A lack of fade

As part of the declutter effort we went through a lot of photos to see what was worth holding on to. One of the things to go was my high school class photo, as it was a panoramic shot rolled into a cardboard tube. You could not flatten it out and it would never fit into an album or of the shelf frame. Plus, a classmate on facebook has already taken the time to scan it in, so there’s not really a need to keep it.

But that’s not what this post is about. The post is about a photo I found of myself, that my mom sent to me to show how much I looked like my son when I was his age. We both have the same expression, the same eyes, though apparently I have more of a sweet tooth as I was enjoying my cake at 1 year than Alex did. Alex prefers to crush the cake rather than eat it.

But that’s also not what this post is about. My apologies for two tangents in a row. It’s hard to not get nostalgic about old pictures. And that is what this post is about.

I wonder if there’s  a chart guesstimating the number of pictures taken of the course of the last 100 years. Digital has really only been on the scene for about 10-15 years, and before that it was film. Unless those pictures have been scanned in, most of those photos will slowly fade over time. The colors will distort, become blurry, especially if exposed to direct sunlight. Pictures get worn out, albums get lost or thrown away. I wouldn’t be surprised if more than a few pictures have gotten buried in the backyard.

There are few pictures of me when I was young. Fewer still of my folks. Fewer still of their folks, and likely none of their folks. But my wife and I have taken a lot of pictures of our son. It’s easy because we have a digital camera and there’s no real expense in snapping a photo like there was with film. A lot of these photos are uploaded to web albums, storing them in the cloud, plus local backups of everything should a hard drive ever fail. This means that my son will have a hyper detailed photo record of his youth. But would he, or anyone for that matter, really want that?

A lot of people using facebook started their accounts in middle and high school. In 10 years, when they’ve graduated from college and have entered the working force, will they want a link to that party they went to when they were 14 and in that awkward phase? How about a record of all the time spent playing Farmville instead of doing homework?  Some employers now look you up on facebook to get a sense of who you are outside of an interview setting. How professional are you really?

I don’t see social networking going away. I believe it will ultimately be necessary to establish and maintain an online identity. Kind of like how we take steps to ensure a good credit rating. It’s not mandatory, but your options will be much more restricted without it. But the cloud and the digital age means that everything you do is more likely to be recorded and preserved for you and potentially others to see. Is that wasteful? Does the threat of persistence limit our freedom of expression knowing that now, we really do have a permanent record? Our memories may fade, but now our photos will not.

War on paper–Victory!

That’s right, I’m calling it done! It was a hard battle. My paper shredder will never be the same, and it will be some time before we successfully clean up all of the little bits of shredded paper that the cats have migrated through the house, but aside from that it’s all gone.

I was set to call it about two weeks ago except that we found a couple of boxes lingering in the attic. One of them we kept, as it was full of my writings and I’m not about to give those up. The other box had finances from 98-2003 and a bunch of sentimental and academic records. Turns out I had my report card from kindergarten. Apparently I did quite well. What’s more, you’re going to have to take my word on that now as the proof has gone out with the recycling. All of the finance stuff was over 7 years old so I was able to shred all of that. In all, it took all of three hours to empty that box, and most of that was waiting to keep the shredder from overheating.

The filing cabinet is gone, and the table that held all of the loose papers has been taken down. Suddenly my office is huge! I’ve recovered all of the manuals that Chrome (grumble) corrupted. And it’s all backed up.

The war on clutter is not over, but we’ve made great strides. Nothing motivates de-cluttering like prepping a house for sale. We’ve begun packing things up and have rented out a small storage space. Part of that packing up means going through everything and seeing what we can get rid of. Thank goodness there’s no cap on freecycle and craigslist postings.  But that fight will not end even after we move. As jobs change, as kids grow, as things break and gift giving times pass, clutter will try to accumulate. The good fight must go on, and so shall we.

War on clutter - Grumble

When downloading masses of PDF's and throwing out the manuals they're meant to replace, first check to be sure your browser has not corrupted the PDF.

All of the PDF's.

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=126a994c86c546eb&hl=en

Chrome is on my 'do not like' list.

Of 73 Manuals downloaded, 68 must now be found and downloaded again only this time without the original hard copy to know if what I'm getting is right. All of the ones I used Chrome to save the PDF.

Grumble.

My favorite story from Christmas

Alex had a good year this Christmas. He got quite a haul. Enough that Julie and I have taken several toys and put them in closet to take out when he starts to get bored with the toys he currently has.
But one toy stands out:  an RC train. It has a button that makes the train go forward, and a button that makes it spin in a circle (and a couple that make noise, but that’s just a footnote). We pulled it out of the packaging and tried to get Alex to play with it. Alex, true to form of a one year old, was preoccupied with the very first toy he’d gotten, a little school bus with a flywheel so it keeps going for a long time, and had little interest in any of the other toys around him.
After some cajoling, I managed to sit him down in my lap and get him to start playing with the remote. Alex loves buttons, and the remote had several for him to press. The train was right in front of us.
After several button presses, Alex looked up from the remote and watched the train. Everyone’s attention was solely on him at this point. You could see the wheels turning in his mind. Sure enough, he realized he was controlling the train. The smile and scream of delight that followed made the day for all of us.

Does Instant Gratification make us less efficient?

It starts with corndogs. Yes, I still eat corndogs. And I like them!

Ahem, it starts with corndogs. There are two ways to prepare them. One is to put them in the microwave, zap for 45 seconds, roll them to their other side, and zap for another 45 seconds. The other is to preheat your oven to 350 degrees and then let them sit in there for 18 minutes.

I always microwave them, because by the time I’m hungry f0r a corndog, I sure don’t want to wait 20 minutes!

But a few weeks ago I did. It was largely an experiment to see if they tasted any better cooked in the oven vs. the microwave (they didn’t, but I swear that instant oatmeal mixed with water that’s been boiled is better than oatmeal mixed with cold water and zapped in the microwave), but in so doing I noticed something. 20 minutes is a solid block of time to accomplish something. So I took care of the laundry. I spent about as much time placing the corndogs in the oven as I would the microwave, but I didn’t wait idly by the microwave for a solid two minutes accomplishing nothing. I could have done the laundry after lunch, but in all it would have taken two minutes longer than necessary.

When is instant gratification really instant? High speed internet still requires time for a given page to load. Every time you do a google search, as fast as the search engine may be, you still click on the page and wait for it to load. How much time do you spend in a given day waiting idly for pages to load into your browser?

In the 90’s no one enjoyed television commercials, but we sat through them because the commercial breaks were short, and it was easier to wait idly and endure them because the time slot was too small to get anything productive done.

By slicing our time into finer and finer segments we stop paying attention. This is similar to micropayments for downloaded content in videogames. What’s $.99 for a cool feature that will make the game I paid $49.99 a little more enjoyable? But, just like the micropayments, that time is still being spent somehow. Imagine if you could take all of those little moments spent waiting over the course of a day and add them all together? How much time would that give you? 10 minutes? An hour? 3 hours? What could you do with that time if you had it all mushed together instead of sliced into a thousand page loads and seconds spent standing next to the microwave?

Instant gratification is never really instant. And without meaning to, we pay for a perceived convenience in lost productivity. How many days of your life have to spent staring at the spinning wheel on a youtube video as it loads the buffer before starting to play?

This is not to say that high speed internet is the enemy. Fast access to a swath of knowledge has the potential to make us more efficient. I’m mostly just trying to become more aware of what leeches away my free time without my knowing it. 10 minutes. That’s probably the minimum time block I need to get a small but productive project done. I think I can free up at least that from my current time wasters. The fastest solution may not be the best, if it results in a less productive use of your own time.

And now I’m hungry for corndogs again. Nuts.

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.