Weeknotes 45

I started my job six months ago so I’ve been spending some time thinking critically about it. Overall I’d say it’s going alright, although I don’t feel especially useful yet. (Maybe that’s normal?)

I have good days and bad. I enjoy the company of my colleagues and the technical work is rewarding; when I’m elbow-deep in writing or reviewing code, or spending time mentoring another engineer, I’m evidently doing some good and I finish the day satisfied. But being both remote and in a different time zone makes the non-technical work more difficult, and that can be frustrating. It feels increasingly obvious that I either need to get better at the bad parts or find a way to do more of the good parts.

See you in six months for another dose of searing insight.

I regularly get emails from random strangers who work at content farms and want me to link to their articles from my conference talk write-ups. I’m guessing this is only because they’re targeting pages which link out to Wikipedia so they can get their shitty filler linked alongside something more reputable.

In the last month I’ve been offered the opportunity to send my readers to “a table to convert decimal to binary numbers”, “an overview of how LED lighting differs from traditional incandescent bulbs” and “an in-depth guide about how to make macOS Big Sur faster”. I don’t wish to be rude so if you’re interested in any of that then please get in touch and I’ll pass your email address on to these people directly. Maybe then they’ll stop following up.

Per this James Hoffmann video I’ve started adding a tiny amount of water to my coffee beans before grinding. This information would normally fall short of my extremely low threshold for weeknoteworthiness but I’ve found it so effective at reducing static (and thus frustration) that I wanted to pass it on.

We watched the first season of Ted Lasso starring celebrity anosmic Jason Sudeikis. I loved it. I find it impossible to judge how I’d have responded to its cheesy sincerity during more precedented times, but right now it’s the wholesome content we all need.

There’s a bit in the pilot where he says “I do love a locker room. Smells like potential”. Does it Jason Sudeikis? Acting.

Community progress: Competitive Wine Tasting. I am getting a lot out of this show. It doesn’t make me laugh out loud very often, but it sustains me in an almost continuous mood of feeling pretty amused and then once in a while something so unexpected will happen (e.g. “it’s going to be a maze”; Troy’s notches) that I’ll really laugh.

The only thing that rubs me the wrong way is the lazy device of making Pierce an elderly bigot as an excuse to put straightforwardly bigoted jokes into the show beneath a flimsy veil of irony. It’s not so much offensive as it is comedic dead weight — Chevy Chase saying “those shoes are gay” or whatever is just not funny compared to the actually good jokes about gender, race and sexuality from the other characters. I’m guessing they wouldn’t have done this if they made the show now so it kind of dates it too.

The weather has been pretty gloomy for the last few days. It was getting me down a bit until it reminded me of “wind smear” which cheered me up again.