delicious. It does clean me out a bit, but the energy curve on it is nice and stable. When I’m on it, I crave sugar way less.. I get full faster. I will be reordering it. Tastes way better than soylent, IMO.

Running

Two 5k’s done.. several more to go. I have heart rate, date, and pace information .. should make for an interesting plot.

Home Office Organization

I made an inventory of stuff, and sorted it by: Visibility, Usage, Importance, Replacement value, Sentimentality. And used that to figure out what went on which shelves, etc, and what to release.

That’s it for now. I expect my world might clear up a bit around July.

Its been forever.. here, lets watch some ice melt.

One of my gifts to our life was a GE Opal Nugget Ice Maker.

I was curious how stale the Ice could get. So I timelapsed it. Here it is, from about 6am to about 11pm:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G6I-FdJVZI]

My guess is that its loosing maybe 1/3 volume in about 12 hours. So maybe 36 hours for a full refresh of ice?

In other news:

I finished up a session with Code Louisville .. several unlisted videos from that. May make them public in the future.
I’ve transitioned over to covering maintenance tasks at work – and figuring out my tooling for capturing that flow:

I’m also trying out using a google group in “shared inbox” mode to capture requirements naturally from emails
I’ve got a zapier zap for converting emails into cards on the above board.
I ran more than 2 miles for the first time in 2 years or so!
We as a family tried to go without an internet connection at home, and we only lasted about 2 weeks.

I’m hoping that my schedule has cleared up a bit..

At first, I barely had time to take care of just the emergencies, I had left myself no time to breathe with all my projects / commitments
Now, the last 3 nights, I’ve had options of what to do with my time.. and I’ve mostly been catching up, decompressing, regaining my humanity
I’m promising NOTHING (that’s how I get into trouble), but just writing this blog post .. feels like I’m coming back to an equilibrium of some sort.

Inventory of Projects

I’ve been meaning, for a while, to put together a spreadsheet of the (software) projects I’ve worked on in my life so far. The sheer number of them is staggering.

The thought was I could put in enough columns so that .. an interesting taxonomy could emerge.

Its also one of those things where, I never thought the list would get so large that I couldn’t remember them, but.. here I am. I guess 26 years of paid experience will do that to a person.

I Started It

I tried to do that for a bit – here’s what I got:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19ivowzqQJiPrMVk8rAfHbZ-cf_G6tqmQAzqYIW1sc00/edit#gid=0

The columns I have so far are:

Name
Year(s) – turns out some of them extended over multiple years.
Employed by + Project For – working at igNew, my project was for a client other than my employer. But before that, these were the same.
Implementation Details – this was pretty hard, to figure out what columns to use:

Language – Its mostly C#, but if I go back far enough there’s some Java, Perl, Clipper, etc as well.
UI – technologies related to UI stuff
DB Backend – technologies related to database stuff
Host Platforms – I was trying to figure out how to say Asp.Net MVC vs a Windows Service.
Additional Technologies – I think maybe EF + Dapper need to move to DB column

Management Details

SCM used.. this feels like an unnecessary column, who would ever want this info?
Unit Testing / Mock framework – if sorted by start year, can see how this becomes important
Integration Testing – as I think this is super important, putting it out in its own column.
CI/Build strategy – or lack of it – how we went about running the project

Project Management Details

Roles

Engineer = “thought about how to do it” + “did it”
Lead Engineer = “mostly all me”
Project Manger = “updating the Burndown” + “Communicating estimates + schedule”
Ops Support = “things broke in Prod. Figure it out.”

Slices – If I worked with a team of people, then these are the bits that I worked on.
Proud Of – this is probably the best part of looking back.
Coworkers + Contacts – I’m going to have to go look up many names for Contacts.

What Now?

There are so many projects! I put down 11 tonight, I think the list of paid things is.. probably in the 40’s? 1-3 per year, depending on role, and then add in another 30-40 of fun things?

I guess I could make a list of all the projects I could think of first .. vertically .. going through each Job.

I could (and will!) also add in all the for-fun projects that I’ve done.

But Why?

Simply put, this is to battle Imposter syndrome. Also, in my job, I’m undergoing a role shift – where I’m taking on more Ops and Maintenance type work – it feels like a good time to look back at my career as a software developer and take some stock of what I’ve accomplished so far.

The other part of it is, … my resume. I don’t need one at the moment, but every time people talk about keeping a resume updated … the level of detail involved … gives me anxiety. So the thought is, if I have this spreadsheet out there – my resume can become more of “who I am” and “what I care about” and shove all the detail crap to this spreadsheet.

Time Inventory: 1 week in February

After listening to https://www.relay.fm/cortex/44, I decided to do another round of time-tracking. I had done this twice before —

https://geekygulati.com/2012/06/28/where-did-my-time-go/

https://geekygulati.com/2014/06/04/time-use-may-2014/

This time, I used a new tool, https://www.toggl.com/app/timer. More on that below.

Results

My time is evenly spent working, and sleeping, and “everything else”.
Everything else – “entertainment” (youtube, twitter) took the most time.

This is a direct reaction to the political climate right now – this was me staying glued to my versions of news sources, to get a feel for “what’s going on out there”. Not necessarily healthy.

Then Family, and being around other people
Then Admin, which is chores and self-care thing.

Not too bad. The “Entertainment” is too large, but otherwise, this feels solid.

The way that I tracked it this time, if I was driving to work, that was “work” time, but tagged with driving. So, I could narrow down to just the “driving” tag and see where all I was driving on the behalf of:

As expected, most of the driving was to work. My 30 minute commute is represented accurately.
Lots of driving for “social” reasons – to have breakfast or lunch with friends.
Recovery and Teaching are next – also good.
Nevertheless, 9.5 hours in a car during the week. Of those 9.5 hours, 3 hours were logged as “listening to a podcast”.

I don’t always want to listen to a podcast when I’m driving. Sometimes, I prefer silence.

I also spent 11 hours and 13 minutes engaged in “eating”:

Thanks to notes, I can see what I was eating, and who I was eating with.
I spent around 2 hours eating by myself (at my desk, or drive through).
The rest of the time was split between friends, coworker-friends, and my family.

Toggl

I did NOT like it. For the purposes of doing 24 hour coverage, it was NOT easier to use than Eternity (an iPhone App). However, it was definitely better at reporting.

Specific reasons of dislike:

Starting a timer on the phone, then stopping it on a computer – timer kept going on the phone, throwing things off.
Very hard to adjust things AFTER the fact. In Eternity, it has “locked” times so adjusting end of one thing adjusts the start of the other, etc. With a calendar display where i could just slide times around, rather than having to enter every digit. twice.
Gap detection only possible using the website client. And then, when I detect a 6 hour gap from 4 days ago… it took way too many clicks to try to get time entered.

I would say Toggl is more directed at business-type things – not personal enthusiast things. And that’s fine.

Changes to consider for the Future

I need to get my Youtube / Twitter / News intake, more under control.

We might be doing another experiment – getting rid of internet at our house – and I might be downloading “what do I want to watch” to my iPad while at work, and further delaying what I watch.
I think I overkilled with watching Colbert + Noah + the other guy. I think I’ll rank Trevor Noah at the top for me, I don’t need to see all 3 folks’ interpretations of what happened that day.

I have to get exercise back in there somehow. I don’t yet know how. Probably less being social? Combine it with family? Here kid, let me strap you in to my chest and run on a treadmill.
I didn’t do much (any) cooking this week. Previous weeks, I had 6 hours of cooking in there – at least. However, that’s also quality family time for me.
I also need more personal, not-scheduled, do-whatever type time. Places where my creative side can come out. Like writing this blog post.

Good news – I have a week of vacation next week. Help me juggle and resize things and try to come up with a plan.

Levels of Being Freaked Out

The events playing out at the airports freaked me out over the last few days.

I realized that my security instinct was kicking in – I’m not directly threatened – but my instinct is still kicking in. Okay, acknowledged.

I started thinking about all the “threats” that my system was reacting to, and .. after sharing them with my sponsor, realized, I could zoom out and get a perspective.

Here is my perspective (click to zoom in):

Specifically, there are two sub-sections which I need to zoom in on:

This is the “well, either things will go to shire or they won’t, and as much as I can figure, I should take actions to affect the outcome, and me harm none.” branch.

Secondly:

This is the “catastrophic failure of society” branch.

I had to think pretty hard about the green arrow – this is related to me choosing to arm myself or not (in a way). There’s a subset of “short term society crash” vs “long term society crash” where my answers are different – I think I would arm myself to “keep my peace and order” until society order is restored. I don’t know about long term crash.

Okay, good. I have a framework in which to rest my fear.

Now What?

Society hasn’t folded, so I guess I’m at “Discern Actions” stage. There’s actually more to it than that:

Awareness

This is the tumultuous part. This is when the inputs that are coming in the eyeballs cause discord in the brain. Best thing I can do at this point:

Don’t shut down, let it in. Need information for the next stage, knowledge of what is going on.
(at least not me) don’t react in indignation. Indignation may be short term good for my emotions, but its not a long term strategy. Good news: plenty of other people to carry the indignation immediate action torch for me.

Acceptance

This is the point where one has a decent enough perspective of what’s going on, that one understands the system that is in play. Now the better vs worse actions are visible.

Action

Act without expecting outcomes.

Thats all I have for now.

Blue Apron: roasted cauliflower pitas

Made my 3rd of 6 Blue apron meals (last shipment arrives Tuesday). It went rough, but I figured out some things:

Definitely check out the recipe online: https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/roasted-cauliflower-pitas-with-purple-potatoes-spiced-yogurt

They have little videos showing easier ways to do things – like – peeling carrots. Helps with the overwhelm as well.

Print out the recipe from online. I did a photocopy of the recipe in black and white and crossed things out as I went, if I had printed it out, it would have been easier to read.
Get appropriately sized bowls for everything ahead of time.
I probably need more salt and pepper. I swear .. put in the taters. salt and pepper. add oil. salt and pepper. remove and put in bowl add lemon. salt and pepper.
Lock the camera down with magnets (or use a better camera). However, dropcam is so convenenient .. just do stuff and create the timelapse later. No editing. But yeah, it would be nice to have a really high res timelapse. Could do it with my phone, I guess.. (video nerd came out, sorry)

Once again, the recipe took 2 hours from “decision” to “prep” to “cook” to “plate” to “eat” to “clean”. So about the same as driving half an hour to a restaurant. I did not have my wife’s company this time. Would have been cost: $20.

The food was delicious! I think they’re growing on me.

Timelapse:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbuCSCNZynQ]

My attempt to do the moonwalk in slow-mo didn’t come through quite right. (Its during the purple potatoes).

Blue Apron–Timelapse + Minor Analysis

I am investigating different ways to go about eating. First up to try: Blue Apron.

There are a gazillion reviews of it, so I won’t focus there; instead I’ll go for my reaction.

Timelapse

First, here’s a timelapse of me preparing https://www.blueapron.com/recipes/potato-artichoke-quiches-with-romaine-orange-salad . The time covered is from 5:54pm to 7:15pm or so – from the time my wife picks the recipe to me plating the food.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GptVmizTcIA]

video caption here is what i entered

Analysis

Going through the video at normal speed, and inventorying myself:

Stage	Their Est	Me	Comments
analyze recipe so I don’t miss anything.	(none)	5:56-6:04 8 min	The text is pretty scrunchy, so I convert it to a flowchart of sorts. I don’t refer to the flowchart again, but connecting all the things in a flow helps me consider everything.
Get Hardware	(none)	6:05-6:08 3 min	Pots, pans, salt, pepper, oil, etc… and bowls for ingredients.
Unpack food	(none)	6:08-6:11 3 min	Sorting 2 recipes, I had already made one.
Arrange	(none)	6:11-6:13 2 min	I wanted everything easily visible and available in its own bowl.
Prep	15 min	6:13-6:31 18 min	I slowed down on the orange, I think. It was frozen-ish and my hands got numb.
Cook:	35-45 min	6:32-7:14 48 min	Broken down further
Taters	12-13 min	6:33-6:46	13 minutes
Taters+Art	2-3 min	6:46-6:49	3 minutes
Mix with Egg		6:50-6:52	Everything till starting to pour them in
Pour them		6:52-6:53	I was afraid of missing.
Bake	18-20 min	6:54-7:14	20 minutes. Thank you Timer.
Salad		6:58-7:01	(Extra Salad Chopping)
Plating		7:14-7:16	2 minutes
(eating)			Not included in the time lapse.
Cleanup		7:35-7:44	Unload + Load Dishwasher, Clean stove.

So end-to-end time with no technical debt: 2 hours.

It was quality time, with my wife hanging in the Kitchen with me as we chatted about stuff.

So Is It Worth It?

To try to analyze it more objectively, I think its a 3-D plot.

For Health Level, its a bit arbitrary. 1= bottom, 2=mid, 3=good. Circle size = bigger = healthier.

I did not include Tastiness.

The labels overlapped, its in the bottom right of the grid.

So,

Its healthier but much more time-costly than going to a place like Noodles & Co which is 20 minutes away.
Its better than costlier long-wait-restaurants like Mikato.
Its about the same as driving 40 minutes to the Whole Foods to eat at the buffet there.
Amortizing the cost over 4 meals, its probably the same as going to a grocery store to shop, and then cook, something healthy .. maybe. I don’t have actual samples on this yet. I will soon.
I put Soylent on there.

Assuming you don’t have an adverse reaction (I do)
and you don’t have objections to the idea
its “perfect” nutrition, very fast, and at fairly low cost.
Its not friendly with my diabetes, either.

When viewed through this lens, I guess its okay. Its not earth-shatteringly better, its just.. more tuned.

Summary (so far)

You have to like, and have the time, for the cooking.

If you like cooking, and hate shopping, and like trying new things, it would be PERFECT for you.

For me, cooking is okay, the hard thing for me is the time.

I have one more recipe from them to try, then its off to Green Chef or something like that.

Year End, Backup, Archival

Because I have the time available, rather than just reacting, I’m trying to plan what I’m going to do with my various sources of information. Its on my head to keep them backed up (in case of data loss or service loss) and archived (long term storage, and also dealing with service loss).

There were too many things! I’m going with “resilio” (formerly bittorrent sync) as my offsite, in-my-control backup (if it dies, the files are just plain old files on a hard drive), but i still need to get my stuff from Dropbox / Google Drive etc to resilio. But how I get the stuff there?

So I added a Risk and Importance column where low numbers = don’t care and high numbers = care, multiplied them together, and got a priority.

Starting the copies while I go do other cleanup stuff around the house…