Frustration, frustration

One would think that I'd be old enough and wise enough to avoid frustration at work.

The issue is, when you care about things you don't have control over, that is like a magic recipe for frustration, irritation and stress.

The latest example for me is the irritation that I no longer have enough staff to keep up with the work coming in and because of that, some of the work is being done by others. These others don't follow our standards in technology and probably in other areas as well.

I need to remember that old Mantra:
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:9 Ave SW,Calgary,Canada

Hectic life - depressing life?

In your 50s, the typical "Americana" picture is of a greying, somewhat overweight man that is the boss in the corner office. Hmmm.

Wow, I'm a cliché! :) Other than that my corner office is a cubicle. - See a photo.

However, I don't feel like that old guy. In the past few months I've:

• Learned Mac Cocoa programming;
• Learned iPhone/iPad programming;
• Introduced myself to the Flickr API;
• Introduced myself to the Amazon Web Services API;
• Updated and fixed bugs in my quantum programming language;
• Come to love the effectiveness of texting to communicate;
• Procrastinated heavily regarding my PhD comprehensive exam;
• Fixed various proofs in my paper on Inverse Categories;
• Worked;
• Played;
• Loved.

The most significant thing for me over the past few months, though, is starting to apply the "Getting Things Done" philosophy from David Allen. At the moment, I'm using a spreadsheet on a USB thumb drive with a variety of tabs in in. One for projects, another for the next actions, another for project details, one for roles and one for delegated items. If you've ever read GTD, you'll see that is primarily the "horizontal axes" of the system. I have not yet been taking the time to do that vertical axes, the goals, principles, vision of my life.

Why, you (probably don't) ask?

Well, at the moment, it is because I have this exam staring at me 3 and 1/2 months from now. If I can finish that, that feels like a significant milestone and then I can take some time to re-asses, look at goals and so forth.

Then again, what is the real story....

The real story is... most likely I don't write those things down as I believe they would force me to consider what I am doing day to day and I would then have to make some changes. Changes are tough, not fun and a lot of work.

So, bringing this back to the title - "Hectic life - depressing life?". I don't believe that for a second. I may be a human being, but I really seem to be happiest when I'm a human doing. The small trick in that is - I have to be doing the right things. The right things for me. When I avoid looking at goals, vision, purpose, I start getting this vague feeling I am not doing the right things. For example - was learning all this Mac and iPhone programming the right thing when I have a comprehensive exam around the corner and I'm not fully prepared for it.

We'll see.

Motivation

Over the past few months at work, I've been involved in an IT project with an immovable deadline.

As it turns out, we (a few hundred dedicated and many more part time resources) have managed to get the work done and we'll be implementing it at year end. (yayyy us! :)

It has been a long, hard slog for everyone involved though. Ask anyone in the hallway and they'll respond with something like "I'm just glad we're near the end."

One of my roles on the project has been the "wiki-master". (We use a fine product - a wiki written in Java, from an Australian company).

Early last week, I was approached with a request to take something (system health checks) that had been mocked up on a spreadsheet and put it into the wiki. The main reason was the perception that the spreadsheet could run into sharing issues, while with the wiki there should be some way to keep that separate for updating, while still showing a consolidated view. The idea was to have something that shows the state of our systems while we proceed with the project implementation.

"Sure, I'll give it a try", said I.

A couple of days pass during which I think about the health checks from time to time. My thinking goes something like: "Man - I'm never going to be able to get something that looks like that spreadsheet by including pages on the wiki....". Thursday morning comes and at my sub-teams morning scrum, I'm asked about it and I reply "I just don't think it's going to work... We'll just have to use the spreadsheet". At this point, I'm told to make sure I tell the PM that asked me for it.

One of the other features of our project is that the CIO holds a weekly standup Thursday mornings. This Thursday was the penultimate meeting, so there was a lot of information about our implementation and how it would proceed and be communicated.

The last line on the last slide read:

• There will be a wiki with the health checks for our systems

It is amazing how motivating it is for the CIO to promise something to a roomful of 250 people :)

So, naturally, I had a working version of the wiki built and ready to go that afternoon.

Looking back, I had two issues:

• I was tired and didn't want to think. (Not motivated)
• I was focusing on the presentation (i.e., must look like a spreadsheet), rather than the need (Must communicate the systems health effectively)

The CIO presentation fixed the first one :). The second one followed naturally once I had the motivation.

Christmas is coming!

And so is one of my kids!

Short post. My oldest daughter phoned last night and invited herself (and family) (including two grandkids) over for Christmas day. This always fills me full of joy because:

• She feels comfortable enough to phone and invite herself
• I will get to play with Grandkids
• Spending Christmas with family is a blast.
• I get to play with Grandkids
• I can cook a big turkey (or roast or something) and not be eating leftovers for two months.
• Did I mention I get to play with the Grandkids?
  

Vauge feelings and expressing them

As a recent tweet mentioned:

Lately, I've had a vague feeling that I'm not accomplishing all that I want to - difficult to put it in words, though.

So - perhaps more than 140 characters will help...
Vague feelings. This is something that seems to occur regularly in my life. (Get ready for the usual "It all started when I ..." story :).

I don't remember ever talking about feelings as a kid, vague or otherwise. Likely had a lot to do with the mores of my family. They didn't learn how to chat about them, so how could they teach a kid to do so?

After my first divorce, I lucked out and started attending various self-help groups and going to counseling. Amazing transformations happen at these places.

The first few years after the divorce, the best I could do was to actually start identifying that I had some uncomfortable feelings. It took a while longer to actually identify them. The worst were when there was just the vague mass of blechh floating around somewhere in my gut. I don't think I ever really understood where that came from, it just started to fade out over time.

So, why is this germane at the moment?

Lately, I've been thinking about what I really want to do with the next few years of my career. My wife and I had come up with a plan and I was quite excited about moving it forward.

Then, the company I am working at now decided to go through a major physical re-organization. I've been assigned a role in the re-org process and it takes up all of my time and energy - or at least it has for the last two months. When you add that together with my obligations on research / school, I'm left with negative free time.

So this builds up and I start to resent it, but it is from a decision I made / accepted / agreed to, so I don't feel like I can complain / talk about it. Uggh!

I remember a book written by Heinlein that I read in my teens about a twin who is tricked into going on a star voyage by his other twin. Everyone, including the twin who goes, professes that it is so lucky and fantastic that he gets to go. Unfortunately, subconsciously, he doesn't want to go. Because of that, and that he can not voice that feeling, he becomes suicidal. Life works out (He gets the girl in the end, as is usual with Heinlein), after some psychotherapy.

So, how would I really like to spend my week? (After a few weeks of resting / relaxation / sleeping)

That's easy - programming. I adore programming - the creative aspects, the blend of "big picture" and multiple tiny details, the immediate feedback, the feeling of creating something useful.

Given that I've now burned up 30+ minutes just talking about this (to no one :), what am I going to do about it? Answer - get programming. I have a day off tomorrow and I intend to spend the day writing and creating. Let's see how I feel after that.

In Honour of SysAdmin day

So yesterday was SysAdmin day - various stories circulated about amazingly naive users doing things like using their mouse as a footpedal and wondering why the computer didn't go faster and other things like that.

Not all "SysAdmin" stories need to be about computer usage :)

I was busy working away at the University when my wife finished work and called to see if I was ready to go. Answering in the affirmative, she told me she would pick me up in about 20 minutes.

Well, about 5 minutes later, she phones: "Brett, the car won't go - the brake is stuck!"
Me: "What do you mean?"
Marie: "Stuck! - The foot pedal won't come up and the car won't go."
"Can you pull it up?"
"No - how do I fix this?!?"
"Don't know - never happened to me. Try jiggling it and call me back". (Jiggling is a highly technical term used by SysAdmins when working on hardware issues)

Three minutes later - Marie: "Still stuck!"
"OK - call AMA and tow it to the dealership - no car for the long weekend." (SysAdmin last resort - threaten to take the toy away)
"OK, I'm going to try one more time first."

Two minutes later - Marie: "OK - it's going now. See you soon."
"Wait, wait - what happened?"
"If I tell you, you have to promise not to blog this!"
Me ----.
Marie: "Well, I had turned the car on to open the windows, but I hadn't started it."
Me: (Trying reaallly hard not to burst out laughing) "Ok - love you."

A pointy-haired manager moment...

About a month ago, my whole team was consolidated into one floor in a new building.

It was quite nice really. We all have reasonable sized cubicles, lots of natural light, plenty of Coke (Coca-Cola... :) in the fridge and good views from the windows.

As is reasonably natural with new floors, there were a few issues with furniture and so forth.

One of the issues was that I was the only person who did not get a name tag on his cubicle.

For a while, I thought "Fine, I'll just wait". Eventually, though, I got tired of waiting and called our company help desk asking for a name plate.

As it turns out, because of the furniture in this building, they had run out of the kind we had on the floor and had no way of getting more. I got a very nice phone call from our people in the admin area explaining this and saying they would figure something out.

So - good, right? I was cool with that, I thought something would happen eventually.

Imagine my surprise when later that day, I get a nice new shiny nameplate for my cuby. This is cool, I thought. Then, I started looking around - and all the other nameplates were gone.

So, with one "pointy-haired manager moment" I managed to get rid of all the nameplates for everyone else and I'm the only one left with one.

I love big companies :)

A bee in the bonnet

A couple of weeks ago, we went to my nephew and niece's for a barbecue and some firepit time with the family. It was quite the nice day in Calgary, perhaps a bit cool, but it did seem that summer had arrived.

They have a lovely area to eat outdoors, a shaded area built off their garage, so no one has to be ravaged by the bright sun or other slightly inclement weather. However, it appears that a few bees had decided that this area was just the right place to build a nest.

This was no issue while we were visiting, but after we started eating, a couple of the bees must have decided we appeared quite floral.

My wife, luckily, is not allergic to bee stings. As I am, I had sat as far away from the bees as possible.

Once the bees started coming near, they seemed to highly favour her, buzzing around her face and hair. Naturally, not being a fan of painful stings in the face, she would freeze, close her eyes and make herself as small (and cute) as possible. Luckily, these were the big bumble bees which don't sting, so she was in no danger, it was just a bit frightening.

After about 5 episodes of this where she was the only target, one of the other guests said "It must be that you smell good to them. What shampoo do you use?". At the same time, the latest bee was frolicking about my wife's head.

In a tiny voice, with eyes screwed shut and scrunched down as small as she could be, she replied "Bumble and Bumble....".

What this is about

A couple of years ago - I didn't have a blog and didn't want one. Now I have multiple ones, each with a different focus.

The focus of this one - well - perhaps "no focus" would be the right answer. Probably more of a "random thoughts, random stories, random feelings" kind of blog. Sometimes it will be a funny story, sometimes just what's happening in my life.