So, Buzz Out Loud ended this past week, which sucks considering I only discovered it last month when I started using Doggcatcher as my go-to podcast reader (I’m aware of the term ‘podcatcher’ and its symmetry with ‘podcaster,’  I just think it’s a terrible word.)

So, I had to go in and remove BoL from my subscription list.  While I was in there, I the following subscriptions for the following reasons:

• Mintcast – This is actually a really good Linux podcast; they do news around new Linux distros, the latest in the Gnome/Cinnamon schism from the Linux Mint team, and general sys-admin-y stuff.  Nothing wrong with the cast itself, other than it’s middle age sys-admin guys talking about linux
• Linux Outlaws – This one hurt.  I’ve listened to Linux Outlaws for almost a year now–started right after I got my Atrix.  The issue I have is the main creative force behind the show–Fabian Scherchel–has moved on.  He’s acting like he hasn’t, but he’s really been phoning-in the podcasts lately.  His co-host, Dan Lynch, is the ever-present straight-man and I still subscribe to his RatholeRadio podcast, but LO is don’t for me.
• NPR Culturtopia – Once I discovered that Pop Culture Happy Hour had its own podcast link, random stories from Netta Ulabe (sp?) became superfluous.  PCHH is my favorite podcast–bar none–and it’s a welcome change from my normal diet of tech, tech, programming, nerd, tech stuff.

Current subscriptions remaining:

I was sick all weekend (hayfever).  Hot/cold, freeze/pollen, dust/grass…thankfully, none of it’s made it to my lungs.  Yet.

Grace was sick all weekend (Hand/Foot/Mouth).  Hasn’t eaten normally since middle of last week.  

Nobody slept well.  

I didn’t get to go to church, as I stayed home with Grace.

A bright spot was we had a new couple from our church over to the house to have Easter dinner, Tyler and Kayla Williams.  Really enjoyed their company, their sunny disposition.  Whitney and I are SO FILLED WITH HOPE. :-)

“Why do you like Europe?”

In our house, we do lots of “apropos of nothing” discussion.  One minute, you’re talking soccer, the next you’re analyzing the selfishness of the Baby Boom generation.  Last night’s verbal ejaculation came in the middle of another dull, overwrought Shonda Rhimes pilot, Scandal--or as I like to call it “Scrawny balloon-lipped gal who flounces through every scene.”

Anywho….“What, you mean like to live there or to visit?” I replied.

I typically abhor facebook.  It’s banal.  It’s boring.  And, 20% of the world’s population is on there, so–like a bad High School Reunion–you sorta have to be there too.

This thread I’m about to copy/pasta reshare single-handedly changed my perception of FB:

Status:
On cruise shuttle. Entering radio silence. I hope the world can survive without my exciting posts for a few days….

Okay okay, a little self-important, but hey, this is the Twitter/Facebook generation where every meal and waste elimination is comment worthy.  But then….in the comment stream:

In working on my small group lesson this week, I’m stuck again in James 1, and there’s this verse (26)

Ifanyonethinks himself to be religious, and yet does not [bb](http://www.biblestudytools.com/nas/james/1.html#fn-descriptionAnchor-bb “Or “control”")bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, thisman’sreligion is worthless.

You could pretty much summarize my last 5 or 6 years right there.  I’ve deceived myself time and again, focusing on what was easy, felt good.  I can rationalize anything, it seems.

When I was born, my head was almost too big to fit through the birth canal.

That explains much about me to this day.  Just sayin'.

You know how you go out looking for the right car, with a checklist and a list of requirements?  I’ve been doing that for the better part of two years.  I’ve driven every small car known to man at intervals, trying to find some reasonable personal transportation when the Camry of Doom goes kaput.

What I’m *really* looking to do is duplicate the love I had for the 1998 Impreza 2.5RS, a car with All-Wheel Drive, a sweet 5-speed manual transmission and the turn-in responses of a B13 Sentra SE-R.  I still remember the test drive I took at the now-defunct Oldhan’s Subaru in Nicholasville Kentucky back in college, and whoo boy, was it FUN.  Pity I had no job at the time. :-)

It’s been a rough few weeks, almost entirely self-inflicted.

As the Eastern KY saying goes: “Work is aggravating me to death.”  Nothing about what I’m doing is hard; tedious and frustrating, sure, but not difficult.  Basically, I fight whatever fires appear, and 90% of the time these are communications issues between teams, not technical problems.  Corporations tend to self-select for people who can hide within bureaucracy, stifle their own opinions, and dumbly line-up behind meaningless mandates.  That’s wearisome, to say the least.

The listing

Yes, there’s Kitchen-Aid porn in that picture.  Jealous?

Nothing like a deadline, I guess.

So, we’ve known we needed photographs of our house up on various MLS/Zillow.com sites, and our realtor scheduled a photographer for today.

Today?!

Yeah, lots of work had/has to be done.  We were up last night until after 1am, and back at it again this morning ~7am.  I had a Diet Mountain Dew influenced crisis of confidence at 11pm, but…uh…pushed through it.  I stuck my head in our oven.

So, my home sweet home is on the market.

It’s been a long road getting here.  Whitney’s been feeling the tug to get out of the house since before the housing crash (!), and she’s been a steady force there throughout financial crises.

Anyway, so it’s up.  We’re supposed to be hosting a photographer Thursday, so it’s been continuous clean/declutter/reclutter/clean/declutter since New Year’s.  I’ll give Whitney all the credit–she’s got the place looking great, especially the paint, staging, and her attention to detail.

Prove: Authoritarian Decision-making is myopic
Assume: You work in a engineering-centric corporation with attendant corporate hierarchy.

1. Engineers believe no one is as intelligent as an engineer. (Dilbert’s Razor)
2. Engineers view non-quantifiable job skills as unimportant (Scientific Postulate)
3. Engineers age and seek more salary, responsibility (That’s life)
4. Engineers become managers (by 3)
5. Engineers often communicate poorly (self-evident)
6. Persuasiveness is not quantifiable (self-evident)
7. Charsima is not quantifiable (self-evident)
8. Persuasiveness and Charisma are unimportant (by 2, 6, 7)
9. New idea implementation requires persuasion (The “He who has the Gold makes the rules’ axiom)
10. Engineer managers must persuade to promote new ideas (by 4, 9)
11. Engineer managers will be told ‘No’ (by 5, 10)
12. There’s no point in resubmitting the idea; all pertinent facts were included, by definition. We were told ‘No’ (by 2, 8, 11).
13. Those in power will only see an idea once, no matter change in market conditions (by 12).
14. Those in power will not be given a chance to change their mind (by 8, 13)
15. THEREFORE: Authoritarian decision making in an engineering-centric corporation is myopic. (13,14). QED

* * *

I can’t be honest.   Not anymore…not since 2008, basically.  My honest, analytical opinion would hurt too many feelings and likely get me fired, or sued, or jailed.

Suffice it to say, there are things I’d like to get off my chest and express that I just can’t.   That’s hard, because my blog has always been the place where I did that, consequences be damned.  Well, these days, “consequences” includes four other people.

Perhaps I came out of the womb worrying.

Pehaps it’s learned behavior.

Luke 12:25 says:

5 And which of you by worrying can add a single [a](C)hour to his [b]life’s span?26 If then you cannot do even a very little thing, why do you worry about other matters?

What does this have to do with 2011, anyway?

I worried alot this year.  I worried about myself, my wife, my kids, my parents, my job, my church obligations.  And, frankly, I freaked-out.  Often.  So often, that yesterday and today, I talked myself through “this is usually the part where I freak out,” because the triggers were all there. Self-awareness is all that I have sometimes whenever I see fear, rage, selfishness, hate, guilt, jealousy, betrayal, disappointment, anger, etc. building.  I finally can see it coming  and I believe I can choose something different.

Some things are stories.

Some things are not.  There are facts I remember about my idiosynracies and ticks, and those of my fellow humans that just don’t go anywhere.  They’re kinda just…there.

These are those:

• I once roomed with a guy D.E.F.  D had this curious Pavlovian response to riding in a car for any length of time > 2 minutes.  He’d go to sleep.  My other roomie once took him on a road trip from Georgetown, Kentucky, to Jackson, TN.  D slept the entire way there and the entire way back.
• I hate the blue ring optometrists use for glaucoma checks.  Basically it goes like this: They dilate your eyes, you can’t open them for love or money, and then you need to open like a droog from Clockwork Orange so the optometrist can move this DEATH MACHINE towards your eyeball.  Really, it looks like a scene out of a Bond Movie, complete with bad dialog.  Only here the thing–it’s not Sean Connery’s penis they’re going to ginsu, it’s YOUR EYEBALL.  Usually, this procedure takes like 2 minutes at the end of the exam.  Poor Dr. Jones in Jackson, Ky used to devote 20 minutes to this and we both dreaded it.
• Supposedly, there’s a puff-of-air thing they can do to check for glaucoma.  I believe this is a lie perpetrated by optometrists, cruelly giving false hope there will be no more BLUE RING DEATH MACHINE.
• Once something reaches a certain level of messiness, I mentally refuse to deal with it.  I focus my attention somewhere else, like a pair of shiny keys or maybe the weather outside.  This drives my wife nuts, part 1.
• When I’m upset, I fold things.  I’ve compulsively folded an entire load of towels without realizing it. 
• When I’m REALLY upset, I clean things.  I once reorganized my DVD collection at 2am while listening to PCHH
• I have an extreme fear/fascination thing with knives.  Once when I was 2 or 3, I got my dad’s jacknife out and cut my fingertip to ribbons.  Whenever I see my kids near one, I’m sure the same thing will happen to them.  Yet, I like knives very much–my father and I used to bond over them every Christmas–and my cherished birthday present this year from my wife was a Ken Onion Chive by Kershaw.
• Segue: I used my pocket knife in lieu of scissors when wrapping all my gifts this year.  Yes, I’m unaccountably proud of this.
• I seemingly can’t do household chores without music or a podcast playing.  This drives my wife nuts, part  2.
• I have a mental block about the following things:  Housepainting, Barbecue Grilling, Drum Brakes, carburetors, general carpentry, automatic transmissions, audio/visual equipment, HVAC operation & repair.  I’m sure I could think of others.
• People with explosive tempers and feelings of paranoia oughtn’t own firearms.  I do not own firearms.
• Tempur-pedic isn’t all hype.  Try one for yourself.
• As I get older, I find increasingly fewer things offer any escape.  Video games, meh.  Kids…sometimes.  Joey’s gone this week, and I miss him pretty badly.
• My phone is like a security blanket.  Seriously can’t believe how fast I got here from May ’til now.  This drives my wife nuts, part 3.
• I basically couldn’t care less what I wear, provided it’s decent and has < 2 holes in it.  #tdmwn

When I was about 5 years old, my mom decided to drop me off with my aunt at her office while she did business in town. As my aunt worked in the District 10 Department of Highways in Jackson, Kentucky, her job was utterly regular and somewhat dull unless something extraordinary happened–>lots of overtime, somebody got fired, that sort of thing.

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 As it was the middle of summer, nothing like that happened. Anyway, my mom rented a VHS video of Pound Puppies and dropped me off.  My Aunt took me to the big conference room in the middle of the cinder-block building and plopped me in front of the television, daring me to move.

I’m rolling off a 16 month stint as the sole proprietor of a Java library used internally where I work.  Yep, it was an almost unheard-of situation within corporate America: I had no project manager, no marketing rep, no support staff, no unique testers.  I was responsible for API design, test plan, interfacing with multiple teams, delivery, support, infrastructure.  The works.

In short, I loved it.

I loved getting to code 6 to 12 hours a day, every work day, working through design decisions, collaborating with other teams.  I’d go to bed noodling on design problems, I’d often get insight into them over coffee, then I’d have them implemented by that next night.  Most of the people I worked with were colleagues of mine from way back.  My only mandate was “make them happy,” and take care of my own stuff.  I had a project manager for the first month or so; once he was satisfied I had my stuff together, the reigns were off.

Update: We didn’t really have Neural Programmi…

Harold Combs - Aug 3, 2019

Update: We didn’t really have Neural Programming in 2016.

Wow, the blogger.com interface sure has changed since the last time I posted!

Well, to catch-up a few things:

• My job title is now ‘Software Architect’.  This is avowed to be one of the most despised roles in all Software, since Developers resent architects’ unrealistic, out-of-date ideas, and managers resent anyone besides them directing their teams.  Yay, me.
• I had a motorcycle residing at my house for ~1 week in late June.  This was one of the worst episodes in  my life, and rocked me to my very core.  In a true case of ‘be careful what you wish for’, I lied and manipulated my way to take advantage of a tragic situation (my uncle’s motorcycle accident) to come by a bike that I didn’t really want.  My inner King Baby came to the fore in many ways.  I hurt everybody.  The bike left a week later, and relations with my parents haven’t been the same since.
• Joey is now a Webelos II, the last stage of Cub Scouts before becoming a Boy Scout.  We attended the district camp-out at the R.J.Corman property this past weekend and had a blast.
• Gracie is now walking, taking 27 steps unassisted yesterday.
• Maria is now in pre-school at the First Methodist Church in Georgetown 3 days a week.  She’s loving it, and seems to be flourishing amid the social interaction and learning environment.  
• Whitney and I are making the first halting steps toward selling our house and buying another.  This is possibly the worst time to sell a house since WWII, but hey, when you get The Call, one needs to answer it.  We already absorbed several huge maintenance issues with our disaster of a house by ignoring this leading.
• Whitney currently has car fever, and if you read this blog you know I *always* have car fever.  Current target de lust is a Toyota Prius 5.  Fifty one miles per gallon sounds pretty ideal for the day-to-day operations of Whitney and the kids, plus it would make my bi-weekly trips to Louisville cost 1/2 as much versus the Camry of Doom.
• Whitney believes the Camry of Doom has a terminal mold problem.  I can’t smell any mold, which she says is part of the problem.
• Andy Rooney is retiring from 60 Minutes as of this weekend.  This man has been doing weekly essay commentary my entire life (1978-present).  Wow.
• My current daily car fix comes from www.thetruthaboutcars.com The site is everything I always wanted www.autoextremist.com to be, and has one awesome refugee from VWVortex, Jack Baruth.
• I ramble sometimes.
• My current work notebook is a 13" Macbook Air, with a 128GB SSD.  This thing is pure sex, and I love it.
• I hit an all-time adult weight low of 190 lbs a few weeks ago, at which time people started asking me if I had cancer or something.  I don’t–the tests came back negative.  Basically, the meds I’m on increase your metabolism, particularly of protein.  In short, my body’s been eating my muscles since March.  Since my last doctor’s visit, I’ve been eating Cliff Bars and mainlining protein like an Atkins Addict, and my weight, muscles, and energy level seem stable.  
• I’m involved in an addiction accountability group that strengthens me every week, and if this were an anonymous blog, I’d love to tell you all about it.  If you’re interested in details, please email me.
• We got a new dishwasher at home.  It’s the little things that make you smile.
• I think Google+ is a great idea, but it’s like a bar with no women–not that interesting. 
• I’m a twitter fiend.  Love it and the immediate access to some of the best minds in the world, particularly in tech.
• I no longer sleepwalk or wake up exhausted.  Yay, modern chemistry!
• I no longer feel the need to disrupt, destroy, or be defensive all the time.  Ibid.
• I still love my Motorola Atrix 4G, and think Android fits my mind better than iOS.  My wife loves iOS.  God has a sense of humor, what can I say?

Definition: Dutch Disease

After reading Alan Greenspan’s book last year, one concept that’s remained with me is Dutch Disease, which I (over-)simplify to mean: When you have one huge cash cow industry/revenue stream, then all your other industries suffer.

Combine that with this article on tech crunch.

I see a similarity there, in that tech companies that were formerly innovative latch onto a current upper-bound revenue source (Let’s say MS Office) and short-change other opportunities, or (worse yet) view them in terms of the current technology.