I wonder what an unbiased observer (if such a thing truly exists in our Heisenbergian world) would make of my day.  Feast or famine?  Uplifting story of redemption, or cruel tale of regret and defeat?  Actually, none of the above – just another day of banal desperation masquerading as something else.

It started out promisingly, with an early trip to Zoka to do some coding and deploying and such.  This noble effort, planned so painstakingly in the mind of our hero – that’s me, btw – ended in looping, giant crop-circles of FAIL, owing to some truly wacky architectural decisions made by a predecessor.  At the moment I’m attempting – for I think the fourth time – to download a 4GB database extract that *should* allow me to circumvent some of the problems and get a working system established completely locally.  Right now, when I hit F5, I connect to a French foreign-ministry database, the mobile phone of a Nigerian 419 scammer, and a penguin-habitat monitor that sends binary-encoded environmental data via dialup modem.  It’s a mess.

Next?  A nice interlude – I introduced myself to, and chatted with, a fellow Zokan, a gardener and former rower, a new transplant from Rhode Island by way of Cincinnati.  I was told that I was “friendly for a native Seattleite,” which I took as a big compliment.  I’ve heard that we Seattleites can be polite but standoffish, so it’s nice to put another (small) crack in that stereotype.  I left a business card and hope to possibly catch up for coffee again.

More work chasing my tail, then I admitted defeat for the afternoon and went for a five-mile run at the gym.  I’m scheduled to race in a 5K next Saturday morning, so it’s nice to know that the distance is easily manageable.

Then, home: a typical crisis and catastrophe and sturm und drang and drama and fecklessness in the face of serious circumstances.  I’m tired.  That’s all I have to say about that.

Dinner out with the kids at Serendipity; now I’m waiting for that huge download to finish so I can continue my efforts on this side project.  I won’t finish until tomorrow, and based on how today went, I’m not that confident about saying that.  I’ll do what I can and give my best and over-communicate and be responsible. In the meantime I read through the most recent New Yorker and learned more about Gaza, Ayn Rand, America’s violent exceptionalism, and a tepid but funny review of “Men Who Stare At Goats” by Anthony Lane.  I’m about to pick up a thin volume by Heidegger called “Poetry, Language, and Thought” and am looking forward to more passages like this:

How could cheerfulness stream through us if we wanted to avoid sadness?
Pain gives of its healing power where we least expect it.

Tomorrow AM, weather permitting, I’m taking the kids out for a play date with a friend and his kids.  I’m looking forward to that.  I hope it doesn’t rain.  I’ll take that last sentence as a metaphor for my life right now.  I hope it doesn’t rain.

Wow.  Talk about mixed weekends.  For starters, let’s talk about programming.  Yesterday I spent five hours working on a project I didn’t need to start yet, while waiting for input on a project that I really should have started last week.  The good news: I achieved that flow state that is so elusive: an early Sunday morning at Zoka, sparse crowd, the IDE humming along like it was part of my brain, fingers tapping out code fast and furious….it was a good experience.  We’ll see today about that other project, and hopefully I can make some significant headway on it this week.

As far as exercise goes, I spent an hour Saturday on the rower, which really made my back muscles tired come Sunday morning.  Yesterday afternoon, however, I made rough love to the octopus, which seems to have worked out some kinks.   This morning it was a crowded house at the gym as I did a simple 45-minute weight workout.  Day 78 has come and gone!  Three more weeks to go until I hit my goal of 100 days in a row.

Spent a lot of time this weekend thinking about technical agility – specifically, what are the prerequisites to be agile in the first place?  I’m beginning to formulate a blog post in my head about the various checklist-type things that teams MUST do in order to consider themselves agile (lowercase “a” – the specific agile methodology doesn’t matter).  The impetus?  Two scenarios in particular: business-continuity planning (BCP) and the problem of bringing new team members on to an existing project.  Both can expose areas of your software process that are manual, error-prone, risky, or in general create drag on the system.  More to come on that later.

Looking forward to a good week at work.  Last week was so hectic; the team needs a “normal” week to catch up, take a deep breath, and make some progress on our main iteration goal.

Kids’ soccer game this past Saturday was good insofar as we had good weather.  Will is showing great instincts around the ball, especially on defense.  I need to get out with him and Audrey during the week and practice a bit.  We still got creamed – the other team had one little kid who acted like a young Ronaldinho.  No worries, it’s just U-6 and they have plenty of time to worry about scores and competition down the road.

Signing off from Voxx Coffee and wishing you all a great week!

If you’re any sort of a propeller-head, you owe yourself a visit to Proper Fixation, by Yossi Kreinin. I have found a programmer blog with this caliber of writing (and humor, and common sense) in a while.

Excerpt: here’s Yossi, writing about dependencies and redundancy:

But you already got it – I don’t want your code, because I’m an antisocial asshole that has no team spirit whatsoever. I’m going to parse arguments using 5 lines of C code. Worse, I’ll make a function out of those five lines, prefix its name with the module name, and replicate it in all my modules. Yep, I’m the copy-paste programmer and you’re the enlightened developer of the next generation command line parsing platform. Have it your way, and I’ll have it my way.

Good stuff. Take a gander.