I'm In Love With My Wife

I love my wife, Debby; she's smart and beautiful and full of love. My family loves her and are happy she came into my life; she straightened me out and still keeps me straight. When I was young, I couldn't imagine being married; now I shudder to think where I'd be if we weren't. She is the best thing that's happened to me since the day I was born.

If anything happened to her, I don't think I could go on living.

The Secret to My Success

One of my old bosses noted that I was quite successful in every department I worked for. He asked me:

"What key items do you think contributed to your being able to keep technically and product-wise up to date, manage customers to the level of minimal/no complaints and able to deliver projects with scope creep or similar priorities on time?."

Here's how I answered. I don't remember who Dr. Berger was.

Oh man, that's tough. 'The secret to my success.' Now that you got me thinking, it's hard to concentrate on my work! One of the work habits I've gotten into is to answer email as soon as I read it so it doesn't stick in the back of my mind and occupy space I need to devote to my real work. This has the added benefit of allowing me to get in a better focused dialog with the emailer before the emailer loses the thought that led to the email. The emailer also percieves me in a positive light when I respond quickly. People are more willing to give a little when the relationship is good.

Dr Berger has the right idea. People are not objects. This is at the heart of christianity: love others as you love yourself. If you treat customers and fellow employees equally with respect, the focus turns on the product rather than the relationship. People are much more reasonable and willing to bend if the respect is mutual.

This also means that I, myself, must be willing to bend. Things change, especially in the software industry. There is no 'right' way to do anything. My ideas are just that: ideas. They don't define me and if they don't fit the situation, I'm ready to drop them and move on. I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I don't assume I know best.

I have a terrible memory. Therefore, every problem or project is totally new. I question assumptions - especially my own. I concentrate on the facts. I don't jump to conclusions. Not only do I keep notes but I edit them too. I focus on the problem until the solution becomes clear. That moment of clarity sometimes comes to me only after I write down and order the facts. I write as if I need to explain it to someone else (and consequently have the explanation ready if someone asks for it).

I experiment. I play with our products and the tools we use. I educate myself and go deep - but only in the area that pertains to the task at hand because everything changes too fast to be applicable later. I try to predict where scope creep is most likely to occur by listening to the customer's reasoning behind what their overall goal is. If I play with our software with an eye toward their goal, sometimes the limitations stand out and it becomes clear that either scope creep is inevitable, or the goal needs deflected (the earlier this is realized, the easier it is to implement either way).

I try to keep up on the latest trends of thought in the software industry. I read magazines and internet ramblings. Having a bad memory helps filter out unimportant stuff. A lot of the most popular items in the software press are temporary but the trends have a direction and it helps that I've been watching this industry closely for years. I have a pretty solid foundation on which to build an understanding of any architecture I need to support.

My wife and I have always been considered the best workers whereever we worked (at least by the people that mattered, which is not always the same people that are in charge). We don't like to chit-chat or beat dead horses. We think that most meetings are a waste of time. There is usually too much focus on the process and not the product. One of Deb's bosses (in an aerospace company) was famous for saying "Get the plane in the air - worry about the paperwork later."

Perhaps the underlying theme is 'focus'. I don't know. I got new glasses, so that popped into my head pretty fast. You can go to seminars and read books, but they all boil down to the same thing everyone's been telling you since you were young: work hard, ask questions and be real.

While Deb Was Away

8 things I learned while Deb was away:

1. The output of the coffee grinder falls off dramatically when the beans run out.
2. The left side of the bed is quite comfortable.
3. The magic wastebasket stops working.
4. Hitler capitalized on a terrorist act to win the Nazi party a majority in the German legislature and to squash civil liberties.
5. Which is something I learned while researching more important things like: the true meaning of 420.
   
6. I smell bad after only a couple days without a shower - but after 3 days, I just don't notice it.
7. Watching strippers dance just doesn't do it for me anymore. Lap dances, OTOH....
8. I don't function well on 2 hours sleep.

Rock-A-Bye Baby

Apart from the first verse, I wrote this for my mom to sing on her forthcoming CD. The first and last verse are sung a capella. The middle verses are accompanied by an every increasingly manic piano. I can't believe she agreed to sing it!!!!

Rock-a-bye, baby In the treetop When the wind blows The cradle will rock When the bough breaks The cradle will fall And down will come baby Cradle and all When you get big We’ll send you to school They’ll teach you to write And how to be cruel When the nerd breaks And shoots up the hall Then down will come baby, Bookbag and all One day you’ll move And load up your truck We’ll hand you a cellphone And wish you good luck When the truck brakes, And hits a brick wall Then down will come baby, Cellphone and all. Down through the years The children have grown People divided and stuck to their own When the world crumbles And humanity falls Then down will come baby, Children and all. Rock a bye baby In mother’s embrace The warmth of a parent Cannot be replaced The voice of an angel Comes down from above And baby is safest When cradled in love.

My New Favorite Saying

Quoting Walter from the TV show 'Fringe'
When asked the question, 'Are you sure?'

"I'm not entirely sure we're on the same plain of consciousness."

Robustness Principle -

From RFC 793: Transmission Control Protocol

2.10. Robustness Principle

TCP implementations will follow a general principle of robustness: be conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others.

The Gender Table

In my current job, I write hot fixes for a buggy 3-tier VB6 app. The app connects to a SQL Server database and has a Person table. This table has the typical demographic fields like first, last, middle name and birth date. There is also a ‘Gender_ID’ field.

The Gender_ID field is a numeric field that can hold 100000 numbers. That means we can have 100000 different genders. Last I heard, there were only 2.

Technically, we could use a bit field. But sometimes you just don’t know the gender. So that means you need a 3^rd choice: ’Unknown’. This is the thing about real life. There are no black and white answers.

A common practice of old (before Y2K) was to use a single character (byte) field. The storage space allowed for 256 choices, but we could use a letter that was easily understood in reports. The choices were typically M, F, or U.

Apparently, the designers of our software were very forward thinking. They must have realized that there are people out there that have undergone sex changes and, since the software is used in a clinical setting, that fact may be pertinent to certain diagnoses. The Gender_ID field therefore links to a Gender table. The Gender table includes a 255-character description field. This design allows us to create a gender like ‘Was born a man, became a woman at age 23 and then switched back after finding God at age 42.’

This design also allows us to prepare for the inevitable clash with alien species that may have more than 2 genders. Can you imagine a species that requires 3 or 4 individuals to reproduce? Many plants and simple organisms reproduce asexually. It’s not a stretch to reason that since there are examples of single and double gender species, there may be triple or quadruple gender species as well.

What is the advantage of having two genders? Since a single sex species reproduces exact replicas (clones, if you will), diversity within such a species is limited and mutations are rare. Adding a second set of chromosomes mixes up the pot a bit. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that adding a third set would create even more diversity – as well as more chances of mutations?

If you increase the chances of mutation, you increase the speed a species can adapt to a changing environment. That may be desirable in the current administration.

So if you take this argument sideways and wrap it around man’s baser instincts to have sex with everything that moves, you come to the conclusion that those that society considers sexually abnormal (i.e. gays and Mormons) are taking point in the evolution of the species.