Aaron's Status

6:10 am

Rain

It’s supposed to drizzle on and off for most of the day today, giving way to sunshine and low-60s highs through the rest of the week. It just feels hard to get the week started in the rain, y’know?

Persona 5 Royal

I have played probably 100 hours of this game, and overall it’s been really good. There is one notoriously difficult battle, with a guy called Okumura, which I previously wrote a lot about, but otherwise it’s a pretty good difficulty balance for me.

I’ve reached the final boss, I attempted the fight once and got to the last phase and then he just murdered my whole party with one strong attack, so I took the option to fall back to the area just before the battle and I’ve been “dungeon grinding” there to raise my level.

I think I’m pretty close to where I want to be to do another attempt, but I have this grinding circuit so perfectly figured out now that I’ve just been doing it mindlessly while watching reruns of old shows. Currently it’s “Lie to Me,” an entertaining procedural starring Tim Roth.

Managers gotta manage

I was a manager of large engineering teams for several years. The largest team I managed was like 40-ish people, so I had two layers of managers under me. When you move from doing the work to orchestrating the work, a lot changes; it’s definitely a distinct skill set.

A couple of years ago, I left that world. I ran a solo coaching practice for a year, and then joined a start-up as an individual contributor. I am one of a handful of folks at this company who were managers before and wanted to leave that behind.

Anyway, now and then, the situation calls out for someone to just organize things and level the expectations among everyone and so forth, and one of those moments is now. I kind of hate having to be the one to do it, but, I can’t dispute that I’m probably the right person for the job… So here we go again.