Active Ingredients

A new but familiar orange bottle.
The safety lid to protect children.
Little, white pills.

Active Ingredients:
    bupropion hydrochloride,
    entirety of your youth unprotected,

Inactive ingredients: 
    ethylcellulose, to keep it together
    glyceryl behenate, to keep it together 
    microcrystalline cellulose, to keep it together
    always finishing last in the mile run,
    povidone, to keep it together
    the regret you didn’t kiss her in the field by your junior high,
    polyvinyl alcohol, to keep it together
    hydroxypropyl cellulose (type H), to keep it together    
    the embarrassment when the teacher called on you with a mouth full of paper,
    laughter that you could ever date her,
    the light decaying behind your eyes,
    keep it together

Action:
    NDRIs reduce the re-uptake of dopamine and norepinephrine
    allowing more to linger in your brain
    with your childhood, still turbulent and swirling,
    so the memories may repose and be protected

Side effects:
    Vitality, 
    Joy,
    Rest for these ugly memories that are a part of you
    but never again the whole you 

The tablets are printed with edible black ink

Dyson Sphere

In the deep hollows of space
I can build a sphere around the sun
to apportion the radiant energy,
joule by joule.

It is buffered by cool
and tenebrous mechanisms that
regulate the transfer of any glimmer 
between us.

Structural containment is critical.
If I yield, it will flare and
irradiate everything,
warming you without restraint.

And, oh, how we may grow so reliant
on the touch of light
unregulated and unbuffered
by space.

The Next Great Adventure

Oliver No. 5 circa 1912.

Alyska and I are collectors. She collects Kodak folding cameras and projectors, I collect typewriters and Russian cameras. These items represent powerful forces in our lives — creativity, mechanism, self-actualization.

These are beautiful machines in themselves but the things they allow are what captivates us. These devices are an interface between a person, their creative spirit — call it muse or inspiration or that awful thing that only appears when I don’t have paper to write it down — and the outer world. Through them may c we build something that did not exist until eye met prism, until fingers met keys.

Discovering joy in a nowhere barn

The act of acquisition is an immensely powerful drive. Setting aside the American consumerist zeitgeist, when you’re a collector much of the joy springs from the journey to find your next piece. It is as close as many get to Indiana Jones’ style archaeology — you set a day, map your situations, dig through awkward corners of overstuffed rooms hoping that Thuggee bandits don’t jump out of that wicker basket.

When you find something, the feeling is intoxicating. It’s there, dusty, on a desk that no one has sat at for decades, wondering at its own purpose. You feel the capability it still has. For me, place hands on keys and hearing that clack of smooth hammer action is what will sell me. For Alyska, the faint difference in the shuck of 1/30 versus 1/100 a second spring-loaded shutter time. It’s finding life.

Stacks of paper to the ceiling

And life can get ahead of you. We try not to buy everything we find lest our house be so full of little mechanical interfaces that we cannot navigate our own rooms. We place limits on our collections, strict ones, to keep the stacks in check. We both will only collect things that work or could easily be made to work by our own hand. Typewriters can be restored, but I can only fix certain problems myself yet. She can unstick a shutter on occasion or remount a lens. But some pieces are yet out of reach.
It’s important to have a limit for it, though, part for controlling but part to help these interfaces work again. I’ve typed something — letters, poetry, on all my typewriters. She’s shot with most of her folding cameras. These working objects have purpose re-discovered and in us they instill it.

Where does the adventure end?

The dance of utility, joy of discovery, the finite space we occupy all must balance. Collections can grow large. There are many, many things even when you limit yourself to certain elements, that you can acquire and at some point you reach a limit. Where does my adventure end with any of these objects?

We, in fact, love that we requested the device from that barn (and narrowly escaping the Thuggees who protected it) but is it any better sitting on my shelf than in that barn? If we believe a machine can have purpose, at they are built to perform that purpose, it is unjust for us to let it sit and diminish again.

And I think that’s the point at which we must release these things back into the world. When the emotional resonance has dwindled to a faint ringing in the ears and this working machine is admired a little less, it must find a new home.

This moment is hard. You remember the dust, the digging, the serendipity. You cannot imagine letting go of this machine that was lost.

Just look here: you found it; you reveled in joy of it again. That will never change and in absence may that grow fonder while allowing for the space your next.

And in letting go, may you allow another to find their own adventure

Internet Valhalla

Most viking burials were similar in bent to modern burial practice (1). People were buried or cremated in normal clothes or buried with personal effects of importance. The more spectacular burials - the flaming boat rides - were likely reserved for important figures in a tribe.

I have taken many of the entities I followed on social media, set them adrift in a faering, and ignited their path towards Internet Valhalla. It’s not that they do not have value, they just no longer serve a purpose for me. Thus the respectful metaphor…. while still offering the opportunity to light them on fire,

Metaphorically.

Building the Boat

These words from today’s exercise in The Focus Course were a boon for motivation:

Attention is earned, not owed. Just because you were interested at first doesn’t mean you have to pretend to be interested forever. Your priorities change, your interest changes, your availability changes.

I had, in fact, just yesterday asked myself why I was following some people who are negative nigh constantly. Did I really want or need that negativity in my life?

Despite the answer being seemingly obvious, there was an internal swell (2) of resistance in which my brain offered many reasons why I was awful for wanting un-follow anyone, even businesses (3).

Placing the oars

It’s a curious thing how difficult it is to do something like this. Remember LiveJournal? When I first started blogging in 2001, it wasn’t easily possible to know if and when a person stopped following you. LJ gave you a list of followers and you could, I supposem check it every day. Or there were tools, sure, but the default state kept us blind to it. And I think it was better for it. I have my reasons for following and unfollowing who I please. As do you and, really, it isn’t any of my business to understand the why’s and wherefore’s 4) for your decision. You don’t owe me your attention any more than I owe you yours.

Shoving the boat off

So, that was satisfying in the end. Doubly so because it this further reinforces current efforts to reduce distraction on my phone. With even less content, good or otherwise, I have fewer reasons to check.

And. And this is something I did not expect to click along with removing distraction from my life:

My desire to create better things in the world increases every time I remove distraction.

And perhaps this is the key, dear reader, to my point.

A Flood of Creativity

The way we forestall our own drifting to internet Valhalla is by making things that are useful and good for people. What is useful and Good can differ radically person to person and that is both OK and desirable.

What draws me to you and you to me is the thing that make us unique; our perspectives, or interactions, our interpretation of the world is as varied as we. The intersection of creativity and humanity is the avatar for experience. If we can discover what that is for us and present in a positive way, we cannot help but flood the world with good things.

This is to say that both the Focus Course, reducing distraction, and my stepping away from a project that had been, at best, a bog of frustration, has done wonders for me.

It’s all been going just swimmingly since. (5)

1. Minus embalming. How typically human is modern burial? We put our bodies to decompose in a box that stops our decomposition from actually return our bodies back to the natural order. Humans: too important to feed a tree. ↩︎

2. Swell, get it? ↩︎

3. Aren’t businesses people too? ↩︎

4. Those words mean the same thing. ↩︎

5. Were there enough water-related puns in this entry? I’m just trawling for your approval. ↩︎

Controlling Distraction

If you can’t rely on yourself, upon whom can you rely?

Committing to little changes, day to day, is exactly how you build personal integrity. You teach yourself that, yeah, you can do the things you intend to do, accomplish the projects you build for yourself. And getting to the point where you know implicitly that you have the capacity for these things is a long journey.

The first task in the Focus Course is to give something up for the duration of it. It has two-fold intention: 1. Take the time gained by giving something up to do the course. 2. Building trust in yourself that you can meet personal commitments.

It’s the baby-steps to ensuring you complete the course and start to trust yourself.

Reducing Distraction

I’ve chosen to reduce distraction in my life. I have pretty serious organizational requirements for my phone home screen. The apps on the home screen are the ones I use every day and need to be immediately in reach. Everything else I access via search and should, for the most part, be things I don’t use too much lest I get annoyed with the extra steps required to access them (unlock phone> pull down home screen> enter search text> tap on up> instead of unlock phone> tap app).

Here is my home screen before (left) and after (right) reorganization. for the Focus Course.

   <img src="_Blog+-+controlling+distraction+1.PNG" alt=" Before ">  Before  




   <img src="_img.png" alt=" After ">  After  

It was pretty tight to start, in that I try to be clutter-free with my devices, but my home screen included two of the most distracting apps (two that I thoroughly enjoy) easily to accessible - Twitter and Instagram. Now, I have moved them to the Distraction folder and “promoted” Omnifocus (1) to the dock, re-added Vesper (2) and Reeder (3) to the home screen, and created workflows (the black custom icons) to do things I do everyday with my phone faster.

But how will you tweet (4)?

I am not abstaining from Twitter and Instagram; rather, I want access to them to be more deliberate. Before, when I had any idle moment or just pulled out my phone to do something, I’d end up checking either for updates, umping into Facebook soon after, and losing a few minutes to them (at best); or, at worst, bouncing between them for more than a few minutes in some sort of brain-dead social zombie app shuffle that ended with me forcibly shaking myself out of the daze.

In the grand scheme, not so bad; I mean, I still get work done on time and with good quality. I just want to avoid the idleness cycle that pulls attention into un-useful tasks. If I’m going to “waste” time, I’d rather do it with Reeder where I’m reading and acquiring some new knowledge, than seeing yet another cat photo.

Directing boredom

Boredom isn’t a bad thing. It can be useful to be bored if you handle it directly. And by that I mean, embrace the idle moments with intention If I’m bored, read and article to enrich myself. Or take a sinful moment in a line to let my mind breath between moments.

Really, we spend so much of our lives racing to get stuff done that we don’t need to race through our leaner moments. You’re not missing out.

1. Omnifocus is my GTD app. I switched to it last month and have felt way more in control of my time. I still can’t quite get recurring tasks to work as desired in my perspectives - that they appear every morning and drop when checked. It seems you can’t have a recurring due task that doesn’t always appear because of its due status. ↩︎
   
   
2. Vesper is where I’ve started keeping snippets of poems, journals, anything creative that occurs to me. Like I think of a phrase I like the cadence of so I jot it down for later review or usage. ↩︎
   
   
3. RSS reader. Ostensibly Reeder contains beneficial content, stuff I want to read to learn something or get news. I don’t think anything I read regularly is fluff but I also don’t know how I would define fluff… ↩︎
   
   
4. If you like discussing the manner in which creative people work, you should listen to Cortex. This sentiment occurred in the first few episodes and the way CGP Grey and iMyke talk about work and distraction resonates with me like crazy. ↩︎

Self-immolation

I signed up for Shawn Blanc’s Focus Course this weekend in the hopes of rebuilding my creative self and further help remove me from the cloud of self-doubt and anxiety I have been having in my creativity in the last few months.

THe course is about doing our best creative work, about building space in our lives to make the things we want to make. It’s turning creativity and personal expression into a rewarding routine. It is an encapsulation of many of the things I have been trying to accomplish with varying degrees of success this last year in my Virtue Project, my writing and handwriting routine, my reading note structure… everything I’ve been trying to do daily.

I have been trying to write an extended version of my Virtue Project the last two months and it has been agony. I mean serious gnashing of teeth, self-hatred, and surprising amount of resistance that I just do not understand. Every time I sit down to write, world fills with fire and feel helpless to avoid it.

Sitting down to write is like a come down to the kitchen, light the kitchen table on fire, sit down with my coffee, and sit there while it spreads up my arms and consumes my face. All the discomfort is self-inflicted both in that I sit down to write but force myself to stay there until either I quit in frustration or run out of time before work.

In the best cases, I write a paragraph or two before time runs out. Those few sentences have become a drop-dead fight rather than a joy or even a challenge. And any attempt write something else just fuels it, fuels the resistance.

The resistance has grown to an obsessive smolder; it follows me through the day and distracts me from my job.

“You should be writing.”

“You didn’t even get a sentence out today.”

“What do you know about the topic; who are you to bother writing that?” (1)

I’m shelving the extended writing project for now in the name of personal sanity and, hopefully, as a way to step around the fire blocking any progress forward. It’s about giving myself permission to do other things, to find some joy again, to redefine my routine in the morning away from self-immolation and back towards a comfortable, creative hearth.

4 days in to the decision, and 2 days into the course, and I feel a least a little better. I’m writing this instead of flailing, which is a step in the right direction. And while part of me thinks it is personal failure to set aside a project I feel so strongly about - which I do and in a positive way - it’s more important to allow for personal sanity rather than constantly relighting the pyre.

1. This last one is especially toxic, I’m aware, and I am talking to people about it. ↩︎︎

Whiskey and Airports (Dram and Drag)

Couple of things up front:

1. I swear I write cigar reviews too. I just drink a bunch more whiskey than I smoke cigars.
2. I am writing this under the influence of delayed flights in Detroit airport.

As a Chicagoan, there are a number of things I like about DTW compared to O’Hare. It’s not gargantuan while still serving international flights. The terminals are laid out in two parallel lines joined by the single coolest audio-visual art installation I’ve ever seen. The toilets are clean (1). And I can get acceptable food in about 15 minutes while waiting for fights.

I was delayed today while flying to Boston - I’m heading to do elbow-to-elbow support for end users of my software - for 2.5 hours because of storm systems over the east coast. Personally, I’m ok with delays when the gate attendants are communicative abut the reasons so I have a concrete sense of that delay (2). Today, they were being communicative, so I went sushi and whiskey hunting.

Food in general can be touch and go in an airport, fish especially so. You don’t really know what sort of access places can get with all the security scrutiny of goods coming in and out of the terminals. It’s why, when you find a good place to eat when you have nothing but interstitial time between flights, a good restaurant can be like finding El Dorado. Just made of fish. This, oddly, seems dolly so for a restaurant that stocks good whiskey.

Today I stumbled upon Yamasaki 18 year, one of those mythologized whiskeys known for its general amazingness.

Japanese whiskies (3) hit their renaissance (4) in 2010 when Yamazaki started winning awards. Having had the 14 year before, and found it sweet and smoother than you’d expect for a 14 year, I was excited to see the 18 year. In an airport.

The neatest thing

(see what I did there?) The dram itself is probably the smoothest whisky I’ve ever had, much smoother than Johnnie Walker which is know ’round as the smoothest of whiskies (5). And I think that’s an accomplishment given the advantage blending gives to controlling particular variables in the whisky experience.

Nose

Yamasaki is such a demure drink. It’s so soft on the nose and only aromatic of oak, maybe a little resin (like a violin resin) and kind of that pleasant alcohol nature. If I could choose one word, I’d say, “simple.” Not in a derogatory way; rather in a focused way. It’s not simplistic. Just simple. Pure.

Taste

Oak and oak and more oak and a sweetness somewhere between oranges and nectarines with some of that syrup you get at the bottom of a fruit cup in your elementary school lunch. It’s hardly overpowering in sweetness, but it certainly isn’t backing down on it. It’s just nicely balanced woodiness and sweet notes. It would make an excellent aperitif or dessert whiskey if you’re having a tame fruit tart - thing too sweet because you’d lose the best of the whisky.

It don’t think I’d call it complex. It is smart in its approach in that Yamazaki knows what the whisky can become. If you try the 14 year, you can see the start. It’s a bit more aggressive (insofar as Japanese alcohol is never aggressive) in flavors but has more acrid moments in the middle.

Those are essentially gone with 4 years longer in the cask.

The problem with airports

Buying alcohol in airports is an act of desperation. Usually, and I’m making gross generalizations here, the people drinking in an airport are delayed six ways from Sunday and are applying the best salve they can find to their over-tired wounds. Airport bar know this and charge accordingly. We are, after all, a captive and surly audience. You can expect to pay about $10 for a decent pour of Jameson which, otherwise, would cost you maybe $5 in the average bar.

Yamasaki 18 year? Holy shit. But, like I said: captive audience. I was willing to pay the price…

(And hold on a second where I realize that I am extremely lucky in that I could pay the following for a glass of whisky)

…of $32.

…

I know, right?

Like it was good but probably not that good.

In that, it’s a lot like the Detroit airport. If you’re going to get stuck anywhere, a linear airport terminal which feels vast and open and bright, with its i-have-been-mopped-at-least-once-this-year bathroom floors, it is pretty good.

So relative to my situation, it was a bargain to enjoy something that hugged my tongue in its unabashed oaken flavors and smooth finish while I contemplated by delayed flight to Boston which, after writing this, is still an hour from boarding.

Assuming the weather cooperates. And if it doesn’t? I think I saw a bottle of Jameson Black Barrel around here somewhere.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

1. I mean, as far as public restrooms trafficked by thousands of people in a day really can be.↩︎︎

2. If they’re not talking, I wonder how likely it is to shorten all-of-a-sudden and leave me stranded, mid slow and luxurious sushi meal. Because, really, Sora at DTW is mighty fine sushi for an airport.↩︎︎

3. “E” omitted here because Japan produces whisky in the Scottish style, generally. ↩︎︎

4. Which is weird to write because Japan wasn’t known for whisky until very recently. Yamasaki, owned by Suntory, was the first in the early 1920s. They mostly labored in local fame until 2010-ish when Yamasaki swooped in and started winning top prizes for 3 out of the 4 years following. ↩︎︎

5. Blended whiskies have the advantage of, well, being blended to adjust certain characteristics. It is like booze chemistry. ↩︎︎

Silence, The Sequel

I completed the Round 2 of Silence with only a few observations:

1. I feel like I’ve got it down pretty well. I’ve always been a pretty quiet dude.

2. I was positively loquacious on Friday night when I got to OmegaCon and around friends in a rustic lodge in Nowhere, Wi. I talked myself lightheaded.

I feel like the later should count as a failure but I needed to be around people who get me and have no expectations. I was able to relax and relieve some tension. And that should account for some value beyond following a this virtuous credo I’m attempting.

This may be rationalizing.

Or I’ve well internalized modern expectations for silence? Which is certainly possible though as previously stated, i’ve never been much of a talker. Society values vocal contribution and extraversion, especially in men (1), and dominating a conversation is some ridiculous social trophy (2). But, again, I’ve never been much for that; I like absorbing conversation, or fading into the background in larger, unfamiliar, gatherings.

But, extraversion is the expected mode of operation today, or at least the ideal. So I may well have been virtuous according to modern societal expectation, I do not think extraversion was well regarded in Franklin’s era. At least not like today. Today, to be brash, loud, forthright is to be in charge. To be quiet or reserved is to be passive or defective (3). Modern expectations for Silence or founded upon an extrovert ideal.

From Susan Cain’s Quiet

The Extrovert Ideal has been documented in many studies, though this research has never been grouped under a single name. Talkative people, for example, are rated as smarter, better-looking, more interesting, and more desirable as friends. Velocity of speech counts as well as volume: we rank fast talkers as more competent and likable than slow ones. The same dynamics apply in groups, where research shows that the voluble are considered smarter than the reticent — even though there’s zero correlation between the gift of gab and good ideas.

Regarding the gender differences, in particular I’ll call out from the same book,

Introverts living under the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.

Emphasis mine but I think that’s important.

Anyway. I was acting “properly” according to current standards which is rare for me.

Maybe it’s that I can’t really lose. I’m quiet and I learn. I talk and people listen (4).

1. Arguably, it’s only ok for men to be verbose. Research regularly shows that men talk more in school or in meetings and, if women speak even 30% of the time, are seen to be talkative or bossy. ↩︎

2. In some cases. ↩︎

3. In men. Women, gosh, you’re always supposed to be reserved. Can’t have any opinions or thoughts. What are you, bossy? geez… ↩︎

4. Likely because of my bossbosyy parts. How idiotic is that? ↩︎

Temperance, take 2

My views on Temperance haven’t changed much with tis second round. It is obvious to me why Franklin listed it first in the line of virtues. All things flow from temperance; or, I suppose, all vice flows from intemperance.

The trend I see with my own virtues is that days where any other virtue receives a red dot, Temperance is often the first to fall. To wit, one loses composure, will power or organized thought when drinking and becomes so much more likely to laze about the rest of the evening doing very little of purpose.

Even a single drink, measured before consuming, throws me off my game. I suspect there’s really two reasons for that:

1. A drink signals to my mind that the night is over so I settle in to read or watch television.
2. I don’t eat directly when getting home and often exercise between work and home which enhances the effects.

No. 2 above is restating my previous edicts — don’t drink on an empty stomach which I have been especially bad about following. The most formidable distortion of logic is that I can cook while I’m making dinner. That’s like drinking on a full stomach, right (1)? Add a little inebriation to it and that logic seems like the foundation of a new way of life!

No. 1 is somewhat less insidious on any single day but a string of days becomes a momentum killer. There’s much to do right now - Spring means the war with yard continues (2), I’m trying to research and write these entries, I’ve added (inadvertently?) a new section to this blog (3), and I’m trying to read more this year (4, 5), and maintain some relevance for my business (6) — and ending a day when there’s good light too frequently means these other projects get delayed. It’s both a bad association and a bad habit. I sort of worry that my habit is to have a drink nearly every night because that seems like a lot.

According to recent surveys (summarized above), 30% of all adults abstain completely while another 30% have a drink a week. About 30% have 1 drink a night while 20% of adults have 2 drinks a night (that’s where I tend to fall). The top10% of adults drink 10 drinks a day which is terrifying (7). So, depending on how you slice the numbers, it puts me at above average for American adults, average for typical American Adult drinking patterns, and a light weight for all adult drinkers in America (8).

It’s hard to find numbers for alcohol consumption in Franklin’s America but it wasn’t unheard of to consume a beer or cider, which were closer to 4-6% alcohol, at each meal. It wasn’t until whiskey distillation became popular that Colonial American drinking started to be problematic — the rise on proof affecting American productivity.

So: a new day, same problems. What I’m getting at is the ease of which I fall into intemperate habits which affect all aspects of my life. Clearly, I have not mastered Temperance. I’m fighting against years of… I don’t want to say bad drinking habits… but a lack of attention to them. I’m building awareness and seeing more connections to how intemperance affects everything else.

Habit is stronger than reason.

• George Santayana

However, it will take yet more time to internalize this understanding. Habit is not rational, especially bad habits. To be able to short circuit that habitual takes habituating the inhabitation of your habit. You have to make a new habit to break the old habit. So, asking myself if the drink is “worth it”, a damn tough mental calculus to begin with, it is going to take time for that question to become habit (9)

1. Nope, nope it isn’t. ↩︎
   
   
2. Years of neglect has it overrun but we’ve made really good progress to beat back some of the more invasive species in the last year. ↩︎
   
   
3. Is this how you turn vice into virtue, write about it? Maybe but I enjoy a good dram and drag now and again and making it an intellectual pursuit enriches the whole experience for me. ↩︎
   
   
4. Though I only track what I’m reading or have read, you can find me on Goodreads. I’d like to hit a book a week but I don’t know how to account for the ridiculous amount of research I do for much of my writing. Or the internet articles I read most days (5). ↩︎
   
   
5. Using Goodreads has prompted me to realize how much I read on line. I average about 20-30 articles online a day from various blogs and news sites — places like Daring Fireball, The Pen Addict, Kottke, and other similar sources. Length varies but they tend to be 500 to 1500 words (2-6 pages). I… read a lot. ↩︎
   
   
6. The struggle with Bunny Rope right now is probably a meaningful post on its own…. ↩︎
   
   
7. I read the summary at the Washington Post. which was a review of Paying the Tab: The Costs and Benefits of Alcohol Control (affiliate link), analysis of alcohol control since the 50s. ↩︎
   
   
8. I’m ok with that. Can you imaging drinking two bottles of wine a day? I think I did that once, as in two bottles in one night once, in my 20s and it was pretty awful. But, that is not how addiction works. ↩︎
   
   
9. And this doesn’t even begin to touch the effect mood has on the desire to drink. Had a good day? Have some whiskey! Had a bad day? Have some whiskey! Reward systems and how we apply them is also a whole other thing…. ↩︎

What the hell do your ratings mean?

I’m sure this will surprise no one (1) that I have a consistent meanings for my ratings for whisk(e)y and cigars. I figured it would be helpful to actually share that so we can all be on the same page.

Star Ratings

No stars: Even spite or malice towards this cigar or whiskey couldn’t bring me to finish it.

★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆: I finished, potentially out of spite, or I was too lazy to care enough about its badness. I wouldn’t argue of someone gave e my money back, especially if it was a Gurkha (2).

★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆: It was fine. It had something that was vaguely interesting about it but I wouldn’t recommend it unless I knew that was, like, your thing.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆: Entirely reasonable. It had a few good things going on for it that I appreciated. I’d probably buy it again and would be happy with it.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆: This was marvelous. It has a memorable character, lots of good things going for it, some complexity or just does one things stupidly well. This makes me want to find other stuff by the group that made it.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★: Holy fuck balls, can I main-line this? Like, I’d probably be ok watching my life waste away into vice, only to be found in a gutter with nary a broken bottle to rest my head upon as I gaze with regret upon all the blog posts I would not make because this things was so good my life had to be given to it.

Et voila, we have our system.

1. Except you…. Rob. ↩︎

2. (Oh snap.) Actually, one of my earliest, tastiest cigars was a Gurkha but I didn’t pay for it myself. So that may have helped what with their markups. ↩︎

Dram and Drag: Teeling Small Batch

Friday I found myself with a few friends at the Malt House on the East Side. If you’re not familiar (1) it would behoove you to visit, even on a Friday night when it gets loud. It’s the only place I’ve been in Wisconsin that captures the Irish pub feel. Small, jovial, with warm and inviting bones with a little bit of bar hard edge. The delightful irony that I was drinking whiskey sitting in a reclaimed church pew was not lost.

I am very clearly an Irish whiskey (2) guy. Nearly all of my top whiskeys are Irish or start with an Irish whiskey character - malt and caramel, light body. I was pleased to see something very new on their menu: Teeling Small Batch whiskey. It was new in two sense: new to the menu and new to distribution. Teeling has (sorta) just started.

The family itself has been distilling whiskey around for 230 years only a few years under current naming The Teeling family sold their original distillery to Jameson around the beginning of the 20th century and this incarnation was spun off after Jim Beam bought the second incarnation in 2011.

The interweaving of old world distilling knowledge and modern sensibility is apparent in the Small Batch I drank last night. It is, at its core, a light (3) and malty Irish whiskey. Where it forks from expectation is in the intensity of the malt flavors. Each taste itself is smooth and caramel tinged so that I am left with the over all impression of a wildly malty drink is curious.

The secret, I think, is in the body. Irish whiskies evaporate more quickly on the tongue. This one, because of it, insinuates malt and caramel over your entire mouth thus allowing those flavors to build over time. Further, the spice you get on the middle and end, which is created by finishing in rum barrels (4), is draped in that same sweetness making that less intense sip to sip. But it similarly builds over the entire drink.

Teeling Small Batch is a clever whiskey and I am, for lack of a better word, intrigued to find the rest of their line.

Check out their intro video below.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

1. Shame on you. You need to go if you like any of the following:

   1. Whiskey, especially American because if the size of their selection.
   2. Trappist beer.
   3. Freedom ↩︎

2. With an “e”. ↩︎

3. It’s that lighter body which makes Irish whiskies so drinkable. They do not weigh on the palette. It is also why Irish whiskies are mediocre mixers. ↩︎

4. I’ve not seen other spirits aged in rum barrels. It is interesting and encapsulates Teeling’s old world sensibilities with modern affectation. ↩︎

Version 4

Yet more changes.

1. The obviously iconographic bug bugged me (ha?) so I went a little more literal. And it looks less like a coffee bean now.
2. All the principles had the first half bold except the third which looked silly. So either, I needed to phrase it differently or just ditch it.
3. Change line lengths for the text block.

I did try to justify the text into a square but the program I’m using decided to be finicky and I am far too lazy to do it manually.

Still not sure I call this done yet. Something about the text block is irking me.

See that… I didn’t say “bugging” me.

Wait…

Three Months Down, My Whole Life To Go

I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wish’d to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into.

It’s been a little over three months since I started this Wrestling with Franklin project with the above quote from Franklin’s autobiography. I am not sure what I expected to happen or to be after working through his 13 virtues but I know I wasn’t so foolish to believe that even working through them once was going to grant me some Great Insight into myself. On the contrary, I think I expected it to be the start of some longer revelation and I’d have the seed of something start to germinate, like the end of a long winter.

At the risk of sounding self-aggrandizing, here’s what I said back in January:

“I am, however, not striving for moral perfection. I don’t know if I even fathom what that would look like given my beliefs and place in the world. But it is no matter: the process of watching myself, having a focus, should help reveal it.”

I’ve made a few particular insights each week and I feel like I have a better sense of what the virtues mean to me after having studied them from Franklin’s writing. For one so ambitious as Franklin, who says himself he’s seeking perfection, he didn’t really write that much about virtue. He was probably too busy inventing the post office, the public library, or a country, I suppose.

So I feel like I have a sense of what these virtues had to mean for Franklin given his time and place in society. And I see how the virtues would work or not work for me then and now. But I don’t think I can quite articulate that today.

Which is entirely fine. Franklin’s intention for his Moral Perfection project was an ever-spinning cycle of focus for each virtue. After 13 weeks, one simply starts anew with focus on Temperance again. He offered no process for evaluating progress or suggestions for righting wrong behavior. I don’t even think he kept a record of his own weekly progress - he says himself that he erased each week’s grid marks when he started again:

To avoid the trouble of renewing now and then my little book, which, by scraping out the marks on the paper of old faults to make room for new ones in a new course, became full of holes, I transferr’d my tables and precepts to the ivory leaves of a memorandum book, on which the lines were drawn with red ink, that made a durable stain, and on those lines I mark’d my faults with a black-lead pencil, which marks I could easily wipe out with a wet sponge.

From all of this, there seems to be no record or writing on how Franklin progressed, if he got better over time. Which is fine, I suppose, since his “better” is not necessarily my better. As I see it, virtues change over time. Things once valued may no longer be centuries or decades or even months later. Society fluctuates. What I value and what modern society values and, what both would deem “Virtuous” is going to be different necessarily.

So after spending 3 months trying to understand what this all meant to Franklin, I have to start figuring out what this means to me. Starting tis coming Sunday, it;s back to the top with Temperance but I shall endeavor to outline what the virtue meant to Franklin, briefly, and then outline what the virtue means to me today. The delta between these two is interesting because maybe we can see how society has changed since Franklin started his own exploration over 200 hundred years ago.

Let us begin chapter 2, eh?

Connemara, the Pretty Irish Lass

Irish whiskeys are pretty unassuming characters, subtle, calm in temperament. This whiskey has a light touch with caramel and oak flavors on the front. This gives way to the peat and smoke.

The smoke rolls in rather abruptly and wipes clean any lingering sweetness and ushers in an acrid feeling as it evaporates off your tongue.

It’s neither pleasant or unpleasant, it just calls for attention in a way you wish it would not. But not for the rapid transition, I think it would be easy to miss the peat flavors that bridge these two distinct tasting portions.

There’s a moment where it becomes this lush, green flavor, like what one would expect the Irish countryside to taste like if you could distill a few square miles. It’s unexpected but draws you from the simplicity of the fore-flavors to the smoke and fire and warmth you find in heavier Scotch. It takes the whiskey from unassuming, to knowing; which makes the whiskey a pleasant dram with a little secret that the two of you share.

Irish or Irish-styled whiskeys are fast becoming my favorites. And I especially like finding a lightly smoked drink perfect as the weather in Wisconsin shifts from Spring to Summer. It will keep you warm and happy and fuzzy like a good Irish stereotype.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
3 to 3.5 stars. Drink it straight after you let it aerate. Straight from a fresh bottle and the sweeter notes are dull but the smoke is not and it will rampage over your palate.

I could see this pairing well with a light wrapper cigar or one of the interesting barberpole cigars I;ve seen lately; I especially liked the one from Camacho which included a green wrapper that would enhance the vegetative, peaty notes on the transition.

Connemara, the Pretty Irish Lass

Irish whiskeys are pretty unassuming characters, subtle, calm in temperament. This whiskey has a light touch with caramel and oak flavors on the front. This gives way to the peat and smoke.

The smoke rolls in rather abruptly and wipes clean any lingering sweetness and ushers in an acrid feeling as it evaporates off your tongue.

It’s neither pleasant or unpleasant, it just calls for attention in a way you wish it would not. But not for the rapid transition, I think it would be easy to miss the peat flavors that bridge these two distinct tasting portions.

There’s a moment where it becomes this lush, green flavor, like what one would expect the Irish countryside to taste like if you could distill a few square miles. It’s unexpected but draws you from the simplicity of the fore-flavors to the smoke and fire and warmth you find in heavier Scotch. It takes the whiskey from unassuming, to knowing; which makes the whiskey a pleasant dram with a little secret that the two of you share.

Irish or Irish-styled whiskeys are fast becoming my favorites. And I especially like finding a lightly smoked drink perfect as the weather in Wisconsin shifts from Spring to Summer. It will keep you warm and happy and fuzzy like a good Irish stereotype.

★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
3 to 3.5 stars. Drink it straight after you let it aerate. Straight from a fresh bottle and the sweeter notes are dull but the smoke is not and it will rampage over your palate.

I could see this pairing well with a light wrapper cigar or one of the interesting barberpole cigars I;ve seen lately; I especially liked the one from Camacho which included a green wrapper that would enhance the vegetative, peaty notes on the transition.

Applied Humility

And lastly, his great Resignation and Humility in acknowledging the Just Censure passed on his Essay, joined to his hearty Repentance, as well for that as other Sins of the like Kind he has heretofore been guilty of, together with a sincere Promise of Amendment for the future.
- A Defense Renewed (1)

Humility is multifaceted. It’s not just moderating one’s self opinion to avoid arrogance, but also having a modest or low view of one’s own importance and knowledge. Humility is understanding the distinction between what you do know and what you don’t know. And when you encounter the boundary between the two, humility is see that before you barrel across the line into a morass of uninformed arrogance and pride.

And like most of the virtues, perhaps especially so, humility is hard to maintain but glaringly obvious when you don’t have it.

I recently inherited a company wide initiative that fell off the rails (2) in the hope that I can, at least, drag it kicking and screaming nearer the finish line for the current development version. Because at this point, it’s bloated and decomposing carcass is way too heavy to actually get it across the line.

Yeah. So, part of that screaming involves getting people on all the other applications to finish the analysis of their data that we asked them to do in 2014. For lack of previous completion, we created some high priority bug reports that show up on all the application reports with really red text. The idea being that, by hook or by crook, we’re going to get people to pay attention.

In our bug tracking system, you can attach the bug report to a development tracker and, once you flag that development as complete, it flags the bug report as fixed. And it then drops off all the reports. One team opted to attach the report to a development log and set the dev as complete. In about an hour. Without attaching any development objects or filling out the requested research documentation. So, poof, the bug report fell off all the reports.

I found that the next day when reviewing all those reports to see if they had, at least, been assigned for review. And I wrote an email.

In said email, which included their team lead and the application manager, and my boss, I did anything but assume for competence. I assumed, rather, that because they did the above they were trying to game the system and avoid all the red marks on their application reports. And boy did I make that clear. This was about 6pm that night so I went home.

The next morning I was greeted with a few BCC “hey look at what this jerk is saying about your team member” emails. And a voicemail from his team lead. To his team lead’s credit, he was calm and deferential. He said that he understood how all this looked, understood where I was coming from, and dang it they were going to fix it, and that email read as really mean — don’t do that again.

In short, he was doing everything opposite what I did and acted without ego.

And I felt awful.

I immediately called the guy I accused of gaming the system and apologized. We worked out what was going on, why he did what he did, and both arrived at the place we needed to for tracking their research progress as intended.

And I felt better. And I called his lead and apologized to him too.

Well, sort of. I felt awful for all those assumptions but great about where we ended up. I was, ultimately right that we needed to track things and that was what he was trying to do. He just didn’t realize that the way he did it defeated the escalation path we were using. Which made sense as he had only been around for about 7 months.

A couple of lessons taken from this total failure at humbleness: 1. Don’t assume people are trying to work around the system. Ask them what’s going on. 2. Assume for intelligence, dedication, and a desire to do right in the world until you have evidence to the contrary. And even then, be helpful and not accusatory. 3. Don’t send angry emails when you’ve been working late for most days the last few weeks. And wait to send it when you’re NOT BEING EMOTIONAL. 4. When you screw up, acknowledge it and make it right.

4 is clearly the most important part if you find yourself in this sort of hole which is easy to do in a world of digital communication. You cannot include tone or intention in your digital breadcrumbs, one can only infer it.

And inference is a dangerous hubris.

3. John Webbe: Defense Renewed, I. Printed in The American Weekly Mercury, November 27, 1740. Accessed from FranklinPapers.org.↩︎

4. I’m not entirely sure it was ever on the rails.↩︎

   Also: the more time you wrestle with each virtue the more you find your flaws with them. When do you actually start getting better at them?

Iterate iterate iterate

Version 3

Never content (or posted the other too early?) I made two more revisions. Removing the computer frame around the bug was an obvious improvement in the second revision. The computer was unnecessary and bulky. The bug is the more recognized symbol for a QA engineer. I had also removed the lines and kept the text left aligned.

And then stared at it for a good 2 minutes before saving it off then doing something else.

When I came back to it, I reworded the principles in the third iteration and moved the developer one to the end for a better balance in the text. The text block looks a little more like a heart this way, which is nice. This is not to say respecting development is the lowest priority but to remove that impression, I chose not to include ordinals. These things aren’t hierarchical.

I think I prefer this over the 1st version, sure, but I’ll probably change something again later! What do you think? Do the principles ring true for those of you that do QA work?

Seven Principles to Quality QA

As naturally follows from yesterday’s post: a poster of the principles.

Well, a first draft of it. Something feels off that I can’t put my finger on.

QAing your QA

Work has been tough lately. I’ve been overworked and requests for help have been mostly ignored. It is up to me to fix it ultimately which is pretty great, all things considered, because I am trusted to handle myself and my growing team.

Much of my overwork is self-inflicted because I assign myself too much to do and it reduces my ability to focus on the quality of my job. And quality is the entire point.

I am Quality Assurance.

It’s, like, right there.

But it’s hard to see that whn there’s a crush of development to test, unhappy customer calls, company wide initiarives to rescue.

Now though? I’m post deadline and I have had a chance to breath, step back, and look at what I’ve been doing and how I’ve been doing it. Which ives me time to think and when I think, I philosophize about goodness of things. Of quality, if you will.

I”ve written up what I think are guiding principles for any quality assurance engineer.

Seven Principles for Quality QA

1. Quality first, excuses never.
2. Why is your strongest asset.
3. Where there’s one bug, there are more.
4. Find bugs sooner, get them fixed faster.
5. Write it down or it didn’t happen.
6. Break the code, respect your developers.
7. Advocate for your end user.

I am not sure if that is complete or the right wording. I initially had “love your developers” but people look at me weirdly enough when I say normal things.

What am I missing? What matters for quality software testing?

Little grids

I made some little custom grids for the continuationof my virtue project. I’ve stopped using the Art of Manliness notebooks because of how hard it is to use - the binding is just too tight that I can’t hold the darn thing open and write in it concurrently.

I also switched to using a hobonichi planner to track my daily schedule. I write (1) my daily schedule in it and then add a page index for any notes or writings completed that day. My notebook has page numbers (2) so all I need to do is add an identifier so I can look things up afterwatd as needed.

It is mostly nice except that I have a hard time taking the time to copy out my schedule for reasons likely obvious:

1. You already have one on your phone.
2. You already have, like, 7 calendars.
3. You don’t reference your notebooks anyway….

Well, to that I say: Pbbbtttllll.

It’s useful and the rigor is probably a good idea. I’ve been bad about getting up in the mornings (it’s so cold and my heater is finicky with timers).

Still. I like writing in the hobonichi (3) and that it can act like an index for more extensive notes is super useful. Also, it has pockets and has replaced my wallet.

And it was a terrible excuse to get a multipen (4).

1. I am not so good at that. I find it hard to justify for the rasonans specified AND taking the time at work do it. Even if it helps me focus for the day. It’s purely mental.↩︎
   
   
2. I use the Leuchtturm Medium. It is very fountain pen friendly and comes in so many colors, like white, because it matches all my other stuff because I’m apparently that guy.↩︎
   
   
3. “Hobonichi” translates to “almost every day.” The planner tsekf has a neat story that you can read a little more here. There’s a huge community for it like most organization tools.↩︎
   
   
4. A Pilot Hi-Tec-C Coleto with 3 pen inserts adn a pencil. The build quality is blah but the refil ink is really nice. I like having convenient colors but I actuslly disolike the size I got - .4mm tips - which is really scratchy to write with. I think my next refills will be reollerballs to smooth it out. The pen taes standard D1 refills.↩︎