Author: e.v.

Work and BSG

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Today was one of those days at work where you find out that something is URGENTLY needed TODAY. The thing that was needed was completed over a year ago, but it has never been tested in real usage, UNTIL TODAY. And today it is urgent. Despite being completely ignored for the past year. I do get frustrated with this. A few weeks ago there was a similar scenario where a fix for something was urgently required for a demo at 2PM. Well maybe if you have a demo at 2PM, don’t deploy an untested new release at 11AM?

Battlestar Galactica spoilers ahead!

So I’ve now finished S3 of BSG. To be honest it’s dragging. Season 1 and the first half of 2 (up to the end of the Pegasus/Cain storyline) was gripping, but since then it’s meandered a lot towards interesting ideas via some extremely boring ones.

I liked the trial subplot and I liked the lawyer. I liked Lee sticking to his innate sense of right and wrong. He and Helo are quite consistent in that, while some of the other characters oscillate all over the place and become unbelievable and dislikeable (Adama, Roslyn).

But where are we now? Starbuck died, and I didn’t care at all. Because firstly I don’t find her to be a nice person at all, and secondly I didn’t think she was really dead. Now she’s back again, wow didn’t see that one coming.

I’ve been very intrigued by who the final five will turn out to be, but after four of them have just been revealed I feel a bit “well, okay?”. What bearing does it have on the story? It just seemed a bit pointless. And tying it all to a Bob Dylan song was really strange and took me out of the BSG universe while I was watching it. Maybe Bob Dylan is the final cylon. Maybe it works better if you’re not familiar with the song, but the line “said the joker to the thief” is so distinctive that you’re immediately taken out of the program and into whatever relationship you have with the song.

I don’t know, to me it feels like we’re entering Lost territory where the writers have lost sight of the original intrigue and are making things up as they go along and stop focusing on keeping a tight storyline.

Halves

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I have signed up to a half marathon in August. There is one in my town (!) for the first time ever, so how could I not? I hope it goes ahead. The last half I signed up for was just as COVID was breaking out, and it got cancelled. In some ways I’m in better running shape than ever, because I’ve been running half marathon distances every Sunday for the past couple of months. In other ways, with the lack of Parkrun and any other timed events, I haven’t run fast for a long time. With Parkrun it used to be that every Saturday morning was a 5k tempo run.

So…. I did some intervals this morning. 6x500m with 60s rest in between. The first interval was about a 4:20/km pace, which considering I used to do an entire 5k at a 4:00/km pace seemed a bit underwhelming, but the others hovered around 4:00/km so it’s not too bad. Though I do vaguely remember somewhere around the 4th or 5th recovery period feeling like I was going to cry and/or throw up (I didn’t do either).

Since I was worrying about on Monday about the fact my manager had casually mentioned about returning to the office in June, there has been a timely discussion thread on Hacker News about “how to negotiate continuing to work remotely”.

There’s a remarkably insightful quote towards the top of the page, which says “The act of trying to force someone to do something, whether by (implied) threat, logic, emotional manipulation, or whatever, can mortally wound a relationship making getting a concession you want moot.“. I realised that it’s up to them at this stage. They’re looking to change the terms of our relationship at my expense, so they need to figure out how to approach it and open the discussion without damaging the relationship.

Office?

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My boss today casually mentioned that the managing director had casually mentioned that he could get everyone back into the office in June. 🤔

I don’t really know how this is going to go, because at the moment my response is “nope” . I mean, I haven’t been vaccinated yet?! But also…

The thing with commuting is that it’s just terrible. It takes up about two hours a day and it costs about £1000 per year. If my employer suddenly says “hey, we want you to work an extra ten hours per week and take a £1000 pay cut”, well, no thanks.

But then there’s also the salary review issue. I’m now 12 months overdue a salary review and am actually due another one just about now. I haven’t worked out how to phrase it yet, but I won’t be going back into the office before they have settled the last 12 months.

My mum thinks I should send an email to the MD and ask about it, but eh, I don’t know. I prefer the idea of waiting until his expectations are clear before I set out my position. I don’t know how it will go anyway, because if he just makes a demand that everyone comes back to the office now then he’s at risk of multiple people leaving all at the same time, and there aren’t many of us to start with.

Though I do wonder how much the salary issue is just an excuse for me. There are much more important factors in my employment, which are: 1) Commuting is awful, 2) I’m an introvert and working from home is far better for my mental health than working in an office, and 3) I’m bored in this job and if finding a new job wasn’t such a hassle I’d have left already.

Holiday

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I’m on holiday this week. The weather has been terrible but that’s good because the lack of rainfall over the past months had started to become a problem. We have a pond that was starting to look very low, and I was also getting worried I was going to have to start rationing water for my plants (of which I have many).

The plants aren’t really doing great, because the weather has been quite unusual. We had a cold winter, then it warmed up a lot and they all woke up (great!) then it went really cold again and a lot of them went back into winter dormancy. Then as it started warming up again we had weeks and weeks without any rain, and quite a lot of sun, so some were getting dried out, even though the temperatures have been pretty low for this time of year. All in all it’s a very late growing season.

Though the plants indoors are doing well. I will take some pictures soon. I have a Sarracenia in the conservatory which has just put up a 70cm pitcher, and when it opens fully I’ll probably post some photos.

So I’m very pleased about all the rain we’re having at the moment, and every time it does rain I’m outside draining off the (connected) water butt into the other (non-connected) water butts (one of which is actually a 240litre wheelie bin).

I’ve also been trying to finish an app I half-wrote a couple of years ago. It’s a sound recorder that uploads to Google Drive. I started creating it because I used to record little things on my guitar a lot, and it was always such a pain to get the files onto my PC. Then I also had a great idea for something else, which is a website where you can ‘watch’ a specific model of running shoes and be notified when they are available in your size for less than a certain price. When you run a lot shoes can get expensive.

Thick of it

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I watched The Thick Of It, which if you’re not familiar with, is a political comedy from 2005. I mention the year because it’s sort of dated to that time period, both in terms of the politics and the, er, I don’t know, office behaviour.

It’s kind of strange, because the first three seasons are quite light hearted political satire. There is a lot of swearing and a lot of shouting, but, to you as a viewer, it doesn’t seem that serious. Then in S4 the tone shifts a lot and suddenly it is serious.

It only took me a few days to get through the whole thing, but now I feel a void in my life knowing that I’ll never find out what happened next to all the characters. I think I’ll miss Robyn the most. And maybe John Duggan.

Mobile games

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I started playing a game on my phone called Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes. I didn’t mean to italicise that, it just ended up that way from copying and pasting the name (I couldn’t remember exactly what it was), and now it seems appropriate so I’ll leave it.

I don’t know if I like it. I am pretty sure that it’s the old Knights of the Old Republic engine that’s been ported to mobile. The game is turn based battles, which you complete to unlock new characters. At a snail’s pace. It’s extremely repetitive, but there’s a button to auto-play. Which is what I’m using, because it’s incredibly boring otherwise. I’m not really sure why I’m opening a game up to let it play itself.

I want more characters, but then what am I going to do with them – watch them in battles that play themselves?

Still alive

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I haven’t been on here much for a week or two because I’ve been distracted with a little project. I had this idea that job adverts are really boring and depressing to trudge through, so why don’t I make a bot that crawls job sites, pulls out relevant information, and just shows me the ones that might be interesting? And then I had another idea that was something along the lines of “well that’s a search engine, isn’t it?”. When you write extremely boring enterprise software for a living you can forget how fun it is to program things that interest you.

In tangentially related news I had the LinkedIn email last week where it tells you that you appeared in 37 search results and your searchers work for these companies. I usually just open and discard these emails on autopilot, with no memory of actually doing it, but this time I opened it and was greeted by the logo of my old employer. I found that a bit stressful. I ended up having a nightmare about still working there and haven’t really felt like I’ve settled down again yet.

How strange is it that it’s almost a year and a half ago and they still cause me so much stress. Part of me is fascinated to know who performed the search though. In theory it would be the HR lady but she could barely switch her computer on at the best of times. On the other hand I always suspected that she was an android, so maybe she was just overcompensating so as not to arouse suspicious, and really has a direct mental interface with LinkedIn.

And on the subject of androids… Battlestar Galactica! I am now probably about a third to half way into S3. I am finding it alternates between completely gripping, possibly the best TV I’ve ever seen, but then it seems like the writers go on holiday every so often and they have to quickly make up some stories that take up screen time but add nothing to the plot. It’s quite frustrating really.

Lejog

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Since last year I’ve been doing a running challenge called Lands end to John o groats, i.e the full length of the UK. Aptly abbreviated to lejog. Or at least it would be apt if it was French.

It’s about 874 miles in total. Every time I run I put it on the website and see my little map marker move further along.

It’s taken me a lot longer to finish than I envisaged as I spent the first few months battling my hip, then I lost another few weeks when the neuroma in my foot started complaining. But I’m really close to finishing now. I’m about 37km away. I’m hoping to finish it on Sunday. This means I need to run about 16km tomorrow and then a half marathon on Sunday.

Can I do it? We’ll see…

It might slip to Monday.

Dosing

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I went up to the full citalopram dose a few weeks or maybe a month ago when I was anticipating interview stress. I’m prescribed 20mg but since I restarted it I stuck to 10 until recently.

I don’t know if I really feel any difference between 10 and 20 in terms of mental health, but it something I really do notice is how tired it makes me. On 10 I don’t really notice it at all, but on 20 I feel like I could go to bed any time after about 7pm.

Over the weekend I had a think about what my goals really are. I decided that I’m fairly comfortable at work right now and I don’t need to move until something changes. When work wants me back in the office I’ll try to negotiate permanent work from home a few days a week and take it from there. But until then I don’t really need to stress myself.

So I decided to drop it back down to 10mg again. I’ve done 15 for the past few days and in a few more days I’ll go to 10. I felt quite irritable and impatient yesterday but better today. Ironically feeling impatient made me want to start job seeking again, but I think that’s just the withdrawal talking.

Weekends

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The weekend was pretty good. I am definitely feeling better than I was last week. On Sunday I woke up at 7:45, which is unusual for me recently – usually I’m awake at more like 6:00.

Sunday was mother’s day (in the UK, don’t worry, Americans) and I bought her a little ‘bee hotel’ which is a little wooden thing filled with little wooden tubes where supposedly bees and insects go and live. She has to work out what to do with it now. It has a string on the top to let you hang it from something but we think it would be better on the ground. It needs anchoring so it won’t get blown around. She has some ideas about trying to build something around it to accommodate wildlife too, but I’m not sure what that will look like at the moment.

Sunday was also half marathon day, just because I felt like it. I hadn’t planned it. I got to 14km and thought “why not?”. I haven’t run that far since the last half I did in September (which was disastrous). My left leg has felt heavy today but nothing too bad.

I think I might have a break from job seeking for a bit. The recruitment sector as a whole is icky. I had a recruiter email today with the message “Thanks for the application you’ve made to the role I have online. Could you let me know when you’re free to speak, and what number to call please?”. 🙄

I’ve had two more email me with roles that are supposedly working from home 3 or 4 days a week, but they haven’t even bothered to tell me where they are based! As if that’s some minor detail. Well it’s in Penzance but you only need to go there twice a week, which is pretty much never, so it’s not important really. And don’t get me started on LinkedIn. It’s 50% a recruitment site and 50% Facebook for awful people. Every time I log in and see the main page I feel like I need to go and have a shower.