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Reading a book of lectures by Donald Knuth that I let myself be tempted by in my last spin through Borders. (Note to self: when picking up a book you’ve reserved, it’s completely possible to JUST go to the checkout line and buy that book, and only that book.) Donald Knuth is most famous for writing a set of algorithm books. His lecture set is from a set of lectures he gave at MIT on “Interactions Between Faith and Computer Science”.  The book’s entitled ‘Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About’.
Observant readers of this blog will see a category for Christianity among my archives. It’s not something I’ve written about much of late, for a variety of reasons. But you’ll occasionally see in this blog that says something about Christianity and what I’m thinking about at the time.

Anyway, as I’m skimming his first lecture, I’m also taking a quick peek at Dr. Dobb’s Journal. Thinking about Knuth made me think about the made-up language he used for his algorithm examples which made me think about what new languages are out there that I haven’t heard about of late. An article about build systems (The Buzz About Builds) is on the cover of this month’s magazine, and since I’ve been wrestling with an automated build system at work, I take a quick look-see.

Now I’ll caveat that I’m not all that impressed with this article. I’m three sections in and it hasn’t told me anything of great technical value. A little bit of business background as to why build systems are now getting greater focus in the industry’s great, but isn’t going to help me wrestle with CruiseControl tomorrow. What I do find interesting is a quote that’s at the top of section three, ostensibly about distributed development teams and thus the need for better build systems, is this quote:

We Bokonists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. —Kurt Vonnegut

Note that I think it’s a lousy quote for distributed development teams. I don’t ever want to be on a team where I can’t “discover[…] what [I’m] doing”. But a very interesting convergence of reading materials. I’ll caveat that I haven’t read the source of Mr. Vonnegut’s quote: couldn’t tell you its context, applicability, etc.  But it does pop out to me tonight and intrigue me to find out more.  (Will admit to you that I would believe that we could often do God’s will without being aware of it.)
Update: a quick spin around the ‘Net points me to Bokonists being in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and various serious-minded writers speak on its satire of religion. Now on my list of soon-to-reads…

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A thank you to my friend, Ken, for reminding me about the Freakonomics blog…  A quick peek over there today brought me to a theory positing why retirees build such big houses.  After all, rationally, most need less space, and have no real need to restart a mortgage. Worse, as my grandmother is finding out, dealing with a big house when your arthritis is acting up and your afraid of breaking a hip if you fall off of a ladder is no fun at all.

I’ll toss my theory into the ring, though, that a house is not a rational purchase.  We don’t buy homes to fulfill our need for housing.  We buy homes to fulfill our dreams of what our life could be like, in a particular area, or with a home that’s decorated a particular way or that has a certain kitchen layout.  We dream of things that we COULD do in a particular space, not of what we will do with our own particular sloppy habits or lack of time.

The homes that are going up in our area are massive.  The signs used to say things like “starting in the low 400s”.  I can’t say as I’ve seen one of those in a while, unless it’s associated with a townhouse: the numbers have definitely gone up.  This, in what is widely listed as a housing downturn.

We debate about buying a new home, or upgrading our own, for a combination of rational and dream lifestyle reasons.  We haven’t yet pinned down where the boundary between those lay, and what rationality versus dreams is worth to us.  The rational side says that when our kids get bigger, our house will need a bit more elbow room to handle those growing elbows.  I want a bigger seating area near the kitchen, so that we can have people over for dinner and not be pinned up against the glass sliding door.  And hey, if we’re going to expand out the back of the house (assuming we did an expansion), I’ve always dreamed of a bigger master bedroom with a nice master bathroom to boot.  What’s a little more renovation when you’re only dreaming of the tab?

A few years ago now we had our basement renovated.  We quickly discovered that tabs run up: we upgraded the lighting system downstairs, and then realized we needed to upgrade the electrical capacity in our home, and then discovered that to meet the new code we needed to install smoke alarms that were hooked into the electrical system upstairs, and THEN decided that since the electricians needed to run wiring up into the ceilings anyway, we’d have them install wiring for ceiling fans in each of the bedrooms.  Cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching.  And that was just for the basement.  Imagine rearranging a load bearing wall on the back of the house, adding the plumbing and installations to support a true master bathroom rather than our half bath, dealing with moving cabinets and lighting in the kitchen, and then matching things like siding (oh, we want to replace the siding, anyway: might as well throw it in the mix).

All of this to fulfill some dreams of what we MIGHT do in the house.  Note that none of my proposed renovations there really does anything to add too much more elbow room to the kids’ living area…  we sort of figure them having small rooms will just encourage them to be more involved with the family.  🙂

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I just did a quick Google search, trying to find an existing Excel spreadsheet template to do sprint burndowns for Scrum.  I badly mistyped, and ended up requesting Google do a search on ‘excel spritn burdown chart’.  Google couldn’t find anything on that search request (imagine that), but did offer: Did you mean: excel sprint burndown chart .

Not too long ago, I considered applying at Google.  They’re now up in Pittsburgh, we’ve got family up there, and wouldn’t it be interesting to get to work at a company that’s just become such a hallmark of our times.  I ended up deciding that, one, we weren’t really all THAT interested in moving to Pittsburgh, and also that I liked enjoying the idea of being able to say I worked at Google more than I enjoyed the practicalities of interviewing and working there.  Frankly, I’m not sure I’m smart enough to work there, and I’d rather not prove it to myself (or worse, have it proved to me).  (Even worse, somehow, would be the idea that you DON’T have to be smart to work there, that all of the things that they’ve built have been built using generally good folks like me who just somehow create technical magic.)

Anyway, Google’s intuition of my real search term needs brought all of that to mind and inspired an impromptu mid-day blog.  Now back to my generally interesting, but not nearly so AI-like kind of existence.

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So, I think I’ve mentioned I started a new job a few weeks ago.  Thought I’d mention an interesting culture shift I’ve seen…  I’ve mentioned that I’m running at lunch now.  Most of my office does some sort of exercise at lunchtime.  For most of them, bicycling is the sweat-dripper of choice.  These guys go out for 16 mile rides, and then come back and sling code with the best of ’em. 

At my previous gig, lunchtime meant walking to a great restaurant in Bethesda and having interesting conversations.  Here, it means dripping with sweat and comparing stories as to great hills conquered or sports jelly beans (I want to get me some of those!).  Gotta admit, this way is cheaper, and might even lose me a few pounds in the meantime. 

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So, a few weeks ago I mentioned needing to run between 7 and 8.5 miles to hit my next milestone on the marathon plan.  I’m happy to say I ran 8 miles that day along the local trail.  That meant Saturday was a nine miler.  I got up in time to go out and beat the heat, but then, so did my son, and since my hubby’s never been one to go to bed earlier than way later than he should, didn’t seem quite kind to get him up so I could go run.  Cameron and I went for a walk instead.  Later in the day, though, when it was way too hot to be out pounding the trail, I did my 9 on the treadmill at the gym.  Boring, but effective. 

My marathon strategy is to recognize that I’m neither a fast runner, nor a great endurance runner.  I can, however, run for stints of time over and over again, so Galloway’s method of run/walk works by me.  At the moment, I’m a 6 minute run, 1 minute walk person, which puts me in at around 11 minute miles.  (I did mention I’m not fast.)  Since I just want to finish, preferably in under 5 hours, that puts me in good shape.  This upcoming Saturday is my first training run with the local running club.  I missed the cutoff date to get my entry bib into the Marine Corp marathon, but the local runners’ clubs have first-time marathoner entries.  Gotta suck up the 6:30 am start time, and the ten mile + training runs, though.

In the meantime, I’m running loops at work at lunchtime, making good use of that afore-mentioned shower in the ladies’ room.  The loop is 2 miles, with a nearly .5 mile trek to get there (with an almost .5 mile trek to get back).  By the end of the summer, I want to run the loop twice, getting me a 5 mile trek.  Short-term, I just want to run the loop itself without stopping.  (Closer today, but still walked on the uphill side.)

I like goals.  Running gives me goals, and accomplishments.  Given how slow/out of shape I am, I can pretty reasonably continue to set incremental goals, and with some work achieve them.  The upside to the side-effects of 3 pregnancies, too much beer, and too little exercise.

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7-8.5 miles tomorrow…  yikes.  I was driving back from Krispy Kreme tonight with the girls (today was National Doughnut Day, according to our favorite Krispy Kreme guy, Mr. Jeff), and was watching our van tell me how many more miles it could eke out on the last bit of its gas tank.  10 miles.  Which looked to be longer than the distance from Krispy Kreme to get back home, in terms of how the Sienna’s mileage meter was counting.  (Note that I stopped for gas before I got home, as I didn’t want to rely too heavily on that meter.)  Still a darn long distance, though one that I need to be able to run/walk by the 16th to go on a training run with the Striders and get my marathon entrance.  To make it to 10 by then, I’m supposed to run 7-8.5 tomorrow.  I did 6 last weekend: very slowly, iterating on running N minutes, walking 1 minute.  Starting to fathom just how much long a 5 hour marathon is…..