Raking up the leaves

I started out the day thinking I was just going to put together the leaf blower and learn again how to use it. I remember last year, when we first got the leaf blower and tried to use it, that it was not as easy as it looked. The leaves went everywhere and it seemed to only cause us more work. On top of that, I thought it would be better if we put all the leaves in the trailer that fits behind the lawn tractor and just haul the leaves behind the house and dump them in our woods. Well, the tires on the trailer were flat and I had to go and either get new tires (they were old and crumbling) or get them pumped up to last for a day. Mr. Cheap went with an offer to pump them up for free from our local tire company (yes, we do business with them so I didn't feel too guilty). I finally figured out how the blower was best used and it went fairly well. But all five of us (including Grandma) were out there raking as well as using the blower.

This year, I was going to be prepared. I was going to practice! It didn't take nearly as long to relearn to use it as it did to learn about it in the first place. After about ten minutes, I was having a blast! In about an hour and a half, I had the whole front yard in one big pile (see the top picture with our son Evan). As I used the leaf blower and learned more about it (you can start low and sort of blast the leaves into the air and then raise the nozzle and push them where you want) it made me think about how we go about learning anything and specifically how I learn a new project at work. It's always fun to learn new things but, for me, the best part is when you get to the place where you can actually do something useful with your tools. There is always a big debate about why more programmers don't use the code developed by others to save time and the need to make sure the code works correctly (I'm talking about using freely available software components or purchasing packages of software components - not stealing other peoples' work). The problem is that people get into this line of work because they like to fix problems and make new things - we like solving puzzles. Well, part of that is doing things your own way. In the back of your mind thinking, "I can do this a new, better way." That's how I felt with the leaf blower. I could have asked someone who had used one before to help me learn it. But it was more fun to figure it out for myself.

As you can see from the second picture (that's Emma buried in leaves, you can't see the fact thats she's lost one of her shoes and that we'd spend a long time looking for it :-), before hauling the leaves around back, I called the kids out to jump in the leaves. I should have taken more pictures - especially when they were jumping in together and throwing leaves at each other. Then Charlie the Dog came over and joined in. He had a great time, too. He helped us haul the leaves in the back (it only took four trips). Evan got to drive the tractor and Emma rode in trailer. We were all exhausted when it was over but it amazed me how fast it went. And to think, I wasn't going to really do the job that day - I was only practicing!

New layout for my blog and...

This is just a quick note to mark that my blog template has changed. Blogger (the service which publishes this blog) has made it easier to add links to the list on the right. But I had to upgrade my blog to use the new features. I like this new layout. My profile is at the bottom now. That's good, too. Who wants me staring at them while they read the latest entry?

As a side note, we've been in our new house for just over a year (we started moving in on Saturday, November 4, 2006) and I've been blogging (intermittently) for over a year (first post was October 14, 2006). I've got a few stories to tell about our first year in the house. Like when we'd only been in the house for a week and a big rain storm hit (the night of Saturday, November 11) and we got water in the basement - where half of our stuff was still sitting from having just moved in! I'll try to add this and other stories soon.

We are also wrapping up our big project at work. It was originally planned to be done in April, 2007. The new plan is the end of this month (November, 2007) but we'll see. There is still a lot to do.

Also, in the middle of the rush to get the project done, our company had scheduled a one-day seminar in how to help our creativity. Perhaps I'll write a bit about that, too.

I know I've been bad about writing new posts for this blog. It's not that there enough things to write about. The problem is finding the time to create a well-written, understandable post about the people, events and things in my life. My main reason for doing this blog is for my own use - to document the everyday things. I want to remember when we did certain things. What I was thinking at certain times. Also, I want to push myself a bit to improve my writing. As someone once told me, "The best way to be a writer is to be a writer." Just having thoughts is not enough. You need to write those thoughts down to organize them. And, if the thoughts are only in your head, they are easy to forget. But, I need to treat this blog more like a diary and force myself to write something every day. I'm missing a lot of the little things that happen every day.

One final note, the reason I wanted to edit the layout of my blog was to make it easier to add a new link to my list of blogs. My wife has started blogging and I have added her blog, "A House with Two Cats", to my list.

How much reality do we need in a movie?

We are big Seinfeld fans in our house. And Bee Movie has opened which stars Jerry Seinfeld (he also helped write it). I've read three reviews of it so far and two like it and one doesn't. That's OK - we're going to see it no matter what. This is one of the many advantages of having children - we get to see a lot of animated features that we might not see. And I have to say, I've enjoyed almost all of them: Cars, Shrek, Brother Bear, Home on the Range, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Surf's Up, Hoodwinked, The Polar Express, Madagascar, Robots, Chicken Little, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Monsters Inc., Ice Age, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and lots of others. And these are only the animated movies we've seen in the theater. We've seen live action movies in the theater and animated movies on tape and DVD. So I understand the idea of the non-reality of movies in general and especially in animated movies.

But it strikes me as odd that three of the movies are about the social insects: Bee Movie, Antz and A Bug's Life. And all three of those are about a "worker" insect and all three had male lead characters. This posting is really late. I originally started it back on November 2, 2007, the day before we were going to see the movie. Now (November 14), I see in the New York Times, there is an article about this very subject. I swear, I had the idea first! But they have quotes from famous biologists so you might want to read the Times article, too.

Now, we all know that the insects that do the real work in a bee hive or an ant colony are all female. The male ants and bees are kept around only to mate with the queen and then they die. Not that this isn't an important job! If it wasn't for them, the colony and hive would disappear after a generation. But this is not the job the males are given in these movies. Is it the fact that studios, writers and directors feel that the public will not accept a female lead in these movies? It's not that they think that "bugs" can't be voiced by women because there are plenty of females in the movie and the queen of the hive and nest are always female in the movies. Maybe it's the fact that the workers are sometimes called on to fight or lift heavy objects. We still haven't gotten used to women doing these things. And by the way, ants and bees are NOT bugs but of the order Hymenoptera. Bugs are the familiar name for the order Hemiptera.

Now that we've seen the movie, I can tell you that two of the three of us enjoyed it. Our 5-year old daughter didn't want to go ("Yuck, I don't want to see something about bugs!"). My son liked it and so did I (there are always great "parent" jokes in these types of movies and this one has more than the usual number). But my wife wasn't crazy about it. I wonder what she would have thought if it had had a female lead? Maybe the movie could have been about the lead character's conflict between just staying in the hive (cleaning up after everyone, teaching the young and making the food) versus getting out to look for pollen, defend the colony- you know - more the female athlete role. Now that would be an interesting movie about "bugs".

"I'm going to read through Keeton this summer"

When I was in college, I was a double major in a special program that took five years. I majored in electrical engineering and biology. I was hoping to get a job with a company that made instrumentation for medical research or for hospital use. But I was stuck with the mixed problems of needing experience to get a job and needing a job to get experience. No one was willing to take the risk on me. Perhaps I just didn't exude confidence. Maybe I wasn't as smart as I thought I was (only a 3.0 average out of 4.0). Maybe I didn't apply to the right companies. I probably should have gone to graduate school (like my friend in the program did - he is now a medical physicist working with doctors to design MRI and X-ray therapies and imaging). Anyway, that explains a bit about this story - why would an engineer be talking about a biology text?

Every spring, just before we would leave for summer vacation, every other biology major I would talk with about our plans for the summer would include the phrase, "...and I plan to read through Keeton before fall semester." What we were referring to was our general biology text, Biological Science by William T. Keeton (later versions include a second author, James Gould). It was a fantastic text book. It covered every major subject in biology in surprising depth. It covered everything from cell biology to phylogeny. Ecology to animal behavior. Evolution (its theory and its problems) to developmental biology. We used to joke that you could probably use that one book for any course on your way to a degree. But there was so much there that, to my knowledge, no one ever managed to find the time over the summer to actually read through Keeton! There were just too many things to do - like work enough to make money for the coming year of school.

I was reminded of all this recently when Jeff Atwood, at the Coding Horror blog, did a write up of The New Turing Omnibus by A. K. Dewdney. Here is the link to Jeff's article. This is NOT the Keeton of computer science but, in a lot of ways, it is better. It covers a large number of topics that would be covered in a computer science curriculum but the subjects aren't covered in the depth that Keeton covers its subjects. Each chapter is from four to sixteen pages with references and further reading lists. It covers subjects such as algorithms, random numbers, text searching and compression. It talks about Shannon's Theory, regression and Karnaugh Maps. Its long enough to explain what you ought to know but is short enough so you really could get through it over the summer and still get other things done.

I think the obvious difference is that Keeton was meant as a text book and later as a reference book. Dewdney's book is meant more as an introduction; like a preview of the subject. I am going to make an attempt to read through The New Turing Omnibus over the next few months and then see where that leads. Since I never went through a computer science curriculum, I will be learning a lot of new things. I am sure it will open up areas that I will explore more deeply at a later time. I can't wait!

Great ideas :-)

I thought I'd better write these terrific ideas down before someone else uses them:

1) I remember a bunch of commercials years ago that stated that their product, or the people who used their product, were giving 110%. I believe this started when NASA was televising its launches and they would announce that the engines were running at 110% as the rocket or Space Shuttle rose. This meant that the engines were working harder than their rated specification. You wouldn't want to do this for long but with machinery, it was possible. Now, every other commercial says they are working 24/7 for us. This is just as silly as saying you're giving 110% but it sounds good when a customer is looking for a new bank or a new dog groomer but it's not real. But reality has never stopped advertisers. So, my idea is to come up with a marketing scheme where you say you are working 25/8 for your customers. That's like giving 114% on the days side of that expression!

2) The doctor always tells you to take two aspirin and call him in the morning. Well, my idea is to make each aspirin the size of two aspirin so you only have to take one pill. Think of the time you'll save. You'll be giving 200% when you take a pill.

3) I have a great idea for one of those one-panel New Yorker magazine style cartoons. A person is pushing a vacuum cleaner that has obviously broken (maybe a plume of smoke is rising from it) and they say to a person standing next to them, "Well, you know, nature hates a vacuum."

4) Another New Yorker style cartoon would show a husband and wife doing the dishes together and the husband has dropped one of the dishes he was washing and turns to his wife and says, "I thought you said these were dishwasher safe!"

Social engineering

One of my (many) pet peeves is the baggage claim area at the airport. You know how it is - the flight was late and crowded, many people are worried they'll miss their connection, everyone rushes to the baggage claim area and then waits and waits for the bags to appear. So, when the bags finally appear, everyone rushes forward to stand around the belt conveyor or spinning conveyor to grab their bag. Under ideal conditions, it looks like the top picture to the right. Sure, you can stand right up at the conveyor and wait for you bag. You're not blocking anyone's view and when you see you bag, grab it and swing it off the conveyor, there is no one right next to you that gets whacked with your bag.

But more often, the scene looks like the second picture below on the left. I couldn't really find a picture of a crowded baggage claim area so I substituted a picture that reminds me of one. They are very similar except here, the zebras are worried that the "luggage" is going to claim them :-)

There are more people looking for bags than there is room around the conveyor. Not only do the first or most aggressive people keep the rest from getting to their bags, the people in back can't even see their bags. The people in front probably think that no one else is under the same pressures they are under. No one else will mind that they push to the front to get their bags, knock into others as they swing their bags off the conveyor and bump into them as they leave. Why would we?

Well, my idea is that everyone should stand back. Far enough so everyone can see the whole conveyor. Then, when you see your bag (or think you see your bag), you move forward to check it out. If it is your bag, it is much easier to get it off the conveyor and get away from the claim area without bumping others or being bumped. Is it ever going to happen? No.

Squirrel on my walk

Normally, I wouldn't consider a picture of a squirrel all that exciting. But the squirrels in the woods behind our office are not the tame, gray squirrels I'm used to. These squirrels are very much afraid of humans. I can hear them scurrying off as I approach. Sometime, I'll see them run up a tree and hide on the side away from me. This is where their having eyes on either side of their head come in handy. If they cling to the tree with their head facing up, they can see a predator approach from either side of the tree and run to the other side. And that's what they've been doing to me for five months!

Well, I've finally succeeded. I think this one must be a young squirrel who isn't as afraid of people as it should be. It did run away as soon as it heard me but when it climbed the tree, it decided to watch me from a branch. I guess it felt safe enough because I was pretty far away. He (or she, I can't tell) didn't know my camera has a 12x optical zoom (equivalent to a 420mm lens on a 35mm camera) so I was able to snap these two pictures without needing to move too much. He didn't seem to be scared off by the various "beep" sounds the camera makes as it changes modes and focuses. I could have gotten more pictures if I didn't have to get back to the office. I continue to be impressed with this camera, a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ7S, with this wide zoom range and its built-in image stabilization - I don't use a tripod on my lunch-time walks.