Skit Skat Skoodle Doot

We’re forecast to get a foot or two of snow tomorrow, but it won’t start until around 2pm. Even so, with all the anticipation (both positive and negative), I’m going to be disappointed when I wake up in the morning and there’s nothing on the ground.

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I write a fair amount of Javascript for my job, and recently I was reminded that I should really be running eslint against my code to keep it up to our operating standards.  So I ran it against my updates today before I commited them to the repository, and it was a huge PITA to fix all the minor style warnings.  One solution to this would be to use WebStorm like some of the other Excellence Wranglers, since that’s a powerful IDE that can do dynamic linting as the code is written.  But I hate using IDEs.  I know they offer a lot of advantages, but to me nothing beats the simplicity of gvim (or MacVim for OSX).  It’s got a GUI, so I’m not restricted to the terminal, but it has all the strengths of vi, which is my editor of choice.

But lo and behold – Syntastic – a vim plugin that can run any syntax checker, including eslint.  I installed it, and now it lints my code every time I save the file.  The only feature it doesn’t have that I’d like is the ability to automatically fix the errors, but that might be something I can hack in there later, or continue to just run via the command line.  For now it’s enough that I see the problems a few at a time instead of waiting until I have an entire file written without enough spaces in my function calls.

I went to the dentist this morning.  Don’t worry, no cavities.  But I did do some interesting eavesdropping.  There was an older man (not sure how old, but I’d guess at least 70) in the chair next to me, separated by a wall.  His hygienist was new to the practice, replacing a woman who had been there for a long time, so there was a lot of ‘getting to know you’ conversation.  It was clear that his dental hygiene was a little bit lacking, and his gums bled a fair amount during the cleaning.  She asked if he brushed twice a day, and he said “I’ll lie to you the same thing as I did to [the old hygienist], yes!”.  So she tried to tell him that brushing twice a day will solve those problems, and started saying how there’s a strong link between problems with oral health and a myriad other diseases.

At this point he cut her off and said that he disagreed.  His theory (in his words) was that when he was growing up nobody wore gloves while they were serving food, and nobody got sick from it.  He thinks that if you sanitize things too much then we won’t build up any immunities.

Now, I agree that the microbiome is important, and keeping an active culture of bacteria in our systems is critical to our well-being.  But it’s not like she was asking him to gargle bleach to kill everything in his mouth…she just said “brush twice a day”.  I wonder if he washes his hands when he uses the bathroom, or handles raw chicken.

I also wonder why it’s not worth 30 seconds to do a crappy job of brushing his teeth twice a day, but it’s worth going in to the dentist for a full cleaning/checkup twice a year.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr Day in the US, which is a federal holiday.  Most people get the day off work, but I’ve pretty much never been in that category.  I think I’ve only not worked on MLK Day once in my entire professional career.

For nearly a decade I worked for Lockheed Martin, and their policy is to give employees a few “fixed” holidays and a few “floaters”.  The fixed holidays are New Year’s, Memorial Day, 4th of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and you can only take those holiday hours on the actual holiday (unless you’re a shift worker, which introduces tons of fun addendums and quid pro quos).  The floaters can be used at any time, and one of them is in theory designated for today.

After I left Lockheed I worked briefly for another small contractor, and the contract I was on with that company was structured differently.  There I only had to work a certain number of hours (1880) across the span of the year, and it factored out to 40 hours a week minus 3 weeks of vacation and holidays.  The contract was officially shut down on all federal holidays, but I could work if I wanted to shift those holiday hours to a later date.  So essentially the same as the floating holidays, but more flexible overall.  Regardless, this was probably the one time I took the day off.

Now I work for Automattic, and everything I did before was thrown out the window.  There’s no concept of vacation or holiday time.  I work whenever and wherever I want, as long as I get my job done.  And holidays like today are especially nebulous, since the company is spread out all across the globe, and the holiday is limited to just the US.  So I’m working on a federal holiday, but I’m doing that work from the comfort* of a coffee shop.

*It’s comfortable, but there are some jerks in the corner doing a video chat with the volume up.  Seriously, how is that acceptable?  This is a public place.  Share a pair of headphones or something.

Colemak is a keyboard layout alternative to QWERTY.  You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout#Colemak

I’ve set as a New Year’s resolution to learn it and use it as my primary.  This post was written using it.  I usually type ~80-100 wpm, depending on the typing test you want to use.  Now I’m typing ~10-20 wpm at best.  Probably closer to 5-10 in real world usage.  It’s very frustrating, but not as hard of a transition as I expected.  I’m not quite going cold turkey, just using it a little every day.

The benefits are that it’s potentially faster, but I’m not really counting too much on that.  The bigger thing for me is that everyone I’ve talked to about it has said that their wrist/hand pain has completely gone away.  I don’t really have a big problem there, but I do have minor issues occasionally.  If nothing else maybe this will stave off carpal tunnel a while longer.

Several times recently Valentina, 9 months old, has peed on me while I’ve been getting her bath ready. Rather than learning my lesson and just leaving her diaper on until the last moment, it happened over and over again over the last few weeks. So last night I decided to start her potty training early, and I held her up on Gia’s training potty while I got the bath ready and sure enough she peed in it!

Now I’ve got dreams of a world where neither of my kids wear diapers…which I know is sadly still a long long way away.

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Posted from WordPress for Android!