Month: September 2024

Systems Thinking

Our scrum master at work suggested this week that we look into design thinking and systems thinking. I guess there’s some application of both to scrum, though I haven’t done much work on it yet, so I don’t really know what that is. But I like researching stuff and wasting time on the internet, so I did some reading and found some resources. I’ve found two books on design thinking and two books on systems thinking that are often recommended.

For design thinking:

For systems thinking:

Full disclosure: I got these recommendations from an AI chatbot. But, in looking into them, they do all seem to be popular choices. (And they’re all real books, and not hallucinations, which is more than I can say for the list I got out of a chatbot when I asked it to recommend some books I could give to a friend for his 65th birthday last week. But I digress.)

I also looked at some LinkedIn Learning videos to try to figure out some basics. My initial takeaway is that I’m not really interested in reading about design thinking right now. I might come back to it later, but systems thinking makes more sense to me at present.

So I went ahead and bought the Kindle versions of the two systems thinking books above. I started reading Thinking in Systems today. It might actually be a good book. (Too early to tell, but I’m optimistic.) The author passed away some time ago, but there’s a good website devoted to her work here.

Of course, I’m still in the middle of The Gathering Storm. And I’m enjoying it quite a lot. The series is really ramping up here, with only two more books to go. So I’m going to try and go back and forth between the two books and see how that goes, but I’m probably going to be a lot more interested in the Wheel of Time rather than the Systems Thinking stuff.

Laundry and smoke detectors and other exciting stuff

I think this post is going to be a bunch of little updates on things. I’ve got a lot of thoughts in my head, and a bunch of things I want to blog about. Let’s see how far I get through them before running out of steam!

First, an update on some boring mundane stuff. We got four new washing machines installed in my apartment building, so I was able to do all of my laundry in one fell swoop this morning, in my own building. (See this post for a previous update.) Of course, the new machines cost a little more than the old machines. And one of the new machines is already broken.

My other big apartment-related issue lately has been my smoke detector. It went off in the middle of the night Sunday night, twice. Not the actual alarm, but the double-beep that normally indicates a low battery. I’d replaced the battery only about a month ago, so I opened a maintenance request with my landlord. The maintenance guy came in on Monday, told me he thought my new battery wasn’t strong enough, and replaced it. Of course, he was wrong, and I got the low battery warning in the middle of the might again, on Tuesday night. So I opened another request, and the maintenance guy came in and replaced the unit. (I was working in the office on that day, so didn’t get to talk to him about it.) I hoped that would be the end of it, but then, the next day, I came home from work and saw that the new unit had come loose and was now hanging from the ceiling by the wires that hook it into the building system. I opened another maintenance request on that, on Thursday, but the maintenance guy didn’t come in on Friday, so now I guess I have to deal with a smoke detector dangling from the ceiling for the whole weekend. At least it’s not beeping.

This is all completely useless information to anyone other than me, of course, but it makes me feel a little better to write it up and get it out of my head.

And this is all background to talk about my general state of mind, which has been influenced by (1) not getting enough sleep on multiple occasions this week, and (2) feeling like everything is an uphill battle that always takes multiple tries, just to get to a semi-stable situation that isn’t any better than the previous semi-stable situation.

On the positive side, I’ve got a nice move streak going on with my Apple Watch right now. I’m at 40 days, which is the longest streak I’ve had, by far. Generally, if I get a move streak going, the watch suggests that I up my move goal, and I do that, and then I can’t meet it every day the next week, and the streak is broken. Or I get sick and rest for a day. So there’s a couple of interesting things going on here. First, that the watch isn’t asking me to up my move goal. And, second, that I’ve gone 40 days without getting sick. Which probably isn’t a lot for most people, but it’s a lot for me. So I’ve got at least one nice stable situation going this month! Plenty of walking!

Watch OS 11 will let you pause a move streak, apparently. I don’t think I’d ever bother doing that. It’s nice to have a streak going, if it motivates you to keep exercising. But I think it’s good to just let it reset once in a while. Or change the goal so you can’t meet it every day.

And here’s a funny video that’s related to the idea of walking for mental health. It’s actually a sneaker ad, of course, but it’s still kind of funny, and I definitely agree with it.

And that’s it for this post. I started writing some more stuff below about another topic, then realized that it didn’t belong in a post about laundry and smoke detectors.

AeroPress

After yesterday’s post about laundry, I thought I should write up something more typical of this blog. So here’s an article about making coffee.

I finally bought an AeroPress. I think I first heard about the AeroPress around 2011, from something Cory Doctorow wrote, probably this. It seemed to be very popular with a certain crowd of tech folks at that time. For instance, here’s a blog post from Macro Arment about it from 2012.

Here’s an article on the history of the AeroPress. It’s interesting, if you haven’t already learned about it.

Anyway, I never got around to buying one, even though it’s not expensive, and seemed like the kind of thing I’d get some use out of. It’s a simple gadget. Of course, like any simple gadget that becomes popular, there are now several variations of it, in several colors, but they’re all basically the same thing. I noticed last week that Woot had a sale on the original version for just $30, and decided to order one, on a whim. Now, $30 is what the original one was priced at when it first came out, so that’s not much of a deal. But the original is now $40 new, and the slightly fancier newer version is $50, so I guess it’s a good deal.

I’ve used it to make my morning coffee yesterday and today. It works well, and makes coffee that tastes quite good. And it’s easier to clean up afterwards than my Moka pot, so that’s nice.

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, long term. I’ve fallen into the habit over the last few years of making my weekday morning coffee with my Krups drip coffee maker, and my weekend morning coffee with my Moka pot, and that’s been working well for me. I could see myself alternating between the AeroPress and the Moka pot on the weekends, depending on my mood.

I’m also thinking about bringing it into work and using it to make my afternoon cup of coffee. But I’m not sure I want to become “that guy who uses a weird gadget to make his coffee” though. I’m probably already known as a weirdo, because, well, I am who I am. So I’m not sure if I should double-down on that, or try not to push it too far. Anyway, the whole office coffee situation is a problem, and this blog post will get too long if I get too deeply into that.

Laundry Day

OK, fair warning, this post is mostly going to be me whining about dumb stuff. You’ve been warned.

My apartment building has a laundry room with six washers and four dryers. The washers have been breaking, one after the other, and the landlord hasn’t been fixing them. As of this morning, we were down to just one washer. I managed to get two loads of laundry done, then, on the third, that washer stopped working. I was feeding quarters into it, but it kept resetting. So I lost a bunch of quarters and had to give up and go over to the laundromat for my last load.

There’s a laundromat near my apartment, but I’d never been in it. I haven’t used a laundromat in at least thirty years. It turns out to be a pretty nice laundromat. Everything was clean, and I didn’t have any problems. It’s a lot more expensive than our laundry room though. I’d been paying $1.75 for laundry for many years. The machines at the laundromat cost $3.25. (And it’s all still quarters only. That’s a lot of quarters!)

The landlord sent out an email a few weeks ago saying that they’ve ordered new machines for our laundry room, but I don’t know when those are coming in and getting installed. So I guess I’m going to be going to the laundromat for a while.

It’s a small thing, relatively speaking, but it’s annoying that I’m having to change up my usual Saturday routine. Since 2020, I’ve been keeping to a pretty consistent schedule: up at 6, shower, start the laundry, eat breakfast, then move stuff from the washers to the dryers. Then, go over to ShopRite for groceries. Then, when I’m back, get the stuff out of the dryers and fold it up and put it away. I can get that all done by 9 AM, usually. Then I have the rest of the day for whatever.

Today was really inefficient, doing one load at a time for the first two loads, then not being able to do the third. And then having to wait for my stuff to dry before I could take the last load to the laundromat. Next week should be easier, since I can just take everything over to the laundromat and do it all at once.

Though I remember now that I’m supposed to do some testing for work next Saturday. We’re doing some kind of edge router replacement or something, and I have to test a few things after they’re done. That’s not a problem when I’m using the laundry room, but if I’m at the laundromat, I can’t leave my stuff unattended. So I have to get the laundry done either before the testing starts, or after it’s done. (Or I need to take my laptop to the laundromat, and tether it to my phone, and work from there…)

I also might need to get a laundry cart now. The laundromat is a short walk, but I know a full hamper of laundry will be a bit heavy to carry that far.

Oh well, at least the weather is nice today, and I’m done for now. I can have a nice lunch and relax.