jducoeur: (Default)

Okay, so as of last October I'm at Troops -- let's talk about that.

Troops has been very much me going back to my roots: a scrappy little startup. Unlike most such, it's been pretty well-run -- cautious without being timid -- with the result that when I got there the company was six years old and still only 30 employees. That's refreshingly sensible: too many startups fall into the Cult of Blitzscale, believing that the only way to succeed is to GrowGrowGrow as fast as possible, to weave illusions in front of investors, regardless of whether that makes any business sense. Troops thinks a lot more like I do -- you're trying to build a viable company, and that takes a lot of time and experimentation.

There's a lot to like about Troops: they started talking about the company's values from the first interview, and unlike many places, they tend to walk the walk. For example, Transparency is a very big deal, and I've been impressed on that front. Every Monday we have an all-hands that goes into serious detail for every department: not just what Product and Engineering are working on, but line-by-line breakdowns of how things are going in Sales, details about what Marketing is working on, what's going well (or not as well) in Customer Success, and so on. The result is that I've actually gotten to not only know everybody in the company, but also what they are doing, in a way that I don't think has been true of any employer since Buzzpad. (Which was only eight of us, so scarcely counts.)

The product is mundane but terribly useful: we provide analysis and notification services from "systems of record" (eg, Salesforce) to "systems of communication" (eg, Slack), so that you can get notified when something interesting happens, or just get updates on a regular schedule. The company started out just doing Salesforce-to-Slack, back when that was a new and somewhat heretical idea, but pivoted a couple of years ago to be more generalized. It's still pretty focused on customer-relationship applications in practice, but our tech is pretty general-purpose by now.

The stack is very much in my sweet spot: a pure-FP Scala backend, coupled with a TypeScript frontend. Aside from using ZIO instead of my preferred cats-effect, it's largely the same stack that I was pushing at Rally, so the coding is fun.

The company is small enough to not be hidebound -- we have a level of continuous integration and release that we were dreaming of at Rally, not too far from one release per engineer per day on average. We count on the engineers to take strong ownership of the application, working together and with Product to figure out how to make things better.

My timing could scarcely have been better. The company was just hitting market-fit in a serious way when I joined, with sales starting to really take off and the user base growing in serious ways. That's an exciting time to be at a firm, when you can look at it and say with some confidence that things are getting steadily better.

Mind, it can be a somewhat hectic environment: being a tiny group (just ten engineers) supporting a growing customer list and a hugely ambitious technical vision, we've had to work hard and stay focused. But the company has a generally good attitude, and doesn't push burnout-level stress -- folks understand that building a company is a marathon rather than a sprint, and are quite supportive of maintaining a decent work/life balance.

So it's been a good time, these past six months or so. Things got more interesting last week, but that'll be the topic of the last entry in this trilogy...

jducoeur: (Default)

Soooo -- looking back, I haven't talked at all about work for the past eight months. That's probably been a mistake, because boy, my work life has been complicated. Let's break the story down into three posts, for the three major phases. This is basically a trilogy of diary entries, bringing us from a year ago, up to present day.

When last we left our hero, he was working at Rally Health, and largely enjoying it. Rally was pretty huge by the standards I'm used to -- my first employer of more than about 300 employees -- but still small fry in the grand scheme of things. The tech stack was solid; the people were pretty great; maybe most importantly, the community and culture were really excellent.

(I started at Rally as a consultant, and jumped ship after about a year to join them full-time. When I was interviewing, they asked, "Why do you want to work here?" My answer was, "You've gotten to 1500 employees, and don't suck. I want to see how you manage that.")

Sometime early last year, they announced that Rally would be folded into its much-larger parent company, Optum. (Which is itself part of the gigantic monolith, United HealthGroup.) That caused a lot of consternation, including people panicking about layoffs. I initially dismissed most of those concerns, on the grounds that Rally was a primary engine of innovation for Optum, and to a non-trivial degree for UHG as a whole. Surely they wouldn't strangle the goose that laid the golden eggs?

By the late summer, though, I was starting to get nervous. It was clear that Optum's benefits weren't as good as Rally's, and I didn't love the answers I was getting on that front. The response to losing our unlimited PTO was, "Oh, we just don't track the PTO for engineers. But no, we refuse to write that de facto policy down anywhere." That did nothing to soothe my lawful-good heart, and the implied inequity of it burned.

Then the attrition started. Some of it was just natural, but certain highly-placed people who I considered "Rally lifers" suddenly left, which I took to be a bad sign. So for the first time in a long time, I started actually responding to the recruiter emails.

I did a few interviews, but as usual, the really interesting one came via networking. Thor, a member of the Boston Scala group, who I'd worked with on ScalaBridge a while back, pinged me because he had just joined a little company called Troops, and might I be interested in chatting?

I'll talk more about Troops next post, but suffice it to say, yeah -- it was up my alley, and the timing was impeccable. So I wound up interviewing during our trip to Hawaii last fall (with Kate rolling her eyes about that a little bit, but she understood the situation). It all looked good, so Troops and I were making encouraging noises at each other, with me asking for about six weeks' transition time.

Then I got back from vacation, during which the merger had happened. I'll avoid going into the details, but suffice it to say, I was deeply unimpressed by Optum. The benefits were mediocre; the internal politics were more corporately nasty; perhaps most importantly, the level of general competence just wasn't there. I was used to Rally, which had an ethos of hiring great folks into all groups and giving them lots of room to build high-quality stuff; it really hurt when I kept stumbling across Optum internal systems that just plain didn't work right.

It was a worse environment in all ways, with no salary bump. It hurt to leave my team (who I really liked a lot), but they just plain weren't paying me enough to put up with that nonsense. So I wrote back to Troops and said, more or less, "I've changed my mind. Give me an offer now, and I'll put in my two weeks' notice."

So: Rally Health, RIP. It's a real pity -- as a wholly-owned subsidiary, Rally was a really great workplace, and it still presumably has that great tech stack. But Optum feels much more corporate, which isn't my scene. So, on to something better...

jducoeur: (Default)

I should stop over-thinking things, and post more. Let's get on that.

Monday was my first outing to the local Scottish Country Dance practice. I had been introduced to SCD at Pinewoods ESCape last year (where Kat was teaching a really good intro class), and it's very much up my alley -- close enough to the Renaissance stuff I do that I find most of it fairly intuitive, but different enough to be new and interesting, and really high-energy.

(But like all the modern forms, they start everything on the right foot, which has lots of little knock-on consequences. It's going to take a while for this to stop making me feel clumsy and off-balance. I'm also going to need to pull some knowledgeable people aside and get them to tutor me in stepwork -- the practice teaches choreography, but tends to assume you already have the steps and basic figures.)

Anyway, SCD practice was great: we tended to have about two dozen people on the dance floor, which is well above the level needed to sustain a lively gathering. Me being me, I wound up doing every dance despite my beginner status -- I made lots of mistakes, but mostly kept up and didn't cause any major choreographic disasters. Overall, it was the best workout I've had since at least Pinewoods, maybe longer. With any luck, keeping at this will help reduce my plague-times poundage.


Monday afternoon was also Shot #4, and Tuesday was all about dealing with the effects of that. "Dealing" mainly consisted of sitting around and trying to muster the energy to read some comic books -- it was fortunate that I got the critical work tasks done in the morning, because by about 1pm the side-effects were setting in in earnest, and by 4pm I was a feverish, exhausted lump. I'm mostly recovered now, but last night kinda sucked.

Don't get me wrong -- I'll take one day of feeling like crap over risking long covid. (Especially with Boston in the middle of a slow-motion surge that nobody seems to be paying any attention to.) But I may just have to plan for a sick day after each of these boosters.


Overall, a good start to the week. The timing was very intentional, getting dance in before the side-effects kicked in. I expect I'll probably continue to attend SCD most weeks, which means my Mondays are mostly spoken for as life continues to gear up again...

jducoeur: (Default)

(I was reminded today that, while I've told this story many times, and a fair number of you have heard it, I don't recall ever writing it down. So...)

No shit, there I was -- on the tarmac in St. John's, Newfoundland.

The year was 1993, during the reign of Tsurunaga and Genevieve, and the Shire of Ar n-Eilean-ne had decided to hold an East Kingdom University.

Now, the thing about Ar n-Eilean-ne is that it is the northernmost point of the East Kingdom. And the easternmost point. Indeed, it is more or less the north-easternmost point of North America: St. John's is way out there. It's in the East Kingdom, but I believe it's technically closer to England than to Boston. It's a serious trip.

Of course, they invited everyone in the Kingdom to join them for University; of course, very few folks from the US actually came. In practice, IIRC, the American contingent wound up being four Carolingians and the King.

The event was delightful. My top (if by now rather vague) memories were discovering that five-year-old stockfish (from the autocrat's mother's larder) can make a truly fabulous dinner when the cook knows what they are doing, and His Majesty leading everybody on a small pub crawl afterwards.

So -- no shit, there I was the following morning, at the airport in my plane home. The flight up had been uneventful, and I fully expected the same to be true of the return. And that was true for the first half of the flight.

Down we flew, stopping at Yarmouth Airport (more or less the southwestern tip of Nova Scotia) for refueling, and thence on to Boston. All seemed to be going fine, and after a few hours we were approaching Logan Airport.

We began to circle for our descent. And circle. And circle.

After about half an hour of this, the pilot came on the PA, apologized for the delay, and announced that free drinks would be provided for all passengers. A small voice at the back of my head said, "Uh oh".

We continued to circle for a while, collectively partaking of the free spirits, and the passengers at the back began to get a little boisterous. I learned that they were a women's bowling team -- precisely why they had been visiting St. John's I don't know, but they greatly appreciated the booze.

Another half hour later, the pilot came on the PA again, terribly apologetic, and explained that we would be unable to land at Boston Logan. Boston was fogged in, and while that would normally not be a big deal (because instrument landing), the Tall Ships were currently in the harbor, and there was a non-zero chance of clipping a mast during the landing. We would be seeking other airports to land at.

Twenty minutes or so later, and the mood was getting a bit uglier. The pilot came back on the PA, and the ladies at the back began to vigorously heckle his French accent. He was terribly apologetic, but there was an additional problem -- none of the airports that were nearby and still open at this hour on a Sunday evening were international airports: they didn't have Customs, so we couldn't land at them. So we would have no choice but to fly back to Yarmouth.

An hour or two of backtracking later, the pilot came back on the PA, terribly apologetic, to explain that Yarmouth was now also fogged in. To this day I'm not quite sure why that mattered -- I halfway suspect that Yarmouth airport just didn't want to deal with us -- but we were going to have to keep going.

And so it was that, eight hours after boarding the plane, we landed -- at the next gate over from the one that we had originally taken off from. No worse the wear, but collectively cranky and tired as only a group of fifty strangers stuck in close quarters in an existential nightmare can be.

(Yes, the airline put us up for the night, and I got home the next day: bigger plane, clear skies, and as uneventful as I had originally expected. But it says something that that flight is my dominant memory of the trip.)

jducoeur: (Default)

So, this is the spot where there should have been an Arisia '22 post. Unfortunately, the timing of Omicron was almost perfectly bad, so the Chair Team had to cancel the convention on very short notice, after negotiating things with the hotel so that we don't get sued out of existence.

(Reminder for future-me reading this, years down the road: Omicron was the "tidal wave" variant of Covid-19 that swept the world in early 2022. It currently looks to be a little less deadly than the more "traditional" forms, but is vastly more contagious, with the result that a large fraction of the people in the Northeast currently have it. It's a bad time to hold a mass gathering. Anyway...)

With less than a week before runtime, there was no way we could move to a full-scale v-con the way we did for A'21; besides that, the Remote Team for A'21 was still a little burned out, having collectively put in thousands of hours of work creating that experience. It was great, but it was also hard.

But it would have been mournful not to do something, so Gail basically did an impromptu, "Let's build a barn!" for those who were willing. Arisia was formally cancelled, but in its place we held ACOG, the Arisia Community Online Gathering.

tl;dr -- that didn't suck.

Having so little time, ACOG wasn't remotely as ambitious as A'21; indeed, we didn't even call it a v-con. But in practice, it kind of turned into one.

They already had a Discord server partway set up for A'22, so that got repurposed for ACOG, as did things like the SignUpGenius account that Gaming had been planning on using, which wound up getting used to set up things like Help Desk and Moderators. Discord became the centerpoint for ACOG, much as it had been for A'21, and that was helpful: some of the better innovations from A'21 fell right back into place, including the #at-the-westin quasi-LARP (narrate what you are doing right now at the convention that doesn't exist) and #ten-forward (the 18+ channel where you could order e-drinks and snacks from the friendly local @bartender-bot, and mind the occasional animated coyote falling through the ceiling).

Gaming was, of course, very active -- the Minecraft server that had always been part of the A'22 plans was front and center, and a lot of online games sprang up. (Not least, because that is Gail's thing.) Streaming wound up a fairly major deal this year, with a bunch of sessions on Twitch and multiple excellent dance parties. (Not least, because that is Anna's thing, and she was very much Gail's partner-in-crime in pulling this together. And note to myself: DJXero spins a really great dance party.) Hobbit decided that there should be a music track, so he went off and built a separate Discord server specifically optimized for that, and gradually enticed folks over there to do some singing.

As for me, it was a surprisingly mellow weekend -- since there was no A'22, there was no Press, which means that I was not on-duty all weekend the way I usually am. (And, sadly, no Renaissance Ball outside of #at-the-westin.)

But I was part of the Remote Team (just not running it this year, and not doing any coding), so Gail asked me to help keep folks apprised of what was going on. We had "On the 50s" -- announcements of what was coming up, ten minutes before the start of each hour -- but she asked me to do a twice-daily "What's New" to supplement that.

As is my wont, I looked at it and said, "Sure, I could just list things -- but that's boring. We should make something chattier, that gets folks excited about stuff to come. And we could include news about what's going on around ACOG, and announcements and such. Andandand... I've just reinvented Clear Ether, haven't I?"

Hence, my main focus for the weekend was writing and editing The Erisian, the newsletter for the "con". I turned on Enthusiasm-Brain and went into Publicity Mode, which I haven't pulled out in quite a while but used to be quite good at.

It was rather fun, and over the course of four issues wound up being a sort of loose historical record of the event -- incomplete, but covering most of the highlights of what was going on. If you're curious, check it out!

(Frankly, it was enough fun that I'm tempted to get involved with the running of Clear Ether when things go back to normal. I've been doing Press Liaison forever, and could use a change.)

Anyway: what could have been a depressing weekend wound up being a rather fun one. It was more of a low-intensity relaxacon than the firehose of activity that is Arisia proper, but there was still constant chatter, things to do, and people getting to hang out and get their weird on. It was only maybe a third the experience of A'21 -- but was under 10% of the effort, so the bang for the buck was pretty good.

So -- one for the win column. Hopefully next year, circumstances will allow us to hold Arisia for reals...

jducoeur: (Default)

As our Hawaii trip draws to a close, I'm thinking about the significant highlights. And one of them is just about the ultimate example of "It's about the journey, not the destination": Hana.

For those who have never studied a map of Hawaii (as I hadn't before we planned this trip), Maui is kind of two islands joined at the hip. To the left (west) is the smaller lobe -- due to the way trade winds work, that is the hotter, drier side of the island. (For the same reasons why Kona is the hot, dry side of the big island.) That is exemplified by Lahaina, the tourist center where we have spent most of the week. To the right (east) is the bigger lobe, which is wetter and lusher. That has one small town of note: Hana, at the eastern end of the island.

Hana is quite small. The "downtown" stretch includes something like seven places to eat, of which five are food trucks and one is the fancy resort. There are several other places to stay (including the Hana Inn, a six-room place where we spent the night), but it's not the kind of place you go to for the town.

The reason you go to Hana is for the drive itself. The Road to Hana (Route 360) is a tiny, torturous, gorgeous road along the north edge of eastern Maui. It's only about 30 miles long, which makes it sound like a quick little there-and-back, and that's how most tourists do it: they land in Maui, immediately head east, turn around and drive back.

What that misses is that this is a slow road, and best treated as such. If you know state Route 1 down the California coast, the Road to Hana is a lot like that, but ten thousand times as lush and considerably less terrifying.

Like Route 1, you're basically driving along cliffside for much of it, so this is not a drive I recommend to timid drivers. But the speed limits are far more sensible: the road is mostly marked with a no-kidding-we-mean-it 25 MPH limit, frequently marked 15 or even 10 MPH when going around curves. And you are never not going around curves: during the main part of the drive, I don't think the steering wheel is ever straight for more than maybe 50 yards. 90 degree curves are common, and 180-degree switchbacks aren't unusual.

Just to make this more fun, it is full of single-lane bridges, so you need to pause and yield to oncoming traffic on a frequent basis. I have to imagine that being in a rush on this road must be maddening. But driving it at the speed limit is positively Zen, even a bit relaxing. Turns that would be gut-wrenching terror at 30 miles per hour are fairly calm at 10, and just assuming that you are going to at least mostly stop at every bridge forces you to chill out.

(Yes, there are people who want to do it much faster. Fortunately, the people who built the road were smart, and there are pull-offs several times per mile. So when a tailgater starts climbing up your ass, you just get out of the way and let them pass.)

What makes all this worthwhile is the scenery. More than anywhere I've ever seen, you can count on every mile having at least one view that takes your breath away. Sometimes it is waterfalls, sometimes jungle canopies, sometimes crashing waves, sometimes a broad view of the mile-wide canyon that you are crawling along. Even for the driver (who needs to keep their eyes on the road) it's pretty great; the passengers get to really enjoy. It's basically a two to three hour journey through some of the greatest beauty possible, surrounded by an endless variety of greenery.

There are also many places to pull over and see the sights. Our guidebook provided a fine mile-by-mile breakdown of the options, and we did several, ranging from the slightly crowded little park with a lovely waterfall to the mile-long drive down a side road, followed by a hike down to the shoreline, leading to the best coastal view we found in all of Hawaii. It's worth planning some of these little side-treks.

Note that it will rain on you at some point: you're in a rainforest here, so just build that into your assumptions. Again, so long as you are going slow, that's not a big deal.

So if you find yourself in Maui, that drive is my strongest recommendation. The destinations are decently nice, but that road is the reason to come here. Plan to stay overnight in Hana so that you can take your time, and don't get started eastward until the traffic dies down (around noonish). But do go a-wandering...

jducoeur: (Default)

No, this isn't about terrorism or anything of the sort. It's about scary activities, and ways to make them more or less scary.

Context: so, we're currently on vacation, and have been for a couple of weeks so far. It is a long, long, long-planned trip for my in-laws' 50th. The original theory was that they were going to go to Australia, and then we would meet them in Hawaii. That was supposed to happen last year; for obvious reasons, not so much. And Australia is still out of the question -- while there are hints of the borders opening, they're still not welcoming tourists. But we've been in Hawaii for the better part of two weeks now, and as of this morning we're on our own, having left the family group. So I have time to start writing, and a bunch of random posts will probably follow in the coming days.

(Yes, Hawaii. Yes, Hawaii is being super-strict about its covid protocols. That's why I haven't availed myself of any of the wonderful-looking SCA events that have started happening in the past couple of months, and why even our socializing fell to almost nil for several weeks: we wanted to make extra-sure that we were clean before traveling.)

But I digress...

We spent the past four days in the town of Hilo, on the eastern side of the Big Island of Hawaii. On two successive days, we did two adventurous excursions, and they're a fascinating compare and contrast. First, there was a tour through a couple of lava tubes that was far scarier than it really should have been; then there was a zipline tour that should have scared the living bejeezus out of acrophobic me, and yet wasn't that bad. And it all came down to professionalism.

The lava tube tour is basically spelunking -- the only difference is that you are going into a tube that was "dug" by fast-moving lava in a long-ago volcanic eruption. This is a common thing around here: the islands are volcanic, and the ground is basically Swiss cheese as a result. And the first half of the tour was fine -- the floor of the tube was fairly flat, the tunnel was wide, and aside from a few places where we needed to crouch it was plenty tall enough. We all had helmets, gloves and flashlights, so it was all fairly tame and pleasant.

But the second hour was the "adventure" tour, through a less-public tube. It started by all of us clambering down a 20-foot construction ladder into the entrance. (With all of our feet muddy from getting there, and no safety precautions whatsoever.) Then we get led by our guide down into a cavern piled pretty randomly with large, sharp, randomly-shaped and frequently unstable rocks. At once point we wound up walking very carefully along an 8-inch-wide ledge halfway up the cavern wall, ten feet above the rocks below. Up and down we went, trying to follow a guide who was traipsing well ahead of us, not paying much attention to how folks were doing and whether we were finding safe paths across the rocks. And mind, we had two 70-year-olds in the party.

We got out of it mostly intact: my mother in law got a nasty bruise on her leg, but nobody got seriously hurt. I have to attribute that in fair part to luck, though -- there were many occasions when somebody could easily have slipped and broken a leg or worse. I have no evidence that they had any plans or preparation for what to do if that happened.

And the hell of it is, it was almost exactly what I expected. Before we got there, the back of my brain was going, "If somebody says, 'Oh, you don't need masks here', that's a bad sign" -- and that was almost the first words out of the proprietor's mouth when we arrived: the only time I've heard that in all of Hawaii. The place was not just out of the way, they had lost power sometime in the past, so there were no lights, nor even working plumbing. It reeked of a complete lack of professionalism from start to finish, and the result was an experience that was a lot scarier, and less fun, than it should have been.

Then there was the zipline tour. Starting in some agricultural upland, this was a series of seven progressively-more-interesting lines. The first was the pure training-wheels line -- probably 50 yards, about eight feet off the ground, just to show you how the equipment works, how to get set up, how to launch yourself, how to land, and so on. From there, each line roughly doubled in length and interest, culminating in a line that was, no shit, half a mile long, something like a quarter mile over a ravine with a fast-rushing river and waterfalls.

Like I said, I'm acrophobic -- in principle, this was one of the scariest things I've ever done. But the tour operators were the exact opposite of the day before. Despite our two guides both being youngish and very casual and laid-back (indeed, she was giving him a constant stream of snark that reminded me of nothing so much as me and Aaron), they were both extremely precise and detail-oriented. When each participant got up on the "launchpad", the humor took a back seat to what looked to be a well-trained ten-point checklist, communicated by walkie-talkie between the sending and receiving ends before sending us on our way. When they were on the lines themselves they were just having fun (he was particularly fond of pulling various positions as he flew through the air), but on the ground it was all business. And the harnesses themselves were clearly well-designed, with no apparent single points of failure.

The result was that it was really less scary, and far more fun, than the lava tube, because the rational side of my brain could appreciate the sheer number of redundancies and checks that they had in place against someone getting hurt. We even chatted with them about "What if someone gets stuck in the middle?" -- which they casually admitted does happen (especially if you have a guest who is a little too light and a headwind). And they crawl out onto the line and fetch them. (She said that she actually finds that part rather fun, but it slows the tour down too much.) No denial that things could go wrong; instead, careful advance planning and training about how to react when it does.

The moral of the story isn't surprising: a well-designed and well-run activity is just plain more fun than a slipshod one. I'm sure that the lava tube operator would proudly brag that this was an "adventure" tour and you should expect danger from the name, but I really can't recommend it to anyone -- it was pointlessly risky, to no real benefit, and not well-described as such. Whereas the zipline was simply a blast: scary, but more exhilarating than terrifying...

jducoeur: (Default)

Time to fend off the stir-crazy, so we took a long weekend back in Great Barrington, staying at the same weird but wonderful house where we were back in September. (The one on such a steep hill that the roof of the fourth floor almost comes to street level, and they built a bridge from it over to the road.)

The weather hasn't been terribly cooperative, so Friday was simply a shopping out-and-about, checking out fun little stores in Lenox, Stockbridge and Great Barrington.

But the point of going to the Berkshires is hiking.

Yesterday we went out to Bartholomew's Cobble, a lovely wander through some easy nature trail down by a river, and a bit of uplands hiking scrambling around.

Today's main focus was Bob's Way, a nice forest walk with a lot of rolling hills -- several miles of ups and downs.

Following that, we still had a little energy, so we went back the Benedict Pond Loop Trail, which we had enjoyed last year but taken the relatively sedate road for a good chunk of it. This time, we did the real trail the whole way around the pond, which turns out to be much more fun but a lot more effort, especially in muddy conditions: much of a mile of hopping strategically from rock to rock to avoid the mud.

Good exercise all around, and helps me feel like I'm getting value from my AllTrails subscription. I suspect we'll find somewhere other than Great Barrington for our next discretionary vacation, once we can leave the state and not feel guilty about quarantines, but it does continue to be a lovely place to visit...

Extracon

Feb. 28th, 2021 03:41 pm
jducoeur: (Default)

For obvious reasons, Intercon (the annual LARP convention that I've been attending approximately forever) couldn't happen as usual this year. It's kind of a noniversary marker for me: last year's Intercon was where the pandemic started really hitting my consciousness -- between games, the hotel TVs were all talking about the news from Washington state as things were starting to look bad there (before we really knew what "bad" meant), and IIRC they were debating the first stimulus in Congress that weekend. Things really started locking down on the East Coast a couple of weeks later.

Anyway...

Lacking an Intercon this year didn't mean no LARPing, though -- it just meant that the games had to be distanced to fit this year's reality. And Extracon, like Virtual Arisia before it, really stepped up and produced a weird-but-great weekend that showed the possibilities of online LARP. All four of the games I played suited the online environment reasonably well; a couple of them only make sense in that environment.

I should note: to get everyone into the spirit of the thing, Alison assembled little Swag Bags for everybody for the weekend, contained everything from The Traditional Intercon Lip Balm (no, really -- at this point, it's sacred tradition) to chocolate to stickers to slightly disturbing squishy little dolls. For those of us who opted in, we even got official Extracon Contingency Envelopes, which we were signaled to open Saturday afternoon. It was lovely, and helped set a positive atmosphere.

So, my weekend:


Friday evening was Spirit Island: Create a Spirit With the Designer. Eric did a sort of Zoom live-art exercise, with the audience participating via Discord as he frantically wrote stuff down. I conked out about halfway through (it didn't start until 9pm), but the group collectively came up with a theme, gradually narrowed it down and refined it under Eric's tutelage, and wound up with the first version of Spreading Rot Renews the Earth.

As it sounds, this is basically the Decay Spirit: it has a special ability that, when things are destroyed on your lands, they become "Rot tokens" that you can spend on the innate powers or to gain energy. It is explicitly the Spirit of natural decay, breaking things down in a healthy cycle, and while it needs lots of balancing yet (there was a second meeting this morning, which I couldn't make it to), I quite like the concept.

This was a neat session -- everyone got to see a bit of the process of how Eric designs Spirits, and put together an Apocrypha Spirit that will probably evolve into something worth playing.


Saturday morning was Common Sense, more an experimental experience than a game in any meaningful sense.

We were all given lists of items to prepare before runtime -- a handful of warm dirt, a freshly-peeled orange, an ice cube, a cinnamon stick, etc. During the run, we were guided through a series of interactions in which we would try to communicate an emotion or idea solely through different non-verbal modes of communication, including at different times:

  • Making non-verbal noises
  • Using Discord text chat, listing specific smells (in one round) or textures (in another)
  • Making faces at each other

It was generally interesting -- not 100% successful, but a good first try. The smell and texture rounds were particularly neat food for thought, finding emotional resonance through those specific senses -- someone would list some items in Discord, and everyone else would go sniff/touch them. The "making faces" round proved problematic for the sole reason that it turns out to be really hard to do that with more than two people, but was otherwise a cool interaction.

I think this one needs some evolution, but has promise as a sort of mental-limbering exercise. Like so much of the weekend, it really needs the online medium. (Although I think it would have worked better on Zoom than Discord.)


Saturday afternoon was Conscientia, and I can't say a ton about it without spoilers. Suffice it to say, all of the players are connected via a telemedicine call using new, experimental technology, and the whole thing is sort of a group therapy session.

Beyond that, as the blurb says, it is a game of "memory, morality, and forgiveness", and it is pretty brilliant, and it is brutal. It ended with one of the hardest collective ugly-cries I've seen in a game -- what I originally thought was going to be a relatively intellectual experience turned out to be quite the emotional gut-punch. There is a lot of fine, subtle design going on here, some of which I didn't fully grok until after it was over.

(I played A -- saying much more than that would be spoilers.)

While this one could probably technically be played in-person, I wouldn't recommend it: it was hands-down the best use of Zoom I have ever seen for any purpose, and the GMs use it as a very precise and subtle instrument to drive the game. (I actually learned about several Zoom features that I hadn't even realized were there, which are essential to the game.)

This one gets my highest recommendation -- one of the best games I've played in years, and mechanically brilliant, but very much an All the Feels experience.


Saturday evening was a lovely palate-cleanser from the emotional wringer an hour before, as six of us got together for Re: That Rip in Time and Space.

This light-hearted game is explicitly set around a "Kids on Bikes" story. You know those movies and TV shows where a group of plucky teens discover something weird and terrible, and have to save the world? This game is about their idiot parents and teachers, the members of the Neighborhood Watch, who are arguing about what to do about the giant magenta vortex that has opened in the neighbor's lawn. (I was Diallo, the local cop who theoretically tries to herd this bunch of cats.)

Suffice it to say, this is not a game of puzzle-solving, because the parents aren't the heroes of this story, the (offstage) kids are. Instead, it is two hours of pure scenery-chewing as the parents argue about sleepovers, who is responsible for what, who has been keeping what secrets, and dog poop. (The poop is a constant topic.)

Utterly silly, but rather a lot of fun -- recommended for some time when you want to turn off your brain and just roleplay in a story that really isn't about the lot of you.

(This one doesn't require Zoom the way Conscientia does, but works quite nicely in that environment.)


Finally, this morning was the capstone of silliness: Too Polite. This is a game that is about Zoom. You are all in a conference call. However, no two of you were supposed to be in the same conference call. But you are all Canadian, and much too polite to tell everyone else that they are in the wrong place.

Basically, it's an eight-person Who's Line Is It Anyway? sketch. At the beginning of the game, the GM randomly and secretly assigns you one-sentence roles (I gather that the official list contains 32 roles, so no two games are the same). In some cases, you must choose a specific detail to add to that role; in general, you choose your name, and fill in the character details as you see fit.

The game runs 20-45 minutes; after the 15-minute mark, you are allowed to start calling out other players by (very politely) saying what meeting you think they meant to be in; if you are right, they are "out" -- still on the call, but embarrassed, and no longer able to call other people out. The "winner" is the last player whose role has not been guessed.

Since there is no reason not to, the game was also open to spectators. There was a Discord channel specifically for the viewers, that the players were not supposed to look at. After we were assigned our roles, the GM listed all of them in the Discord channel, and the audience had fun heckling us behind our backs.

Me being me, I simply threw myself on the grenade -- I didn't say who I was, but was enthusiastic enough about my role that I got guessed first, not terribly long after the 15-minute mark. That was fine: I'd much rather have an over-the-top roleplay experience than "win", and this was a hoot. (Suffice it to say, I was a biologist here to present my newest discovery, the Giant Big-tongued Gecko. I had a horrifying gecko image all lined up to present; sadly, I didn't get an opportunity before they got me.)

Anyway -- this one is an archetypal Intercon Sunday-morning game: light, fluffy, requiring zero preparation, just jump in and play. The GM says that he's planning to box it and sell it for a few bucks, and I would recommend it: this is one of those games that doesn't require deep knowledge of LARP. We discussed after-game that this is the sort of thing you could just use as an ice-breaker or team-building exercise. It's a lot of fun.


So that was my weekend. I won't say that it was everything that an in-person Intercon provides, but it was a great time. Congrats to everyone involved: it was a fine example of the possibilities for online LARP, and I think some of these games should continue to be played that way even after in-person LARP is a thing again.

ETA: oh, right, and there was Other Stuff. On Saturday afternoon, I attended a delightful online concert that Heather Dale did for Extracon. And we had a short 20-minute virtual outing to a farm, to see goats and llamas. (Llamas! Cute!)

Car notes

Jan. 30th, 2021 12:12 pm
jducoeur: (Default)

I mentioned, just after Thanksgiving, that we had just bought a new Prius. I'm pleased to report that this week, after more than two months, I'm about to fill the tank for the first time.

Now, that's partly because of covid times. Where Jane and I used to drive 10-12k per year each, Kate and I average a few thousand miles per year between us, and that's down to something like 2k/year now, since there isn't as much worth driving to.

But still, I'm managing just about 45 MPG -- not exactly electric-car hyper-mileage, but not at all bad, especially given that a lot of that is city driving. I've forced myself to get into the gamification of the thing, maximizing how much I can do on the battery without letting the gas engine turn on, which requires a just-so touch on the gas pedal. (I'm also learning when not to do that, on the grounds of pissing off cars behind me more than it is worth.)

The Prius is still a lovely car, although it is definitely a computer on wheels. I spent 15 minutes figuring out how to get it to open all four doors when I touch the driver's-side handle (which involves holding both buttons on the keyfob), and am still figuring out how I prefer to play music in there. At least for now, I'm given up on trying to use my old iPod in it -- while it is likely that I could have someone mess with the hardware to expose the Aux jack, that's not going to happen soon. Still, being able to turn on the car and have it automatically start playing music (or my current book) from my phone is delightful.

Ten Years

Jan. 20th, 2021 03:36 pm
jducoeur: (Default)

For most people I know, today is a day of celebration -- or at least, of breathing a sigh of relief at a particularly important turning of the page.

For me, it's a bit more bittersweet. I just came from the cemetery.

Mind, my life is good -- I've been unreasonably lucky to find love again, and for all that the past few years have offended the hell out of me, I can't say they've done me much personal harm, knock on wood.

But still, I do miss her...

jducoeur: (Default)

Arisia 2021 is now done. A bit of quick braindump of what I've spent the past four months focused on. Forgive me if this isn't very organized -- I'm very tired, but want to get it written down while it's front of mind, before I get distracted by other things.

In late August, I was approached to head the new "Remote" division for Arisia -- basically, be responsible for creating this year's virtual convention. (V-con, for short.) We spent a couple of weeks figuring out what that meant, but by early September I had accepted.

We decided that Remote would be responsible for the infrastructure side of things: we would build the website and set up the technology. The Tech division would do the on-the-ground running of individual sessions, and each division would do at least a variation of what they normally did.

In practice, I started thinking about it as creating a little software startup. I meant that as kind of a joke; I had no idea how true it would turn out to be. After spending most of my professional career working for "startups" (loosely defined), this turned out to be My Startup Experience in many ways, both good and bad.


Let's talk about the good first, starting with my staff.

I got staggeringly lucky, from very early on, in recruiting. It's a standard truism that a startup needs a "rockstar" team, and through sheer luck I wound up with one.

I'll first call out Raven for kudos. One of the things we did that was very, very different from most v-cons was to prioritize UX (User Experience) design. I advertised for a UX Designer, and Raven -- a very experienced one -- was the first person I hired. She made sure that we were thinking about the users first, and the technology second, and the result was a better experience than most.

Gail should also be highlighted. She came in fairly early as the frontend lead, complimenting my backend skills; later on, she took lead on the Discord side of the project, so I could focus on Zoom and the other integrations. In the last two months of the project, she wound up spending nearly as much time on Remote as I did, while simultaneously being the head of the Gaming division. (I suspect she was the single hardest-working member of the convention.)

Add to that, we had Em (a more junior but enormously disciplined and diligent UX Designer), Erika (as our UI Designer and Artist), Chris (Gail's right-hand on the frontend side, who did most of the work to take the UX/UI designs and turn them into code), and Deborah (who dealt with most of the thankless IT jobs so that we actually had things like a server and a database). Oh, and Gail's Mom, who I still haven't actually met, but who volunteered to do a ton of data-entry for the divisions that needed it.

All told, it was a software startup in every important respect: the team was the right size, folks worked together well, everybody was thoroughly professional and we generally worked together well. There were some debates, even some serious arguments, but overall I think it was a pretty healthy team, better than many I've worked with in my career.


The technology itself -- well, let's just say we got ambitious. V-cons have mostly colored within the lines of what you can easily do with the major tools like Zoom, using them in their standard consumer configurations. Folks have tweaked settings and stuff, but not many have tried to really push the boundaries.

I said (perhaps unwisely), "Hey, we've got four months -- surely we can do better". I basically set a mandate to the UX team of figuring out what we wanted this to do, and let me and Gail figure out how to do it. All of the glorious and terrible aspects of this project flowed from that.

The thing that was really different about Virtual Arisia (as it eventually became known) was that it was tightly integrated. The website tried to pull Zoom, Discord, Convention Master (the very old and rather clunky third-party commercial product that we use for Registration) and Zambia (the open-source scheduling software that originally sprang from Arisia and is now used by other conventions) together into something that I can't call "seamless", but at least tried to hide some of those seams. (The techies should take note: Zoom actually has pretty good APIs, and you can automate things enormously if you try.)

In particular, Arisia turned out to be very different because we the convention is very safety-focused: we try to create an environment that is relatively free from crashers and abusers. That meant that authentication was really important: you got into everything via your Arisia registration, and everything else flowed from there.

One downside was that that surprised the snot out of many people. We were doing things like creating Zoom meetings on-demand when the sessions were starting, and providing links to them directly in the schedule (redirected through the website so we could enforce security). That mostly worked well, but folks were enormously confused that we weren't doing things like emailing piles of Zoom links around. Overall, I thought our approach was good, but we didn't realize that we needed to do much more to highlight that this was not going to work the way consumer Zoom does.


More on the downside, we committed a raft of classic startup mistakes. We committed to too many features, with the result that our attention was too split, and the task got monumental. In the end, we managed to get most of it working, including pretty much all of the mission-critical stuff, but we were sadly unable to get to some of the more fun bits, and there were some corners cut under the hood that kept me up at night. I knew of several things that could have gone horribly wrong; we were fortunate that none of them did.

The most startup-y thing was that our deadline was almost impossibly tight, and as rigid as could be: we knew that, this past Friday, a thousand or so people were going to show up expecting a convention. As a result, I know that I worked about 250 hours over the past three weeks, about a hundred of that on my dayjob and the rest on Arisia -- Gail may have worked even more than that, and everyone on the team was tooling in the hardest possible way. It was the hardest I've worked in my life, and I'm somewhat angry with myself about it: I teach Agile Development processes specifically to avoid that, and I'm chagrined that I fell into the trap.

Similarly, we were flying without a net. The only real test harness we had was some unit tests from Chris; there was no automated testing at all on my side. It says a lot about the professionalism and skill of the team that the whole thing didn't completely crash and burn on Friday.

As it was, the first 24 hours were seriously rocky. It started okay, but things started getting confused and meeting-management largely melted down for Friday, forcing Tech and Programming to scramble and come up with backup plans for getting the Zoom links to people. That worked, but it required a lot of manual labor that I had been specifically trying to avoid.

By mid-Saturday, things were settling down and mostly working right from an attendee POV; by Sunday, things were actually stable and working more or less exactly as designed. (Suffice it to say, Sunday was when I got to stop programming for 16 hours a day and actually start mostly attending the convention.) Which underscores what happened: the convention itself was essentially the first real alpha-test of this software, and we got what we deserved.

The moral of the story is a familiar one to any experienced software engineer, that Agile processes exist for a reason. Stay focused on getting things done a few features at a time, in priority order, fight scope creep, and Test, Test, Test. We pulled it off, but only by the skin of our teeth.


All that said: Arisia happened, and it was pretty damned great. It was of course different from an in-person convention, and that lack of presence hurt. But nearly all of what you expect from Arisia was there -- not just the programming and events and artists and dealers, but most importantly the sense of community. (I didn't appreciate until we were really in it just how important and central Discord would be to the experience.) It was fun, and that's not a small thing.

Yes, the entire thing is open-source -- you can find the repo here. I'm pretty sure that no other convention will be able to just take this software and run it -- it is very specific to Arisia 2021 -- but I strongly encourage folks to dig though it, adapt it, turn parts into libraries, strip it for parts, and so on. (It would be delightful if somebody was motivated to evolve this into a more genuinely reusable platform: it would take a lot of refactoring and evolution, but the seeds are here.) Questions are warmly welcomed, and I'm planning on writing a bunch of documentation in the coming weeks.

So -- that was the end of 2020 and the beginning 2021 for me. Now I get to refocus on other things (not least, getting serious about Querki again for the first time in ages), which will be nice. But this was a win, and a much-needed one: I'm quite proud of what the team accomplished, and I hope it inspires others to take this Virtual Convention thing seriously, and ask what sort of experience you would like, and how to get there...

jducoeur: (Default)

Not sure I've mentioned it here (it was a few weeks ago), but after something of an epic process, Kate and I have a new car. Let's talk a little about the good and bad.

tl;dr -- unsurprisingly, it is still the case that Toyota makes good cars and terrible dealerships. We're going to do a bit of name-and-shame here.

Good: The Car

The car is a Prius: we've known for a fair while that that was what we were going to get. At this point, for city folk like us, at least a hybrid is the responsible thing to do, but a plug-in doesn't look like it makes sense for us. (Installing the plug at home wouldn't be simple, since we live in a tiny condo complex, and all reviews say to only get the Prius Prime if you have a plug: otherwise, the added weight and bulk is a net negative.)

I quite like the car. Yes, it's basically a computer on wheels, and the complete lack of a key worries me slightly, but on a day-to-day basis it's lovely to be able to just walk up to the car, open the door, push the button to start it, and have music start playing from my phone -- it's a lower-friction experience than any I've had before.

The XLE is full of extras that we sort of rolled our eyes at, and some of them are a bit annoying. It is flat-out impossible to get into our driveway without the car freaking out and beeping frantically, sure that I am going to crash into something, because our driveway is just that narrow. OTOH, as we get past the Solstice, I am finding that the heated steering wheel and seats are a joy that I never previously knew I needed.

I'm still getting used to not having quite the oomph I'm used to in the old Honda, but that's largely by choice: the Prius does a fine job of gamifying mileage, and I'm willing to play along, leaving Power Mode turned off. I'm gradually building my reflexes to push the pedal more when I actually need to kick in the gas engine to get moving quickly, and when I can just ease my way along on the battery. (Just did an out-and-about to the suburbs and got around 58MPG -- I'm inordinately proud of that.)

My only complaint is that the XLE model lacks an AUX input, and it turns out that trying to run my trusty old iPod Classic (the device with the best UX in all of tech history, and a mammoth 160GB hard drive) through the USB port just doesn't work right: there's no way to do so and be able to use the iPod's own controls. And I'm disappointed to find that Android Auto doesn't work over Wifi -- I have to physically plug the thing in in order to use its maps, which is a nuisance and risks leaving my phone in the car. So all that massive computer power isn't entirely a net positive: in some ways, it's less flexible than the cobbled-together approach I've been using in our old car.

But overall, it's fun to drive, and a pleasant experience.

Bad: Two out of Three Toyota Dealers

The process of getting the car, OTOH, was by no means pleasant.

Part One: Watertown

Let's start with the worst of the bunch. We originally planned on buying the car from Watertown Toyota, and this should have been an easy sale. We knew precisely which models we wanted to take a look at (the LE, XLE and Limited versions of the normal Prius, and a Prime). We called them in advance, made an appointment, told them exactly what we wanted, and expected a smooth experience. Not so much.

When we got there, we were paired with an associate who I gradually came to realize knew far less about these cars than I did: more than once, we asked a question that shouldn't have been very hard, and he had to duck away for ten minutes to ask someone more experienced.

Worse, it became clear that they had paid no attention to what we said in setting up the appointment -- the cars we wanted to look at weren't on the lot. Twice, he had to leave us for almost half an hour to go to "The Annex" to get the right model. During those times, while we were clearly growing impatient (eventually furious), nobody else even came over to check on us, despite there being an entire cluster of associates sitting around chatting 20 feet away.

We had expected an efficient half-hour stop in, to try a short test drive and look at a few models. After two hours of wasted time (our associate had abandoned us again twenty minutes earlier), we gave up and stormed out.

I should be clear: I don't blame the associate, but I enormously blame Watertown Toyota -- he was clearly completely undertrained, and their handling of customers is inexcusably bad. I give it my strongest thumbs-down, for utterly incompetent customer service.

Part Two: Herb Chambers

I was practically blind with rage at this point, and ready to just go home, but Kate pointed out that Herb Chambers was just down the road a few miles. So we decided to just drop in on them and see what happened.

This was night and day a better experience. We were handed to one of the experienced sales managers -- he took us down to their underground lot, and talked with us as we poked around a few models. Then we came upstairs, and spent half an hour talking details. Unlike the situation in Watertown, he knew his stuff quite well: what the availability situation looked like (tight), what sort of pricing we might be able to get (not too much discount, because tight), what the expansion packages were, and so on.

We came out of that meeting much happier, and quite frankly, the sale was theirs to lose. Unfortunately, they lost it.

We were looking for a front-wheel drive model: I don't have anything against all-wheel-drive, but I'm mostly city driving under undemanding circumstances, and the AWD is overkill for our needs, so I wasn't willing to pay extra for it. So Kate called a few days later, ordered a front-wheel-drive car, gave them her credit card, and was told that it should be ready in a few weeks.

And we waited. And waited. And waited.

After 5-6 weeks, Kate called them back to see where our car was. The associate we had been assigned to (not the sales manager we had originally talked to), said basically, "Oh, we can't get a front-wheel-drive car."

That was it. No explanation for why they couldn't get us a new-model-year car that Toyota was advertising on their website. No apology for wasting our time. Not even telling us whether or not they had charged our credit card for the deposit. Just a factual "no", and that was it.

So this time, it was Kate's turn to have steam coming out of her ears. (Which happens less often than it does with me -- I've rarely seen her so pissed off.) She went online, and started looking for anybody more competent.

Part Three: Lexington Toyota

She wound up in an email conversation with a salesman from Lexington Toyota, who was, finally, actually attentive and competent. He got into the details of what was going on, which is that Toyota apparently just decided that people in the Northeast shouldn't use front-wheel-drive cars, and doesn't ship them here any more.

(Mind, they don't say that anywhere customer-facing, as far as we can tell. So I'm going to give a big black mark to Toyota Corporate as well, for being responsible for a good bit of this fuckup.)

Anyway, he found a front-wheel drive model in CT and offered to have it brought up for us, but it wasn't the right color, and he also said that he could just arrange the incentives so that the AWD version wouldn't cost much more than the front-wheel would have in the first place. And he could get an AWD that was the right model and the right color (bright shiny blue -- Kate quite loves it, and it's easy to find in parking lots) for us quickly.

The result was that we finally got the experience we had been looking for: someone who efficiently got us what we wanted, and got the whole sale done in less than an hour once we came down to the dealership. We drove away with a new car in far less time than the guy at Watertown had spent getting us basically nothing.

So to summarize: out of this little two-month epic, the dealership that proved itself competent, friendly and efficient was Lexington Toyota. They get a recommendation; Herb Chambers came close but missed; and I'm never going into Watertown Toyota again.

jducoeur: (Default)

So -- no shit, there we were, trying to figure out what to do about Thanksgiving, when we can't visit relatives nor attend the enormous dinner with friends that we usually do nowadays. Cooking a full T-day dinner for the two of us is a bit more work than I am usually up for, and Kate (mostly) doesn't cook. But not having a good spread on Thanksgiving would make me sad.

Enter Field and Vine. Kate and I did some hunting around places that would do most of the work for us, and they had the menu that was the best blend of "sounds like Thanksgiving" while still sounding interesting.

tl;dr: wow, that was great.

We picked it up yesterday: a box full of things to put in the oven and on the stovetop, with instructions for each one. Everything except the chicken was just reheating (carefully calibrated so that it could all go into the same 375-degree oven), and even the chicken was already brined, spiced, and sitting on the bed of herbs to cook it on.

We had:

  • A half-chicken as the main course. On the one hand, it's just chicken; OTOH, that was really good chicken.
  • A smoked confit turkey leg, to satisfy my sense that this was really Thanksgiving.
  • Buttery mashed potatoes, with a chive-heavy creme fraiche to mix in at-table.
  • Andouille sausage stuffing.
  • Buttery-soft roasted carrots, with a brown-butter yogurt sauce and fried sage to put on top.
  • Truffle-infused gravy.

Yum. It was a high-end-restaurant-grade meal, for which we only paid about a hundred bucks -- and given that we only ate about half of it (so we're getting another dinner out of it), even a good price. Filled the oven and used a bunch of pots for the reheating, but in the grand scheme of things it was really easy.

(No, we didn't buy dessert. It's the holidays, which means we actually have an excuse for my chocolate-bottomed pecan pie.)

So: big thumbs up to Field and Vine for rescuing Thanksgiving, and I hope they do this again in future years...

Trompies

Oct. 17th, 2020 04:56 pm
jducoeur: (Default)

Given the lovely weather (slightly cool, sunny, overall what I want out of October), today we wandered out to the Middlesex Fells Reservation for a gentle hike. We wound up doing the Crystal Springs and Whip Hill Road Loop -- officially "Easy" on AllTrails (having discovered in the Berkshires that their definition of "Moderate" can be pretty challenging for us), but at the "occasionally clambering up rocks" level of Easy, rather than the "gentle walk through the forest" level.

Really a fine way to spend an hour or so -- the loop is a couple of miles (and a couple hundred feet elevation), which we supplemented by a bit of extra loop to fill out our available time. It wasn't really empty (unsurprising on a nice Saturday), but there were few enough people that we could go maskless most of the time, and just put them on when we saw people approaching.

Recommended for city folks who are looking for a chance to get outside without hordes of people around, if you are up for some non-trivial but not terribly hard ups and downs and uneven terrain...

jducoeur: (Default)

Life has been so busy that I've been totally neglecting posting here, and there is a huge backlog of Things I'd Like To Talk About Here. I'm sure that many will get neglected, but hopefully I can knock a few out this weekend.

First, though: Kate and I actually got a vacation in, a few weeks ago. The original plan (for the family to go to Italy this summer) got scragged for obvious reasons, so we started thinking about how to get something that would feel like a good vacation, while not causing quarantine headaches. The right compromise, we decided, was the Berkshires.


We rented an excessively-large but gorgeous house (I just posted photos to Instagram), set on a really steep hill. Like, the driveway is steep enough (and long enough) that the handyman who came by one day admitted that, when he has to plow it, he sometimes winds up just praying that the berm at the bottom is deep enough to stop his truck. Like, the third floor of the house is below the road -- so they built a turret on top of the house, and a bridge from that out to the hillside path, where it is only twenty more feet up to the road. It's wild. If you ever want to stay in Great Barrington, and can afford something a little pricey, I can recommend it.


The point of going to the Berkshires was, of course, hiking -- while Kate and I aren't in remotely the kind of shape that my brother (the mountain climber) is, we do 4-5 mile hikes on easier trails routinely, so we looked forward to some fun there.

We succumbed to a bit of hubris, and started out trying to climb Mount Greylock, the highest point in MA. By mountain standards it's pretty modest, but it's still a mountain, and the trail we were on was very steep by our standards: no clambering up huge rocks, but at points it was a good 30+% incline, and the whole thing was a steady uphill for almost 3 miles.

I figure we got more than halfway along, and more like 2/3 of the way up (something over 1.5 miles and 1500-2000 feet of elevation) before Kate's lungs noped out -- between the exertion, the humidity (it was a pretty damp day for September) and the altitude, it was turning into a problem. And my heart was hammering hard enough that I had no objections to stopping: it was probably the single hardest physical exercise we've ever tried together, and the hardest I've done, period, in some years.

It was comforting to then drive to the summit, and realize that the 2.7 mile climb we had tried corresponded to about 8 miles of pretty steep road.

Lesson to myself: climbing up is hard; climbing down isn't nearly as hard, but it is sometimes terrifying. I eventually realized that my old fighting/fencing habits were helpful here -- when I dropped into a lower, wider stance, I was way more secure on the way down. (My thighs did give me hell the next day, though.)

Later in the week, we did a longer but milder hike, all the way around Bear Mountain pond, with a mile or so detour up the Appalachian Trail. The latter bit was back into Really Steep, but not nearly as ambitiously long as Greylock had been. That was a really lovely day out, highly recommended and not so hard.


Us being us, we Foodied our way around greater Great Barrington, and were not disappointed. We hit a pizzeria (Baba Louie's), an Indian restaurant (Aroma Bar and Grill), a relatively authentic Mexican restaurant (Xicohtencatl), and a susherie (Bizen) -- all were innovative and high-quality enough that they wouldn't be at all out of place in Davis Square. Given the circumstances, we did everything take-out at the house, but it all traveled decently well.

The place we kept coming back to, though, was Patisserie Lenox -- the pastries and macarons were our desserts pretty much every night, and the sandwiches we got for sidewalk lunch our last day there were very tasty.


Overall, it was a beautiful five days (even with one day that got somewhat washed out due to rain). It was the very end of September -- not yet what I think of as leaf-peeping season here, but at the higher elevation there it was getting close to peak, so it was utterly beautiful, a chance to get away from the city and soak up some nature for a little while. Not enough to entirely relax me, but at least improved things to the point where I no longer felt like I was going to imminently explode from the ambient stress...

jducoeur: (Default)

Yeah, not so much. The chills hit around when I went to bed, and I am still feeling astonishingly craptastic now. I am giving myself a rare sick day from work. (Yes, I'm still checking Slack and email occasionally, but that's about it.)

Could be worse: it's still not nearly as bad as getting the actual flu. Really, it's remarkably like Day 3 of the flu -- remarkably exhausted and brain-dead, but I'm actually capable of getting out of my chair, and even standing for ten whole minutes.

And on the bright side, I can't do any of my high-stress projects today, so I'm going to "enjoy" just sitting and reading comic books, which I haven't done for more than an hour in who-knows-how-long...

jducoeur: (Default)

Bleah -- I knew intellectually that a flu shot could sometimes cause flu-like symptoms, but this is the first time I've been hit by that. Still a good idea to have gotten it, but...

(ETA: just to head off anyone panicking -- flu and covid have very different symptoms. Body aches, exhaustion, sniffliness; no fever, cough, problems smelling or anything like that -- it's much more flu-y, and is totally plausible nine hours after the shot. It will hopefully be gone in the morning.)

jducoeur: (Default)

I've spent today trying not to be depressed about the news by making one last large donation to the presidential and senatorial funds, and otherwise working on Arisia. Which reminds me that I've been remiss in my diarizing.

So -- a few weeks ago, I was invited to become the Div Head for the new Arisia Remote Conference division. Now that we are confident that (a) Arisia will be entirely online next year and (b) Marriott Corp isn't going to sue us for not using the hotel, that's starting to seriously ramp up.

Basically, I'm in charge of making Arisia as a 100% virtual convention possible. The new division will be basically in charge of the online infrastructure, working with all the other divisions to produce the best experience we can.

In principle, there's no longer anything revolutionary about that. Ever since the pandemic hit and conferences starting moving online (starting with NE Scala, which we turned into an online conference on 48 hours' notice), there have been many proofs of concept -- we know this can be done.

That said, we have a lot more than 48 hours here: we've got four months, enough time to do this right. Some v-cons have been better, some worse, but I haven't heard of any that were really excellent yet, so I think there's still a lot of room for learning and experimentation.

Which is where y'all come in.

First of all, I need help with this. Lots and lots of help. I need IT/Ops help (Ops is not my specialty), I need some adventurous programmers who are interested in helping with this new platform I'm going to be building, I need web designers to make this pretty, I need UX designers to make it usable -- heck, I could use a good project manager so that I don't have to do all that myself. If you'd been interested in getting involved with the project, drop me a line.

Second, your thoughts would be welcome. If you've been to any online conferences or conventions this year, tell me what you thought worked, and what didn't. If you have crazy ideas for how to do things better, talk to me. While we're constrained by available time and labor, I am totally hoping to be able to do some Mad Science here, and Show Them All How It's Done. (Bwahahaha, but seriously -- I think there are a lot of ways we can improve on the state of the art, and produce some great open-source stuff.)

The goal is to not just have an adequate Arisia this year, but to have a great one -- to help folks come together and have a really good time. If you're interested in joining in on that, or even just have ideas, I'd love to hear from you, in comments or privately.

jducoeur: (Default)

Before I forget, a bit of name-and-shame:

No shit, there we were, at Watertown Toyota a couple of weeks ago. We've pretty much decided that it's time to get a new car -- while the old one still drives okay (and has some resale value), it's ten years old and was pretty bottom-of-the-line to begin with. We've been talking about a Prius for years now, and decided sometime back that this was the year when we were going to upgrade.

I'd done my research, so Kate called ahead, made an appointment, and specifically listed the three models that we wanted to look at hands-on.

So we get there, get assigned a salesperson, and it quickly becomes apparent that:

  • Despite claiming to have listened to her, nobody at the shop had actually prepared for our arrival in any way.
  • The salesman had absolutely no idea what he was doing -- indeed, he clearly knew less about these cars than I did from an hour of online research. So he kept disappearing to pass questions on.
  • Only one of those models was even on the lot, so he kept having to run off for long periods to "the annex" to fetch cars.

During the second instance of the latter, after he'd left us twiddling our thumbs for 15-20 minutes (and we had been there for 1.5 hours of what had been planned as a half-hour visit), we finally gave up and left. Only as we were storming out the door did anybody else show the slightest interest in talking to us.

The most generous interpretation of the situation was that the salesman was brand-new. But even that doesn't really excuse it, because he was clearly almost completely untrained. So while I'm willing to forgive the salesman a little, I'm not willing to forgive the shop.

And seriously: this was a nearly-guaranteed sale. We weren't going to buy on-the-spot, mostly because I wanted to mull it over between the three interesting models, but we were all prepared to write a check in the next week or two. As it was, I left with steam pouring out of my ears, vowing never to enter the place again.

The day was salvaged by Kate pointing out that Herb Chambers Toyota was just down the road a bit. So we walked in unannounced; got assigned a salesman instantly; he immediately took us down to the lot to look at the models we wanted; he was able to speak intelligently about the various options and tradeoffs; and he was able to discuss the availability situation. (Which turns out to be pretty tight: manufacturing has been hit by the crisis, and a lot of people are buying cars right now because they don't want to take the T.) Guess where we're probably going to buy from?

So take this as an implicit side-by-side review of two dealerships. Strictly anecdotal, but wow, the difference was striking...

Profile

jducoeur: (Default)
jducoeur

June 2025

S M T W T F S
12 34567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags