Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to thatcrazycajun and starless_knight!!!! Sorry I'm a little late; hope you had a good one!!

Done the last 2 days (20110524 Tu)

( raw notes )

A pretty good couple of days. As a matter of fact, I filled out a depression questionaire yesterday and scored a 3, which is an all-time low. (Of course, "all time" covers only the last two years, but I suspect that I would have scored somewhere in the teens or higher through most of the last couple of decades.)

To cap off the happiness, I got the pink slip for the Ford van in the mail yesterday -- apparently I'd made the last payment on it without noticing what I was doing. The extra $400-odd/month will come in handy. And I was surprised to find that my FSA carrier approved the new battery pack for Colleen's scooter.

I'm not used to feeling good. It's weird.

At work, of course, things aren't so happy-making. It's just that I'm pretty much a short-timer now (going back to research at First Customer Ship, which is sometime around the end of July if all goes reasonably well) and can smile at the insanity without getting sucked into it.

Tuesday I did get sucked in for an hour, wasting my lunchtime listening to a coworker griping about the instability of the server software he's trying to test against. Sorry, L; that's part of the system you're testing. It's not done yet; that's part of why you're testing it.

But I do it myself. A lot. It's easier and more satisfying to complain that things don't work the way I want them to, than to figure out a way to either fix them or work around the breakage.

Dr. Rogers pointed out to me that there's a difference between a communication problem, and an agreement problem (where both parties understand what's being discussed, but disagree about some aspect of it). One can continue to work on a communication problem as long as the channel is still open (e.g. due to emotions); an agreement problem is best walked away from until some new piece of information can be introduced into the discussion.

Here's another interesting one: It seems that one reason I have a tendency to talk over people in a conversation is that I think of something to say, there's a pause, and then someone else starts talking before I say whatever it was but after I've decided to say it. Race condition, in other words, brought on by the fact that I can't listen while I'm thinking about what to say. I also have a lot of trouble figuring out when somebody is done talking. There must be a cue I'm not getting.

A few good links up there; since there a lot of conventions this weekend, Networking 201: How to work a room and How to Hang Out in the Bar with Writers at a Convention seem highly appropriate.