Category: ramble

Ch-ch-ch-changes

How has the world changed in the past ten years?

  • Cell phones have become ubiquitous.
  • Everyone is on the internet.
  • Broadcast TV has shifted from analog to digital.
  • High speed access to the internet is available everywhere.
  • Many people think of the library as somewhere to go to use a computer.
  • Wikipedia has become a creditable research resource.
  • There are working prototypes of flying cars (horizontal fan style).
  • We survived the Y2K scare.
  • We survived a major terrorist attack.
  • We survived 8 years of the Bush administration.
  • The DVR has freed people to watch what they want when they want to watch it (without the commercials if they like).
  • Dynamic languages are making a strong comeback.
  • Hybrid gas-electric cars are a fairly large segment of the automobile market.
  • The space shuttle is near end of life, as is the International Space Station.
  • We have a black president.
  • We are experiencing climate change unprecedented in modern times.
  • I am a grandfather.

So much for the short list. I may revisit the question in a couple of days if I think of any important changes that I forgot.

A Modern Prophet Speaks

I read David Gelernter’s The Second Coming — A Manifesto today. I agreed with most of what he said and even when I didn’t agree with a specific prediction he made, I agreed with the motivation behind it. I’ve been saying for a long time that the desktop metaphor was unnecessarily constraining. It is fine if what you are trying to do is mimic the operation of a pre-computer office. The problem is that nobody wants to mimic the operation of a pre-computer office. The computer has changed everybody’s expectations of how an office should run.

I have been telling people that the future of computers would be based on constantly shifting clusters of computers, for example, if you walk into a room and you have a small hand held computer with you, it will form an ad hoc federation with the input and output devices in the room. If there is a display on the wall, your computer will associate with it. If there is a camera in the room, your computer will use it to watch you and look for you to make gestures to tell it what you want it to do. As Gelernter says, the focus will shift from the computer and the programs to what you want to accomplish.

I also agree with the indictment he makes of computer users for putting up with such horrible software without even complaining about it. I think the reason for this is that the average person doesn’t know how bad things are or how good they could be. There is a conspiracy between the people that understand computers to keep the people who don’t in the dark about what might be done with a little imagination.

All in all, the Manifesto is a great read. It inspired me to rethink my attitude toward software development. It helped me imagine the emergence of artificial intelligence just any day now. Go read it! Now! I’ll wait for you.

Daily Contemplation

I started writing every night. I set a time, 10:00pm until 10:30pm, as a minimum time. I was inspired to do this by Gladwell’s observation that it takes 10,000 hours to learn to do something well. I believe in practice. I have recently discovered that an important component of practice is to make sure that you are practicing the correct way of doing something, else you will learn to do it incorrectly. I suppose that matters less when it comes to writing. I have never heard of a right or wrong way to write. Perhaps that is because, it is so difficult to write anything substantial that it is a miracle if you write anything at all.

I have so many projects in progress that it is difficult to keep them all moving. I am doing better than I have in the past though. I think that my nightly writing discipline may help me develop some blogging discipline. I’m an eternal optimist, aren’t I? I have noticed a pattern to my writing though. I seem to spend most of my time writing about writing. That is something that I need to work on changing.

I’m using OpenOffice to write at home on my MacBook. I have given up trying to write using emacs. I’m not sure why but I end up spending too much time thinking about the structure of the document, for example, placement of line breaks, etc., when I use emacs. When I use a conventional word processor, I just take the defaults and type.

A Post From My Blackberry

I hope this works the way I think it should. I have never posted anything from my Blackberry using the WordPress web form interface. It is time consuming to type using the BB keyboard but it does allow me to post at times and in places that were not viable before now. This post is going to be short so that if it doesn’t work, I haven’t lost much.

Quick update: I was able to save a draft of this post but I couldn’t figure out how to publish it without using a “real” browser. Still useful. And maybe I’ll figure out how to publish from the BB with a little more effort.

Musings on Quo Vadis

I’ve been thinking a lot lately. With the current state of my bank account, thinking is a very inexpensive pastime. I’ve reached a point where I know quite a lot about myself, my profession and living in general. What I’m still trying to come to terms with is translating what I know into action. I’ve also had problems reconciling what I know with what I feel. My psychologist tells me that is because the limbic system takes much longer to achieve stability than the frontal cortex does. This means when you’re angry, you stay angry long after you’ve resolved the issues that made you angry in the first place. I suppose there was probably some kind of survival benefit of this at one time but it doesn’t seem to be nearly as useful in the modern world.

I am approaching a time when I can take early retirement from my job and draw a pension large enough to pay most of my bills. I’m too young, IMHO, to consider really retiring, as in quitting work and living the life of Riley. I don’t think I’ll ever really want to retire in that sense. Instead, I am considering what I want to do now that salary is not a major consideration. I have been thinking about what I enjoy doing most as well as what I can contribute to the world. I still haven’t achieved my initial goal of financial independence. I really don’t want to be rich. I just want to have enough money so that money is not hampering me from doing whatever it is I want to do. Perhaps that is at the core of why I am not financially independent yet :-).

Whatever I decide to do, I have this gut feeling that blogging is going to be part of it. Blogging is a way of getting your thoughts out where you can see them and doing it in a public forum helps keep you honest with yourself. I need to get in the habit of writing something here every day. It doesn’t have to be big, just regular.

Trying out Flock 2.0

I downloaded the brand new, fresh out of beta, version 2.0 of Flock. I’ll have to try it on the MacBook at home tonight. It looks like they have improved it somewhat. Give it a try if you’re in to social networking. I’m going to explore the RSS reader capabilities tonight myself. I think the drag and drop photo uploading is going to be useful too.

I will be blogging a little more frequently now. I’m doing an experiment in therapeutic writing. If I express myself here in writing, maybe it will help me work through issues and relieve some of my stress.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: , , ,

Me and My MacBook

I love my MacBook but I spend all day every day that I go to work using the Dell PC laptop that my company provides me. It seems ironic to me that I have to endure the frustrations inherent in using Windows XP when I know there is a better way. I know that there are people that love Windows. My good friend, Jim is one of them. I just have a different opinion. I’m not a fanatic, just a satisfied user. I like other Unix based operating systems almost as much as I do OS X. As time goes by and all the operating systems improve (we’ll ignore Vista as an anomoly), it is getting less important than it once was. I guess I feel about my computer the way car lovers feel about their cars.

There are lots of features of my computer that I haven’t had time to discover yet. I am a professional programmer but I barely know the basic components of the OS X programming libraries. I also want to learn Objective C, one of the core programming languages on the Mac. The Ruby scripting language is another topic I’d like to explore more deeply but I rarely have time to play with it. From the little that I’ve been able to use the development tools on the Mac I’m convinced that they are far superior to any other tools that I’ve used on other platforms.

Another thing that I want to use my computer for more often is to write. I have several ideas for screenplays. I like to blog, as you can tell if you are reading this. I also think I have a novel and maybe a few textbooks that I want to write. I just installed Dave Winer‘s OPML editor on my MacBook and I’m using its WordPress tool to write this blog post. I’m trying to exercise some discipline and write something every day. I’m hoping that the OPML editor will help with this.

What’s Up?

I went to the Huntsville, Alabama Hamfest on Saturday. I walked from around 10:00am until after 1:30pm. My feet were sore. I didn’t buy much. I bought an RCA Victor stuffed Dalmation for Riley and a bamboo cutting board for Pam. I bought me a little dual band (2m and 70cm) mag mount antenna with an SMA connector. It worked great. I got ready to go to work this morning and discovered that the main radiator had come loose and fallen off the antenna sometime since Saturday. I was angry and sad.

Also, this morning the sherrif was outside my neighbors house with a bull horn telling her to come out or call them on the phone and tell them her side of the story. Pam called later to say that she had come out of the house and gotten in the police car without handcuffs and of her own volition. We’re worried about her dog. We’ll call the sherrif’s office later and see if arrangements have been made.

I’m anxious about my trip to Huntington Beach this week. It’s not that I’m afraid of flying or anything. It’s just that flying to the west coast exhausts me. I have apnea and so I have to carry a CPAP machine with me. I can’t sleep without it so I  refuse to check it. I also have to carry a laptop to do my job while I’m there. The laptop the company provides me is a Dell M70 that weighs in at over 7 lbs. I am really excited about the training that is the reason that I’m going. I’m just dreading the travel process.

If any one is actually reading this, drop me an email. I am jkelliemiller at gmail dot com (you know the drill). I’d love to hear from you. Or comment here. Comments are moderated so it may take a little while for your comment to be approved. But I do read all the comments (even the spam).

A Pause to Reflect

So now I’ve got this really nice blank piece of paper in front of me. I’ve gotten myself into the habit of writing on it frequently. Where have all my ideas gone. I wrote them down somewhere. I guess I need to find that file or notebook or whatever.

I know what I’m interested in. Programming, video making – both vlogs and actual video production with scripts and editing and such, playing music, composing music, writing, building robots, ham radio, creating web sites, the list goes on and on.

I suppose I should write about those things and see what happens. I act so ADHD though. I flit from one thing to the next. I can’t do them all at once so I have a hard time sticking with anything for long enough at a stretch to accomplish anything to speak of.