Tales from the jar side: A busy week of training, conference talks, writing, and a little election you might have heard about
Stress leads to memes, and memes lead to the Dark Side, but at least they're funny
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of November 1 - 8, 2020. This week I taught a Spring and Spring Boot course and a Managing Your Manager course on the O’Reilly Learning Platform, and taught a private course on Kotlin for Android Developers. In addition, I gave a talk on Groovy 3 and a talk on Kotlin Coroutines and More as well as a workshop on Kotlin Fundamentals, all at the GIDS 2020 Conference.
Oh, and you might have heard, there was an election in the US this week.
Let’s get the ugly (but funny) part out of the way
I’m not going to share my detailed thoughts about the election, partly because that’s probably not why most readers of this newsletter read it, and partly because my feelings are still complicated and it’s going to take me some time to sort them out. I will share a few funny tweets from the last week, however, and a few links you might find interesting and/or informative.
First was this gem, which came up during the count:
In the immortal words of Larry the Cable Guy:
You may be familiar with the Downfall meme, where the Hitler’s bunker scene from the movie is shown with completely different subtitles. Somebody made this version, which I thought was a riot:
This tweet cracked me up as well:
So did this:
We’re going to need an old priest and a young priest.
Good luck getting Tubular Bells out of your head for a while. I did post this Saturday evening:
That bottle was my 30th anniversary gift from my wife. I thought this, too, was great:
Most readers of this newsletter probably get the reference right away, but just in case, here’s a link to a description of the Darmok episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That refers to this little event:
So far I’ve heard three possible explanations for choosing that location:
Some staffer booked the wrong Four Seasons and rather than admit a mistake, they had to go with it.
Trump tweeted about the press conference at the hotel before the reservation was confirmed and the hotel told them they wanted no part of it, so this was a fallback position.
Rudy Giuliani wanted to spend as little time in Philadelphia as possible, and this site at least had the advantage of being right by an I-95 onramp.
That last one is the theory supposedly put forth by the New York Times, but I’m going to wait for the inevitable 5000 word article on the whole fiasco. As many noted, it’s better than any Veep episode ever could hope to be.
While I don’t want to comment too directly, I did find one twitter thread and one blog post to be really insightful. Both come from “real” writers (as opposed to what I do).
The first is a Twitter thread from J. Michael Straczynski, who knows all about growing up with abuse:
The other is a blog post entitled The Sound of a Landslide Not Happening, by John Scalzi.
I highly recommend both.
Okay, back to my usual blend of personal events and general silliness.
GIDS Lang 2020
I really enjoy the GIDS conferences. They are incredibly well-organized and run, and the couple times I went to Bangalore for them I really liked it. Everything is online now, of course, but worked. I also have to admit, I don’t know where they’re getting their pictures of me, but this is a really good one:
And so is this, for the same workshop, a day earlier:
The attendance was a bit lower than usual, but that’s probably to be expected. The hard part for me is that on Wednesday I had a training class from noon to 7pm, followed immediately by a conference talk at 7pm, followed by another talk the next morning at 6am (!), then day two of my training class from noon to 7pm Thursday, followed by the three-hour workshop at the conference.
And on Friday, I slept. Mostly. I still had work to do and meetings to attend. Oh well. I made it, but let’s not do that again for a while.
The Queen’s Gambit
If you haven’t seen it yet, The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix is excellent. I’ve been a (mediocre) chess player all my life, and watching the story of Beth Harmon basically be a female version of Bobby Fischer from the 1960s (with very different issues) was a blast. The show has been #1 on Netflix around the world for a few weeks now, and even led to the FIDE, the International Chess Federation that sanctions all the major tournaments and titles, award her the GM title:
Awesome. It’s great when big organizations show a sense of humor, not to mention appreciate all the publicity for chess (especially women’s chess) the show is providing.
I only have a few minor nits to pick with the show, which were echoed by Magnus Carlsen, the current World Champion himself:
It’s very unlikely anyone with substance abuse issues that bad could be successful at the top levels.
The show mentioned Nona Gaprindashvili, one of the greatest woman players ever, as a former women’s World Champion, but said she avoided playing against men. In reality, she played in men’s tournaments many times, and was the first woman to be awarded the Grandmaster title.
On the other hand, it was great to see the Soviet players portrayed as reasonable people, not the evil inhuman machines they normally are in other Cold War related movies. In fact, it was the CIA guy who Beth was forced to deal with that acted like all the worst clichés of the time, which was either intentionally funny or an ironic commentary, take your pick.
Hi, Trisha!
The Java Annotated Monthly, authored by the inimitable Trisha Gee, came out right on Election Day.
To my surprise, Trisha once again was kind enough to include a link to an issue of this newsletter in the monthly, this time referring to the discussion about loneliness and isolation as depicted in Good Will Hunting.
Trisha also decided to start producing a video version of her monthly post:
It’s very good, of course. I suspect if I tried to make a video version of my newsletter, the result would be longer than just reading the text. Still, if you find that idea appealing, let me know.
Miscellaneous
I spent a lot of time this week digging into the Jetpack components for Android development. I’m at that awkward stage where I think I get it, but not enough to fix the problems that come up when I use them. That’s an inevitable, though frustrating, stage to be in. Hopefully soon it will all settle in.
Long time readers of this newsletter know I’ve been struggling with teaching my Android classes for several months now, given how much the development model has changed in the past couple of years. I was even considering dropping the whole area. Recent opportunities, however, have pushed me toward putting in the necessary work to retrain myself, and I’m getting there.
I just wish I was able to learn whatever I needed this way:
That capability would put me out of a job, but I’d take it in a heartbeat.
Finally, I’ve gotten several thorough reviews for my Managing Your Manager draft. Once my final Kotlin for Android Developers course ends on Tuesday I can finally make the necessary updates and we can publish a beta version of the book. Believe me, I’ll make a big deal out of that when it’s ready. I enjoyed teaching the associated training class again this week.
Whew! A long, hard week for pretty much everybody. Hopefully we can all stay healthy and at least moderately productive going forward.
Last week:
Spring and Spring Boot, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Managing Your Manager, same
Kotlin for Android Developers, private course
Groovy 3: All The New Features, GIDS
Kotlin Coroutines and More, GIDS
Kotlin Fundamentals workshop, GIDS
This week:
Kotlin for Android Developers, private class
Functional Java, O’Reilly Learning Platform
NFJS Virtual Tour Stop, where I’m giving four presentations on Friday