A Portrait of the Dumbass as an Old Man

Blah, blah, blah

What more can I say? Just finished "Code Reading" by Diomidis Spinellis. This book got good reviews, somewhat disappointing. Probably a good review for a young developer. I was reading it as one of my Q1 goals, I'm going to see if I can not get "Read and present a development book" the next quarter. I think about work too much as it is, and reading a development book for the last 3 weeks definitely didn't help.

I got a new position at the start of the year, and it has been working out well. For 5 years I was VP of Software Development. I started with development, QA, information development (tech writers), and IT, had 25 reports at the peak, got down to just having development, which grew to 17 direct and 3 indirect reports. I am now Executive Software Architect -- an official loose cannon, no one reporting to me. I am back in the code 70-80% of the time, doing the systems rationalizer thing, refactoring, modularizing and cleaning up dependencies. But, the code seems to really have an affinity for my brain -- likes to get in there and take over.

Got a new guitar amp -- a Fender Blues Jr. Took 2 tries, 1st one came in with inoperative reverb, 2nd one works great. Very nice sound, and 1/3 the weight of my Super Reverb, have amp will travel.

But, American Legion Monday Blues Jam is defunct, the volume was interfering with the bingo upstairs -- no joke, damn philistines. Lindsey Olive and some other guys put together a Wednesday jam at the former Lynagh's on Woodland, now "The Good Time Lounge" I think. I went to the 1st one last week, a ton of people, only got to play a couple of songs. Skipped this week, my wife works 2nd shift on Thursday, so Wednesday night is a slightly virtual Friday (she works so much you have to take what you can get). I'll go back this week tho, try to make some contacts for people to play with.

I was going to mention re Dennett's "Breaking the Spell" that he trots out the "brights" name for non-religious people. This came out in the secular humanist movement about a year ago, a term for rational, secular thinkers without the negative connotations of atheist. "Brights" totally doesn't work for me. I tell people that I am proud to be a flaming atheist, and I will continue to do so.

Still haven't decided how to move ahead after basically concluding that the human mind, language, and music have all evolved by sexual selection. Not sure where to go now. I have been thinking for retirement I would look for an open source AI project to work on. I should get in touch with the young guy who worked for me who was doing some interesting natural language stuff. I think my point is, I think I may have learned as much as there is to learn about mind at the high levels, may as well just start trying to build one.

My wife and I hadn't seen any movies for a while, so we binged a little. First saw "The Constant Gardener", a little to british; then "Flightplan", what a totally contrived plot; then "Redeye", the other airplane movie, worked better than Flightplan and came in at 75 minutes (movies are less disappointing when they're short). Saw "Syriana", re, US foreign policy sucks, a little dry and slow but well done, then "Lord of War", re, US foreign policy sucks. The movie we liked best was "Four Brothers" -- unpretentious, the guys came across as brothers, and a great sound track.