French
I think that I’ve reached a new milestone. I had my first dream in French. Well actually, I distinctly remember having two dreams in French last night. Not that I remember anything about the dreams themselves, or even how coherent the use of French actually was. But this is a big landmark in my brain accepting that this language might actually be a thing. It’s a landmark that I’ve never achieved in the various dabblings I’ve had with other languages. It really feels like my brain is taking this serious as a thing.
The timing of which is very opportune. I was starting to have a flag in motivation again. It can’t be helped it comes in waves. After an initial burst of enthusiasm, the realization that the task is actually quite daunting was beginning to kick in. I managed only one French class this week despite having a lot of time available - but it’s easy to pretend that the second half of the week was going to be busy so it was okay to take it easy in the first half.
The classes themselves are an interesting mix of excitement and hubris. Every time I go into a class, I have fear and trepidation. How am I supposed to fill the next hour? But then, this week the tutor had to cut me off because he had another class starting and we’d overrun by 10 minutes. It’s still wildly frustrating to be left searching for words or not being able to grammatical build a sentence, but I suppose each week that goes by this will be reduced. Or simply that the goal posts will move, and then I’ll be frustrated that I can expression some ridiculous future, past, conditional tense - the gold standard of language stupidly, i.e. By next Tuesday, I will have done…
Work
On the work front, another day, another dollar. With the client we had the monthly Steering Committee and it passed largely without drama. Which, whilst I shouldn’t complain about the thing, the amount of corporate double-speak and just straight up lies about the situation on the grounds was really a masterclass.
As one of the folks on the team said, we’re the consultants, we’re the ones that are supposed to be disguising the truth and we’re being waaaay more honest than them.
For instance, it was reported that 80 sites have now been connected to the data lake. And whilst, that might be objectively true, according to my dashboard, only one of those sites managed to deposit any actual data into the data lake. Worryingly, after all this time, they aren’t even in a position to say where the issue is. The list of contenders includes,
- maybe all those brand new machines put in at each site aren’t capable of streaming a few JSON messages (despite remote desktop connections are fine)
- maybe the API client is broken
- maybe the network and site internet connections can’t take an extra 100 MB of data per data (again despite remote desktop being flawless and no problems with credit card transactions)
But as is tradition, we’re not going to look at any of the cloud side infrastructure. Or look at the logs. No, some random off-shore resource says that they set up some un-reviewed script, and that’s good enough for the multi-million dollar digital transformation project.
At least the staffing situation has been mostly resolved now. The short version of that story goes, I was presented a pretty questionable staffing solution as something akin to a done deal. Like a 4-dimensional chess move that would save the business. So I reluctantly signed up to the idea - despite the damage to my own project, and moving a junior dev that was super happy on the project.
Only later it appeared that this wasn’t quite the chess move that I had first assumed it to be, and it was more of a random, back-of-a-napkin kind of thing. At which point drama ensued, and we needed to invoke business directors and VPs to work out what was going on. So just the usual drama. All told, probably 4 hours of wasted drama just to retain the status quo. Lovely.
Miscellanea
Dentist
Thursday morning saw taking the big guy to the children’s dentist - which was surprisingly low drama all told. No fillings. No orthodontics prescribed (this time). Just a regular cleaning and the reprimand of dentists everywhere “you should be flossing more”.
The interesting part was instead, that despite it being the start of the year, and it having been 6 months since his last appointment, the health insurance essentially refused everything. The hygienist and cleaning was outright rejected as being irrelevant for kids. The fluoride coating, also rejected as per usual. A third of the dentist inspection was rejected on the grounds of being too soon and above our scheduled frequency. The whole thing feels ridiculous. The two preventative things that would ultimately save the insurance a bunch of fillings later, rejected outright. And the fact that there’s no provincial coverage for anything, also feels off.
A childhood dentist trip costing $200 with no real treatment feels like a broken system to me.
I mean, look at it this way. With minimum wage at $15/hour, that’s 2 days of work for a lot of folks in the city. And that’s with paying for health benefits. Crazy.
Finances
After last week’s reflections on finances, everyone will be pleased to hear that I did absolutely no review of my financial situation. But with getting paid this week, and it being the end of the month meant that a little of juggling needed to occur.
Thanks to the new sofa, the credit card bill came in at nearly eight thousand this month, add in the tax return, and the never ending march of condo fees on the apartment the finances looked pretty dire. The line of credit was pushing dangerously close to $50k. I finally resolved that it was time to take the last of the Covid stock market gambling funds out of the TFSA. There’s still 3 companies left in there, but with returns greater than -95%, it’s barely worth the transaction fee to sell them, but the remaining $5k in cash was moved to pay off debt.
New opportunities
I’ve slowly been pursuing a new opportunity with a new company. Obviously nothing is guaranteed, but it looks like a good fit. They want someone with a history of delivering to run their platform. They being in the healthcare and wellness space - which would be great to get back to.
The whole thing is classical proof, that all of the cliched talk of most jobs coming via the network being true. Yes, I had technically seen this or a similar position advertised previously, but having applied to a few publicly advertised positions recently, I know that you are simply lost to the HR auto-screening process.
This time, I worked the network, found a warm intro to the CTO. Had a good chat with the CTO, who passed me onto the VP, who directly entered me into the HR system. This week, I was still required to talk to HR, presumably to confirm that I’m not a psychopath - but I’m pretty convinced that even the most ineffectual psychopath could pretend to be human for half an hour over the phone.
Anyway, with the phone screen passed - we’re onto a case study. A take home exercise, that feels eerily close to “okay what’s your 90 day plan for starting?”. We’ll see how it goes.
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