Weeknotes 122

Hello. I have some rollovers from last week, so let’s deal with those first. ⏪

California had the alien and not entirely convincing vibe of a land where COVID never happened. I saw almost nobody wearing a mask and it never got mentioned by anyone. We ate outside a lot.

I was at a loose end for my first full day in the hotel so I decided to use my room to get some work done. I defaulted to my usual meek routine of going somewhere nearby and popping back every couple of hours to check whether housekeeping had done whatever smaller things they do daily (make the bed? empty the bin? replace the towels?) rather than camp out in the room and risk deterring them. But by bedtime they hadn’t come, and the room was still undisturbed the following evening even though I’d been gone all day.

At that point I realised they weren’t going to do anything about the increasingly smelly fruit detritus in my bin unless I asked them to. So I did, and they did. But… is this how hotels work now, in the Definitely After? Of course it’s always been unnecessary to have your room reset to a pristine state every single day like a princess, but I just thought that’s how hotels worked and hadn’t heard or seen anything to suggest otherwise.

I expect the hotel industry made a bigger noise about this change at some point over the last two years and I missed it. Housekeeping still worked the old-fashioned way during my hotel stay in London a few days earlier, though, so maybe it’s a cool new American thing like rock ’n’ roll or the prison-industrial complex.

The main thing I learned from this trip is how dependent I am on the negative feedback loop caused by the big clock in my bathroom at home. I like to think of myself as relatively efficient when I’m having a shower or a shave or whatever, but I was late several times while away because I was completely unmoored from any sense of how long I’d actually taken to get ready.

Flying home overnight posed a mild threat to my unbroken streak of doing stretches every night before bed. Planes don’t have wellness zones for this sort of thing so there was no chance of getting away with it inconspicuously — or probably at all — once it was time to fall asleep.

So, while I was waiting to board, I had to make do with wandering around San Diego airport to find an empty gate and lying down on the terminal floor to do some stretches. It wasn’t massively hygienic but it did the trick and only a few people looked at me like I was causing a disturbance.

Avoiding a missed day had no measurable benefit for my body but it meant I could straightforwardly maintain the streak on a technicality instead of having an unscratchable itch in my mind about it forever.

And we’re back. ▶️

My mind and body are pretty much fully back on London time now, which is ideal preparation for flying to the Pacific Northwest in a week.

As is the fashion, Nat & I cancelled our Netflix subscription because hearing the news mention Netflix made us realise we hadn’t watched it at all this year. I think the last thing we saw was Don’t Look Up and that wasn’t even good.

I did enjoy Inside and Squid Game so I imagine I’ll be tempted to temporarily resubscribe if some unmissable show drops in future. It feels inevitable that we’re all going to end up paying for one-off months of different streaming services at the precise moment when they actually have something worth watching, rather than staying subscribed and mostly not using them while money drains away pointlessly.

I’m not sure this system is better than normal telly any more.

I’m three episodes into Moon Knight. It’s sort of weird and borderline incoherent so far but I heard episode five is good so I’m hanging in there. If nothing else I’m entertained by Oscar Isaac’s (diegetically?) terrible British accent.

We binged all of The Dropout and loved it. Arguably it lifts too many ingredients from both The Social Network (especially its soundtrack) and Succession (especially Alan Ruck) but Amanda Seyfried’s performance is fantastic and the story is very convincingly told. I hadn’t previously paid much attention to the Theranos scandal and now I’m keen to know more; I’ll definitely watch the Adam McKay / Jennifer Lawrence film whenever that appears.

We’ve also watched all existing episodes of Shining Girls, a gripping drama about data structures starring celebrity Scientologist Elisabeth Moss. She’s extremely good at looking harrowed and lots of extremely harrowing things happen in it. Again it’s one of those shows that’s better if you don’t know anything about it, so if you’ve got Apple TV+ I reckon it’s worth a punt without risking trailer or review spoilers.

The change to my job which began nine months ago has gestated and emerged screaming into the world: my remaining reports are moving to other managers and I’ll have fully transitioned back into “individual contributor” technical leadership work.

While I still think this is the right choice for me under the remote circumstances, it’s bittersweet and I feel surprisingly sad about it. I just met everyone last month, so those interpersonal relationships I’d been missing are currently stronger than ever, and losing official membership of my peer group of other managers is going to make things more lonely in the short term. Plus all the recent travel and excitement has overstimulated my brain with human connection and now, back in my spare room in front of a webcam, I’m on a bit of a comedown.

I’m not sure what the solution is. I should probably double down on mentoring and other kinds of work relationship, and be more proactive about arranging regular contact with my friends and non-manager peers on the team. I’ll be seeing most of them at RailsConf anyway so that’s a gimme. After that, perhaps I should think about how to spend a bit more (than none) of my time in Canada, or conversely maybe I should learn to rely less on my job now that London is opening up again.

Anyway.

To follow a week of sitting on planes and teaching in rooms, this week I continued Project Pretend COVID Is Over by going to the gym every day. The upside is that it’s helped me to already lose most of the weight I gained due to illness & travel, which is a relief, but the downside is that the man at the front desk now recognises me and greets me by name, so I can’t ever go again.

It was five years ago that I wrote the foreword for Effective Testing with RSpec 3. It doesn’t feel like anywhere near that much time has passed. Fortunately I still agree with everything I wrote; I don’t get many opportunities to use RSpec these days (work uses minitest 🤷‍♂️) but I always enjoy it when I do.

I had a talk accepted for Brighton Ruby, so that should be fun. In particular I’m going to make an effort to enjoy it more than my RubyConf talk last year, which shouldn’t be difficult since I’ll be attending in person and I’m going to try to keep it light this time.