Meaning?
I was just looking through a series of photos of couples. It started with one couple, then showed each of their two sons with their wives, and finally showed the two sons of one of these last couples. Apparently the other pair had no kids. All of the photos showed people in old age. Did the last two brothers never marry? Who knows.
It got me thinking though. The last of those photos looks like it was taken in the early 1900s. The only value in the clothes that they are wearing is that it helps us to estimate the period that they were alive. What did these people think? What was important to them? They lived lives and we know nothing about them.
Should we? At the times that they were alive people knew them, they were important, their opinions mattered. They got angry about things, and wrote to papers, fought people, or argued with their partners about things that seemed important at the time.
Are these same issues important to us now? Probably not. In these peoples day, they were really invested in the problems of their time. They may have been convinced that the issues that they cared about would change the world. But did they? Probably not. We see things in the world that seem really important to us now. Things worth arguing with people about, protesting. But I think that there are very few things that we battle about now that will matter to anyone in a hundred years.
I would love to think that people in the future will look back on me and say “Oh yeah, that was the guy that …”. But probably, the most that I can expect is that maybe someone will come across a photo of me and wonder about what I cared about?
What is important when you’re alive? Each of these people affected their family and their community, but when they were gone they were briefly a memory, and then nothing.
Media (social and otherwise)
We are so connected now that we can know anything. We have the reach to see things happening all over the world. But for us to see it, someone has to publish it.
Traditional media only publishes what they think will make them money. They try to out-do one another with the exotic and the bizarre. They are not interested in anything that is not bizarre and unusual.
We gain our perceptions of what is normal and true from what we see every day. So if the news every night tells us that there is a terrible economic downturn, and it’s going to get worse, of course we start to spend less. So the economy will downturn, and the media will be proved right! And we’ll keep spending less until the media is distracted by something else and forgets about the economy. And then the economy will recover. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the recovery from the global economic downturn in 2009 coincided with the swine flu pandemic. All of a sudden the news you saw every night stopped any mention of the economy, and instead was full of swine flu. People started spending again and all was well!
What we see every day is what we come to accept as normal. And the media is showing us ‘bizarro’ earth. If you watch traditional media day after day, you’d have to come to believe that the worlds population is made up of terrorists, murderers, rapists and politicians. But in reality, by far the majority of the worlds population are good, normal people. By showing us the bizarre, the media is moving our perception of what is normal off centre towards the bizarro zone.
While a lot of people criticise social media, I think that it will be our salvation. It contains the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, but that is life, and it is in balance. In traditional media we see the bizarre. In social media we see reality. People living their lives, and sharing their experiences. We get to see drunken rants, and bigotted comments, but we also get to see peoples favourite recipes, and what they did on the weekend, and how they’re enjoying their lives! It doesn’t have to be bizarre to be seen! This I think is far more valuable to us than another hour of death, destruction and politics delivered by the TV news.
By sharing in peoples lives we get to learn that the majority of people are good, normal people. Don’t let your view of the world be distorted by the media freak-show.
Trust ourselves!
I haven’t posted for so long. I guess I had a bit of a year off last year. I had a few injuries so my training was pretty limited, and the year just flew by without much happening. It’s worked out well anyway, this year I’m so keen to get back into everything. Having a break isn’t all bad.
I was speaking tonight to a coach who is training some Olympic hopefuls. He was talking about the stages athletes go through, from the initial technique gathering, to the point where they are technically good but don’t believe in themselves, and eventually getting to the stage where they have the skills, and are confident enough in themselves that they can just go out and perform at their best.
How many people ever get to that third stage? There must be lots of people who have the technical ability, but never quite develop the confidence.
It’s so easy to believe that you’re not as good as anyone else. In my one and only experience of international competition, I couldn’t believe that I’d been selected for the National team. So I didn’t take it that seriously, and expected to fail. I treated it like a paid holiday.
Stupid me. When I got to the competition I discovered that everyone else was about the same level as us. I finished mid-field. If I’d put any serious effort into training it’s very likely that I could have got a medal. But instead I just let down myself, my team, and our sponsors.
Lesson 1: There is nothing special about your opponents. They struggle with the same things you do. You have the same chance as them. The winner will probably be the one who wants it more!
A few years ago, I decided to enter a power breaking competition at our National Taekwondo competition. I’d never done power breaking before. It involves stacking up some 20mm boards with 10mm spacers between them and seeing how many you can punch through. I searched online and couldn’t find much information about how to do it, so I just went to the hardware shop and bought some wood and gave it a go.
On my very first attempt, knowing nothing about what I was doing, I broke 8 boards. So I thought I’d improve over time, and nominated 12 boards for the competition, which was three weeks later.
At the competition how many did I break? Seven. After three weeks of training, I broke one less than I’d done on my first try. Why was that? Because I was thinking too much. I’d studied and practised technique, so on the day I had all this information swirling around in my head, and ended up mucking it up.
Lesson 2: Trust yourself. The time for thinking is in practice, or at the pub talking over how things could have been better. Once you’re on the mat, don’t think! You know what you’re doing. You’ve done the practice. Don’t think any more. Just get out there and do it!
So hopefully that will be my year. Be confident in what I do, and don’t think too much!
How real are your goals?
I train at a Taekwondo club where many people are pretty driven, and intent on winning at the international competition level. Some are really good and will probably make it, others could try for years and not get there.
What I’ve noticed lately is that middle level competitors getting discouraged, and stopping competing all together, because they see that they may never get to the level they want. Or they change focus from the aspect of Taekwondo that they enjoy (like sparring), to compete in other events because they think that they are more likely to get that International medal. When you start thinking like that, I think that Taekwondo moves from being a hobby to a job. And that is fine if it’s what you want, but you probably already have a job. And doing two full-time, demanding jobs is stressful (though not impossible).
Most people when they start Taekwondo don’t think about the sport side, they are taking it up for fun or because they have an interest in martial arts, or they just want some exercise. But when you see other people going overseas and competing it’s easy to get caught up in the moment. To buy into the pushing and goal setting and training and always trying to get to that next level.
I’m not saying that chasing your goals is bad. Teaching you how to set and achieve goals is one of the things that Martial Arts does really well. But make sure that you understand what your goals really are. Is it what you really want, or are you getting caught up in someone else’s dreams?
So what are my goals? I have competed internationally. I was selected in our National team to compete in Korea one year and it was incredible, I loved every minute of it. It was completely unexpected though, and I really didn’t think that I would be competitive, so I was very unprepared and didn’t take the preparation seriously enough. And what did I find? I actually was competitive. I ended mid field, and saw that with a bit of more focussed training, I really could have been up for a medal.
So is my goal now to train harder and push for that medal? It was for a while. But then training turned into hard work, and I found myself staying later at my ‘real’ job (which I do enjoy) instead of going to training. Training wasn’t fun any more.
My real goal now is to live a life where I exercise regularly, and participate in Taekwondo because I enjoy it. I try not to focus on any particular aspect of Taekwondo, but enjoy it all. And I enter events that I like at competitions, not the ones that I think will win me medals.
If I am ever lucky enough to be selected on another team, I’m sure I’ll love it again. And I will take the preparation a lot more seriously. But I wont be there because I’ve pushed and struggled through years of hard training in search of that medal, but because through doing something that I love I’ve actually managed to get better at it! And this time I’ll know that I can be competitive, and that is a great incentive.
Minefields!
I work in computer security, and that is how this post came about, but it’s not really WHAT it’s about.
I’ve been thinking about the things we do to try to secure computer systems, and realised that what we’re doing is setting up minefields. It’s not a solid, impenetrable barrier to keep people out. Our access lists, file permissions, and selinux policies are more like a set of booby-traps and land-mines that we hope malicious people will bump into, so that they either cripple their attempts, or at least trigger an alert so that we know that they’re there.
But if someone is careful, clever, or lucky enough, they can still get through. And even if our tripwires trigger, if we don’t have our response prepared and ready to go, it wont help.
The only reasonable way to safeguard a system is to lock it in a safe and let no-one near it. And that makes it pretty useless. So all we can really do is to keep deploying our mines and hope they’ll catch someone.
And I think that our lives are sort of the same. No matter how organised and prepared we think we are, there are always things that can happen that we don’t expect and haven’t planned for. There is no 100% guaranteed way to make sure that things will always go the way that we want them to. We can try to be as prepared as we can, but in the end the best that we can do is to expect the unexpected, and be prepared to roll with the punches.
Programming is fun
The read at http://stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks is cool. It says a lot that is true (and it’s an awesome name for a web site), but I think that he’s missing something!
Programming is a creative pursuit. It is used in engineering, but it is itself only engineering in the same way that writing a novel is engineering. When you’re writing a {program,novel}, you have an idea to express. You have an infinite number of ways to express it, and you have many languages to choose from. But in the end you’re trying to create an effect, and you can judge your success on how well you create the effect.
I love programming. Before I discovered it I used to do a lot of logic puzzles and crosswords, because I liked solving puzzles! And programming is an amazing puzzle, because there is no single right answer.
The reason that I think the bridge analogy doesn’t really apply, is that people have been building bridges forever. It’s a pretty well understood field. Other than the substitution of more modern materials the requirements and design for bridges probably don’t change much. Compare that to software design. Bridge requirements change over decades, as trucks get bigger and traffic gets heavier. Software design changes by the minute. You demonstrate a system and when people see it they get an idea for a way to use it that they haven’t thought of before.
I think that if software design ever gets to the point where it can be done by numbers, the types of people who want to do it will change dramatically. At the moment people who like solving puzzles and creating things do well in IT. If it gets to a point where it is so cookie-cutter that it can be done by numbers, or standards and strict methodologies, we’ll have people seriously debating whether to choose accounting or IT as a career path! No offence meant to accountants, but creative accountants tend to get into trouble. As would creative programmers in that sort of environment.
Ironically, I think that ‘Still drinking’s article is a great piece of programming. He obviously enjoyed writing it, and is rightly proud of it and the effects that it’s produced. That’s programming!
The effects of many different people having different, conflicting opinions and standards can be a real problem, but only if what I think affects how you implement something.
I think that what we need to do, is to give people the freedom to create, rejoice in their creativity, and implement things however they like. Let people be as happy with their code as ‘Still drinking’ is with his article! BUT, when it comes to talking to others (code), we need to cleanly define the borders and interfaces.
Testing anything even remotely complicated is impossible, so reduce the size of the chunks that we develop to things that can be cleanly and unambiguously specified and tested.
Muay Thai girl
I was looking at a blog the other day that had a lot of black and white images, and I thought some of them would make cool backgrounds for my phone. They did, but all were a bit dark. So I did a google search for black and white photos and found this one.
I love this photo! I’m sorry now that I didn’t bookmark where I got it from, but something about it really appealed to me. It is now the background image on my phone, and everytime I see it I’m inspired.
I dont really know why. Funny how some images just get you.
I’ve never done any Muay Thai myself, but I do love that Muay Thai is now a modern sport martial art, but has retained a very strong emphasis on the traditions associated with the art. Even non-Thais who practice Muay Thai still mainly go through the traditional pre-fight routine.
I also have a lot of respect for women who fight. I fight myself but with men it’s nothing out of the ordinary. Women have a different approach. Where men slug it out, women have a style and focus on technique that is nice to watch. I’m not saying that they are soft, far from that. They hit hard, but do it with style! I’m sure that the lady in the photo would take around 30 seconds to knock me out.
So I guess it really is no surprise that I love this photo after all!
And I only just noticed the watermark in the bottom corner for vangHER photography. I googled them and they’re at http://vangher.com. Haven’t seen them before but I’m going to have a look now!
Noticing people?
I read something the other day about sexism, and it got me thinking. As you go through life, you notice many things that get your attention. A nice sounding bird, a pretty sunset, a nice looking person, someone saying something really interesting, or funny.
All of these are considered ‘OK’, except for the nice looking person. If you see one of those you should ignore it. This is a bit odd I think. Physical looks and intelligence are both accidents of birth, why is it OK to value one but not the other? Is it ‘intelligenceist’ to value someone for being smart?
The thing is that whatever first brings another person to our attention, that is just a fleeting moment. From that moment forward, we can start to learn more about them, and discover that they have far more to offer than whatever it was that first made us notice them.
So if you’re the ‘noticer’, the important thing is not to get too wrapped up in the first feature you notice. Get to know the person more. And if you’re the ‘noticee’, then try to remember that the other person has just realised that you exist. Don’t assume that whatever brought you to their attention is all they see in you. Give them a chance to get to know you.
And of course there’s the other side. Don’t write people off because they don’t leap into your attention straight away, or don’t notice you straight away. Everyone has so much to offer. Be friendly, supportive, and give people a chance!
Help, my Arduino is dying!
The Arduino/Raspberry Pi combo I’m using for my pizza oven failed completely last weekend, just in time for the biggest event the oven’s had!
We had a party Saturday night, so I lit the oven about lunch time Saturday and cooked a couple of pork bellies, then made pizzas when people arrived for tea. So the oven was fired for 8 hours or so straight. I would have loved to see how the temperature travelled through the walls being fired for that long. But it wasn’t to be.
I am powering the Arduino through a USB connection from the Raspberry Pi, which is I think a mistake. Still, it’s been fine until now. The whole thing is powered by a 12 volt power supply inside, feeding through the spare wires in the ethernet cable, which is fairly long. From the cable it goes through a cheap 12v -> 5v (USB) power converter into the Raspberry Pi, which has a USB connection that powers the Arduino, and lets the Pi pull temperature readings from the Arduinos thermocouple shield. It’s worked fine for over 12 months!
But now if I power the Pi up itself it works fine, but when I plug the Arduino in and initialise the serial the whole thing dies.
I have been wanting to build a decent 12v -> 5v power supply for a while, and power both devices directly from that. Or even better, find a thermocouple interface for the Pi that handles 8 thermocouples so I can get rid of the Arduino altogether.
I guess now that this is happened I finally have the incentive to built that power supply, or two of them, so I can use one in my car as well.
My broken Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pis are great little machines. A PC in a couple of inches of circuit board! They make it so easy to develop applications. What can you do with a computer that would fit in your show? Anything you want.
I have a pizza oven that I built myself. Part of the design involved being able to record temperatures. So I originally installed some thermocouples from eBay, and an arduino with a thermocouple shield. Arduinos are also fairly cool, but are a bit harder to deal with and more limited software wise. And everything is an expansion. So I had to buy an Ethernet shield to get network connectivity.
I wanted to set it up so that my computer inside could connect to the arduino and grab the temperatures. I never really got it to work. I could work it with the Arduino connecting to the internal server, but not theother way around. The arduino just kept locking up.
After a lot of fiddling I got my hands on a raspberry pi. This was more like it. A Linux machine! I know Linux! I still needed the arduino to run the thermocouples, but connected it to the raspberry pi using USB. The USB fed the power and also let me poll the temperature readings through the serial interface. And then a simple web app using Ruby Sinatra lets my internal machine poll the readings as needed. The data goes into a MySQL database and generates pretty graphs.
Anyway, back to the point. My raspberry pi has stopped working. It’s mounted on the back of my pizza over in a plastic box. When I turn the power on, I can ping it for around ten seconds and then it stops. So I’m going to need to pull it out and connect a monitor and see what’s happening.
The point of all this is that while implementing these things is fun, the more you use them for around your home, the more you end up spending your home time doing free IT support!.
The fun is all in the implementation. Once that’s over, supporting it is just a chore!
Do all the things! 
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