Tales from the jar side: Gradle, Self Isolation, and way too many Star Trek references

Sure they're death traps, but can transporters filter out COVID-19?

Mar 15, 2020

Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of March 8 - 15, 2020. This week I taught a private Gradle training class in the Chicago area, an online Java Testing With JUnit 5 class on Safari, and like everybody else dealt with the growing pandemic.

The goal for so many people now is simply to maintain forward progress, putting one foot in front of the other, while the world falls apart around us. Given that the crisis in this country is only getting started, I’ll say the following:

My family and I are fine, as are all my friends, as least as far as we know.
I’m glad I’m home at the moment.
Like everybody says, wash your hands.

Star Trek: The Newsletter Diversion

My personal hand-washing mantra is “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise: its continuing mission; to explore strange, new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where Nomad has gone before.”

Wait, that’s not right. It’s “to boldly split infinitives that have never been split before.”

Hmm. Something like that. Whatever. I usually finish with, “that’s close enough” and go for the hand towels.

(And yes, I’m old enough to have memorized it with “five-year mission” and “where no man has gone before”, but if the Trek universe can grow, so can I.)

"NCC 1701. No bloody A, B, C, or D." — Montgomery Scott, during the Next Gen episode Relics, ST:TNG Season 6, Ep 4

Continuing on the Star Trek theme for a moment, a few weeks ago a friend of mine said his son was interested in watching some episodes of the original series. He asked me if I could recommend a few of them.

I suddenly realized I’d been waiting my entire life for that question. I dropped what I was doing and spent a very pleasant half hour or so putting together an annotated list of about twenty of the episodes from all three seasons, from The Trouble With Tribbles to Amok Time to The City On The Edge Of Forever to the infamous Spock’s Brain. It was awesome. I had such a good time and eagerly sent it off to him.

I saw him at the DevNexus conference some time later, and I was very careful not to ask if they had watched any of them. The world has evolved such that the nerds have arguably inherited the Earth, but some things are still embarrassing, and are best done alone, in private, and yeah, be sure to wash your hands afterwards.

Update: that’s all I was planning to say about that, but now that so many people are self isolating, I figured I might as well append the list here. All episodes of the Star Trek series are available on Netflix and on CBS: All Access (which even has The Animated Series). We subscribed to the latter just so we could watch the Picard series, but that means we’re caught up on Discovery and Short Treks as well, many of which are better than the regular series episodes. If you’re interested in my lightly annotated list, it’s at the bottom of this message, which makes it easy to skip if you want to.

As a final note, this week my wife and I re-watched Journey to Babel, a really good ST:TOS episode if you don’t think about it too hard, and followed up with the only really good episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series, entitled Yesteryear. The tag is: “Spock must travel to the past to rescue his younger self from danger.” It was written by D.C. (Dorothy) Fontana, one of the greats who we lost last December.

(To any newcomers to this newsletter — including you, Scott — I should say welcome! and yup, that’s the kind of bold, insightful commentary you can expect to find here. Let me just apologize in advance and get it over with. But welcome anyway.)

As a final note, I should mention that back in the early 90s I wrote a really good Star Trek parody called Star Trek: The (Intentionally?) Lost Episode. Someday I’ll resurrect it and post it somewhere accessible.

Twitter: The Adventure Continues

Getting back to the coronavirus:

I got myself into a bit of trouble on Twitter this week. Like many people who have Netflix, my wife and I recently binged the first season of The Witcher. That led me to come up with the following joke, which I tweeted during a break in my Gradle training class:

Ken Kousen @kenkousen

I tossed a coin to my Witcher, but he refused to protect me from the coronavirus. Do I need to be from the Valley of Plenty?

The reference is to the following song (warning: serious ear-worm ahead):

The problem is that when I checked my responses, several people had replied with things like, “Oh no!” and “Get well soon!” and “Hope you’re all right”, etc. I had to immediately post that it was just a joke — we’re all fine here.

Image result for we're all fine here how are you

Boring conversation anyway.

In the end, I decided that the joke really isn’t that misleading. The responses were more an indication of how on edge everyone is at the moment, and I totally get that.

So in the spirit of keeping on while keeping on, let me offer this quote, from the Marvel Avengers movie (the good one from 2012, written by Joss Whedon):

Nick Fury: Until such time as the world ends, we will act as though it intends to spin on.

Actual Work-Related Stuff

This week, in what is likely to be my last onsite course for a long time, I traveled to Chicago to teach a private Introduction to Gradle class. The class went well, with one complication — on the second day, the network got slower and slower until it became unusable. We were onsite, but we also had several remote students using WebEx to attend.

As it turned out, the delay had nothing to do with us. The entire company’s network was collapsing, and this was a big freakin’ company. The reason they gave was that so many employees were working from home on a VPN that it was bringing the network to its knees. They then modified a setting in the firewall (?) and somehow that fixed the problem.

I got the explanation for both the problem and the fix third-hand, so it may not be quite right. Still, that was an interesting side-effect of the coronavirus that a lot of companies are going to have to manage over the next few weeks.

Since I wasn’t scheduled to fly home until Wednesday, I took the opportunity to meet my friend Jim Harmon for dinner. Jim was a technical trainer, who specialized in Android-related topics. He basically got me my start in that area, and helped enormously when I had to give my first couple of NFJS presentations on that topic and was woefully underprepared at the time. He now works for Foot Locker on their Android team and couldn’t be happier, so it was great seeing him again.

My other class this week was online, where I taught a JUnit 5 course. I always enjoy that one. On Safari, for privacy reasons they only show the initials of any attendees. One of the students, who actually said hi to me at the beginning, was someone named DV. It took me a while to realize that was my friend “Disco” Dan Vega, but I didn’t get a chance to reply until much later. So, if you’re reading this, Hi Dan, and yes, I’m sure nobody calls you Disco.

As a reminder, Dan is the author of a lot of great content on the Vue JavaScript framework. Check out his very active YouTube channel for details.

Last week:

Private Gradle class in Chicago area
Java Testing with JUnit 5, online at Safari
Some writing

This week:

Free (!) public Introduction to Gradle course for Gradle, Inc, online Tuesday and Wednesday, four hours each day. Still time to register if you’re interested.
Only a couple of commitments that will cause me to leave the house, and they’re one-on-one anyway. Who knows if they’ll even happen?
Writing my Managing Your Manager book
Working on porting some of my Kotlin Cookbook recipes to the O’Reilly online katacoda system. More about that in upcoming newsletters.
Since I’m doing okay at the moment, I’ll be looking for ways to help out my local shops and restaurant workers. I’ll probably order food for delivery (assuming there’s a safe way to do that), just to give them the business. I know gift certificates have been suggested, but hey, we still have to eat now, so if there’s a way to help at the same time, I’ll do that. If someone organizes a food bank in my area I’ll contribute to that, too. We’ll see what develops. Again, this is all in the early stages, at least in this country, and the situation changes dramatically every day.
I guess I should go wash my hands again now.

An Annotated Guide to Memorable ST:TOS Episodes

Season 1:

Balance of Terror: First appearance of the Romulans, whose commander is played by Mark Lenard, who later played Spock's father.
The Menagerie, Part I and II: The original pilot, redone as a two-parter. Shows Captain Pike for the first time, who also shows up on Discovery.
Arena: Kirk vs a Gorn. Nuff ced.
Court Martial: Trek always did well with trials. This was the first.
Space Seed: Khan! The basis for the second movie.
The Devil in the Dark: My sister and I always said the Horta looked just like my mother's meatloaf. “We’re having hortas for dinner? Cool!”
The City on the Edge of Forever: A very young Joan Collins (seriously) in a time-travel episode. Original script by the famous Harlan Ellison was almost completely unusable. Was rewritten by Roddenberry, leading to a life-long feud. Considered by many the best episode of all.

Season 2:

Amok Time: Written by sf writer Theodore Sturgeon. Another classic.
Who Mourns for Adonais?: Enterprise meets the Greek god Apollo. One of the episodes that spawned the famous criticism of all Roddenberry episodes, widely attributed to Harlan Ellison: "The Enterprise meets god, and it's a child, or a computer, or both." (I left most of those episodes off this list.) Reasonably entertaining, but you can skip it.
The Changeling: "You are flawed. You are imperfect. Sterilize." -- Nomad
Mirror, Mirror: First appearance of the "mirror universe". Deep Space Nine went there a few times, and Discovery second season practically lived there. Spock with a beard is seriously menacing.
I always used that picture in my presentations on the Spock testing framework.
The Doomsday Machine: Famous episode featuring a planet killer. Good acting by guest star Wiliam Windon.
I, Mudd: One of the funny ones. It won't matter that you haven't seen the first Mudd episode.
Journey to Babel: Mark Lenard, who previously played a Romulan commander, returns as Spock's father. A really good drama.
The Deadly Years: Everybody on the landing party ages really fast except Chekov. Even as a kid I wondered about the plot holes, but a fun episode.
The Trouble with Tribbles: Debut of writer David Gerrold. Probably the funniest Trek has ever been on any series. Gerrold also wrote a book about the entire experience writing for Trek, which I read so many times as a kid I practically have it memorized.
A Piece of the Action: Trek crossed with Chicago gangland mobs, but funny anyway.
The Ultimate Computer: Basically an A.I. episode from the 60's. Pretty good, but not as highly rated as the others.

Season 3: (a complete wasteland)

Spock’s Brain: Pure ridiculous camp. So bad it's good. Only watch it to make fun of it. “Brain? Brain? What is brain?” Fits the current administration perfectly.