Oh, yeah

Now I remember what it is I hate about having a management-type job: it doesn't feel like real work. Yesterday it was like I was playing "Operator" - developer A tells me he fixed a defect and sends me a file, and I send the file to deployer B and ask if he can deploy it today; when B says okay, I ask tester C if deploying the fix will interrupt testing; when C says it's okay, I tell B to go ahead and deploy; then I wait for B to tell me if the deployment was successful. Which it wasn't, because for some reason a "node" was down, which was causing business analyst D to panic. For this I went to college? Twice? Retirement cannot come soon enough.

Most recent evenings I have been watching the Olympics, which is mildly entertaining and surprisingly engrossing. I'm not attracted to action movies, but wipe-outs on skates or skis? I'm so there. If I was the boss of the Olympics, though, I would turn it back into amateur competition. The primary rules would be, you can enter only one event, and once you have won a medal, you can never return. We could call it the Olympics for Real People.

I finished Bright-Sided. It was okay. Some of my friends are into the Law of Attraction and The Secret and I was hoping B-S would supply me with some ammunition against their magical thinking. But it didn't. Barbara Ehrenreich's bias is about all that carries the book, although the history of positive thinking was interesting. (I didn't know I was such a Calvinist.) Anyway, we all engage in magical thinking in one form or another, which is okay as long as it doesn't supplant critical thinking.

Now I am reading Horse Boy, which is about an autistic kid with an affinity for animals. The dad is convinced his son can be healed if they seek out shamans in Mongolia. No, this is not fiction, which is what makes it such a compelling story.

Somewhere in there, I watched "Bon Voyage" which I would describe as a French romantic farce. It must not have made much of an impression on me because all I can remember is that Gerard Depardieu was in it. Oh! Wait! It was about an actress and her besotted childhood friend in pre-World War II France. Gerard played a government minister the actress was leeching off. Not exactly a fun time in history, but the movie did make me laugh.