Mark Carroll's Journal

My journey to Tennessee went roughly to plan. ( My flights went fine … )

( … though the pandemic changes some things. )

( I am glad to be back in the US … )

( … though there are many relocation tasks. )

Dreamwidth is about as mainstream as I get in terms of social media. I have never had accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. To some extent, I get away with this because my family here do have such, so they can report to me any particularly notable local news.

In moving back to the US alone next month, to a new place in which I hope to settle, I should consider increasing my engagement with social media. I am sure that I will learn a little through chatting with coworkers but I should probably do more than that.

Many years ago I found Meetup useful for small casual social stuff around the city, e.g., if I wanted to watch some old television show, maybe if I brought some food over then someone else was putting on a small showing in their apartment. I also found craigslist useful, for both finding apartments and disposing of unwanted possessions. Local free news/sales papers, even grocery store bulletin boards, carried useful information about events and suchlike.

I wonder what might now allow me sufficient local awareness while not wasting my time with clutter. Perhaps local papers and bulletin boards remain useful. Online, Meetup and craigslist might remain popular even now; I wonder what else? Local newsgroups, in the NNTP sense, are probably obsolete. Is Facebook still the thing, and actually useful? Maybe there is now some alternative that I might should consider. Organizations announce through Twitter but they also seem to clutter their feeds with varieties of repetition and mutual backscratching.

While I worked in Ohio State's AI lab I took a few master's-level courses and found them strange. I was being set homeworks as if I were in secondary school, somebody else was choosing how much I worked on what each week. Whereas, for my bachelor's, to a first approximation the system was: don't bother registering for courses, just turn up and listen to what you like, at the end the academic year there will be examination questions covering a spread of these computer science topics, you'd better be able to answer enough of them. In my subsequent professional life this style has suited me: if I needed to learn something then I sat down with textbooks and studied them at my own pace, focusing my work on where I felt weak. For example, when I found myself in a job requiring use of Perl 5, I sat down with the Camel Book and experimented a bit. My initial Erlang learning went similarly and I enjoyed it.

I try to notice trends and open my mind to them. An Erlang online course fell into my lap and I had wanted to brush the rust off, in preparation for trying Elixir, so I thought I might give the course a try, one of these with videos to watch and problems to do and such. Into the third week, I am not much finding that it suits me. It has been difficult to fit the extra work into my schedule. The abstract problems to solve occupy more of my attention than anything specific to Erlang. I patiently listen to things that seem easy then have to rewind parts after my attention drifts. Then I find myself having assignments commented on by fellow students and doing likewise for them; it's a nice idea but to me it feels more like the blind leading the blind. There might be some value but my time is more valuable. At least at work with peer review, the cross-check is preferably by the best available critic; indeed, in my previous job, often the product lead for the codebase on which I'd worked. For returning to Erlang, I conclude that I am better off cutting my losses and going back to the textbooks, with which I can focus my time exactly where it is best spent.

A year ago I mentioned having a wart that survived many rounds of prescription-strength acid and cryotherapy. I suspected that the local healthcare providers were simply not being aggressive enough and it now seems that I may have finally dealt with it successfully myself. Back in January I sprayed it with half a can of some aerosol for quickly cooling dental impression material and that seems to have been sufficiently potent, I still see no wart returning. What others should do is not mine to suggest but I am glad that my impatience led me to try this off-label approach.

I excel at some kinds of formal, abstract thinking. For example, I have a good track record of studying real-world problems then devising an analytical approach that lends itself to some solution in software, a process that includes imagining how prospective algorithms would behave. I enjoy helping my kids with math and science homework and in college I enjoyed courses like vector calculus. However, I have noticed a common thread among my weaknesses: regarding things from other perspectives.

One is time zones: If the business day starts elsewhere at a certain time and now I enter daylight savings time locally, what does that do to when that business day starts from my perspective? If I don't break the simple elements out carefully of how I put the clock forward then I reach times sooner so they are incremented for me while unchanged at the other end, etc., then there is a possibility of my guessing wrongly, it's not an instantaneous, natural realization.

Another is celestial mechanics: When I am trying to think through the motion of the sun and the moon and suchlike there is a fair chance that some element will confuse me unless I make a little model to look at as I imagine rotating bodies and light paths. There is some basic guessing I can do about seasons or earthlight or whatever but it does not take long to find a simple astronomy question of whose answer it would take me some work to become sure.

I do fine with such problems. For instance, when in the defense industry, I created a system that could use a mix of radar and camera observations of objects to not only locate objects but also locate and orient other sensors that are observing some of the same things. Still, I notice that this kind of relative thinking is such that, rather than my being able to do it all in my head in a moment, it really can help to pull out a notepad and pen.

Taking minutes at meetings has me engaged in three different activities:

1. Listening to what people are saying.


2. Paraphrasing what they said, summarizing the important content.


3. Writing or typing the summary of that content.

I am surprised that people are generally happy with the minutes I take because those three activities feel to me to be sequential, especially it seems suboptimal to me that I am tuning people out to minute what I just heard. Perhaps in the back of their mind is the thought that if my minute-taking is inadequate then I am quite happy for them to do so instead.

As can be inferred partly from my television viewing, I am hardly as much a Force for Good as I ought to be despite how very dysfunctional so much of society and governance seem to be. This would be true even simply locally, whether in the UK or the US, without considering the severe problems faced in the wider world.

I was feeling a little down last night and skipped my workout. I thought sleep might help but after well over nine hours of it I find that I was wrong. It takes much of my available effort to tread water in looking after my own life and family: paid work, household chores, parenting, etc. A significant fraction of my remaining time goes into rest and escapism so that I can recover. This keeps fatigue, depression and despair at manageable levels.

Even just being reasonably well informed is draining and angering. I thus have much respect for those I know who positively put much time into trying to make things better for us all. I admire the fortitude of those who can engage with awful things in society more frequently and deeply while still holding on to their normal lives and their sanity.

I can easily do some things: I can vote, I can donate a little. Once my children are fledged and I have a simpler life back in the US then I can probably do more. That's less and later than what's needed. I am sorry not to be pulling my weight anytime soon but I don't see why that would be any consolation to those less comfortably placed than I. Perhaps I like my comfort just a little too much.

My workouts ran slower for a while but are now speeding up again despite the warmer weather. At the same time, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs have finally issued the certificate I need for filing our 2018 taxes with the Internal Revenue Service and by day I am working on server code and tests that I understand rather than battling Hibernate internals and Ansible playbooks and fielding mysterious user queries. I still suspect that stress is a significant factor that slows my exercise.

Unexpected developments left me with more vacation time for this calendar year than I had initially expected. I figured that I should finally perform a filial duty and take my parents' ashes on perhaps a last visit to Cornwall for me and scatter them there. I am conscious of how much of my thinking is, on its face, irrational. For example, whom does this trip benefit? It is not as if I believe in an afterlife. So much of what I believe turns out to arise simply from received wisdom about how one ought to behave. Rational or not, it seems the right thing to do so I have now made the related bookings for the middle of fall after the summer vacation folks will be long gone.

I also hope to move further toward sorting through my parents' photographs. I took backups of their hard drives and flash drives before I wiped them but had left things there. My work is on software for organizing, annotating and sharing one's images so I may as well start clearing the obvious clutter from my parents' data then arrange the remainder using the software I work on. I can't help but be reminded of Roy Batty's, All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. I won't even know where some of their photographs were taken or of whom.

As usual, I follow what my instinct tells me: I shall preserve and eventually organize my parents' photographs. Regardless of if it is a good thing to do, it might be quite interesting. I will try not to trouble myself over what meaning those photographs had for them or that others should think similarly.

As a teenager I was beset by existential angst that had me reading authors from Dostoyevsky to Sartre for clues to how to give my life any meaning. In my thirties I was struck by a deep depression that took me years to climb out of. That healing process changed me and, among other things, somewhat inoculated me against despair. It's partly a matter of perception. The things that matter to me will someday be forgotten by all. I must accept that, whatever their value, the old things pass and make way for the new.

I have been happy to leave these inherited items alone, to procrastinate considerably. As well as the photographs from the computers I still have some physical items that I inherited, such as my father's coat which is presently in the attic. Likewise, I preserve the physical items but am in no rush to engage with them. It will get easier with time.

A few months ago I always used to listen to something while using the cross-trainer. More recently I have often found myself deciding not to, instead using the time to think quietly. Typically I end up having a couple of interesting or useful thoughts over that half-hour. I wonder if this change is a symptom of my feeling a little less on top of everything at the moment so needing that extra opportunity to collect myself.