The past few days I've been powering away quietly at work-related matters at all sorts of hours of the day. It started off which smashing through the remains of a new version of the HPC website which, whilst it has reasonable content, is poorly organised. The new version tries to be a lot more intuitive to the user's needs. Since then I've been making my way through the numerous job submission examples that need new versions for our new build system, starting with those that are absolutely necessary for the four training courses that I'm running this month. In any case, given we have a big planned outage at the end of the month the job examples are going to be necessary as they'll be the default environment. Apropos this had two meetings by international HPC bodies; one based in NZ trying to revive the HPC Carpentry and the latter for the HPC Certification Forum. I was a little annoyed with the former using a heavy-weight low-performance organising tool.
I've had a little bit of an opportunity to engage in the realm of speculative fiction these past few days as well; not only with my usual RPG sessions (our CyberDarkSpaceStalkers mash-up continues), along with divesting myself of a small mountain of White Wolf, GURPS, and GDW gaming products. But perhaps the most fascinating came from a conversation with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
johnny9fingers which led to the conclusion that that The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas engage in The Quest for Tannelorn. Naturally enough, I contacted Michael Moorcock about the idea; I am enthused with an idea of writing up an exploration of the problems of utilitarian ethics with the equilibrium between Law and Chaos.
The half-way point of the year has passed and the plans that I had prepared at the start of the year have gone somewhat awry. But this is not surprising given the circumstances, who could have predicted the global pandemic in advance? There have also been what were unexpected changes to health, relationships, and hobbies, none of which I was prepared for but nevertheless have become major life changes that count as events for the year. Whilst this year has been truly exceptional at the scope and scale of unexpected changes the general principle is not unusual. Project management teaches one to plan, but as long as everything goes to plan it is relatively trivial. One manages by exception, when events and results are not according to plan and require intervention. Which means reworking the plan accordingly - which should result in what in the parlance as "agile project management" but is usually misconstrued by unskilled grifters in suits. All of which means I am rebuilding in accord to what the second six months of my life should look like in light of the new circumstances.
I've had a little bit of an opportunity to engage in the realm of speculative fiction these past few days as well; not only with my usual RPG sessions (our CyberDarkSpaceStalkers mash-up continues), along with divesting myself of a small mountain of White Wolf, GURPS, and GDW gaming products. But perhaps the most fascinating came from a conversation with
johnny9fingers which led to the conclusion that that The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas engage in The Quest for Tannelorn. Naturally enough, I contacted Michael Moorcock about the idea; I am enthused with an idea of writing up an exploration of the problems of utilitarian ethics with the equilibrium between Law and Chaos.The half-way point of the year has passed and the plans that I had prepared at the start of the year have gone somewhat awry. But this is not surprising given the circumstances, who could have predicted the global pandemic in advance? There have also been what were unexpected changes to health, relationships, and hobbies, none of which I was prepared for but nevertheless have become major life changes that count as events for the year. Whilst this year has been truly exceptional at the scope and scale of unexpected changes the general principle is not unusual. Project management teaches one to plan, but as long as everything goes to plan it is relatively trivial. One manages by exception, when events and results are not according to plan and require intervention. Which means reworking the plan accordingly - which should result in what in the parlance as "agile project management" but is usually misconstrued by unskilled grifters in suits. All of which means I am rebuilding in accord to what the second six months of my life should look like in light of the new circumstances.
