Not quite completed, then completed
* Turns out the thing I thought I completed yesterday wasn't! I debugged the problem to-day and fixed it. Embarassing, but I learned something from it...a better way to approach development.
* I did another task which turned out to be as easy as I had hoped, but had earlier been very conservative about how much time it would take. As Scotty said to Geordi, always multiply your repair estimates by four and then when you get it done as you had hoped people think you are a miracle worker. Well, maybe. But it is always good to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. That is one of my mantras.
* Our new organization is pushing for 100% ergonomic health, so has made mandatory the use of this thing called Wellnomics to monitor our time using the computer, our typing speed, use of mouse...and requires us to take micro-breaks of like 10 seconds and macro-breaks of 5 minutes. Because this is required I have no option but to just stop working on the computer whenever asked. So I am doing something personally productive: reading biographies.
* Besides learning about the people whose life stories are detailed in the books, I am also learning about how to pull together readable and entertaining journeys into the past. The one thing I think I have to get over is my insistence as a journalist to only state facts. The facts should be there, but you also have to fill in the gaps with reasonable inferences about people's thoughts, behaviors and motivations.
* Take the book I am reading now: Houdini: The Untold Story by Milsbourne Christopher. On page 13: [Samuel] "went to New York with the conviction that its larger Jewish population could support another small religious school." Most likely Christopher was working with the following facts:
-- Samuel no longer lived in Wisconsin but had an address in New York City at the time of the narrative.
-- New York City had a larger Jewish population than their town in Wisconsin.
-- Samuel started a small religious school later.
Christopher makes these three facts live by interpreting Samuel's motivation to moving there. It is, of course, possible that Samuel went to New York because he liked the food there...or any number of other reasons. Yet, he did go there and he did start a small religious school. So Christopher imbues Samuel with "conviction". It is a reasonable interpretation. He doesn't say "Samuel was at this address, then at this address and later he started a religious school."
* On the drive over to Hillsboro, (a little later than normal but I slept a little longer and frankly worked overtime earlier this week...so justified), I thought about a song from Godspell. This reminded me of the following:
* Around 1972 I enrolled in a cassette club, I think the RCA Record Club. Don't know how I could do this, but I must have used my allowance. My mom had been with the RCA Record Club as we could tell from the LPs in our family's meager collection which included Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Beethoven's 9 Symphonies as recorded by Arturo Toscanini, an album called "Meet the Artists" and probably some others. Cassettes made more sense at the time for me because I had my own monophonic cassette recorder. I just got a Panasonic recorder for Christmas even though we had this older recorder which seemed perfectly good. The Panasonic came with a sample cassette which had a version of La Bamba (a core inspiration for my love of exotic music). Meanwhile, I was inspired by the music selection of Keith Campbell, our choir director/teacher at McLoughlin Junior High School in Medford, Oregon. We sang music from Godspell and even P.D.Q Bach (My Bonnie Lass She Doth Smelleth). Also I still was impressed by 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film our family saw at the Presidio movie theatre when the film was released in 1969. Also we actually tried to perform one of Gyorgy Legeti's compositions in our choir class. Mr. Campbell liked to bring us a variety of music to try...the ones which he thought would go over in performance and ones which we seemed to like and easily master...those are the ones we would continue to work on. Yet, those experimental ones captured my imagination. So, I ordered my initial cassettes: the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wurst of PDQ Bach (2 cassettes) and the soundtrack to Godspell. I played these over and over so, even more than 40 years later I can remember much of the lyrics and melodies to Godspell. I think I took in the required number of cassettes and cancelled the club. I knew then that I could not keep buying. I would join these clubs from time to time throughout my life to get the low-priced items and then cancel. I took the same tact with encyclopeadias: I had a number of first volumes from many of these sets including Above and Beyond (an encyclopeadia of astronautics) and the Time-Life series about the history of the United States. This kind of offer-driven purchase was no doubt inspired by my mom's tendency to cash in on various offers, sometimes for both the thrill of it, but also to get the item. I remember coming with Mom and Dad as they went to a shopping mall with this little office. The room had curtains all around. I think maybe the sales guy took our parents to another room. Eventually they came out with Mom hanging onto her new alumnium Teflon-coated frying pan and the salesman still trying to get them to sign on for a time-share! I would bet the salesman tried to sweet talk my mom, but he obviously didn't know she was a hard-sell. I remember the time my mom wanted to get a new car and went to one car lot. The sales people took the keys to our car, supposedly to check out the car for trade-in potential. When my mom decided she didn't like the deal they were pitching she asked for the keys. The sales people wouldn't get them, still trying to convince her. Then my mom got angry. "If you don't give me the keys to my car right now, I am going to call the police." No body messes with my mom and gets away with it.
* I did another task which turned out to be as easy as I had hoped, but had earlier been very conservative about how much time it would take. As Scotty said to Geordi, always multiply your repair estimates by four and then when you get it done as you had hoped people think you are a miracle worker. Well, maybe. But it is always good to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. That is one of my mantras.
* Our new organization is pushing for 100% ergonomic health, so has made mandatory the use of this thing called Wellnomics to monitor our time using the computer, our typing speed, use of mouse...and requires us to take micro-breaks of like 10 seconds and macro-breaks of 5 minutes. Because this is required I have no option but to just stop working on the computer whenever asked. So I am doing something personally productive: reading biographies.
* Besides learning about the people whose life stories are detailed in the books, I am also learning about how to pull together readable and entertaining journeys into the past. The one thing I think I have to get over is my insistence as a journalist to only state facts. The facts should be there, but you also have to fill in the gaps with reasonable inferences about people's thoughts, behaviors and motivations.
* Take the book I am reading now: Houdini: The Untold Story by Milsbourne Christopher. On page 13: [Samuel] "went to New York with the conviction that its larger Jewish population could support another small religious school." Most likely Christopher was working with the following facts:
-- Samuel no longer lived in Wisconsin but had an address in New York City at the time of the narrative.
-- New York City had a larger Jewish population than their town in Wisconsin.
-- Samuel started a small religious school later.
Christopher makes these three facts live by interpreting Samuel's motivation to moving there. It is, of course, possible that Samuel went to New York because he liked the food there...or any number of other reasons. Yet, he did go there and he did start a small religious school. So Christopher imbues Samuel with "conviction". It is a reasonable interpretation. He doesn't say "Samuel was at this address, then at this address and later he started a religious school."
* On the drive over to Hillsboro, (a little later than normal but I slept a little longer and frankly worked overtime earlier this week...so justified), I thought about a song from Godspell. This reminded me of the following:
* Around 1972 I enrolled in a cassette club, I think the RCA Record Club. Don't know how I could do this, but I must have used my allowance. My mom had been with the RCA Record Club as we could tell from the LPs in our family's meager collection which included Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Beethoven's 9 Symphonies as recorded by Arturo Toscanini, an album called "Meet the Artists" and probably some others. Cassettes made more sense at the time for me because I had my own monophonic cassette recorder. I just got a Panasonic recorder for Christmas even though we had this older recorder which seemed perfectly good. The Panasonic came with a sample cassette which had a version of La Bamba (a core inspiration for my love of exotic music). Meanwhile, I was inspired by the music selection of Keith Campbell, our choir director/teacher at McLoughlin Junior High School in Medford, Oregon. We sang music from Godspell and even P.D.Q Bach (My Bonnie Lass She Doth Smelleth). Also I still was impressed by 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film our family saw at the Presidio movie theatre when the film was released in 1969. Also we actually tried to perform one of Gyorgy Legeti's compositions in our choir class. Mr. Campbell liked to bring us a variety of music to try...the ones which he thought would go over in performance and ones which we seemed to like and easily master...those are the ones we would continue to work on. Yet, those experimental ones captured my imagination. So, I ordered my initial cassettes: the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Wurst of PDQ Bach (2 cassettes) and the soundtrack to Godspell. I played these over and over so, even more than 40 years later I can remember much of the lyrics and melodies to Godspell. I think I took in the required number of cassettes and cancelled the club. I knew then that I could not keep buying. I would join these clubs from time to time throughout my life to get the low-priced items and then cancel. I took the same tact with encyclopeadias: I had a number of first volumes from many of these sets including Above and Beyond (an encyclopeadia of astronautics) and the Time-Life series about the history of the United States. This kind of offer-driven purchase was no doubt inspired by my mom's tendency to cash in on various offers, sometimes for both the thrill of it, but also to get the item. I remember coming with Mom and Dad as they went to a shopping mall with this little office. The room had curtains all around. I think maybe the sales guy took our parents to another room. Eventually they came out with Mom hanging onto her new alumnium Teflon-coated frying pan and the salesman still trying to get them to sign on for a time-share! I would bet the salesman tried to sweet talk my mom, but he obviously didn't know she was a hard-sell. I remember the time my mom wanted to get a new car and went to one car lot. The sales people took the keys to our car, supposedly to check out the car for trade-in potential. When my mom decided she didn't like the deal they were pitching she asked for the keys. The sales people wouldn't get them, still trying to convince her. Then my mom got angry. "If you don't give me the keys to my car right now, I am going to call the police." No body messes with my mom and gets away with it.