Baffled

Well, I’m stumped.  I watched “The Children of Men” because of its stellar reviews and hated it so much that I read the book.  And I liked the book, but the only similarities between it and the movie were 1) the title, 2) the names of the characters, 3) the basic premise (the species is facing [...]

Funky

I started this blog with the idea of writing in it daily, of untangling the threads of my life, of becoming less inhibited and more sharing.  But I was in a funk for several days – over my job, always over my job – and everything I tried to write sounded like whining.  Wah, wah, [...]

IN in NYer

The January 14, 2008, New Yorker contains an article about Indiana in its “The Talk of the Town” section.  The appearance of anything about Indiana in the New Yorker is a rarity, and a whole article, brief as it may be, was a sign that whatever it said about Indiana was not going to be [...]

Kind of Bummed

One bad thing about calculated incompetence (see previous post) is that someone, somewhere, has a negative opinion of you and your work.  Like a virus, this can spread.  Hopefully, the people who matter know the truth.  And, in this case, it helps that the person holding the negative opinion is The Nemesis, who is also a [...]

Calculated Incompentence Pays Off

A while back I wrote a post about the benefits of calculated incompetence.  Today it paid off big time.  One of the projects “owned” by The Nemesis has performance problems, problems that I have verified are not due to my code, but The Nemesis is not convinced.  He found someone else to investigate these performance [...]

Crying

Yesterday I read a short story by John Updike in a recent issue of the New Yorker.  The subject matter was the usual upper middle-class suburban angst that Updike specializes in, but the language was so exquisite that it made me weep with admiration and jealousy. 
I write, and sometimes I write a lot, but my metaphors [...]

A Day Away

I am one of those people who “musterbates,” with the refrain “I must do this, I must do that” constantly running through my brain.  Not that I actually do all the things I think I should be doing – usually I just fret about them – but it is difficult for me to just take a day [...]

Rxxx

I used to be one of those people who, when a doctor handed me a prescription, dutifully followed directions and took it all (with the exception of pain meds because sometimes you don’t need it all now but you might need it later, which is how I came to find a nearly full bottle of Vicodin in [...]

More Hilarity

A few posts ago I wrote about knowing which tasks safely can be ignored at work.  Well, apparently someone somewhere on the infrastructure team thought they could ignore backing up certain file systems, like the one that contains the repository for some very critial source code.  From what I hear, this particular file system has not been [...]

What Happens If You Miss a Meeting

Many years ago I was introduced to a group that provides support to a local county park.  Let’s call that group FoM.  I shortly convinced them that they should have a newsletter and offered to be the editor.  They were receptive to the idea and the FoM newsletter was born.   Somewhere along the way, I also [...]