Indiana Jones and the...

I rely on my brother to filter only the most important Ain't It Cool News. Thank you Steve. And thank you to all the creative folks out there suggesting titles (readers talkback) for Harrison Ford's swan song as Indiana Jones.

Remote Prosperites

Last month, I was fortunate enough to spend some time with Cyd in London (Camden Town). It was a short but incredible trip; made more comfortable by the fact that I flew business class both ways. It's disgusting how they treat you in business class. I highly recommend it.

Day 1 involved:
1. Making it onto the correct tube train and realizing I'm sitting in the absolute middle of the train, with my luggage, 8am on a week day (packed), I'll need to navigate off the train soon with my luggage, and I'm American. DOH!

2. Trying to decipher Cyd's directions out of the Underground station. "Go straight out of the station" can be interpreted in many ways when you're faced with a 6 point intersection, cars driving on the other side of the road, and no street signs (street signs are on the buildings - I didn't know that until day 2). In fact, it took 3 tries to head in the right direction. Have a look for yourself... which way would you have gone?!

3. Trying not to succumb to spontaneous REM sleep. In the famous words of Evan Dando, "I know what it feels like to be MAARK today." (paraphrased)

My prescription for shaking off GMT-0700 was spending some quality time with myself in the crisp air of Regents Park.

And then a few more hours exploring the catacombs of Camden Market. I think I probably heard at least 20 different languages while wandering through.

4. And later after a short nap, wandering to a tiny little back-alley with a couple boutique stores, drinking hot sangria, and helping Cyd find a bobble (Christmas tree ornament).

Day 1 conclusion: Absolutely amazing.

Day 2 involved:
1. Waking up at 6am. That's the time my son usually wanders into our bedroom every morning. This strikes me as completely bizarre as it's 6am London time.

2. Knocking out the things I absolutely had to see: Sir Isaac Newton's sarcophagus in Westminster Abbey and John Harrison's clocks that won the Longitude prize. Along the way, I got to see the rest of London via the Thames and Greenwich. Very satisfying.


















3. Listening to some very bad karaoke in a local pub.

4. Loading up the jukebox at the Camden Castle, birthplace of Blur, and partaking in an obligatory G.W. discussion with a young Londoner currently residing in Barcelona.

Day 2 conclusion: Absolutely amazing.

Day 3 involved:
1. Waking up at 6am again.

2. Wandering to and then through the Tate Modern gallery. Rodin, Picasso, great views of Saint Paul's, etc.








3. Wandering through Picadilly Circus and the theater district to find some amazing Indian food.

4. Eating amazing Indian food.

3. Spending some quality time at a local pub with Cyd's international mates over a few bottles of wine.






Day 3 conclusion: Absolutely amazing.


So Cyd asked what the best part of the trip was. The best part of the trip was the conversation with Cyd about life and actually spending time with Cyd's mates. It was just being there.


By the way, I just saw King Kong the other night and the commercial they played before the movie had Kate Winslet walking here.

Hey Cyd, take a close look at the Camden Lock... you'll see some of Banksy's work (hanging painters). My brother picked up on it in this photo that I took.


Cheers!

Create

Instead of coming up with a list of fleeting New Year's resolutions, I choose an action verb that I intend to incorporate into as many aspects of my life as possible during the new year.

For 2006, I choose "create."

Create abundance.
Create time.
Create love.
Create health.
Create opportunity.
Create prosperity.
Create something unique.

Here's to a happy, healthy, prosperous new year! Cheers.

Context Lost

The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.
-- Frank Zappa

Context is lost with technological advancement.

Back in September, Sunday finally succeeded in getting rid of Cyd. Smashingly brilliant! One of the best parts of the evening was when Sunday broke out her 10 year old Polaroid camera. When I first met Sunday and the topic of her camera came up she said, "I love it. Instant gratification." Today, not only is the gratification still instant, it's just downright freaky.

Ironically, every day we move into the digital age we lose context. Or, life.

My wife and I just purchased a 5 megapixel camera that replaces our 2 megapixel camera. We take thousands of pictures and keep a fraction of them. We regularly hand the camera over to our three year old son to take as many pictures as he can (yes folks, I predict in about 17 years an unprecedented revolution of photographers who've been taking photographs nearly their whole lives). We store our pictures with an online service and view them in perfectly formatted HTML tables or play them in high definition slide shows. We change them at will from perfect color, to black and white, to sepia, and back to color again.

Context.

I can remember wondering why everyone was so unhappy or serious in all of the childhood pictures of my great grandmother, born in 1891. Later someone explained to me that they all had to sit very still for a period of time so that the exposure would take. That's a story behind the story in every one of those photographs. How uncomfortable must they have been? What kind of day must they have had preparing for the photograph? What must have been going through a mother's mind anticipating the proposition of getting her child to sit still..?!

But even in my lifetime, context has been lost. I possess two photo albums filled with roughly 50 of my baby pictures. The photo paper is thick and the ink is tinged a subtle greenish-brown. Cameras, film, and film processing were not cheap for a new family. The photos have faded with time.

The physical nature is gone, and with it, the experience it embodied. The same can be said for programmers who turned in punch cards once a week to get processed. I cannot imagine the cost of a single compilation error in that system!

But maybe there is a continuity. Maybe one day my son will lament the day when Microsoft endorsed a technology incompatible with JPEG and his parents failed to convert the thousands of JPEG's they had of him. Maybe my daughter will lament the tens of thousands of digital files that we've entrusted to her but organized in a naive, 2004-like manner that is so counterintuitive to the technologies she uses. Maybe static photographs will be our lost context.

(In any case, Sunday, thanks for porting those photos to the 21st century!)

Relative Champs

Two last place teams that split apart, formed one team, then won the league...

Top row, left to right:
Cam Stewart, Goon. Goal Scorer. Father.
Mike Smith, Software Engineer, Sun Microsystems
Rob Ford, Architect, Level 3 Communications
Dave Skema, ex-Kent State club team member
Josh Sims, ex-Steamboat Springs club team member
Rick Pease, ex-Connecticut area goaltender
Patrick Gates, DBA, Level 3 Communications
Jason Snider, 18 years old with energy to burn

Bottom row, left to right:
me (Joe), ex-goaltender with a taste for scoring goals
Claire Solohub, Calgary, Alberta native
Jamie Slorf, Goaltender. Father. (holding real gold-colored metal trophy)
Sloane Stricker, DBA, Level 3 Communications
Steve Sangalis, ex-U. of Indiana club team member
Molly Meehan, Marketing, Avalanche/Nuggets/Rapids

Not pictured:
Brian Snider, Edmonton, Alberta native
Brian Yarosh, the enigma
Free pitcher of Molson

How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Complex Material More Easily

This is an excellent presentation by Dr. Michael A. Covington of the Artificial Intelligence Center at The University of Georgia. He makes such interesting points and I think this has so much relevance to some goals I have for this blog and to engineering in general.

Some thoughts...

I've found that it's very hard to translate personal technical knowledge into elegant, interesting writing that engages a reader. I've also found that you really need to know what you're talking about inside and out and exactly what the goal of your writing will be. This really dawned on me when I wanted to write about Apache Axis handling web service calls from a .NET client. I realized that I didn't know how we had deployed Axis, or really how it actually worked, even though I was writing to it every day for months. I think this is common, especially in large companies. One of the ironies of engineering is that well-engineered products shelter developers from having to know their internals, but we generally end up digging in and learning them anyway. To some extent, this is one reason why I've posted very little of what I want to say with my technical voice.

In my book, the King of translating deep technical knowledge into interesting and engaging writing is Rod Johnson. By far.

"You don't understand anything until you learn it more than one way." --Marvin Minsky

Dr. Covington makes this same general point in one of his "Clear Understanding" slides (#92). This is something I've personally witnessed through myself working with different languages and life cycles of projects and in engineering in general. For instance, it's truly remarkable to have an epiphany about the elegance of a design pattern (or hideousness of an anti-pattern), or come back around on a database design decision for a project that supports some totally unforeseen requirement from some unrelated project. Most recently, Threading has been the foremost area of personal learning for me along these lines - probably because, in order to truly know threading, you must be bit in the ass by it hard a few times.

"Better to keep your mouth shut and let people assume you're stupid than open it and remove all doubt." --anonymous

I've read various buzz about managing projects through blogs or wiki's. Blogger's team support is intriguing and I've checked out cool services like Backpack. I've realized that the stumbling block isn't the tools support, it's motivating other engineers to actually write (sentences). I think this is one subtle underlying reason why the XP tenet of self-documenting code is one of the easier XP practices to actually adopt.

"The more I see, the less I know..." --Matt Johnson, The The

So in the end, Dr. Covington is really giving a nod to all the technologists out in the blogosphere. For me personally, his presentation is an affirmation of my methods to figure out what I know and continue my journey of learning.

NHL celebrates opening night with historic 15-game slate

The National Hockey League opens its 2005-06 regular season Wednesday with 15 games, 30 clubs in action, dozens of storylines and 600 players in uniform in front of an expected quarter-million fans at sold-out arenas, marking the busiest playing date in the League's 88-year history. NHL teams had combined to play as many as 14 games on nine occasions, the most recent of which was Nov. 1, 2003.

It also marks the first time that all NHL clubs are in action on the schedule's opening night since 1928-29, when 10 clubs were featured. The last time all clubs in a major pro sports league played on the opening date of the schedule was in 1969, when the National Football League kicked off with all 16 NFL clubs and 10 AFL clubs participating.

Here are some fearless predictions for the Avalanche by people "in the know":

• John Buccigross, ESPN: 9th in the Western Conference
• Jim Kelley for ESPN: 9th in the Western Conference
• Adrian Dater, The Denver Post: 7th in the Western Conference
• Scott Wraight, SI.com: 13th overall in initial power rankings
• Linesmaker.com: 20-1 odds to win the Stanley Cup
• Canadian Press: Joel Quenneville as 1st coach fired, 3 teams headed downward
  

From what I can tell, these guys are only focusing on the negatives of losing Foote and Forsberg (who, by the way, has been injured for the majority of the last three seasons with the Avalanche, and last season with MoDo).

Here's why I disagree and think the Avalanche will finish no worse than 5th in the Western Conference:

1. Their head coach has a Stanley Cup ring.
2. Their goaltender's name is on the Stanley Cup.
3. Rob Blake, Norris Trophy winner, All-Star.
4. Joe Sakic, Hart Trophy and Conn Smythe Trophy winner, All-Star.
5. Milan Hejduk, Maurice Richard Trophy winner, All-Star.
6. Alex Tanguay, career high 79 points last season, #1 star with 2 goals in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals against the second best goalie of all time.
7. New addition Andrew Brunette, 49 points last season under Lemaire's defense-first system.
8. New addition Pierre Turgeon reunited with coach Quenneville under whom he scored 66 points in 55 games of clutch-and-grab hockey, last season notched his 16th consecutive season of 40+ points.
9. Leadership: one current, and three previous NHL captains: Joe Sakic, Rob Blake, Pierre Turgeon, and Steve Konowalchuk - captain of the Capitals when they went to the Stanley Cup Finals.
10. Karlis Skrastins, second only to Blake last season in Time-on-Ice minutes - ahead of Foote(3) and Sakic(4).
11. John Michael-Liles, Team USA defenseman.
12. No more team/press soap opera that is, "No offense to you guys BUT is Peter ready to play again? Will he be back? Will he? Will he? Please say he's ready..!"

Stay tuned hockey fans! It will be interesting!