unscriptured

God says I have trust issues. She has a point, but I contend that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

I was talking to her about some of my tribulations at work this week. I was working on a computer program that relies on an external program and on an internal library that manages communication with that external program. Everything worked great in the test environment but when I moved it out to the production environment, not so great. It was not only taking too long, it was intermittently returning the wrong results. Neither of these were things I could live with.

It’s been a common theme in my career that using other people’s code causes me more trouble than it’s worth. In this case for one function I’m relying on two completely different sets of other people’s code. And at least one of them is failing me, which kind of makes me look bad. And I’ve got enough of my ego wrapped up in my skill as a coder that I think, first, I shouldn’t ever look bad, and second, that I really don’t like it when it’s somebody else making me look bad.

So I don’t like to use other people’s code. Mind you, in modern programming you have to, you just can’t write everything yourself down to the bare metal any more than you can build your own toaster from raw ore, but for some things, you have to figure out if it will take more time to learn somebody’s library, and work your way around whatever it does wrong and whatever it does in a way that isn’t exactly what you need, than it will take you to write your own version that’s expressly tailored to the problem at hand, rather than some generalized case. I find that surprisingly often, writing my own is the quicker route.

Does that mean I don’t trust other coders? Well, yeah, but it’s like the old saying, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Somewhat reluctantly, I’ve joined the food truck revolution.

I don’t know how much it’s going on in the rest of the world, or even the rest of the country, but here in California, well in at least San Francisco and Los Angeles, the revolution is happening. The catering trucks of old, bringing convenience store wares and greasy spoon grills to businesses that are too far from the non-mobile versions for their workers to make it there and back during their measly meal breaks, have been supplanted or at least supplemented by designer foods on wheels. These new trucks, rather than cover the basics and show up at the same businesses everyday, specialize and shift. They’ll do one kind of food and concentrate on doing it well. They’ll have regular locations but they’ll be on a rotating schedule, waiting usually a week or more before returning to the same spot. It’s a different business model and one that seems to be working for them.

Okay, maybe revolution is a bit strong of a word, but it’ll do. Besides it goes good with the whole “wheels” thing that trucks have going for them.

Mind you, I’ve eaten off these trucks before. I’ve also eaten plenty off the old “roach coaches” of yore (a moniker that no one applies to this new breed of rollicking, rolling, restaurants). So what did I do different today? Well first let me tell you why. I mostly eat lunch alone. It’s my habit to break up the day, to not get stuck at my desk doing essentially the same thing for eight hours at a stretch. And God respects that. He respects that to the point that he almost never comes around at lunch time. So if I have an urge for curry-over-criss-cut-sweet-potatoes, like I did today, I can’t just ask God if the truck is nearby.

So I used the web to find out where the truck was.

I’m still tentative in this revolution, though. A real foot soldier would be subscribed to their Twitter feed, that’s how the real rebels do it. But I did bookmark the site. Sigh.

I’ve been doing some online shopping lately, and more often than you’d think, while I’m browsing the virtual aisles, God nudges me and points to the screen. Sometimes it’s good for a chuckle, sometimes it’s a little scary, but most of the time it’s just, “huh?”

What she’s pointing at is that most famous of online shopping tools, “customers who bought this also bought…”

I don’t have any really good examples to share with you, but if you ever want to see how widely tastes vary while still managing some overlap, just spend some time looking at that section of the page. Sure there’s plenty of common sense examples, if you buy a slow cooker it makes sense to buy a book of recipes, for instance. What surprises me most is how often the direct competition shows up on the list. I mean, does someone buying a beard trimmer really buy two different brands? Or is that just marketing masquerading as mass consumption?

But the fun ones are when products that don’t even come from the same family tree show up; then you get to make up little stories. Perhaps the buyers of toenail clippers also buy plastic freezer bags because they save their clippings and need to keep them fresh. Maybe the people that bought both Russian and Israeli gas masks think that each country tunes their masks for different mixes of chemical agents. Or maybe they’re like trading cards, and they just want to get the whole set.

It’s like having an everchanging set of those, “which of these things is not like the others” tests. Fun for the whole family.

One of my favorite bits of advice, one that I’ve cherished and passed on for decades, is to make your habits work for you. But a lesson that I’ve been slower to catch on to is that habits that were once good for you may not stay that way. They need to be periodically reevaluated and reexamined to see if they still meet your needs.

When I mentioned this to God, he told me that was one of the reasons we have seasons. We get used to doing the same things every day, but as summer rolls around the days get longer, so we look for more things to fill them. In the spring there’s new growth everywhere, so we remember to go to the botanical gardens, or the zoo, or the nearest National Park. When winter has us in its grip, we tend to curl up in our cocoons and pare our routines down to just what we need to get by.

Every turn of the seasons should serve to remind us that our lives go through different phases and that what works for us in one might not be best for the next. So when you’re passing by the park and see all the new growth going on, maybe you should take a moment to think what in your own life could use a little new growth.

Or you could just stop and smell the flowers. That would be nice too.

One of the things that I spend time wondering about is how the various trappings of religion came about. I mean if you were a priest or a shaman or some such and God didn’t talk to you, and you wanted to keep control of “your flock” and get them to do the right thing, why would you come up with the various things that make up your “beliefs.”

Along that line I was asking God the other day how it is that the notion of “soul” as separate from “person” came about. Was there really a need to come up with a separate term for a part of us that continues on past the death of our bodies?

She told me that it was partially invented as a way to keep us hating people and to help depersonalize interventions. If someone was doing something bad you could say that their soul was still pure to give you a reason to still value them. Then you could go to them and say things like “Look, we want to keep you from damaging your soul.” It’s a variation on when you do something bad and someone says “Hey, you’re better than that.” There’s a trick that some people do to fool themselves into accomplishing things that they think may be beyond them, they “pretend” that they can do the thing and then just go ahead and do it. Sort of fooling themselves into not having fooled themselves, or something like that. The soul gives us a personal, anthropomorphized ideal to live up to, to aspire to.

One of the downsides of this is that it allows us to keep both our love of people and our prejudices intact, without having to do much self-examination, without having to resolve the cognitive dissonance. You see that in such statements as “love the sinner but hate the sin” which is a cheap platitude that keeps many people from having to reevaluate the values that they’ve been taught, as opposed to those that they’ve been able to derive from first principles.

After all, why walk a mile in a man’s shoes if you can just say the problem isn’t with the man but with his shoes. And then maybe you’ll see that “soul” and “sole” have something in common.

I’ve never been to a Toastmasters meeting, though I’ve had the opportunity. I have talked to people that have, though, which is only a slight step up from playing an attendee on TV, but enough of one for my purposes here today.

What I remember from such talks is that one of the things that the Toastmasters spend a lot of effort at is getting people to embrace the silent pause, to not fill their moments of gathering thoughts with “ums” and “uhs,” let alone the dreaded “like.” It’s easy enough to understand why we use them, we use them because we don’t want to lose our moment of attention. We’re in the middle of saying something, but we need a moment to put together the rest of the sentence, the rest of the thought; if we don’t make some sound, utter some placeholder, there’s a very real chance that someone else in the group will take their shot, will jump in and divert attention to them, will steal our audience. Even God understands how valuable it is to have someone listen. Actually, God more than anyone probably understands that; how many millions of people have found comfort in just having God listen, not respond, not interrupt, just listen. What power there may be in prayer may just be in believing that someone is listening.

But before someone else jumps in, let me get back to the point I was about to make. I was engaged in a brief instant messaging conversation the other day and God was sitting there with me; he nudged me and pointed at the screen. He told me that what I was looking at was an “um” in the cyber age. It was that little notice that pops up and says the other person is typing. I don’t know if the programmers that put that in knew that that’s what they were doing, but there it was, a little signal that it wasn’t yet my turn to speak. It’s an elegant example of how some things that we barely notice in the real world are still so essential that as we transition part of our lives to the online realm, we still need to bring them along, not in the form we’ve grown up with maybe, but nonetheless there, disguised in plain sight.

Let me just take a moment to say to all those “modern” fast food franchises out there, “stop it.”

Stop trying to make me the chef.

I don’t know about other parts of the world, but here in the U.S. one of the growing trends in fast food is to make every meal personalized. You run into this at Togo’s and Chipotle’s and at Subway, the joint with the most locations in the country. You can’t just order number 12 or the pastrami sandwich or anything so simple. You have to specify each little thing you want. “Great, you want the pastrami! Would you like lettuce on that? How about onions? What condiments do you want?” It’s the worst at Chipotle. You not only have to specify every little thing, but they pass you down an assortment of stations, so you can’t even memorize an order and rattle it off, you have to talk to three different people even though you’re only traveling five feet.

I read an article this week that says that half of people are introverts and half are extroverts. I don’t know if that split is correct or not but I’m definitely one of the introverts. It taxes me to carry on this charade of a conversation. I don’t mind if the menu lets you “build your own burger,” that’s great for those high maintenance orderers out there, but it’s a pain to me, so don’t make it the only option on the menu. Give me something that I can order in as few syllables as possible and I’ll come back more often. That’s one of the reasons I go to fast food in the first place, no waiter or waitress coming around to check up on me.

I don’t need a lot of interaction. Somedays God and I just sit around on the couch and barely more than grunt at each other. They call it parallel play when toddlers do it, for adults it’s just “comfortable companionship.” And besides, isn’t it the chef’s job to figure out what should go on what? Stop trying to make me do your job.