Anyone notice I've been posting again?
Jan. 31st, 2007 08:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pseydtonneI spend my work day writing. I take a call, type some notes during the call, talk the meatcustomer down from the ledge, and then blow twenty minutes turning "CC05 Sol8 backed up Fri -901 on 1 vob since Tues9am dbchk dies d01" into full paragraphs such as:
"Customer is running version 5 of the product on Solaris 8. She has been seeing database error 901 on the Precious repository since Tuesday morning. She ran the database checker and it died during the d01 file pass. The last full backup of Precious was Friday."
Oh yes, I had to give you the full paragraph to give you an idea why I get bored from typing this stuff. My attention drifts during conversion. I've learned to put on music during this part of the job so that my brain doesn't want to catch up on web comics. I've also learned to get a full cup of coffee and a big glass of ice water and have both ready so that I don't walk away for five minutes.
I've been told my notes are verbose to say the least. I've trimmed them down, but I still make them full sentences. I have made the concession of typing "Customer" instead of the grammatically correct "The customer", which took some moral effort a year and a half ago.
Okay, when I write down these crazy things, they suddenly look nuts. It made a lot of sense to me that I was concerned about dropping a definite article in documentation that gets read 3% of the time by other people. Now i write that fact down and it looks like I chase invisible demons with a fly swatter. Gah, I need to get over this crap.
I need to get beyond my rococo or even vestigial quirks so that I can foster my interesting or even marketable quirks. So I type them up. The more I type them, the fewer there are. More will arise and I can crush them as needed. My anxieties and my obsessions become my desires; my sanity and prosperity depend on going full Buddhist on the buggers.
In the process of writing them down and making that writing publicly presentable, I am getting better at writing. You should have seen the sentence that eventually became "The more I type them, the fewer there are." It was part of a very long sentence that had way too many clauses. I slapped that trout and made savory pie from it.
Trout pot pie. That sounds delicious, especially with corn and peas...
So I am writing again. I feel more confident about my writing skills. I don't feel like I need to polish before I publish because the publishing IS the polishing. Then I'll drop that feeling in a few months and have to come back to it. Perhaps I will improve that bad cycle by writing it down.
This exercise in reflexive writing has felt like penance should feel. When you're a kid and you say ten Our Fathers, they're meaningless. I've been a heathen since the Reagan administration, so I'm not going to say any Pater Nosters. I understand that I must write my own acts of contrition so that I can put orange cones on my foibles.
-what I have done and what I have failed to do at 60 WPM, Dante
"Customer is running version 5 of the product on Solaris 8. She has been seeing database error 901 on the Precious repository since Tuesday morning. She ran the database checker and it died during the d01 file pass. The last full backup of Precious was Friday."
Oh yes, I had to give you the full paragraph to give you an idea why I get bored from typing this stuff. My attention drifts during conversion. I've learned to put on music during this part of the job so that my brain doesn't want to catch up on web comics. I've also learned to get a full cup of coffee and a big glass of ice water and have both ready so that I don't walk away for five minutes.
I've been told my notes are verbose to say the least. I've trimmed them down, but I still make them full sentences. I have made the concession of typing "Customer" instead of the grammatically correct "The customer", which took some moral effort a year and a half ago.
Okay, when I write down these crazy things, they suddenly look nuts. It made a lot of sense to me that I was concerned about dropping a definite article in documentation that gets read 3% of the time by other people. Now i write that fact down and it looks like I chase invisible demons with a fly swatter. Gah, I need to get over this crap.
I need to get beyond my rococo or even vestigial quirks so that I can foster my interesting or even marketable quirks. So I type them up. The more I type them, the fewer there are. More will arise and I can crush them as needed. My anxieties and my obsessions become my desires; my sanity and prosperity depend on going full Buddhist on the buggers.
In the process of writing them down and making that writing publicly presentable, I am getting better at writing. You should have seen the sentence that eventually became "The more I type them, the fewer there are." It was part of a very long sentence that had way too many clauses. I slapped that trout and made savory pie from it.
Trout pot pie. That sounds delicious, especially with corn and peas...
So I am writing again. I feel more confident about my writing skills. I don't feel like I need to polish before I publish because the publishing IS the polishing. Then I'll drop that feeling in a few months and have to come back to it. Perhaps I will improve that bad cycle by writing it down.
This exercise in reflexive writing has felt like penance should feel. When you're a kid and you say ten Our Fathers, they're meaningless. I've been a heathen since the Reagan administration, so I'm not going to say any Pater Nosters. I understand that I must write my own acts of contrition so that I can put orange cones on my foibles.
-what I have done and what I have failed to do at 60 WPM, Dante
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-01-31 02:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-31 03:31 pm (UTC)By the way, the line "what I have done and what I have failed to do" is specifically from the Act of Contrition, a prayer we Catholic school kids learned leading up to First Penance. It's the longest prayer you learn as a third grader, although the version on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_of_Contrition) lacks the length. Then again I confuse it with the Confiteor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confiteor), which had a different name when I was in grade school.
That great part about "and I ask the blessed Mary, ever virgin, all the angels and saints, and you my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God" is a real koan that breaks a lot of us out of Catholicism.
I love reading diatribes (http://www.orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/evervirgin.aspx) of how Mary could remain a virgin after having Jesus when she's clearly married. Unless the point is that Joseph is the Eternal Cuckold and that's the only reason he gets a saint's day (my birthday, by the way). It's like "oh, you got totally kicked in the balls by God. All that hot sn@ch and you can't even get passed third. You must be a saint!"
The other piece that shatters Catholics is the Nicene Creed: "God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, one in being with the Father. Through Him all things were made." All of this really means "no Gnositics, no Arians (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01707c.htm), no free thought when you're in this chapel. So be it." Thus I bailed at thirteen.
Of course I still struggle with this. Why do they get so into it and I just see rationalized loop-de-loops? What am I missing? I've learned a lot of what's missing over a score of years.
Oh man, I've been an agnostic for nineteen years. Whoah... that's a lot of thinking about nothing.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-31 03:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-31 03:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-31 03:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-31 04:30 pm (UTC)-trousers?
no subject
Date: 2007-01-31 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-31 08:15 pm (UTC)oh, as a side comment: i’ve recently been reading John Birmingham’s He Died With A Felafel In His Hand. in and of itself it’s a fun book (though a bit on the sophomoric side), but other than that, the most remarkable thing about it is that Birmingham’s prose style is amazingly like you riffing. And hey, he’s a Published Author!
so, do not lose hope: the market clearly exists.
-steve
no subject
Date: 2007-02-01 03:49 am (UTC)I get bug reports to the effect of "It doesn't work." Occasionally, they'll maybe give me a function of the software: "Detailed Query doesn't work."
I thought the bug reports I got to work on at my LAST job were bad... oy...