War on clutter - Casualties

All wars have casualties. With a few tears I bid a fond farewell to my pencil collection. Back in the day, whenever we'd take a trip I'd buy a pencil from the gift shop (it was a heck of a lot cheaper than a t-shirt). I'd also save pencils with cool designs, fun toppers, and whatnot, but for many years now it has simply gathered dust on a shelf.
And so, I donate them now to a charity that sends school supplies to Africa. May they find as much utility in the collection as I found joy.

Database interfaces

As part of cleaning up I stumbled across this draft that I apparently never published back in 2007. I'm a little more database savvy now, but I think the crux of the article still holds. Reprinted in it's entire, incomplete state due to my laziness to properly edit. 

Database interfaces continue to prove an enigma to me. I’ve tried to work with Access, MySql, along with a couple others whose names I don’t remember or have since blocked out of my mind. They’re wretched to setup, harder still to change, and seem to specialize in one of two categories:

Those that are easy to put information in.

Those that are easy to get information out.

Wikipedia is a great example of a database that’s easy to get information in. Bugzilla is another one. People who need to get information into a system love these types of systems. You freehand in information and do not require any particular type of structure. They’re very approachable, and great when you wish to amass information from a variety of sources very quickly.

But have you ever tried to compare two articles?

Let’s say you want to know the name of Franklin D Roosevelt’s dog. In wikipedia, you can probably find such a thing, but you can’t search for it directly. You have to search for Roosevelt, and then cull through the various pages that reference him to see if they mention his dog. You can add a string modifier to look for dog, which will reduce the time, but you still have to scan through the article to see if the information is relevant. Inconvenient, but not a show stopper.

But what if you wanted to compare articles referencing Roosevelt’s dog? What if you wanted to find out the context of someone’s life that an author would reference a famous man’s dog? There is no culling of data to gleam some greater insight. There is only an upchuck of that information that has already been deposited.

Now, on the opposite end of the spectrum, more business oriented databases like Access exist. My former employer used Access to keep track of clients, inventory, and various product models, as well as employee records. These systems require a lot of forethought. One must first consider Exactly what types of information you’re going to need to enter. For a product that you sell, you could include information like:

Sale price, sources of goods, prices your vendors charge, prices you sell for, etc. This is all well and good. Often someone who is entering information into the database needs a certain level of training so that they don’t enter numbers into a cell that requires text. However, you can design custom search strings to compare similar pieces of information. If you want to compare the prices of your different products, or look at what goods are the most expensive and the most cheap, you can do this fairly quickly and effortlessly.

But, if a year into the business you decide it’s time to start considering multiple vendors for a particular good you need, something you hadn’t thought of originally, your database needs a reworking to support all that. Cells have to be added, new information has to be entered. New queries have to be created, and some old ones have to be changed as they may not work anymore.

War on Clutter, part 3

Progress is never as swift as one may like, but progress is still progress. Our reclining chair is now gone, and just in the nick of time, as it gave us a place to setup our Christmas tree. That act alone was enough to galvanize me back into attacking the stacks of paper that had begun to gather dust next to my desk.

Manuals continue to fall prey to the recycle bin as I find their digital counterparts online. I’ve also become more lax about what I’m willing to throw out, and have to laugh at myself for holding on to some things so fervently before. Why do I need assembly instructions for the entertainment center? I’m not going to put it together again.

Going paperless has also had a positive impact on the amount of mail we receive. It’s mostly junk now, and I’ve not figured out how to make Chase Bank stop sending me credit card offers, but the sheer mass of paper flowing into the house has decreased dramatically.

One odd note. It turns out that when you call the yellow pages distributor to opt out of receiving future copies, the try to sell you books. They also ask for your email address to verify that you wish to continue to opt out in the future. Sketchy?

Storytellers

The thing about storytellers is, the telling’s the thing.

Everyone loves a different part of a story. For some people, it is the narrative structure, tracing the arc of presentation to building tension to climax to denoument. For some people, it is the people, their characterizations and mannerisms. For some people, it is the scenery and the setting that makes the story compelling. And apparently, for a lot of people, it’s about sex. I can only guess that’s why most of the free contemporary ebooks on amazon are stories I’ll never read to my son.

But for storytellers. It is the act of telling the story that they find enjoyable. A storyteller can tell the same story to the same person 5 times in a row and enjoy it every single time, unlike the person listening to the story for the 5th time in a row. I think it is important for both parties to realize this.

The telling’s the thing. For the storyteller, it’s more about how the story is told than the story itself. While the listener may hear the exact same story told 5 times in a row, the storyteller is actually tweaking the story each and every time it is told. A little more dramatic cadence for these sentences. Take out the ‘and then’ for that part, it’s extraneous. Pause for half a second longer at this point. They are artists for which the story is a canvas whose paint never dries, forever allowing itself to stretch, squeeze, and twist into new variations. The stories evolve over time. Sometimes the canvas tears, the endings change. It’s not about consistency. It’s not about accuracy, it’s about the telling of the story. The telling’s the thing.