Friday, November 27, 2009

Compare And Contrast: A Trans-Siberian Orchestra Concert And A US Airways Flight

In the past two days, I've attended this year's TSO concert in Greensboro and taken a flight on US Airways to visit my kids at Thanksgiving. Let's examine a few aspects of the two experiences.

Food. We ate a meal at CiCi's Pizza before the concert. It's certainly more expensive there now than when I could take all the kids and feed all four of us for under $15. Still, it's filling (very), there's plenty of variety, the pizza is quite tasty, and we were satisfied.

I took a couple of breakfast bars on the flight out Greensboro, Chex Mix Turtle bars, to be exact. They're my favorite quick breakfast this side of Chick-Fil-A's chicken burritos, but they left me feeling hungry.

My connecting flight was through Philadelphia, and I had enough time to get a larger breakfast of scrambled eggs, home fries, and sausage. Yummy, and reasonably priced for airport fare. It's a little bit surreal that I got this from an Italian eatery...

All told, the concert experience wins the food battle.

The wait. We got into the parking lot at the Coliseum with very little delay. TSO scheduled two shows in Greensboro this year, the four o'clock show started a half-hour late, and since they perform for 2.5 hours, we had to wait to enter the arena for the 8:00 show. Of course, that show started about 20 minutes late...

Both of my flights arrived at their destinations on time, but they were stuck on the tarmacs before departures. In fact, the flight from Philadelphia to Indianapolis left Philly about 20 minutes late, but we still arrived early in Indy.

This one's a tie.

Seating. There was more room on the airplane than at the Greensboro Coliseum. The flight wins this leg.

Noise. Who are we kidding here? TSO puts on a rock concert, wired for sound and light and light and sound, and they rock hard. Next category.

Speed. Greensboro to Philadelphia to Indianapolis in less than six hours, including 2.5 hours of airport wait time. Point to US Airways.

Atmosphere. The air at the Greensboro Coliseum was smoky from the pyrotechnics used in the show. The air before the flight from Greensboro was foggy, enough so in Philly to make us wait on the runway. Tie.

So, Eddie, who won? I did, in every way imaginable.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

This Makes Me Happy



I had a similar experience, way back in the dark, dark pre-YouTube days. I didn't have a camcorder back in 1994, so there's no record of David shakin' it to Alan Jackson's Livin' On Love on the radio, but the memory gives me great joy.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

50 - 254: Where He Says "If", I Am

In my Taking Stock series, I usually do not rely on the words of others, but the publisher of Skeptic magazine captured my belief on religion vs. science perfectly.

If one is a theist, it should not matter when God made the universe -- 10,000 years ago or 10 billion years ago. The difference of six zeros is meaningless to an omniscient and omnipotent being, and the glory of divine creation cries out for praise regardless of when it happened.

Likewise, it should not matter how God created life, whether it was through a miraculous spoken word or through the natural forces of the universe that He created. The grandeur of God's works commands awe regardless of what processes He used.

As for meanings and morals, it is here where our humanity arises from our biology. We evolved as a social primate species with the tendency of being cooperative and altruistic within our own groups, but competitive and bellicose between groups. The purpose of civilization is to help us rise above our hearts of darkness and to accentuate the better angels of our nature.


- Michael Shermer, cnn.com

Sunday, November 22, 2009

I'm Just Wondering

Would the world be a better place if folks did like I did at the grocery store this morning? After I unloaded my cart and pushed it over to the cart return, I took the time to gather the scattered carts together. I normally only do that with my cart, but there were only three others this time, and by taking about 30 seconds out of my day, I made things easier for the next store employee who will be sent out to bring carts in, and I made sure that three carts were less likely to roll around the parking lot.

It's a simple courtesy that I didn't used to care about, but I find now that, like giving a smile to someone as I walk by, it costs me next to nothing and brightens my small corner of the world.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

From 4 To 5

There's always been a periodic something, throughout my whole career, about that last hour of the workday. I experienced it twice this week, for the first time in quite a while. It's something you'll probably understand, if your labor is more mental than physical, as mine is when I'm deep into a programming task.

I literally cannot count the number of times that I've opened my work day optimistically, just knowing that I've picked apart a knotty bit of logic and that I was going to dazzle myself and my fellow developers. Almost every time, I would have been better following the old saw about being a pessimist -- you're pleasantly surprised when things turn out well.

Programming is described by Fred Brooks, the project manager behind IBM's OS/360 and the author of The Mythical Man-Month, as the discipline of building things out of pure thought stuff. This means that there's no limit on the raw material needed for the job. It means as well that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways to do any particular task, and even more ways to it wrong.

Programming is an exacting discipline. Computers make no assumptions, provide no defaults. This means that developers must supply all the details in every layer, from the bare metal and plastic and silicon to the operating system to the network to the database to the web page in the browser.

It's those little details that trip me up: the need to specify an absolute path to the directory where I want to write a file rather than a relative path from the web page I'm programming; drilling down to the exact property of an object to get the value I want to work with rather than stopping at too high a level; forgetting a period or a semi-colon (depending on the punctuation a programming language demands) and thereby blowing the scope of a conditional statement.

These are just a sampling of the reasons that programming, testing, and debugging are still more art than science.

So after the optimistic start to a day writing computer code gets shot and left dying in the dust, after frustrating hours of echoing obscenities in my head, how is it that in that last hour of the workday, my subconscious mind is liable to offer up a solution? Not only a solution, but one that is usually not only workable, but even elegant?

I rather hope this remains a question whose answer eludes me. Otherwise, I'm afraid I'll have graduated from craft to engineering, and I'll feel more like a cog in a wheel than a mystic.

Monday, November 9, 2009

The Lil' Spittle Maker

He drools. He sticks one leg straight up in the air when he licks his nethers; I think of this as his "little teapot" pose.

There are commercial opportunities to be had here. I wonder if anyone is cybersquatting on TheLilSpittleMaker.com.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Yankees 4, Phillies 2

Well, I can't honestly say that there's a lot of joy in the World Series results for this National League fan. However, I must acknowledge that the best team in Major League Baseball did win.

I was right a couple of years ago when I said that Alex Rodriguez would succeed in the post-season when Curt Schilling did not. After all, retiring from the game would preclude success in the October (and November) baseball.

Friday, November 6, 2009

Homecoming

This past Sunday was Homecoming at Pleasant Plains Baptist Church. My parents' church, the one I grew up in. It was also the final celebration of the church's 175th anniversary.

The usual order of the day at Homecoming is, as with the invitation to family and friends and former members, to invite a former pastor to come back and deliver the message. This time, instead, there were three speakers, members at Pleasant Plains, who gave testimonials to what the church has meant to them, to the history of the church.

The most noteworthy of the speakers, to me, was Dan Gore. He's a scholar, a farmer, a preacher, and an accomplished storyteller. He rambled a bit, as all the best Southern spinners of tales do, and one of his vignettes concerned a heavy church bell installed in the steeple belfry back in the 1930s. About a year after they got the bell, several church members were concerned that it might be too heavy for the structure to bear long-term. Several trustees of the church were nominated to climb up in the belfry and inspect the bell. Dan's dad Scott was one of the trustees, so he got to tag along.

The stairwell up through the steeple was dark, Dan recalled, but there was plenty of light at the top. They examined the timbers holding up the bell, and one of the trustees said, "You couldn't blow that out of there with a charge of dynamite."

That's all there was to the story, except for two small details. The trustee didn't pronounce the word "dine-a-mite"; he said "din-a-mite". And the trustee's name was Don Ward.

My granddaddy. I heard him say "din-a-mite" many, many times.

This was a new story to me. It's been nearly 30 years since Granddaddy passed away, but for a few minutes last Sunday morning, in a rare and precious gift, Dan Gore brought him back to life for me.