Off my Arse in Trichotomy

Vaccinated

I got the second dose of Pfizer vaccine last weekend, so I should be fully vaccinated by next week. The case number in Nassau county is about the same as last summer, though it’s trending down. I’m among the last people in my friends group to get vaccinated, so at least this will let us visit each other indoors without masks. But other than that, there won’t be much of a difference in my life.

DeBlasio says New York City is supposed to reopen in July; I’ll believe it when I see it. There’s no discussion in amateur musician group about resuming in-person activities, and I’d imagine that if/when we do, it’ll still be not normal (no wind players, no singers, masked, reduced capacity). Unless we can use a vaccine passport… New York has one, but we have members from neighbouring states which don’t. The good thing is I’d finished the automatic performance slot sign-up system, so the ENT pianist shouldn’t have to deal with too much of the scheduling stuff.

We were supposed to go cruise on the Elbe this year, but things are looking pretty grim in Europe, so we are likely to defer this trip.

I should figure out what to do instead.

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Back on the Bench

I haven’t really touched the piano for almost a month now. Just feeling unmotivated in general. Maybe now that the automatic performance slot sign-up system is done I’ll feel more drive to practice. I’m still trying to learn some Poulenc nocturnes and a Rach 2 transcription for solo piano.

Without a concert though, it’s hard to get motivated.

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Down the Drain

The project I’d transferred to the Infrastructure team for is for all practical purposes dead. We expect the announcement to come down next few weeks. It was an overly optimistic premise to begin with - they are migrating people from an existing cheap storage system to a new expensive storage system, with the expectation that the new system will catch up in terms of price performance, so that they can deprecate the old one.

It still may one day, but I think after 3 years, upper management finally came to the realization that no one can give a realistic expectation of when that can happen. And as long as the new system is more expensive, no one will want to migrate.

As an ex-academic, I’m used to flushing years of work down the drain, but this particular mistake should have been foreseeable - at the time the mandate was announced, most engineers who are familiar with both systems were puzzled by the decision to mandate a migration to the new system because of the cost performance gap between the two. At that point I figured that upper management knew something I didn’t, but turned out no. They just saw the high cost of maintaining the old system and underestimated the cost of making the new system competitive. It’s a case of seeing in the projection what they want to see.

For now, the technology we’d developed is getting re-purposed to implement a new feature, so the project has not been a complete waste.

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