Working from Home - Day 30

I hit the code hard this morning. I thought I had to get it wrapped up by stand up this afternoon. I did get it done, I started the morning with giving up on the whole damn project and wrote a simple console application to read the email and find the fields I needed. I wish I had done that three days ago. Trying to figure things out with all the cruft in the way is the least efficient way to write code. I try to teach new developers to code slow, so they can deliver fast. I fucked up again.

Moving to the porch office, I slowed my thinking down listening to the kids on the trampoline and the birds calling. I found the problems with my assumptions. Fixed those and got back to productive work. I delivered the patched code and spent some time chatting with the CTO about a new long term opportunity. Looks like I need to get up to speed on another identity and access management (IAM) technology. The great thing about consulting is that I get to learn something new every month. The downside is that I need to learn something new every month.

Six weeks at home and I really enjoy coming down to my office every day. While I would like to spend a day or two with my teammates each week, ninety minutes of driving times five days a week is a horrible cost. The big thing I have learned during the pandemic is that we own three more cars than we need. That is a stretch, but we really only need one gasoline powered vehicle. We could get by with a couple of electric subcompacts. Once I can trust the boys with something other than a beater, we are going to rearrange our transportation configuration.

We have been working on an efficient mask that is easy to construct the past few weeks. I have a bunch of old t-shirts that we are using to pilot our designs. Shoestrings make things easier. Guess what? Shoestrings are a pain in the ass to find in the wild. People throw shoes out when a shoestring breaks. That is a problem to fix later, but I am looking for a local source of shoestrings. So, I’ll let that go for now. I noticed that some of my old scouts were posting pictures from lovely places they have been sent on expeditions financed by the government.

Shemaghs are the ideal accessory. You need to cover your head in the sun. You need to cover your face when the sand is blowing. I spend a lot of money to cover my head from the sun and block the dust and other crap from my airway. Turns out that people solved this problem over a thousand years ago. I ordered one on Monday, creating my own cotton gauze is a high bar at this point. It came today, we washed it, I found a video on how to tie it and succeeded on my first attempt. My Facebook profile picture has been updated with my (better) personal picture. It hides the extra chin too. This is a win/win.