Groundhog Day situation

What would happen if you would be a situation just like in Groundhog Day, stuck for years and years in the same day? Is that a blessing or a curse?

People often think that the mechanic repetition of the same events and the same people would become tiresome and boring. But we already live the same day. We wake up, eat breakfast, go to work, lunch, more work, home, tv, sleep. Again and again.

I would go for it. I would want the rest of my days to be distilled into a single day, played and replayed over and over again. The absence of tomorrow is a liberating thought. I wouldn’t care which day it is. As bad as you played your life up to this point, I believe that in one day you can redeem yourself. There is no such thing as a one way ticket to hell. No more fears, no more doubts. Always do the right thing again and again.

Forget the New Year's resolutions

The New Year’s celebration doesn’t have a true soul. Unlike Christmas, a holiday that is significant for me as I’ll explain in just a moment, the New Year celebration seems totally empty by comparison.

All cultures have a celebration around the winter solstice. Christmas is the replacer of Sol Invictus. It is a well reasoned event. Our ancestors tied a lot of things to cosmology. From the Egyptian Pyramids and the Temple of Heaven to Stonehenge and Chichen Itza, the religious and political system were woven in reason with cosmic events. So the winter solstice, a moment where the day starts to become longer, is extremely important in any culture. Also a lot of animals are sacrificed in this time—feeding them becomes harder without fresh pasture. This is why a party is due: longer days and hope for spring, a lot of meat and the need to celebrate the gods that made all this possible.

The New Year’s celebration is not tied to any cosmic event. Well, one year is a revolution of the Earth around the Sun, but the date we celebrate a cycle is debatable. Now the international calendar is the Gregorian one and so we celebrate the New Year on the 1st of January, but different cultures used and have different dates to celebrate it.

Have a read on when did our forefathers decide to adopt 1st of January as the New Year’s eve. You’ll be surprised on how recent that was.

It feels so artificial as it is not tied with any astral reference—they just had a day open. If all civilization is reset, we will still have a celebration for the major astral events. We humans are wired to gaze at the stars. We will certainly celebrate the full revolution of the Earth around the Sun, the New Year, but not on this date. For me, it’s just a party with extra fireworks.

So this is why, this year I will not make any resolutions tied with the year or the changing of it. I chose a different measure of time: the earth rotation around its own axis. The day.

This year I’ll have daily resolutions. They are simple: to get out of the house, to do some sort of physical exercise, to write something… anything and to have a cup of tea. Every day.

Meanwhile, I’ll procrastinate in becoming a better person till next year.

Let's have another drink, shall we?

This is the type of writing you will not see from me. It’s personal. Deeply personal. Uneditied. Raw. I didn’t want to write this and I didn’t wanted to make this public, but this is a moment of clarity and it hurts bad.

The last serveral weeks were hell. Two weeks ago, I’ve moved alone and calling the transition hard is a huge understatement—even without the idiotic rules I’m setting for myself.

I am tired. I am dirt. I feel empty, void. My insides have been replaced by worms, vermins that crawl and devour the very fabric of self. I drink every day to numb these feelings. I do not know words in any language that can describe my situation. I am certailnly not well. Oh my, what have I done to myself!?

I would like to thank all the ones that had a good word to say to me this whole time. Unfortunately, as I am a private person, an actor, a fake, they never got the full extend of my problem. This is for you: Aida, Andrei, Brîndușa, Cati, Elena, Ilinca, Mari, Mihaela, Vasile. Thank you so, so much! I will make it up to each and every one of you.

This is not a request for further help. You have done that more than enough. This is an apology. For what? I don’t know. I can’t judge my actions right anymore. I surely failed you. I surely made a fool of myself. I surely broken your expectations. I surely not thanked you enough.

This is the first time in my life I have nothing to look forward to.

The 5 items experiment

The story of the [insert weird nation here] fellow that wasn’t happy with his home is pretty straightforward. The guy went to the spiritual leader to complain about how small his house is—and his life is hell because of it. He was given advice to move all his chickens inside and come back after two weeks. He came and said that his house is a mess and hates it. The spiritual leader advised him to move his cows into his house as well. Again giving him two weeks time frame to adjust and report the outcome. After those passed, our eager-for-change fellow was absolutely demolished. He told his spiritual leader that he can’t sleep, nor can his children and wife. His house was made a mess by the animals inside.

The smart-ass spiritual leader told him to go once more to his house and, this time, remove the chickens and the cows. Then, again, report in two weeks. When time came to see the leader, our protagonist was thrilled. He kept raving that now his house is spacious, clean and all he wanted all along.

The moral is simple: we are always unhappy with what we possess. But sometimes our unhappiness is not related to how few items we have, but how many. It may be that we accumulate all this mess slowly over time and we suffer from the boiling frog syndrome.

Lately I started to turn, obsessively some added, to a more minimal lifestyle. Because I don’t know what things I need in my life I will start an experiment. It may seem like an overdose of craziness but this is my plan and the rules are simple:

1. On December 1, I will start with an empty room and I will be allowed to only have 5 items in it.
2. Every 5 days I am allowed to bring another 5 items.
3. An item is a unitary utility object—that means that the object can be useful by itself.
4. Every 5 iterations there will be an item removal stage where I must renounce 5 items.
5. Everything will run for 12 five-day iterations.

This will bring me to 40 items at most in my room in two months—everything I need and nothing I don’t. I believe there is plenty of time and the rules are clear enough so I can get to that perfect number.

My first five will be a mattress, a pillow, a blanket, my Macbook Air and my sound system. But why not count the mattress, the pillow and the blanket as one bed and free up some slots? It’s because rule number 3. All three of the aforementioned items can be used on their own without the need for the other two.

I can’t wait to see what this experiment will bring. I will certainly follow up when I complete this nonsense.

Boring intro; exciting annoucement

At the beginning of 2011, I’ve been appointed to hire somebody to fill a front-end developer position. I had to assess their technical knowledge and to give a hiring recommendation. All followed by training them to the needed level of expertise.

Preparing for the task at hand I researched tests and training material for front-end developers. Nothing. That was bizarre but I didn’t make much of it at the time.

We’ve read hundreds of resumes and selected about 25 participants for the technical interview. This process took us more than five months and only two candidates received my seal of approval.

Don’t think the test was hard! This was an ongoing discussion with my colleagues during the recruitment process. I decided not to make it easier that it is since I was the one responsible of fixing bugs in the new code; and that on top of my normal work.

After the inefficient hiring process was over and we’ve found what we’ve been looking for, we got to the training part. I had 2 months of 2 hours per day to get someone from interview-level to holy-moly-I-am-responsible-of-dozens-of-thousands-of-css-code-lines-level expertise. It may sound like plenty of time but it all distills to mostly a 80 hour window to make an impact. Seeing how poorly all the candidates presented themselves, my skepticism was at its highest.

This is when I’ve realized how small the market for front-end developers really is. I believe this is the case because there is no proper documentation online for this job. I am not talking about slicing a brochure site, but handling an enterprise level web application’s markup and css.

So, I woke up early, and while enjoying a cup of tea I’ve busted my brains and came up with a list of things that a qualified front-end developer must know. I had an outline. It was brilliant and following it made the training a success.

Actually I am so happy of how my plan turned out that—after this long, boring intro I can get to the meaty part of the story—I’ve decided to write a book. I don’t want to throw all my work and gathered resources away as I am sure it will help others.

The book will be distributed as HTML, of course, and will be creative commons licensed. That means it will be free and available for derivative work so that anybody can improve it. I plan on releasing the first chapters in January 2012 and finishing it by spring 2012.

For me it’s monumental task. The vast majority of people I look up to are brilliant with words and so I started blogging to improve the way I express myself in writing. But to write book? Even though it is mostly technical, I don’t know if I am ready. All I know is that there is a need for it and, for me at least, it will be one hell of a ride.