Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Those of you who have followed Jack Baruth for any amount of time know that he is a connoisseur of fine, expensive watches. I am not.

But when my old Apple Watch stopped holding a charge, I thought about whether I would replace it. Mostly for two reasons:

• We’re still running on a lean mixture here until I fill out my work schedule. Or maybe permanently if we get used to it.
   
• I’m thinking about de-MBAing my life a little. I mean, the Apple Watch, even my old one, tracked a whole host of metrics–stand goals, active minutes goals, exercise goals…. All arbitrary and determined by an algorithm I didn’t know. Still, I found myself working to hit those goals even if they didn’t make sense in doing so. Like getting up and walking around the house when I awakened in the night to get a stand hour in case I had a long nap or long meeting later in the day. I mean, I can tell how I’m doing by how I feel and how much exercise I’m getting (currently: not much) by how I feel and whether I have the good muscle soreness or how I sleep at night. So do I need to hit artificial targets determined by Cupertino? Or am I just nerfing on this because I’m not getting my allotment of martial arts classes and gym sessions anyway? Time will tell.

So I dug into my bureau for old watches (including a daddy watch) that I wore before my FitBit… what, seven or eight years ago?

Of course, after that length of time, the batteries were dead. In the olden days, I’d take it to the shopping mall and one of the guys at a kiosk would have sold me a new battery and would have installed it. But if I’m not going to the gym, you know I’m not going to the mall (well, unless it’s an antique mall). So I popped open the backs and got the memory sizes, and…. Of course, I did not have any button batteries of that size in hand.

I mean, I have all sorts of button batteries of various sizes from remotes, children’s toys, and other things, but not for actual watches. But since they’re sold in ten packs on Amazon for $6, I order ten and they linger in my battery cabinet for…. Well, archeologists will eventually have to tell you when they’re done lingering, as I’m unlikely to use them all.

So now, look at la-di-dah me, with two watches from which to choose:

Of course, I only wear the silver one because a brown watchband might indicate I would have to match it with something. And color-coordination in clothing is not a skill of mine.

So now I have 8 more of these batteries in the cabinet. I can take up watch repair (battery replacement anyway). Or, if I live for thirty years, perhaps I can replace the batteries on these watches four more times. And they’ll likely spend most of that time in the drawer where they’ve spent the last half-a-decade-and-more since I don’t wear this kind of watch in the house, and I don’t leave the house all that much.

Glenn Reynolds on his Substack: Report from the Other Side.

Yeah, I’ve been feeling like I’ve been hit with the aging stick myself lately–and I’m over a decade younger than Instapundit. My kids are fixin’ to be adults (the youngest is a senior in high school now). I’m not getting to the gym or martial arts as much as I would like–and it’s not because I’m buried with work. I just can’t be arsed sometimes.

Although, gentle reader, if you’ve been around long enough, you have probably seen variations of this post for, what, ten or fifteen years by now?

I guess it’s just who I am. Probably rooted in the fact that I’m now not long from 60, where so many of my matrilineal family died.

I guess this is the Saturday morning reminder to step away from the computer. And perhaps the housework which fills Saturdays as well.

If you reveal these 3 things in an interview — you most likely won’t get hired, says CEO.

To sum up, the three things are:

1. ‘I want to start my own business someday”
2. you “value work-life balance.”
3. Another thing that should be kept under wraps in an interview — although it’s a common experience with many corporate workers — never say you were let go as part of your company’s recent layoffs.” [I am not sure where the quote actually begins since the paragraph ends with a quotation mark, but there’s not an open quotation mark–ed.]

You know, the first trips me up. I already own my own consultancy, and interviewers will ask if I’ll still do contract work, and I say, “Well….” And I explain how sometimes former clients and friends will ask me for a little help with something, a couple hours a week for a couple weeks, and I’ll take that, but not another full time contract. But the truth does not satisfy them as much as the lies told by people who will actually do just that.

The second doesn’t trip me up.

But I dodged the last when I quit my last full-time job. The company I worked for was absorbed into the parent company, and they let go the operations staff and management and kept the engineers. But they didn’t have any QA engineers, so they were not sure what to do with the two of us. They decided to turn us into full-stack engineers (along with the front-end engineers), but I looked at the collection of 250 engineers brought into the mothership from the other companies, and I knew that somewhere along the line, that number would be trimmed. A lot. So I was kinda given the option of being “managed out”–that is, they would give me a software engineer title (but not the pay, natch) and start the process in motion to let me go, which would have involved writing me up for not being a good software engineer and putting me on an improvement plan (whatever they do in big corporations) that I would not meet and then they would let me go. It would get me a couple extra months pay and maybe an annual bonus, but I said, nah, I have my pride. Which means I can honestly answer that I’ve not been laid off (except for my first job, but that was a headcutting for the stock market move–my manager there worked his network to get me a second job, and he convinced them to hire me even though they’d just hired the two technical writers for their open positions).

But you know what does trip me up?

I am probably too comfortable in the interviews. I overshare stories of my experience, I draw parallels and explain evolutions when they just want me to declare I have such and such experience. And I can be a little glib.

I’d like to try to improve on this, but I have not had even a screener in a while (and that one was to prove that Americans could not do the job). Still, I applied to a couple of interesting-looking jobs today, and I’ve got two active part-time contracts, and I’m making progress on my next mobile app project. So don’t cry for me, Argentina.

Jeez Louise, everyone has been slagging on that imported communist who would be mayor of New York:

One little probably spur-of-the-moment and probably impromptu TikTok video later, and suddenly everyone is Hans or Franz.

I’m not jumping on the bandwagon. Because I tend to plateau around 45. Coincidentally, that’s why I dodge the question when someone hears that I go to the gym and asks me how much I can bench. I can sleep on a bench for hours, I say.

As you might know, gentle reader, I am an intermittent weight lifter and have been a member of one gym or another for most of my adulthood.

I tend to be diligent in spurts, and then slack off, and then be diligent again for a while. Generally, I tend to get to a certain point and then rather plateau before I slack off. And I tend to plateau right around that 45. And then when I come back to the gym after a couple of months of slacking off, I have to start my way back to it.

In a bit of my defense, my workout is not geared to driving toward a big number max for one or two reps. I tend to want to do a lot of reps at whatever weight. So I can do eight or ten at 45. I have gotten back into the habit of starting reverse pyramids there and then backing off the weight by five pounds and doing eight or ten reps all the way down to the bar. Which ends up being, I dunno, a hundred or so reps total. Not 1 at a couple of plates.

I don’t tend to work with a spotter anyway, so I have to make sure I don’t work completely to the point of failure, or I’ll have to hold a bar at the failure point until some stranger rescues me (it’s only happened once, and that was enough).

Bloody hell, I don’t even calculate the max. I just pay attention to how much weight is on one side. Because that’s all I need to remember, not the calculations of what a man I really am.

This is spoken as a guy who went into the weight room in high school and could not lift the bar alone if it had the heavy screw-on collars you never see any more.

So, yeah, not doing some sort of Internet clout dance on this particular instance. And it’s a waste of time to do so.

Well, unless you have blog-inches to fill.

But the guy was not afraid to lie on the bench, knowing his limitations. How many of the ha-ha! crowd would not?