Over the past weeks I find myself repeatedly saying phrases like “Roman Polanski made some good movies”. In conversations, we keep covering brilliant ideas from people who’ve done despicable actions or who’ve made great creative works and also advanced horrible thoughts.
I think it’s important to get the good from people and appreciate it. But you have to know that the man who helped America get to the Moon was a Nazi who worked people to brutal deaths. I believe I can fly is an incredibly good song. Jefferson, an architect of so many good thoughts, was a slavemaster, slaves built the White House and George Washington fought hard to recover the slaves that escaped him.
It’s uncomfortable, but you also need to know the full story. We need to talk about it. Because pretending the full story isn’t there is bad for us. Pretending the good isn’t there is also bad for us. And thinking people are only one thing is a fundamentally bad idea.
It’s a day with a good idea, based on a bad story. I’m going to take the good idea – practicing gratitude and not celebrate the bad story.
I have SO MUCH to be grateful for. My family is healthy, faces struggles and difficulty with patience and practice and we have enough to give back. We have growth and navigate trouble together – and while we’ve had plenty of trouble to navigate, none of it has drowned us.
My workplace is appreciative of what I do, not abusive, and has a fairly healthy relationship with me. More to come on this, but my main challenges are prioritizing the interesting problems to solve and navigating change.
My personal health is a bounty. I hope for my friends with difficulties life threatening and chronic. I am merely stuck with the realization that I won’t achieve my goal to do 2 one-arm pullups by the end of the year. But I’m so close I think I’ll have it by the end of next year. It took me multiple years to be able to do a pistol squat, but I got there as well.
I’m grateful to have found some of the most wonderful interesting people and to have them be my friends. I’m still a little incredulous that they tolerate my personality, my long silent periods, but show me the same love and joy when we find each other together. They shore me up where I’m weak and I’m grateful when I can similarly help them.
I’m thankful that people are resolving to cooperate locally, support their communities and help each other get through coming tough times. The bonds forged in adversity can be strong and I hope they will link us in better times as well. I’m hoping to do more direct help by feeding hungry people at CHiPS and find more ways to be personally involved.
I donated money to the Alex Morse campaign, a progressive candidate who’s trying to unseat Richard Neal, a greedhead Democrat. That happened earlier, but recently it appears that there was a sex scandal accusation against Morse. He’s accused of having consensual sex with adult students at the university he teaches at that are not in his class and also messaging people he’s met on Tinder. Sexual harassment and consent are incredibly important, but weaponized accusations are exactly the sort of thing that conservatives have professed concern over. In Alex’s case, the investigation by the Intercept certainly makes it seem like people who want to work for Richard Neal have been manufacturing a scandal instead of uncovering one.
Other campaigns I’m looking closely at:
The State Slate – The great slate didn’t do great in 2018, but I still like these ideas and I’m willing to give again. These candidates are all good chances to flip a district and any campaigning they do is good for upballot races.
Donna Imam – an engineer who might be able to flip a texas district.
We’ve been doing more hikes again. I’m trying to make sure the little monsters leave the house every day. We’ve been going out to the village a little bit as well. I haul the kids in our expandable wagon and we can eat at an outside restaurant called The Partition.
We’re getting an eensy bit more social (in safe and measured ways).
ZZ had an extended encounter with a nice lady named Alexa and her dog Chacho. They spent an hour hanging out and I can’t recall having a nicer meal in ages. Here’s pro tip – if you hang out with the children and amuse them while we have drinks and dinner I’m grabbing your bill!
Beer Club had a mini executive retreat when Ray showed up in Rhinebeck! We took the Ho’s to the FallingWater trail where I finally got to meet Finley! He loves Max and Zelda loves him.
The Scott’s dropped by! We took them out to Fallingwater as well, where Max and Ben got along really well and explored up the waterfall all the way to its source. Zelda is in love with Zoe and asks about her.
Max and Ben never usually play together, but for some reason this day was just perfect. Everyone got along famously.
DIY
Around the house, we’ve been struggling a little to knock out more projects. It just seemed like we lost steam. So we dug out the back yard next to our house and put in a bunch of marble rock chips over garden cloth. Now things are better looking and won’t require any weeding – instead of a dirt patch next to the house we have clean white stone which doesn’t need maintenance.
We cleaned out the trampoline, which had been under a mulberry tree, trying to become a mulberry jam strainer. Yecchh.
We spent a couple of meeting looking at adding solar panels to our roof – I really like it for a lot of reasons including my predilection for distributed systems over centralized ones. Sadly, the tradeoffs right now don’t seem worth it. Even with incredible financing and all sorts of incentives it would take forever to pay off the panels and require trimming trees.
This helped me feel like we can really start getting going again. I’m gonna finish that Patio!
Code and nerdery
Great news here! I’ve been thinking at work about ways to better handle and test documentation across multiple languages. The key here is to make sure that you can extract code samples from documentation and then push it out to a testable format.
I also type this on the linux laptop as I managed to resize partitions without destroying anything. I thought 80 gigs would be enough for my Ubuntu partition, but it seems to be growing and I had to give it a few hundred more gigabytes to grow.
I didn’t think America was ever going to take black lives seriously in my lifetime. I’m close to thinking we might. There was finally a murder so slow and egregiously awful by police that it seemed fewer people came out to defend it than normal. People protested – which has happened before, but this time the police responded swiftly and brutally all over the nation, which helped more people realize the urgent need to demilitarize and defund or abolish police departments all over the nation.
More people have been murdered by police and by right wing activists. More people are seeing that there is significant infiltration of right wing racist groups into military and civilian armed forces like the police and the national guard. Significant effort seems to be put into either pretending the grievances we list are fake or that protesters are the same as rioters or into sparking riots to give a chance for crackdowns or to trigger broader societal conflict and breakdown.
The plague of systemic racism is getting acknowledged and the movement is being recognized enough to be co-opted. Many states have decided to paint a road with “Black Lives Matter” which is nice. None have revoked qualified immunity. Still, this co-option is a good sign – people are uncomfortable enough to start making the most basic gestures. DeBlasio still sucks. He can’t get the road painted in front of Trump Tower because he sucks. He and the City Council failed to defund the NYPD, instead shuffling money and police officers around.
Still the streets fill with people angry that they have to fight for simple recognition that black lives matter and the police are not here to protect or serve them. Even in the tiny village of Saugerties, people are showing up every day to stand vigil with their plague masks on.
I hope that we can skip reforms and channel some of our vast wealth into things that benefit people instead of control them.
In our home, we are much more settled into a routine. I’ve got a space to work. Max has rules around how he can earn precious screentime by doing workbooks or reading a new book. Zelda has similar… She’s learning to count and does M&M math with me because she’s insatiably into chocolate. Sam’s growing an impressive number of things outside, where the filthy dirt is. I’m no farmer, but it’s really nice to eat a sandwich with your own lettuce in it! Today she showed me where beans are coming up near some corn.
It’s been a ton of activity around here for home improvement. I’ve built a pretty large stone patio by leveling one stone at a time. Sam came up with the idea of putting an outdoor rug over it and it looks great – gotta finish the edges somehow though.
Sam’s gardening has been huge – we’ve got plants everywhere and it looks amazing. Together, we built some raised planters and they are full of the three sisters: corn, beans and squash. She tore out our old sink since there was a leak that screwed up the cabinet and we put in the replacement. We also tore out the old vent exhaust light and put in a new one – plus a better light for the entranceway. Sam bought a tiny washer and got it installed near the kitchen so we can continuously wash clothes. Speaking of continuously washing, we have to continuously wash dishes since we don’t have a dishwasher and don’t want to be set upon by insects.
We celebrated July 4th in style with a TON of fireworks. The neighbors applauded.
I’m working too many hours because work bleeds into everything when it is so close. I also think we are all sick of sitting around the house – the newness has worn off and we crave change. I started running with Zombies, Run to explore the neighborhood. I registered for a virtual fitness championship, and tomorrow afternoon I’m going to try to submit my first workout.
We’re still getting out and exploring.
That picture is from earlier on the 4th. To get here you park your car by the side of a road on the path through the Catskills on the way to hunter mountain. You hop a guardrail and navigate the rock fill to get down to this paradise of mountain streams and waterfalls everywhere.
Hike down a bit and we came to little pools dug into the bedrock, natural water slides and everywhere it was gorgeous.
It was amazing. The mostly black and brown families around us had managed to bring music, barbecues, hookahs, kids – it was amazing. We left as it got packed. When I got to the road, of course the police were ticketing and towing cars. We got a $75 ticket.
The federal government is paralyzed from the top down, offering no solutions, only misinformation and confusion. As NY is beginning to be less wildly dangerous, other states are beginning to see their lax policies have the same payoff as Cuomo and DeBlasio’s initial bungling. Here in Saugerties I see some restaurants reopening with “social distancing” but it’s very poorly observed. Here’s an idea: people can’t be trusted to make smart decisions when they are drinking. So no wonder I’m seeing even in big open spaces people hopping from group to group, saying hello and hugging with masks around their necks. Places that haven’t seen ice trucks holding bodies are probably going to have to experience it for themselves.
I told Max we might not be back in Brooklyn for a long time or that we might sell our place so he could have a place with a backyard and more room. He seemed heartbroken by the idea – I think I really messed up. He could articulate that he missed it and it was special to him. But given that we think there’s very little chance the schools can safely reopen by September, what can we do? I think about how I never felt attached to the second place we moved to in Colatown.
As always, our problems pale in comparison to what’s happening around us.
Since my internet connection is crucial to my work these days, I wrote a little utility to graph ping time so I can see if things are going wrong early. I’ll neaten it’s up and share it.
Just looked up and realized it’s tomorrow so I’m gonna schedule this to publish in a few hours and get some sleep. Let this be a reminder to me to never mess with .htaccess rules again.
Still adjusting to working with offshore developers. There definitely is a pattern of setting up a request, expecting it to be all done in the morning, and having to answer a few questions or concerns the next morning. If you don’t get to those questions immediately, you miss another day cycle.
Speaking of cycling – I took a day off of biking to work on Monday. Tuesday I went again and hit tons of personal bests! I’ve given in and started using Strava and it’s interesting to see how there is a an actual trend of improvement. For example, here’s my times on the Manhattan Bridge.
It is cheesy, but all these personal records and gold medals against myself are very rewarding.
Another takeaway: maybe rested legs are stronger! Due to rain and hangovers, I’ve only done 24 miles this week . Hope for more next week!
Also at work, we’ve whipped up some backpacks for kids that can’t afford school supplies.
I did some virtual phone banking at lunch on Thursday and Friday for Danny O’Connor. Mostly leaving messages, but every bit helps. There’s a special election on Tuesday in Ohio and I want to make sure I do what I can for it. I invite you to join me – these things are easy, they don’t take time and they make a difference.
On twitter, I really like the #InvisibleNetworks tag. @ctrlcreep is running 30 days of story prompts and people are replying with weird imaginative little stories.
Max is writing a book. He’s done 2 chapters about a bunch of robots in space. Cute Bun, AVX and their pals are all fighting and using lasers and it’s awesome.
Zelda is still working on her walking. 3 or 4 steps at a time now.
This week I got to dig in a bit on some performance profiling.
While doing some performance testing I found I needed to put in a bunch of temp log statements, but ugh… So I just created a decorator that will log the docstring of any python function and voila!
I set up a terminator session with a few open terminals (different terminals allow you to take advantage of multiple processes and cpus). Then I used entr in each one to run profilers and timers and linters on the scripts.
This tells entr that whenever any python file changes
clear the screen “-c”
profile the code: “kernprof -l ProfileDriver.py;”
then display the saved profile of the code: “python -m line_profiler ProfileDriver.py.lprof’
In other terminals I put in
ls *.py | entr -cs 'flake8 *.py'
ls *.py | entr -cs 'pylint *.py'
This way I keep my code clean – with a dash of autopep8 -a -a -i to solve the easiest pep8 errors automatically. It’s also really something how much easier it is to reason about the code as I break it down into smaller chunks.
I’ve installed PyCharm in the linux workspace, and it is definitely a step up. Comes with vim emulation built in and it’s got some nice refactoring tools.
I’m really enjoying the new toys to work with there – there are so many smart folks and they’ve been doing the right thing for years. I’ll suggest a clever solution and they will point out they’ve got that in their plan or that they considered it and it doesn’t work for good reasons. The tools, the documentation, the culture, it’s all really impressive.
I’m working in tighter boundaries – instead of nobody caring about performance I find myself in meetings with high level people where we are talking about differences of 200ms. We’re hiring! Get in touch if you’re interested and I can refer you in.
There’s no dress code and that’s been really nice. It makes it much easier to bike in – so I’ve been doing that way more than usual. I skipped a few days due to rain and I’ve still done 36 miles this week. Since I joined Strava I’ve ridden 100 miles.
I’m sweating less for a 6 mile ride and I’m noticing differences in how fast I can go up bridges and such. I also don’t have as much energy just waiting around in my legs – they get more tired and I’m not giving them much rest at all.
I’m doing weight watchers with Sam and it’s definitely affecting my choices. Now that there’s points I’m eating way healthier. And the sous vide machine has been helping – it’s easy to pop something in when I get home and then finish the cooking after putting kids to sleep.
The boy got sick this week and we had to take him to the urgent care center because his heart rate seemed very high. He refused to take anything to bring down his fever, I think that’s what caused it. So we go to the urgent care and they say take this medicine to reduce your fever and he refuses to drink it. Ultimately they say, then we have to give a suppository.
That’s no fun. But when they came back in a few hours and said it’s time for more medicine he looks up and says “I’ll do it the easy way. Bring me the cup!”
I’ve had a chance to volunteer on the texting team for the Beto O’Rourke campaign and it was fun and easy. I HIGHLY encourage you to give it a shot because Ted Cruz can be beaten. If you can’t donate money, these days it is super easy to donate time.
Baby Z is taking her first walks and she points at her belly if you ask her where it is! She also is playing with Max. This morning they both had fruitsicles (to keep Max hydrated) and she kept leaning over to wack him with it! It’s so wonderful to see them loving each other.