by ·1 Comment

Cynicism among engineers isn’t a character flaw. It is key to their strength. And for the Dilbert view. . .

Cynicism reigns! “I will worship no more false [optimists].” – misquote of The Tempest’s Caliban [actually, the misquote started as a pure misquote in a 12th grade English paper – a paper explaining/reference a quote that apparently doesn’t exist in The Tempest, by Caliban or any other character. Hey, it was an in-class writing where we couldn’t reference the play – not an intentional whole-cloth misrepresentation of the play]

[My apologies for the mild incoherence of this entry. . . Too much caffeine already.]

by ·0 Comments

For machines that supposedly have no true intelligence, computers are the most infernally arrogant personalities that I have ever met! I suspect that that’s why I like working with/on them: by crafting a well-designed, well-implemented (both are important!) program, I solve both the problem at hand and clamp down on any future insurrections (via bugs introduced later through program revisions). Lately, though, I’ve felt like I’ve been losing the battle. I’ve been working on a GIS system on the one project, and on a project involving servlets and web services on the other. I’ve run into so many interesting ways to blunder that I created a HardKnocks document into which I’ve been pouring my notes for the next hapless adventurer in Java web services. The GIS system is deployed on a Solaris machine – completely different than administering a Windows machine. Very interesting. . . and I’m getting the crash refresher course in all the Unix command stuff I briefly learned in college to figure out such things as why an 18MB download doesn’t fit on a drive that has 40MB+ free space.

I used to have (still have?) a cartoon somewhere in which a programmer is standing in front of a large (think full room-sized) mainframe. The gentleman is holding a bell, a candle, and a knife, and appears to be sacrificing a woman to the infernal machine. I found the cartoon amusing ten years ago as a newbie developer, and find it even more amusing now that I’m quite a bit more seasoned. We don’t sacrifice women, but we do sacrifice time and stress; we don’t give the machine offerings of food, but we offer it more RAM and disk space; we don’t read tomes of prophecy, but we do pore over volumes of design patterns, language references, and coding techniques.

Think I’ll try to dig up that cartoon and hang it in my office. . . maybe with a candle next to it.

by ·0 Comments

Sunday, the day of rest. Too bad my daughter doesn’t appreciate the value of a good nap on a Sunday. Some friends of ours invited us over for lunch today after church: wonderful way to spend an afternoon, eating together and just having a chance to get together and talk. As hurried and jam-packed as the rest of the week always is, and as tempted as we often are to fit some of the overflow from the week into our Sundays, it’s definitely refreshing to just, well, REST on Sunday.

Our Sunday school lesson a couple of weeks ago had to do with resting on the Sabbath. The Sunday school kid answer to why we rest is “because God did”. And why did God rest? “Because he was tired”. The Almighty? Tired? Nah. He rested to show us just how good it feels.

by ·0 Comments

My mother-in-law (who graciously takes care of our daughter 3 days a week so that I can work: thank you!) has made a prediction that our now 8 month old daughter will be walking before she’s 10 months old. Our daughter’s intent on motion – at 6 1/2 months she was scooting/crawling backwards and content nearly only when standing. At 7 1/2 months, she figured out how forward works, and has been taking full advantage of it ever since.

The problem is that I’m just getting used to having a baby who moves from where you put her. It used to be, you could put her down and be fairly certain that she’d stay within a few feet of where you put her. Within the past couple of days, though, she’s figured out that she can crawl to where you are. I’m having trouble adapting. I used to put her down somwhere in sight of whatever it was I wanted to accomplish, give her a toy, and then happily do whatever it was that needed to get done but couldn’t have a baby in the mix (lots of things involving cleaning products fit into this category). The idea of her walking and all the various things that that’ll impact are just frightening! I have some basic idea of what it’ll mean, but I’m certain it hasn’t hit home yet.

We want our child to grow up, to experience and learn new things. It’s all happening very quickly, though, and I’m just not keeping up! I just get used to how things work at one stage, and she’s off and running (figuratively, for now) to the next thing. I have this fear that I’m going to wish my baby was still at some particular stage (I can actually see this wish coming), and that that’s going to convince me that we ought to have another child. Never mind that the logical side of my brain says that babies/kids are a whole lot of work, that my patience level isn’t what I’d hoped it’d be, that two kids are probably more than twice as hard as one kid. Some part of me will want to have a snuggly baby who can’t move more than a few inches away from where I put her.

So, the prediction is that she’ll walk before 10 months. Today’s her 8 month birthday. I’m scared.

by ·1 Comment

Some days there are just too many topics swirling around in my brain. Stuff ranging from the completely mundane to the nearly, possibly sublime. I have this hunch that, were I ever to filter out the mundane and concentrate on the sublime, that something amazing might just bubble up. Wonder if that’s how genius works? Folks can either filter out the mundane thoughts that clutter the rest of our daily lives, or they can connect it with the sublime and make something sublime-er. Or maybe they can just bubble the sublime stuff quicker – make a quicker cup of caffeinated thought.

Maybe I’ve just got too much gunk in my filter.

by ·1 Comment

The Ghosts of Christmas Present(s) has appeared to me, beckoning me to the mall and to the online retailers, calling me to steal o’ deals and wonderfully chosen gifts. The list of things purchased is slowly beginning to gain ground against the list of gift recipients. So, if you think you’re on my present list, or think you ought to be, now’s a good time to both be nice to me, and drop hints!