Tales from the jar side: Spring Live, Online courses, and the Muppets
The 70s were problematic for more than just Disco
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of March 15 - 22, 2020. This week I taught an Introduction to Gradle class online, participated in the Spring Live 24-hour virtual conference, and worked on my Managing Your Manager book.
Quick coronavirus update
My wife and I are home and healthy so far.
Many of my training classes are online (thanks to the O’Reilly Learning Platform and, coming soon, the No Fluff, Just Stuff virtual workshops), so my business is healthy, too.
My wife is a real estate lawyer who primarily does title searches, so if the town records she needs are online, she’s good. Otherwise, we’ll see. Some town halls are open to title searchers only, but who knows how long that will last?
My son no longer lives at home. He works in retail (he sells guitars at a local Guitar Center), and his job will be shutting down tomorrow. That feels really late to me, but so be it. He can’t visit, of course, since my wife and I are in the (most) vulnerable population. At least I can send him money if needed.
It turns out my little town of Marlborough, CT, has a food bank. My plan is to contribute to it on a regular basis, as I expect this crisis to go on a while. We’re also ordering meals online from local restaurants, mostly to help keep them in business. I’m able to keep up with the town situation on their Facebook page, which makes FB actually useful occasionally.
I hope you and yours are all healthy. I expect that for the next couple of weeks the “isolation” part of social isolation will be a challenge as people adjust to the new reality. For those of you with young kids at home, sigh, good luck with that. If we had gone through this with my son when he was young, I expect you would have seen him listed on eBay pretty quickly.
This gif is making the rounds, and it’s pretty good. I just thought I’d share it here, in a medium where you can’t tell how I pronounce the word gif.
(I pronounce it like gif, of course. Duh.)
Interview Available
I mentioned in an earlier newsletter that at the DevNexus conference in February (remember when we used to be able to go to conferences and interact with crowds of people? Yeah, neither do I) I did a couple of short interviews. One of them appeared on YouTube this week. Here is the link:
I’m the heavy set guy wearing the cap and glasses. No, the other one.
It’s only five minutes long, but I tried to cram in all the book-related jokes I know.
Spring Live
Spring Live was quite an event. It started at 9 am Pacific time on Thursday the 19th and ran for 24 hours straight (the complete vernal equinox — first full day of Spring, get it?), with only short breaks in between talks. My talk was held at 23:20 Pacific time, which translates to a mind-numbing 2:20 am Eastern time where I live.
My job was to speak intelligently for 40 minutes at 2:20 in the morning. That was quite a challenge, but for a different reason than for most people. It wasn’t so much the hour (I’ve always been a night owl) or the fact it was virtual. That’s much of my job these days. The hard part for me was keeping the presentation down to only 40 minutes.
I spent way more time preparing than I expected, mostly because I knew I was talking to an audience of Spring developers, and partly because I kept finding things I wanted to include. Then I had to make sure the code all worked, and pare everything down to the limited time slot.
Here is a link to this GitHub repository (I’ll add the YouTube video when it becomes available — possibly as soon as next week). I also added a pdf version of the slides I used to the repository.
So, if you’re interested, enjoy. The conference was very good overall and I look forward to watching several of the talks I missed when the recordings come online.
Introduction To Gradle
This week I taught the Introduction to Gradle online course offered every other month by Gradle, Inc. I really don’t have anything special to say about it, other than the class went well and was quite well attended.
(Gee, online courses are doing well. I wonder why? Could it be related to the fact so many people are working from home?)
We had an enthusiastic group with lots of questions. If you’re interested, it will be offered again in May. See this page for details of all the free online offerings from Gradle, Inc.
Managing Your Manager
I expect to spend a lot more time over the next couple of weeks working on my Managing Your Manager book, which will be published by The Pragmatic Programmers later this year. One of the bigger challenges is trying to keep the book active when so much of the advice is negative, like “avoid bypassing the chain of command” or “your boss is not your friend”.
In Judaism, the mitvot (commandments) break into two categories: positive and negative, or the “thou shalts” vs the “thou shalt nots”. The Ten Commandments themselves are a good example: honor thy father and mother vs thou shalt not murder. So this isn’t exactly a new problem.
I don’t enjoy writing a “thou shalt not” chapter, because much of it is a chronicle of all the consequences that can happen when you violate it. On the other hand, it’s easier to perform a negative commandment well. If I follow a positive commandment, someone can always say how it could be done better. But I can NOT do a negative commandment as well as the holiest scholar who ever lived.
Somehow I have to work that concept into the book. At any rate, this week I worked on the Violating the Chain of Command chapter, which is as negative as it gets. The good news is that finishing it gives me three chapters that have been revised and are in decent shape, and I can move on to something more positive. Much more about that in future newsletters.
The 70s were problematic
A couple weeks ago, I made an oblique reference to Pigs In Space, a recurring skit from The Muppet Show. Like most people, my memories of The Muppet Show are overwhelmingly positive. It occurred to me that many of those episodes, or at least some scenes from them, must be on YouTube. I did a quick search and found a collection of Pigs In Space snippets.
I’m not linking the YouTube videos here, because oh, lordy, no. Each one consists of three recurring characters — Captain Link Hogthrob, First Mate Piggy, and Dr. Julius Strangepork — aboard the spaceship Swinetrek. So far, so good. The problem is that the plot of each episode is essentially Miss Piggy desperately trying to be taken seriously and the other two dismissing her as a woman who is only capable of, at best, housework-related activities. It’s awful. The word “cringe-worthy” comes to mind. I watched a handful to see if they ever got over that, but nope. I’m pretty sure I was uncomfortable with them even at the time, but I don’t really remember. All I can say now is, yikes.
To try to get some balance, I checked out a collection of Veterinarian’s Hospital (“the continuing story of a quack that’s gone to the dogs”) skits. Those were much better, though not as funny as I remember.
In an attempt to salvage a vital part of my childhood, with some trepidation I rewatched the old, original Muppet Movie from 1979. I am very pleased to report that is still as awesome as ever, despite Stadler and Waldorf’s review:
“I’ve seen detergents that left a better film than this!” — Waldorf
Rainbow Connection is still wonderful:
The guest stars are great, too, including Charles Durning as Doc Hopper, who wants Kermit the Frog to be spokesfrog for Doc Hopper’s French Fried Frogs Legs, and dozens of cameos from Bob Hope to Richard Pryor to Mel Brooks to Orson Welles. Just a joy all around, which is so badly needed these days.
If you get a chance, see it again.
Speaking of the 70s, on the day we went to Daylight Savings Time, I tweeted this:
As it happens, 1979 was the year I saw both The Muppet Movie and the Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time. I was only 17, attending Harvard Summer School in Cambridge, so I went with several friends to a midnight showing in Boston. By then, everybody in the audience knew what lines to yell out (Magenta: “To the planet Transexual, in the galaxy of Transylvania”; Crowd: “In the state of New Jersey!”) and what props to throw (Brad: “Great Scott!” and everybody threw toilet paper — an unimaginable luxury now).
I loved the movie, and not just because as a 17-year-old straight male I fell hopelessly in lust with Susan Sarandon. I’m not going to say growing up in York, PA (better known as “where? never heard of it”) was a sheltered existence, but I had no idea trans people even existed, much less saw one on screen. Fortunately, I know better now.
The music especially was awesome, and I bought the 8-track tape (another problematic contribution of the 70s) and listened to it constantly over the next year. I’m sure I have all the music memorized, or at least the songs that appeared on the soundtrack.
Seeing Susan Sarandon go from Janet in Rocky Horror to Annie Savoy in Bull Durham to Jane in The Witches of Eastwick to Louise in Thelma and Louise means I’ve watched her grow older as I did. She just did it better.
Rocky Horror still holds up well, at least for me. The most striking thing about it now is how tame it all seems, but I suppose 40 years will do that. Sigh.
As a final note from the 70s, I found that lots of episodes of Super Chicken are available on YouTube as well. (Okay, that’s technically the 60s, but I watched them in the 70s, so I’m going with it.) Whether you have young kids at home or you just want to use them as an excuse to watch the episodes, enjoy.
Last week:
Introduction to Gradle online for Gradle, Inc.
Spring Live presentation on Spring and Kotlin
Worked on Managing Your Manager
This week:
What’s New In Java online course on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Presentation online for the Connecticut Java Users Group
Rescheduled online presentation on Kotlin for the NY Java SIG.
More writing.