Monday, September 29, 2008

Birds!

A young man realized his long held dream of being accepted at State U in the ornithology program. He *loved* birds and wanted to study and preserve them.

He worked and worked at his lessons, learning things about birds no other undergraduate had even thought to wonder about. After four very hard years, he sat down to his last final. He knew that the good grade he would get on this test would complete his degree with highest honors, and along with his field studies would propel him to graduate school, where he would be able to begin teaching others the wonders of birds.

When he got to the examination hall, he saw five bird cages on pedestals at the front of the room. Each cage was completely covered by a canvas drop cloth. The proctor for the exam was none other than the distinguished elderly head of the department of ornithology, and he had designed the test himself.

At the appointed hour, the professor stood and addressed the gathered students. "You see before you five cages, with the avian in each cage concealed. You must now prove your skills and knowledge in the realm of ornithology by recognizing each avian, giving as full a description of the habitat, the diet, the mating habits, and the parenting style of each as you can. You have 90 minutes to complete the exam." With that, the professor proceeded to raise the canvas over each cage only enough to show the birds' legs.

Our young man was stunned. *Only the legs?! ONLY the legs??!! ONLY THE LEGS???!!!* After all the hours he had spent studying everything about birds except their legs?!

After ten incredulous minutes, he could take no more. He shut his examination book, stood up, walked to the front of the hall and screamed at the the professor, "This is stupid. This is asinine! No one, but no one who is in the least rational can tell you everything you want to know about these birds from looking at their LEGS!"

He threw his exam book on the floor in front of the professor and stormed toward the door to leave. The class was very large, and the professor had had his graduate assistants handle most of the one-on-one contact with the undergraduates. Therefore, he did not know most of the students in the examination hall, including our young man.

He called after the young man, "Just a minute here, what's your name?"

Our young man turned around, hiked the legs of his jeans up to his knees and said, "You guess, buddy, you guess!"

----------------
Now playing: Sara Evans - Born to Fly
via FoxyTunes

Saturday, September 27, 2008

RIP Paul Newman

From Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Butch Cassidy to the Piston Cup winning Hudson in Cars, there's hardly been a finer American actor. That he both gave so much to charity through the many Newman's Own products and stayed true to his marriage -- I believe his quote was, "Why should I go out for a hamburger when I have steak at home?" -- shows a true wealth of spirit that enriches the world, all the more for being so rare.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

It fits me well

This is my PDA. Why, you may be wondering, am I bothering to write about a gadget? Well, because it's just about part of me.

It wasn't the most powerful Palm PDA on the market when it was brand new, not by a long shot. It was leaps and bounds beyond my previous PDAs. My first one was a Palm Vx, which had 8 megabytes of memory, a green and black display, no expansion slot, and no communications capability. It reached the point, rather quickly, that the the battery would not recharge. A PDA that won't hold a charge is pretty much useless.

This lead me to buy my second PDA, a Palm m130. It also had 8 megabytes of memory and no communications capability, but it did have a color display and an expansion slot. It had a nicely curved profile that fit my hand very comfortably. I bought an SD card with a whopping 32 megabytes of storage. It was completely and thoroughly adequate as a personal information manager, you know, calendar, contacts, tasks. It's real shortcoming was that it had no provision to act as an MP3 player.

Lisa answered this for me a couple of years ago, when she got me the Palm Tungsten E2 in the picture. It came with 32 megabytes of memory, Bluetooth for short range communications, RealPlayer MP3 player software, a 128 megabyte SD card (I soon replaced this with a 1 gigabyte card), and Palm's ebook software. Actually, I had installed different ebook software on my first Palm, from Mobipocket, and I have a nice library built it.

Take a good look at the PDA. There are places where the shiny finish has nearly worn off. It's been used, a lot. It's my alarm clock, my calculator, my calendar, my address book, my photo album, and my portable library. It has almost every novel from Peter F. Hamilton (grand scale space opera) and Kim Harrison (urban fantasy set in Cincinnati), plus a lot of Shakespeare and Mark Twain and Cory Doctorow and David Weber and Eric Flint, with room to spare.

It's my secondary portable music player since I got my 30 gigabyte Creative Zen W for both music and movies. Obviously I can't be as expansive with the PDA as I am with the Creative Zen player, so I've limited the music to my very favorites albums: Kind of Blue, Back in Black, Red Headed Stranger, Dark Side of the Moon, Hotel California, Nickel Creek, The Road and the Radio.

I also have a short playlist of favorite songs on the PDA:
  1. Bob Dylan is rightly regarded as one of our best songwriters, but in my opinion, he blows chunks as a singer. Jimi Hendrix of course pioneered a lot of rock guitar. The intersection of the two? Hendrix's rendition of All Along the Watchtower, which I think is the best performance of a Dylan song. Ever.
  2. The 1960s changed almost everything about America. For a decade that was so much about love and freedom, it ended with in a great deal of despair. That's why Bridge Over Troubled Water was, and is, such an important song. It's about hope, and about a promise to be there when a friend is bottoming out, even if the relationship isn't what it once was. Paul Simon's lyrics and melody are just about perfect, and Art Garfunkel's vocals are stunningly beautiful.
  3. I love the melody of Until the Night by Billy Joel, and I like the story that tells the woman you love that coming home to her is the reason you can make it through the day.
  4. The Change by Garth Brooks is, in a sense, the flip side to Bridge Over Troubled Water. The latter song is an act of compassion, of simply responding to a spirit in need. The former song is an act of defiance, of reaching out to another to dare the world to crush your integrity and sense of compassion. It's one of the few country power ballads I know of.
  5. When You Come Back Down by Nickel Creek is what I hope I have given my children.
  6. Anything But Mine has Kenny Chesney's sure sense of melody going for it, along with some nicely rockish guitar. It also has Kenny's patented nostalgia vibe, this time starring a horndog college boy trying to score with his summer romance before the beach vacation is over.
  7. Vince Gill and Diana Krall are two of my favorite singers. Their duet Faint of Heart from Gill's 4 CD set These Days sounds right up Krall's alley, like an old jazz standard. It definitely doesn't sound like a Vince Gill composition a la When I Call Your Name, but it is, and despite the low key, relaxed presentation, it smoulders.
  8. Martina McBride is one of the best female vocalists there is, easily on par with a Barbara Streisand or a Billie Holiday. She was for the longest time a song interpreter, but she became a first rate songwriter with Anyway.
  9. The Eagles released their first album of completely original material in 29 years last October, and Long Road Out of Eden was the title cut. It's a passionate condemnation of the current state of American politics, with an angry Don Henley vocal and a fiery Joe Walsh guitar solo. Rock music doesn't get much better than this.
  10. Sugarland, Little Big Town, and Jake Owen were on a CMT-sponsored tour together earlier this year, and they resurrected a 1980s pop gem, Life in a Northern Town. This is the kind of joyful melody that exuberant harmonies were meant for.
By the way, the picture on the mousepad is entitled Haulin' Ass.

DotNot, Part 1

In the first fourteen years of my career in Information Technology, I worked for a half-dozen companies, but I basically did three jobs. I started out a Cobol and JCL programmer on IBM mainframes. In this job, I learned not only a programming style, but a programming philosophy. We'll come back to this.

There are two traditional career paths for a mainframe programmer, at least if he desires to continue in Information Technology. One path is technical support, which involves building and maintaining a company's IT infrastructure. The other path is called systems analysis; this path consists mainly of serving as a liaison to the business users and translating their needs and requirements into technical specifications that can be used to build applications, which drive today's businesses.

This career path scenario simplifies, indeed largely ignores, several current realities of Information Systems/Information Technology, such as sufficiently flexible PC software that savvy business people can use to create very sophisticated applications, outsourcing, and the rise of the independent corporate IT subsidiary that has replaced many internal IT departments. My work environment is largely a mix of the last two, "competitive sourcing" and the IT subsidiary. There are opportunities because of this that I wouldn't otherwise have. I work on applications across several platforms, including mainframe, Unix, Windows client-server, and the Web; these applications span multiple companies in North America and Europe.

As I faced this branch, I determined that I get much more enjoyment and satisfaction from writing software than from detailing the functionality that someone else should write. Or put another way, I'm a bit of a geek who enjoys cutting code. I would have actually been very happy long term to continue mainframe application development in Cobol. It's not a cool language by any stretch of the imagination, but it's a darn satisfying workhorse of a language, and I'm good at it. But, it was pretty much a given ten or fifteen years ago that programmers didn't stay programmers. You were expected to become either more technical or more business. Otherwise, well, there must have been something wrong with you.

Since I knew I wanted to remain on the more technical side, I began to look for opportunities in technical support. As it happened, there was a very attractive opening as systems programmer supporting mainframe database management software at my then employer. I posted for the position, and I felt very positive about my chances to get the job. I had very good relationships with the people in tech support, including the hiring manager, and I knew I could do the job. It may have even worked out that way, if I'd already had experience supporting mainframe database management software. I didn't get the job, and that was a blessing in disguise. Mainframe technical support turned out to be mostly installing and configuring software packages, lots of troubleshooting performance issues, and tons of after hours and weekend trouble calls. There was basically no software development in that line of work.

Shortly after this, my company ran into business troubles and began a long cycle of downsizing and layoffs. I made it through the first round of layoffs and decided it was time to change jobs. What did I end up with? My second IT job, the one I hadn't wanted, systems analysis. Turns out I'm not too shabby at this, either, but I still wanted be the guy writing the programs.

During most of the next four years, I did get to do a little programming, but more and more, I was writing program specifications and test plans for other programmers, and then testing their programs. I do like the design side of applications, but not as my full time gig. And I definitely didn't care for the on-call and planned overtime parts of that job, the parts that made it feel as if I worked two-and-a-half full time jobs, while getting paid for one.

I moved to a new company again, and I ended up in the third of my three discrete IT jobs. For a little over two years, I was a DBA, a database analyst. This job was actually a move away from programming, even more so than systems analysis. I didn't install database software, but I used it extensively. My job was to design the data structures that programmers needed to hold the business information their applications had to have to do the business work, to maintain the integrity of the data (for example, if there's a credit card account, there has to be a cardholder), and to ensure that the applications got acceptable performance from their databases. A poorly designed or implemented database can kill computer performance; how long do you want to wait on your online banking, or to buy a concert ticket? Yep, that's what I thought.

Now, there are dozens of database managers on the market. I worked primarily with DB2, IBM's mainframe relational database manager. Truthfully, for my purposes here, it doesn't matter which topography of database comes into play, be it relational, hierarchical, or network. What matters is that I was in an infrastructure support position, I was professionally challenged, and I strongly considered staying in that career path. In the end, I didn't like where the office politics were taking me, and I decided to change jobs again. I very happily got back into application development, programming again. This time, though, I stayed at the same company, and I have now been there for a bit over 10 years.

I haven't gotten around to explaining the title of this post, nor have I touched on programming philosophy, yet. I'll get to those in Part 2.

RIP Richard Wright

Pink Floyd's keyboard player passed away last week. He was the group's George Harrison to Roger Waters and David Gilmour's Paul McCartney and John Lennon. George Harrison contributed Something to the Beatles' cannon; Rick Wright was the songwriter of Us and Them. What a song - melodic as can be, with a killer sax solo, and just as depressing as anything else in Pink Floyd's oeuvre.

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Golden

Fifty years ago today, on Sunday, September 14, 1958, my dad worked the graveyard shift at Riegelwood Paper Company, went to church with my mom and her family, and after the service, Dad and Mom got married. There was a small reception at the church, but they skipped it to go to Myrtle Beach, where they stayed overnight. They returned home on Monday, because Dad had to go back to work.

Yesterday, we had a family gathering to celebrate Dad and Mom's golden anniversary. I got the planning going for this nearly a year ago, and after several iterations, we settled on simplicity. After all, my dad and mom are very private people who intensely despise any hint of limelight.

Friday night, Lisa and I picked up two of our three kids at the Raleigh-Durham airport. Andy, having just started his first semester at Purdue, elected to stay in West Lafayette. Gigi and David's flight from Chicago was scheduled to arrive at 10:08, and we planned to drive on to Mom and Dad's in Whiteville, two-and-a-half hours away, rather than drive an hour back to Greensboro. We wanted to let the kids spend as much time with Mom and Dad as possible, since they had to fly back today.

Well, Hurricane Ike intervened, and that 10:08 flight arrived at midnight. They didn't have any checked luggage, so we were out of the airport in very good order. We wanted a bite to eat and had seen a sign on I-40 for a Wendy's, but we got lost for a short while looking for that restaurant. Happily, once we got back to the interstate, we found another Wendy's at the next exit. So, a quick trip to the drive thru window, four sandwiches, four cups of water, an order of fries, and a frosty later, and we were back on the road.

We got to Dad and Mom's at 3:00 am yesterday morning.

Yesterday evening at 5:00, almost 20 of us met at Dale's Seafood at Lake Waccamaw -- unfortunately, the view was the parking lot rather than the lake, because they don't reserve the lake side -- and between us, my brother Ken and I treated our extended family to a nice seafood dinner. Then, we all went back to Mom and Dad's. Lisa, the kids, and I left the restaurant first, because we needed to put the punch together. I forgot the code to the alarm system, and I was sure the security company would call, I'd fail the challenge, and the party would be spoiled when everyone came downtown to stand my bail. Mom and Dad came to the rescue, by driving up and giving us the code.

We had our punch, a really nice cake that my sister-in-law Susan bought, and for the next couple of hours, Mom and Dad were the center of eating, conversation, and hundreds (if not thousands) of pictures (gotta love digital cameras). We had a few gifts for them, a Ruth's Chris Steakhouse gift certificate and tickets to a Le Grande Cirque performance. I would have done more for them, but in the same way that they dislike being the center of attention, they didn't want much in the way of gifts. It was a celebration for them, so I honored their request.

This morning, we had to leave earlier than I wanted to, but Gigi and David had a flight from Raleigh to Chicago scheduled to leave at 12:30 pm. We were on the road just before 8:45, and we were pulling into RDU just after 11:00. The departure board at the United ticketing area showed that their flight was on schedule. After we got the boarding passes and got Gigi and David to security, we checked the departure board again before settling down to wait until their flight was in the air. Their flight was now DELAYED. The Midwest was experiencing very heavy rains; this evening, several Chicago expressways are closed due to flooding. The flight didn't leave until about 2:45, and once they got to Chicago, the flooding interfered with their drive home. In fact, they didn't get home until almost 9:00 pm our time. My poor kids had a hectic travel weekend, but it was in a good cause.

Now, it's time for a short, maudlin note:

Mom and Dad,

Congratulations on 50 years together. You inspire and challenge me to be as constant and attentive in my marriage as you are in yours, and I hope that I have been half as successful a parent as you have.

Your loving son,
Eddie

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Happy Birthday, Andy!

My oldest son turns 18 today. When I called him, he sounded happy. He seems to be enjoying college so far. The only downside to his day, from my point of view, is that UPS didn't get my present to him yet, even though I paid extra to get it there yesterday. He's been out both times they tried to deliver it. Frak!

Monday, September 1, 2008

I can identify with this

Today's imitation Shakespeare

Blazer jumped up on the bed, meowing for his breakfast, well before Lisa and I were ready to get up this morning. I told him, "I will rise up and smite thee righteously if ye do not stop, cat."