What’s on my mind and what I found interesting of late.
I went six weeks without working a 5-day week. Between holidays, camping, and a wedding it’s been long weekends all summer. While it’s lovely, I have to admit that it’s affecting my work more than I anticipated.
It turns out there’s a fixed overhead to my work-week, and as the week compresses the remaining space for productive project progress shrinks rapidly. In a five-day week I usually spend 12-17 hours in meetings. My last couple of three-day weeks? Still 12 hours in meetings, fully half of my time! Mail, chat, and bug triage together form about another half-day each week. That leaves about a day for everything else.
This does have a focusing effect. I’ve found that I’m down to about one sizeable project in a three-day week, and it might be driving me to make some good/hard choices about where my attention goes. One short week I chose to drop 1:1s in favor of a writing project that had to get off the ground, and I think it was a good call.
On the other hand there are a lot more cache misses when I get back from a long weekend, and it’s hard to be heads-up like this. Looking around and ahead is impressively time-consuming. I’ve started puzzling over how to do this better in meetings with other people.
Alleson and I flew twice and attended a ~100 guest wedding and apparently did not get COVID-19. I took an Aranet CO2 monitor along and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of ventilation in most spaces. The exceptions were the aircraft both ways and (to my surprise) the inside of our rental car. We were careful – masked up consistently and only ate outside – but mostly I feel fortunate, especially since some regions are seeing the largest surge yet, disguised by under-reporting.
Monkeypox is a global emergency according to the World Health Organization. I haven’t been following, and it’s probably time to pay attention. Most US states have confirmed cases. Good news: Vaccines and treatments already exist.
Best-laid plans and all that. There was a planned Xfinity outage in my neighborhood. They notified me ahead of time that maintenance would start at 9am and last about two hours, with possible brief interruptions after that. They started right on time, and I tethered to my phone and got back to work.
Around lunchtime I noticed that their truck was parked right outside, and there were actually three technicians all working on the one cable box that serves my neighborhood. I wasn’t surprised that things were going long, but I hadn’t seen three techs before. Odd.
Around 4pm our connection was still down. I looked over just as a second truck pulled up behind the first and more techs got out. This is getting out of hand, I thought. Now there are two of them! Twenty minutes later I saw one of them go back to the truck and return with a blowtorch (!?) in hand. I went outside to see for myself what was happening.
They seemed to be wrapping up. I told a tech it’s been interesting to watch and I’m just curious what happened. All I got was a long, heavy sigh and a “Yeah, it’s been a process.” I asked about the blowtorch, and apparently it’s just used on heat-shrink to waterseal the connections.
They closed everything up and drove away. Our connection worked for about five minutes then went down again. One of the trucks came back a half-hour later and it seems fine now. I’m still curious what went so badly that day.
Recently I’ve been listening to Tunic (Original Game Soundtrack) by Lifeformed x Janice Kwan. I just finished playing Tunic too. It’s recommended if you were that kid that read all the videogame manuals (I was) or if you’re curious why people get nostalgic for old Nintendo games. It kind of recreates that feeling without looking or playing like an old game, which is a neat trick. I also played the first hour of Pupperazzi and read Michael Crichton’s posthumously published Pirate Latitudes. Thanks for reading! I’ll be back in about a month.