Bobiverse

I have been reading, for a couple of years now, a series of books called the Bobiverse. It is a science fiction series which follows a project manager and software developer called Bob who dies and is then resurrected around 100 years later as a von Neumann probe. Von Neumann is a self replicating machine, which is to say a machine which has all of the materials and equipment it needs to make another copy of itself. Bob is remarkably restrained and the series maintains some structure because each copy of Bob effectively starts a lineage and they set very quickly a few rules for themselves. One. each new Bob will have its own unique name, two, they’ll stay in touch and three, they’ll retain as much as possible of their underlying humanity.

As an example, the original Bob spends a significant amount of time creating a virtual reality environment for himself so he can spend most of his time in the story as a recognisable human being, drinking coffee, having moments of panic, etc. There are some really fun little allowances for his machine nature, for example it’ll never say ‘for a few seconds’ or ‘a few minutes’ in the dialogue instead it’s always ‘a few mils’. Mils here being milliseconds. It’s a really simple device which reminds the reader they’re dealing with an artificial intelligence stored in a memory cube rather than a real human being.

One of the side effects of reading this series of books flow from Bob being really keen on project management. Everything that happens is responded to with a plan and most of the social occasions in the books, especially between the various versions of Bob, are project management meetings. They get together, they have an agenda, they review the tasks, they review the progress, they review updates, issues and risks. It’s very familiar territory. And it’s kind of fun to read about projects that are wacky and wild, exploring wormhole networks, or dealing with alien invaders, rather than upgrading a data loss prevention system.

The net effect here is I’ve been thinking about some of the things I need to do in a slightly more project management oriented way. Right before I started writing this entry I thought to myself I should really check when my BUS grant certificate expires and I can tell you the answer is the 17 November 2026. I have about two months to complete the installation of the heat pump, the large water tank, the buffer tank, and at least one of the heat emitters in my house. This is very doable, in some ways the actual work might be accomplished over a single weekend if it was done by some professionals but the reality is I have a job and I’ve never done many of these things before.

The immediate challenge is to install a wet room in the ground floor of my house. There are some prerequisite tasks, for example a need to remove the old heating system, then I need to remove the wall in the upstairs bathroom to which that heating system is fixed, then I need to remove the wall in the downstairs bathroom, then I need to dig out the floor a little bit, install a drain, tile it, and then I can install the large water tank.

This is why yesterday I found myself in the loft tearing out the old water tanks used as part of the old gravity-fed system. Pipes from these tanks run down into the upstairs bathroom and so I need to cut them out from both sides to be able to remove them properly. I also found what I think might be some asbestos sheeting, it’s like plasterboard but more shiny. This I need to remove extremely carefully and then double bag for the tip.

Today I hope to remove the rest of the heating system. I’m going to turn off my electrics so I can do the wiring part of that safely and without any concern about blowing myself up or hurting myself. Then I hope I have time to knock out both of the walls and get started on revealing the floor in the downstairs bathroom. That opens up the task of then working out how to install the drain, booking in a tiler and buying the tiles I guess.

So yeah, thanks Bob for making me think about this like a project manager.