jducoeur

Time for that end-of-year tradition, taking stock of where I am now. This is kind of a diary entry, but I've been posting infrequently enough that much of it is probably news to most folks. This will be a pretty long braindump, but hopefully informative. Comments welcome -- it sometimes feels a little lonely around here nowadays.

Job

Not to bury the lede: remember my ruminations last month about how I wasn't fitting into Big Corporate Life perfectly? When I wrote that, I already knew I was on my way out the door. My manager knew, but she asked me not to announce it until four weeks out, lest I be too much of a lame duck for too long. (And she was right: while I got a colossal amount done those last few weeks, it wasn't easy to maintain motivation.)

Anyway, I'm no longer with Slack/Salesforce. My last day of work was the 18th, and my technical last day of employment is tomorrow -- I'm starting to pack up my laptop to ship it back.

It's kind of a pity: Slack was a pretty great company, and my team are uniformly great folks. But I just wasn't being as effective as either I or the company wanted me to be, mostly because succeeding at a senior level in a really large company calls for different skills than doing so at a small company, and those aren't skills I'm all that practiced in.

(I was great at the programming, of course. But once you're up to a really senior level half the job is about communication, and that's just plain harder at a really big firm.)

It's not entirely tragic -- Slack is slowly getting more deeply absorbed into Salesforce, and necessarily becoming more corporate in the process, which isn't really my ideal world.

And Salesforce is absolutely all-in on AI ("Agentforce" is the hot buzzword these days) -- I'm by no means as anti-AI as many of my friends, but I'm also not especially passionate about it. IMO the current situation is very, very similar to the Dotcom Bubble, circa 1999. I believe there's some real potential, and some companies will hit very big, but most are over-committing, there's an enormous amount of Dumb Money chasing anything with the word "AI" in its pitch, and I believe we're likely to see a massive crash in the next few years, with similarly huge layoffs. Having lived through the last big bubble, I don't necessarily need to focus excessively on this one.

Anyway, I'm going to be in the job market again in a couple of months, looking for a smaller company (ideally an early-stage startup) that is looking for a strong backend tech lead and preferably open to pure-FP Scala as its stack. (Happy to blather about why I firmly believe it's the best current stack for anybody who is actually serious about building something that will scale well.)

But first...

Sabbatical

It's been 12 years since I last took a break, and I could use a little time to get my head together and recover from the burnout. So I'm officially setting Q1 aside as a sabbatical.

That's specifically not a vacation, mind. Kate is still working full-time, and it would (quite reasonably) annoy the snot out of her if I was just sitting on my ass all day.

But I'm going to take the time to focus on the many, many neglected personal projects that have built up. The list is as long as my arm (yes, there's a checklist), ranging from working on our overfilled basement to outlining some missing public documentation for Typelevel to getting our financial plans in order. (We're gradually approaching retirement, and I suspect there's a stock market crash coming in the middle of next year, so it's time for readjustments.)

Above all, the highest-priority project is getting Querki back on a decent footing. For complicated technical reasons, it is still running on an antique version of Scala, and its dependencies are unbelieveably out of date. It's time to pull the tablecloth out from under the running system, change the way it works under the hood, and get it to the point where I can begin seriously moving the project forward again. (In particular, get it to the point where developing it is fun again.)

Social

Part of the sabbatical, but worth calling out: even more than usual, I'm looking for opportunities to get together with my friends. That can be board games, dinners out, club activities, whatever -- the point is to reconnect socially, because I've been feeling a measure of loneliness lately, and that's likely to get worse with the cold weather.

Of course, we're also about to start Crazy Season -- the period when a lot of High Impact Social happens in quick succession. (Arisia, Birka, Intercon, etc) But that's not the same thing: while I love those huge events, I often find myself lost in the crowd, so they don't necessarily alleviate the loneliness. So smaller get-togethers are still super-important.

Socials

And speaking of "social", it's worth reviewing my current social media presence. People here aren't necessarily on all of these, but connecting is welcome if you are.

• Dreamwidth -- obviously, I'm still here to some degree, but also obviously I'm not posting as much. With the rise of microblogging, I've tended to focus my DW usage more for long-form posts, where I have more to say and am willing to spend the time thinking about what I'm going to say. Over the years I've become a bit less comfortable posting brief hot takes and links here; those are winding up in the places below.
• Mastodon has become my primary home for the time being, at https://social.coop/@jducoeur. I post way more frequently there: retooting multiple times a day on average, and tooting my own thoughts pretty often. I don't know if it's ever going to be the biggest social media outlet, but IMO it's the healthiest. I read a lot of feeds there (enough that I can't keep up with all of them), and I'm happy to connect to folks there. (And if you'd like help getting started there, I'm happy to provide advice.)
• I have two accounts on Bluesky. My "real" Bluesky account is https://bsky.app/profile/jducoeur.bsky.social, but that's mostly reposts -- I rarely do main posts there. More important is the Bluesky bridge of my Mastodon account, which copies all of my Mastodon posts -- if you are only on Bluesky and want to follow me, that's the one that is more worth connecting to. Note that I only read Bluesky very erratically: since I mainly read Mastodon, I primarily follow accounts that are bridged to there, checking in on Bluesky itself mainly when I'm out and reading on my phone.
• Quite recently, I set myself up on Bookwyrm, which is basically the Fediverse version of Goodreads, at https://bookwyrm.social/user/jducoeur. That's still an experiment, but I'm trying to at least record, and often review or comment on, the interesting graphic novels and audiobooks I'm reading. (I read relatively little text these days, but Libro.fm has enabled me to get back into audiobooks without feeding the voracious maw of Amazon and its abuses.)
• Finally, it's worth noting that I'm on LinkedIn at (as usual) jducoeur. I do not follow the feed there (I find the idea of LI as a social network just daft), but I do use it as my Rolodex. With me planning to look for a job in a couple of months that's going to become more important, so I encourage folks who know me reasonably well to link to me there.

Health

Finally, if I'm going to do an honest braindump of my current state, it's worth talking a little about health.

I'm approaching a Big Round Birthday, and while there's a measure of "yay" to that, it's also faintly depressing. I'm feeling my age, and beginning to grapple with why and what to do about that. I think there's going to be another big post (possibly within the next few days) on that topic.

More immediately, I am slowly being driven spare by reflux issues.

I've had problems with reflux my entire adult life, mind, starting shortly after college. Esophageal reflux made me absolutely nuts for the better part of ten years, thinking something was deeply wrong with me, until I got a new doctor with a clue who realized what the problem was and pointed me in the direction of Omeprazole. I've been on and off of that ever since, which isn't great, but at least it was under control.

But ever since my last bout of Covid (just about a year ago now), I've been fighting laryngeal reflux, which is new for me. (Aside from a few months of it last year, after my previous Covid, which is why I have a nasty suspicion of a connection.) The symptoms are totally different: burping, a bit of a cough, some raspiness in my voice, sometimes "cottonmouth" and/or a touch of sore throat in the morning. It's just inconvenient, rather than painful, but it's not a great thing to have ongoing for long periods -- it's undoubtedly doing subtle long-term damage.

Nothing has yet succeeded in controlling that. The Omeprazole keeps the acid from eating away at my innards too much, but clearly haven't fixed the underlying problem. I picked up a Medcline pillow a while back, but it isn't obvious that it's helping all that much, and my sleep with it is only so-so.

So that's a constant, low-level stressor. And just to add to that, there is some confusion, because the problem seems to lessen when I travel, and I can't figure out why: on the road I tend to be dealing with worse pillows and mattresses, and not obviously any better foods. It's a puzzle, and distracting to say the least.

Finally, yes, I'm still on Ozempic, although still at a minimal dose. I'll likely raise that a notch at some point, to knock myself down out of the pre-diabetic range and get my weight back to something a bit more appropriate, but I'd love to fix the reflux first, before making more changes.

Conclusion

So overall, life is decent, but not perfect -- nothing awful, but lots of stuff to grapple with and try to improve.

How are you all doing? Please feel free to opine about any of the above -- conversation is what makes DW most fun, and I've monologued enough here...

Got back from Pennsic on Sunday -- there may be some diary entries about it over time. Suffice it to say, despite sub-optimal weather, it was a generally good time.

(And no, Hurricane Debby wasn't relevant. A lot of folks cut and ran before the remnants got to us, but it was basically a non-event for those of us who stuck it out: something like a tenth of an inch of rain, and no wind to speak of. The serious storm was War Week Tuesday, several days before that -- we got slammed by something like an inch of rain, including some torrential downpours. Blochleven was largely fine -- we have good drainage so it was just a bit muddy -- but some of the Serengeti was underwater. But I digress...)

The day worth mentioning, though, was Middle Friday, when I got to the War.

I was pretty stressed-out to begin with: the predictions for the day said it might rain, so I arrived in a mild panic, getting my pavilion set up as quickly as possible, and all that probably didn't help.

Still and all, once I was fully settled in at around 2pm, I was a bit surprised to notice that I was feeling noticeably faint. It's not the first time that's ever happened, but full-on "wow, am I in danger of passing out?" faintness -- that's pretty new.

I figured I was probably a bit dehydrated, so I pushed liquids hard over the next few hours -- something like a quart of water, a pint of tea, a pint of Gatorade, around half a gallon total. Still, by 5pm I was wandering around Downtown Pennsic and still having distinct "whiteout" moments: never quite feeling like I was going to keel over, but definitely less steady than I should be. And my heart rate (according to my watch) was stuck at around 115-120 -- not a scary level, but a fair ways above my baseline 88.

I dithered about it for a fair while: I'm prone to mild hypochondria, and it was just weird -- I'm normally fairly decent with moderate heat during the day. (I require cool to sleep, but I commonly let my work space get to the mid-80s.) But after the fourth or fifth go-round of feeling faint, I let my feet lead me into the EMT building.

The Pennsic EMTs were solidly friendly and professional throughout -- kudos to them. They noted everything I was saying, brought me into one of their improvised wards, and ran a battery of tests. The EKG was fine (always comforting), but the heartrate was indeed elevated. Most significantly, my blood pressure had crashed to 87/52 lying down.

(Yes, I have a lot of friends to whom that's a normal Tuesday. But it's the lowest I've ever seen in myself, a good ten points below what I normally think of as my "yay!" normal, and explained the faintness nicely.)

Their very-reasonable conclusion was that, despite my attempts at oral hydration, I was pretty dehydrated. We chatted about it, agreed to put in an IV, and over the next hour they proceeded to shove a solid two liters of saline into me before my BP and heart rate got back into the normal range.

So my Pennsic was spent pushing liquids hard, maybe more than I've ever done before. That was generally fine, aside from the need to get up and pee once or twice every night. (Which is significantly less convenient when it involves getting up, putting on shoes, untying the pavilion, and walking 30-40 yards in the dark to the porta-potty.) But I think that's my new normal when I'm out in continuous heat.

The EMTs were specifically unsurprised by this: I wasn't the first person they had seen reporting hydration challenges after starting Ozempic.

So the moral of the story is that this seems to just be a semi-common side-effect of the stuff. It isn't so severe as to turn me off of it (I was basically fine for the rest of the War, once I got super-serious about drinking water at every opportunity), but it's worth being aware of if you're on it or considering it.

(Continued CW for weight and health and meds and such.)

Picking up from my last entry, which talked about what it was like going on Ozempic, this time let's talk about what it's like when it wears off.

I took my last dose a week ago Sunday, in the late afternoon. I'm trying to shift my schedule slightly, to work around holiday travel (and avoid needing to bring the precious vial through plane rides); it's early evening Monday, and I just took my next.

I woke up early Sunday morning, and found that I was hungry. That was kind of interesting, and drove home that I really hadn't been hungry for the past week. So at 6 1/2 days, the Ozempic was starting to wear off.

In general, yesterday continued to involve some hunger here and there, but it was today that it really set in. I was ferociously hungry today, almost startlingly so -- much hungrier, earlier in the day, than had been typical before starting on the Ozempic. And it's been getting worse over the course of the day.

On the plus side, yesterday I was able to constrain my eating pretty thoroughly: I was a bit hungry, but didn't have a lot of difficulty eating as if I wasn't. Which drives home one of the really interesting things -- the drug seems to make it easier to make good decisions. In a comment on my last entry, andrewducker remarked that there is anecdotal evidence that it seems to help with alcohol abuse, which doesn't make much sense physically, but does seem to line up with that odd way in which it's just easier to eat more sensibly while on it. (The just-informed-enough-to-be-dangerous layman in me suspects that the vagus nerve is going to turn out to have something to do with this.)

Today, I mostly continued that -- one of the real benefits is that it's quickly setting me in better habits than I had before -- but the hunger has been making it markedly harder. While I've eaten less than I was doing three weeks ago, it's definitely more than three days ago, and I'm still decidedly peckish.

Hopefully that will die down soon; I'm watching with some curiosity to see how long it takes to kick in, now that I'm more conscious of the effects.

But the moral of the story is that I now totally understand the reports that, if you go off semaglutide for any serious length of time, you'll gain all of the weight back. This stuff isn't addictive in the conventional sense, but I can already see how you wind up dependent on it.

Make no mistake: the benefits are quite serious. (While I'm still much too heavy, my weight is already lower than it's been any previous time this year.) But this is the perfect drug for the capitalist age -- one that (its benefits aside) if you're on it, you're on it permanently, and it's pretty important to stay on it: the perfect money-maker.

When last we left our hero, he had finally found out that his foot was, yes, broken, but Pennsic was still on the cards. Picking up from there...

So -- yeah, Pennsic. It happened, and it didn't suck.

The biggest challenge was that my foot had mostly stopped hurting a few days before I left for the War. That sounds lovely, but it put me squarely in the danger zone. As the podiatrist explained to me, when the foot stops hurting, that's when you are most likely to say, "Great!", start moving normally, and break it even worse.

So this was a War of forcing myself to take it easy -- easier than I've done since something like Pennsic 15. Avoiding the dance tent like the plague, because the temptation would be horribly strong. Walking only about five miles a day. (Which is maybe half my usual, and for the first time ever I actually made non-trivial use of the bus system.) Generally not being responsible for much.

It was slightly boring, but remarkably relaxing, and there is much to muse on there. (There is another post brewing, about my subsequent realization that I may be a wee bit overstretched.)

Anyway, herein ensues my traditional stream-of-consciousness wanderings about last week. This will be long, covering lots of topics, but hopefully it's a bit interesting.

By my best guess, it's been eight years since I was last at Pennsic. That isn't for any dramatically good reason. Mostly, it's half that traveling on my own isn't as much fun (to put it mildly, Pennsic isn't Kate's bag), and half that I acquired a CPAP in 2014, and camping with the damned thing sounded like too much effort.

That latter excuse got firmly torpedoed by the release of the first really great CPAP battery I've ever seen. None of this farting around with heavy deep-cycle marine batteries: this thing is only four pounds, with a convenient carrying handle, and provides about five full nights of power.

It achieves this by specialization. It is for CPAPs, and nothing else. It comes with direct DC power cables for a bunch of major CPAP models, and powers them very efficiently -- each one at the correct voltage. And it recharges ferociously fast: as far as I can tell, the thing draws up to 24 amps if you'll give it that, so it recharges faster than my cell phone.

I haven't actually pushed it to five nights, because I haven't had to. But after three, it claims to be at about 50% and still going strong.

Caveat: it's persnickety, and you have to be careful. Turn down the power usage on the CPAP (turn off humidifier and such), and turn the battery off when you're not using it. But used properly, it's a marvel, and way easier than I was expecting.

The War itself has changed less than I had expected in eight years. Lots of little things have changed or moved, but mostly everything was where I expected.

The biggest change was to Lochleven's encampment. We've been in E18 -- nearly the "lower right" corner of Pennsic -- since time immemorial. (See map.) But we've talked about moving for a long time (E18 is a fun location, but it's muddy and somewhat noisy), and everyone decided that this was the year for an experiment.

So we moved to B03 -- the extreme "upper left" corner of Pennsic. (Get to Bannockburn, at the foot of Mount Eislinn, turn left, and go all the way to the end: we were the second-to-last encampment.) From our old site to the new is somewhere between one and two miles by road.

I have mixed feelings about it. The downside is that it's a much less exciting neighborhood, and considerably further from most of the folks I hang out with. And the quiet is just plain weird -- for me, going to sleep to the sound of distant drums from the Bog is part of the Pennsic experience.

OTOH, it's pretty convenient for the fighters, fencers and archers, who make up a substantial fraction of Lochleven. It's uphill (so far less muddy), has lots of high tree canopy that folks can camp under, and the Oversized Parking for my big rental van couldn't be more convenient.

So we'll see what we choose to do going forward. I expect a spirited discussion at Lochleven's winter household meeting.

Weather was pretty average. The annual Act of God -- a serious drownpour this time -- happened on middle Friday, so when I arrived on Saturday things were pretty soggy, and the air was soupy for the next several days. (Although not horribly hot, with highs in the 80s.) But things cleared midweek and steadily improved from there on, so the last several days were gorgeous: dry, clear and cool.

I got to see lots of folks, which is half the fun of the War. This included several people who I've previously only talked to via the Known World Discord (which I've been hanging out on a lot this year), as well as a bunch of friends I haven't seen in years. Most folks were doing well, but some not -- it was sobering to talk to at least one good friend whose life has been savaged by Long Covid, and has had a pretty crappy year as a result.

Covid was, of course, a recurring theme. While Pennsic had reasonable requirements (vaxx or test in order to enter; if you get sick, please leave immediately), Omicron laughs at such things, so there was a fair amount going around. One family from Lochleven had to leave early in War Week because of a positive test (although given the timing, I suspect they may have caught it before arriving); a couple of others tested positive after getting home.

So while I'm not panicked about it (Pennsic is mostly outdoors, and I wasn't interacting much face-to-face with those folks), I've spent this week mostly isolating and testing, to be on the safe side. Knock on wood, I still feel fine; assuming I still test positive tomorrow, I will cautiously figure that I escaped.

I sat through East Kingdom Court (of course -- this is me), and it was unusually good. Their Majesties have every bit as much style as I've been led to believe, and clearly believe that putting on a great show is part of the job, so Court was more fun than usual. (Any 3+ hour Court that can be described as "fun" is doing something right.)

Court was actually the other thing that tipped the scales and got me to attend the War: I knew that Thyra was getting her Pelican, and didn't want to miss that. (Really, pretty much everyone except her knew about it. The fact that they double-whammied her again helped make that possible -- as far as she knew, everyone was there for her husband's MoD.)

It was also lovely to see Emine (one of the friends I've made on Discord) get her AoA, and I wound up sitting with Hu Zhen and Matthias (also friends from there), so it made for an overall excellent experience.

There were other entertainments as well, of course. I did a modest number of classes -- highlights included a great survey of period cookbooks available in English, and a class on SCA philosophy taught via selections from Silverwing's Laws. I sat in on the bid meeting for the 2023 Known World Music and Dance Symposium. (June 29 - July 2 in Charlottesville, assuming it clears all the bureaucratic hurdles: I'm looking forward to it.) And I caught most of the Wolgemut Returns to Pennsic concert, which was every bit as much of a blast as I would expect: they always give great show, and it left me completely jazzed.

This was the year of The Crazy Plan, which I've been hypothesizing for years now.

Given:

• Me feeling slightly guilty about how much vacation I'm taking this summer;
• The sometimes difficulty of finding a place to recharge the CPAP;
• The desire to occasionally chill out in A/C and get a really good shower;

The plan was to rent a hotel room -- but not one to sleep in. After all, night time bardic circles are at least half the fun of Pennsic. No, the idea here was to head over to the hotel every couple of days, get that good shower, recharge everything and check my email.

On the one hand, that worked. OTOH, it wasn't really worth it. It cost a fair bundle even by my standards, and none of it was really necessary. Checking in at work was worthwhile, but could have been done by phone. The CPAP could probably be charged with an adequate solar array. And the in-camp shower is sufficient, if not luxurious. So I think that next year, I won't bother.

That said, getting a hotel room for the night on the way each direction was totally worthwhile, and helped make for a safer drive. And points to HGI, on the way home: they upgraded me to a King Suite with a mammoth jacuzzi tub, which was so the right thing after a morning of striking camp and seven hours on the road. They continue to be my hotel chain of choice.

Also worth noting: after many years of renting from Enterprise, this year entailed a switch to, of all things, U-Haul. Enterprise was unwilling to guarantee me a van with cruise control, and I was no way risking that drive on a still-slightly-broken foot without it. So we looked around, found that U-Haul does guarantee it, and you can do long-term round-trip rentals if you call. And they gave me a significantly better rate than Enterprise, to boot. ($900 for 11 days, including 1500 miles, tax, and the CDW -- not bad at all.) So we have a new winner there.

A great aspect that hadn't occurred to me was the "kids". Lochleven's camp has always been full of children underfoot, and when last I saw them they were mostly teenagers.

That was eight years ago.

Now, they're mostly 20-somethings, in college or graduated, and several of them came to Pennsic with their SOs. It was a blast getting to hang out with them.

Probably the biggest highlight of the War was the last night, which was absolutely Classic Lochleven. Everything "downtown" was pretty much shut down, so after dinner we lit a fire and started burning All The Wood.

We actually hadn't overbought this year, and went through the official firewood pretty quickly. So Becky started foraging in the wood we were camped under, finding rotten deadwood and tossing it on. This wasn't always easy, given that some of that deadwood was eight feet long, but she persevered, slowly feeding it in and building up an absolute lake of embers.

So we all sat around, roasting gigantic marshmallows. (Which was great in and of itself -- there's an art to toasting it just right, peeling off and eating the outer browned layer, and then repeating with the innards.) And things quickly turned to song.

Most of the camp gradually drifted to bed, but Becky, the "kids" and I kept going for a full six hours, until after 1am -- singing, talking, and generally having a grand time.

I'd forgotten how much I love that campfire, and it was delightful getting to share it with the next generation: a perfect way to end Pennsic.

So -- yeah, it was pretty great. It was a relaxing time, and there were lots of other highlights. (Watching friends in various battles, especially the Heroic Rapier Champs. Turkish coffee from Kafa Merhaba, and many coffee slushies from Odyssey. Helping Crook'd Cat de-mud the bricks from the oven, after it was disassembled. Walking -- ever-so-slowly -- around the lake on Friday.)

I'm planning on returning next year, when I expect it to be a lot more crowded. (Only about 8k on site this year; I suspect it'll be back to a full 12k or more for Pennsic 50.) With any luck I'll be in better health, and being camped in the middle of nowhere won't be a problem. The big question is whether I bite the bullet and go for more of it -- one big change is that a lot more interesting stuff happens Peace Week these days, so I may want to do more than War Week...