Matigo dot See, eh?

Nozomi gets to mark her 3,653rd day on the Earth today, meaning she's now ten years old!

Nozomi was just 107 days old when she joined the family and she's calmed down quite a bit during the intervening 3,500 days. Despite her age, Nozomi continues to be a playful and energetic puppy, forever looking forward to her walks in the park, meal times, and any opportunity for tummy rubs. We became friends even before bringing her home from the pet shop and she's been by my side almost every day since. This past decade would have been completely different — and far more difficult — without her.

Happy birthday, Nozomi! Regardless of how many trips we make around the sun together, you'll always be a puppy to me.

It seems either a serious case of burnout, depression, or WTFC¹ has taken the wind out of my sails once again. The only thing I'm particularly interested in doing is reading. Anything that is even remotely creative gets no more than 30 minutes of good effort from me, and this isn't cool.

We're technically going into a 5-day weekend here in Japan. I've decided to work through the Golden Week holidays, but maybe it would be better to stay away from the day job until Thursday. A little recharge might be in order.

1. Generally translated as "Who the fuck cares?". When this condition rears its head, everybody's problems look asinine and beneath contempt … because we live in a world that is full of magic and people are bitching and moaning about shit they could probably fix themselves with a single Google search.

Dreams can often inform us of something our subconscious mind is trying to present. In my early 20s, my dreams felt as though they were months or years long. I would wake up with the alarm, completely disoriented and unsure of what day it was. The dreams at this time consisted of me wandering a mostly empty world. This eventually gave way to years of insomnia, which later gave way to years of dreaming about work, which gave way to dreams that were incredibly loud. The dreams conjured up for the mind's eye recently, however, have been quite a bit different from the past themes¹.

Similar to the wanderings that took place two decades ago, there are no other characters to interact with. In fact, there is literally nothing to interact with in my recent dreams. I am alone in a void where there is gravity, but nothing to stand on or fall towards. There is no light, but I can see myself. There is no sound beyond a very low hum, like the sound of a 60s era analog stereo projecting the current picked up by dirty connections on an idle record player. It is as if my mind has conjured up a representation of reality that took place before the Big Bang that created our universe.

Strange dreams are nothing new to anybody. Our subconscious creates all sorts of weird depictions of reality to help us parse and better understand the world around us. These dreams feel a bit different, like I'm expected to do something in the empty realm beyond listening to the background hum. Thinking this environment through, it's almost as though I'm being presented with chaos in its truest representation; a malleable substrate from which existence itself can be fabricated to banish entropy from our sight.

If this is even partially accurate, then the subconscious may be suggesting that I need to make something new. The question I'm most interested is knowing what should be created? Very little can be extracted from a void without a clear vision. Hopefully something can be revealed in the next couple of nights.

1. Rarely do my dreams take place just once. When I have a dream, it's generally played again and again, with minor revisions, for weeks on end. For this reason, I can usually remember many of the dreams from over the years simply because they've been seen so many times.

An old story in Jewish folklore tells of an object that King Solomon asked for. This item would lift his spirits when they were low, and lower his spirits when they were too high. His people came back with a "magic ring" with the words גַּם זֶה יַעֲבֹר inscribed on the inside: Gam zeh ya'avor — This too shall pass.

The reasoning behind the request was a humble admission that even a wealthy, powerful, and wise king needed to be reminded that what we're experiencing right now, no matter how great or terrible, is ephemeral. When we're happy we hope it never ends. When we're miserable we think it will never end. However anything that begins will have an ending as this is the nature of all things.

People around the world are feeling a great deal of stress and anxiety as a result of the COVID-19 coronavirus and it's certainly no joke. The collateral damage that will result from the spread of this virus will be felt for years to come. However, this will pass. As a people, we will overcome the challenges that lie ahead. Our recorded history shows that we've lived through worse and come out stronger as a result. We owe it to the people who didn't make it to ensure the mistakes that allowed the planetary shutdown to take place are never repeated again.

This most certainly will pass. Let's not forget.

Over the course of several months I’ve been reading through two books of the Bible, Exodus and Mathew specifically, as part of a reintroduction to studying these historical tomes of wisdom. More than two decades have passed since I last invested so much time into studying the word and there’s a great deal that I’m rediscovering along the way. While it’s not uncommon for me to consume an entire Star Trek novel in the span of a weekend, the Bible is different. Reading is done more deliberately, with regular pauses to think through the message of a particular passage. One of the things that I’ve chosen to do while reading is to write quick blog posts containing quotes and my thoughts as a means to think a little more intentionally about the content of the message. The format is essentially like a Quotation-style post but, rather than link to a website, the reference is to a specific point in a book. The writing has been invaluable, as it’s very easy to go back and expand on ideas. The one thing that I’d like to improve, though, is the format.

Presentation is incredibly important and, while it may not always be evident, I do invest a great deal of time into thinking about how words are displayed to a reader. Bible journalling is a personal enterprise but, even with zero readers beyond the author, how the text is laid out can encourage revisits to past notes. This could be particularly interesting for people who aim to review the Bible every year as it would allow for an evolution of notes to be collected around thought-provoking passages and verses. So with this in mind, I’ve been making notes and linking them to specific points in the Bible. There’s just one (immediate) problem: quoting different parts of the book does not lead to those different books, chapters, and verses.

Quotation posts on 10C point to a single web page as a means of indicating the source material for a post. The body of the post can contain additional links to other pages and resources. This is tricky to do with a book, though, as even the some of the more common digital representations of the Bible are presented in a manner that resembles a physical bound work rather than what it is: a self-referencing collection of stories. In order to take better digital notes I need a better presentation layer for the Bible, allowing for quotes to contain links to specific words.

While the current post types within 10C certainly get the job of displaying a completed post consisting of quotes and thoughts, they’re not quite what I’m looking for. Something more sophisticated is needed. The basic layout of the journal pages have been worked out, so what I need to do now is build a consistent format around the design and make journal writing simple enough that it doesn’t distract from the ultimate goal of the effort: to better understand the meaning behind the words our ancestors preserved and their relevance in our own life.

Sometimes I wonder if it would be better to just stick with pen and paper ….

For 583 consecutive days a post has been written and published on this site, a record for me in a number of ways as the only other tasks I've been able to consistently complete are related to being alive. However it might be time for a bit of a break to make time for other important things. There are books I'd like to read, important topics to study, and responsibilities to carry out. More than this, though, is the desire to avoid putting some of the more negative articles I've been writing online by mistake.

Writing plays an important part of my day. Through various writing exercises it's possible to develop a better understanding of a problem. Over the last few weeks a recurring theme has been forever present at the forefront of my thoughts and it's not at all helpful. Writing about it lets me analyse the why behind the problem so that possible solutions can be found. Not being able to finish the analysis because a less-morose post needs to be written and published just adds to the frustrations that have been accumulating recently.

There will still be posts when time permits, of course, but I'm not going to lose any sleep¹ if a day is missed every once in a while.

1. Sleep? Me? Never …

When I started working from home on a full-time basis two years ago a number of colleagues were quite envious of the opportunity our employer made available to me. One of the primary reasons that I could spend my days at home rather than the office was because the majority of the people I was meeting with at the time were located in North America. This meant attending meetings between 9:00pm and 1:00am local time, when all of the schools are very much closed for the night. Managers also knew that there wouldn't be any question about whether I was working a full day or not. People would see updates to software, solutions to problems, and an absurd number of messages over Skype. Over time this allowed for a regular pattern to emerge where I could spend time with the boy in the mornings up until 10am, then work, then stop for lunch and an occasional afternoon walk¹, then work, then dinner and family time, and finally a few more hours at the desk to finish off the day. It's a good cycle that works for everybody.

That said, nothing can be completely good forever. There is one thing that is sorely missed and I feel the lack of this is creating some comprehension issues: human interaction.

On a typical day I am at home for 22.5 hours. This allows for 90 minutes outside for Nozomi's two walks and the boy's morning trek around the neighbourhood. If I do have an opportunity to head out for an afternoon walk, then I can enjoy an extra 45 minutes to an hour outdoors. Aside from the people living in this house, I rarely have an opportunity to speak to anyone outside of meetings. There are occasional 5-minute conversations with neighbours but, thanks to the various "social distancing"² policies in place, these are few and far between. Recently the most anyone can hope for is an おはようございます³ in the mornings when putting the trash out⁴. What this means is that for two years I've spent a diminishing amount of time around adults talking like an adult about adult things. Over the last year or so I've noticed that casual chit chat, whether it's in English or Japanese, has required a great deal more concentration just to keep up. When it's my turn to speak, I often grasp for words as though I've forgotten the name of objects or verbs to describe actions. It's bizarre. However, more than this, the problem seems to be bleeding into my reading comprehension as well. I simply don't understand what some people are trying to say on the first attempt … or the second … or the third.

Whether there is an actual correlation between these comprehension issues and lack of adult interaction is unclear, as I'm not a doctor. It does seem plausible, though. If I'm not using the communication and interaction skills learned over decades, then I could be losing them, no? The brain is like a muscle in that if we don't use certain aspects of it, the skills or abilities will atrophy to a certain extent.

My ability to understand language has not completely deteriorated, as evidenced by this very blog post, so all is not lost. The issue also does not seem to interfere as much with certain people that I'm familiar with. Perhaps this is just a natural thing that happens to people who do not leave the house often. Maybe this is an indicator of cabin fever or some other mental condition that comes about from isolation. Maybe it's all in my head and I'm overthinking something to the point where it becomes a self-inflicted hinderance. These hypotheses are nothing more than wild guesses in the dark. One thing is for certain, though: when it becomes socially acceptable to start talking to strangers again, I'll want to head outside and see how everyone is doing.

1. Walks can happen only if the boy is napping and Reiko is home. That said, they've become much less frequent as a result of the COVID-19 issue and Reiko's fear of infection.

2. The quotes are because I find the name silly. We already have perfectly good words for not going near other people, so why the new term?

3. "Ohayō gozaimasu" ⇢ Good morning.

4. There are some neighbours around here that are itching to have conversations with people, but there's always the concern that a local gossip will see the interaction and raise a stink … by having conversations with people.

Earlier today I was thinking about how little of the software I've written since 1994 is still in use today. The oldest application that I know to be running was written back in 2006 while the oldest bits of code that I personally use were written somewhere around 2000¹. Nothing that I wrote in the 90s exists today and, even if it did, nobody would want to use it. Heck, very little of the code that anybody wrote in the 90s continues to exist today outside of some very legacy systems used within governments, militaries, nuclear power plants, and banks². There's a good reason for this, too: software in the 90s was rough.

When I think about software from 25 years ago, Windows95 springs to mind. The promise of Microsoft's ambitious operating environment was attractive, but the implementation was incomplete. Applications would crash all the time³ and, because everything had to be "multimedia", we would need to have large binders of CDs next to the computer for all the resources that couldn't fit on the internal hard drive⁴. There is little chance that anybody would willingly choose to use Windows95 and a myriad of compatible software from the same time period today.

Or so I initially thought. Then I remembered how my friends and I would use computers when there weren't any adults around: Doom and Doom II.

Operating systems, operating environments, and productivity software from 25 years ago are probably best forgotten. Games, however, can have a much longer lifespan. I can actually say that I've run Doom II on a 386, a 486, a Pentium, a Pentium II, a Pentium III, a Pentium 4, an AMD Athlon XP, a Core2Duo, a 4th Generation Core i7, a 5th Generation Core i5, and a 9th Generation Core i7⁵. 35 years of computer development for a game that was released in the autumn of 1994.

Silly as it might seem, I find it fascinating that of all the software that was written before Y2K, Doom and other games from the same era are likely the only examples of applications made for general consumption that have seen more than a quarter century of use.

Is there any chance that I might write an application that people enjoy using for a quarter century or more without updates? Probably not. Modern software is often more dependent on its operating system than applications written in the past. That said, who knows what the future might have in store. A well-written, self-contained tool for a Linux-based system might enjoy a longer operational life than something written for Windows or macOS.

1. An example would be the NoNull() function found in 10C's /lib/functions.php. It was rewritten for PHP a decade ago to replicate a very useful task that I had picked up from an earlier time while developing VB6 applications that would read from a SQL Server database. NoNull() — and it's integer variant nullInt() — are "old" pieces of code that have remained largely unchanged in 20 years despite being re-written in several programming languages.

2. There are bound to be a good bit of code within Unix that hasn't been updated in quite some time, too. Anything that isn't dependent on dates or very large numbers would have avoided Y2K and 64-bit updates.

3. I switched from WordPerfect to Word in the late 90s simply because WordPerfect would literally crash after every page. I would save my documents after every paragraph. Word95 didn't have this issue and, if that wasn't reason enough to switch, Microsoft's word processor was faster and easier to understand. Believe it or not, it had fewer buttons than any of the competition.

4. Remember when a single CD could hold almost twice as much data as a hard drive? Those were rough days.

5. It was after the Athlon XP that I stopped upgrading my systems every 6 ~ 8 months, hence the gaps in processor generations. And, yes … I've played Doom II on a 2019-era MacBook Pro.

Every so often I find myself wondering why it is that I put so much effort in at the day job. A great deal of what I do is not specifically requested. Instead I see what needs to be done within the organisation and begin working to solve the problem. A lot of times this means doing something that will go completely unnoticed, because it's only when something is noticed that the issue is raised. This is particularly true with a little textbook delivery system that I started writing about nine months ago that is slowly gaining traction within the organisation outside of Japan. Whispers are observed through various communications channels about things not quite being right or how an older textbook that is only used by a handful of students can't be found anywhere, and I jump into action and fill the gaps. People don't really notice the changes; they just focus on doing their job to the best of their ability with a more complete set of tools.

For the better part of three years, this has defined a good chunk of my efforts at the day job and every small improvement makes these systems a little bit better for the people using them. But why do this? Why give myself work? Why stay up past midnight solving problems that nobody has complained too loudly about?

As anyone who has worked with me might expect, I do it primarily for me.

In a perfect world, software would be "invisible". People would learn how to use the tools to complete a task, then never think about the system in a critical way ever again. Building software like this is hard. Really, really hard. And it's this challenge that I look forward to.

For the digital textbook system, my ultimate objective is to have every material we have distribution rights for in the database along with every audio and video file for that book. I would love it if a colleague looked for a text we haven't used in the classroom since the 90s and found the resource plus all of the audio files that were once only on cassette tape, or to see someone try to share these resources with a student who forgot their book with a couple of taps. All without thinking about the complexities that lie under the surface.

The goal, as unrealistic as it might be, is to make something that meets the Apple stereotype of "It just works". Corporate software needn't be ugly and unwieldy. Educational software needn't be sluggish and half-baked. People expect more from technology, as they should. So I build the tools that people will hopefully want to use for their everyday work and pay attention to the online water-cooler banter that might reveal the next task to accomplish.

Hopefully one day it will be possible to stand back and see that the effort put into the work has bore some impeccable fruit.

There has been a recurring message in some of the movies I've watched recently and it has me wondering if this is something I've subconsciously picked up on as a result of recent distractions at the day job. Over the past two weeks I've caught myself wondering whether the tasks being performed, while important, were the most important things that needed to be done. With schools across the globe shutting down on account of the COVID-19 issue, thousands of my colleagues are struggling to make the transition from working in a classroom to working in front of a camera. The tools are sub-optimal. The training was rushed. The hardware consistency has devolved to an unchecked BYOD¹ mess. People are doing the best they can with what they have, but the tools! The tools ….

So I've been working on some of those issues in an effort to reduce some of the friction teachers are having when delivering their lessons over a video call. Based on the feedback, there's still a long way to go. However, despite the urgency that exists for this matter, there are other things of similar priority that have been sitting to the side for weeks while teams coordinate and confirm requirements for what is arguably one of the next "big" things for the company. Even without specific marching orders, there is nothing stopping me from jumping on some of the low-hanging fruit that needs to be done before the big tasks begin.

Would this be the better place to put my energy? On "the next thing" rather than "the current thing"? It's because of questions like this that we have managers who we can ask for guidance and clarity. Perhaps I should have done so.

Instead a full five days of work were used to resolve some issue that were preventing teachers across Japan and in some parts of Europe from delivering their classes online effectively and efficiently. In my mind, this was the higher priority; get teachers teaching and students practicing. The next thing officially kicks off its tight-deadline schedule this coming Wednesday, after all. Make sure the basic needs of the team are met, then use the rest of the time to fix things.

Sometimes I think this makes me a "poor member of the team" as I'm not seen worrying as much about something as others. Other times I think the lack of anxiety over some things² is better for the people in the company who might not otherwise get a timely solution.

1. Bring Your Own Device

2. I have a lot of anxiety to begin with. I try to minimise taking on more.