Coming to the end of a very tough year

I have not abandoned this blog. It may seem like I have because my posts have been infrequent this year. But I'm always thinking about it. Every day at least one thing happens that I think I should write up and post but often, I only take notes about it and don't finish it. Most of my ideas, though, leave my head as soon as they enter it. One of the best "explanations" of this I know about is in Stephen King's book The Tommyknockers where an alien spaceship is influencing the minds of the people who come near it. The influence involves the people coming up with brilliant ideas or knowing how to do things they couldn't do previously - especially technical things. They start to invent things no one could have imagined before. But people only traveling through the area get fleeting ideas that they lose when they pass out of the influence of the spaceship. They try hard to remember their ideas but can't. That's because the original influence is lost.

That's how I often feel when I walking or driving along and have these incredible, lucid thoughts. But if I don't write them down immediately, I seem to pass out of the area that influenced my mind. It's not an alien spaceship, of course, that caused the idea in the first place. I'm not sure if it's Divine influence or just randomly varying ideas in my mind coming together in a once-in-long-time conjunction that causes the ideas to appear and then disappear. All I know is that if I could remember a tenth of the ideas I have and then lose, I'd have written hundreds of posts a year instead of the 34 I've written so far this year.

If the ideas come while I'm driving the car, I would have to pull over at the side of the road to write them down. Fat chance of that! I'm always late or near to running late. So, if I'm in the car, I never pull over when ideas come along. Usually, though, I'm riding my scooter and I'm used to pulling over to let faster, impatient drivers pass me. So, pulling over to write in a notebook shouldn't be that hard. Honda was even nice enough to have a glove box that is easy to get to without needing to open up the seat or dig through my jacket for a notebook (see the area circled in red in the picture here). But I don't do it because, as with the car, I'm usually running late or close to late.

In an earlier post, "My thoughts on walking", I mention that it's a good idea to write down the ideas that come while you're walking (item 6).

"I find I get some really good ideas while I'm out for my walks. But I also find that these ideas are fleeting. I get so many thoughts and see so many things that the ideas can fly away as fast as they alight. It's great to be able to pull a small notebook and pencil out and jot down the ideas before I forget them."

I don't do that enough, either. And how many times have I gone back through the pages and pages I've filled in that walking notebook? Not as many times as I should. But that is going to change.

This is one of my New Year's Resolutions. I am going to try to get back to my old frequency of writing posts in this blog. My first few may be about what kept me from writing more this year. Other posts may be about projects I've worked on, books I've read and movies I've seen. There have been some wonderful sermons from the pastor of our church I'd like to highlight and the Lord has taught me some important things this year. My son and I sang in our church's Christmas program again this year. That was fun and enlightening. There are so many things to write about! To paraphrase the old hymn, "How can I keep from writing?"

Machines as Best Friends - 2

Fisher Price Rockin' Tunes Giraffe

In my previous post, Machines as Best Friends, I mentioned seeing advertisements for two toys that made me think about whether we are setting ourselves up to prefer machines as friends over real human friends. Of course, I'm not really worried about it but it is something to think about. Well, today, I saw the commercials again and realized I had many of my fact wrong. It wasn't a horse the the child was riding in one ad. It was a giraffe! How could I get that wrong? The picture of the Rockin' Tunes Giraffe is the first image in the upper right. I did get some things right. It makes pleasing sounds when the child does certain things. And when it rocks fast enough, the clopping sounds start. So, we can begin to train our future equestrians (or giraffe riders) to prefer the higher speed gaits of those animals.

Fisher Price Crawl Around Car

The other toy I was thinking about was a small car that the child can crawl around in . As you can see from the second picture, on the lower left, the part that tells the child they have selected the sunny day is showing.So, I was wrong about this one, too. I didn't remember it being a car. That is all after seeing both commercials that day. How many other things do I get wrong? Did the Red Sox really get into the play-offs this year?

As usual, I'm late to the party on this. There was a Twilight Zone episode ("I Sing the Body Electric") back in the 60's about a father who, upon his wife's death, goes out and purchases a robotic grandmother to take care of his three children. She never gets tired. She always encourages. She never dies and is always friendly. The episode didn't show them preferring the robot to other people but it is the robotic grandmother that the children spend most of their time with. And there is a sub-plot in the story about the oldest child being upset with her mother for dying. She's just a child and can't help being selfish. But when she finds that the robotic grandmother won't leave her like her mother did, you can see how happy she is. It's almost as if they are saying the robotic grandmother is better than the child's mother.

We need to concentrate on getting along with our fellow humans, first:

Never pay back evil with more evil. Do things in such a way that everyone can see you are honorable. Do all that you can to live in peace with everyone. Romans 12:17-18 NLT

Machines as best friends

i-Cybie, robotic dog

I was watching an advertisement about some toys for babies at the age when they are just starting to crawl around and walk. The toys, one was a horse the child could ride and the other was a set of smaller toys combined into one set, respond to things that the children do. When certain buttons are hit, a message of encouragement is played. When certain other things are selected, they get a few words of explanation - like when a wheel is flipped over to a picture of a smiling Sun, the happy voice says, "It's a sunny day!" When the child rides the horse faster, clopping sounds like a horse trotting will play. It all sounds fun. I wonder what would happen if we took this to the extreme and older children started to be taught by machines. Would it get to the point where children (and later, as they grow up, adults) would prefer the company of machines because they react more reasonably? You don't have to worry about a machine having a bad day. And, probably, the machine wouldn't say anything bad about what you were doing. It would just always encourage you. Machines could be the perfect companion if they were complex enough.

I already see this happening in my own life. I turned on the Spelling Check for this blog entry and it gently told me which words were probably misspelled and what possible correct spelling might be. It didn't tell me I was stupid. No one had to know that I misspelled "advertisement" the first time (using a 'z' instead the 's'). Is this part of our problem with human relationships? Married folks bristle when their spouse disagrees with them. Workers react poorly when given a bad review by their boss.Friends fall out with friends when they don't agree about something. Have we all gotten a little too sensitive? Are we ready to replace our dogs with cyber dogs because we don't have to take them for walks and they don't need to be house broken? The picture above is from Wikipedia and the article about this particular machine friend is from this article at Wikipedia.

I'm an electronics engineer and I should be happy about all this. I will admit that I'm impressed with what the toy makers have been able to do to produce these things and keep the price reasonable. And their little toys are not going to turn these children into adults who cannot cope with the vagaries of human relationships. But it still worries me. I know people who prefer to text their friends instead of visiting them and having a discussion with. The friends might disagree with them. Better to go home and have a nice discussion with an android friend who will tell you that you're the smartest person they know. I hope and pray this isn't the way we are headed.

Starting up again

Trying to get it started again

It's been too long, of course, since my last post on May 21, 2013. There were reasons for the slowing down of my posts on this blog but as I gradually decreased the frequency I was writing, it fed on itself. Drafts of posts backed up and I found it harder and harder to finish them. As it stands now, I have over 20 posts I started recently but didn't finish. There are those that would say, "None of your posts look like you put much time into them." While they may look like that, I do try to put enough time and effort into writing these blog posts to at least satisfy my own standards.

As I've said before, this blog is not really about writing for others to read. It's about getting things down before I forget them. I want to be able to look back on thee short articles to remind myself of what my family and I were doing and various times in our lives and what we were thinking about. There are also the rare occasions when I comment on current events in our country and the world. Not that I have such great insight into those event but I just want to remind myself about what I was thinking about those events.

So, here I go. I've done the hardest part - I've started again. Let's see how this goes. I hope that now that I've started again, it will be easier to keep it going. At least I haven't gone the whole summer with posting. I got this one in between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

The picture of the guy trying to start a car by hand cranking it is from the  DenLors Tools Autoblog and this article in particular.

Everything is harder than you think

From Wikipedia Commons

My title is a cliche, of course. Everybody knows this. Whenever you try to do something, especially something you've never done before or haven't done in a long time, it takes much longer than you think it is going to take. I was just struck by this fact again today when one of my fellow engineers mentioned what a hard time he is having with the project he is working on. Then, just an hour later, another engineer mentioned the hard time she is having with another project. So, I wrote this to them:

I've come to believe that EVERYTHING is ten times harder than you think it will be. And twenty times harder than everybody else thinks it will be for you.

The second sentence is not really new, either, but it makes everything more interesting. We all know we have trouble estimating how long an unfamiliar job will take. That's because we don't know enough about it. As you dig into a problem, you discover nuances neither you nor anyone else thought about when the job was first proposed. But it's even worse when someone else, who doesn't have to actually do the job, is saying how much effort will be involved. There's just something about not having to do a job that makes the job seem so much easier. Trying to estimate the time a job will take is like only relying on what you see in the rear view mirror of your car before backing up. But when someone who won't be doing the work is estimating the effort of the job, it's more like not even looking in the rear view mirror before backing up. Just put the car in reverse, hit the gas and assume everything will be OK! "People will get out of the way if they need to."

I think we all do this to some extent. None of us put the effort into imagining how hard a job will be if we don't have to do the work. It's more critical when that other person estimating the work is your supervisor. But our opinions can carry weight when we are part of a group of "non-workers" telling the "worker" how much effort we think it will be. Our numbers make it hard for the "worker" to disagree. The group's estimate carries more weight.

No matter how carefully you plan something, there are always hidden aspects to the job. I believe this is called The Iceberg Principle. Most of the iceberg (89%) is below the surface so you can't see it. Just like a new project. My conjecture is that when someone else is deciding the effort a job will take and is not doing the work themselves, that number rises to 94% of the job being hidden for that person. But I have resolved to try to cut down on this. When I am estimating the effort for a job someone else is going to do, I am going to try to imagine how I would do that job. I am going to actually think about the steps that will need to be taken. Maybe others will return the favor.

The image is from Wikipedia Commons. Doesn't look that big, does it?

Happy Mother's Day

I was so proud of myself. I found the perfect gift for my wife for Mother's Day. The kids already had their gifts for her and I already a gift for my mother. My gift was something I knew she wanted but I wasn't expecting to find it. It was one of those exciting times when you just bump into the right thing. I wasn't out looking for it. It just happened. I was in a store and I turned around and there it was!

We were out one day a few weeks ago and Cindy mentioned that she wished she had a small purse. Something that would just hold a little cash, some credit cards and her keys. She has some nice purses but they are all large and, "sometimes they're just too much to take where you're going," she says. So, here I was in a store, turned and saw the little bag in the picture in the upper right. It was one of her favorite colors and it was small. It had a few compartments so she could organize things. I was set. I was the perfect husband (for a little while). It was going to be a great Mother's Day. Then it happened.

We all went to church this morning. That's a good thing, isn't it? Recently, our church has been giving out small little gifts to the mothers on Mother's Day. That's a good thing, isn't it? Guess what they were giving out today? Today's gift was a small purse that could just hold a little cash, some credit cards and her keys. I was floored. The little purse they gave out is in the picture on the left. And it's one of her other favorite colors. How could God let this happen? Hadn't I done all the right things?

So, was the day going to be ruined? Well, I had sold myself (and my wife) short. She loved my gift. My bag came with a little strap and the church bag didn't. My bag had compartments and the church bag had just one zippered pouch. My bag was a little larger but not too large. She liked it so much, she took it with us when we went out to dinner at noon. To tell you the truth, I'm not exactly sure Cindy likes my bag that much better but she likes me that much better. She knows how to make me feel like I'm the King of the World. And I'll love her forever for it. Happy Mother's Day, Sweetheart.

Are we under too much stress?

Five people in the Software Group have recently (in the last three months) had to get repairs for damaged teeth. I am one of those people. We've had to get crowns because a tooth broke or cracked. That's five people in a group of fifteen. Does that seem like a lot to you? It does to me. And I think I know the reason.

We are all under a lot of stress. We're under pressure to not only get our work done but to get our work done quickly. We not only have to get our work done quickly but we have to think ahead and plan the work we do so that we don't make things harder for ourselves or others in the future. That means the whole time you are designing your software, you have to be thinking how it might be used in the future. You have to think about how the hardware might change and you have to think about what features the Marketing folks might want to add.

And all the time, we are constantly being reminded of the schedule. We plan our work over a period of months and then set the schedule. The actual writing of code starts and we will work on it for another period of months. But just before we start the coding, we publish a schedule and no matter what happens after that, you get sick, your car breaks down, an asteroid hits the Earth, Jesus returns and takes us to Heaven, all that the directors of the company remember is that first schedule that was shown.

We develop our software using Agile Software Development. I'd like to write more about this methodology in the future but I only have time to write the short description here. Agile Development is meant to help you make schedules that are flexible and to increase the communication among the programmers of the team. It is a really good system but I don't think its ideas have sunk into the people that run companies (not just ours). In previous times, schedules were set and that was it. People treated software (and all types of design, really) like you were stamping out parts that have been made for years. Times have changed and what we produce has changed. When we run into things like illness or problems keeping us from work, Agile handles those well. Every month (or even more often in some cases) you rearrange your schedule. The important thing is to know what you are working on, that everyone else knows what you are working on and what parts depend on other parts.

But old ideas are hard to change. We are all under a lot of pressure and we've been clenching our teeth as we try to deliver good products on time. I go in tomorrow morning to get the permanent crown for my tooth that broke. I hope it lasts. Maybe I should get a mouth guard. Who would have thought that writing software could be as tough as playing hockey?