What's it all about, Alfie?

I don't claim to know what the future will bring. I'm doing my best to just make it day-to-day most of the time. I'm lucky in that I have a decent job, and it affords me a nice distraction - most of the time. I have a support system that seems to work pretty well, and on the whole, I am making it day-by-day.

I was reading about the Five Stages of Grief and one of the things that really amazed me was that when talking about the final step - Acceptance - "...a gift not afforded to everyone.", it is marked by a withdrawal and calm.

I don't know why I was surprised to read this - I mean, I'm going through a loss, but I expected to "find myself" in one of the previous stages. And to be honest, I think I find moments of anger, or bargaining, from time to time - but I always end it with the resignation that it would never work, and for better or worse, this is my path.

Finding out that not everyone reaches Acceptance was also a bit of a shock - because as they say your life is never the same. Never. It's just a new "normal", and you make new routines, and new paths, and you get on with living.

Anyway... it's another month in the books, and I'm still here.

This morning I noticed an upgrade notice in Adium, and while I wasn't going to go back to 1.5.11b2 - due to the Sparkle issues and security, I read it and the maintainers had created 1.5.11b3! While I know it's not making a lot of progress, it's something to see these updates shipping - it's not dead. And that's great news in my book.

Sure, Microsoft has killed Hotmail's IM support - and that's a shame, I don't understand why they wouldn't want to have users on their service, but that's their choice and not mine. I still hope that one day libpurple will support it, but that's a wish, not something I'm really holding my breath for.

But today it's nice to have Adium updated with the latest Sparkle and a few other fixes. Nice!

This morning I saw that Adium 1.5.10.1 had been released, and while I've been running 1.5.11b2 for quite a while, and while I was reluctant to go back to 1.5.10.1, because there had to be something in 1.5.11b2 I liked, I realized that there really wasn't. Not a thing. And as long as I had the ability to get back to 1.5.11b2, I could download it and go back to it again.

No downside.

Then again, it's important to note that Adium hasn't been getting a lot of love from the maintainers lately. I have been toying with the idea of getting the code and building it, and then seeing if I could fix the Microsoft Live connection so that I could once again get my Hotmail IM again.

Then word spread of the Sparkle security issue. I didn't know the depth of the issue on the software I have - but certainly a lot of the OS X software uses Sparkle, and the HTTP vs HTTPS endpoints is a big issue, and I'm glad they have fixed it, but then Adium reported a new version with the new Sparkle, and I decided that maybe 1.5.10.1 isn't so bad.

Maybe it's stable, and not abandoned. Maybe I just need to realize it's working great for me - save the Hotmail issue, and that's good enough.

So back I am. Happy to be here.

This morning I realized that may path really has shown me something I never expected to see: that being happy does not require the absence of sadness. Not at all. Instead, it now seems to me that being happy - having a giggle, or a good laugh at something - is really about being able to focus on that which is right in front of you, and not what has been happening, or maybe is continuing to happen.

This isn't to say that the sadness isn't there - I felt it very much this morning, but that didn't stop the giggle and smile I got from what I was doing and looking at.

It's been so easy to focus on the darkness - as if it needed fixing, and because it was present, nothing could be positive until that negative was erased. But that's not the case at all. It seems that sometimes you have to accept that erasing the negative will take a little more time than you have right now, and yet that shouldn't stop you from enjoying what you are doing.

Like getting out of debt. It may take you a couple of years, but that's no reason to not enjoy today... you're doing everything you can today to deal with that, but it's just going to take more time to finish off that goal.

Sadness, too.

Smile more. It's not ignorance, or denial... it's just enjoying the thing you are doing right now.

Well... I can't say as I'm all that surprised that I've had a hard time keeping up with writing this year. It's been a little better this year, but it's not really been a great year, and I know myself well enough to know that I need to be in a reasonably positive frame of mind to be able to write on a regular basis. But hey... I can keep trying.

Advent of Code

This year, a friend of mine started doing the Advent of Code problems, and so I joined in. They started off fun and interesting - almost in a little competition with my friend who was also using clojure for the solutions. It was nice, and it made me smile, and fir that I am very grateful.

But then the problems got to be massive searches, as opposed to interesting little problems, and the fun faded. Still, it's something that I think is a lot of fun to try - and do all the problems you want to do. For fun.

Change of Jobs

This year I changed jobs, and this time it was to a Shop that wanted to do clojure. There were a lot of good signs in the interview, and so far, it's been pretty decent. Nothing is perfect, so it's learning what is important to me, and what isn't, and learning to live with the latter, and relish the former.

I would like to be here next year at this time, but who knows... I know I don't, that's for certain. But I will try, and maybe that's all I need to do.

My Friends and My Recovery

Probably the most significant thing this year was that I actually saw old friends that I haven't seen in nearly 20 years. These are guys that defined my childhood, but since my marriage, and moving to Chicago, I really haven't seen them. A year or so ago, one of my old friends called me, and we started talking. Every month or so, he'd call, and check-in on me to make sure I was still alive.

Finally, this year, I was invited to his Dad's 85th Birthday Party in Indy, and I decided to go. It was a nice time, and it was very nice to see my friends again. We have all changed a lot - mid-30s to mid-50s is a lot of change. And in the end I think we all cut each other a lot of slack, and can move forward from here.

My recovery is going about like I figure it'll go - slowly, but inevitably. There is nothing that replaces the passage of time. It's not a cure-all, because people can hold grudges for a very long time, but in my case, I think it's a vital part because "distance" is the thing I need most. Distance provides perspective, and that's what I've lost in this Season. Hopefully, things will look better in a few months, but I'm guessing it's probably a few years.

But I hope it comes.

This morning I saw that iOS 9 dropped from Apple, and I upgraded my iPhone right away - why not, right? I've been hearing of all the nice things in iOS 9, and one of the things I was really interested in was the Ad Blocking in WebKit/Safari. I've worked in the Ad business now, and I have to say that while it has the potential to be a very useful thing, it's really degenerated into a cheap way for some folks to get a little revenue for their web sites without having to do anything other than a little code added to their pages.

I get it... you pay $20/yr for a site, and you'd like to see $30/yr in revenue, but the "easy money" is not in advertising - at least not now. It's the wrong game to let Double-click or AdWords into your site. They just they show is just not good stuff - and they'll say it's not their fault - it's the publishers - and it is, but it's all a race to the bottom.

So I've just gotten sick of it, and got Peace, the ad blocker for iOS 9 from Marco A. as he's one of the good guys, and he teamed up with Ghostery, the desktop Chrome/Safari ad blocker, and it's pretty slick. The point was just to get a better experience on my iPhone as well as getting rid of all the tracking. If a site wants data about me, and they offer a decent reason, I'll do it. But as it is now, Google is the company that's collecting all this data, and I'm not so sure I like them knowing so much.

Just too much power.

So I turned on the ad blocking with Peace on iOS 9, and with Ghostery on my laptops. I have whitelisted a few sites: Bank of America, Loggly, Daring Fireball... they are OK. But the rest - no thanks. Too much.

This morning I have nothing to do at The Shop, and so I decided to catch up on all the Faces work I needed to do in Apple's Photos app. It's getting to match the iOS Photos app a lot more, and while there are a few things to get used to, it's not bad, and if you just give it a few minutes, you're likely to find what you need right there in the app.

For example, setting the 'default' picture in a Faces collection used to be a scrolling and selecting deal - could be hard with a lot of faces, but now you look at all the pictures for a given face, and then right-click to set the one you want. Very simple. Very easy.

It's really a great little app.

I wanted to make a head-shot for my brother, and Faces had picked out a nice one, but it didn't allow me to set it as the contact. But it did allow me to duplicate the one picture... crop it... save it... and then the Contacts app allowed me to use that from the Faces for this contact. I mean it's just super simple.

At the same time, I have a somewhat unique problem in that two of my kids are trans. This means their names have changed - and not just a little. Once I got all the pictures under one name, then I simply clicked on the name in the Faces view, and changed it. Simple. And for me, that's a lot of pictures. So much easier than having to do each picture.

Finally, the camera metadata. Wow! I looked a a picture we all took a while back. It had all the metadata - not just the geolocation tags, but also the camera, the conditions... it's crazy what a camera will stuff into the metadata, and Photos accurately stores all that.

Very slick tool. Very. Thanks, Apple.

This morning I don't have anything to do at The Shop - I'm waiting on people to decide what to do, and ordinarily that's a stressful time for me because some of the people blocking me aren't the most helpful of people I've run into. In fact, they just plain make me nervous. But this morning, I'm listening to Hootie and the Blowfish and I just know that this life of mine is in my hands - no one else's.

Not Liza's. Not the kids. No one - but me.

I can choose to feel beaten up, or not. I can choose to feel the victim, or not.

This isn't the first time I've felt this way, but it's been an exceptionally long time since I've felt this way. Just a silly smile on my face realizing that: No weapon formed against me shall prosper. It really is that simple - and it's really just that hard.

It's been so easy to feel beaten up - face it, there are people emotionally, and financially, beating up on me, so it's pretty easy to think that I am who they see me to be. They want to beat up on someone - they want a victim. So it's easy to see myself as they see me, and I then become the victim.

But the alternative is to realize that I have a code of ethics, a morality, that says I will honor my obligations, and then there's the divorce law, but that doesn't cover emotions. That doesn't cover honor. That isn't the sum total of who I am.

No, that's much more. So I can take the slings and arrows, because I choose how to handle them. They can be deadly - or they can be nothing more than the emotions ejected from others, and while I can see them, I don't have to internalize them.

Good start on the day!

There are very few things I'll walk two floors for - but a nice Diet Coke is certainly one of them. There is just nothing like a good Diet Coke for me. Coffee doesn't do it, Sprite, Lemonade - forget about it. So when I found this morning that the fountain on this floor was serving up soda water where once Diet Coke flowed freely... well... I had to grab some glasses and head downstairs. To the other fountains in the building.

Now I have a reasonable supply and I'm sure the kind gentlemen (or ladies) whose job it is to detect such outages will be right on the case and correcting this injustice as soon as possible.

But until then... Ah...

This morning I saw on HipChat messages from two folks at The Shop:

Chris M. said that you helped him to setup our new hardware. Guess what? I just ran a test ETL in new hardware, it is 5 times faster. The full MMS ETL cycle takes about 2-2.5 hours. In new server, it takes 0.5 hour. THANK YOU for whatever you helped Chris M. 🙂
-- Okji

and from Chris:

So, you were 100% right on the hardware specs for the Pentaho stuff.

Okji is running initial stuff now and it's insanely fast.

thank you for dealing with a stubborn asshat me through the ordeal and lighting a fire under my rear.

tbh I'd probably be flogging the dead virtualization horse at this point w/o that back and forth we had.

So yeah, thanks 🙂
-- Chris

I don't often have people sending me these kinds of notes for work I did for them. The problem was simple and obvious - to me, but if you have never seen the other way, you often think your way is the only way. I've seen it a million times. The point is to get them started, let them see, and then be very gracious when they thank you.

That last part is key.

You want to build up everyone - not just yourself. Help others feel good about what they did, and they will want to work with - or for - you again. It's simple. Who wants to be around someone that makes them feel bad about themselves? No one I know.

Interestingly enough, this is going to make things work a lot better for the short-term goals. There's a consultant at the shop, and this is going to make his Uber Plan much less attractive, and necessary.