Jack's Diary

One last thing - I just finished up watching a French tv series on Netflix called Bonfire of Destiny. It was really good. There were lots of layers to it, lots of surprises. The acting was really good, especially by the main guy. French is so nice to listen to, it is to me by far the most beautiful that I've heard.

Also, it's infinitely easier than Japanese. There are so many similarities to English that you can guess at words. Japanese is just so alien compared to a Romance language. Oh well, if we ever move to Japan again, I'll be ready. Readier, at least.
 
I love the sound of the French language but prefer Italian. It's so passionate. Yesterday I decided to start learning Dutch!
 
Cate said:
I sometimes sneakily correct typos, but thought I would leave yours in because it made me smile. I hope you didn't need mediation, Jack.
Well done on your very productive week & day, especially a trip to the beach. Hope it wasn't crowded :)
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Lol Cate - mediation. I guess not. My guy, Ekhardt Tolle, teaches that nothing is good or bad and I think that's a good way to think about marriage. The grass is always greener, is it not?
 
I'm very lucky, Jack in that I am actually really happy in my marriage. I don't think I could have chosen a better man for me. Nothing is ever perfect & marriages have their ups and downs, but I have always thought that I wanted to grow old with G. That has got us through some tough times.
Thanks for your input into my diary today. I have been feeling quite fragile & having support really helps. Perspective is a wonderful thing.
 
jackbenimble said:
She doesn't think the virus is going to be that bad, expects less than 80k cases.
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I sure hope she is right, as you say who knows. I have always been lucky with my blood pressure, one thing I have noticed is if I consciously relax I can bring it down, always do that in the docs office.

Sometimes I think I might need mediation in my exercising, lol.

Thanks for your posts on my diary, I appreciate it.
 
Cate said:
I'm very lucky, Jack in that I am actually really happy in my marriage. I don't think I could have chosen a better man for me. Nothing is ever perfect & marriages have their ups and downs, but I have always thought that I wanted to grow old with G. That has got us through some tough times.
Thanks for your input into my diary today. I have been feeling quite fragile & having support really helps. Perspective is a wonderful thing.
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It's really wonderful you feel that way about your husband, Cate. I'm sure it's as much of a tribute to your qualities as it is to his. As far as the support, I'm just returning the favor or at least trying to.
 
alligatorob said:
I sure hope she is right, as you say who knows. I have always been lucky with my blood pressure, one thing I have noticed is if I consciously relax I can bring it down, always do that in the docs office.

Sometimes I think I might need mediation in my exercising, lol.

Thanks for your posts on my diary, I appreciate it.
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Rob, I feel like she's being a bit sanguine, as there are still people out there who don't quite get how easily and quickly it spreads. I was reading about a restaurant owner in Wichita or somewhere that's keeping his restaurant open because he feels like he'll gain patronage for "toughing it out" when the other restaurants were closing. Zoiks - I get that small businesses are getting hit hard, but it's not about toughing it out.

As far as meditation, I suck at it, always have, always will. Usually, I just fall asleep. Either that or I can't stop thinking. But I know it's good for you, so I sporadically try. Mild stretching is actually a better meditation for me, I think. The soreness of the muscle I'm stretching gives me something to focus on instead of just my breath.
 
Weight-wise, this wasn't a great week, as I tipped the scales at 168.5 this morning. I blame it on the virus, as it's a convenient scapegoat. But the true fault lays in the pina coladas, the cookies and cake my wife's been making since she's at home more, and the caramel swirl lattes I've been getting on pretty much of a daily basis.

I think I got too cocky once I hit and maintained 165 for a week or two. It's the usual cycle. It's a little tough to hang at exactly 165 or so for me. I get hungry and I'm more prone to sweets because I think I'm low enough already
 
I haven't been doing great on my hobbies - guitar, Japanese, chess. Chess I find it hard to beat the computer at level 5 unless I'm really focused. The problem with chess is that you can play well for an entire game, but one moment of inattention and the game flips. With guitar, I really need to set a goal like playing at an open mic.

Japanese, we had our visit last year and a lot of the stuff on netflix is anime, which is kind of for kids. I wish they had more adult shows or historical dramas, but those seem to be mostly Korean or Chinese. Not that there aren't a billiion ways to learn. My wife isn't interested in my learning Japanese, because she wants to improve her English, which is far better than my Japanese after 30 years in the US.
 
Hey Jack, sorry to hear that your hobbies aren't doing so well. Must be preoccupation with the virus, I think most of us have that problem to some extent.
jackbenimble said:
I blame it on the virus, as it's a convenient scapegoat
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Yep, it's a world class scapegoat, probably never have a better one! At the gym (before it closed) I stepped on the scale and a woman ordered me off, I was a bit surprised and she rather authoritatively said, no weighing until this thing is over. Took me a minute to realize she was joking. For some folks that may not be a bad idea.

It is really hard to maintain an exact weight, do you have a range that would make sense, like 165 plus or minus a couple?
 
So, I'm strongly considering getting back into doing something software-related in my free time. I've done zero programming since I switched to apps engineer last year, and with the economy tanking, I think it might be a good idea to get something recent onto the resume.

There's a perfect opportunity to do a project for work, which relates to issuing and tracking licenses. My boss more than once has asked me to do something on that. The problem is that with my other responsibilities, and being part-time, the time just isn't there.

One thing I really want to do is modify the program to put a check on the MAC addresses. That's the only part I can't check against the product because it differs by PC. I had left a right quote out of the last one in a list the other day, and so the license didn't work and we had to resend it. And of course, my boss was quizzing me as to what happened and chided me over email that we had to stop making so many mistakes. Actually, there have only been 3 since Feb 11, all mac addresses, two by the offshore resource, and there's been a lot issued, but the perception is out there now.

You'd think he'd be happy that just this week I turned an image around in a few days that looked like it was going to be months (with a lot of pressure from a customer), found the solution to a remote access issue the device software was having (which is a critical issue for an image we want to sell to a customer), and just yesterday during an emergency conference call had them successfully installing, testing and activating an image I created last November *during the call*. Not to mention saying I had already completed another image they were asking about. Although that call was after the boss chided me on the "too many errors".

The whole license thing is way out of proportion, as problems are easily fixed and have nothing like the gravity of getting these images right. But it just happens because when there is a mistake, it goes out on a huge list and everyone sees it. Fortunately, they gave me access to an offshore resource to help out, and she is a literal godsend. Although she did screw up a couple of them recently, which is why the boss is saying there are "too many" errors, along with the one I made.

But that is another good reason to create a database to track licenses. So I can have numbers saying "so many licenses were issued, and this is the number of resends".

The problem is, I'm going to have to do it for free, because my part-time job is averaging over 30 hours and there is no way I'm going to get that amount of programming done without it being more than 40 hours.

But the benefits are
1) I will be getting recent experience
2) I will have a focus for my free time
3) I'll be able to cut down the errors on issuing the licenses
4) I'll be able to come back with some numbers when accused of having "too many errors".

I feel kind of resentful, but at one point there really were too many errors, so in a way, I brought it on myself. Also, l like working with software, so it's a kind of hobby anyway. We'll see.
 
alligatorob said:
Hey Jack, sorry to hear that your hobbies aren't doing so well. Must be preoccupation with the virus, I think most of us have that problem to some extent.

Yep, it's a world class scapegoat, probably never have a better one! At the gym (before it closed) I stepped on the scale and a woman ordered me off, I was a bit surprised and she rather authoritatively said, no weighing until this thing is over. Took me a minute to realize she was joking. For some folks that may not be a bad idea.

It is really hard to maintain an exact weight, do you have a range that would make sense, like 165 plus or minus a couple?
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That was funny about what the lady at the gym said, I got a good chuckle out of that.

As far as a range, I feel like it should be 165 or under. But in reality, the range is (going back years now) 165 to 170, more or less. That probably won't change much, I guess.
 
Jack, it sounds like the pros of creating a database to track licenses outweighs the cons, especially seeing you feel that your other hobbies are not going as well. Does it matter that you would not be paid for it if it's something you would like doing anyway?
 
Cate said:
Jack, it sounds like the pros of creating a database to track licenses outweighs the cons, especially seeing you feel that your other hobbies are not going as well. Does it matter that you would not be paid for it if it's something you would like doing anyway?
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You're right, Cate. I haven't been able to generate any intensity or flow behind any of the other ones recently. And I do enjoy programming. Not to mention, it pays.
In fact, I did program for about 8 hours yesterday. I got the main thing done that I wanted, which was a check on the MAC addresses. Today I'm going to add more unit tests and get it loaded up to bitlocker, which is going to be another project. I may add a date edit, but that's less important because that you can check against the application.

The unit tests are important because that's really the trend, and I want to be able to say I've done that for work. The rest is no big deal.

I have to compile my hours also. I guess I'll leave that time out.

I was down to 167 on the scale this morning. No pina coladas for Jack yesterday.
 
So, I put in about 10-12 hours of work this weekend to get some edits into the license program. It's more time than I should have spent, but I got needlessly hung up on the regex. Also, I did some legitimate unit-testing, which is the first time ever except for about 10 years ago on an app I was doing. I emailed the link to the offshore resource, and she'll do some testing on it as well. I already generated a license with it. So that's my first real-live programming since last August, I would say. Hard to believe it's been that long, but I'm back in the saddle again.

The next step is to create a program to read through the existing licenses and store them in a database. I'm thinking maybe a document database like MongoDB. It's about time I got a noSql database under my belt, and I've already played around with Mongo in the past.

Then I'll create a web interface so you can paste the data in from the request and have the license auto-generated, and store in the database at the same time. I'm going to base it on the habits app I created last year. Too bad I did in Angular though - React seems to be more popular. I can understand why, as the Angular was pretty complex. I might give React a shot this time.
 
Holy crap, what a week. The news is insane. I hope everyone is staying home and staying safe.

Our company is instituting a 2 to 8% interim pay-cut for regular employees. For me, my boss said that his boss said to "stick to the contract" meaning a max of 25 hours. Ugh. I don't know if they don't approve if I bill for over that. I'll have to stay in close contact with the boss on that.

I'm hanging in there with that weight at 167 despite not getting to the beach for the past few days. I haven't had pina coladas for the past couple of nights, which helps.

I went shopping with a facemask and gloves this morning, which felt a little strange, but not that much. I've used the facemask, which I scored a Drs. visit a couple of weeks ago, a few times now and am getting used to it. My wife doesn't have one (I asked at the Dr's but they said it was the last one), but she's going to make one. It should be a piece of cake for her because she makes a lot of her own clothes, i.e. dresses.

I also ordered a couple of dozen facemasks from a shady Chinese company a couple of weeks ago, but it doesn't look like they'll ever show up. The tracking number, from an even shakier looking carrier name "Shipping Express", as of yesterday is returning a "not in system" message.
 
I've been putting a lot of time on the side into creating a web-site for licensing for work. It's going to have to be free work, but that's ok. Why? Because I have demonstrated pretty clearly to myself that I'm not really able to generate much motivation behind my hobbies, and so I just end up wasting a lot of time. So, at least I'm doing something productive.

Also, with the plague and the economy tanking the way it is, I don't want to be taking money out of my IRAs until it comes back. Which means I kind of need to keep working. The good news on that end is my boss told me in a webex yesterday that they "need" me. The bad news is that, as I mentioned, it looks like I won't be able to bill more than 25 hours a week. Honestly, I'm grateful because that's plenty to keep the income rolling until say June and hopefully until the end of the year.

So the free work pays off in a number of ways:
1) It makes me more valuable so increases the chances they don't cut me and/or extend the contract (which btw it though the end of the year)
2) It's updating my skill set, which makes me more employable even if I do get cut.
3) I don't hate programming, actually kind of enjoy it. So, why not? I'm not doing anything else really.
 
It sounds like you have found a good way of keeping your brain active, Jack.
I think that's extra important at the moment. I sent you a pm with a specific computer question :)
 
Got up nice and early to get the senior's hours for shopping. I ran into an old buddy for the second straight week there - he had knee surgery and it's working out great. Already showered and ready to go.

This week started out crazy, the lightened up the last couple of days. I'm going to put in for less that 25 hours this week. I checked my original contract and it called for 20 hours - yikes, thought it was 25. So, as a goodwill gesture.

I'm going into work Monday as I need to get remote access to this one site, and as far as I know, we can only get at it from this one PC at work. There are still people going in every day (not many) because they have to be there to run the tests for the device developers. I don't know if I'll wear a mask, but I think I will, even though no-one is wearing them there. Why take a chance?
 
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