Last post of the year

Well, in spite of the fact that I didn't post anything from December 23 through December 30, it's been a good year for my blog. I posted more this one year than in all the previous years combined. So, one of my New Year's Resolutions is going to be to make at least this many posts (132) next year. I'm going to try for more, though.

It's been a pretty good year all around although we've struggled financially. Due to our company switching health plans, we've paid out more in doctor, dentist, eye doctor and prescription bills this year. Also, due to the recession, our company kept the raises low this past year (2.5%) but at least I still have a job and we did get a raise - unlike many people I know.

Besides that, though, many good things have happened. I love my wife more than ever before. I love my kids, my mother and my mother-in-law more than ever. Our pets are healthy and bring us great joy. I've learned more about God and Jesus through the excellent ministry of our church. I can truly say I love God, Jesus and my fellow humans more than ever, too. Even my fellow humans that I don't necessarily see eye-to-eye with! After all, we are all still neighbors. As hard as it is, I even felt sorry to see the news today that a certain Conservative radio entertainer had to be taken to the hospital with chest pains. I detest his angry, vile comments but I have to love him. This is completely the opposite of the radio commentator who wishes harm to those who disagree with him. But then, he must not be a Christian or he wouldn't espouse such hateful views.

I pray that we'll all have good health in the coming year and that we'll use that health to help others who are less fortunate than us. After the first commandment, to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul and with all our mind, our second commandment is to love our neighbor as our self. I can wish no better thing for all of us next year - that we can all live more fully in those commandments.

We enjoyed the movie "Avatar"

My thirteen year old son and I went to see the movie Avatar last night. At first, he agreed to go because he thought it was the movie version of an animated TV series he enjoys called Avatar: The Last Airbender but that movie hasn't been released yet.  It's coming in the summer of 2010 as a live action movie (more information here). But when I told him this movie was in 3D, he couldn't resist.

So, we found a theater in our area (a 45 minute drive) that was showing it in 3D. It was worth it. It is an amazing visual experience. Even if the story wasn't so interesting, I would have enjoyed the experience of seeing it. I would suggest you look around for a theater that shows it in 3D, though. I can't imagine that the 2D version is anywhere as enjoyable as the 3D version we saw.

It's a very long movie (about two and a half hours) but it needs to be that long to explain everything. I'm not a professional editor so I am not qualified to say this but I don't see what they could have left out of the movie and still have been able to explain everything that needed explaining. You'll find story elements from many sources from folk tales to the stories of this country's westward expansion to colonial powers' movements in Africa and Asia. You see themes from Anne McCaffrey's The Dragonriders of Pern series to the Star Wars movies. I highly recommend the movie. My son also enjoyed it. It is very entertaining.

Where have all the snow shovels gone?

Yes, my title is a play on the title of the song, Where Have All the Flowers Gone written by Pete Seeger and performed by Mr. Seeger, The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary and many others. The image at the right is the front cover of Pete Seeger's autobiography. It is described as, "An autobiography in words and songs by one of the most influential figures in American music." What a fitting format for such an amazing man.

I was thinking about it the other day when I saw news reports about our big snow the other day (my previous post) and the fact that many stores were sold out of snow shovels. This happens with every big snow and I never thought about it before: What happens to all those snow shovels? They can be used more than once, folks! Do people throw them out in the spring? Are all those people moving every year and leaving their snow shovels behind? Are all those people just getting their first house? Are they like socks and just get lost? This would seem to be a good area to investigate - if I had time to take away from all my shoveling.

A big snow on the last day of fall

Well, it was a big snow for Cape Cod anyway. The official report is that we got about 17 inches of snow but there was a lot of wind and the snow drifted so it's hard to know what we really got. This isn't the prettiest picture of our house with the car in the front. I hope to take some better pictures in the next few days. You can see that the screens collected a lot of the snow and we couldn't really see out very well.

The next picture is of some holly and berries in the back yard. This is a pretty big holly tree (at least 10 - 12 feet high) and I like the colors but I think my camera was having a hard time focusing. The wind was dying down but it was still very cold (again, for Cape Cod) so the camera was moving slowly. The birds and squirrels like to hide in this tree because it still has its leaves and they are a lot wider than the pine needles and give more cover.

The last picture is of our front door. You can see snow on the wreath which is under the porch. So, you can see how much the wind was blowing. We had at least 6 inches of snow on the porch. My wife says this would have been a perfect picture if the snow shovel hadn't been in it but I like it. It shows that I had to do a little work to get the picture. By the way, my wife, Cindy, bought that snow shovel many years ago at Walmart because it was cheap. But it is the best snow shovel I have ever used. It digs right under the snow and has held up to all sorts of use and abuse. I don't see them anymore so I hope this one lasts for a long time. It looks like we're going to need it.

"That will never work"

Well, today is the anniversary of another interesting event. On this day in 1936, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy debuted on the radio. Younger people may wonder who they were and why that is so special and other people, who know about the successful career of Edgar Bergen might say, "So, what?" Well, the reason this has always struck me funny is that Edgar Bergen was a ventriloqust and Charlie McCarthy was his dummy. A ventriloquist on the radio? Even I could be a ventriloquist on the radio. After all, no one could see if I was moving my lips or not. "Now I'm going to drink some water while my dummy continues to speak." Yeah, how would they know?

It's not really as silly as it seems. Back in the 1930s, radio shows had studio audiences. So, yes, people would see if Edgar was moving his lips. Also, no, I couldn't be a ventriloquist on the radio today even without a studio audience because I'm just not funny (just ask the doctor who operated on my nose). Edgar Bergen honed his act onstage for many years before he was good enough for a national audience. After his successful debut, he got his own radio show - because he used Charlie McCarthy to great effect. It always reminded me of Bob Newhart and his use of the telephone in his act. You only heard one side of the conversation but he got you to infer what the person on the other end of the line was saying.

A friend of mine I used to work with is a good programmer and wanted to see if he could write a programming book. At that time, the Java programming language had been out for a while and many books had already been written about it. But it was still gaining a share of the programming population and as it grew, it was getting more complex as new features were added. So, my friend decided to write a book on one aspect of Java. But our Director of Engineering downplayed what my friend was going to be doing as if everything had already been written about Java. In the end, this was far from the truth and my friend went on to finish his book. I found it to be very useful and thought it was well written. And, at the time, there were no books written on that particular subject. And even today, new books are being written about Java as new features and libraries of routines continue to be added to the language.

So, I always try to remember these things when people tell me that something I'm thinking about will never work. If you do it well and find an angle that someone else hasn't thought about or hasn't done as well, you always have a chance to succeed.

Dragging Marley's chains

I noticed that today is the anniversary of Charles Dickens' publishing of A Christmas Carol so it seems like a good time for this post:

I have worked at my present job since 1988. Our company designs, manufactures and sells electronic equipment and there have been a number of different versions and variations of these units over the years. Since I've worked here so long, I am often the person the newer employees go to when they want to know about the older models we made years ago. I describe it as "dragging Marley's chains" when I need to take time from my current project to explain something about an old project. My description comes from the scene in A Christmas Carol where Ebeneezer Scrooge's long dead partner, Jacob Marley, appears to Scrooge on Christmas Eve to warn Scrooge that he is headed to the same fate as Marley - that is Scrooge will be dragging his own, longer chain around with him in the afterlife. Marley describes it as,

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost.
"I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded
it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I
wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?"

Scrooge trembled more and more.

"Or would you know," pursued the Ghost, "the
weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself?
It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven
Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since.
It is a ponderous chain!

from the Project Gutenberg entry for A Christmas Carol

It's a puzzlement. While it's a good thing to take an interest in all of your company's products, it can also be a burden.While working for a company for a long time (in my case, 22 years next month) can be a good thing, it can also mean that you're dragging along the knowledge you've gained in those years. While having a broad-based knowledge can be good, you limit the amount of time you have for learning more about a specific supject.

I know a lot of people that always plan on working for a company for only three to five years so they can leave all the old stuff behind. They want to move on to the next new thing. I, on the other hand, like to refine and improve the things I work on. My favorite product was a programmable controller that had no hardware changes for over ten years but was continually improved by rewriting its firmware (that's a program that is burned into the memory of the board). We never had to change the way the board was manufactured. We improved it by modifying what was loaded into its memory.

So, here I sit, forging more links into my chain. A chain of knowledge and memory.

The Rules of Life - Part 3

At this time of the year, when we are preparing to celebrate the birth of Jesus, I think it's appropriate to list the third in my series of The Rules of Life. It really should be number 1 but I messed up. That's all I can say. I messed up. So, without further ado, Rule Number 3 is:

Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

That's how we learned it in grade school. Yes, in a public school. You could do that sort of stuff in the 1950's. Believe it or not, we also started the day out with a Bible reading, reciting the Lord's Prayer and saying the Pledge of Allegience to the flag of the United States of America. We also sang My Country 'tis of Thee (I guess they thought the Star Spangled Banner was too hard).

Yes, "my" Rule Number 3 is the Golden Rule as found in the Christian Bible in Matthew 7:12 and again in Luke 6:31. It is said that many religions have a form of the Golden Rule and maybe I'll investigate that some day but for now, let's just look at how Jesus said it. The King James Version has Matthew 7:12 like this:

"Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets."

The New Living Translation puts it like this:

Do to others whatever you would like them to do to you. This is the essence of all that is taught in the law and the prophets.

 It only seems fair, doesn't it? But who is more concerned with "fair" that children and it takes them a while to learn this rule. To them, things are only "fair" when it benefits them and things are "unfair" when they don't get what they want or don't get as much as the kid standing next to them. The hard part is putting ourselves in someone else's shoes and it takes a long time for children to understand that. And some never learn it.

Jesus later summed it up as, "Love your neighbor as yourself." He said it was the second commandment - right after "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind." It makes it all seem so simple doesn't it? Jesus could sum up everything in only two laws. I've taken three already and I'm not done yet!