Lunar Obverse - Page 8 of 276 - The bright side of a Moon

Re-focusing

Tech

Got a lot on my mind tonight but it’s not really gelling into one cohesive story. I’m just going to let my fingers run as fast as my brain will let them across the keyboard and see what happens. I’ve got a good feeling about this.

I had a breakthrough at work this week. I’ve been very tense and anxious about my performance with basic tech support issues. I poked around, feeling the customer’s frustration. I feel things deeply. That led to me not being able to think through the basic steps and work toward a fix. I felt their frustration and it fed into my doubt. Wasn’t good. My brain was foggy, unfocused, dull.

Late yesterday afternoon, I had two different calls scheduled for customers with various problems. One of the clients was one I had talked to, tried to fix their issue, and had to end the call saying “I will need to research this and get back to you” and they very much gave me the impression they weren’t happy with that, for whatever reason. So I was already uptight about wanting to do well and solve the issue, as well as reverse the impression of incompetence I’d given previously.

On top of that, the client had added a second, unrelated issue, one with many potential causes and solutions. Thinking about working through all the steps to troubleshoot it on top of the other issue gave me time-pressure-anxiety, which should totally be a German-style compound noun.

On top of those, Thursday’s call had been a rescheduling from the day before, adding another layer of delay to the situation. I was caught up in a much-longer-than-expected site visit and was unable to live up to my word in calling on schedule.

The second client had what could be a very tricky problem involving their network connection from home, and I had enough experience to mentally enumerate the many potential causes of that kind of issue: home network, wifi, VPN, unstructured environment compared to an office setting… also the client was an engineer, and they are notoriously picky (said the tech support person, knowing our own reputation.)

My sense of duty forced me to make the first call… and within a few minutes I had demonstrated the solution to the first question for this client, and they had accepted it without argument. I pressed on, and being more focused and methodical, found the cause of the second issue almost immediately; they had two versions of the same software installed. After showing them, gently and diplomatically, that they would lose nothing when I removed the extra program, I found I’d also fixed the issue.

I’d scheduled 30 minutes for this, and I finished in 15 minutes. Easy peasy. I got to close two tickets with one phone call. Confidence returning.

The second call? When the client demonstrated the issue to me, I recognized the problem because I had been setting up VPN connections for this specific company last week and discovered that some settings didn’t stick until you set them twice. The call started at 4:04 PM; I solved the problem by 4:08 PM.

My swiftness impressed the customer; “that would have taken me weeks to figure out!” they said. Felt good. Closed another ticket.

I am good at my job. I just needed some wins to remind myself.

Troubleshooting

Tech

Had a rough day at work yesterday. Specifically, the task I was assigned to do had many hidden pitfalls. Going in, I wanted to be prepared and made at least one choice to try to mitigate for something I thought wasn’t in place. Which lead me to spending extra time getting an extra part I thought I needed, even more time trying to make that part work, and spend time undoing the unneeded mitigation because it looked like everything we needed was in place.

Sorry, I’m trying not to give too many client secrets away so this may be extra vague. You’d think that the above covered the whole dang process, but there was a second part, where I kept trying to make the parts I knew about work, until it turned out there were even more hidden parts that were silently causing another set of problems in the background, until I found and disabled them.

Fixin’ things is better than not fixin’ things.

What could I have done better? I could have done more investigation in the beginning; some of the parts in place were available to me before I got onsite, and I could have found some of that out going in. Other parts were not known to me and had to be discovered onsite, though.

I could have gone through my troubleshooting faster, I suppose; I got mentally blocked by all the surprises and it slowed me down, and led me to asking my lead for more help. Help they’re happy to provide, and they insist they are not upset with me at all, but it weighs on my sense of duty, y’know? I’m very Capricorn Sun like that.

But troubleshooting, which is what I do for my job in my career, is often like that. You go into a new sitaution not knowing all the details, and finding out those details is the majority of the process. Only when you have the full picture can you start coming up with a solution. And it’s often the case that you try multiple solutions before you find the one that works. It’s not always obvious what solution will fix or resolve the problem, and that’s due to the fact that in a complex system you can’t know every factor that is involved.

Luckily the clients knew none of this. All they saw was a tech working away dilligently and in the end it all worked. They never said, to me at least, that I was taking too long, or that the job was easy and should have been finished faster. They just let me work and waited for it to be done. That was nice, and I appreciated that, but because I knew what was going on in my head – stress, anxiety, doubt – I still felt guilty.

But once I was able to clear all the known and unknown hurdles, the task was swiftly brought to a successful close. And that felt good, reaching the right conclusion after hours (literally hours, fuckitall) of confusion, frustration, and investigation. All’s well, that ends well.

Iced Coffee Kick-In

General

Such weird dreams last night again. Must be the heat that’s making them so vivid. I’ve got a window-mounted air conditioner in my bedroom. It’s the good kind, which is the kind that hangs on the windowsill and has part of it outside; here, let Technology Connections explain it for you, they’re great at that and you should watch them.

Anyway, even with the AC running in my bedroom, it doesn’t get much cooler than 75°F in there. When I woke up this morning, it was 64°F outside, a full 10 degrees cooler. I’d complain, but when the heat of the day rolls around, I’m happy it isn’t 100 freaking degrees in my bedroom because that would be unlivably hot.

My dreams were centered around Star Wars tattoos (not mine), work, bad authoritarianism, the ignorance of crowds, and petty theft. Also friendship? Lots of weird themes in there. I’m not going to relate the events of the dreams because on waking, they don’t really flow together well. In the dreams, of course, since it’s all a stew of feelings and impressions, it felt like it was one continous story.

Even though the themes I mentioned feel heavy, for the most part I was not anxious, I was happy and felt connected to those closest to me in the dream. It only got scary and tense during the theft part, but since it felt like my own fault for tempting danger I couldn’t be too hard on myself. But up to that point I was the one who was righteous and I knew what I was doing. I was encouraging the community to be better, which is a personal goal in real life, too. Well, once I’ve built community, I mean. After I have a community, after I have connected with my neighbors, I will encourage them to be better as much as I can.

Now I’m sitting at my computer tapping on my keyboard trying to come up with something interesting to say for 500 words or so. I have some great stories from yesterday evening but I’m saving those for when I have more time to put into them. Don’t want to rush through those.

Because of the heat I have made cold brewed coffee instead of hot brewed coffee this morning. It’s a nice treat and the flavor turned out mild and rich. Waiting for the coffee to kick in. Any second now, coffee. I need your brain-rejuvenating power today. It’s not kicking in yet. I hope it’s just a bit slow today.

I’ve been trying to include pictures with as many of my posts as I can, either something I personally took or a good royalty-free stock photo. Can’t really tell if the posts with pictures do “better” in terms of page views than ones without. Even if there’s a difference, my page views are low enough that the difference would be single digits, and who can tell if that’s significant or random noise? Not I. I may favor the scientific method but I am no statistician.

Ah well, coffee-kick-in or not, time to go to work. Have a great day, readers. I treasure every one of you. Thank you for stopping by.

Heated dreams

General

As I write this, it’s 6:17 AM on Tuesday, and my apartment is warmer inside (about 81°F) than the air temperature outside (65°F). My little window air conditioner unit started out OK but has been struggling to keep up with the sustained 90°F and up days. I’ve got my windows open and fans blowing air outside to try to move some of the heat out. That’s how it works, right? If nothing else, the cooler air from outside feels nice for now.

Woke up in a sweat about an hour ago, which is about 45 minutes before my alarm would go off. My dreams were about group activities; sports, for one thing, specifically, football. And it was some odd mixture of American football and what Americans call soccer; sometimes the ball was an egg-shape and sometimes it was a sphere. And nobody on the field had protective gear, just loose clothing, because it was a casual game for fun, not a professional game for money.

The funny bit was, I kept having the most incredible luck. I’d just be walking across the field and the ball would bounce off me, blocking a goal. Or I’d find myself near the ball, in position to kick it away and toward someone else on my team. I wasn’t planning any of this. There was no mastery of the applied physics and geometry that someone who is good at sports would have; just me, wandering around like a chubby old guy, getting in the way in exactly the right time and place to make something good happen.

If dreams are metaphors, what is my brain telling me? My dreams, my most vivid ones, are soaked in emotion. For a long time the emotions I felt the most when I was unconscious were anxiety, fear, doubt. This dream was much lighter in tone. I was surprised and delighted whenever I managed to complete or assist with a play or a goal. I was a little nervous when the opposing team targeted me, but I was able to win them over with a joke.

I do remember a little tension around what I should have been doing. Maybe I wandered into this game to avoid something else? Yeah, OK, that tracks. But am I creating a new plot line now, or am I honestly remembering a plot line from my subconscious mind an hour or more ago? Hard to say.

I am feeling anxiety now that I’m awake, though. I worry that today is the day the 100°F weather is going to make my apartment too hot for my dad. I have to go to work, where the office has air conditioning, but dad has to stay here, with my meagre mitigations for the oncoming Fire Season. But the forecast shows that cooling temperatures are on the way. This doesn’t appear to be a Heat Dome situation, or maybe it is but it’s reaching its end. One can only hope.

There’s a small bit of anxiety about work, too. I worry that I can do this job. It’s a good job, great team of people, doing good things for the community. I couldn’t ask for much more. My self-doubt, though, might trip me up. Don’t want to get in my own way, y’know?

The Joy of Beverage

Joy

When I say, or write, the word beverage, I always smile. The positive associations between that word and my delight were installed a long, long time ago, when I was very very young. Let me explain.

I did a search for the word beverage. Hard to believe I’ve never told this story on the blog before. “It’s a core formative memory, and I link it, at least in my head, to another core memory, one of the earliest behaviors I can remember in my mental chronology of myself.

As I’ve written about before, I learned to read at an incredibly early age. It was pre-Kindergarten, I’m almost sure of it. The family legend is that when we would all go somewhere in the car, I would read out the signs on the side of the road. I associated the primary colors and simple four or five letter words, and through questions of my parents and repetition, cracked the code of the English language.

We’d pull up to a Stop sign and I’d say “Stop!” We’d pull on to a highway and I’d see the yellow sign and shout “Yield!” I loved words and reading, and I wanted to share this mystic secret with everyone around me.

To this day I have a deep-seated urge to say out loud traffic signs when I’m driving. I warn new friends about it when we go somewhere; my old friends are surely used to the behavior by now.

My family tells another legend about my reading, though I don’t know which came first. My mom told the story of walking in to the living room one Sunday and saw me and my 13-month older sister laying down looking at the colorful Sunday comics from the newspaper. Except as mom watched, we weren’t just looking at the pictures. I was reading them to my sister.

This connects to beverage, I promise you. Where would I have seen the word beverage? Why I would have seen it on menus in diners and restaurants. Picture us now, on those road trips and nights out, the Moon Clan approaching a counter to order, or sitting down with menus, and the little tow-headed round faced boy shouting out “Beverage!” as soon as I spotted it.

My mouth loved the shape and feel of the word. The hard B, the similar but softened V, the buzzy G. A linguist who applies Grimm’s Law could tell you if those sounds are connected; maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. I just love them, in that order, all together.

Dad would chuckle and ask me if I wanted a beverage, which I did (I preferred 7-Up over Sprite, Pepsi over Coke). Mostly though I wanted to find that three sylable word in the sea of words before me, and yell it out like I was playing a game of Bingo and I’d filled out my card. Beverage!

Knowing this, it feels weird to me that I have used the word so little in the decades of runnning this blog. It only appears in eight posts, which seems low. This word is a source of a happy memory for me; I smile when I say or write it. I don’t feel any shame or embarassement. I learned to human by learning a game with words. I won’t deny myself that joy moving foward.

Beverage!

Marie Kondo but for bookmarks

Joy

In my browser (I use Edge, don’t @ me) in the bookmarks bar, I have five folders, left to right: Weather, Tshoot, Money, Funtimes, and Other favorites, pinned to the far right.

Weather is rarely used; it’s not only got weather sites, but sites for reporting the Air Quality Index and smoke from fire, since Portland and the Pacific Northwest now has a Fire Season.

Tshoot has links to my network router/cable modem, my Synology, and a bunch of bookmarks for collecting network information and troubleshooting Windows and Mac computers. I use this more often than the ones in Weather but not as often as the rest.

Money has multiple sub-folders but they’re all related to my budget, my bank and credit cards, utilities and bills, memberships and subscriptions, healthcare costs, paycheck calculators, you name it. The top bookmark here is to my budget spreadsheet.

I use this folder a lot, and I mean a lot. I’m opening something from here multiple times per day if I’m sitting at my computer. It might be unhealthy, how often I’m using something from here. I’m using it more now that I have a job and income, to help plan out paying down my debts, than I did when I was unemployed and had no income in-coming.

You can kinda sense a theme in these three, right? They’re informational or related to responsiblities and duties I have. There’s very little joyful about figuring out if the weather is going to kill me or not, or finding out why my Xfinity connection has dropped again.

Next one up is Funtimes, and it’s where I put links for entertainment sites, time-killers, social media, as well as sub-folders for running my online D&D game, or other gaming-related sites: wikis for games I play, that kind of thing. You would think that this folder is full of nothing but joyful things, right? It’s there in the name: Fun Times ahead, all ye who click here.

You might think that; you’d be wrong. In fact, the observation that kicked off this whole post was when I opened that folder this morning. I saw that the top folder in there, the first thing my mouse cursor hovers over when scrolling through the links, is “Site Management”. That’s where I put links to login to this blog, the hosting site, the Analytics page, domain renewal, DNS, that kind of thing.

I’m the one who put it there but I couldn’t tell you what that has to do with fun times. I do enjoy writing but I admin my blog as basic maintenance and upkeep. I like having a well-maintained blog but it’s not joyful, y’know? Seeing that today, realizing what it means, I moved that folder over to Tshoot, where it fits better.

Below that folder is Creative, and it’s full of folders. The top one in Creative is Writing Tools. In here lives a link to my favorite online text editor, Writer from Big Huge Labs, which is where I draft all my posts. This is joyful. If I’m writing in here (as I am now) I’m freely putting down words to express an idea, and that is joyful.

The rest of the folders in Creative are for drawing and art programs/pages like Inkarnate, which is joyful for me to use. Also a folder for Generative AI links (yes, I use these, but sparingly, as I’ve explained). Still looking for more ways to add joy to my days.

The Joy of Eating

Joy

Still thinking about joy, motherfucker, do I feel it? I probe for the feeling of joy the way someone would poke the socket where thier tooth used to be. It’s missing. I don’t know where it’s gone. I have to think about it, which I know is less than ideal. It should bubble up from my feelings-place. Laughter and happiness, not cold analysis.

I might need to make it a practice to try to spark joy in my life. I will have to seek it out. Find joyful things, expose my heart to them, ask, “what does this make you feel?”

But I did find one thing recently that always makes me feel good in the momemnt. A category of thing: food. There are many kinds of foods, meals, that I just love. I can list a few of them, and how they make me feel.

Brian’s Burger

Close up of a homemade cheeseburger; lettuce, tomato slices, white onion slices, pickles and banana peppers, along with catsup, spill out of it onto the aluminum foil that wraps it up. In the background is a Yeti microphone, a bottle of Squirt soda, and the bottom edge of two computer monitors. This person is eating at their desk. — I made this!

There’s nothing like biting in to a big old cheeseburger. To me, the perfect cheeseburger starts with thick, medium-rare beef patty that’s been seasoned with salt, pepper, onion and garlic. To begin, in-between a toasted bun (Kaiser rolls are great), I want catsup, spicy brown mustard, thick slice of medium cheddar cheese (as an Oregonian, it’s hard to beat Tillamook brand) that’s been melted onto the patty when it was cooked. Garnish with fancy lettuce (I tend to buy 50/50 spring mix of baby greens and spinach), slices of pickles, white or yellow onion, tomato slices (Roma tomatoes have the best flavor).

Add some banana peppers just for fun. Maybe a drizzle of sriracha for spice. Also could add slices of bacon for flavor and texture. Now that’s a good burger. My mouth is watering just thinking about it. Making and eating one of these is absolutely a joyful practice for me.

Pad Thai

There are meals that I love that I don’t know how to make. One of these is pad Thai noodles with chicken. At its most basic it’s a sauce made of tamarind paste and fish sauce, stir fried rice noodles, and veggies and some protein (chicken is my favorite). I know that in Thailand it’s not really fancy food, it’s street food, simple and easy to make and serve. Just haven’t attempted to make it myself.

I remember a trope on sitcoms back in the 80s and 90s was someone taking a pad Thai class. It was a signal that that character was pretentious and upper-middle class. They had spare time enough to take a class to make a specific kind of Asian food. It’s entirely possible that that idea soaked into my brain and has created a barrier that won’t let me learn how to make it. Kinda sad, if true.

But eating it is absolutely a joy for me. Accordingly, when eating it, I love the tangy sauce, the slippery noodles, and the cruncy bits of bean sprouts, green onions, sliced carrots, as well as the ground peanuts (I always order extra ground peanuts.) Simple, filling food that I would eat many times a week if I could. Maybe it’s a good thing I don’t know how to make it? I might learn to get tired of it. Until then, though, joy.

Why I want to build community

Community

Community Part 3

Now that Community Tales is a series, time for me to explain myself. And the starting point is, folks, things are bleak. The majority of the country has been left to fend for ourselves, having to work long hours at low pay just to afford the things we need to maintain a life: adequate living quarters, clean food and water, and healthcare. And then we’re forced to pay even more just for the tools we need to keep a job on top of all that.

A convicted felon is running for president and he’s polling even with the establishment centrist. Our elected leaders would rather ignore the rising right-wing tide in favor of propping up an authoritarian apartheid state, and slow-walking tiny crumbs of OK policy here and there, none of them addressing the literal ecologic collapse we see happening before our eyes. And the unelected illegitimate highest court of the land is stripping away the legal foundations of the bare democracy we’ve fought and bled and died for.

I could go on but you see where I’m going with this. It’s bad and feels like it’s getting worse. How can I keep going in the face of all this bad news?

Community, that’s how. I think that’s the key. We need to start building our own communities, band together, try to put together our own safety net. There’s way more of us than there are of our leadership and the billionaires who buy their attention. We need to organize. We are stronger together.

A sign, lit up from the inside, that says "Make This World Better" in friendly multi-colored letters sits on a shelf, with a blurry background overlit by sunshine. — We can’t wait for our leaders, we have to do it ourselves.

We need to reject fear and hopelessness. We need to move our bodies and dance. We need to join our arms, raise our voices, and sing. Joy is what fascism wants to stomp out, so we need to find joy in the world. There is still so much that is beautiful, even if it feels apocalyptic.

The world may be ending, but death comes for all of us, rich or poor, young or old. While we still draw breath, we need to love one another, we need to create and write and be beautiful. And we need to do it together, in every space and public forum we can, right out where the cowardly liberals and grasping conservatives can see us.

It’s difficult, I know. I am aware of what happens when we try to fight back. So many of us have paid the ultimate price for resistence. But it’s the one move we have. We need to build our own better world.

The old labor union battle cry was “8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for what we will!” If our homes are our First Places, and our jobs are our Second Places, where are our Third Places? Where is our time and place to do whatever we please? The demands of longer hours at work to crank out the productivity that our billionaire overlords steal from us have encroached on our Whatever We Please time and space.

We have lost our Third Places for Whatever We Please over the decades. Our billionaires and politicians want us to work until we’re too tired to do or think about anything else. But we can claw back that time and space, if we start to rely on ourselves for help, for healthcare, for food and drink, and housing. It’s a reality that labor always produces more than it needs. That means a little bit of our labor can provide enough for all of us, provided we don’t let the capitalists steal it from us.

I’m trying to start where I live, by reaching out to my literal neighbors, the people who share this apartment complex with me. This is the community I live in, and this is where I plan to build my metaphorical community as well.

Together we are stronger, but we have to work at it.

Personal Finance (is a pain in the ass)

General

I try to keep track of my money, and make sure that income equals or exceeds spending. I know that sounds like a basic adulting skill, but I have to tell you, the way my brain works, if I don’t track these things regularly and in as much detail as possible, I quickly get underwater and in dire trouble. There are surely as many ways of managing money as there are people on the planet. But I have to make, update, and adjust a list that shows what I’ve got now, what bills are upcoming and what income I can plan on, and a rolling prediction of how much money I’ll have left over.

Close up of a spiral-bound paper notebook. The pages are covered in a square grid of lines. A crumpled up page sits on top of the open notebook, and a pencil, its eraser worn and the end covered in bite marks, rest on the page. — I used to budget the old-fashioned way, on paper with a pencil.

Right now I keep a Google spreadsheet. It has one tab per calendar year, with seven columns, left to right: Date (of transaction); Income; Due; Current; Payee; Paid; and Notes. Every month I paste in that month’s bills and expected income; and I drag down the formula that takes the balance, adds the income for that date, subtracts the bill for that date, and shows what I have left over for that date.

I’ve tried other budgeting software. To me, most of them are focused on the past and the current. They don’t let me look foward. So I developed this approach. I was actually re-creating a web app known as Quicken Online. In 2007, it was great because it could pull in bank information so the users didn’t have to manually enter everything. We could add in ongoing and future payments. I loved it. Then it merged with Mint.com (not the current cell phone company, a budgeting web app) and all the features I loved went away. It was a sad day.

Having a web app was great because I could log in anywhere that had an internet connection and see the same data. You think that’s boring, but it was not a standard feature in 2006, let me tell you. And when I got an iPhone in 2007, I could carry that information around in my pocket. Transformative, for me, at least. So that’s why I love my Google spreadsheet; it’s available whereever I have an internet connection, which is 98% of my life.

Prior to that, I used a system that I had learned from a book that I read in the mid-1990s, “How to Get Out Of Debt, Stay Out Of Debt, and Live Prosperously“, a ponderous title for a self-help book. The author, Jerrold Mundis, basically applied the 12-step program to money and debt. I didn’t care for the philosophical elements but the practical elements of tracking spending worked very well for me, as long as I stuck with it. My master list of monthly expenses were kept in a notebook, and I carried a smaller notebook with me where I wrote down everything I bought, and then at the end of every day I added it all up. I began keeping receipts, shoving them in my wallet for later accounting. And I liked knowing what I had left, even if it was going to be negative.

That’s an important point: I track my spending even when I know it’s going to result in a negative balance. Sure, sometimes I get anxiety and feel like I don’t want to know. That urge to ignore it was stronger in the past than it is now. I view it as what it is: a number without any inherent meaning beyond a cash balance. It doesn’t define me as a person. It’s a resource that sometimes I have more or less of. I don’t always find it easy to do the addition and subtraction necessary to get that number, but I do it, and I do it often enough that I can use it to adjust things.

Or to ask for help if I need it. Learning that was also a hard lesson but it is habit now. My friends and family want to help if they can. Hey, maybe I did learn the philosophical parts of that book, after all?