This is personal nonsense, so if this is not your thing, tune out now.
Got divorced about 12 years back. Chose badly, wanted to do better the next time … and had no notion what that meant. Gave up.
In the last year read rather a lot about what is known about personality. Kind of a good news / bad news thing. The good news is that the fact I feel affinity for very few is quite predictable, given my personality sort. The bad news is that finding a strong match is … pretty damn rare.
Made a choice about a year ago – a result of an odd conversation with a girl. Turned the question sideways. If the chance of my finding a match may be small, then what would I do to be ready for that (unlikely) chance? That answer is easy … quite a lot!
Started a list. Mostly placeholders at first. Revised as I went along. Call it the building-a-social-network list. Took a year to get to the bottom of the list. Had fun as the path between was about becoming the fullest version of my self.
Turns out I had a long-running conversation with a girl, through Flickr originally, whose “voice” I liked a lot. (In truth, more than that.) Of course, this girl was damn near on the other side of the country. From the conversation, I had rather a lot of clues, that I could not sort. On the surface, she looked like a bad idea. But I liked her “voice”. Reading on personality, the clues sorted. One writer claimed that our disparate rare personalities were the strongest possible match. Explained a lot. This after I had fucked up the conversation, perhaps permanently.
Oh. Damn.
I called this girl a “glitch”, and she adopted “glitchgirl” as her online persona. Ironic. Turns out that for me she might well be the perfect glitch. Seems I may never find out.
Take this exercise (exorcise?) as a bit of intentional ego-damage. Time to move on.
Reading up on Dependency injection in the Spring Framework. Class-binding is late-assigned in XML (mainly). Spring uses another (different) interpreted language, derived from JSP expressions.
Reading up on the Standard Template Library for C++. Class templates are written in this semi-interpreted template-script with tricky semantics, rather different from C++.
Right. This is doing badly a long-ago learned lesson. Lisp does all it’s meta-level stuff in … Lisp. A decades old insight. C++ has this newly-invented semi-interpreted declarative script for templates … that is tricky to interpret and not reusable. JSP and Spring share a very limited expression language, that is very much a niche, and not much worth reusing.
The Lisp community learned decades back the lesson of using the same language for meta-level stuff as for the regular level.
In the Java domain, I would use Javascript as the meta-language. Not quite the same level, but close enough, and able (in the case of Rhino) to readily access the Java world. The JSP expression language is a limited wart. Use Javascript.
There are lots of higher-order languages that could fit in this space, but the presence of Javascript in the browsers offers a selection criteria. Javascript is good enough.
The prior photo-handler in Ubuntu was implemented in a slightly idiosyncratic language. Could be pragmatic, or could be programmer-ego. Not immediately obvious, which. The current photo-handler in Ubuntu (and OpenSUSE) is Shotwell … implemented in a *completely* idio … idiot … er, “unique” language. And it crashes on uploading photos … for months. (A photo-manager that cannot upload photos. Right.) There is an anti-pattern here.
We might make fun of Microsoft and the closed-source community for predictable sorts of anti-patterns … but the “open source” community is also prone to (different) sorts of anti-patterns. The photo-manager community is on a different sort of non-functional ego-trip, at present.
Not sure how much I care. Given a couple more (somewhat likely) upgrades at work, I may just buy a Mac, and stop spending my time getting this nonsense to work. (In my current role, less wasted personal time might translate to millions in revenue on the company’s bottom-line, through shortened product timelines. Nothing instantly provable, nor will I try. Personal motives still trump in personal time.)
Guess I am somewhat amused with the current tension. I do very much enjoy my work, but on personal time have more time than money. I have in past enjoyed spending personal time getting open source software to work … but not so much of late. Of late my personal time goes into my family, and to personal priorities. I spend personal time painting my house, fixing leaky toilets, driving my kids from one place to another, and other things. Would my work get more value if I could pay to get some of those things done? Very likely … but not easily provable, and I have no reason to try. As a guess, in my current situation, I would not be surprised if a thousand dollars of personal time translated into a million dollars of company revenue (or more). Given no way and no reason to prove … no point for me in spending time.
In a macro-economic sense, I am reasonably sure my choices are non-optimal. In the current economic system, my choices are personally optimal. This tension I find amusing.
Not much on my weblog in the past year. The past year has been about personal change.
At the work-level, went from working at a dull company with a dull product (kept alive only by a couple extreme efforts on my part). Served the purpose I needed. Allowed me a decade at home to raise my kids. The kids are doing great, and no longer need the time. The new job is anything but dull. (There was a bit of a worry on my part. Maybe I had become dull? As is turns out, hell no! This is fun … and my work could turn into more revenue for the new company than the entire gross income of the old company. Fun. A strong challenge. Definitely fun.)
At a personal level, had knee surgery about a year back, and working to bring my physical self in line with my self image. Hard to explain, perhaps. There was a time between high school and university when I did not know if I could reach the future I wanted. Hope was uncertain. Something woke, an aspect of my self, that took me then from an average cyclist to riding with UCSF category 2 cyclists (which at the time meant able to compete at a state and national level). These pictures are from that time:
Somewhere at the back of my mind, my mental self-image has always been something like what was in my mind at that time. In the past year, that long sleeping aspect awoke. Clearly I will never again be physically capable of what I could do as a 19-year-old kid, but I will do all that I can. Which as it turns out, is quite a lot. My weight has dropped, a lot. My endurance has increased. And I have added muscle mass. Lots of iteration needed. And something else.
Climbed up Saddleback Peak last weekend. The second time since resuming hiking. (The first was September 25, last weekend February 25.) My time to the top was close to 3 hours (for 8+ miles with 4000 feet of elevation change) with a similar time for the hike down. Perhaps my strongest hike yet, on that mountain. Took my regular ~11 mile longer hike through Whiting Ranch this weekend, and finished in my fastest time yet (a bit over 3 hours for ~2500 feet of elevation change – expected to be a slower, as still recovering from the Saddleback hike.) Getting steadily stronger.
Not done yet.
During the “Art Walk” in Laguna Beach. Walking along a dark, crowded, noisy sidewalk.
“Do you have a cigarette?” Heard distinctly from an approaching blonde girl, when still twenty-odd feet away.
“No.” I answered, as the couple passed.
“What??” She turned after we passed. “What did you say??” She had a very odd expression, as she approached.
“I do not smoke.” She continued to stare. “You look surprised. Do I look like someone who smokes?”
“Yes.”
I smiled, turned and walked away.
Later, I could not quite place her expression. First, I thought she was surprised, but that did not fit. Puzzled is closer.
Perhaps she was asking the question of her companion, though she was looking directly at me, and she spoke clearly enough to be heard quite a distance away. That might account for the puzzlement.
On reflection, I heard her very clearly from a distance – I usually have trouble in noisy environments, even up close – and I do not recall seeing her lips move. Mind tricks. Dark sidewalk, many distractions … but why the expression?
It is fun, having intelligent children. Was trying to remember a phrase. I have an odd memory. I cannot remember a person’s name, told to me moments ago, but came recall an interesting notion from decades back.
There was a quote. Something like “Confuse the idiots”, but deliciously subtle. I could not recall the exact phrase, so my daughter started hammering at Google, trying to find variants. Not sure that we found (eventually) the exact phrase, but this comes at least close in subtlety:
When in doubt, confuse the innocent.
Sometimes I think, as a Father, I did not completely screw up. 
Just after, I found this: Adam’s Family reference Still looking for my Morticia.
Was asked recently if I was “driven” in my work, and other activities. My first impulse was to say “no”. My kids would describe me as always-calm, rarely upset, almost never angry. The tag “driven” is just not at all a part of my self-image.
Except when intensely focused on a work-task. When absorbed in work, I am overt, and my kids know to keep a distance.
Except when on an exercise hike, and working at my physical limit.
Except when working on my drawing. At the end of a session, I tend to be in a pretty intense state.
Except when … doing other things, where my goal is important to me, and far from my current ability.
Seems I need to adjust my self-image. Yes, it seems I am very much “driven”!
Trying to rebuild a personal social network. Something I neglected over the last decade.
Music … local social groups offer “tribute” bands. Not interested. I liked … at the time … a lot of the then-popular bands. The “tribute” groups are bands that cannot produce of value their own music. I did like the ’70′s bands … in the 70′s. I liked the ’80′s bands, in the ’80′s. In the present? I find the old bands (and their reproductions) a bit boring.
Who is new and who is interesting?