Notices by Don Romano 🍹 (thj@mastodon.cloud), page 16

Well into my thirties, I have developed a taste for alcohol that was conspicuously absent before. I used to find the taste of alcohol terrible, and would only mildly enjoy the effects, but that has changed. I did nothing to encourage any of it except to grow older.

I've been having red wine rather frequently lately, and it just occurred to me that alcoholics are rarely under 30. Something about getting older makes you want to drink more.

@ChrisWilson I have a couple of female friends who get close. One of them is a teacher. Good looking and intelligent. She doesn't go for particularly brainy guys, though. Says she wants to feel protected. Married to a guy who lifts weights, naturally. In other words, not all that different from other women in what she wants in a man.

It would be hilarious if I'm secretly a chick magnet to Barbie type girls, because that's the type I'm the least attracted to...

"It turns me on so much when you talk about math... Go on... Explain the relationship between Euler's constant, the imaginary number line and Pythagoras' theorem to me again, daddy... 👄"

Tried to have my roommate take a photo of me with my cat, but I'm not good at smiling for the camera, so I looked like a Bond villain.

I've been on Tinder for a few days now.

I'm swiping left for the vast majority of the time.

Many of the people are conventionally attractive, but they have this bland and indifferent air to them that I can't connect with.

It feels like an entire segment of the population is virtually absent from this site, and also every other dating site I've ever used, namely people who possess both good looks and an interesting personality.

I have friends like that, but they're already taken.

Coming up this evening on Radio Bizarro: Four hours of pop music, but Goofy sings all the lyrics.

"There is nothing called Quick and Dirty Code. Dirty code is bad code. Period. Never cut corners or accept anything that is second rate."

"If you keep your code clean during normal times but make messes in a crisis, then you don’t really believe that messes slow you down."

That's all fine and well, but I have people at work telling me to cut corners all the time. Just today, the lead developer on my project told me to do it.

I'm having some trouble with adopting a quick and dirty approach to programming, which is more or less what I was asked to do today.

You'd think that would be easy, but the clean way feels more obvious to me. It comes naturally, and the quick and dirty way does not.

I'm on a software development team.

They say that teamwork requires compromise. As it turns out, this also means compromising your standards, which is hard if you actually care about them.

If you look at libraries like react.js and immutable.js, they were designed by developers who were bothered enough by the bad code patterns they saw to design entire libraries that attempt to fix them.

It seems that the mental challenge level of a task doesn't just affect my brain's regular reward system, because if that was a case, the stimulants I take for ADHD would be be sufficient, the dopamine would make even the most routine task satisfying.

There is another system, engaged in problem solving, learning and curiosity, involved.

One analogy would be to use a McLaren as a family car. Picture gunk collecting in the valves because they're never blown out.

When I write new code, I lean heavily toward solving the more general case of the problem I've been told to solve. For example, I've been told to implement some specific camera moves in a 3D infographics system, yet what I'm trying to solve is the problem of how to represent any transition M between any range of values [A, B], and how to overlap any N transitions belonging to the space [M, A, B, T, U] where [T, U] is the time interval.

"There is no wrong way to watch kittens play the piano."
— Random YouTube user, 2019

@FiXato I'll just have to decide if I think it's right.

@FiXato It's a bit difficult to tell when she's just being quiet on purpose versus when she's gone for a minute. I think it's a mix of both, to be honest.

@FiXato Ah, and this touches upon one of the things she will only speak to certain people about.

My father has been trying to ask her where she wants to rest, but she says she will only tell my sister, who is coming tomorrow.

She's been getting very weak, though, and the morphine makes her difficult to communicate with.

Apart from simple requests for water, or to sit up, she hasn't said much to me and my father.

We keep hearing from other people that she's been saying more, though.

@FiXato More importantly, my mother trusts him more than all her other siblings.

@FiXato He never talks about religion. I don't think he's the religious type. I do, however, trust and respect him. When he chooses to open his mouth, what comes out is never stupid. He's intelligent and wise, speaks with a calm voice, and doesn't draw much attention to himself.

I admit feeling a bit hurt by the fact that she won't talk about certain things to some of us, but I don't think that's unusual. Dying people make up their minds about certain things.

I haven't got on well with my mother in my adult years. We would often get into arguments when we tried to sit down and talk properly, so we've been avoiding that, and have limited ourselves to practical matters and declarations of affection.

I'm considering if I should read a verse from the Bible to my mother.

She might not be able to hear it, and she knows I'm not a believer, but I want to do it for her.

I feel somewhat hesitant about it, because she hasn't been very forward about her newfound belief to me or my father. She's very particular about who gets to know particular things. I think she's made some decisions about this and are sticking to them.