The Peacock's Feathers

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes. It is the preservation of fire.” – Gustav Mahler


“If you want people to really laugh, make it about something they’re really anxious about.” – Norman Lear


“You can’t outwork your body. At a certain point, you have to be honest about your limits. I’ve reached mine.” – Kate Rouch

It’s been another busy week. Life under our AI overlords moves so much faster than before. Is it Friday yet?

Today I had a couple of meetings, one of which was talking about how to address our horrendous backlog of 1,700 issues in GitHub. One of the team had mentioned wanting to look a little closer at the numbers, and something in my brain kicked off an idea. I went in and looked at how many issues we had open from each year and made a little table. I had to google how to query a range of dates (thank dog for StackOverflow!). I discovered that we had two issues that are eight years old! (those got closed today). And the other thing I thought to throw into my table was when each version of our product was released, at least as far back as the three years I’ve been here.

TL;DR, we can close at least half of our issue backlog as being opened against versions of the code that we don’t support anymore (versions 2.x). We released version 3.0 in 2024, and we released version 3.7 a week or so ago. Technically anything that’s not from 2025 or 2026 is probably against an unsupported version of the code, but we’re starting with the oldest and working our way forward.

I spent time this week closing issues against our Helm charts (which moved to another repository and the Community is owning them now) and against a deprecated client that reached end of life (EOL) last month and has been ripped out of the code. I’ve also been going back and looking at anything tagged as docs to see if I can merge/close or otherwise resolve them. So lots of cleanup work this week and today.

Today I also:
- Submitted Tom's resume for an open position.
- Made my hotel reservation for the weekend in Athens between our Lisbon offsite and our Athens offsite.

***

We tried to put out a patch release at the end of the day yesterday, but had trouble for some reason. Three of us got to work troubleshooting. I’ve had plenty of problems with our automated workflows failing, but even so, it took the three of us about an hour to debug things before we could get the release process to start. I wrote up quick patch release notes (there was only one change) and got those published, then logged off. The release process takes a while to build and publish all the downloads. But when I logged on this morning, apparently the build process failed.

The engineer tried again today, and failed again. The automation knew that it had already created an 3.6.9 release yesterday, so it created a 3.9.10 release today. When he was grumbling about it on Slack, I quipped, “Well, on the bright side we can just declare 3.6.9 "The April Fool's release". ”

He replied, “I love your positivity, Julie!”

And another engineer commented, “haha, Julie that's genius!”

I do manage the occasional good one-liner at work.

***

Too tired to cook tonight, so I order a pizza. All the snow piles are gone (I’ll have to check on Snow Mountain over in the Hannaford parking lot while I’m out running around tomorrow). And I spotted the resident bunny on my way to the car. =)

Every now and then I get sucked into some website that sells rich people shit. It's always expensive and frequently fugly. And I always wonder what people are willing to pay so much money to look so bad.

Would you pay $255 for this ugly hat?

(click to embiggen)

If it looks that bad on the model, no way it would be flattering on my body.

It was a very lazy weekend, as I was still trying to catch up on hydration and sleep from last weekend at Military Through the Ages down in Jamestown. Naps happened, as well as a call to the 'rents. I needed to let my parents know that with a two week business trip on the horizon at the end of April, I wasn't going to have the energy to make a visit during April. We've put that off for now. No idea when I'm going to visit, but it will happen at some point this year.

I’ve not only drunk a lot of fluids last week, but I ate my way through almost an entire jar of bread and butter pickles. I figured I was caught up on rehydration when they stopped tasting so damned delicious and just started tasting like tasty pickles again. =P

I've recently finished re-reading Killers of a Certain Age, and the sequel Kills Well With Others. Checking for other books by the same author (Deanna Raybourn) I saw that she also wrote the Veronica Speedwell books. I’ve had a copy of A Curious Beginning on my To Be Read pile since a friend strongly recommended the series to me. So I read that this weekend. Unfortunately, I can’t stand the main character. In fact, the only character that I really liked in the whole book was the corpse, and they made their exit around page 57 which meant getting through the rest of the book was a slog. I kept hoping things would improve, but alas. I will not be reading any more of that particular series. But she does have another mystery series, I might give that one a try and see if I like that heroine better.

Another book that I read over the weekend was recommended by a former coworker, it’s The Blazekeeper of Bowmore House, and it’s a reimagining of the Cinderella story. I feel like there are bits and pieces of the Live Action Disney movie (Cinders meets Prince Charming in the woods and he doesn’t tell her he’s the prince) as well as bits and pieces of Ever After (there’s a sort of mustache twirling villain who wants to marry Cinders) as well as a lot of the author’s own imagination. I enjoyed it, but maybe that’s because instead of mice, her best friend is an ancient Tom cat named Henry. But probably I liked it because our Cinderella is more spunky than the usual droopy Disney Princess who doesn’t have a whole lot of agency other than being treated badly and then falling in love.

I had an unplanned power outage at Frogholm today. Right around 1:00, so thankfully I'd already eaten lunch. I was in the bathroom when the lights went out, because of course I was. So pants around my ankles, in a room with no windows and ZOT! The lights flickered and tried to come back on once or twice, so I was hoping it was one of those times when the power goes out and then comes right back on. But by the time I got back out to my desk, it was clear that I was in the dark.

I checked the outage map for National Grid on my phone, and there were a couple of small (5 person) outages across town, but nothing on the map anywhere near Frogholm. So I tried to enter the outage on my phone, but they wanted my account number and I don't know that off the top of my head. So I called. And the automated system still wanted my account number, so I stumbled around to find a flashlight and was rifling through my mail when they dumped me into the queue for a human. I found a bill just as I got a human on the phone, so I filed my report. Turns out we did have a known outage in the area, but power was going to be out until at least 3:00pm. So I texted my BFF at work and asked her to post on Slack that I'd lost power and internet. And then I took a nap. Because I was exhausted, and what else was I going to do? Not work, not laundry.

When I woke up, there was a text updating that power was going to be out until 7:30, so it was just as well I'd caught a couple hours of sleep. Power actually came back on a little after 6:00, but it's been a while since I've had an outage that wasn't related to a major storm.