Flint's Bleeder Valve

Alright you crazy kids

2008-04-03T00:25:00.002-04:00

Here we go. I'm on a new host, new blogging software, starting from scratch.

You can read all about it over here.

I'll keep this up as a place to vent when I encounter a disturbance in the force.

http://mpwilson.com/

- Mike

(Oh yeah, that whole "MadWilliamFlint" thing? Yeah, just scratch that. All of a sudden after five or so years it became old.)

Hilarious Muppet Blooper Video

2008-04-01T17:50:00.003-04:00

Check it out.

Ferriss

2008-03-31T11:18:00.001-04:00

I cannot highly enough recommend the Four Hour Workweek book. It's full of wonderful ideas on breaking away from the day to dayness of life if you're up to the challenge. Tim Ferriss has an incredible ability to get outside of the world's workings and live his own life.

He also has a website, a blog, for lack of a better term. The site has been equally full of good information both in the posts themselves and in reference areas around the site.

On each of the posts (near as I can tell, having spot-checked it a bit in retrospect) there exists a byline:

"Written by Tim Ferriss"

Well today there's a post written by Tim Ferriss (possibly) confessing that the last year of posts have indeed not been written by him, that he's outsourced pretty much the whole thing. I've been had.

And herein lies the problem.

97% of what Ferriss has to say is plain old great out of the box, innovative lifestyle thinking. But he crosses a line I simply can not abide.

I've wondered on this and other occasions about that motivation. Why should I care after all?

When push comes to shove, I get to pick the qualities I value in people I respect and look up to, and while he's flirted with this line more than once, this pushes him over the edge for me.

I can't trash him or his work. It's innovative and wonderful.

But I won't be back to the site. I don't care if you're going to teach me to fly, be honest about it.

I'll not be made a patsy.

Beijing 2008

2008-03-30T14:00:00.003-04:00

Awesome...

Fannie Farmer Cookbook (full text)

2008-03-30T12:02:00.003-04:00

The Fannie Farmer cookbook is awesome. Check it out:

This classic American cooking reference includes 1,849 recipes, including everything from “after-dinner coffee”—which Farmer notes is beneficial for a stomach “overtaxed by a hearty meal”—to “Zigaras à la Russe,” an elegant puff-pastry dish. Bartleby.com chose the 1918 edition because it was the last edition of the cookbook authored completely by Farmer.

I know I know, I need a hobby

2008-03-29T16:01:00.004-04:00

One of the things that I think way too much about is the sort of disposable culture problem that's grown out of advances in industrial and economic progress. We don't make things any more. We don't FIX things any more and it saddens me a bit.

So Friday night (that would be yesterday) I decided to try my hand at making butter. Not a big deal, just get some heavy cream, a smidge of salt, put it in the kitchen-aid and go for a bit, right?

Actually yeah. It's the weirdest thing. I let it go for a bit (20 mintues?) and all of a sudden the sound the thing changed and it was making this weird sloshy noise.

I walked over to it and damned if there wasn't a big wop of butter sitting in a pool of what turns out to be buttermilk (neat! who knew?)

You have to work the butter a bit to get the rest of the water out of it, but that was easily accomplished with a big zip-lock freezer bag. (Kneading butter's not my idea of a good time. Though I have to say I could really see where it would be part of one. >;-)

So now, for two pints of organic heavy cream (I tend towards organic milk products. I'm not an environmentalist. I just think it tastes better enough to pay more.) I have about a pound of butter and two cups of buttermilk, which is rather more than I expected.

I did the math and realized that, not only do I have a better result than store bought. It's an interesting novelty and, get this...

IT'S FUCKING CHEAPER TO MAKE BUTTER YOURSELF THAN IT IS TO BUY IT!

Yes. Even with the "organic" premium compared to plain old non-organic butter. Add in the price of buttermilk (which I use in baking ALL the damn time) and this is just win/win/win.

You're welcome.

I'll amend this post with more details if anyone's interested.

Memelet of the day

2008-03-29T15:20:00.001-04:00

"Good Intentions are the easiest thing in the world to fake because you don't ever have to show results."

- Me

Me again

2008-03-28T14:01:00.002-04:00

I'm having weird DNS issues again, so I think I'm coming back to this site for a while.

I'm actually in the midst of writing a piece of blogging software. I can't believe I'm actually going to do this after all this crap. But I'm so sick of NOTHING doing quite what I want.

When push comes to shove, the real feature set I'm interested in is almost entirely in the generation of the post html itself, which was a big "a ha!" for me. This means that what I'm really creating is a rich blog posting tool; but one that has deep knowledge of the full site itself and can do some interesting cross-referencing tricks.

Like Radio Userland but without the suck.

Stay tuned!

Not the real blog

2008-02-20T00:50:00.002-05:00

It just occurred to me that my blogger profile, which I use to comment all over the place, points here. It really shouldn't and I"ll fix that at some point. But if you're here 'cause you clicked through for more about me, go here: The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty

2007-08-14T10:24:00.000-04:00

Mic check, mic check...1..2....1..2...

I figure since blogger is now google's, that posting from google docs to a blogger blog ought to be relatively painless eh?

It'll do for now

2007-08-14T09:54:00.001-04:00

Yeah, see this may just be the thing to do from now on.

Sure blogger is minimally functional. But it least it's functional.

ugh

2006-12-19T11:17:00.000-05:00

4 shots of Pitrone
2 Pepperfucker shots
1 shot of Cuervo
4 pints of Magners
2 greasy burgers
1 order of fries

Makes for a grumpy and not particularly productive mikey

sniff

2006-12-18T09:04:00.001-05:00

Just....

watch it.

Do The Simplest Thing That Won't Work

2006-12-17T12:17:00.000-05:00

(or: Holy Shit, Mikey Drank The Kool-Ade)

My current employer is the only one I've ever worked for that has taken the process of software development seriously.

By that I mean that they understand it's a complex thing and have gone out of their way to seek out the people and ideas that really make it work instead of some management consultant derived crap-ass methodology involving nothing more than reams of "deliverables" with no real attachment to the product or process at all. (read: cmm,ss,uml,omt,etc...)

So we get guys in from Object Mentor and such places to sell and teach us about the various permutations of Agile programming and Xp.

Most notable is the practice of Test Driven Development. A few years ago I was hanging out on the One True Wiki, detecting the murmurs of TDD. I started applying it, or rather, trying to apply it. ...err... painful.

Eventually though I got the point. But wasn't quite motivated enough to do it on my own, especially without any kind of tools.

It's all about the tools.

So on Thursday I had the pleasure of getting a brain dump by sitting down with Mike Feathers from Object Mentor as he dragged me, kicking and screaming into pulling nunit into a...get this... C# .net GUI, to test code that heavily relies on 3rd party gui components, by instantiating those components (without a live interface) and driving them through code-based calls, rather than through normal gui clicks and typing.

This is something that other ... what do you call those, consultants? *shrug* have come to XPify us have been stumped by.

The end result is usually along the lines of "Well... split as much of the code out from the gui as you can, and test from there down." Made sense to me. Hell, I'm a network systems programmer. I don't even like LOOKING at guis, let alone programming them.

But we succeeded. By 3:00 in the afternoon, I was able to write a couple basic tests surrounding a new gui-based feature I was adding.

Now...

By 5:00, the fact that I had 5 such features to add, all mildly (though not substantially) different made everything perfectly clear.

I started by taking the tests, copying them and renaming them. Then the matter of refactoring the tests came up. I spent the first few hours of Friday cleaning up these tests into the front-end tests themselves and a bundle of support code.

This, my first serious foray into TDD, resulted in taking a piece of work that was no less than 3-4 days and squnching it down to 8 hours of working on tests, and 3 hours of working on logic. The result has a MUCH higher confidence rating than I could have gotten without the tests. NOT "would have", COULD have.

So let me zoom back in to the process for a second here...

The degenerate idea is that if you're going to write a piece of code, write a test first. You write the test (such that it fails) then you make it pass, then you evolve the code through evolution of the tests.

It occurs to me now that in evolving the tests that what you want to do at any given time is add a test that is "The Simplest Thing That Won't Work", then solve it with the far better known expression "The Simplest Thing That Will Work".

By switching back and forth between these two practices, you develop not only a body of code that you know works; but through the tests, a body of code that is fundamentally adaptable to new requirements and structural changes because it is anchored in the tests.

Plus, it forces you to constantly examing what it is you think you're trying to achieve and making sure you're on track with it. In addition to actually being functional proofs that the code works, the tests say "This is what I'm working on Right Now" at all times.

Until you've done it, this all seems like a bunch of crap. Maybe you've been burned enough to get to the point where "yeah, testing all my code seems like a good idea." But almost invariably what I hear (and swore up and down for a very long time) is "but the OVERHEAD!?! Shouldn't you be spending that time doing work?"

The answer, which I'm only going to briefly touch on here is that you don't have the faintest idea what work you're doing if you don't test. The work you're doing is "Build a house" and you're trying to figure out where to put a 2x4.

I'm a C++ programmer. I've been a C++ programmer since very soon after C++ existed. I love the language. It's low level, flexible and powerful. Plus, it's truly arcane in a way that appeals to my sense of order.

One of the things about C++ I love so much is that it's a thin evolution on top of c. When you write C++ code you know exactly what it's doing and when. There's no guesswork, no nonsense about garbage collection, who owns that reference, none of that crap.

As such there's a level of security that comes from writing your own libraries in it from the ground up. "I KNOW what this is and what it does." It's tough to beat with the fuzzy scripting languages, virtual machine environments, and all that. There's too much going on under the hood. Too many unknowns. (and don't DARE tell me "those details don't matter".)

I've a pet theory that I've developed in the last 36 hours about this: That this level of security is the source of a vast amount of bad practice in the software development world. Most notably the "Not Invented Here" syndrome, which really comes down to "I didn't write it, I don't know it, and in the time it takes me to learn it well enough to be as comfortable as I want with it, I could write it myself and know it better anyway."

The surprise of Test Driven Development (see, there was a point to that sidebar ;) is that having a body of 34 tests left me feeling secure about the quality of my code in a way that I did not at all anticipate. In the worst case, the WORST case, I have a bad test or I'm missing a test.

So from here I'm not sure where to go on my own stuff. Should I start pulling down pyunit, cppunit, junit, etc? And instrument all my code? (I have hundreds of thousands of lines of code.)

I actually think that might be a good idea. I have huge libraries that I've developed over the last couple decades. But as I've moved from interesting project of the moment to interesting project of the moment, my familiarity with these things has atrophied to the point where I look at the source directory and the few test programs I've got and I get this kinda fuzzy... "Yeah, but how well did that actually WORK?" feeling (resulting in "Not Invented Here" syndrome on my own code *sigh*)

Perhaps some of these projects and big ideas would be more tractable than I thought at the time if I could lock down the code under a comprehensive suite of tests.

*rolls up his sleeves and heads out to pick up a couple cases of diet dew*

Nothing to see here anymore

2006-10-01T22:24:00.000-04:00

The REAL blog is back online. Nothing to see here. All posts of substance have been migrated.

Whence cometh this volume?

2006-09-28T23:26:00.000-04:00

I made a conscious decision a couple weeks ago to put significant energy into writing. I know that in order for me to get to the good stuff, there's an immeasurable amount of schlock I have to get through. I imagine this is similar to a lot more things in life than I suspect at this moment.

So I've been bringing my little 10.6" laptop to work and sitting in Grand Central Terminal at lunchtime, blasting out to the page for a half hour. (No, I don't connect to wireless networks with my laptop. Which is why there aren't as many 2:20 in the afternoon posts as you might otherwise expect.)

And the content, the raw content, has been remarkably good. Not the form, the wordsmithing, structure and such. But the ideas and the way they're starting to gel.

So I've got a few pieces in the works that I want to buff a good shine into. But I may not get to that point. I may get to a point of mild dissatisfaction and just post a bunch of stuff out of the (historically suggestive) fear that if I don't post it while half-assed, it'll never get out there.

So for many of these things that may suffice for now. Because the most important thing for me now is raw throughput as it "greases the wheels" between my mind and an external representation, which is my biggest stumbling block.

"Where do I start?" is much more of a problem for me than "How do I finish?"

s'ere a point here? Not really. But you're going to be seeing a lot more from me lately and I thought I'd just do a brain dump on why it's likely to be a damn measure shy of my best work.

We'll see.

Reversal of Attutude

2006-09-28T23:24:00.000-04:00

[This was a lunchtime brainstorm on Tuesday of this week. It's rough around the edges. But that's fine for now.]

It occurred to me this morning that it's a particularly strange reversal of attitude with which I've been experimenting over the last few days.

As previously mentioned, I'd been mourning my ill fortune at work for a couple weeks. Being moved to tweaking gui colors and background styles is without a doubt beneath me in the purely technical sense.

Friday though a couple things happened which caused me to spend the weekend untwisting my brain a bit.

We had a "Gui Summit" which is as pretentious as it sounds. But what it amounted to was getting the stakeholders (the real high-end suspender wearing stakeholders, not the "I don't like that icon" users) in a room with the developers and all the associated management to talk about what we'd done over the last six months and where we're going to take this client offering, etc.

It was fun.

It was REALLY fun.

At almost 4 hours long it was about 8-10 hours too short. Unfortunately I wasn't able to uncross my arms and join the conversation for far too long. But once I got rolling I was able to attention (and FAR more importantly, I was able to grab INTEREST) of people who were (I heard ad nauseum later) were "tough nuts to crack" as far as direction changes, proposals and brainstorming. I got that great head-nodding as I talked about the way this stuff had better be designed.

I received more feedback from upper management from that meeting than I have in perhaps the entirety of my career leading up to that point.

Yesterday I actually received a phone call from the head of UI design telling me that SHE'S been inundated with calls about a couple ideas I tossed out and wondering how long they are (not "would", ARE) going to take to implement.

The proceeding brought me to a couple points, some new, some old.

1) I'm really fucking glib. I'm erudite, compelling and I can sell ashes to the devil at will, as long as I believe he should have them.

2) I LOVE corporate politics. LOVE it. Sorry. I LOVE it. Primarily because I'm not really a stakeholder most of the time so it can go south and I don't really lose anything. It's not like I'm ever really in the middle of it. Though I"m about to change that.

3) There are more things to love/hate about a programming job than how much it hurts your head to try and solve problems and whether or not you hang out with the people you work with after work.

There's enough going on in my life that I need to fix (though less all the time) that it occurred to me that it may be nice to take a break from brain bending programming problems at work in order to have the brainpower and energy left at the end of the day to work on myself a bit.

The hilarious poetic justice of all of this is that it comes from something I learned in the gym.

I'm inclined to push myself at those 80' type "110%" levels if I can. It's very difficult for me, most days, to maintain the attention to do so. But when I can, I floor it. I find this particularly easy in the gym.

It started from my treadmill cardio warm-up. I kept pushing the speed up and up and up, knowing that I had an upper bound of 10 or 15 (sometimes 20) minutes. So I'd give it everything I had, being in a dead sprint for the last half lap.

It felt GREAT. I was watching my progress and performance go through the roof on that machine. But there was a problem: I wasn't worth shit for the rest of the workout. Lifting after I had "got my heart rate up" was almost pointless as I had absolutely no energy left.

I tried all kinds of things: Gatorade, candybars, power drink this and protien bar that. Nothing. There was only one thing that really worked.

SLOW THE HELL DOWN. The only way to get everything I can out of a workout (indeed thereby getting my 110%) was to back off on the treadmill and spread my energy out a bit. Back off and dole out energy judiciously, instead of sprinting out of the gate.

Seems obvious now, but that's only because it's only now that I codified my problem quite so succinctly. See, this is what I do at work. Blast my head into the problems, hunched over a keyboard, and completely burn out. The end result being that I couldn't care LESS about the company, the environment (so much as it meant anything more than "keeping people off my ass") or anything else.

But I think that by taking what was, until Friday, a real pride hit and forcing myself to not define my success by the difficulty of the problems I"m working on, that I may very well open the door to working on far far more compelling things.

Like making decisions.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a few meetings put together this afternoon to cost out some of these features and redesigns.

What a great line (aka QOTD: 20060928)

2006-09-28T11:50:00.000-04:00

"It's never too late to make a difference. Just...keep...trying s***."

oh knock it OFF already

2006-09-28T11:28:00.000-04:00

http://techdirt.com/articles/20060927/214638.shtml

While the RIAA must love that, it's very troublesome. Just because a tool is widely misused, that's hardly evidence that the maker of the tool intended for it to be used illegally, or that it actively "induced" illegal behavior. And, even then, inducement should be a higher standard than just intent.

This brings to mind a tangental point that's been bothering me for about 8 years.

COULD WE PLEASE STOP PRETENDING THAT FILE SHARING SYSTEMS ARE FOR ANYTHING OTHER THAN ILLEGALLY DOWNLOADING CONTENT!?!

I mean good christ people. Who do you think you're kidding? This polite fiction has gone on quite longer than enough.

It's like stoners arguing for hemp as an industrial product. KNOCK IT OFF. You want to con people into legalizing it so you can smoke it. If that's your aim, fine. No problem. Take your position and stand by it. But don't insult the intelligence of the entire human race just because you're too damned stoned to realize how transparent you are.

Yes, Bit Torrent is really interesting technology, and it's adoption in legitimate distribution of large-scale content is a triumph of that technology. And it's an exception to the rule because it's not based on an established p2p network where you can "go shopping" for things you might happen to want to download (you know, like updates to your anti-virus software you have a paid subscription for. Or public domain gutenberg text. :-/ )

If you're all for downloading mp3s, do it. If you think it should be legislated into legality, do THAT.

But this incessant whining about how p2p networks aren't REALLY about distributing music and movies ripped off of cd/dvds and how dare they pick on the innocent little file sharing service is utterly ridiculous.

Something isn't so just because you say it and people are smart enough to know not to take everything at face value.

That being said, as someone with near perfect ignorance of intellectual property law, I've got some nebulous creepy feelings about the way the RIAA is going about shutting these things down (as well as the notion that they're being shut down at all.) It's an awfully grey area to be attacked so viciously. I'm not all that sure I believe the p2p services themselves have really committed a crime. Though I'll say it reminds me of the recent story about a website that essentially advertised sources for buying pot in college towns. To come down on either side of it smacks of loopholes and semantic games.

Why I love my city: #226,238

2006-09-27T13:41:00.000-04:00

OHiNY

Guy: I don't discriminate based on race, but you in particular are a suspicious-looking motherfucker.

--Red Sky Lounge, 29th & Park

My First User Script Tweak

2006-09-27T11:51:00.000-04:00

Securify stuff.

This is a tweak of Mark Pilgrim's nice little GMail securing greasemonkey script. All it really does is replace "http" with "https" for urls matching a string. (All I did was add a couple urls to the list.)

It's very handy for things like gmail & writely, which have ssl equivalents that aren't used by default.

What caused me no end of trouble, that I finally figured out is that greasemonkey scripts need to end not with ".js" but with ".user.js"

Here 'tis... (again, note that all I did was add 2 include lines and change the name to "securify stuff".)

// ==UserScript==
// @name Securify Stuff
// @namespace http://diveintogreasemonkey.org/download/
// @description force various sites to use secure connection
// @include http://gmail.google.com/*
// @include http://writely.com/*
// @include http://www.writely.com/*
// ==/UserScript==

window.location.href = window.location.href.replace(/^http:/, 'https:');

W00t!

2006-09-26T11:35:00.000-04:00

Yeah. That's right. Blogging from my cellphone. OMGLOLWTF!?!?1

ouch

2006-09-25T10:52:00.001-04:00

Holy crap have I got a headache.

I tried reading on the subway this morning. A little Ambrose Bierce. But it just wasn't happening. I couldn't focus on anything. I had to keep syaing to myself "you can see the words right? You do know what they all mean right?" But trying to ready more than a couple in a row was just more focus than I could muster.

Now I feel like someone's stabbed me in the left eye.

I've gotta go pump my self full of OTCs and hope that helps; something I'm loathe to do in general. But this shit ain't ok.

I haven't been in this much pain in a great many years.

UPDATE: Ah the miracles of modern pharmacology. Turns out 3 Aleve and a nodoz can work wonders. I'm almost back at the point where I can read.

oh good crap already :-/

2006-09-23T10:16:00.000-04:00

I've got my pc (yep, my only wintel desktop left) and my mini hooked up to a 2-port DVI KVM to which is tethered my lovely 23" apple cinema ADC display thingamabob.

Last night the display stopped displaying and the little power light started flickering on and off at about one second intervals (which sometimes happened with the crap-ass kvm I've got. I'll get the model number and make to recommend against in a minute) so I did the switch everything off then back on thing, the "is everything plugged in.... REALLY plugged in?" thing. Nothing.

After a few minutes of fiddlation the lcd stopped receiving power... it seems.

So I went to bed disgusted and had my first full-on "wake up screaming" night terror in a l0ng time (which I think was far more closely related to the HP Lovecraft story I read as I drifted off than it was to the lcd not working... but let's remember who's talking here.... ya never know.)

This morning (read: 10 minutes ago as my laptop was taking it's own sweet time in booting) I ripped everything out of the kvm and plugged everything directly into the mini.

Nothing.

:-/

Now I have to go pull the G4 out of the closet (where it's been humming along, nice and file-servy for ever) and try and connect the display right to that, instead of going through a dvi converter to see if THAT'S the problem.

Is it so damn hard to get things that work? The task of getting ahold of a 2-port DVI KVM was horribly frustrating, then the dvi-adc converter, then a week of tweaking to realize what order my cpus and monitors needed to be switched on to get the whole ensemble to work (it's very particular) to create the tenuous balance I've been sufficing with for the last couple months (gah, is it 6? when did they announce the dual-core intel minis?)

And now something breaks a nail.

It'll be ok. I've already decided to use this as an opportunity to break away from the internet (can't you tell?) and rent the heavy equipment and hire a demolitions crew to come and clean my apartment once and for all, so I can do some long-promised baking this weekend (and ...well... nevermind what else.)

Maybe it'll plug into the g4 and just work.

But I doubt it.

I'm really not looking forward to dropping any cash on anything. Not that I don't have it. I'm finally nice and flush again (it's a long path to savings when you've got $220 a week in personal training sessions on top of rent.) I'm just not all that excited about not having money.

If then, when I come back at 12:30, I can't get the lcd to work; I'm just going to go get it's original box out of the closet, put it in there, hook up the crt I've got to my wintel box, slurp the files off the mini over the network, then just shut it down and move on for a while.

Besides I have a target, reachable (though not quickly) goal of savings which, when reached, allows me to:

Stop working for someone else forever.

All my professional life I've been making money in significant excess of my needs, and as such the notion of "going without" has been an entirely unnecessary concept.

So I'm starting to get a little thirsty. But I've got no well. I do have one kick ass shovel that will take me through a few years should I not just swap it out for another.

But now, ironically, I've got to go buy another 20 training sessions, which comes to about $1700. about 3% of my total savings goal.

The only thing more expensive than those... is not buying them.

Harrumph and all.

2006-09-22T23:06:00.000-04:00

(This is a brain fart from yesterday at lunch time. Sitting in grand central with my cute little sony laptop for about 45 minutes. I'd planned on working on a couple character sketches. But hey, what comes out comes out. Something I'm inclined to allow while I get rolling.)

I'm paying today for not having drank the slightest bit of water after last night's escapade. Not of course that I drank so much. Four bottles of Cider and a couple shots (Pitrone (en?) and some creation that I think is called a Washington Apple.) But between that fairly late evening and my despondancy at the job, I've got a headache of epic proportions and my ability to actually stay awake for a normal work day is losing the battle.

Alas, we've no diet coke in the fridge/closet today, though Magally did come up and ask me (quite specifically) which sodas we are deficient of, etc. She had to come up a floor to get to me. It wasn't convenient for her. After I'd registered my preferences we chatted and she walked away as we both laughed a bit about some joke we'd spun. As she left the guys I work with turned to me and asked why it was that she asked ME what I wanted and what was missing and not everybody, etc. I couldn't help myself.

"Maybe because I actually TALK to people."

"We talk."

I let it go from there. They're not bad guys but I didn't know what to say other than "well you talk when you NEED something from each other. But that's about it." So I decided to leave it unsaid.

See I'd started writing a piece in the office, but I had no way to get it to the laptop, so it's lingering vaqguely in the back of my head as it sits, nearly sketched out wanting only for some fleshy bits, on my machine in work... which this is not.

Still though, to actually sit in grand central with my laptop and write, stream of consciousness or no, is remarkably refreshing.

I could easily see it becoming once again, one of my standard habits, all the better this time around as I work (such as it is) scarcely five blocks from here.

After all the years of programming, all the books I've read, my half finished passionate projects sitting in the boneyards of my mind and on hard-drives strewn throughout my apartmnet I've still not progressed professionally in any meaningful way, other than working as a sort of abstract "senior programmer" of sorts.

I really thought this job was going to be different. I was a pain in the ass during the job search. I did more interviewing than my interviewers. I was critical, exacting and particular. Recruiters can't STAND me... unless they have exactly what I'm looking for.

Alas.

I'd turned down an offer and rather abruptly ended the interview/negotiation process with other companies when this offer came through. The work itself was compelling and it seemed that, even in the off chance that the programming wasn't technically challenging, the subject matter would be far more than sufficiently engaging to keep my interest.

It was two weeks that I worked on those projects, before being shuttled off on loan to another department. For a couple months I lived in "well... it's pretty interesting I guess" land, knowing that it was to be a brief tenure and that I would be reclaimed into my original position once it was over.

And I was... for a week and a half.

After which I was informed via instant messaging, that I was going to be working on a GUI application, doing plain old gui work.

ANY programmer could do this job. ANY.

It's now been something close to three weeks that I've been making modifications to screen controls, font families and pitch sizes, colors and layouts. I've been fighting an uphill technical battle not because of the fundamental difficulty of the subject matter or the intricacy of the application itself. But because the original programmers have such blatant disregard to the task of code design that even the simplest modification is days of work.

[This isn't the topic I wanted to hit (not that I had one in mind particularly) but hey, if it's what's on my mind then it's going to need to be purged before I can get to the good stuff anyway ;-)]

So much else seems, to my current eye, to be going well. But this weighs on me terribly. On one hand my job has become easy. So there is an aspect of myself that says I should embrace that and use it to move my job to the back of my mind and run on autopilot for a couple months while I clean up other areas of my life.

It doesn't seem such a bad idea on the surface. That's a lot of frustration and anger to let go of though, and I'm not sure if "settling for now" is really the way I want to go.

Too much I just settle for status quo, unable for whatever reason to evoke sufficient passion as to be actually motivating, instead just coming to enough energy only to generate some vibrant plea with the universe written in emacs, posted to a blog someplace.

Reading back on this though seems so misleading. I'm not sunk in one of The Pit Of Despair, hooked up to The Machine. It's just a frustration. A major one, to be sure.

It is only because this thing is out of order that I feel compelled to address it. My fear is that if I do not that I will succumb to an attitude of everything else being good enough that I accept a certain inappropriate complacency.

Things on the whole are better in almost entirely unidentifiable ways. I'm certainly a better person than I was on December 23rd, 2005. (though that's not so strong an endorsement.)

But I'm still not quite good enough.

Alas. Back to work...