Thursday, October 30, 2008

234

This is the least I've weighed in probably five years. It really does feel good, especially on my knees.

My rate of weight loss has slowed. That's not really surprising, since I'm not exercising as diligently as I did for a while. Nor am I really eating quite as well, although I couldn't stand the thought of again eating fast food like I used to.

All in all, I'm happy with my progress.

A World Series follow up thought

To Cole Hamels: Congratulations on winning the Series MVP award. You earned it. But, on your comment that "This is the best thing to ever happen to this city. Ever," you play in Philadelphia. There's a place not far from Citizens Bank Park called Independence Hall. Go take a tour, kid, and learn some history.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Election 2008

In short, I am more aligned philosophically with John McCain than with Barack Obama. However, I'm terrified by the thought of Sarah Palin as President if something were to happen to McCain.

I'm also thoroughly disgusted by the hatchet job the Republican Party machine has run on every single Democratic candidate this year. Not that the Democrats haven't slung their share of mud, but the GOP has run a particularly heinous campaign.

I am going to vote for Obama for President, Bev Purdue for NC governor, and Kay Hagan for NC Senator.

Phillies 4, Rays 3

And so the 2008 MLB season ends. Game 5.5 of the World Series was very entertaining, very well played.

I'm not particularly a Philadelphia Phillies fan, and the Tampa Bay Rays are the baseball story of the year, no doubt, but I am a National League fan first and foremost. So, I'm happy with tonight's outcome.

I found it sweet that no New York team made the post season this year. The Mets have had a good team for the last three seasons, but in 2006, the NL pennant slipped away from them in Game 7 of the NLCS, last year they blew their post season chance on the last day of the season, and this year it happened in the last weekend of the season. I see a trend here.

As for the Yankees, well, sooner or later they're going to buy another championship. I just hope A-Rod is long gone before then.

Saturday, October 25, 2008

The Sad Truth

After finishing the first chapter of The Secret Life of Bees, I am moved to recount a few things.

The sad truth is that there are still too many people who believe that the color of someone's skin makes a difference in their character or their intelligence.

The sadder truth is that I sometimes fall into that trap.

The sad truth is that there are people who believe that God wants them to kill other people who don't believe exactly as they do.

The sadder truth is that they do kill people who believe differently than they do.

The sad truth is that people seeking public office trust political handlers who believe that the best way to win an election is divide and conquer.

The sadder truth is that this strategy succeeds.

The sad truth is that organizations feel a need for diversity training.

The sadder truth is that there truly seems to be a need for this.

The sad truth is that it's a parent's job to become obsolete in their childrens' lives.

The sadder truth is that I became obsolete too early.

Hope was the last thing to emerge from Pandora's Box. The sad truth is we're still waiting.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

I can't get it out of my head

Ever have a melody that you seem to hear unceasingly? I do from time-to-time...actually, it's more than that. I'm not only serenaded in my mind, but I need to play it out loud, over and over. On my CD player in the car; on the Favorite Songs playlists on both of my mp3 players -- I know I have a mild touch of dyslexia, which I am aware of and cope with, but OCD I can do without!

So, who are the current artists-in-residence in my mental musical salon, and what are they playing?

The poet John Keats once said, "Though a quarrel in the streets is a thing to be hated, the energies displayed in it are fine; the commonest man shows a grace in his quarrel." I can see this description in Wild-Eyed Southern Boys by 38 Special.

The song is really nothing more, on the surface, than a well-crafted Southern rock song, basically a ditty you'd hear on Classic Rock radio, with a couple of lead guitarists swapping licks and two vocalists singing about a rowdy bar crowd listening to a hot band, everyone looking for an excuse to brawl, to throw back a beer or a shot, to hook up for a night's romance.

Look, or more properly listen, more closely. The singers are right on tune, both on leads and harmonies. The guitar solos rock, the two drummers lay down some very solid and complex rhythms, and the rhythm guitarist and bassist handle some tricky time and harmonic changes.

Whether or not there are worse songs to obsess over, this one makes me happy.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Happy Birthday, Lisa

I can't think of a better reason to take a day off from work than to spend it with you, sweetheart, and there's certainly no better person in my life than you. I love you.

Happy Belated Birthday, Gigi!

Gigi, I'm sorry I didn't get this out on your birthday. I'm glad you enjoyed Wicked, and, well, don't spend all we sent you in one place! Love, Dad.

Sunday, October 12, 2008

DotNot, Part 2

At the end of Part One of my professional biography, I promised to come back to both my programming philosophy and why I entitled the piece the way I did. Let's get back to these ideas.

As a mainframe Cobol programmer, I learned the "Top Down" model of programming. This means to take a problem and break it down into smaller and smaller chunks. This is done iteratively, until a chunk is of a manageable size to be turned into computer code that can accomplish a very specific task. Then, the next chunk is tackled, translating part of a business or technical requirement into a program. And then, do the same for the next chunk. And again. And again, until the entire set of requirements has been translated.

There is nothing magic here, just the methodical, detailed, and painstaking transformation of an idea from one idiom to another. What has historically intimidated many people about this is just how detailed you must be to do this successfully. That, and the fact that programming languages are simply not natural expressions of how people communicate. Of course, when we program, we're not communicating with people, we're communicating with very persnickety machines.

Cobol is a particularly verbose method of communicating with computers. It is a third generation programming language. The first generation was binary machine language, 1's and 0's grouped into specifically sequenced patterns that matched exactly how the central processing unit executed them. The second generation was assembly language, mnemonic codes like ZAP and MVC and BLR that were slightly less cryptic representations of patterns of binary, that were translated into machine language by programs known as assemblers.

A third generation programming language is more human-readable than earlier generations. Its statements may resemble mathematical formulas or English-like sentences.

Consider the normal calculation for straight time pay, hours worked times hourly rate. In Basic, this could be rendered as: Pay = Hours * Rate. Contrast this with a typical Cobol rendering: Multiply Hours by Rate giving Pay. Both are easily comprehended, and the languages are much simpler to learn than a first or second generation language.

In both cases, and this trend has not only continued but accelerated with time, the drafters of programming languages have continually taken advantage of increases in computing power to make the job of the programmer easier. Languages are not only more comprehensible to more people -- there is less of a caste of programming "high priests" or "wizards" than there used to be -- but programming environments are more conducive to troubleshooting programming problems and to higher productivity in writing programs in the first place.

The syntax and grammar available in a language both shape how ideas are expressed and limit what can be expressed. Cobol was my primary programming language, counting school, for a decade and a half. That has had a profound effect on how I program, as well as on how I think about programming.

The top down development methodology imposes a discipline that is process oriented, which lends itself to Cobol quite nicely. Cobol is a procedural language, which means that the flow of control, the sequence of execution, throughout a program is in a straight line, step-by-step from beginning to end. Each Cobol program is a whole, a single unit, and each executable statement in a program can access and affect any piece of data being processed. This concept is known as "scope", and it's another idea we'll come back to.

There are statements in the language that cause program execution to branch to another place in a program; this is a necessary feature of all programming languages. Loops cause certain program instructions to be repeated over and over; subroutines isolate certain functionality in a single piece of code, which can be executed from wherever it is required in a program. Branching instructions, when used haphazardly, give rise to a programming style know as "spaghetti code". This means that you can jump from any point in a program to any other point, leaving an execution trail that resembles a plate of spaghetti. I learned a more disciplined style known as "structured programming", which requires a designed execution path through a program, where each subroutine has single entry and exit programs, and scope is designed to be limited rather than global.

Cobol and top down design combine to form a simple and straightforward programming methodology. This does not mean simplistic; this methodology is behind the majority of the world's business data processing. It is a rigid methodology; once development has started, it is not easy to change directions if requirements change.

When I returned to programming eight years ago, I became a web developer. I primarily used VBScript, Javascript, HTML, Internet Information Services, and the Oracle database manager. Except for Oracle, my development tools were either Microsoft technologies, or Microsoft implementations of web standards. All of these tools were philosophically aligned with Cobol and top down design.

In the years since, I have continued to support applications developed in this older mode, as well as having done new development in a newer methodology called object oriented programming. This is a radically different philosophy of programming than what I originally learned, one that I struggle with mightily, and the subject of the next essay in this series.

Friday, October 3, 2008

A sense of "History, Violated"

I'm in Allentown, Pennsylvania, to train a contract programmer on an application I support and enhance. The application is used at several North American and European sites by the companies that are IT clients of my company. Most people would certainly recognize the brand names involved.

When I got to the Allentown headquarters, I immediately felt very comfortable. The building was built and dedicated in the 1970s, and it reminded me quite powerfully of the Greensboro headquarters of a company I used to work for. The facilities are showing some age, the building style isn't anything approaching contemporary, and the corporate symbol is displayed everywhere. Everywhere, from peoples' desks to the hallways to the cafeteria to a three story representation on the front of the building that I understand is lit up at night.

This is not some obnoxious and empty form of corporate rah-rah cheerleading. These people, by and large, are proud of where they work. And, they are entirely correct to be so. The company is over 100 years old, their product is a brand name that has become, not genericized like Coke or Kleenex, but romanticized, almost mythical. It's well known and even celebrated, has been for decades.

Economics trumps history.

The multinational that owns all these companies has looked at the market conditions here in the US -- not the stock market, but the larger consumer market -- and reached the cold blooded decision that it cannot afford, in the long run, to maintain two brand headquarters in North America. All of the operations in Allentown are being shut down and consolidated to Greensboro by 2010.

I'm glad to know that both of the co-workers I'm closest to are making the move to North Carolina next year.

Both brands will continue, and I am hopeful the Allentown brand will maintain the quality and the toughness for which it's known. But, for us insiders -- even though I've made only the one trip here, I now consider myself an insider -- something will be missing; our little tribe is being swallowed up.

He gets it, in more ways than one

Chet Flippo is a music journalist. He was a rock writer for Rolling Stone in the 1970s, and today he is the editorial director of CMT.com. He writes a thoughtful weekly column, Nashville Skyline, on myriad things country, and I recommend it to all music fans, whether country music does anything for you or not. Today, he expressed many things I believe dearly and deeply, with a powerful eloquence well beyond what I possess.

Thanks, Chet.