Automated toilets that flush way too soon; I wasn’t done yet you, mechanical bastard!
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I’ve got another 3 chapters yet!
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Po is also a river in Italy
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I do not miss that place at all
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Interesting point that. The inhabitants of the Po valley have a reputation for being taciturn. Umberto Eco tells the story of the Nativity play there; the kings ask a little boy the way to Bethlehem, the little boys says “that way”, his father comes out of the audience, thumps him and shouts “I told you never tell strangers anything!”
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I want this to be the real origin of po faced
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Amusing rather than angrifying…
When people complain that “cultural relativists” are “censoring” Victoria art.
I asked for clarification, because it strikes me as a contradiction:
Do you think cultural relativists are imposing their contemporary British values on earlier British art? Instead of appreciating earlier British art in its own cultural context?
And I don’t think this resolves the contradiction:
Yes. They view everything through the lens of an inflexible hierarchy and know what they think before they even look. A female nude=patriatchal exploitation of women. It is actually very prejudiced thinking, in the sense of pre-judging. This is the irony. They then run around accusing everyone else of prejudice, which is really just projection of their own habitual mental state.
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I’m kind of angry at myself for reacting like this, and for not understanding when other people react to the sound of fingernails on slate. By the way, I could really use that sound, it always helped me react. But I just can’t cope with the sounds of slurping, or of spoons clashing on bowls, and more. It’s driving me up the wall. It’s not painful, it just fucks with my head.
P.S. It may have something to do with the water trouble, flooding trouble I’ve had, especially last month but also before.
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Get to work and realize I’ve been shanghaied into a weeklong planning session for the new {MAJOR IT INITIATIVE} (Actually, I’d been shanghaied a couple weeks ago, I’d just repressed the knowledge until this morning)
I skim it over what I can find out about this week and see how it only hits me tangentially at this point in time.
I push back on the project lead and get, “Well, you need to be ther Monday, but the rest of the week you can skip if you don’t want to be part of the decision making process.” Now the person who is leading this project is great. I will go to the ends of the Earth for her.
So I sit through the morning. At lunch she asks me what I’ve taken away so far and I honestly say, “Nothing a two page quick reference chart wouldn’t have told me.”
So she says how these sessions have been helpful to a lot of people to sit in and see what is going on.
I did not follow up with, “A lot of people are stupid.”
The afternoon came and went and there was nothing directly pertinent to me discussed. An entire day gone like that.
The rest of the week I will be available via IM for anything that directly affects me or my reports. Otherwise I am letting chips fall where they may.
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Well you could go in every day wearing this:
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I’m tempted to get that sticker gor my laptop.
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I’ve been told that at Samsung HQ, staff only attend parts of meetings relevant to them. They can watch and listen to live feeds of meetings while doing other things, and if they feel they need to be involved they simply go off to the meeting and leave when their part is over. On the way to the meeting, of course, they can follow what is going on by phone.
I haven’t been to Samsung in Korea but in the UK their internal wireless and 3G (I imagine 4g by now) network is simply the fastest thing you’ve ever come across to give them the capacity to do this.
Why couldn’t we in the West do this? Is it the cultural assumption that when big gorilla wants the band around him everybody must drop everything and run?
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I have a theory that as people evolve into management, they see “calling meetings” as a sign of “I am leader, follow me.”
This is aided by those meeting loving coworkers who attend every meeting they think they can get invited to.
And this particular project has so many people on it who may understand their piece of the pie and can’t see the big picture. Death by committee.
It reminds me of a convo I had with some IT folks at a sister company:
Other Tech: “So, how did you go about setting up your GPOs for Windows 10?”
Me: “blah,blah,blah and I looked at the new policies and turned on what made sense.”
OT: “But who decided what was relevant to be set? Did you hold a committee?”
Me: “No. I set it. I’ve tweaked a few things after site support mentioned some edge cases I hadn’t considered, but why waste time with a meeting to discuss the minutia that can be GPOs with a bunch of people who don’t understand them.”
OT: “…”
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There is a theory that you can get senior management to understand things by discussion. It’s a bit like the Phlogiston theory.
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My least-favourite variant is when the committee is formed, apparently with the express purpose of telling users they don’t know what they’re doing:
Committee: we’re holding a meeting to find out which apps you use!
Me: hey, thanks for the invite! Here’s a list of all the apps everyone on my team uses at least twice a week.
Committee: hahaha that’s so cute you don’t use those for your job.
Me: yes we do, here’s documented proof.
Committee: She brought proof! That’s adorable!
(It all got straightened out, but seriously, why “gather requirements” only to treat users so badly their manager pops by after to ask if they’re okay?)
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Yeah, that had already happened a few times.
The root cause for us was that… y’know those diagrams and examples people put in technical docs? People didn’t realise our team was making those. They assumed the client/the architect/somebody else made them. It wasn’t until a bunch of projects got delayed because we didn’t have Visio and other tools that word finally got around we were making the whole document, not just the headings and bullet points.
For real.
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Things that grind my gears:
People of privilege trying to condescendingly dictate to me how I should express my own discontent:
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Who is that? Oren deleted a bunch and I think thats all gone now?
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