Road to Chocopocalypse
Blog Written with a loving hand by kitt some time around 11:11 on 18 February 2015Today marks the first day of Lent, which means it starts the first day of the Road to Chocopocalypse, the day of delicious gorging on chocolate, all chocolate, and only chocolate. In past years, chocolate and I have just about tied with who defeated whom, with chocolate scoring the most recent victory. With the discovery of The Meadows in Portland, this year's Chocopocalypse promises to be amazing. The chocolate selection there is incredible. I am looking forward to the gorging.
In addition to giving up chocolate for Lent (yeah, yeah, still not religious), I have chosen to give up not doing something, also. In particular, I'm giving up not working quickly. The idea of giving up not doing something for Lent was suggested by a fellow member of a private slack channel, an idea he had heard from a friend. Said friend had given up not going to parties, thereby going to social events during Lent. I really like this idea, so, giving up not working quickly.
Imagine me, a work demon avoiding chocolate!
Ask me again in 47 days how it went.
Another Man's Moccasins
Book Notes Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 15:15 on 17 February 2015
Yep, still enjoying the Longmire books. Would be rather hard not to enjoy them, with the wit of the characters. In this one, the dead body comes from OUTSIDE of Wyoming, so whoo! not another person dying in the county. Who would have thought so many people could die in such a small place anyway?
The format of this one is a little different, in that it has a number of flashbacks to Vietnam (the reference of which is coincidental to Bosch, who was also in Vietnam, but with a much different experience), and an intertwined storyline. Two mysteries for the price of one!
The ending was satisfying. I'll keep reading this series and recommending it.
Amish Mugshots
Scalzi Story kitt decided around 14:52 on 15 February 2015 to publish this:Wherein I take a band name from Scalzi’s Next Band Name list, and spend no more than 20 minutes writing the story with the band name as a title. Current one is Amish Mugshots and the full story archive. Plot premise from Luke.
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"Okay, what the hell is this?"
Johnson looked up from the papers on his desk, at the folder his partner had in his hand. Murphy looked tired, and maybe a little angry, with the thin stack of papers in his hand. Johnson shrugged.
"That is all of the information we have on the Miller brothers."
Murphy flipped through the three sheets of paper, the top two being mug shots of the two men who looked like they could be twins.
"This is it?" he asked, incredulously.
"Yep."
"What the hell?"
Johnson paused for only a bit. "Yes, you said that."
Murphy flipped the two photos onto his desk, and scratched his head, looking down at them. After a few moments, he spoke. "They look Amish."
Johnson smiled. "Because they are."
Murphy looked up, his jaw clenching. "So, you're saying our two prime suspects are Amish?"
"Yep."
"Amish."
"Yep."
Murphy stared at Johnson, who stared back, knowing after years of observation of his partner, it was the only way to get Murphy to say what he was thinking. Eventually, Murphy spoke again. "Do we know where they are?"
"We sure do," Johnson answered as he stood up. "They're in interview room 4."
Murphy's jaw bulged again. Johnson smiled. "Why didn't you just say so?"
Johnson shrugged. "More entertaining this way."
The two men gathered the folders from their desks and started moving towards the hallway on the far side of the precinct room. Johnson had his folder still open, looking intently at the pages he was holding. Murphy, the bigger of the two men, looked over the top of the other man's head as he asked, "So, what did they end up taking from that fancy, schmancy bank vault?"
"Nothing," Johnson commented, as he looked up from the papers.
Murphy stopped walking. "Nothing?" Murphy asked.
Johnson sighed. "Well, as near as we can tell, nothing that didn't belong to them. It looks like they broke in, opened and emptied the box their father had, and left. Their father died last year, left everything to the two sons."
Murphy waited.
"The bank manager says they've been in a few times over the last two months, trying to get the box. They didn't have all the correct paperwork to establish ownership, so the manager never let them in."
"But they're the dead box owner's sons? We know this?"
"Yep. Looks like they are the correct owners of the box's contents." He paused. "Other than breaking into a high security, high tech, brand new bank vault, they haven't really done anything particularly wrong. Well, except trespassing."
"Trespassing. To get what they rightfully own."
"Yep."
Murphy shook his head and started moving forward again. "Any idea how they did it?"
"None."
The two men arrived at the door with the number 4 on it, and leaned over to look at the two bearded men sitting in the room. They looked comfortable, relaxed in a way most bank robbers caught on four security cameras, and carrying stolen items on their persons, usually aren't. Murphy shook his head. "Didn't steal anything. Fuck," and opened the door. The two sitting men stood, and smiled as the two police investigators walked in. The one of the right put out his hand.
"Hello, officer."
"Hello, Mr. Miller, I'm Detective Martin Murphy. This is Detective Derick Johnson," as he shook the outstretched hand, then gestured to Johnson who was moving his chair to sit down. "Thanks for coming in. We have some questions for you, if you could help us out, we'd surely appreciate it."
The two brothers looked at Murphy, before the one on the right said, "Sure, Detective Murphy."
"First question, which one is who?"
The one on the right chuckled. "I'm Samuel. This here is my brother Jacob," he pointed to the man who could be his twin. Jacob smiled the same way as Samuel, and offered his hand over the table.
Murphy, then Johnson, shook it. Smiling, Murphy continued, "Okay, then, second question, how'd you do it?"
"What in particular, officer, er, detective?"
"Break into the vault."
Samuel Miller looked at Murphy for a moment, then answered. "We walked in."
Murphy looked at him, then at his brother, then back at Samuel. "Yeah, we got that. We have you on video walking into the bank, waiting for a bit, then walking back to the vault, then standing around for a bit, then opening the vault door, then walking in." He paused to take a breath, and continued. "Then you took out your box and it appears only your box, then walked out of the vault, out of the bank, and across the street to the diner, where you and your brother had breakfast."
Samuel was nodding. "Yes, that is correct."
"So how did you do it?"
"Do what?"
"Break into the vault."
"We walked in," Samuel repeated.
Murphy leaned forward a bit. "You don't just walk into the most expensive, latest technology bank vault in the country with no tools, no scanners, no electronics, no descramblers, no touch sensitive devices, no passcode breakers, no fingerprint pads, no retina scanner overrides and just open the bank vault door."
After a moment, "Okay."
"So how did you do it?"
"We walked in."
Murphy looked at Johnson, who shrugged. "That looks like what they did, Murphy."
Murphy looked back at the two brothers. They shrugged their shoulders, and smiled at the officer. "We cannot tell you how we did something we didn't do. We walked in to the vault. We have our father's belongings. We have no wish for anything further. We would like to go home, if you don't mind."
Murphy inhaled a big breath and exhaled slowly. He stood up, and Johnson followed. "We'll be right back," the smaller man said, as the two detectives moved to the door.
Once outside, Murphy looked at Johnson. "Well?"
"I say let them go. Maybe get an expert in to review the video? They didn't take anything but their own property, which they had attempted to retrieve several times previously. If the bank manager hadn't been such an ass, he wouldn't have discovered that one could just walk into his vault." He shrugged again. "Let 'em go."
"Damnedest thing I've ever seen," he muttered as he shook his head. "Low tech beats high tech again," he said, as he reached to open the interview room door.
The Antidote to Nothing Done Last Week
Blog Written with a loving hand by kitt some time around 12:52 on 15 February 2015There's an ongoing joke in my family that I'm sure I've mentioned before, along the lines that we're sure my dad won't ever retire because he doesn't know HOW to retire. Unsure what he would do with himself in retirement besides watching television, sleeping, and being yelled at by someone (likely his daughter), and rather than thinking about it too hard, he chooses to keep working.
Unlike my dad who won't retire, I'd be happy to retire, though not in the traditional "let's learn how to golf and square dance" sort of way. Instead, I'd likely keep working while in my retirement. My working would be more like "working" than working: building the things I want to see exist in the world, instead of building things to make other people money. I would (will?) have a giant list of things to build, and a sense of "oh, shit, I have only another 60 years left in this life" urgency to finish them all. That would get my butt in gear.
This past week, during my weekly triage of tasks that bring me closer to accomplishing my life goals, I added only 14 items to my "things to do this week" list. It was a respite from my previous week's 38 items, where I finished 30 of them. I figured, if I had 38 items and was able to finish only 30 of them, having only 14 items on my week's list meant I would have the delightful satisfaction of completing them all.
Did not work out as expected.
Not by a long shot.
Right, so, this weekly triage list. I have four items that go on pretty much every weekly goal list:
1. 10k steps a day
2. Check in on Wednesday
3. Check in on Friday
4. Commit to nothing new today.
The first is the bare minimum to functionally exist health-wise. The second and third make sure I keep on track for finishing my weekly list. The last one ensures that anything that is added to my daily or weekly list is considered carefully and deemed worthy. Work tasks don't count, as that's selling my time to my employer, and those peeps can assign me anything they want for the hours I have agreed to work for them, for the sum of money they provide in return. I have no illusions about that, and no heart to do anything but my best work for them during those hours. Outside of that contracted time, my new tasks are considered carefully.
So, last week, 14 items, 10 of which were actually items that needed to be done. 10 items in 7 days.
Each of the items I put on the weekly list are actionable, doable, well-defined and measurable.
10 items.
I managed 2.
Two tasks.
The previous week I managed to complete 26 tasks. They were also measurable. The 10 from last week were comparable to 40% of the 26 I finished the week before, so even if I had finished all 10, I was still doing only 40% of the work from the previous week.
All this time to do just these tasks and I managed not to do most of them.
So, the lesson I have learned here with this?
Stuff the task list full
I clearly do not thrive in a low-stress environment. I trust myself at the beginning of the week to create the weekly list that moves me closer to my lifetime goals. I make that list because it enables me to focus on the things that matter to me. It enables me to work towards those lifetime goals, the ones that I believe will label me a failure if I do not complete them. Having an overloaded list lets me working efficiently, lets me move from one important task to the next, not stopping to think about things too much since I've already done the thinking. I've invested those couple hours a week to ensure I can focus on what needs to be done, knowing I'll poke my head up in a week to readjust my direction.
So, this week's list is stuffed full. It's overloaded. It has this site being moved over from its beta location to the relaunched URL. It has a number of my investments reviewed. It has a number of expenses cut. It has a bunch of writing planned. And it has social time scheduled into the week. The only way I'll get this list done is to frontload the week, taking advantage of tomorrow's being a holiday, which I fully intend to do.
If things go well, this 31 item list will be fully completed by next week. If things go poorly, well, I'll still have more than two things done, since I managed to do two already. Go me.
What happens when you hate your site?
Blog Instead of being asleep at 08:48 on 14 February 2015, kitt created this:Okay, so, I last touched the previous incarnation of my site back in 2007. For someone who builds websites for a living, it seemed odd that I hadn't taken the time to update my site. I was busy building everyone elses' sites that mine languished. At some point, it became retro, and somewhat of a badge of (misplaced) honor to have something so old-school up. In reality, I became embarrassed of my site, not really wanting to show it off, given how just out of date it was.
When you hate your website, you don't use it. If using it isn't easy, you don't do it. Seems simple.
Updating it was hard.
My server died and I had to resurrect it enough to get the data off. I had items I didn't want published on the old site, such that I didn't want to import them into a new site. I needed to update my site from whatever Drupal version it was to the latest version, and really, I didn't even do that, opting for Drupal 7 instead of cutting-edge Drupal 8. And then there's all of my pictures, located in 5 different spots, only 3 of the installations of which I control. And integration with ki.tt, and the SSL certs that go with all of that and oh, good lord.
So, I stopped using the site on the 23rd of November of last year and started in on this site. It took longer than I expected, mostly because I was (and somewhat am still) unhappy with the design. I'm not a fan of the redo, but it's better than what I had before. With the base theme I have on the site, I can whip out new changes quickly, so I'm happier with the site overall.
Of note, one of the biggest changes I did with this upgrade / relaunch, was disable the open RSS for the site. I found my site copied in its entirety in a number of places across the web. I also found a lot of images hot-linked. Both of those ripoffs rather annoyed me, so, I disabled the open RSS feed, which was the source of the import. If you read content from this site via an RSS feed and want my site in your list, contact me and I'll set up a private RSS feed for you. I'm good like that.
With this relaunch, I hope to embrace this site again. I'm back to writing a lot, so maybe that'll spill over here.