Eccentric Flower:200911/New Old Words II

OK, April 2000 is done. One of the shorter months, and one where the subtext is everything. What's not said in those entries except very indirectly is that I was working on a horrible, miserable code project at work, one where the project leader and I hated each other, consensus was impossible, the spec changed every thirty seconds, and I couldn't stand what I was supposed to actually be doing.

It's worth echoing the latter-day comment I put on one of those entries today:

"Whenever you read an entry like this, ask yourself what I'm supposed to be working on at work and how much progress I'm making on it. I've learned over the years that the feeling I'm not accomplishing things at work will cause me to fall apart faster than just about anything else ... but the fact is, I don't enjoy big-projects programming very much at all, and I tend to slack off, so I fall into this situation over and over with any project that can't be done in a single afternoon."

Remember this the next time you encounter a protracted nasty period here.

Meanwhile it was hard to find any favorites apart from the two on Racter, which are almost the textbook definition of a Very Interesting topic - interesting as hell to the five people who are interested in it, utter waste of time to everyone else. Most of my favorite things are like that.

Posted a comment about that elsewhere today in an unrelated context. It's not that I think other people's tastes are narrow or boring - at least not usually, not with the kind of people I tend to associate with - but I do tend to assume, by default, that there is no intersection. That is, I assume my Very Interesting topics will not be yours and vice versa until proven otherwise, and this makes finding common ground a very tricky exploratory topic if it is to be conducted without risk. Here, if I talk about Racter and you couldn't care less about that, you can just skip that bit, but if I'm at a dinner table and I want to talk Racter and you want to talk opera (I don't get opera and I never will), we have a problem - and unless we want all our conversations to be utterly banal, we'd better solve it.

Anyway so that was April 2000. And reading the gender entries from March and April was really depressing, so I may wait a few days before I try to work on May.