This morning I spent an hour or so installing a new wireless router to replace the wired router we have been using since February 2000. The process seemed simple on the surface; unplug the CAT-5 cords and power supply from the old router and drop the new one into place. Access the build in web accessible configuration and we’re surfing the Internet wirelessly.
In the actual doing of these steps I made two minor, easily correctable mistakes. Either of these taken individually would have been easy to diagnose and correct. Taken in tandem they proved to be difficult to overcome. In the end I was forced to contact my broadband provider to sort out what had happened.
In the process of installing the new router I was presented with a choice. When my connection didn’t work after making what I thought was the correct selection I should have backed up and tried the other option. Instead I decided that I must have another “problem.”
In my efforts to correct this nebulous other problem I introduced the second error. When I called for assistance the technician quickly zeroed on the incorrect choice as my problem. Once I made the correct choice every thing would work he assured me. Only, because I had wandered off the reservation earlier, it didn’t. It only took him a few minutes to locate my gaffe and correct it.
The thing I find interesting in all this is the whole paired problem paradigm. I often see situations in my employment as a programmer where outwardly it appears as if there is one problem. But upon examination you discover there are really two problems (or three), one behind the other causing the situation. I think that in life we have paired problems as well. Only without the concrete (if somewhat obscure) error messages and indicators that software gives us, life’s paired problems are much tougher to identify and correct.
In the interaction that occurs between a software developer and their code there are lots of cues as to the understanding of the problem domain by each side. The development tools provide feedback to the developers commands and from that feedback the developer (hopefully) knows what to do next.
In real life, interactions don’t happen via some magical interface that provides cues and hints as to the other participant’s understanding. You may think you are communicating clearly when in fact you aren’t. We have to develop our listening and intuitive skills to provide us with feedback about our interactions with others. We need to have a safe place to develop these skills, a place where we can stop the other person and say, “Is this what you really mean?”, or “I’m hearing this, is that what you are saying?” If we never develop our ability to debug our own life, we’ll spend most of our time being frustrated and angry.
I am fortunate to have a loving and very safe relationship with my wife. I have a place to develop my human interaction debugging skills. Within the safety of our relationship I have learned to trust my instincts and intuitions so that when I am out in the world I can believe what I am telling myself.
Without a safe place to develop these skills I would be suffering from masked problems on a daily basis; life would be much harder and more difficult. I’ve learned through hard experience to call for help when I get in over my head technically. (And to call earlier rather than later…) I’m also learning to actively look for feedback from my trusted companion.
Yesterday I upgraded my Powerbook to Panther (10.3.2) in a relatively painless 2 hour process. After the process was completed I was having trouble with my copy of CodeTek’s Virtual Desktop application.
I was using a 2.x version and knew that there was a 3.0 beta out. I went to their site and got the 3.0 beta and installed it. This morning I restarted my machine and went to my applications folder and started “CodeTek VirtualDesktop.” My finder crashed and I was forced to restart once again.
Back at my desktop I fired off an e-mail to the president of the company, Bill Goldstein, explaining my troubles. Mind you it was just before 7 am Central time. After sending the e-mail I tried installing the beta a second time. Before I could log out to put the install in to place I got a reply from Mr. Goldstein.
He expressed concern that the beta was performing in the manner I described. He said he was passing my issue on to the company’s CTO. Wow. This time I sorted the application folder by name instead of kind and discovered an icon for “CodeTek VitrualDesktop Pro”. Oops. I had accidentally run the old version after the first install.
I quickly replied to Mr. Goldstein and explained my gaffe. He replied, saying he was glad I had solved the problem, and if I had any more trouble I shouldn’t hesitate to contact them again.
The “Pro” version works extremely well, and I will be happy to pay for the upgrade when it goes live.
In this day and age when companies are hiding behind impersonal feedback forms and obscuring their contact information on web sites, it is a treat to interact with a company that shares the president’s e-mail address. And moreover, a company president who responds to customers immediately and with real concern.
CodeTek. Good stuff. Go get some.
Michele and I have been spending a lot of time and energy talking about moving. For the past few weeks we’ve kicked around a couple of potential destinations but we’ve been unable to find a reason to move.
In the 8 years we’ve been together there have been 3 major cross country moves, 4 if you count her moving from Colorado Springs to Illinois to be with me. Each of the moves was done to accommodate my career, each was disruptive and emotionally draining. We’ve learned some hard lessons about taking care of ourselves before, during, and after a major upheaval like moving.
We knew coming back to Illinois was not forever. At various times, depending upon our mood and situation, we’ve thought it would last as long as a decade or as short as sometime next week. We are now painfully aware that the fantasy of achieving some measure of financial independence as a result of working for myself was just that, a fantasy.
As our blinders have come off regarding the monetary aspects of living here, we have come to be less tolerant of the short-comings of life in rural, small town Central Illinois. Our liberal leanings, and humanist stance on world events set us apart from the conservative and closed society here. We feel isolated and cut off here.
In our effort to learn from our past experiences we want to make our next relocation about meeting our real needs, and not just to satisfy some external validation need. Trying to enumerate those real needs is not an easy task; they are more ephemeral and elusive than money or jobs. How do you identify and measure your happiness with a new city’s cultural outlook on human rights or the political direction of the country? Or measure it’s liberal to conservative ratio? How much importance do you give the new city’s weather or scenery?
So in the coming weeks we’ll be asking ourselves, what is important about where I live? And what needs do I have that might be addressed by a geographic location? Once we have a handle on that I think the right future home will become apparent. At least I hope so.
This afternoon Michele and I watched “Bruce Almighty” on a rented DVD. While DVDs maybe better than VHS tapes in many regards there is one area of the DVD viewing experience that I could live without.
Forced watching of previews.
This particular DVD forced us to watch previews for not one, not two, but three movies. Repeated attempts to break out of the previews using the “menu” button only generated the “This function prohibited” message. Turning the DVD player off, and restarting the disk, thinking there may have been a tiny window of opportunity to access the menu before the previews started allowed us to watch the same damn previews all over again.
Even if “Bruce Almighty” was on my list of movies to purchase, in all likelihood I would not buy a DVD copy of it, since any time I wanted to watch it I’d be forced to sit through several minutes of trailers for movies long since forgotten.
Come on Hollywood, let us watch the intellectual property we’ve PURCHASED the we choose to and not according to some pea-brained marketing putz’s idea of how to make more money. (The irony here is that in the movie, you can’t mess with free will, whereas in reality you pays your money and lose your freedom.)
I’ve switched the navigation elements for my site from a vertical list, positioned on the right side of the page to a horizontal navigation bar. I used the List-a-matic web site to find a look and feel I liked, finally settling on Seth’s horizontal list.
I also added a “fieldset” tag around each blog entry, which gives me access to the “legend” tag for the entry titles. I know that I should really use CSS for the all-around border, and still more CSS for the title box, with a negative top margin to position it, but for today fieldset and legend will work.
I have looked it the new pages with all the browsers I have access to at home (Safari 1.0, Mozilla Firebird, Camino 0.7, and Microsoft IE 5.2), and via all the user agents Safari can spoof (Mozilla 1.1, Netscape 7, 6.2.2, 4.7.9, Windows IE 6.0, and Knoqueror 3). Except for some very slight rendering differences every thing looks good and more importantly works.
If you have any problems please contact me via the contact link on my colophon page.
I just read an interesting posting which asked the question, “Do you tell your family about your blog?”
The comment I posted on Makiko’s site went like this:
I guess I would be okay with them reading it since I would not expect feedback or to get my needs met through them. For all I know they are reading it now and just not saying anything to me.
Beyond immediate family and friends, I am curious to know who reads my site. I can see by referer logs, and site counters how many of you there are, and where some of you came from. But I really have no interaction with the people reading my thoughts. It makes this form of communication unique.
Click the comments link below and let me know who you are, and whether or not you have a weblog.
28.571428571428573% of me is a huge nerd! How about you?
As seen on The Daily Report, Fontifier is a free (for now) service that converts a scanned GIF of your handwriting into a True Type font.
Once you are at the Fontifier page, click on the numbered steps and follow the directions to create your own font. In my initial attempt I didn’t scale the template to the full size of the page, and I didn’t make the letters as large as possible. The result, while still very cool, isn’t readable below about 14 points. Next time I’ll know better. Be warned that the service is getting used a lot; I had to reload each step several times to finally get through the process.
It would be more useful if the template allowed you to write each of the 102 characters on the keyboard, but for typical writing this font works very well.
This week marks the one year anniversary of our switch from Windows to Macintosh. Michele and I ventured into the Apple store in St. Louis on January 11, 2003 and haven’t looked back ever since.
She is very satisfied with her 17" iMac and I love my 15" Titanium PowerBook. Within days of getting the new machines we had completed the switch from Windows ME and XP professional respectively. Only twice in the last twelve months have I even turned on my old Pentium machine. I’m thinking seriously about turning it into a Linux based server.
Through out this year I have continually found new depths to Mac OS X, and new application with which to plumb those depths. Being a software developer I was keenly interested in setting up a Java/Apache/Tomcat/Struts environment that allows me to build and deploy web applications with ease.
I have added immensely to my knowledge of Unix through the Free-BSD underpinnings of OS X. I now connect to the Internet through secure shells with port forwarding via tunnels.
And I am discovering the joy of being creative with software rather than solely being creative making software. Using iPhoto to create picture books of family activities throughout the year as Christmas gifts was easy and very rewarding. I want to spend more time with the whole iLife suite of applications, making movie slide shows of our photos, and transferring “I Love Lucy” VHS tapes to DVD.
Today’s MacWorld Expo Keynote address couldn’t have come at a better time for me. Seeing first hand demonstrations of the integration and power iPhoto, iDVD, iMovie, and iTunes have inspires me to try more things with my ideas. And even though I don’t play a musical instrument, I am eager to play around with Garage Band just to see what I can accomplish on my own.
I’ve been using computers for over 20 years; they are a huge part of my daily life. How sweet it is to be able to use products, hardware and software, that still excite me and still make me want to explore my creative boundaries.
Apple isn’t just making the best computer hardware and software in the world today. They are creating tools the free the imagination and give wings to the ideas, hopes, and inventions of everyday people.
Wow.
My December spam totals are in, 7,889 for the month. This brings my 2003 total to 79,287.
For the year I averaged 217.2247 spams a day. And 6607.25 per month. Basically I get one piece of spam every 6 minutes.
I’m afraid that my accounting of good e-mail wasn’t as accurate as I wanted. My best estimate is that I got about 1,437 good e-mails. (This includes 500 odd mail list entries in the past month alone.)
79,287 / 1,437 equals 55.17537:1 bad:good ratio.
Plans to acquire Panther (Mac OS X 10.3.x) have been delayed, but upon that occasion I will be installing SpamSieve to better manage this glut of trash.