Mark Carroll's Journal

I start this year with a considerable backlog of personal projects and deferred maintenance. Once settled back into my routine I hope to do better at making time for progress on my tasks outside paid employment. I will have more to say on the larger picture but this entry is about a recent promising change.

For much of my life I have read a lot but in recent years hardly at all. Last Saturday I borrowed a couple of science fiction novels from the library, Carey's The Boy on the Bridge and Lostetter's Noumenon and over the following couple of days read them both which is most heartening. I am minded to go back today and borrow a couple more. If I can get back to reading then maybe I can also get back to other activities.

In pencil somebody had briefly annotated the first book with critical comments on its writing: I was amused to find myself agreeing. I reflected on how greatly I value editors: while I write reasonably I am in no doubt that guidance from a half-decent editor would much improve my work. I like clever people providing useful help.

A couple of days ago I recalled a scene from a recent story and tried to remember what it was from; it turned out to be from that first book. The memory may have confused me because it was so visual: I suppose that I must have been imagining the story as I read it and I simply remembered what I had invented. I also have a good memory of a handgun from a dream this morning but I suspect that I appropriated its appearance from one of the movies I saw over the holidays.

I had a difficult end to my workweek. Yesterday afternoon I suffered a migraine which felt oppressive. The previous evening I had difficulty getting to sleep. A considerable challenge though was my actual work. I was adapting some previous code and I had wrongly hoped that the initial changes would be small.

On a couple of fronts it turned out that the changes instead required deeper changes in what information is needed where. The code is rather multifunctional and it was difficult for me to determine what the new API should be between parts of code that knew things and others that used them for various purposes: with feeling tired and unwell while finding that the hope of easier changes was ill-founded, understanding the problems and rearranging how the code operated required more remembering and imagining than my brain felt like doing. Still, at the close of business today my changes appeared to be working: I expect to spend Monday on tidying and further testing, also hoping that the next couple of steps go more smoothly. To a user, the project's behavior does not yet look much different but it is now far readier for coming improvements.

I had greatly desired to achieve at least some tangible progress on the project and did not have something menial and comparably important to focus on instead. I am glad that I did manage to bring the code back to some semblance of useful order just in time for the week to end; I am now glad to get a couple of days' break.

This past week was a struggle for me to get through. I don't think I can blame jet lag: I normally recover within a day or two. At night I feel tired but not sleepy. Last night I was looking forward to starting the weekend by sleeping in but ( I currently have a sore back and shoulder. )

I have some computer to-do's that I could get done with the awake-time I am ending up with but few that I trust myself to attempt in this state. At work I catch myself doing things like going to the kitchen to fetch my infused tisane when my mug had already been sitting right beside me on my desk. My body feels as tired as my mind so I am hardly eager to do physical chores instead. Working out is taking considerable willpower.

I am also somewhat stressed by ( barely keeping up with to-do's. )

Work is not too bad right now at least. I have been frustratingly unlucky regarding the effects of optimistic changes to hairy parts of the codebase but I am under rather lower pressure than some of my colleagues. Those supervising me appropriately understand that my success rate reflects what's reasonably achievable in the circumstances.

Several weeks ago I mentioned becoming really tired: even sleep didn't much help. I am still preferring a good eight hours' each night but recently I am back to feeling as awake and energetic over the day as usual. I don't know if the multivitamin helps or maybe the many sunny days we have enjoyed but it is nice to occasionally feel like doing things beyond remaining motionless.

Several weeks ago I mentioned not wanting to miss out on genuinely engaging television dramas. I was just thinking how it might be time to rewatch Hannibal (2013), at least to start doing so as I think the seasons decline so I would be tempted to stop after even maybe just the first. To take another serial killer drama I might also rewatch Dexter (2006), at least the first couple of seasons as it too declines. I was thinking about this rewatching. I usually wait at least a few years until I have forgotten enough.

With eating favorite foods clearly I can be eager to repeat pleasurable experiences. I guess that is also what my watching shows again is about: I would not miss out because I have already seen the shows but I enjoy watching them and I want to enjoy myself so I watch them again. Perhaps therefore I ought to be careful indeed about my time watching television lest I overly indulge unproductive hedonist tendencies. Some of my other possibly superfluous television watching is initiated by my family: I join in partly as a means to interact with them.

When I first left home I mostly gave up computer games: they are just too appealing and unproductive for me. I would still happily spend many hours a day playing games if I could. I am also cautious about alcohol: I like it a bit more than I would a normal tasty drink so I make sure to occasionally go several days without it and to avoid it when I feel stressed enough that it would be unusually welcome. Food is another thing that I find that I really do appreciate. I don't have fancy tastes: hot buttered toast is among my favorite foods. I am not a hedonist but I do greatly appreciate some of life's simple pleasures.

The worst pastime in which I much indulge is television dramas. To wind down for the last couple of hours before sleep I find that passive escapist consumption works well. Furthermore, I find many shows to be genuinely engaging: it is not just a case of finding something to watch because there are enough good shows on, at least in my opinion, that I do not want to miss out on those experiences.

For instance, Counterpart (2017)'s first season just finished and we just had the BBC's brief adaptation of The City and the City (2018) (I liked the book) but we are now into new seasons of The Americans (2013) and Legion (2017), the new season of Westworld (2016) is about to start and Netflix just dumped on us the new season of Money Heist (2017). They each have their merits: taking a couple of those, I find Counterpart an interesting exploration of how we are shaped by our environment and Legion is very imaginatively varied in how it uses photography and music to tell its story. Admittedly, Money Heist was just my latest moreish guilty pleasure.

I need to relax my brain toward the end of the evening or I cannot sleep. I get enough enjoyment from television that I figure that it may as well be my drug of choice even if I find myself suspecting it of being an avoidable waste of my time. I note that a book that is interesting but not a page-turner, like Geert Mak's In Europe, can also get me ready for sleep but maybe it suffices to be careful to not watch many hours' television each night. I can allow myself some pleasures.

I get a fair few hours of alertness each week that I have some freedom to use, even aside from the time before bed when I am winding down and relaxing. I also have things to do that are not getting done.

I think that the root of my problem is that I never quite worked out how to be part of a family in any efficient way. If I were living alone then I would look around and see things that need doing and just get up and do them. Living with my family, I usually don't, for a couple of reasons:

First, some of what I would do affects them in some way. Like, shelves need clearing and sorting, stuff needs moved around and stored or whatever. They have an interest in much of that stuff so I want them to be in the loop. But, they have limited free time too: even if I am willing to trade a fair bit of my own leisure time, I don't want to ongoingly demand significant amounts of their time. Especially, I am sure my eldest could do with whatever downtime they can get with Highers coming up.

Second, I want to be available to them. While they are often engaged in activities that don't include interaction with me, I want to be there for interaction should opportunities arise. I love them and want to be with them more than just sharing the same room. I can go elsewhere and do useful things and tell them not to hesitate to interrupt me but I would then miss more casual opportunities for conversation.

I notice that what I do get done is what I can do from the room they are in but that does not require anything from them nor much concentration from me: for example, working through the day's mail and making online bill payments accordingly.

The solution to the second problem is obvious though I have been poor at effecting it: I need to exert willpower and disappear off and do stuff for a while. For the first, perhaps I can impose more on their free time or go ahead and disrupt their stuff and handle my part of it then leave them to deal with the aftermath at their convenience.

Some time ago at work they switched to Slack for team messaging. I dislike their clients and much prefer having my choice of open-source software, especially multi-protocol so that the same precious screen space can serve all my chat needs. At the time I did not much object because Slack offered workable IRC and XMPP gateways. Over time those gateways became less workable and are soon to be disabled. Fortunately with a change in client I find that I can use wee-slack, a WeeChat plugin that uses Slack's API rather than a gateway.

I have noticed that some government services seem to badly need some consultant to turn up with an application of queueing theory: from my view in the waiting room watching visitors waiting to be being called to kiosks the service often seems to have so nearly enough capacity that I wonder if ( opening just a couple more desks would halve waiting times. )

Regardless of defendants being offered bail I expect that it is so unpleasant to be awaiting trial for a crime that society should put some effort into minimizing that delay. Of course, in preparation for trial various people must do various things, often in response to each other. Still, I wonder how far short the process falls of nearing its theoretical minimum duration for the same work done: if often what blocks participants from working on the case is only workload from other cases and, if so, if some small increase in capacity may yield large gains.

The question of preventable delays comes to mind also with my having had some involvement in some routine property conveyancing in England recently. The process took around five months in all from offers being accepted to exchange of contracts. In Ohio when we bought our house it took but a fortnight from offer to final paperwork: this included surveyor, water testing, soil testing, mortgage finalization, all manner of steps swiftly arranged and executed at low cost. ( Minor nitpicks seem a common obstacle. )

Early this Thursday morning I am to help out with a scheduled upgrade to a local production server. The server suffers a problem such that a user action can bring it down. I generated a reasonable hypothesis as to the cause but I have not been able to reproduce the severity of the server crash in my own testing. During the maintenance window we can try reproducing the crash on the very system that suffered it last. If it happens again then we will take what relevant readings we can before doing the planned upgrade. The upgrade plan includes a configuration change which should help if I am correct about the cause; we will then again try reproducing the crash before the maintenance window ends.

I caught myself thinking that I probably charge this production server maintenance to a different cost code. We moved to Scotland back in 2012. For over a decade previously in the US I was required to track my work time in fine detail. It has now been some time since I saw a timesheet but it appears to be difficult to wholly shake old habits.