High Level Ignorance, Productivity & Cigars
Have you ever had a boss who disregards your warning and then blames you when that exact issue occurs? In this episode, we unpack the chaos that unfolds when bosses refuse to listen, IT horror stories, brown-nosers, and understanding prototypes vs products. We also discuss productive practices, shedding insight on methods that work for people who hyperfixate and lose track of time. Oh, and yes, we also talk about cyclists storming the capital on bikes and smoking cigars as a nod to the mob.
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Full Transcript
That is so. Yeah. I'll never get over it. I'm coming outside. I know right. And then running back behind the fence and then start. Yeah. Yeah. You here? Yep. Oh, nice. Let's get. Thank. You know that haircut? Like it looks like it would be perfect with, like, a porn mustache. Yeah. This was one of those, like, quick things.
It's nothing normal that she would've given me. It's like I ended up being ten minutes late for the haircut. She's like, what the hell am I going to do with your hair? 20 minutes. I was like, I don't know. It's like, we don't have time for shampoo. We don't have time to do anything. She's like, oh my God, like, work your magic, baby.
Yeah. I was like, just do something. So she gives you the 74? Yeah. So that's what I got. Like, kind of Freddie Mercury mustache. That would go perfect. Oh, yeah, I know what you mean. Rule pencil. Been, you know. Yeah. You can either be a porn star, a baker. Yep. Like one of the old fashioned ones that were a visor and had royal revamp on the desk.
Yeah, right. It's like on the side. Be a high profile accountant on the side. Right. Runs books for the mob on the side. Yep. I'm not happy with it myself. Whether you wear a vest. Oh, yeah, I've got to. I've got to wear the vest a little with a green visor. I've got to have the green lamp on the desk.
I have to have one of those calculators with the excessively large, you know, roll school on the back. Oh, you're talking about the handle. The handle that you have. C'mere. You like to emit the transaction? Exactly. That was like, you know. And then they checked the tape, you know? Yeah. Boy. Smoking in the office. Right? That's it. Smoking in the office where you take the tape and, like, the whole entire office, has a haze.
But I'm doing a cigar. If I get William Joyce here. And cigars. That is Nancy, you know. Not, you know, like the the the, high dollar, high paid accountant. Yeah. So the cigars in there could be anywhere from the 1940s to the 1970s. Yeah. Cigars are how you tip your hat to the mob. Like that's your,
That's your signal? Yeah. Virtue signal. Yes. That's my that's my dog whistle to the mob. Oh, shit. Virtue signaling. I love it like the one finger salute at the Q and on Trump rally. Oh, wow. Yeah. Do you see that one now? What do we crap the one finger where we go? One. We go all. Wow. And, so Trump is like, gone for on cue because, I guess he's in hot water.
Yep. So he's trying to have to save him. Yeah, he's trying to he's he's he's on like, you know, drawing on the energy of conspiracy theories to, I don't know, try to try to maybe increase the threat, interestingly enough, and I won't say much about it, but, some of the,
People I work with are, Freemasons. Oh, jeez. Yeah. So it's hard, like, you know, as Q is from yesterday's conversation and all these various cults and trappings that we can fall into. And whether you in one or not, you're in one by default, right? Right, right. American culture. Yeah, yeah. And and that was the that was the crux of what we were saying yesterday that, you know, a cult is really the idea of a culture that you belong to.
Yeah. Like the d signifies the word because there could be certain things that you could be a part of that maybe could be positive. Like, let's say you're in some kind of like peloton group that's not just about riding the bike, but there's like a philosophy extension to it as well. Right, right. Like there's some guru that's leading you in the bike, but then also like, like, Tony Robinson, you know, trying to boost you, giving you a little moral tinge.
It's like you're my life coach. Yeah. So you're trying to, like, double dip. You know, while you're riding the bike, you're throwing out these little inspirational things, you know, not just to get the body in shape, but try to, like, enhance the mind and stuff. And then it turns into, like a really popular, right exclusive thing. And people can get pretty, you know, wrapped up in it.
Hey, that's in a way that could be as long as the messaging was positive, that could be like a positive cause. All the messaging was positive in the messaging. You know, didn't lead you to do anything but starting with Abdul. Yeah. Storming the capital on bikes quite like ten speeds. The peloton. Ami. Yeah. The peloton. Mega mega peloton.
Yeah. Extraordinaire. Whatever. Give us some acronym, dude. Trump. If he fucking rode a bike, that'd be nice. Yeah, he probably, get obsessed with something else. Go scamper off the field. Yeah, well, he subscribes to some theory of, like, your your body, your bio. I heard the subsidiary one time. Like, your body has a certain amount of energy.
And, exercise is, like, not a not a good thing because you, like, robs your body of energy. Wow. So he's got a it's got to keep his energy for his own use. Yeah. So, like, the golfing is the exercise because you're, you're playing a game and you're you're making business. You're making some usefulness out of that energy.
So he's saying, you know, hey, I'm I'm making some use out of it. So the golfing is fun business and and and exercise. Yeah. There's a, there's a theory that like your, your wife energy is kind of a cumulative thing. But I think the data shows that, you know, exercise returns more energy than it takes. For me. It does.
And, I did read something interesting the other day, talking about.
Talking about, talking about resistive breathing. Oh, interesting. Okay. And it was saying you can bring your, this is on PR, you can bring your, blood pressure down. Now, as it, 9 a.m. is at nine millimeters of mercury or something like that. Okay. So let's quickly like, bring it down by nine points. Yeah.
Okay. And that's the equivalent of what a drug often does. Nine points. Wow. If you have high blood pressure, take the drugs and do this technique right. And, so it requires a device to offer some resistance, but the devices aren't that expensive. And so they're basically talking about doing 30 breaths every day with this device.
Maintain lung capacity helps the diaphragm and other muscles, not atrophy as you age. Absolutely. There's a, something to be said for like a morning regimen of stretching, like yoga style stretching combined with meditation. Yeah, you could probably get into a really, really beneficial routine, with those two things. Like even if you dedicate just, you know, ten minutes.
Yeah, you did some yoga breathing, you know, you did some meditation, you did some stretching, kind of, the day before, like it at night, kind of square away your schedule for the next day. Like this is actually how I, when I, when I decided I'm going to be very productive. This is how I do it actually is like I go in the night before and I go into my calendar and I do my time blocking.
That's right. What do you do? 45 minutes, 15 minutes? I try, I try to do somewhere around an hour because that's what works best for me. I know that that's not recommended. I mean, do whatever works for you, though usually when I'm into my tasks, the way my brain works, I get kind of fixated. That's my way of, like, you know, kind of mute your phone.
Do not disturb. Yeah. You know, and then just start. That's for me. That's the things like starting. So if I use the time blocking, calendar, once I get started, I can go almost forever. Cool. So I do the hour, hour loop, you know, for, just health. I don't just sit there, sit there, sit there. Right.
So, and I try to, I try to do, like, a chore or small task between the, the blocks. Okay. So what I do is like an hour of something like, say, reading or studying for something or whatever. Yeah, whatever. I have time blocked off programing and then I'll take a break and it'll be like dishes. Right.
So, like, what I'll do the day before is I'll make the actual chore list that I interweaves and my break cycle. Yeah. Because I feel good when I get like micro things done, you know, like, like feed that's, you know, walk the dog that day and get that, little dopamine hit of accomplishing something. Yes. So then like, I feel good coming back from my break, which is something usually physical, like a chore.
Yeah. And you've taken that break from mentally. Physically. Right. Exactly. That's what works really well for me. And then in the morning, actually stretch and meditate about my day that I don't have time blocked the night before. That's cool. So when I enter into a really highly productive phase in my life, that's how I always do it.
That's awesome. And then when I was running a business back in the day, my friend Sean, you know, if you know him, I'm not an man. He was an Australian. But, we went through a phase where, this is before 911, and I joined the military. I went through a phase where our business was very productive.
All right, so, like, our, we're making a lot of money, so. And, what I would do is I would do the same exact thing. The time block would be with this, like, stretching meditation morning combined with some exercise. Right. And then I would, first thing in every day of the business day, I would focus on the money aspect of the business, like I would block off the first 1 hour or 2 hour cycle to be your accounts of.
Yeah, to explicitly focus on, you explicitly focus on the cash flow for the business. Cool. Right. So I'm like, make the money matters. The first thing of every day. Okay. You know, and that might mean like emailing someone out to collect or, you know, that owed to collect, starting up new business. You know, everything, all that stuff and that initial focus because, like, you're you're kind of bright and ready for the day.
So that initial focus like that is huge. Like it becomes define it. It's really, really, really huge. So like this, for example, or doing the podcast, you know, like you've described as edifying before. Yes. You know, and so we use this kind of like as a meditative morning. Oh, you I've also noticed that really it's, honed and refined my communication skills at work.
I'm a lot faster at, processing ideas and what people throw at me, and I'm a lot faster at responding. And, yeah, that's huge. And that's good to hear. Oh, yeah. It's it's great. It's, and, you know, it's like I was always pretty good and dynamic in conversations at work, but I really feel like I'm that I am that much faster.
And I get there a lot quicker than I used to. Yeah, I have a I'm a real fan of like rapid communication, getting ideas out quickly. And I love fast talking people because I can hang. Yeah, always. Like no matter how fast somebody talks I can usually hang with it. And you know, I was always pretty good with it.
You know, I kind of prided myself on that, but I feel like it's gotten better. Yeah. That idea of kind of like, massive barrage of ideas, kind of like this, this really rapid fire brainstorming is, like, so exciting to me. I love that. Oh, it's amazing. And, you know, it's, and what I like doing also is the rapid fire brainstorming with a small group.
But I like to also kind of try to make sure that everybody is being heard. Everybody's included. The ideas get built on, every idea gets a full treatment. Yeah, that's that's really fun. Imagine that being your job, just being like this think tank that just goes from one top to the next. And just with people that are bright.
We were talking about that at work. We were talking about the, because we came up with these ideas. We had like an ideation session surrounding, blockchain and technologies that I already talked about. And, we were like, yeah, we should just be a think tank for Wells Fargo because we had, we had revamped the infrastructure in this, this vault and everything.
And, we were doing that again yesterday, basically having, like, a collective architecture discussion. That's awesome. So, not to not to, like, insert myself, but by all means, call me up sometime and ask me to to drop by. I'd come in and for free and help, you know, I run a nonprofit that's about education. Yeah. True.
Yeah. And, and ideas. Right. And so, I have usually have a out of the box, some out of the box contributions. Well, yeah. And I'm well versed in all things IoT as well. I mean, yeah, we were talking about, I guess just a sample of the architecture we were talking about. We have this, DNS, management platform called info Blocks.
Yeah. And, we were like, well, how can we make it more redundant? We were just like, okay, we have a couple of physical Linux servers with 768GB of Ram. Let's turn these things into virtualization platforms with KVM or RGV from RedHat. And then, let's do, let's set up a ha pair between two windows VMs for input blocks, basically in the in the VM infrastructure itself.
And do like an active, active thing. That's cool. We should turn that little clip into a YouTube video and then have a translation underneath. A translation guide for normal people. Right? What did he just say? Yeah, right. This is what he said, and this is what it means. Yeah, it's it's really not that complicated when I don't use acronyms, right?
Yeah. It's like have two instances of info blocks and both of them run at the same time and sync their data. And then when, when one fails, we go to the other one. Yeah. Dude. That's that's like, super cool. It is. I actually do understand it, but, it's super cool creative use of that, of those resources.
But at the same time, that would be really interesting to like, have a complete layman in your group, someone that's like, outside looking in, right? Right. That can ask the naive questions because they're like, help me. Definitely. Because you know what happens all the time and it talks is you start talking on this like on a periphery.
Right. And some of the basic core stuff gets completely overlooked because you are past that mental. Yeah, yeah. And and that's the thing our, our lab and the tooling in it is so basic. So we haven't really gotten anything crazy yet. You know that rubber duckie idea? Yeah. Where you talk to the rubber ducky? Yeah, because you have to explain it to the duck, you know?
And then by explaining something out loud, it causes your brain to work a little differently. Yeah. And then you see the problem differently. And a lot of times it leads to a solution. Right. Kind of idea. Right. So sometimes just explaining the full process that you're trying to, unfurl, having the naive. Person. Yeah. The rubber ducky.
Really? Yeah. So there's, sometimes and, you know, I would say 99% of times isn't true, but sometimes having a night manager, that's not it or is it can benefit. I could see that if they if they manage correctly. Yeah. But my overall experience is, is that, technologically naive I.T managers are terribly horrible. The worst thing in the world, unless they are the ultimate in people.
People? Yeah. They can still somehow recognize talent. Yeah. And, have the uncanny ability to clearly listen. Yeah. And trust less than what your right minions are saying. Yes. And trust. Trust and back them up. Yeah. And like me, you know, you shouldn't say things to your non-it managers saying that you have no business being on that side of the desk.
Oh, shit. You know, those are the kind of things that don't win you favor. No, no, it doesn't curry favor to be like, look, you don't deserve your job. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, I have no idea why you're on that side of the desk. Why I actually said that. Oh, shit. It's one of my managers. Oh, well, because it was just frank and honest and.
All right, it is. It is because he was always like, you know, how long is this going to take? And I would give a great estimate of the time, like, that's too long work. Well then you can't have the product like you can't just invent time. Yeah, right. And the thing is the phrase that's too long. You wanted me to back up my estimate, right?
Why can't you back up? You were too. That's too long. That's a great point. I wish I had you said point. That's that's that's fantastic. So what I would do is I would give like, from my experience, I would give what I perceived as very accurate estimates of the time block rate that would be required to to achieve always not so well defined function x.
Yeah. Right. So a more fully defined thing, I've got to bring it to fruition. Right. Okay. This is how long I think it might take. Right. So I sketch up on the back of the napkin, you know, the whole, basic specifications of what this thing's going to do. Yeah. Formalize that into, like a, a basic, you know, 1.0, you paid a version of the specs, right?
And then send that back for review. It was like, is this what we're talking about? You know, I kind of based on our discussion, this is what I think you're saying you want, right? And then invariably it would come back of oh yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That's it. You got it. You know, like like because I'd add in the things that, fill in the blanks that had to be filled it.
Right, right. Like what technology you were using and why reason that you do it for an ill specified to, you know, a decent set of requirements that somebody might actually be able to implement. Yeah. I'll give you a specific example, is that they wanted on the internet a photo library of a different facility because I was in, this one, I was working for Atrium Health, which was formerly Caroline's software.
Yeah, I was where I worked there five years as a, you know, advanced senior vocal programmer. Nice. And, I was I was on special projects and, just because that's where they found my talents to be. Best UI. Yeah, yeah. You were the. You're an innovator that got brought in the special projects, right. And so I, I rolled out about 50, like, novel, applications while I was there primarily something like that in about a five year timeline.
That's a lot of more small, you know, processes, cron jobs, things like that, that I would invent and implement. Yeah. And then, but some of them like really huge project, like I built this reporting dashboard that was just freaking massive. Yeah. Like massive. And that thing was, I could do a whole podcast, but, you know, or no one to do it, but, it turned out to be a really useful tool for the company.
Right. So. So anyway, one of these special projects was they had me build a photo database of various cities, and there's about 30 or so major facilities and a bunch of like MLB's medical office buildings, you know, sprinkled around this, these campuses, you know, so I organized, photos and media for each one of the main campuses, under different ways to sort it.
So, like, you sort by campus, you can sort by name, you can sort by, you know, all these different things. Okay. And then it would pull up all the media that we had, relevant to those things. So it's talking about a huge photo project. I had to go through thousands and thousands of photos. Wow. And, they gave you a completely unorganized set of media.
You had to organize the media and then structure a project around searching it. Yes. So I was able to take advantage of Exif data that was on all the Jpeg. Yeah, man, that's what I was going to say. Did they had the metadata for those. They did, didn't even know they did. And so I was able to geo locate that and give that use user use, Google maps API.
Yes. I had to do that at home because it was like, a home user rather than, you know, business because the business license was huge to use it. And, there, you know, no way I was going to get a budget for, for that because it was it was really expensive at that. So basically, I just did it at home and, ran each pictures geolocation across Google Maps to get coordinates, right?
Yeah. And then use those coordinates to identify which campus it was in. Yeah. And a bunch of other stuff from there, like a bunch of other things I was able to, match up like, so a photographer would go to one to, one of facilities, take a bunch of pictures. Well, those pictures, the date time stamp would be around the same time.
So I use the, just intelligence to just say that, you know, that person obviously wasn't on campus and campus be within the same hour, right? Right. So it's able to use the time stamp to then fill in blanks for other keywords and tags. And I could put on the photos. Okay. And so, after writing that routine, took me about 3 or 4 days to write all the routine.
I was able to, get 95% of all the pictures located very programmatically, and then the other 5%, you know, was wasn't too hard to, surmise where it came from. Yeah, based on visual. And then I use some of the, Python tools for image, matching, some other things that the AI tools really weren't robust as they are today.
So I wasn't able to really roll that into it. Right. But I was able to use like, statistics to, to like, match the photo to, what it most likely is. Oh, man, I wrote that one another day. So like four days in, I've, I've, I've managed to take thousands of pictures and get them located. Yeah. Yeah. So and using all that tag data I was then able to post them and post them on to this like general forum where the upper brass of the company can look through it tool, and they could add their own comments and keywords to the pictures.
Right? Right. So basically it was just a keyword tagging, you know, working in work with the database, just keyword tagged each photo. Each photo was ID in the database with its file name. And it's, you know, the metadata. Yeah. And yeah. So, next thing you know, I spin up this like for, photo gallery, way to view different media that we have.
And you can download the full original high res photos. So I used, the tools to make the, the thumbnails. Right. Nice. The various sizes of each image. Yeah. Right. And then I had the source image, which was the full resolution. Right. And some of these were friggin dope, dude. Like, they were taken by airplane. Wow.
Some of them were like, right. Like they'd hire a plane to go fly over the facilities and oh, that's it. So it was like the bird's eye. Yeah, but all high resolution, it was actually really cool. It's awesome. And so then this is the best feature of my program is you can put the photos in kernel in chronological order and see how the facility has changed over time.
Oh that's cool. So so you had a really large corpus of photos for every facility. Absolutely. And so some of them were historic too, like going back to the 20s and 3040s. And so basically you could take the, go to a campus or a particular facility, filter it by that, and then sort of chronologically and see the full evolution of the building over time.
Right. In some cases it was like full demo rebuild. So you can see like what it was back in the day. So anyway that, that, the top dog and the facilities management team was like heads over heels. Loved it, loved it. Like cool, like salivating at the mouth at how awesome this tool was. Right? And he's like, I got to meet the guy that made this.
Yeah. So he meets me and I explain, like, you know, how I did some of stuff and he's just like, wow, right? He's like, this is incredible. He's like, I'm so excited to show this. All right. So, I go to the boss and say, the problem with this is that this thing doesn't live on an official web server.
This just lives on, on on my desktop. Oh, shit. Right. Because I don't have you never give me access to an official internet web server. Yeah, right. So I told the boss is like, there's caveats here. Like, if my computer's asleep and, you know, or whatever is off, no one can access the service. Yeah, I don't have admin rights on my computer to to wake the computer and someone requests.
Right. So so the whole the whole system is vulnerable because it's not served properly. Yeah. Right. Because it basically went from prototype to production, within a week or two. Right. It was production on your laptop. Yeah, we're on my desktop, but. Yeah. Okay. But you might as well then. My job, right? Yeah. So anyway, I saw the boss.
Boss is like, you know, not his boss is like, okay, whatever. Yada yada rolls his eyes, doesn't care. Right. And then I'm out to. Once my computer's locked. Yeah. Goes to sleep. Okay. And the boss is in a meeting just trying to show off the point. Do. And he can't do it. More like I do this. And this is like, you know, I'm.
Show all of us. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. They're cool. It's like, three weeks into I watch Beverly Hills Hour with Megan, like 30 times when she was younger. Little Chloe dog, like, you know, it's like they anthropomorphize the animals and. Yeah, like, she's just loving as a little kid. Yeah. Set her up with a little juice box and or crackers or, animal crackers.
Yeah. And which is kind of funny because you're eating a dog. Now various animals are is is great. While you're watching a movie about anthropomorphizing, it's it's almost like cannibalism. But anyway, you know, I mean, I digress, at least intellectual cannibalism. Yeah. So this boss, right, like that just didn't listen to me at all, right? All of a sudden, the big boss is calling.
I'm out at lunch and my phone blowing up like, yeah, what the hell? And my boss calls is like, what did you do? And what did you do? Wow. Like what? What's going on? He's like, you know, I don't want to name the person who's like, you know, such and such. The big boss is like in, in the meeting, trying to show the website and it's down.
I'm like, oh no, go wiggle the mouse on my computer and I'll give you my login and it'll automatically start up the server. And he didn't have no idea what that meant. Why, I had to explain. I was like, the whole thing runs on my computer. On my computer. I'm at lunch, so my computer's asleep right now, right?
Yeah. So he goes over there, wiggles my mouse. I give him what you should never do. Like him and and password. Right. But, I mean, you know, what else could you have done? Yeah. And so, you know, go back and change your password. Do the right thing. Right, right. You know, so anyway, the, that saved the day, but, you know, then finally, the big boss is like, comes down and is like, what the hell?
So embarrassed, you know, try to go saying, oh, just give me a blank screen, you know, kind of pissed. And I was like, well, you know, I kind of had I wrestled this issue previously. Yeah. It was actually all, yeah, it needs to be an official web server to be hosted permanently in a production, forward facing internet web server.
Yeah, yeah. So I just need some permission to get a slice on one of those, you know, there's some requirements. Yeah, yeah, I'm running PHP version, blah blah blah. Yeah. And so they ended up giving you something like, you know, they set up their engine next instance or whatever and gave you, Yep. Yeah. So then they gave me, finally put it on a production server that was internet facing with an address.
Oh, I posted everything up on there. Like, I designed it to, of course, be served on a official web server. Yeah. So, basically just put the files over, change a couple of configurations, everything. Bam. Working just fine. Oh, and then, I added to it, a small API. I said all the other, systems on the, on the network could then access via the API the, that you guys have a place where you had to register your APIs.
We we do. No. Back then it was, you know, APIs were still kind of new. Yeah. So basically, I just I just did a mapping to basic, you know, it was like the most basic version of the API you can ever imagine. Yeah. You know, let you retrieve information from your service and. Yeah. And I was able to help create hooks into our boss and some of the things so like, oh, nice.
So they could add right into the archive bus main display of a campus. Yeah. Hey, photos of the building. Yeah, yeah. So I was able to make like a little retrieval tool to do that. That's cool as hell and help implement it. Yeah. So overall was about a month total of ever. And I was able to do all that in about a month.
Yeah. And morning. So with the big boss I went from like guru hero to like the worst person on the planet to guru hero again, like to to almost hero level again. Yeah, just a tad below where you usually it's a but if the middle management boss that didn't that had some kind of it understanding would actually have listened.
I could have stayed guru hero the whole time, right? Right. And that's the thing you know, it he never quite probably internalized his role in the whole thing either. Absolutely. And didn't listen at all. So the idea that it might not be available, the service might not be available. Right. It's on a local desktop. You just thought it was some it nerd prattling on with unfounded fears.
Yeah. And I said, at a minimum, what we can do is we can put my computer in an always on, you know, from C and that was like over his head. Yeah. He kept saying the same thing. Oh God, I hate this phrase. This day is like, oh, I'm high level person. Oh, you're high level. Oh yeah. Like I need this.
I need the 30,000ft view right of things is I'm high level. I can't get in the weeds. And so that translates to me is like I'm not smart enough to understand detail. I mean, that really is it. And it's like, you know, if I give you the 30,000ft view, we're not always working on the 30,000ft view level guy.
I'm never at the 30,000 view level except for in concept and design. Yeah, always down in the weeds programing the small nuance. Things that actually that drive that build the each pixel of that 30,000ft view. Yes, yes. No. Because hey, if you want the 30,000ft view, someone has to descend to a lower level to build what you see on your 30,000ft view, you dick.
Yeah, I have to get that one boss, one critic, because he kept saying to me all the time, something along the lines of I'm too big for that for this job. Like, yeah, he was like, hey, you deserve something more. Yeah. It's like you're you're just too the way you think is, is beyond, you know. Right. The boundaries of of what you get, what we're giving you.
Yeah. And what you're doing with your, your role. Yeah. Yeah. And so I was like, well I appreciate that. You know. So so the guy, you know, at least did from time to time recognize, you know, that I had a lot to offer. And it also it seems like it could have been a slightly backhanded way to say you're hard to manage.
Absolutely. Yeah. 100%, 100% it was. He would never say something like that. That wasn't a loaded comment. No, this is bizarre too. I went out to his house and actually, worked on some of his personal stuff and even during work hours, worked on a couple of his personal projects. Reasons. Because, you know, he knew I could do anything, get get anything done, you know.
Right, right. And so, the big boss and he, both lived both had a cabin up on this mountain while. And, was like their second home type thing that they were going to retire to, right? Right. And so I love it because the big boss has literally the cabin at the very top of the mountain. That's so funny.
And then he had the cabin like the bitch cavern, like down on the crown of the mountain where, like, lower and smaller. Yeah, exactly. And it it really just encapsulated the, where they were on the ladder. And he was willing to, like, translate that into his retirement flight. So he was okay with the idea of, like, I'm always I'm forever in this man's shadow.
Yeah, yeah, literally. I could never be like that. I could never do that. Well, the thing is, I just understand why you have the same aspiration. It was bizarre. And what, like, okay, you can imagine, like, brown nosing taking to its extreme. Yeah. And this guy built a career on masterminding the the the brown nosing principles. Right, right.
And so he would get to the point where he's identifying. Right. Like like he just permeates every facet of his personal personality. Yes. Every action is geared toward brown nosing. Yes, exactly. And even to the point where he'd be willing to take in a retirement where he's still, like in that shadow. Right? Oh, because because within the context of the career, this guy, like, have the big boss like having his boy, you know what I mean?
Right. Like carried over into it was, it was brown nosing to the, to the now he's one and I might run into, you know, big boss number one as the, at the store or whatever. Yeah. Yes. Right. And, like, just creepy. Creepy at the end of the day, really stupid. And also like, how, what's the word?
Emaciated or, whatever the word is where, like, you've been diminished as a human being. Yeah. Yeah, he's just been. Yeah, it's it's very reductionist. It's very. There you go. The reductionist, as I get it. And so this, experience, I'm over at this guy's house working on some of his personal projects and fixing up his PCs and stuff because he didn't know how to do all that shit, right?
So he's like, you know, what do I owe you for doing this? You know, because it was outside the business, right? Come on. Dinner. You know, the company with your family is fine, you know? Shit. So anyway, outside of work, cool students sit down and have a beer with. Oh, that's cool. So he was and treated me completely differently outside of the.
All right. I had a boss like that is, and, it was it, you ask, what that was like cool factor. Sit down and be like. Yeah. Like he was really cool outside of work. Inside of work. He was the night guy. Yeah, yeah, he was a developer, though. That's what bothered me. So, Dick, he was a, like, that's what he did.
He would come up with concepts and ideas and develop the software and technologies for the company that they were going to spin off from you and CC. Okay. So he's a really big idea guy. He really knew how to develop in a few different languages, but during that had no clue of it. Yeah, well, I've got I've run into so many people like that, because they can come up with cool concepts and like, do enough of the development to get it, get something rubber band and duct tape together.
That's not working. That's it. And then they think that that's like the final how it needs to be for the auction. Yeah. And they're not even close. Like you look at their code and you're like, no. Yeah. And so before he became my boss, he would come to me and be like, okay, so we need I've come up with version 1.0 of the infrastructure on my laptop, as you said, here we go.
And then he'd be like, I need a server that you can put this on. And whatever he came my boss, it got so funny, he'd go from, you know, spinning up the server to I really wish I could get in there, help you guys break down those servers. That's what he would say all the time. It's like we're not breaking down shit, man.
Stay in your lane. Yeah, like. Right. Totally. Oh, totally. But, yeah, he was just he was he he was really the unicorn guy. He was like the the ultimate brown noser. Really cool to hang out with outside of work. A pretty decent developer. And he was spinning off all these companies and getting share, you know, shares for it and getting paid way more than a lot of developers you want to see.
We're getting paid. He's getting paid over 100,000 a year. Hey, nice. Very fun and good for him. Yeah. Sounds like you added value. So he did add value. He did, but it was like it was the money it part. That was a little annoying. Yeah, but I have encountered so many people like that. And then, I'm really good at rapidly spinning up like a prototype that's working.
Yeah, I've learned how to do that over the years. And so, that could be a huge, huge, problem if you don't communicate upfront that this is not the system. Right? Right. You gotta tell you how many times people have, like, wanted, like, in fact, commanded me to put a prototype into production, you know, and I'm kicking the screaming the whole way is like, no, it it's not ready for that.
There's no load balancing. There's no, you know. Yeah. Look, we haven't architected the how it's all going to work and, you know, like it's not ready for just just because it can serve a page. Does it mean it can handle, you know, 3000 users in five minutes. Exactly. That's a completely different beast, you know. Yeah. And so I can't tell you how many times.
Wow. I then had to like, work day all day and night endlessly to spin up because you're like, hey, it has to be done by Friday and it's Tuesday after a yeah or just no push to put what you have into production and then we'll sort it out from there type mentality. Yeah. You know what? It's not like you can just copy.
You got to do you got to think about the architecture 85% of the way to put what you have in production. Exactly, exactly. And so then, you know, at the end of the day, I learned my lesson there and would just just kick my like, I would make the prototype be the production, like in the future. Oh yeah.
I learned to start at least making it hybrid right where you don't have to work already. Yes. So like start with the basic development from a production mindset. Yeah. Rather than ever bothering making a rapid prototype. Right. Like because they will it'd be time to take a rapid prototype to production ready. So you have to just be production ready for go.
Exactly. And so I would then, you know, that's back in the day when you had like literally three boxes dev test fraud. Yeah. No. Well we do similar architecture still. And so I would just have those three boxes be mirrored, you know, the yeah they're set up would be mirrored. And so I would just start developing remotely in-depth.
Yeah. Not allow config drift between the three. Yeah. And then my prototypes I spin up and tests. And then when they said yes, you know, post that as soon as possible, I would just push the prod. Yeah. So like I just started making prod production ready, software from the beginning to saying, fuck it if it's another week that they have to wait, at least I'm then up night and day, right?
Trying to make something production ready. That was just the project. Yeah, that was so awesome. You know. And then by gosh, going back in hindsight, it's like, what an idiot I was to to do all that extra effort. Like, you know, I allowed myself to be led by the nose. Yeah. I mean years. Yeah. And but I mean, if you want to pull a positive out of it, you learn from it.
You changed your work, your methodology and your personal workflow to accommodate their, myopic vision and idiocy. Yeah. And then you have this whole, like, university professor, like, I took a database class, for example, at the university level and, like, holy shit, half the stuff that that person was saying, the feature was like, oh, it was, was was not best practice at all.
Like, in fact, it's what not to do in many cases. You know, it was like, yeah, okay. SQL server 2005, the way you're architecting this, you know, you're going to as a developer, you're going to kill yourself, going for, you know, like an seven level normalization or something, right? It's like, that's not how you do it.
You know, we would run you through all these normalization steps and they would be always half assed. And they all specified, you know, if you know the query, you're going to have to write to get that, to get that, third level, you know, consistently now in every oh my God, you know, you're basically then creating a series of views, that are grabbing tremendous number of tables and the writing queries off the view.
That's why, you know, to go ahead and speak disparagingly of my own water. They suck. Yeah. Just it's check the block learning. Yeah, it really is. And, you know, I really realized that my last year there when, they tried this flipped glass model. Yep. It was like I was supposed to be learning PHP and MySQL and, you know, the whole stack, right?
Yep. And, she's like, yep, yep. Watches, YouTube videos. Yeah. And then teach yourself how to program and then come back to class and we're going to have a five minute discussion. I was like, fuck you. Yeah. What am I paying then have an instructor for. Yeah. You know. Yep. Yeah. There's oh gosh, I watched this really cool YouTube video of a history.
Professor. And, it's not normally my favorite topic, but, the history, professor was talking about slavery. Oh, that's. And the topic of the video is when did slavery end? Right. Say never. Well, you know, he he looks right now on what he means by that. Oh, yeah. He he said he said, okay, let's define our terms.
That and then, then I have to tell you concretely, when this definition ended, right. Yeah. Basically. And then, he used, he picked on Prager University online university. Yeah. Right. And I don't know how he was able to do it for fair use or whatever. Maybe. Maybe, commentary, I don't know, but it took some of their course content.
Oh, and, was showcasing why it was so horribly wrong. Yeah. Like, not only to, not only to produce that content, but to say that that's how it really is. You. And so, Yeah. Anyway, long story short, he's breaking it down. He's like, you know, this is this is atrocious. The standard, public schools, university, public university version of American democracy.
The I hope it's not the same in other countries, you know. Well, yeah, it's like, you know, he didn't necessarily get much into whitewashing, but he's like, basically this idea that this is how, this particular concept is depicted, right? And taught and disseminated to everybody is absolutely horrible. Yeah. And here's the truth on how this whole thing actually played out.
That's awesome. I love those kind of teachers. Yeah. And so he no longer works as a history professor because of these reasons. Right? He's like, I realized that I was teaching the wrong stuff for years. And then when I actually did the real learning of how this history really until I went back unlearned and learned it enough to present it to you 100%.
That's exactly it. And so how many times have you gotten into a class at an advanced level, and they've actually gone ahead and said something like that? Yeah. Well, I take everything that you've ever learned in the past about this thrown out and throw it out because you're going to learn how it really is now. Yes. You're like, what's a motherfucker?
What? I learned it for the exactly like the model of the atom. Yeah. Oh, shit. Yeah. So, like, you start off proton, neutron, electron. Right? Right. Sorry about the Niels Bohr way. Yeah. The Bohr model, where it's like, you know, little orbitals of the electrons and different electron shells and and it's like, well, we needed enough energy in introducing the system to make the electron jump to the next level.
And you make some equations and you feel like you have some kind of understanding. And then we get into a college level course about the same topic. And it's not even nothing is like that. Like everything has changed. So that was a model. The with lots of abstraction and detail high in. There you go. Now we have reality.
Yeah. It's like what happens in the supercollider. Right. And what is it? How is it really a best of our knowledge compose. Yeah. It's nowhere close to, the Bohr model at all. No, no. Yeah. And you find that out when you look at how the atom smasher works and what falls out of it when you smash them.
Yeah. And and also let's, let's, you know, tip our hat to that. This is all still being trying to understand. Understood. Yeah. Yeah. This is not, this is not to the level where it's a all. Yeah. No, what I just wish is that when they're teaching the Bohr model or one of the primitive models, knowing that it's not like that in reality because they never.
Yeah, it'd been told us this isn't the way it really is, right? It'd be nice to say we're we're teaching it this way to give you the foundational understanding of what you're going to modify later. Yeah. Then you're modify it later. That'd be cool. Well, just show it to show the more detailed version that's over everyone's head. Yeah.
Where you still put it out there that there's a much more complex understanding. Yeah, yeah. It's like, look, this is your own foray into the subject. We had to hide some details. Yeah, the curriculum at fifth grade. Right? Yeah. Shows that we teach it this way. And so this is what you're gonna learn. But. But no. Right up out of the gate there.
You'll learn later in your academic career. There is so much do for a version of this. Some teachers would tell us that in elementary school or middle school, they would be like, you know, hey, as you go into deeper courses, this is going to change. You should have seen these kids. What are they? Middle school level kids, seventh graders.
I was doing for one of my internships for education degree. I actually explained planetary body movement. Oh, that's cool as hell. And actually explained it to, like, a way that the kids can understand. So I set up an actual lamp. They represent the sun, right? And then I showed how the moon goes around the Earth and how it's tidally locked.
Explained that concepts, and they were all blown away to realize that a day wasn't really 24 hours. Nice. The 24 hours has a correction factor. Right. Yeah. It's not one revolution of the earth. It's that was a little bit of a of an arc to compensate for is how much of it swept the one. 300 65.25 arc length that was swept.
And then there's wobble on the axis right by the orbit. Yeah. And so 24 hours is is not an actual one rotation of the Earth. That's with one rotation of the Earth plus a correction factor, so that that same part of the Earth is facing the sun again. Otherwise every six months Am and time as well. Yeah. See what I'm saying.
Yeah. If a day was one rotation you're right. Right. And so I explained that to him. And why. And that's why you need something like an algorithm to figure out when the next sunrise is going to happen or sunset is going to happen. Right. Exactly. They asked this in the, the zinnias and then the perigee and the procession.
All these things start to come into focus when you understand the actual how the Earth rotates around the sun, how the Earth rotates once every 24.1 hours or whatever. Yeah. You know, that's actually one, rotation is less than 24 hours, is one rotation. The 24 hours is a is a compensation for, like I said, the arc, the angle.
So that the angle it's a correction factor that has to be built in. Or else like I said, every six months would be swapping in a PM and that would just be where the would in the summertime. Midnight is is bright is noon. That's weird. It's really weird when you go to southern hemisphere and the seasons are backwards right now.
We're fucking weird. I'm sure that is really odd. And then, on top of that, you know, going to the North Pole or the South Pole or closer enough to it that you can see the effects of, you know, being white for a week, for two weeks. Yes. That's great. We're dark for two weeks here. I've seen a time lapse video of that.
And like, wow, that's so cool. Yeah, like the sun never sets, right? Just gets close to the horizon. Yeah, right. And sounded weird. Sam was saying, even in Alaska where you live, you can experience it. Yeah. It's almost like another planet type shit. Yeah, yeah. But, you could perpetually stay in summer and summer. In spring and summer, you could, you know, have a vacation home in southern hemisphere or second home in southern hemisphere.
And then every six months, swap back and live the rest of your life. Live your favorite season. Yeah, no matter what it was like, I just refuse to experience another winter. Fuck it. I'm part of it because I grew up up north, and I don't ever want to look at a snow shovel again for another month. So now you live in Chile and in the US.
There you go. Yeah. So that's obtainable. You know, it's part of a retirement plan. You can say, I always want to live in spring and summer. Yeah. Now why am I want to just be able to garden year round? You know, pretty cool idea. Yeah. And then, set up a set up another family for the environment idea will probably be ravaged by global warming, but, yeah.
Yeah. You'll be looking for a winter somewhere. Yeah. That's not underwater. Right. Did you see the models for like, the, the the highest levels of sea rise? Predictions are just so scary are that. Oh my God, you're talking about like 3 billion climate refugees or like because of how many cities are on coastal. Oh, if if the full extent of like global warming isn't thwarted and in it all plays out and the full, High winds Act.
Yeah. When you take the highest predicted model, like the one that's like the worst case scenario right now, I and you project in the level three, right? Google has a tool using Google Earth. You can actually have a slider and show sea rice. And it shows which part of the coast just disappears. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. And you know, if you, if you take the worst case scenario model, which unfortunately keeps turning into the model.
Right, right. Because there's, there's all these holistic feedback mechanisms that the people that do the modeling have haven't been able to integrate. Yeah. And then when they integrate them, they get these even worse predictions. And then that's matching the reality. Oh they're like oh shit. You know this is a this is like doomsday scenario But the idea like in 30 years that there's 3 billion climate refugees is awful.
That's game changer. Like that's, that's that's, the gale of creative destruction gone awry. That's the gale of, unfortunate destruction. Anyway, our consequences have come home to roost, unfortunately. We'll leave it there.