Blackcap Blog

Published at 00:45 on 15 January 2016

The end of the smart phone era, that is. As predicted here, albeit sooner.

Published at 08:14 on 7 October 2015

Why? Several reasons.

Just because something can be done does not mean it should be done. This reason is currently lying dormant, as ours is a technology-fetishizing society and we’re still in the stage of being wowed and dazzled by how smart phones are even possible.

Just because something can be done does not mean it is therefore fashionable and popular. Another one that is currently lying dormant due to technology fetishism, and probably a much more relevant one than the above. Eventually, the fashionable will decide not to carry smart phones. People like movie stars and politicians in high office don’t need them; they have assistants to handle such duties. Jettisoning the phone will be a fashion statement that they are powerful and affluent enough to have such assistants.

This will be much like having a suntan went from being a sign of a common farmer to being a sign of someone privileged enough to have lots of leisure time outside of factories and offices. Even if those without personal assistants still have to carry a phone with them, they will opt for phones that are as small and inobtrusive as possible.

When will this happen? Who knows. It could take another ten or twenty years. I don’t think it will take significantly longer than twenty. That’s a generation, which is long enough for a new generation to see smart phones and obsession over them as yet another dorky adult thing. At that point, the way will be paved for the newest, most fashionable entertainment figures to establish not carrying much personal technology as a fashion statement.

Does my personal bias play any part in my forecasting this? Almost certainly. Yet while I personally want the smart phone era to end, that doesn’t change how the above factors all exist and lie waiting ready to manifest themselves. And personally, I’d want the new trend to happen faster than ten or twenty years, yet I’m not forecasting it will begin soon. So it can’t be written off as purely personal bias.

Published at 10:00 on 28 September 2015

Got back from the Mount Rainier faerie Gatherette yesterday afternoon, and didn’t quite finish putting everything away from that outing. Doing so was on today’s agenda, as was planning the rest of the week.

My new job starts with the new month on Thursday, so I have three more days of freedom. The idea of going to the Staircase area of Olympic National Park struck me. I’ve always wanted to go there, yet never have. And the more I’ve thought about it, the better the idea sounds:

• One of the things on the list for this summer was doing some ham radio stuff on the HF bands while camping. I’ve finally got my portable HF transmitting antenna working properly, after spending all summer on it as mostly a “back burner” item,
• As mentioned before, I’ve long wanted to see that area of the park. As in, for decades,
• The weather forecast for the next few days is warm and dry,
• I over-prepared for the past weekend’s camping, so I have leftover supplies begging to be used this season.
• I’m really only in the mood for a quick, overnight trip, having just gotten back from a multi-night trip, and
• One night is all I really have, since I need today to tend to various things around the house, meaning tomorrow is the earliest I can leave, and I need to spend Wednesday night at home so I can show up at the office on Thursday.

I call the above process, when I get an idea and the more it seems to dovetail nicely the more I think of it, “convergence.” It’s generally a sign I really should pursue it. So unless I think of unforeseen complications or such things unexpectedly come up, that is exactly what I plan to do.

Published at 22:05 on 23 September 2015

Looking back, I can see how on one recent interview I didn’t get an obvious sub-question I should have, and how for the job I did land, the only reason I survived the whole interview process so well is that it was mostly done in the form of at-home questions, some of which I was battling the early symptoms of interview burnout on.

So what happened today was the first question (which I answered fairly well) pushed me over the edge and it was all downhill from there. Given that, it would have only gotten worse had I persevered. Ending it early was the best option.

I’m apparently in the minority in thinking this option is best. Most of the “experts” advise persevering. But really, perseverance is not always a virtue. No one thing is; life isn’t that simple. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Knowing how to recognize futility and give up is also a virtue (in moderation, of course, excessive lack of perseverance also a bad thing).

How it can be “good” to exhibit to a prospective employer that you’ll value some silly formality about “perseverance” even when it costs them money and your effort produces nothing but frustration escapes me. Me, I’d want an employee to quit a pointless task (and communicate this, of course) as soon as it became clear to him the task was probably pointless.

Published at 15:12 on 23 September 2015

Had an interview today at a highly regarded company where I was very qualified for the job being hired for and where I would have probably really enjoyed working.

Alas, as luck would have it today is also a very down day intellectually for me. I completely drew a blank at a very easy and obvious problem. Twenty  minutes were allocated for solving it, meaning I should have been able to do it in about half the time*, based on my normal track record for such things, but I couldn’t even get close to a good solution.

* Update: Try one minute. That’s how long it took to solve the problem now that I’ve decompressed from that nightmare.

What is one to do when such a thing happens? Answer: cordially end the interview early. It is utterly pointless to go on: I have never, simply never, ever gotten a job anytime I’ve stumbled even moderately during an interview — and I really stumbled big this time. Going on just for the sake of going on is: a) profoundly unpleasant, b) a waste of my time, and c) a waste of their time.

So that is precisely what I did.

It’s one of the big headaches with hiring someone: you’re trying to decide whether to spend a lot of money on someone, based on a very tiny sampling of who they are. And it’s a statistical fact of life that tiny samples can be highly unrepresentative samples. Just the way it is.

The silver lining is I already have a firm, written job offer. So I’ll just accept that one. Problem solved.

It’s interesting to speculate as to why it happened. Perhaps it was some subconscious desire to move away from the typical startup environment. I do tend to crave change, and the culture of what I call “mandatory fun” (part of many startups these days) at my last job was starting to get to me. The other job — which I will now accept — is at an established firm and is something of a counterpoint. Yet there were some extremely desirable things about the place where I just bombed (I mean, if it was obvious I didn’t want to be there, I would have just rebuffed their interview and signed with the other place already).

Or maybe it was some desire for stability and an answer. If this interview had gone well, it would have created an uncertainty stage for me. I’d be on a camping trip (which I don’t want to blow off, I’ve been camping far too little this year), out of email and phone contact, stalling a sure thing, in the hopes an unsure thing would materialize. This way I have my sure thing before I leave.

Or maybe it was just “interview burnout.” Interviews are hard for me (I’m a very introverted person) and furthermore I’ve had a lot of them recently, so interviewing itself has become something of the sort of rut I depise.

Realistically, I will never know, and further analysis will produce little or no information of real value to me. Moreover, both the missed opportunity and the one being taken are what I call “generic tech jobs”, which I view mainly as medium-term holding patterns until I can get something that really engages my passions. That means something to do with botany or advocating ecological sustainability. Such a thing is going to be a long-term enough process that I’d be broke before I found something if I insisted on such a job or nothing; hence the need for a holding pattern.

Time to get on with life.

Published at 10:04 on 15 September 2015

I actually had a chance to try one out, for free. I’m not impressed.

First, it’s far more distracting than a map. The display animates to show your progress. This grabs my peripheral vision and distracts me from what’s going on outside. That’s more than just annoying: it’s unsafe. There’s no escape from the above drawback: the thing has to be mounted on the dash in order to “see” the satellites. If I put it on the seat so it doesn’t distract me, then I have to wait several minutes for it to locate itself every time I check my position. By contrast, a old-fashioned paper map stays out of the way when I don’t need it yet is there, instantly, whenever I wish to consult it.

Second, it shows only a tiny part of any map. It’s very difficult to get any overall idea of the layout of where I am by zooming out (lose detail) or panning (lose context). A big, old-fashioned map is much better in this regard.

Third, it’s expensive. I just bought a comprehensive street map of Kitsap County for $6. So far as addresses go, the phone company sends me a countywide phone book every year for free. Since I don’t need it at home (where I can use the Internet), I put it in my truck. Any decent GPS will cost about 15 times that much. Plus in a few years, the maps and address data inside the GPS will need updating. That costs $50 or $60, i.e. fully 10 times what acquiring a new map and phone book does.

Fourth, it’s limited. It shows but a subset of businesses and business categories. Compared to the phone book, it sucks. It also shows a very limited subset of points of interest like parks, lakes, etc. Compared to the index on my old-fashioned map, it sucks.

If I did more long-distance road trips, I could see such a thing having some utility despite its drawbacks, because it’s impractical to keep a detailed map for every last town you’re going through with you (and to acquire same in advance). But I don’t — so it doesn’t.

Published at 11:08 on 11 September 2015

Mainly because sexuality is more than a simplistic gay/bi/straight spectrum, and I happen to be further from that line than most.

I just don’t have the sort of strong sexual urges most men do, so if I wanted to I could become an “ex gay” and put up with the ruse basically indefinitely. Attractive men would still catch my eye, but it would be trivially easy to resist any temptation to go further (because for me there simply isn’t much temptation).

It would of course still be a lie (I’d not be straight), and I have no interest whatsoever in practicing fundamentalist Christianity (or any other sort of organized religion, for that matter), and I strongly support the right of all individuals to live according to the sexuality they actually possess, so I’d never actually do such a thing.

But if I wanted to, I could. And although my sexual orientation is unusual, I doubt it’s unique.

So there exist “gay” men who are sexually active to the degree they are not because they’re gay and that’s what their deepest intrinsic desires lead them to be, but because they can be that way if they try. (They’re play-acting at being gay, in much the same way that many so-called “ex gays” play-act at being straight.)

Perhaps, like me, they were curious about sex and wanted to experience some at least once in their lives. I realized that I just didn’t fit in with what is — to me — a hyper-sexualized subculture that was continually imposing its alien sexuality onto me, primarily through the implicit assumption of others that I wanted the same sort of frequent, often casual, sex they desired. I wanted a little bit of sex, with one or two individuals I had a very close relationship to, that’s it.

I resolved the problem by basically walking away from the subculture and ceasing to identify as a member of it. Others may find that difficult to do, and want to replace the gay male subculture with another one, say that of conservative Christianity. And the world’s a large enough place that at least a few individuals probably have.

Keep that latter point in mind. Because, no matter how many “ex gays” continue to be caught in the act of lapsing, it means that somewhere there are probably some who don’t — and won’t — “lapse.” Odds are this will eventually get some attention in the Establishment media.

When it does, it in no way means that it’s possible to become “ex gay;” the individuals which will be reported on never actually were gay in the first place.

Published at 10:17 on 10 September 2015

At yesterday’s interview. Which is promising, but cue Richard Marx:

Honestly, it probably will materialize, but this job search has been sufficiently weird (with signals from prospective employers that in the past were generally promising turning out to be false) that it wouldn’t be a total surprise if it doesn’t.

Published at 18:58 on 8 September 2015

Had another interview today, and the way it want (not badly, but not great either) makes it pretty certain I’m not going to get an offer. Which is OK, given the next point.

The biggest catch is that the guy who would be my boss, while very smart, has fallen victim to Respected Academics Syndrome. That’s when someone with lots of formal education and recognition to their name lets it all go to their head, to the point where they can’t take any constructive criticism, no matter how valid, from someone with less of either. They have the credentials, I don’t, so therefore there’s absolutely nothing they could ever learn from me. Period.

In this case, it was about SQL. The guy wanted to design a program that sent SQL to back-end databases that was both standards-confirming (so it would be database-independent) and efficient. You can’t do that: the SQL standard is surprisingly small. A lot of the SQL syntax that one takes for granted as basic stuff for writing efficient queries (such as the LIMIT clause) are actually nonstandard extensions. But no, I couldn’t make that point without being interrupted and having my concerns waved off (never with any actual evidence to the contrary, of course).

What’s sad is that it is at an organization with a very noble mission (cancer research). So this project is going to run into all sorts of unnecessary and easily foreseeable difficulties, wasting lots of money and effort, largely because the workplace is a hierarchical and authoritarian place. If the world wasn’t largely on such principles, personality faults like that wouldn’t do nearly so much damage: he’d still be respected for his past accomplishments but the moment he tried to bluster others into doing the impossible he’d get ignored and overruled by group consensus, because there would be no such thing as a “boss”. And because such academics could get easily called on their shit, they wouldn’t let their recognition go to their head in the first place.

And that is the biggest reason I am an anarchist: because life experiences keep on underscoring to me that authoritarian hierarchies just don’t work very well.

Published at 13:35 on 7 September 2015

The technology for camping on the playa has improved a great deal since I last seriously pondered going (and rejected the idea because I’m not a desert person and it was simply too expensive and impractical to get any comfort, i.e. shelter from the dust, extreme heat, and harsh sunlight).

Now, with hexayurts and solar swamp coolers, there are options which fall in the sweet spot between an RV, a generator, and lots of extra fuel (comfortable but expensive) and a mere tent (insufficient shelter in such a harsh environment).

But, I still think not. In between building and testing my shelter and its climate-control system, and implementing the theme I’d use, the job of preparing for the next festival would occupy most of my free time, like it does for most who attend Burning Man. It’s why it ends up being more a way of life than a mere week-long festival.

And I already have a life which I’ve chosen based on careful introspection into my priorities. I’m simply not willing to give up weekends spent hiking and botanizing in favor of weekends spent in town preparing for the next Burning Man.

So it looks like the answer is still “no” for me.