A Series of (Un?)fortunate Vignettes - 12 April 02012

[silveradept]

Grab Bag entry today - vignettes and other small things that don't get their own entry.

I ended up spending half a day inhaling floor sealant chemicals today - the joys of a shared building...and the forehead-banging situation where the chemicals were probably applied and then it was assumed they would cure and dry overnight. It was pretty bad - took a walk outside to clear my head here and there. Eventually, the branch closed for a bit to deal with that. Tonight, they're applying another coat, and they tell us that things should be cleared off by the start of business tomorrow. In a building where everything has run behind schedule.

The longer I have to be a responsible adult in the responsible adult world, the less I feel like I'm actually able to hack it. It's no longer Impostor Syndrome, becuase I'm not worried that someone's going to discover that I'm not actually competent and have been faking it all this time. I'm increasingly convinced that I'm not fully competent at this. I feel more like a flawed item among the company of the flawless - the ducks on the pond problem instead. Now, for most people, this would probably be the opening that allows them to stop putting so much pressure on themselves and come to a comfortable agreement with themselves. For me, it's more like "No, now I'll never be able to achieve my goooals!" Some of that might be just that I don't feel stable enough in the necessities. Other parts of it might be the classic struggle between wanting to leave a significant mark on history or to be the best at something and the knowledge that such things are unlikely in the local and infinitesimal in the cosmic.

I know I've mentioned it before, but I...envy? admire? people who can put their creative output out there fearlessly. (Says the guy with the blog.) Some of the Idol prompts have probably helped get some new things out into the blog, but it's not like I have spontaneous outpourings of creativity unbidden - they're prompted by events in the news, or someone else's topic ideas. So it always feels like I'm piggybacking on someone else's idea. Yeah, the geniuses need the aggregators and such, but sometimes you want to be the one making the ideas rather than the one collecting them and expanding them.

D'you want to know the easiest way to make someone happy at a library? Read. The signs are posted. The manuals exist - sometimes even in the branch you're at. While all library workers appear to have infinite patience in dealing with the public, like all retail and customer service people, the truth is, we'd be much happier if you took care of reading things and trying to find them on your own first when it comes to the simple tasks, like "where are your bathrooms", "do you have tax forms", and "Do I need a library card to check things out?"

Related to that, I have a sneaking suspicion that most people do not know how to file an informative bug report. Which means that when we turn staff loose to test something we'll be turning out to the public, I wonder what the quality of our commentary will be when someone discovers an unexpected result, a bug, or doesn't understand how one of the features works. I almost feel like I should create a short tutorial about "How to file a bug report" and have it available for launch time. And then wonder whether anyone would actually read it.

Ah, and one question to the audience before we wrap it up. If you had to point someone to a web resource that would teach them HTML5, assuming they had never been exposed to the language or any programming or document model concepts beforehand, which one would you show them? I'm building one from scratch at this point as a lecture series because I can find tutorials to teach HTML4.X / XHTML 1.X from the ground up, and then tutorials that will teach HTML5, assuming that you've already done the previous tutorials about HTML4, even though the HTML5 standard, as it's shaping up, will take many of the concepts and kludges you learned in HTML4 and give you one elegant tag to use to fix those problems, plus let you do all sorts of other cool things, too.

Finally, I finished Mira Grant / seanan_mcguire's Deadline (Yeah, I know I'm late, with Blackout coming out in a month), and I have received no compensation in any way, shape, form, method, or other manner for the following statement: There are not enough oaths, expletives, blasphemies, interjections, invocations, and bangs to describe what happens in this book and the twists that it takes. Since Blackout's coming in a month, you'll soon be able to snag the entire Newsflesh trilogy from your local library and read it start-to-finish. It's worth the ride through After The End Times, and we might finally figure out the real secret to the reasons why we haven't been able to beat back the zombie virus yet. And just how far and how deep the conspiracy to keep it that way goes. Once there's a record in the library catalog, that's totally going on hold.

Comments

[azurelunatic]

One of my chatfish disregarded my advice about reading that series in public. She has only herself to blame for her bus-bawling adventure.

[silveradept]

Ooh, yes. There are so many spots where that would happen. I'm guessing this particular incident is the climax event of Feed, but it could be a lot of other ones.

[azurelunatic]

Yeah, it was the ending. Though I bawled at a particular minor character death or ... several.

[silveradept]

I was affected by a lot of those minor character deaths, too - there aren't any expendables in either of those stories, so when they go, it feels like it's a real setback to the organization. Especially here at the end of Deadline, there are a lot of people who really would have been a great help to them in getting it all figured out.

[lilacstarprint.livejournal.com]

This reads to me kinda like you're having a bit of a mid-life crisis. I think it's safe to say that you really shouldn't be concerned about "historical marks' too much. Very few people actively set out to make history. Those that do tend to go down in some nasty flames. Many historical figures are just very passionate about something and follow it. Teddy Roosevelt and George Washington Carver are good examples. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster didn't set out to revolutionize the comic genre when they created Superman. They just wanted to draw comics for a decent living.

Being the first to have an idea may be nice. Many times, it's the ideas that follow it which become big. No one likes Bill Gates but his piggybacking on someone else's idea changed computers forever. Let's not forget that a 1958 Brookhaven national Lab science exhibit, "Tennis for Two" led to Ralph Baer's Magnavox Odyssey game console which led the way for Atari's Pong - and a new industry.

[silveradept]

If it's a mid-life crisis, I've been having it for quite a bit of mid-life - this isn't something that just appeared, but has hung around for quite a bit.

But point taken about how the good stuff doesn't necessarily come from people who want to change the world, just people who are passionate about things. And how sometimes it's the second idea that's the really good one that everyone remembers.

[lilacstarprint.livejournal.com]

Despite what some people may think, a mid-life crisis doesn't just "appear". It does tend to fester for quite a bit. Basically, the crisis is really the point where you just boil over and outwardly express your life frustrations by breaking down in front of others or acting out or making big-ticket impulsive buys.

Granted, your sharing of your feelings in your blog isn't one of the above mentioned things. It's reaching out to others for support and empathy. Which is perfectly fine.

I'd just meant that it read as though you were headed in the direction of the "boiling over" point of your frustrations.

[silveradept]

Mm. Maybe it's already happened, just in small times and away from work. There's just some stretches of feeling rotten and depressive in between small anger outbursts. It seems like a pretty mild crisis, which is good, but it might be long-running, which is bad.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Please do write "How to file a bug report". Even if only some people read it, it would be a public service.

The hard part would be "How to maintain enough equanimity to notice the things which need to be in a bug report".

[silveradept]

Yeah, there does need to be a bit of dispassion and willingness to not go boom when the error message appears. But it's worth trying to inspire that idea.

[rimspace.livejournal.com]

Some... observations, if I may.

I'm fairly sure that, with a few rare exceptions, pretty much everyone has that "I'm not fully competent" feeling - most hide it, often quite well, but it's there if you know what to look for. I doubt it's much comfort, but I suspect that your coworkers feel the same way. The people who don't feel that way? They are either truly gifted and amazingly rare individuals, or the source of never-ending problems and drama as they fool themselves into thinking they are awesome, all the while leaving total fuckups in their wake.

Frankly, I deeply distrust anyone that claims to be completely competent at something.

And you're right, people don't know how to file bug reports. Or even report errors - even in a computer science department, I'll typically get things like "X doesn't work", with no details about what was being done, when, where, what error messages were displayed or what failed. I even tell people to include things like that, and it is so successful that now as many of my systems as possible log errors in as much detail as possible, because I know I won't actually get it otherwise.

[silveradept]

I know everyone gets it - the "ducks on a pond" problem is shorthand for a story one of my lecturers told about how everyone in one of his classes came to him and confided that they were struggling and that it looked like everyone else was just breezing along. Said lecturer then told the class about what had happened. Just because everyone else gets it doesn't mean that I still don't feel it. And worry about the whole "leaving total screwups in my wake."

It is, however, amazing to read that even people who will greatly benefit from accurate and complete bug reports do not actually know how to file them properly. The general public, I can completely believe. But the CS department? ...argh. So, are the automated error collectors good enough, at least.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

people who can put their creative output out there fearlessly.

I'm pretty sure a lot of them aren't fearless-- it's just that you can't see their emotional state. There's book you might be interested in called The Courage to Write-- it's about a wide variety of things which frighten writers and ways they've worked around them.

[silveradept]

I'll take a look and see if it's any help. Thanks for the recommendation. If nothing else, I'll have a book to recommend for all the NaNovelists to read in October.