thousand meter stare - noun phrase - Watching multiple poorly designed dashboards jam packed with graphs, meters, gauges, and other barely useful metrics, day in and day out. If you imagine the thousand yard stare into multiple displays showing said dashboards, that's it.
Inspiration: Rev. Nikolai Kingsley
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If you've been following the news lately, undoubtedly you've heard one way or another that massive rounds of layoffs have been taking place. I got caught in one of them.1
If you're younger than I am you may never have been laid off before. That's okay.
I've been laid off a few times in my career, so here are a few things to keep in mind if this is your first goat rodeo.
I can't tell you "don't panic" because you might have very good reasons for feeling panic. I'm certainly not going to judge you for it and …
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I try very hard not to pay too much attention to mercury in retrograde, mostly because I think it's a bad idea to name names too often because Things tend to hear them.
Who am I kidding. I have a calendar that charts mercury in retrograde out to 2030.ev that warns me ahead of time. I just wish I could get the odd warning of what might be coming down the line.
You might recall that during the final days of 2020.ev my car was totalled and hauled away as abandoned. Well, on the 4th of January my …
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As I write this we're just a week or so shy of Christmas. It's been, to put it mildly, one hell of a year. Enough so that I've pretty much coasted into holiday break on fumes (again) and, probably against my better judgement, I'm trying to come up with something (anything, really) to write. If I were smart I'd give it another couple of days to relax and get my head straight. Maybe read some books or something to let the organics rest and wiring cool down.
Of course, taking my adderall also helps.
Work is... well, work. Things take …
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wad;dis - Working As Designed; Design Is Stupid
Source: Anonymous co-worker
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This blog post best read while listening to this playlist.
I keep trying to figure out how to start this blog post. I've started, stopped, pondered, and taken a shower while thinking about it off and on ever since my last post went live back in February. Unfortunately, life in the twenty-first century is.. well, being life in the twenty-first century. The laundry list of things that have taken up most of my time is unfortunately way too long: Java and log4j have cost me more nights of sleep and almost-but-not-quite migraines in the last month or so than I …
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octopus mud wrestling - A situation where multiple conflicting problems and solutions come together to prevent anyone from accomplishing anything useful. Every possible step toward a solution causes two other problems that further complicate things. Sometimes this means that something can't be fixed at all and a forklift upgrade is required. Sometimes attempts to fix everything cause an outage to occur, ruining everybody's day. So called because everything is dirty, messy, confusing, constantly changing and nobody will have any idea what's actually going on until it's over.
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It's been nearly a month since I've last had time to post anything here. Earlier I'd expressed hope that things would slow down and I'd have some compute cycles free to get my breath back, maybe go for a walk and do something fun. Unfortunately, as so often happens these days, that was wishful thinking. I wish that I had a lot of good news to write about, but unfortunately I don't. Just a little. If this post is going to be too much for you in your personal situation, close the tab. Seriously. If you've got your own ten …
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Leaning Tower of Hangout - noun phrase - The covid-19 quarantine phenomenon in which one discovers a stack of hangouts on one's work calendar, all for the exact same time, all flagged as required, all scheduled while you were asleep the night before.
ref, Towers of Hanoi.
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90/10 rule - phenomenon - When 90% of all the stuff management tells you to deploy is monitoring and orchestration software. The remaining 10% is actual make-us-money software.
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