Deferred maintenance

Whew! My brain and body are tired. The kind of tiredness that’s a sign of both a good weekend, and a hopefully excellent night’s sleep to come.

That to say, I don’t have the energy brain capacity to do the elegant jump between how we budget our money (the envelope approach [with virtual envelopes, of course, software is great], plus YNAB’s Four Rules, notably “rule two” that has you set aside a little money each month to build up to big eventual expenses) and deferred maintenance (where you put off fixing something due to lack of resources [generally money], or underinvest in needed maintenance). Instead, point form:

• I’d added up how much I should have saved by now in my “technology replacement” category (which covers things like phone, laptop, watch, etc) for upcoming expenses and realized I was about 23% short, or eight months underinvested.
• And, seeing that shortfall, I totally get the psychological forces of deferred maintenance. “We’ll find the money when we need it, we have other uses for it today!” is a powerful thought.
• Did I fix the shortfall? Uhhh totally.

ANYWAY, that to say, I get why deferred maintenance happens. (Maybe we should all learn a lesson from Chris Schwarz’s approach to tool maintenance, steps 1 and 7: own fewer things you need to maintain.)

A few links for you:

• Dude, where’s my bus? is a delightfully researched documentary into the recent-ish history of OC Transpo, pondering why we’re at the poor state of service we are. Some of the comments are also quite detailed—worth a read in addition to a watch.
• Reading Receipt from the Bookshop is like putting on a cozy sweater at the end of a work week—especially this time of year. Once a week, a story of a day behind the counter at the bookshop, with all its trials and tribulations. This week’s issue is a special one, worth a read.
• Rushed drafting on another bill has thrown a key piece of proposed cybersecurity legislation into parliamentary chaos. Definitely stressful for those involved (especially with the way Parliament is right now), but also a tiny bit hilarious that legislation can go like this. This is the part of the legislative process nobody can teach in school.
• Okay but speaking of cybersecurity, did you read about the time a Russian threat actor hacked into various organizations to jump from their networks to their ultimate target’s neighbouring network via WiFi!?
• How best to store an event’s time in a database? (With a totally appropriate dig at Google Calendar’s baaaaaad timezone UI.)
• Mandy Brown’s “speculative fiction work/shop” sounds so great. Even just the description of what it is had ideas going in my head.

I feel like this issue should’ve been more thinky-thinky with a weighty title like “Deferred maintenance”. But, y’know, linky-linky is also good. All the best for the week ahead!

Lucas