Things I’m in the middle of reading, also known as glimpses into my psyche:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman: we’re reading this for our Women In Technology Group at work. So far, a couple of chapters in, my System 1 brain is convinced the book should progress more quickly
• The Clown in You, by Caroline Dream: reading this to try to think about my clowning in new ways, to spark my thinking in new paths
• Hacking, the Art of Exploitation, by Jon Erickson: my cyber masters program is leaving me less than inspired, and more feeling slogged in its various papers. Hoping this book gives me some new angles and inspiration

I frequent some Facebook groups related to buying and selling used clown and circus supplies. Last month, a guy posted 3 or 4 pictures of this massive yard sale amount of stuff. Folks kept offering him money for individual items, but he’d say he’d only deal with folks who’d pick up. He ALSO said he’d be willing to take a reasonable offer for the lot. After seeing enough folks make individual offers, I decided, heck, the guy’s in New York, I’ll make him an offer, and if he takes it, I’ll make it back by shipping out just the things folks have offered on.

So, that’s what I did. I made the guy an offer. I came back with a mini-van chock full of things. A full-size Scooby Doo costume. A full-size Easter bunny costume. 6 large Lowes’ boxes filled with costumes and supplies, including a couple of puppets that run usually for $300+. Two boxes of videos. Another full (+!) box of clown magazines. A full bin of various magic tricks. A box of juggling bean bags. All in all, a bonanza of random fun. I spent a weekend building out an inventory spreadsheet and looking things up to figure out their probable retail value. I’ve been putting them up on Facebook, selling them off at a bit at a time.

So, if you know anyone who wants an Easter bunny costume or a set of dove pans, I’m your gal! I’ll be taking at least a representative box or two to the local clown convention next month – see if I can find some willing homes for another thing or two, at least!

Quarantine, day N… Was at work last week, and now off again.

Early in, I set up a Google Doc in which I listed goals for the quarantine. Projects I could accomplish with the extra time. Some of them are already complete – I got my Grace Hopper application in, built out some challenges for a CTF, planted seeds. Some are in progress – about half of the front yard has had its onion grass removed. I’ve done more running and pushups. Still working towards pullups. Have mostly left the burpee goal alone, though I think that’s on the list today.

What I’ve realized isn’t strongly on the list are household organizing or cleanup projects. I could wash windows. I could dust floorboards. I could… These are the sorts of projects my parents used to give me when I’d done something wrong, though. The sort of work penance aspects to grind a spirit down. I’m not in the mood to punish myself.

What I keep doing is more minor things: clean up a corner. Put away something that’s been in the wrong place for far too long. Work to keep the kitchen quasi-clear with all of the extra food preparation going on. (Somehow kids love making food, but never connect it with the extra cleanup.) Go for more long walks with my hubby. I’m most of the way through a puzzle, which is usually something we only do over Christmas break. Try a new recipe or two once in a while… We had a Monte Cristo casserole the other day that was pretty good!

The weeks without a rhythm are long. Completing big household projects and then seeing them be overrun would be too discouraging. So I’d describe myself as pacing. We’re in a time of unknown length and I’m just trying to make it through.

Monday, day 1 of quarantine for me. The kids have been off of school for a week, but this was the first day I was told to stay home from work. So, what did I do?

Mostly… worked. On either work (IRAD supervision, resume tweaking for a staff member, phone meeting to get news of quarantine, pulling together ideas for kids & STEM) or our church website (solved some email problems for folks, updated a page or two). Got Cameron up and harangued him for not going to therapy. Planted some seeds. Got in a workout (burpee hell!). Got in a run. Listened to a webcast on cyber machine learning. Snuggled some cats. Uh, wrote a blog post.

Ultimately, stayed pretty busy. 4 more days to go this week…….!

Exemplars of search history on Google: “alternatives to Terraform”. “alternative to rubber chickens”. The things that software engineers who are also clowns search for.

Update!!!! Further down in my Google search result for rubber chickens I find a blog post that crosses rubber chickens and software development: Why rubber chickens make for better meetings! Hmmm – might be time to expense some rubber chickens!

Home sick today.. It’s a lousy day to be sick, as tomorrow I’m supposed to run a half-marathon and today is the day most of the rest of my software team is off. Read that as: no meetings, great day to code day. Instead I’m home, laptop in my bed, puttering away whilst keeping my head not quite upright so it doesn’t feel like it’ll explode.

So, what’s a gal to do in such a situation? Clean out her email backlog! I’m not an inbin zero kind of gal… I file some emails away, delete a good number, but somehow the pile still generally stays. There’s too much useful info there, and I long since discovered if I tried to file things away, I’d have to clean out however many other files, rather than one big inbin. So instead my goal is to just keep it below some threshold number. Over time that number’s changed. For my personal email bin (the worst offender), right now the target number is 7700. Every so often, I’ll try to decrease it by 100. The number used to be 8000 something before, so I’m making progress.

How do I have 7700 emails worthy of keeping, you ask? Well, I don’t, I’m sure. I have 7700 emails that were mostly at one point worthy of keeping. Many have degraded in value since then, but the effort to go clean out the ones that aren’t valuable is more than the cost to me of having 7700 emails. I have emails in which I get told my grandmother passed away and what the funeral arrangements are. That’s now 4 years ago. My memory’s faulty, but my email history isn’t, so I can go back and check the timeline and particulars. I have emails in which I get back acceptances to speak at conferences. Again, my memory’s faulty, so I use those emails to go back and remind myself – what year, what topic… I have emails that have information I meant to read sometime and never got around to. Some of that information is now stale, some isn’t, etc, etc.

So I accept my email pile. I actively prune both new and old emails. Since I started writing this post, I’ve gotten 6 more messages, which push me over 7700. I’ll prune back down below, and go back through the old pile and try to give myself some headroom by pushing it down to, say, 7650. By later today, though, I’m sure I’ll have to compress it again.

It’s my own email garbage collection strategy. Trading off the cycles required to do the collection and cleanup for time to do more useful things.

Just in case any of my faithful readers (meaning, dear hubby) is looking for birthday ideas (hint, hint)…
– new kickboxing gloves from my gym. I originally bought the starter gloves and now want a heavier pair
– I set up a wishlist on ClownAntics for fun clowning toys
– there’s always my Amazon wish list…

I hate the below kind of thing. To avoid repeating the behavior, I’ll tell you _why_ after I show you what I hate.

[8:52 AM] XXXXX: Just saw this feature today.
[8:52 AM] XXXXX: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/web_ide/
[8:52 AM] XXXXX: That’s interesting.
[8:52 AM] XXXXX: There’s a button for it on our version… Chromebook here I come !

I hate when someone suggests I should check something out, but gives no context. In this case, the person posting it is high enough above me in the food chain that I should check it out. In my passive aggressive response mode, though, I’m just venting online, though protecting the identity of the party. Note that this isn’t just a him thing – I get emails of that sort, as well. Most of those I shunt aside and justify by saying, well, that’s a great way to infect someone with viruses – get them to click on a link but give no real context.

OK, done venting. Time to get back to work. If you click through to the Gitlab doc link, let me know what you think of it. I’m guessing by URL structure they’re saying there’s now a development environment bundled with Gitlab. I can guess along some other paths what that might be, and suspect it could be very useful for a former project of mine. But I’m still going to hold out on looking for a little bit.