“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be..” — Lao Tzu
Dear Diary,
Today I decided to start writing a journal entry like 30 minutes before I have another commitment.
A commitment to play some D&D with some pals over the internet.
Instead of editing one of the past entries that have lots and lots of words I decided to write another entry, from scratch, on the last day of my three entry a month self-imposed timeline.
Mother fucker. I put some cheese bread and an empanada in the oven and forgot to set the timer. Just now. As I write this. Sigh.
A self-imposed deadline. Not timeline. Deadline.
Nope. I did not put them in the oven and forget to set the timer. I forgot to put them in the oven. And then I forgot to set the timer. And then I went back to the kitchen and set the timer.
I decided to make some Trader Joe’s Brazilian Cheese Bread. It says it has tapioca flour and parmesan cheese. It is rumored to have a thin crisp exterior with a chewy cheesy center.
I’m pretty sure I’ve had these before and I wasn’t all that impressed. But I may be totally inaccurate. Details about things like foods I’ve tried are typically fleeting unless the food was pretty damn novel.
Like Ostrich. That was novel. In Los Angeles. I was at the Mondrian on someone else’s dime. And by someone else I mean the co-owner of the “adult internet marketing” organization that I was working for at the time.
I have a small oven. It looks like a microwave oven… and it has convection and light based cooking too. It makes amazing chicken nuggets, chicken tenders, chicken appetizers, and taquitos.
It does stuff other than chicken, but you’d have to look that shit up yourself.
I decided to try cooking these orange-yellow blobs of frozen dough with a smart-cook setting.
“I bet it’s like chicken nugget temperature but with less time.” Is what I thought to myself as I dialed in the microwave to the settings I wanted.
Two minutes. Two minutes passed. And when I went to fetch the food I’d learned that they were no longer yellow and most definitely not chewy inside.
They were now slightly browned crackers. But burnt crackers. And a ball instead of a flat cracker. So not a cracker at all.
All I wanted was two cheesy wads of dough before I worked on cables. That was not what I got. I got cables. So many cables. A never ending sea of cables. Instead of dough wads.
It was a tragedy. A damn tragedy.
Somehow over the years I’ve acquired about 613,134 USB cables. I think I’ve bought maybe 15 or so over the past 10 years. They just began multiplying. Type A to Type B. Type B to Type C. and Micro USB too.
I will count these cables before most of them are disposed of. Or donated. But who the fuck is gonna want this many damn USB cables?
There is no reason anyone needs this many USB cables.
Which brings me to the next part of this post. But not. There was no connection between that and this…
Now that the organization I worked for has been absorbed into the new organization I work for I get to help determine what the differences are between what “we” have and what “they” have. Even though “we” and “they” are now us.
“We” who uses Cigna. I hate Cigna so much. Cigna is for cheap fucking bastards. It’s so customer hostile. They won’t pay for some of my fucking meds. bEcAuSe ThEy kNoW bEtTeR.
Unfortunately that whole “us” versus “them” mentality is likely going to persist for a while. People be tribal. Content with their patterns. Averse to change.
Above all that thought, holy shit. There are so many details that are going to have to be worked through. We’re at the “high level” discussions. So it’s like we’re talking about building blocks. And vaguely how they might be wired together.
After the high level discussions have occurred then we’ll begin to make plans to integrate the two platforms. “Their” platform and “our” platform combined into one big mecha platform. Or something like that.
In reality this process is gonna be, quite often, tedious. The high level conversations being less tedious. The work breakdown and then the integration work.
Ugh. So boring. Which is a problem… because some people don’t think it’s boring.
Okay, it’s not all boring. There are fun moments depending on the people I’m working with.
When I was a teen taking calls and slinging Perl code I never thought that I’d be doing a gap analysis. I didn’t even know what a gap analysis was. I didn’t fucking care.
Hyperfocusing on the fun stuff — the stuff that made computers tick — was way more fun than a fucking gap analysis. It still is.
Now that I’m not a teen… well… my sentiment has shifted somewhat. There is some sort of value in discovering what’s different in order to refactor things so they’re less different.
When they’re very different it becomes quite challenging to integrate though. It can take years.
But people want it in days.