Tales from the jar side: Spring, Tweets, and Trolling Memes
By Grabthar's Hammer, Resistance To Memes is Futile
Welcome to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of May 3 - 10, 2020. This week I taught courses in basic Spring and Spring Boot, Reactive Spring, and Kotlin and Spring, and yet all week it felt like Fall, or even Winter.
Before I go on with that, my friend Greg Turnquist put out a YouTube video showing a day in the life of a Spring developer.
Today the sun is out, bright and shining, and yet the temperature is dropping from 59F down to 43F (or 15C down to 6C), which is ridiculous for May. At least I didn’t wake up to snow on the ground, like yesterday, where we even had a brief squall in the afternoon.
I couldn’t help tweeting the following:
Clever? Perhaps, but it didn’t generate a lot of likes. Of course, it’s not the sort of tweet that attracts a lot of likes. It’s more the kind that you read, sigh, and move on.
That’s my somewhat contrived segue to another tweet I sent out this week, which got the most likes in the shortest amount of time of any tweet I’ve ever done. It requires a bit of explanation, however, before I include it. I’ve mentioned in the past few newsletters that I’ve been enjoying watching chess online. The tournaments I cared about ended a couple weeks ago, but that doesn’t mean they stopped entirely. This week featured a team competition called the Nation’s Cup, a rapid tournament featuring teams from Russia, China, the US, India, “Europe”, and “The Rest of the World”. The tournament was ultimately won by China, who drew their final match against the US 2 -2 but won on tiebreaks.
Many of the world’s top players participated, but conspicuous by his absence was the World Champion himself, Magnus Carlsen (being Norwegian, he presumably would have played for Europe, which he admitted was hard to get excited about). The tournament was hosted on the web site chess.com and Magnus is a part owner of chess24.com, so there was some speculation that he skipped the tournament because it featured a rival site. When asked about it during an interview, he claimed that the no one from chess.com had contacted him, and though someone from FIDE (the international chess federation) had gotten in touch, he wasn’t impressed.
In response, the Twitter feed from chess.com released the following statement:
Not exactly a diplomatic comment, and Magnus was quick to respond:
Ouch. If you follow Magnus, you realize he was (mostly) joking, but it’s hard to tell from all the smoke surrounding that burn. I couldn’t resist replying:
And as you can see, that tweet received 148 likes so far — 100 in the first couple of hours — nearly all from people who don’t follow me. That may not be a lot in absolute numbers, but it was a lot for me. :)
Speaking of Twitter, if you’re into Star Trek and humor, this tweet thread made the rounds and it is hilarious:
You have to click on it to see the thread, but believe me, it’s a wild ride.
Since I’m recommending Twitter links this week, let me mention another one, related in the sense it also involves space aliens.
That references this article, written by the inestimable astrophysicist Katie Mack, that talks about those grainy UFO videos released by the Pentagon last week.
This week also contained Star Wars day, May 4. That usually leads to someone posting this famous meme:
That’s a decent attempt to offend four groups of fandom at once. This time a friend tweeted:
So I replied:
If you enjoy these mixed metaphors, here are a few more, found around the Internet:
And even this disaster waiting to happen:
I am Groot, indeed.
A few miscellaneous items, to keep this week’s newsletter mercifully short:
I enjoyed teaching my classes this week, but I have to admit, four days (Spring is 2, Reactive is 1, and Kotlin is 1) is a lot.
I also spent every day participating in Laurie Penny’s Writing Sprint Quarantine Club, working on my Managing Your Manager book. I made a lot of progress on the book, but there’s still a fair distance to go.
Netflix added the documentary Becoming based on the book of the same name by Michelle Obama. My wife and I thought it was excellent.
A lot of what I read this week fell into the category of “long reads,” which are longer articles that require more of an investment. If you like that sort of thing, you can subscribe to the weekly newsletter at The Sunday Long Read.
I finished all eight books in The Expanse series, so now I’m looking forward to more seasons of the TV show on Amazon.
I’m also a big fan of the series of Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher, about a wizard detective working in downtown Chicago. The next book in the series, Peace Talks, is scheduled for July 14, so I’ve started re-reading the Dresden books in order. I don’t know if I’ll finish all 15 available books before the new one arrives, but that’s got to be more fun than dealing with the news these days.
The 17th book in the Dresden Files series, Battle Ground, is scheduled for the end of September, which gives you an idea how the Peace Talks are likely to go.
I should probably mention that May 5 was also my son’s 28th birthday, and he is still as much of a goofball as ever. He’s sheltering in place in an apartment he shares with a roommate, so we haven’t seen him for a while. I can say anything I want about him, though, because there’s no way he reads my newsletter.
Finally, I’m afraid that yesterday I hurt my back again, which I do periodically. I’m not very mobile at the moment. It will be fine in a few days (ibuprofen helps), but in the meantime it’s one more annoyance to deal with. Grr. On the plus side, it kept my newsletter short(er) this week.
Last week:
Reactive Spring, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Kotlin and Spring, same place
Spring and Spring Boot, ditto
This week:
Introduction to Gradle, online for Gradle Inc. Still openings available.
Managing Your Manager, training class on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Writing more of the Managing Your Manager book