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We All Carry Our Own Bag Of Hammers

We all have our own bag of hammers.

I’ve often attributed the above quote to Michael J. Fox, as I recall him first saying it when he openly discussed his Parkinson’s disease.

My version of the quote is more like, “We all carry our own bag of hammers.”

In essence, I’m referring to the idea that each person has challenges to deal with. I gain perspective when I relate my challenges or listen to someone else relay theirs. Almost everyone sees their challenge as the most important, and recognizing that it is to them also provides the opportunity to move forward and hopefully past your own.

Recognizing these opportunities to grow and advance while helping others overcome their challenges makes carrying these bags of hammers that much easier. By recognizing that another is already holding their bag of hammers, you may also see how to lighten your load and allow another to bear their burdens more easily.

Today, I listened to friends tell me about the challenges they have faced and are facing. Almost immediately, I saw that my bag of hammers has nowhere near the number of sharp edges and hard points that they have dealt with. This does not mean that the challenges I will face are not fraught with some very sharp points and significant hard spots, but they are not quite as sharp or as hard.

The challenges we are dealing with are similar but also much different. I can only hope that a sympathetic ear knocked off a few sharper points they banged up against.

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Master Content Management: Tips for Documentarians

The analog world is often very different from the digital world. We live in both, meaning planning a method of organizing “assets” will most likely be different for your digital life, especially how you manage your life outside of the one and zeroes you are looking at on your screen.

As a documentarian, managing content is a multifaceted task. Whether you manage your content from the micro or macro perspective, you can often apply the same approaches.

Consider content as blocks you are building with. Whether that block is a paragraph, a page, or a collection of pages, moving these blocks about should be done with the same ideals of knowing the structure you are using and following the same approach each time you move one of these blocks. Consistency allows you to understand where you can expect to find the information you seek, regardless of history.

Building these pieces of information into appropriate sizes and types of blocks also allows you to ensure that if you need to move a block, it retains all of its supporting information. This retained information can be in the form of sub-blocks or, perhaps, a collection of dynamic links to the supporting information. It mostly depends on the structure being used for the information.

Documentation that combines text and images should either include the images directly in the document or use a dynamic link to a stable repository of images. This repository can also exist as a sub-folder or block within a block of the document.

Moving to a collection of documents should retain this block and sub-block approach for each document. This will allow for the movement of the entire collection or the movement of a selection of documents within the collection, either within or without the overall collection.

This is much like the more straightforward principles of object-oriented programming (OOP), where you often use the same functional approach to various project parts and have individual functions manage smaller pieces of the overall application.

In short, decide your organizational structure, consider future requirements, and iterate on your approach. Organizing anything should always have a dynamic quality.

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Pork And Rice – Winter 2024

One of many comfort foods we like to eat that is also relatively simple, easy, and quick to make. In short, Pork & Rice; in a bit more detailed of a title Pork Tenderloin with Spanish Rice. The following is my Winter 2024 iteration of the recipe followed by some thoughts for future iterations.

To start, the ingredients are rather straightforward. You will need, at a minimum, a Pork Tenderloin, a package of ready to make Spanish Rice (I typically use Uncle Ben’s), sliced mushrooms (fresh are nice, but canned work well and what I generally use), some salsa (as spicy or as mild as you prefer or that fits your diet), and some chicken broth.

First up, start the Spanish Rice. This does require the rice be cooked in a pot big enough to add the tenderloin to at the end. Adjust the recipe to use chicken broth and salsa in place of the water the package calls for. In this case, a full package of rice calls for 3-1/2 cups of water. Switch this to 3 cups of chicken broth and 1 cup of salsa. Set your timer to the low side of the recommended cooking times.

Next, trim down the pork tenderloin as needed. Our diet requires an extremely lean version of any meat. This may take a few minutes. You might consider doing this before starting the rice as needed. Once the tenderloin has been further trimmed, cube it to reasonable bite size pieces and put in a pan to brown and cook to a medium level.

As the meat approaches the medium level, add the sliced mushrooms. These can be prepped while the meat is cooking or you can open the can and drain the majority of any liquid the mushrooms are packed in.

Continue cooking the pork with the mushrooms until most of the liquid has been cooked off and with a bit of luck this will time out to the rice timer you set earlier.

Turn off all the stove burners.

Add the pan of pork and mushrooms into the rice pot. Mix well, and leave to cook on the cooling range burner for approximately 5 minutes.

Stir and serve with a tablespoon, or two, of sour cream on top. Enjoy!

Future considerations:
– adjust the rice recipe to 2 cups or water and 2 cups of salsa.
– and/or add a cup of salsa to the pork pan when you add the meat.

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Sometimes

Sometimes, the best way to get ideas flowing is to just write without any specific direction. Let your thoughts and imagination take you wherever they want to go, whether it’s on a computer screen or a piece of paper.

How do you get started? That’s a great question.

Sometimes things go in cycles. You start, then stop, and then start again. But the key is to make sure you start one more time than you stopped.

Sometimes, you’ll hit a creative spark that takes you on a thrilling journey of imagination, filling your mind with both literal and literary ideas. But other times, you’ll have to brave the dreaded writer’s block that stands in the way of your next masterpiece.

Remember that writer’s block is not just a novelist or story tellers concern. Take it from one who often feels like they are masquerading as a documentarian when they inevitably hit what must surely be a tangible brick and mortar stalling wall.

Sometimes.

Sometimes you have to find a way through.

Sometimes you have to find your way around.

Sometimes you have to find your way over or under or in-between, but you must find yourself on the other side.

However, a firm belief in either the miraculous or the mundane will always find something or someone that will meet you on the other side and remind you of those times you have found your sometimes.

Write often. Write well. Right yourself.

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Herding Cats And Thoughts

Sometimes, there comes a point when you need to step back and collect your thoughts and intentions, which can be a bit challenging when many things are going on in your life.

Consider using what has been referred to as “second brains.” I tend to gravitate towards digital variety, but I still love the feeling of writing my thoughts down on paper. It was a happy coincidence that I found a digital version of my favorite analog approach to note-taking.

Herding my thinking felines is more straightforward and more handy to have the option to pop open a digital device and jot them down versus finding my journal, opening it up, and, hopefully, being ready to add another written note. However, opening a digitized version of a journal or note-taking application makes all the difference when you know that you can easily cut and paste your note from one place to another where it makes more sense. It’s especially great when the digital version of your second brain uses virtually the same system as your preferred analog version of taking notes.

Collecting your thoughts digitally also allows you to search them within your note-taking application of choice; in some cases, you can search the raw files to find the nugget of information you thought might be important and is now actually relevant.

You might even find yourself purring with contentment as you sift through your second brain for those great ideas you didn’t want to forget… or forgot that you forgot it.

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Staying The Course

Following the same path multiple times between two points might be boring and mundane. Still, consistency can bring a certain amount of comfort. Repetition is close to consistency, and repetition and consistency can often lead to great things. Practice makes perfect, or so the old saying goes.

The path between two points may not always be the most efficient or even practical, but that should also be measured against the results and what is wanted when you are trying to get from A to B. Just traversing the distance is one matter, but if you are retracing your steps and looking for ways to improve then that consistent behavior also gives you a benchmark to measure potential improvements.

When trying to maintain a consistent approach leading to perpetual improvement, continuous review of that path is necessary to ensure that improvement opportunities are taken advantage of. As muscle memory provides for consistent behavior, it does no harm to look for and find better exercises to work through.

Consistent interface elements, due to their familiarity, enhance user experience. Users can learn the meaning of an element in one area and expect the same behavior when they encounter a similar element elsewhere. This consistency breeds comfort.

Consistency begets simplicity by its uniform nature. Complex systems built with consistent design can have their steep learning curve smoothed out with consistent design and behavior. Stay the course, and be consistent.

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DevDoc

A DevDoc, or Developer/Development Document, defines what the developer expects their code to do. It may not necessarily cover everything it can do; users tend to be quite imaginative, if not downright looney, in their approaches, but it will help define and manage expectations for the code.

A DevDoc is not documentation; it is not meant for public-facing documentation but as an internal reference by support services or documentarians to help clearly define and recommend uses for the feature or function the code addresses.

Given the developers’ expectations and a working knowledge of the platform on which the code is being deployed, the DevDoc also provides some framework elements for quality assurance (QA) testing purposes. However, a DevDoc is not a QA guideline.

A DevDoc can often be a simple, short, bulleted list of features and functions. No significant details need to be explained in depth about how the code was written and the reason why it may not even need to enter the conversation.

  • What does the code do?
  • Where can the features be seen?
  • How do the changes interact with the rest of the codebase?
  • What other features are affected by these changes?

Of course, the above is not an exhaustive list or even a recommended list of questions to answer in the DevDoc, but your support services and documentarians who receive this information will be grateful.

Besides, a DevDoc is a great way to close the loop and review whether the proposed solution addresses the original request.

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A Return To WordPress

Am I back? No.

However, I still use WordPress when I want to create a new website, which has happened here.

Is this a new website? Technically, yes, but the domain is again under my control and not likely to fall under someone or something else’s control going forward.

Does the phrase “pried from my cold, dead hands” ring and bells? You can believe that must happen for Cais.co to leave my care, again.

So, there’s that. Will this be enough for me to start writing again and leave this digitized journal version to posterity? Time will tell.

I write, think, and write some more. I overthink my writing and paint myself into a marvelously designed corner of writer’s block. I’ve been caught in this vicious cycle too many times to count lately, with the latest victim being a promising work of fantasy fiction: The Bellweather Chronicles (feel free to visit ReiStache.com for some first-draft excerpts).

Now, with all that said. I do like to write in markdown. I like it so much that I would much rather spend weeks looking for just the right platform to use rather than continuing with the aggravating, frustrating, disappointing thing I fondly remember as WordPress.

Some may say that progress requires change, but too much change morphs the thing into something it no longer serves. A thing that is now mostly too difficult for the average Luddite to use easily. Lost to the masses is the democratization of publishing, a thing formerly known as WordPress.

What is being called WordPress today is different from the product or platform that enamored me in the past to the degree that I turned in my 25-year career in warehouse management to start over in technical support.

I have no regrets about making the change. There have been challenges, but today, I serve in a role that lets me help people help people, and I couldn’t be more satisfied with the work or feel more fulfilled—something I was led to believe would happen but never did within the WordPress ecosystem.

~ Cais.