The Day After
After watching the most recent episode of Westworld late last night I fell fast asleep, and didn't wake up until perhaps 6am. After daydreaming for a while, it suddenly occurred to me that the US election would probably have been called, so fumbled with my phone, and opened the BBC News webpage.
And that's all I'm going to write directly about that. I do have a few thoughts though.
After looking in on Facebook and Tumblr at lunchtime, I decided I've pretty much had enough of social media. Social platforms on the internet tend to convince everybody that everybody else shares their views – which is of course absolute rubbish. Perhaps a third of the people I know in the real world use social media at all, and of those, perhaps a quarter use it regularly. Of those remaining few, I choose to mix with a sub-set that I get on well with – that share my views, my humor, my world-view, and so on. I didn't set out to choose those people – it happened organically.
We all joke about our parents or grandparents being racist, homophobic, ignorant, or whatever else – the truth is that they just have different views than us. Lots of people have different views than each other. I'm in a tiny minority that choose to believe that the vast majority are idiots for believing in a big bearded guy in the clouds that invented everything and runs everything.
What am I trying to say here? Maybe that this morning lots of people discovered that they too are in a minority – and they hadn't realised this because they had naturally coalesced into groups sharing similar views to themselves.
Enough about of that.
I wrote several thousand lines of PowerShell code today, in an epic marathon powered by coffee and Mars Bars. I haven't run it yet – that will be tomorrow – and I have no idea if it will work successfully (he says, being modest), but I'm still kind of stoked that I was given the chance to code today. At heart I'm a software developer – it's the thing I can do that differentiates me from most others. Unfortunately I can't tell you what the code is going to do, because of all the usual boring reasons about pretending to be professional, and ethical, and all those other words.
After work I headed back across the plaza to the hotel, and agreed with a co-worker that also happens to be at the same site that we would go to dinner as soon as we got back. Bugger waiting until 7 like everybody else – I was hungry.
Just as we finished our meals and flagged down a waitress to bring us the bill, a huge influx of people poured into the restaurant. I looked at my watch. Exactly 7pm. This is where I admit to doing a secret fist-pump about not conforming to the status quo. I'm not sure eating an hour early will change the world, but it's a start, and it affords me more time to catch up with email, blogs, and whatever else this evening.
So... what's it going to be – a movie, or a late night trip to the one-stop-shop across the way to buy cheap chocolate bars on special offers?