Posts

Dear Ford Motor Company, My 2010 Fusion Hybrid crashed today. No, I didn’t smash into anything…the electric traction system in my car crashed in the computer sense as I was rolling towards a stop sign. I was left without power brakes. Thankfully this was at ~5 mph so just stomping really hard on the pedal yielded a stop. As I approached the stop sign in electric drive mode (engine off), my dashboard lit up light a Christmas tree, displaying warning lights I didn’t know I even had. The display shouted ‘SERVICE ADVANCE TRAC SYSTEM’ and my brake pedal went almost to the floor. ...

Martin Lomasney, an old West End political boss from Boston, is best remembered for his warning to young politicians everywhere — “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink”.

So yeah, let’s spend 20 minutes flying around Pandora from Avatar but let’s leave off the part that makes the plot work… “There is such a thing as a tesseract” – Miss WhatsIt I’ll never forget the day I read Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time for the first (and thus far only) time. I was in 4th grade–11 years old–and I was in my Aunt Norie’s house in Highway 205. My mom dropped me off, and I was alone for hours. I can’t remember the occasion exactly, and especially the reason for my solitude, but it didn’t matter. ...

The following come to mind for being 39 years old ( I turn 40 in November ) “Killing yourself, one M&M at a time.” Bonus points if you sing this to a “Fugees” tune and your coworker thinks you’re having a stroke. “The Advil Years”. Significant things cause you to be sore the next day. Like walking. “Remember when _____ didn’t hurt all the time?” Knees….how did these things pass design review? ...

A programmer dies and goes to heaven, meeting a rather stern St. Peter at the Pearly Gates. “You do know we have a record of every sin you’ve committed?” Peter says. “Sure, whatever…I’ve got nothing to hide. I lived a very clean life.” Peter continued: “…and your full git history of every commit.” The programmer just smiled. “Great! I’m quite proud of everything. I practiced Clean Code.” “…and the full DAG. No rewrites of history in Heaven.” ...

I’m exhausted. Yes, I know all the motivational crap about The 40% Rule. I can (and shall) push through this, Lord willing, creek don’t rise, coffee maker don’t fail. Some things to highlight for future reflection: I’ve crested 270 pounds. I’m nearly 90 pounds up from where I was in 2012, and 30 more than when I moved here in 2016. I’m eating myself to death. My exercise routine is nonexistent. My sleep metrics seem good, but I get no rest. I don’t read regularly. I don’t have any effective hobbies. I basically work, sleep, repeat. …and yes, I happen to be on-call for my current team this week. I begin to wonder (far too late, I suspect) that the above is unsustainable. Other people seem to do this life thing well, and I….don’t. I seem to just work. ...

So, a colleague brought in an espresso machine, a burr grinder, and some beans. So, now I know how to make espresso. Brilliant Idea: I need to setup an espresso bar beside a cardiologist’s office and take 10% of their profits. My EYEBALLS ARE VIBRATING.

So, I’ve left Twitter and Facebook. I had a flirtation with Blind that I’ve also given-up. Detox has been weird. I was used to having a hardwired line into the pulse of the internet. Between my 4 (!) twitter lists updating constantly and watching Tweetdeck incessantly, I was a straight-up information junkie. So….what’s the methadone for this heroin? Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/devharryc/ Thus far, Instagram has a much different personality than either Twitter or Facebook. ...

Well, as I sit here in 2018, it seems social media is an utter failure. Given that I’ve been on internet chatrooms since 1993, this frustrates me. This was basically the moment I knew I needed to get off twitter Don’t lie and say you care about the school shooting today. It’s been 1,866 days since Sandy Hook. Since then: 1,576 Mass Shootings, including Las Vegas.https://t.co/LCwT6fLedK Restate: You *may* care. WE THE PEOPLE don’t. ...

I say this after 19 years making software: There’s always a date. Get over it. I’ve lived through the Agile Revolution, and various schemes to sell consulting named: Spiral, Rational Unified Process, eXtreme Programming, Scrum, Kanban, and the Scaled Agile Framework. Through it all, there’s always some sort of date. Words like: Milestone Need by date Deadline Start of Production Promise Date Customer Promise Statement of Work Honestly, if they’re not there, you should probably be worried. Projects of significance require planning and planning requires dates. If you haven’t seen a date in quite sometime, you might want to join the rest of us getting paid oodles of money to ship features to customers who’ll pay us. ...

In sum, here’s my problem: I’ve joined a Baptist Church, but I’m no Baptist. In detail it goes like this: Baptists come from the Calvinist tradition. You may have heard of “free will baptists.” These are not those. Calvinism is a very well reasoned Protestant doctrine based on Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. It further comes from the sole scrirptura tradition of the Reformation, in that it solely derives from points in the canonical scriptures, especially the New Testament. ...

Things seem….bad. Offhand, enumerating the things that seem broken in my country right now: Our government isn’t really functioning. The Constitutional Republican Democracy of 1787 seems like a failure at scale. We’re more tribal than we’ve been since segregation, a process that’s accelerating. We’re in unending, global guerrilla war against people willing to kill themselves for an idea incompatible with our existence as a nation. We have roughly one mass shooting per day. Yesterday, there was one in Kentucky. We’ve lost our ability as a society to dream of something bigger: The moon, world peace, whatever. That seems like a 1960’s fever dream at this point. What can I do about any of the above? ...

So, 2017 is past. As luck would have it, we decided today would be a good day for midwinter cleaning, as I’m halfway through my 2 week stint off work. I dug through a box I had from our move back in June, and within was my first Employee Evaluation from Amazon. I got to look at what I thought would be my 2017 and got to compare it to what I actually accomplished. ...

After a brief spate of car fever, I did some research on (say) a Chevy Cruze Diesel or a Chevy Volt. What with the recent flooding in Houston, I convinced myself that buying used might be a bad idea, so I decided to check out incentives and options out there. The short version: Math doesn’t lie. Let’s say you finance a $30,000 at 0% interest for 5 years. That’s 60 months, so the math’s rather obvious: $30,000 / 60 == $500 / month. ...

My friend Dannah (Russell) Jones died this past Friday morning, after collapsing following exercise the night before. She was thirty-eight years old. I met Dannah when we were freshmen at Georgetown College in 1997. She was a self-proclaimed “military brat” lately of Dayton, Ohio. She had a spark of life, humor, and intelligence. She made some friends, but she wasn’t a “joiner.” If Dannah didn’t like you, you’d know about it. ...

Much as it takes a symphony in multiple movements to fully exercise an orchestra, Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver fully exercises film as a systemic input to your brainstem. I left exhausted, happy, and eager to see it again. Act I, Take Me Away! Act 1 is Wright’s original concept writ large: “Baby” is a getaway driver, and we see a contender for the best getaway scene in film set perfectly to a soundtrack. This is the overture, the who, what, and where. There’s almost no dialog–just searing “wow….Wow….WOW!!!!!” ...

I’ve just been having a rough time lately. I’m like an overstuffed Tupperware and me trying to close the lid and put one foot in front of the other isn’t working so well in the past few days. This is me attempting to talk that out, to myself. To begin: My sixteen-year-old stepson chose not to live with us, and the Kentucky judiciary has supported that decision. Months of preparation and legal wrangling resulted to a seven minute conversation in chambers. That was a month ago, June 8th, and the reality of it settles upon me a little more each day. It’s all just sadness and anger, and it comes out at inconvenient times for no apparent reason. ...

I haven’t bought a car for myself since 2008, at which time I bought an eighteen year old car I never should have sold. In the intervening ten years, I’ve had two cars, both welcome hand-me-downs from my wife: The Camry-of-Doom and Sparky, my current 2010 Ford Fusion. Having moved to Austin, paid-off my wife’s Sienna minivan, and begun to sock-away some funds for a new ride, it seems time to consider what’s next. ...

I kid you not, this is like the Winston Churchill “never give up” speech for me. Wow.

“You’ve lost the bite in the bit!” my dad yelled. “Huh?” I was about nine and we were installing a swinging gate on our farm, drilling two holes in this gigantic post my father sunk into the ground in front of our tobacco barn. I was excited to be helping him, since I was a general doughy screw-up (his pre-conversion past time was calling me ‘Lardy’). Anyway, I’d been using the brace and bit apparatus because we were probably 100 yards from the nearest electrical outlet. It was a neat hand tool: You basically put the drill bit where you wanted a hole, put your shoulder to the knob at the back, then turned it until you bored the hole desired…. ...