Mark Carroll's Journal

For this holiday season I have another week off work yet. In the meantime I may sleep in as I please on most mornings. I am naturally a morning person, very much early to bed and early to rise. Lately I have been staying up a bit later but then typically sleeping for well over nine hours then still moving slowly, staggering downstairs mid-morning and today it was only during my subsequent workout that I felt the cobwebs blowing off. I wonder if I really need all this sleep or if I ought to be stricter with myself. I am certainly getting less done than usual.

I awoke early this morning thinking about my US tax situation again. ( I am frustrated that it is taking several months to obtain a simple but important document. )

I took today off work as we are all soon off to the Dundee Waterfront to visit the RRS Discovery and the V&A Museum Of Design; the children have been inside neither. With my early start I suppose I'll feel tired for it but it should still be pleasant and interesting. It's a nice morning but is forecast to become a bit rainy at times.

My life seems back to keeping on top of things but not making anywhere near enough useful progress. I need to be better at doing important things that are not yet urgent. I am back to measuring my achievements in terms of trivial chores like if I am bothering to hang up my clothes or use an interdental brush as part of my bedtime routine, hence my recent failure to say much here. It's hard to even get the headspace to try to figure out my issue: when I do have spare time I feel enough tired in a zoned-out kind of way that I don't even bring to mind easy things I could do. I am either busy with tasks, whether at home or at work, or just trying to recover from them.

While this doesn't explain my lack of productivity at home, there is a fair bit for me to watch on television at the moment which at least affords welcome distraction. Having now finished Stranger Things (2016) we are working our way through the latest of shows like Dark (2017) and Legion (2017) before returning to the last of Jessica Jones (2015).

I am a creature of habit; it's how I keep on top of things. So, this Saturday afternoon I was again buying groceries and driving in Dundee. It was another good day: warm and sunny and this time I found a jazz requests program on BBC Radio 3 that made for pleasant listening. (I am not a hardcore jazz fan but these tracks were quite accessible.) I again chose to do a longer workout this morning and expect to again tomorrow. The weather will determine if I also go on last Sunday's postponed walk. I did buy a fair bit of convenience food for tonight; it's a Saturday habit after the tiring business of shopping. I discovered that alfredo sauce is hardly as common here as in the US though at least it's easily made.

Update: With the window open this evening I find that I am not even annoyed by the birdsong.

I have been free from headaches today but my previous pain has developed into the right side of my ribcage being generally ornery. It feels like some kind of soft tissue strain and I had hoped that it would heal more quickly. It isn't greatly disabling; I can still sleep fine, I don't even need painkillers. Still, it doesn't much like my getting out of bed or inhaling deeply and I really don't relish having to sneeze or to change my footwear. This evening I tried applying an embrocation which at least feels nice, from the menthol or camphor or whatever; I don't know if it helps. The pain's mercurial, moving quickly between absent and, ha, you forgot and tried to move, now for your punishment.

My Ansible work got put aside because shortly before next week's software release I thought of a test we could do on that product and yesterday afternoon the test failed. I have my work laptop at home this weekend for gathering a bit more data and in case I think of why the problem might occur. It seems intermittent; I hope to at least grab some debug logs and other state for a good and a bad (but otherwise similar) run then compare though I fear that the smoking gun won't be in that difference. The intermittency makes me try to think of where there could be a relevant race condition.

I feel as if I have been pushing half-done work tasks onto the stack for the past half-year or so and I like to imagine that the coming half-year might let me resurrect and complete that series of interrupted tasks before I resurface and ask what comes next. It may not be very critical but I do prefer to leave things tidy.

For this coming week I am also to organize our daily morning meetings which are mostly about all what needs doing today and who is to do it. This ranges across errors in server logs, questions from users, code that needs review, whatever comes up. It's something that I've been helping with for a few years now.

The weather for the past couple of days has been what the Scots might term dreich though it looks to be clearing up tonight.

I have been oddly productive this weekend. I worked out both days, I sorted and rearranged clothes, did some yardwork, some hours of the computer work (today including getting the new router into the regular backups), wrapped some gifts, wrote to my uncle, trimmed my hair, etc. while still largely relaxing in the evenings. I am now taking a break as hungry-before-meal grumpiness hits. Steak is in progress, with blue cheese and whatnot. I try to limit it to just being an occasional treat: apart from the environmental impact of cattle farming, more selfishly there seems to be consensus on the health benefits of limiting red meats.

I had mentioned how sometimes I feel both hungry and not like doing anything useful. It makes for an interesting challenge to try to use awareness of this to manage it. It reminds me of how I also feel more like doing things if I can see a pleasant outdoors on a sunny day which is one reason why I plan to move back to a house in a field in the rural Midwest or similar, somewhere with decent windows and porches (our previous house in Ohio was blessed with an abundance of both): I expect to not only be happier but also to get more done.

I woke up this morning feeling fairly productive and did some stuff. I should be alone in the house this afternoon which would be a good time to make major changes to the router through which we are online. However, this occurs toward the end of my fasting window so I get to do something non-trivial while possibly not feeling great.

Knowing this is coming up may be a help. Perhaps I can put some music on, make some tisane or somesuch so that there is at least something in my stomach, etc. Or, I can be more mentally prepared, knowing in advance that I can take my time and divert a little effort into ignoring being hungry. It should go fine: once I am into the work then it is likely to be akin to many of my workdays where mid-task I have an obvious short-term what-to-do-next step, the sequence of which hold my attention ongoingly.

I feel as if I don't have a good enough handle on my various to-do's but when an opportunity comes up to do something that seems both important and time-sensitive then I figure the way's clear to just go ahead and do it without overly fretting about relative priority against other maybe-forgotten tasks.

Yesterday my workday started unusually. I arrived at 8am but it turned out that since 7am they had been trying to get the campus access card system to let people in. After 9am I was sitting outside at a picnic table with some coworkers and by 10am I was on my way back home. Sometime after 11am access to my office's building was restored, then the energy utility supplier hit campus with a series of overvoltages.

Later in the afternoon there were still access system glitches occurring. Fortunately I had brought my work laptop home for the weekend and campus now has good wifi coverage so I was able to get useful work done early on from outside my building then later from home where I was safe from being caught on the wrong side of an ornery inter-zone door.

This morning I am heading onto campus a little later than usual, when there will be security staff available to check access cards manually on our way into the building complex.

Update: Indeed there was a guard to check my badge and let me pass; I have been able to reach my desk today.

I am left-handed and have no use for a numeric keypad occupying space on the right of my computer keyboard. I find that there do not seem to be many mid-range keypad-less keyboards available in between those that one barely expects to keep working well for months and those aimed at wealthy gamers. An unlit wired keyboard is fine and in an open-plan office I avoid mechanical.

My keyboard at work needs a good cleaning at the least; it is no longer working very well. For the modest cost of a sufficient keyboard and my pickiness over them it is hardly worth everybody's labor hours to operate the university's procurement machinery so, though it is not expected, I figure that it is easiest all round if I just provide a replacement myself.

I had ordered a probably acceptable replacement keyboard from Amazon but when it turned out to be Czech/Slovak rather than the advertised UK layout I opted for refund rather than replacement as I had no faith that the same would not happen again. There is no option for, replacement only if you can get it right this time.

As it happens I think I have a Cherry CyMotion Pro G85-20050 on my desk at work and also one somewhere at home so I can quietly swap them without note and at my leisure try some compressed gas to clean the failing one. I consider myself lucky tonight to have bagged a new BakkerElkhuizen S-board 840 on eBay for £20 so I can keep that in place of what I take into work.

Since my work started going better I have indeed managed to be more productive at home though the crab-apple tree escapes pruning until a drier afternoon. I renewed and installed the server-side certificates. Despite having also walked all over Dundee yesterday, this past week I did not skip any workouts; it was early November that I last had a week like that. I have now drafted our US tax return for last year; I shall write more about that:

With our Form 1040 I now believe that we must file schedules 1, 3, 6, B, C, D along with Form 2555, 2555-EZ and 8949; mst3kmoxie has yet to check my draft. There were a few other forms that we could have had to file but didn't because we satisfied certain criteria, mostly that the relevant numbers were below the thresholds of interest. There were a few questions that I would not have been sure how to answer except for being reasonably able to construe our finances such that the distinctions were without a difference.

To give an example of but one of many paths through the previously mentioned twisty maze that I was obligated to follow: On Form 1040, because I reported qualified dividends on line 3a and am filing Form 2555, the instructions for line 11a specify that I must use the Foreign Earned Income Tax Worksheet to figure our tax. However, that worksheet tells me not to complete it if Form 1040 line 10 is zero, which it is. What I am supposed to do instead is not specified. It is only by broader but implicit wider indications that I infer that I should simply enter 0 for line 11. Most of completing the forms is quite mechanical: for instance, I copy the number from Form 1099-DIV box 7 over to Schedule 3 line 48, carry it through to line 55 then add it in to line 12 of Form 1040; I just have to read plenty to find all the relevant instructions.

As always, while living in Britain we never come close to owing tax to the US Treasury: all this careful reporting is required but irrelevant. Because of the foreign earned income exclusion our total income is always far below our standard deduction.

This month I haven't done well so far: I haven't achieved much and my workouts have become infrequent. ( After work I find myself feeling tired and cold so I just stay in the house. )

In particular, I wonder if my recent slowness has arisen partly from work. I have not been much of a fan of enterprise software frameworks. Recently I have been battling an upgrade of popular Java ones: Hibernate and Spring, with Hibernate Search atop Lucene. These frameworks are ( fine when they behave as expected but this month they haven't. ) I have pored through source code, documentation, framework reference guides, release notes, bug reports, etc. looking for clues.

Yesterday afternoon at work I reached a good enough point to allow us to move forward. ( I finally found workarounds for a couple of strange issues. ) Over the rest of the month I hope that things will work more easily so that I can frequently make tangible progress instead of puzzling over new stubborn mysteries. If one doesn't know if a code change will work without trying it, that's a bad sign.

I need to get back to writing in languages like Haskell. With that it is a lot easier to write code that ( clearly helps to solve the problem at hand without depending on complex frameworks so ) my paid use of mainstream approaches throws into sharp relief why, where I have a choice, I do things differently.

At work the indexer problems ( were but just one of several matters to which I should attend. )

My domestic to-do's are in a similar state. I have computer operating system overhaul work postponed from last year. However, as at work, urgent tasks are displace the important backlog. The end of winter brings gardening to-do's like pruning the crab-apple tree. I still need to file my FBAR with the US Treasury ( and ) I can now get my 2018 taxes done. Further, another time-sensitive issue is that of managing our investments ( as this year I expect ) to rebalance much further into corporate bonds or somesuch. In the meantime I shall pay more attention to relevant indicators. It is nice being in the UK: I consider only the NYSE and NASDAQ so after work once I have settled in the evening the trading day is still open. On a more urgent matter, in computing I also have server-side certificates to renew and install before the end of the month.

Some of my time has gone into helping my children with their math and science homework and revision. Just as I enjoy programming, I had forgotten how very much I enjoy ( those subjects. )

I had made slow progress at home in reading non-fiction but have continued to make easy progress with fiction: I am now moving on from Tom Baker's Scratchman to the Strugatskys' Roadside Picnic which I don't recall having read before. I also watched and enjoyed Predestination (2014): I do appreciate a movie to which the creators gave careful thought and that requires some attention from the viewer; it was a surprise bonus to see among its cast the guy who plays Hitler in Preacher (2016).

A month ago we had largely recovered from our holiday colds and I had mentioned needing to file my FBAR and having enjoyed some programming (these days, coding) at work. I was also noting that I should be able to fit into my life all I want and need to do. The stressors of last year are past and I hope that as work improves so will my ability to perform domestic tasks over coming weeks. I prefer not to take time off work to catch up on them: small but positive net progress will suffice and the opposite would require further time off as backlog reaccumulated.