Fugato

Here’s John Cleese, in real life, delivering a eulogy at the memorial service for his friend Graham Chapman, who had tragically died of cancer at 48.

… and I guess that we’re all thinking how sad it is that a man of such talent, such capability for kindness, of such unusual intelligence, should now so suddenly be spirited away at the age of only forty-eight, before he’d achieved many of the things of which he was capable, and before he’d had enough fun.

Well, I feel that I should say, “Nonsense. Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard, I hope he fries.”

He said this to honor his good friend, and he explained that succinctly: “Anything for him but mindless good taste.”

Why so grumpy?

Regardless of the content of criticism, its presentation is inversely proportional in harshness to the perceived humanness of its target.

When you criticize what you perceive to be an opaque corporate wall, it is easy to get unnecessarily harsh and negative and ranty.

When you criticize what you perceive to be humans and their work, you may have exactly the same things to say, but you present them in a manner that is more balanced, more respectful/-able, and probably more useful.

(Well, many of us do.)

Probably for this reason, Microsoft gets more flak per unit of suckiness than other software companies.

Nobody is ever suckiness-free. Minimizing flak means both:

• minimizing suckiness
• and minimizing FPUOS (flak per unit of suckiness) — by decorporatizing your image as hard as you can

(Yeah, decorporatize is a word now. 127 results on Google say so.)

I suspect blogs.msdn.com was the best move Microsoft ever made to improve their image among developers.

Of course, releasing a stable, usable SCM would be an even better move. I hope TFS SP1 turns out to be that move.

I sit, engrossed in flow, that exquisite state of mind where time and space cease to exist and the consciousness contains only my work, in sharp focus.

A knock on my shoulder. Guy from the department next door.

I disengross myself, switch to the media player, pause the music, take off my headphones, turn around, say hi with a question mark.

He says: “Oh, nothing, just, hi. How are you?”

I say: “Er, fine. And you?”

It turns out that he is fine as well. He absconds. I start working again, and eventually I’ll get into flow again. But I’m not in it now.

I feel like David Brent dropped by.

… in an airplane, do it slowly. If you jerk it back too fast, you not only bug the passenger behind you; you also risk breaking the screen off his laptop which he has placed on his tray table with the screen wedged up against the groove in your seat back because the seats are so economically spaced that he can smell your hairspray, much as he’d prefer not to. So recline slowly please.

That’s right, old woman travelling on FI 631 to Boston this afternoon, I’m talking to you.

And you snored too. It was audible over the engine roar.

Last night I witnessed the fine heights to which a person’s restaurant manners can rise.

I was pleased to see Shalimar fairly full and lively when I got there for a dinner break from work. Shalimar is a small Indian restaurant in the centre of Reykjavík, just across from my workplace; it is often rather empty when I go there (typically at odd hours), but not this time.

The life was all coming from one table in the center downstairs, and soon enough, said life was accompanied by that joyous gift that benevolent strangers unselfishly bestow upon one another in public places: cigarette smoke. I had never seen anyone smoke there before, so I asked the waiter if the non-smoking space was upstairs — “No, er, it’s down here actually.”

Now, I am a little bit eccentric, and in particular, I am often unappreciative of those best things in life that are always free, such as punches in the face (rare), urination on my house (somewhat less rare), and second-hand smoke (far less rare, sadly). So I was somehow not amenable to the idea of eating my dinner sitting in the fine fragrance of shrivelled plant remains burning on somebody’s lips. That’s okay, it’s my little quirk, and I’m a young and nimble-footed kind of guy, and pathologically conflict-avoiding, so I just picked up my dinner and relocated myself upstairs, in the smoking section, which was entirely empty of both smokers and non-smokers.

But of course, it’s always less fun to eat alone. I think the good citizens downstairs realized that, and felt for me, because they were kind enough to immediately raise their voices to allow me some passive participation in the conversation. They proceeded to keep their voices at that level for the duration of my meal, with plenty of emotionally rich outbursts along the lines of I am not talking to you now, you swine, so stay the hell out of it, etc. That particular young man apparently did not share my trait of conflict avoidance. He certainly did not share my condition of sobriety. Anyway, at no point in the conversation did I feel the least bit left out. Their topics ranged far and wide, covering everything from each participant’s astute perception of the others’ moral failings, to the most contentious dramas current in Icelandic politics (none of which seemed to end up being definitively resolved at that meal, oddly).

And finally, I paid and left. They were still going strong.

Lessons learned, for my own restaurant behavior? Clearly I should try to get into the habit of producing some audio (and some odor) to stimulate those around me. A lifeless lump who just sits at his table sipping his mango lassi in silence — where’s the fun in that? I don’t think I’ll start smoking though. Sorry. I’m just not ready for it. Maybe when I’m older and more mature. And other suggestions for odor production are unwelcome, thank you.