The Power of Significance... And the Dangers

I've been reading a book called "How to Stop the Pain" by Dr. James B. Richards. I wasn't expecting much from it, but it has actually had some pretty good insights. And one that has particularly resonated with me is his concept of significance. I will try to give you the J-Notes version.

The main premise is that we magnify our difficulties in dealing with things based on the significance we attach to them. Say you see your co-workers standing around, laughing and talking. You approach and they fall silent. They aren't cold, but you feel like something is off. Later on, you may conclude they don't like you, or were gossiping about you. You take these speculations and get all worked up. Turns out, they knew your birthday was coming up, and were planning to take you out for lunch, and even baking you a cake.

This is a trite example, but there are many cases large and small​ where we aren't quite sure what is going on, and we make a judgment that leads us to dark places. This is what the author writes:

"...it is not the intensity of the offense that determines the pain; rather, it is always the significance we attach that determines our pain. This being the case, one person could have an extremely intense experience with very few destructive results, while another could go through an apparently harmless experience and, because of the significance attached to it, have devastating results."

This is so true! I think of who have gone through so much more than I, and still are vibrant and positive. And I have known people who couldn't enjoy anything, because they ran everything through a cynical, jaded filter. The extent to which we personalize and magnify is the extent to which we will struggle to resolve it.

Not everything can be shrugged off. But some things must be, for the sake of our own well-being. I find this both daunting and liberating. Something that seemed like the end of the world at the time must be re-evaluated with the passage of time, when there is more clarity and less emotion involved. Note, this doesn't mean white-washing history. It doesn't mean blocking out hurts. But it does mean that we do not carry the rawness from the event with us forever.

I once rented my home out to a family who initially presented as solid and upstanding. The husband and wife had a falling out and she abruptly left with the kids. This situation (in the words of Ron Burgundy, Anchorman) "really got out of hand fast" (see Anchorman Post-Fight Scene). He stopped paying his rent (first on-time, then stopped altogether) and he fell into the bottle. He trashed my home, and instead of trying to work with me to get caught up, ended up compounding the situation by forcing me to incur court expenses to evict him. It turned into a mess, and it bothered me for a while. However, now I think if I bumped into that guy on the street, I could be civil, and even kind. It was tremendously stressful at the time, but now, it's just something that happened, and life has rolled on.

I'm sure many of you have much more painful things in your past, and this post isn't meant to compete for saddest story. However, it is meant to encourage you, to challenge you to look at things with a different perspective. After all, things in the rear view are supposed to get smaller and smaller the further in the distance they get.

Le roi est mort, vive le roi!

JIRA is dead, long live Rally -er, Agile Central!

In an email sent on 2/10, my employer announced (belatedly) that there would be a changing of the guard. For those of us in software development and/or project management it has become a common practice to use some type of tool to track requests and issues and to chart progress towards goals. Without such tools, the logic goes, code would never get moved into production environments in a timely manner. Projects would consistently run late and over budget. "These tools are a must!", the vendors of such tools tell us.

Well, as a crusty old hacker with over a decade in the biz, I can recall the days when all project management was done with Word, Excel, Visio (if you were lucky), and Outlook. I can sum up the era thusly:


But as our modern day Psalmist (and Nobel laureate) Bob Dylan was written, the times they are a changing. Like it or not, the means to have much greater control, insight and feel for projects large and small is upon us, and JIRA, made by Atlassian and used extensively by my company for years, was just good enough to make this cynical old guy a believer. Long live JIRA!

When I was managing a team of talented developers, our mission was to automate automate automate whenever possible. We were to automate testing, automate workflows, automate the extraction of reporting. It was a lot to handle, and being one of those absent-minded professor types who can never find his glasses (on top of your head, sir) or remember anything (yes, we finished that last week, sir), JIRA just made it so easy to keep tabs on many things at once. I could see what my team was doing, they could see what I was doing. We knew if we were on track or falling behind. We could reallocate resources with aplomb, we could shift priorities on a dime. In short, we were agile. We were actually embracing the spirit of the Agile Manifesto, and delivering value more rapidly and with higher quality.

The genius of JIRA, IMHO, was its simplicity. In Agile, one of the core ideas is the concept of the information radiator. Check out this link here. JIRA deftly managed to craft a UI that showed a team everything that was being done, had been done, and what still needed to be done all in one place without overwhelming the viewer with too much data. You could drag and drop tasks and issue from one state to the other and continue on with your work. It was pretty slick, I have to say.


Of course, this is the part in the movie where something goes wrong. There has to be some tension in any good story, right? Well, in their infinite wisdom, the powers that be decided to move away from JIRA and to start using a rival tool called Rally. Cue the clouds of Mordor blocking out the JIRA sun. I went through the training. I didn't like the tool. The UI was not as intuitive, packed with more options than I can ever need, and most damning of all, required me to... change. Not cool. I accept that my projects will change, requirements change, priorities change, political landscapes change -but don't mess with my process once I've got it to where it is working just right! I resisted the move to Rally for as long as I could, a modern day Luddite. Even when I went from Informatics to IT, and everyone on my new team was using Rally, I clung to the dream that we might go back to my beloved JIRA. Not happening. Rally (which recently changed its name to Agile Central) is not a bad tool. I can still manage my projects well. I can still be transparent with my team. But the tool is simply not to my liking. I will climb its learning curve, and may come to appreciate its strengths at some point, but please, indulge me in my grief for a moment. After about a year of supporting both, JIRA is officially being sunsetted. It will go into read only mode on April 3 and decommissioned altogether after a sufficient period of mourning has passed. I'll miss you JIRA. No good thing lasts forever.

Caught Myself Slipping

**I apologize for the wonky direction these musings took me!

I usually get up at around 5:30, and today was no exception. I got the kids up and out the door by 6:30, then took my insulin and other medications. I took time to pray and read a devotional. After a fairly smooth start to the day, I logged in and kicked off my daily reports. So far, so good...

My insulin requires me to wait 30 minutes after injection before eating, which apparently is just long enough for my body to convince itself that it has been deprived of sustenance for weeks and not hours. I head to the kitchen to make some oatmeal. I had two boxes of instant oatmeal in the pantry, one of Strawberries and Cream and one of Blueberries and cream. I poured two strawberry packets into a bowl and added almond milk, then nuked it in the microwave for 90 seconds. When I removed the bowl from the microwave and gazed upon the bubbling goop I thought, "These strawberries look pretty puny. Why aren’t you using real strawberries? And for that matter, why are you using instant oatmeal at all?" That's when my mind went through its Kafkaesque process of chaining totally unrelated thoughts together and came up with Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. This was a book I finished in July of 2016, and its message can be summed up in just seven words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. --What a revelation!

This seems so obvious as to border on the absurd, but he makes the point (and I have to concur) that over the last 60 years or so foods have been largely replaced with "food-like substances" or "foodish products". In the desire to give foods a longer shelf life and to produce them more profitably we have processed them to the point where there rarely resemble anything found in nature. I don’t want to turn this into a book report (although if you are curious, I do highly recommend his work) but his main premise was to avoid eating anything our great grandparents wouldn’t recognize as food. He writes:

"Avoid eating food products containing ingredients that are A)unfamiliar, B) unpronounceable, C) more than five in number, or that include D) high-fructose corn syrup."

So, suddenly my breakfast has gotten a bit more complicated. What's in this oatmeal? I pat myself on the back for having (mostly) avoided bacon, sausage, ham, eggs, and pancakes laden with butter and glistening with syrup, but I think further changes may still need to be made.

Here is the ingredient list for the instant oat meal: Whole Grain Rolled Oats (with Oat Bran), Sugar, Creaming Agent (Maltodextrin, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil [Adds a Dietarily Insignificant Amount of Trans Fat], Whey, Sodium Caseinate), Flavored Fruit Pieces (Dehydrated Apples [Treated with Sodium Sulfite to Promote Color Retention], Artificial Strawberry Flavor, Citric Acid, Red 40), Salt, Calcium Carbonate, Guar Gum, Oat Flour, Artificial Flavors, Citric Acid, Niacinamide (One of the B Vitamins), Vitamin A Palmitate, Reduced Iron, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride (One of the B Vitamins), Riboflavin (One of the B Vitamins), Thiamin Mononitrate (One of the B Vitamins), Folic Acid (One of the B Vitamins).

Wait, these aren't even strawberries?? I'm done! Caught myself slippin'. Thought I was being all healthy, but this is not truly the case. I've got a canister of Quaker Steel Cut Oats that I once read were better for me, but I only tried them a few times because it takes 25-30 minutes to cook. Wah! What’s in it?

Ingredients: Steel Cut Oats.

Well, shoot.

Let’s compare, shall we:

​	​Instant Oatmeal	​Steel Cut Oatmeal
​Calories per Serving	​130c	​150c
​Sugars	​11g	​1g
​Fiber	​2g	​4g
​Protein	​3g	​5g

So, as a diabetic, I see that the steel cut oatmeal has a distinct advantage in helping me keep my blood sugar down. I will have to be disciplined and not go for the quicker, more convenient option with the nutritional liabilities. 

Live and learn.

Monthy Health Check-In #1

I intend to be more consistent in 2017. By this point, many people have abandoned their resolutions. Gym memberships go unused, the healthy eating goes out the window, and as far as getting organized? Well, I had a book that was going to help me with that, but I misplaced it. Life keeps moving. But I am resolved to be a bit better this year. I've already talked myself into new month resolutions, to avoid the arbitrary tendency to put off changes to coincide only with the party in Times Square. There is too much at stake at this point in my life. So here we are at the start of February. I'm going to do a post-mortem on January, look at what went right and what went wrong.

Weight: My weight is down 10 lbs. I was 235.6 on January 2nd, I hit 225.6 this morning. So that's good. Results would probably been a little stronger if I didn't have some off days. It's tough to find good options when dining out. I went to the gym times in January, more than the last half of 2016. It is not quite 3x a week, but it is something to build on.

On 1/24 I went to have my labs done. I expected things to be a little worse than normal because of holiday festivities. Here is the mixed result:

Blood sugar: 191. Last result was 232. This is good. It needs to get down to around 110.

A1C (another blood sugar test): Six months ago, this one was a brutal, red-alert, sound the klaxons 12.0%. Three months ago is fell dramatically to 8.1, and I was feeling pretty invincible. This one, however, showed that it had crept back up to 8.9. Target is 6.1 or lower. More work to do here.

Total Cholesterol: This one was 165, down from 276. Healthy is 0-200. This is a huge win!! Yes! Yes!! By cutting meat, dairy and oils from my diet it, I saw huge improvement. Now, I know some might say that this is being extreme, but it is the only rational response, IMHO. You can see the results are in a very short time. And I wasn't as strict as I should have been. I cut my cholesterol intake by maybe 85-90%, and that was that. I asked my nurse practitioner if I could come off of my cholesterol meds, but she said no. My triglycerides were still too high (195 when they should be between 30-150), so I have still got some work to do, but this was very encouraging.

Blood pressure: Still too high. She took it while I was in her office, and it is improved, but I only have the bloodwork results in front of me.

Summary: Some good, some bad, none ugly. Overall I am pleased but not complacent. My strategy is to continue to bring my weight down. As my weight comes of, the blood pressure, blood sugar and cholesterol all fall at once. I'm going to keep on pressing on.