Musings from Brian J. Noggle

On Thursday, I asserted:

Funny thing; although the university sends me glossy magazines on occasion, they don’t try to hit me up for money any more.

On Saturday, this arrived:

Maybe they actually hit me up all the time for money, but I pay so little attention I don’t notice.

The volunteers have stopped calling, though. I think. Maybe they just don’t have my number at Nogglestead.

Yesterday, I posted about not confusing Misa with Maysa.

Today, KCSM, the Bay Area’s Jazz Station, spins a tune by Misia.

All I know is that when I again get a music budget, it will be gone in a very loose Soundex search.

My mother-in-law recently decided to downsize from her home of 35 years and move into a senior apartment not far from Nogglestead. This led me to reminisce and perhaps wallow a bit on grandmother’s house as a concept, or at least enough to produce an essayish blog post about it.
Continue reading “On Grandmother’s House” →

Jack Baruth links to a piece entitled Managerial failings: complification.

The piece goes on about how managers and the managerial class have made things more complicated mainly to give themselves something to do.

Baruth quotes this bit:

Yale for example: more administrators than undergraduates. This is ridiculous; Yale students would be better off if they hired each undergraduate a PhD educated personal tutor and a maid/servant, and it would be cheaper. There is a Yale administrator event horizon at which the mass of administrators at Yale within the confines of the Yale campus will form a black hole from which light cannot escape. If current trends continue, this will happen by the year 3622.

But the original piece goes from that to talk about shared libraries in software development, and Baruth says:

Being Locklin, of course, he goes on to do the math and show his work on it. The remainder of the blogpost consists of a terrifying journey through the shared library crisis, in which I once again find myself accidentally aligned with a brilliant man; for most of my life in tech I busted my hump to make sure I compiled stuff with static binaries, even if it cost more time and resources. I didn’t have a genuine philosophy behind it, as Scott does. Rather, I was just trying to make more money. Shared libraries always resulted in me doing more work after the fact, and since I generally charged flat fees for programming gigs, I didn’t have any interest in doing more work.

You know, I from time to time try to build an application, but I do it in fits and starts. I get something working, and then I come to a frustration point and put it aside for a bit (or a year), and then I come back to it or do something else with Node.js or whatever framework, and something needs updating, and suddenly nothing works at all, and libraries are out of date, or what have you. Which becomes another frustration point….

You know, in test automation frameworks that I’ve built, I’ve written the code mostly myself, relying on other libraries as infrequently as possible. But it’s not really possible any more, no with the current frameworks. Which is why I have not built myself a billion dollar company on an idea and some code written overnight while amped up on coffee. The frustration of modern frameworks, and the fact that I’m lazy.

As you might know, gentle reader, especially if you read John Kass as you should, the moutza is a rude Greek gesture of dismissiveness. Although I’ve often wanted to throw it at someone who offended me, I did not actually make that gesture as a response to anything until last night.

My beautiful wife is spending a lot of time volunteering with various boards and entrepreneur organizations. She sits on the park board, helps to organize presentations for an entrepreneur organization, and whatnot.

A new local tech organization is trying to become a thing, and it is looking for members to sit on its board. So she thought she would apply. Only after filling out most of the elaborate form did she discover it comes with a $5000 financial commitment.

She sought some clarification, and apparently, it’s $5000 each year of the 3-year term. You don’t have to pay it yourself; you can raise those funds or your employer can pay it for access to other expensive executives at the large tech companies in the area.

Yeah, so we had a whole family moment of education in Greek culture and the meaning of Feesah etho.

You know, if you’re on a corporate board, they pay you a bunch of money to basically show up quarterly and gab. Local public and citizens’ advisory boards are volunteer positions. School boards are elected positions. But, apparently, sometimes boards are just a fundraising tool and/or a super-set of more expensive networking opportunities. Which is not for me. I’m not the best networker when it’s free. I’ll be durned if I’m going to pay used car money (at least, used car in years past money) every year to put board member on my resume.

I mentioned in passing that an acquaintance floated our names for participating in the local YMCA board; my beautiful wife, apparently, had a more detailed conversation about it with our acquaintance and learned that it, too, might require a financial commitment. But you know what? I am already a member of the YMCA and a supporter of the annual capital campaign. I know what the YMCA has stood for historically and the programs it offers to people who might need some help. So I am not ruling that out.

I am ruling out a similar structure in place for what’s essentially a business organization, though.

Which isn’t to say that I will eschew the organization. Although I haven’t yet spent the hundred or two bucks annual fee to join (it’s less expensive to mingle with the climbers, apparently), I might, and I’ll probably attend some of its events. But five thousand dollars a year to nominally work for them? Nah!

Also, I should point out that now that I have started giving the moutza, I shall probably do it a bunch. And I will take pride should I catch my children making the gesture. Unless it’s at me.

So my children have taken to shouting, “Hog rider!” with a particular inflection. Apparently, this is the call of one of the units in the game Clash of Clans.

Which has led me to text them or to say, “Hog writer!” The youngest corrected me, believing I was getting it wrong, but eventually, he caught on that I was shining him on.

When I had a spare moment, I created an image to share with them at appropriate moments. Like whenever they bother me with text messages asking for a ride.

Oh, the things I do to torment my offspring.

I’ve removed the whiteboard that I put on my office wall when we moved in. It’s out of arm’s reach from my sitting position, and it’s outside the rolling radius on the carpet protector beneath my chair, so I really didn’t use it for much. I made columns for home projects, things to write, and other things to do, and I might have written a thing or two under the column headings in years past, but I didn’t actually strike much off of them. I used my whiteboard a lot when I worked in an office and I could roll a couple of feet to it and add a task or strike one off.

So I took the whiteboard down. I shall likely clean it and cut it to fit into monitor bezels for smaller whiteboards.

Instead, in the space, I have put my mother’s spoon collection (or I will, when I polish them all) and two paintings by my great grandmother.

I bought a spoon cabinet whilst Christmas shopping last year, as although I had inherited my sainted mother’s spoons, I apparently did not get her rack.

The spoons hung on the wall near these paintings in our apartment in the housing projects forty years ago. We had the paintings on the wall in our dining room at Nogglestead, but the dining room is the only place where our walls have changed much over time. We replaced the paintings with a chicken key hanger that I wood burned several years ago, and they’ve been floating on my office desk or beside it since.

Their presence on the walls means that we nominally have four generations of Noggle art on the walls. Well, had. These paintings, a sketch by my youngest aunt on the Noggle side, and two pot holders that came from art that our children made at school. Sadly, the potholders replace multimedia art that my grandmother did, which is in my office closet awaiting a good place, I guess.

I was going to polish all the spoons at once and hang them, but it’s turning out to be a harder chore than I’d expected. Individual spoons are taking fifteen minutes to polish. I remember sitting down with my mother and brother maybe annually and doing this at the table in the apartment and maybe the trailer, and it never took us that long, but they’ve been in storage for at least the twelve years we’ve lived at Nogglestead.

As I’m working on them, I have noticed that they’re mostly not collectible spoons or even silver. Instead, most of them are just stainless steel patterns that you would get in a grocery store. My aunt who worked for the government traveled for work sometimes and brought my mother a spoon from Washington D.C. and pre-revolutionary Iran, but my mother did not travel far in those days. The corridor between St. Louis and Milwaukee, mostly, with an occasional trip Up North and one vacation in Rockaway Beach, Missouri, which is about forty minutes from where I live now. It was only after my brother joined the service that she travelled, visiting him at his graduation in California and at his postings in Hawaii and Quantico, Virginia. She would then take cruises with her sister and went to Las Vegas for her sister’s wedding, but she was past spoon collecting then. So most of the spoons that I am polishing are stamped Oneida on the back.

At any rate, I got the spoon cabinet in early or mid-December, and I started the polishing project in January. Las Vegas puts the over/under on my completion of this project in April 2023. Perhaps I should enlist one or more children to make family memories. But they, as I was, are not keen on those kinds of family memories, although it was gratifying to see the silver emerge from beneath the tarnish.