Present Perfect

"The global COVID-19 pandemic has had countless impacts on society. One interesting effect is that it has created an environment in which many people have been able to explore their gender identity and, in many cases, undergo a gender transition. As organizations return to in-person work, be it full-time or hybrid, there is a greater chance of “out” transgender, non-binary, or gender non-conforming employees in the workforce." (From the "5 Ally Actions Newsletter - Mar 25, 2022")

March 31 is the Transgender Day of Visibility. The COVID Cocoon is a nickname given for the phenomenon of people discovering their gender diversity during the pandemic environment.

The full report is an interesting read; one recommendation that we can all contribute to is on Culture and Communication: Proactively communicating that gender diversity is accepted, asking staff for their input, and being open and ready to listen helps create a culture where employees can feel safe, welcome, and valued.

Taken from The Playlist - a curated perspective on the intersection of form and content (subscribe, discuss)

"The global COVID-19 pandemic has had countless impacts on society. One interesting effect is that it has created an environment in which many people have been able to explore their...

Last night I rode our bike home from Brooklyn, with my daughter crying loudly "You are not my papa!" most of the way.

We were a few minutes late picking her up from her class, and she was the last one there, crying in the arms of the teacher, and yelling something loudly, too loud to understand.
I picked her up, hugged her, asked what's wrong and tried to calm her down, but she wasn't having it. I put her in the back of our bike, strapping her in, checking with my son what she could be saying. We finally started making out that she was saying "not my papa".

I tried to convince her that I am, in fact, her papa, but she just kept repeating the same thing. We started our ride back home, and at the first red light I was acutely aware of her still yelling the same thing while standing still in traffic next to other bikes. What would I do if I was stuck in traffic next to a vehicle with a crying child yelling "You are not my papa?", I wondered. I started asking her questions like, "what hair color does your papa have?" to get her to stop and think, and I would respond, "that's interesting, just like me". I'd ask a few questions like that until the lights turned green.

I was hoping this would work for all the stops on our 25 minute ride home, and I was hoping we'd not run into any police cars along the way, just in case. Of course, two minutes later, I was parallel with a string of five police cars, all with their lights flashing. I kept repeating the questions at every stop, until she fell asleep as she usually does on the bike.

She slept all the way through dinner, and the next morning at breakfast I asked her, "who's your papa?" And she beamed at me and yelled, "you are my papa!"

My best guess at what happened is that at pickup she saw a string of papas pick up their kids, but didn't see me, and started saying "you are not my papa" at every other papa, until I was the last one to show up. I'll never show up last again.

Last night I rode our bike home from Brooklyn, with my daughter crying loudly "You are not my papa!" most of the way. We were a few minutes late picking...

Most mornings I take Phoenix to school, as his school is two blocks away from work.

We take the subway to school, having about a half hour window to leave as the school has a half-hour play window before school really starts, which inevitably gets eaten up by collecting all the things, putting on all the clothes, picking the mode of transportation (no, not the stroller; please take the step so we can go fast), and getting out the door.

At the time we make it out, the subway is usually full of people, as are the cars, so we shuffle in and Phoenix searches for a seat, which is not available, but as long as he gets close enough to a pole and a person who looks like they'd be willing to give up a seat once they pay attention, he seems to get his way more often than not. And sometimes, the person next to them also offers up their seat to me. Which is when the fun begins.

Because, like any parent knows these days, as soon as you sit down next to each other, that one question will come:

"Papa, papa, papa... mag ik jouw telefoon?" (Can I have your phone? - Phoenix and I speak Dutch exclusively to each other. Well, I do to him.)

At which point, as a tired parent in the morning, you have a choice - let them have that Instrument of Brain Decay which even Silicon Valley parents don't let their toddlers use, or push yourself to make every single subway ride an engaging and entertaining fun-filled program for the rest of eternity.

Or maybe... there is a middle way. Which is how, every morning, Phoenix and I engage in the same routine. I answer: "Natuurlijk mag jij mijn telefoon... als je éérst een verhaaltje vertelt." (Of course you can have my phone - if you first tell me a story.)

Phoenix furrows his brows, and asks the only logical follow-up question there is - "Welk verhaaltje?" (Which story?)

And I say "Ik wil het verhaaltje horen van het jongetje en zijn vader die met de metro naar school gaan" (I want to hear the story of the little boy and his dad who take the subway to school.)

And he looks at me with big eyes and says, "Dat verhaaltje ken ik niet." (I don't know that story)

And I begin to tell the story:

"Er was eens... een jongetje en zijn vader." (Once upon a time, there was a little boy and his father. Phoenix already knows the first three words of any story.)
"En op een dag... gingen dat jongetje en zijn vader met de metro naar school." (And one day... the little boy and his father took the subway to school. The way he says "op een dag" whenever he pretends to read a story from a book is so endearing it is now part of our family tradition.)

"Maar toen de jongen en zijn vader op de metro stapten zat de metro vol met mensen. En het jongetje wou zitten, maar er was geen plaats. Tot er een vriendelijke mevrouw opstond en haar plaats gaf aan het jongetje, en het jongetje ging zitten. En toen stond de meneer naast de mevrouw ook recht en de papa ging naast het jongetje zitten." (But when the little boy and his father got on the subway, it was full of people. And the little boy wanted to sit but there was no room. Until a friendly woman stood up and gave up her seat to the little boy, so the little boy sat down. And then the man next to the woman also stood up and his father sat down next to him.)

"En toen de jongen op de stoel zat, zei het jongetje, Papa papa papa papa papa papa papa..."(And when the boy sat down on the chair, he said Papa papa papa papa papa papa)

"Ja?, zei papa." (Yes?, said papa.)

"Papa, mag ik jouw telefoon"? (Papa, can I have your phone?)

"Natuurlijk jongen..... als je éérst een verhaaltje vertelt." (Of course son... if you first tell me a story.)

At which point, the story folds in on itself and recurses, and Phoenix's eyes light up as he mouths parts of the sentences he already remembers, and joins me in telling the next level of recursion of the story.

I apologize in advance to all the closing parentheses left dangling like the terrible lisp programmer I've never given myself the chance to be, but making that train ride be phoneless every single time so far is worth it.

Most mornings I take Phoenix to school, as his school is two blocks away from work. We take the subway to school, having about a half hour window to leave...

Today is my two month monthiversary at my new job. Haven't had time so far to sit back and reflect and let people know, but now during packing boxes for our upcoming move downtown, I welcome the distraction.

I dove into the black hole. I joined the borg collective. I'm now working for the little search engine that could.

I sure had my reservations while contemplating this choice. This is the first job I've had that I had to interview for - and quite a bit, I might add (though I have to admit that curiosity about the interviewing process is what made me go for the interviews in the first place - I wasn't even considering a different job at that time). My first job, a four month high school math teaching stint right after I graduated, was suggested to me by an ex-girlfriend, and I was immediately accepted after talking to the headmaster (that job is still a fond memory for many reasons). For my first real job, I informally chatted over dinner with one of the four founders, and then I started working for them without knowing if they were going to pay me. They ended up doing so by the end of the month, and that was that. The next job was offered to me over IRC, and from that Fluendo and Flumotion were born. None of these were through a standard job interview, and when I interviewed at Google I had much more experience on the other side of the interviewing table.

From a bunch of small startups to a company the scale of Google is a big step up, so that was my main reservation. Am I going to be able to adapt to a big company's way of working? On the other hand, I reasoned, I don't really know what it's like to work for a big company, and clearly Google is one of the best of those to work for. I'd rather try out working for a big company while I'm still considered relatively young job-market-wise, so I rack up some experience with both sides of this coin during my professionally mobile years.

But I'm not going to lie either - seeing that giant curious machine from the inside, learn how they do things, being allowed to pierce the veil and peak behind the curtain - there is a curiosity here that was waiting to be satisfied. Does a company like this have all big problems solved already? How do they handle things I've had to learn on the fly without anyone else to learn from? I was hiring and leading a small group of engineers - how does a company that big handle that on an industrial scale? How does a search query really work? How many machines are involved?

And Google is delivering in spades on that front. From the very first day, there's an openness and a sharing of information that I did not expect. (This also explains why I've always felt that people who joined Google basically disappeared into a black hole - in return for this openness, you are encouraged to swear yourself to secrecy towards the outside world. I'm surprised that that can work as an approach, but it seems to). By day two we did our first commit (obviously nothing that goes to production, but still.) In my first week I found the way to the elusive (to me at least) roof top terrace by searching through internal documentation.The view was totally worth it.

So far, in my first two months, I've only had good surprises. I think that's normal - even the noogler training itself tells you about the happiness curve, and how positive and excited you feel the first few months. It was easy to make fun of some of the perks from an outside perspective, but what you couldn't tell from that outside perspective is how these perks are just manifestations of common engineering sense on a company level. You get excellent free lunches so that you go eat with your team mates or run into colleagues and discuss things, without losing brain power on deciding where to go eat (I remember the spreadsheet we had in Barcelona for a while for bike lunch once a week) or losing too much time doing so (in Barcelona, all of the options in the office building were totally shit. If you cared about food it was not uncommon to be out of the office area for ninety minutes or more). You get snacks and drinks so that you know that's taken care of for you and you don't have to worry about getting any and leave your workplace for them. There are hammocks and nap pods so you can take a nap and be refreshed in the afternoon. You get massage points for massages because a healthy body makes for a healthy mind. You get a health plan where the good options get subsidized because Google takes that same data-driven approach to their HR approach and figured out how much they save by not having sick employees. None of these perks are altruistic as such, but there is also no pretense of them being so. They are just good business sense - keep your employees healthy, productive, focused on their work, and provide the best possible environment to do their best work in. I don't think I will ever make fun of free food perks again given that the food is this good, and possibly the favorite part of my day is the smoothie I pick up from the cafe on the way in every morning. It's silly, it's small, and they probably only do it so that I get enough vitamins to not get the flu in winter and miss work, but it works wonders on me and my morning mood.

I think the bottom line here is that you get treated as a responsible adult by default in this company. I remember silly discussions we had at Flumotion about developer productivity. Of course, that was just a breakdown of a conversation that inevitably stooped to the level of measuring hours worked as a measurement of developer productivity, simply because that's the end point of any conversation on that spirals out of control. Counting hours worked was the only thing that both sides of that conversation understood as a concept, and paying for hours worked was the only thing that both sides agreed on as a basic rule. But I still considered it a major personal fault to have let the conversation back then get to that point; it was simply too late by then to steer it back in the right direction. At Google? There is no discussion about hours worked, work schedule, expected productivity in terms of hours, or any of that. People get treated like responsible adults, are involved in their short-, mid- and long-term planning, feel responsible for their objectives, and allocate their time accordingly. I've come in really early and I've come in late (by some personal definition of "on time" that, ever since my second job 15 years ago, I was lucky enough to define as '10 AM'). I've left early on some days and stayed late on more days. I've seen people go home early, and I've seen people stay late on a Friday night so they could launch a benchmark that was going to run all weekend so there'd be useful data on Monday. I asked my manager one time if I should let him know if I get in later because of a doctor's visit, and he told me he didn't need to know, but it helps if I put it on the calendar in case people wanted to have a meeting with me at that hour.

And you know what? It works. Getting this amount of respect by default, and seeing a standard to live up to set all around you - it just makes me want to work even harder to be worthy of that respect. I never had any trouble motivating myself to do work, but now I feel an additional external motivation, one this company has managed to create and maintain over the fifteen+ years they've been in business. I think that's an amazing achievement.

So far, so good, fingers crossed, touch wood and all that. It's quite a change from what came before, and it's going to be quite the ride. But I'm ready for it.

(On a side note - the only time my habit of wearing two different shoes was ever considered a no-no for a job was for my previous job - the dysfunctional one where they still owe me money, among other stunts they pulled. I think I can now empirically elevate my shoe habit to a litmus test for a decent job, and I should have listened to my gut on the last one. Live and learn!)

Today is my two month monthiversary at my new job. Haven't had time so far to sit back and reflect and let people know, but now during packing boxes for...

In the fall of '98 I had a thing for a girl I didn't want to have a thing for. I had also just seen one of my favorite movies, Much Ado About Nothing (the original Brannagh movie, not the Josh Whedon one that I didn't know about until recently and have yet to see).

I decided to exorcise my feelings into a good old-fashioned mix cd (well, I guess that wasn't old fashioned back in '98). I cut up the movie dialogue into pieces, and interspersed them inbetween a song selection aiming to match the flow of the movie lyric-wise and, in places, matching them sound-wise too to the movie snippets. It ended up being two cd's, and a bunch of my friends liked it as well so I think I ended up making about 30 copies of the thing.

Today I needed to recreate those two CD's plus its original packaging. That means I had to actually buy CD-R's (didn't have any anymore after the move to the US), buy jewelcases (can you believe that I actually have actual boxes with actual empty jewelcases that I *kept* in storage in Belgium? These days if you want to buy them they're a little harder to find than they used to be, even though I'm sure there must be landfills full of them all over the world), and go to a print shop to print the front and back covers.

Being the obsessive backupper that I am, it was easy to find the sound files back (actually, I took a morituri rip that I made at my best friend's house, who has the CD's, last time I was there - so that I would have a perfect .cue sheet that would stitch the tracks together). I knew I had the files for the fronts and backs somewhere as well, but they were a little harder to find because I couldn't remember their names. But I trusted my OCD self that I had backups from fifteen years ago somewhere here with me in NY, and I started looking for files from the same timeframe, until I came across the files I was looking for hidden in a subdirectory.

But then when you find them, what do you do with .cdr CorelDraw files from 1998? I tried inkscape, which uses uniconvertor, which on my F-19 machine failed with a constructor with wrong arguments in Python, which seems like a silly bug. I rebuilt the F-21 version, which gets past that bug, but then doesn't actually convert anything. I tried an online converter, and it only picked up on the images and none of the text.

So I went the illegal route - I downloaded CorelDraw 11 from the internet, installed it in wine (which was surprisingly easy, it just worked), and I could open the files. Except that it was missing fonts and so the layout was all wrong. Sigh. Hunt random font sites for the missing fonts, install them for wine, open again, rinse, repeat. Eventually the files opened with the right fonts, except that one of the titles was too big to fit on the CD inlay. Oh well, adjust them all manually, make it a little smaller, export to eps, load in gimp, adjust the page as it was perfectly measured for A4 printing but I'm in the US now and the US uses letter which is slightly different, export to pdf so I could go to any random print shop in New York and get it printed.

CD burnt, on to the print shop, fiddle with the printer as nobody in the store can figure out which tray number the tray is where they loaded the card stock paper, and it's not like the driver on the windows machine knows either - I had to do 5 failed prints to different printers before we even knew which printer was the right one. Cut up the paper by hand with scissors (which I suck at), put it all together, and be on my way.

All this just to say that, while I can be as good about backups as I want to be to bring back to life something I did fifteen years ago, there is still a whole lot of real-world technology fails getting in the way, like outdated proprietary file formats, not having good interchange formats, missing fonts, paper sizes and general Imperial/metric nonsense, ages-old printer crap and just simple manual tasks, which we as humans will probably inflict upon ourselves for forever. I mean, I'd sure like to believe that in the future it will be as simple as pressing a button and getting this 15 year old CD project 3D-printed all at once, but experience has taught me that most likely I will be fiddling just as much with getting 2040's 3D printer to work with 2025's data files.

And so it is that I arrive just after 6 at Barnes and Noble in Tribeca, queue up in front of eight registers with only one open, buy a book, get a wristband, go to the back where Emma Thompson is reading from her Peter Rabbit book, in her perfectly English and genuinely funny way, queue after the reading, and hear her say "I think it's better to look odd than to look normal" to the seven year old twin girls in front of me. I wholeheartedly agree with her. I hand her my copy to sign, give her my two cd's and tell her what they are and say that I thought this was a good opportunity to give them to her, and she smiles and seems genuinely surprised and pleased.

I think my dad would be genuinely jealous at this point - he always seemed to appreciate seeing her on the screen, and after today I can't say I blame him. I hope she enjoys the CD's, and if someone can recommend a good website where I can put these online for others to listen to, that would be great!

In the fall of '98 I had a thing for a girl I didn't want to have a thing for. I had also just seen one of my favorite movies,...