Watt's Up Musings of an original geek

Continuing this scavanging theme… I found a socket on the roadside today. It goes nicely with the other ones that I have found in this same manner over the years (see below). Now all I need is a socket wrench for each one. But where does each one come from? My guess is that a car mechanic lays one down in the engine compartment, forgets to retrieve it, then the owner drives off and it gets shaken loose. And why don’t I throw them away? Why do I save these useless mis-matched things? They can’t puncture your tire. Is it because they are tools? Or because they’re mine, all mine! Who knows, I don’t.

Latest acquisition in the front.

When I’m running I scan the sidewalk ahead of me. I don’t look ahead at the horizon instead I keep my gaze down. I think the constantly changing view stimulates the visual side of my brain (the creative one), makes me think, and I like it. I’m sure this is very bad form for running, but, hey, I don’t really care.

When I don’t really have anything to think about, I look at the upcoming sidewalk, the curb, and the road edge. Since I’ve had several tire punctures over the years I scan for nails, screws and other nasty things on the roadside. When I see one, I stop, pick it up, and put it in my pocket. Upon returning home I toss the nasty in the trash. Naturally I pick up other things like money, CDs, baseball cards, and other intersting curiosities. My children think I’m wierd, but I don’t care.

When I return from running I walk around the cul-de-sac cooling off. Recently the young teen boys who live on our cul-de-sac have gotten toy BB guns which shoot plastic pellets. They have their gun battles in the front yards, sidewalks, and driveways which surroung the cul-de-sac. In my typical manner I now scan for their spent pellets when cooling off. I’ve picked up hundreds of these little beasties. Then instead of tossing them, I save them in a glass. I keep asking myself why do I do this, because they don’t cause tire punctures. Somehow I do care.

Each morning on my regular running route I go by Parmer Lane Elementary School. My daughter, who is now in college, attended 4th and 5th grade there. As I run by the school there is a sign at the entry to the parking lot. The sign says: “Parmer Lane Teachers are A+, We appreciate you, PTO”. Somehow I’ve always liked that happy sign, but over the years it’s gotten a bit shabby; the background paint has gotten lighter and chalky – the brutal Texas sun has a way of doing that. So last Friday as I ran by I thought I should do something about it, maybe wax would help.

So today after finishing my house painting chores, I got my tub of S.C. Johnson Paste Wax, and drove over to the school. It was midday, the sun was hot, and I was quietly working when a woman pulled up in a SUV and yelled “Thank you” from her car. I replied “Sure”, turned around and continued to apply the wax. She drove into the lot and parked on the far side. A few minutes later she appeared again, and while walking toward me she said “I’ve got to send you a thank you note. What’s your name?” I told her, and she also asked for my address, which I gave her. I really didn’t need this publicity. I don’t know who she is or why she was there. Remember today is Sunday, this is August and no one is supposedly at the school. Next she returned and took my picture and said she’d tell the principal and president of the Parent-Teacher Organization (PTO)! She asked me why I was doing it and I explained that I see the sign while running each morning, that I felt it needed fixing-up, and that my daughter attended the school years ago. She was surprised that I was doing this even though I didn’t have anyone attending the school. She left once more and I again continued my waxing. Then about five minutes later she appeared carrying something, and said “I’ve got water or Diet Dr. Pepper, which do you want?” I said that water would be fine. Shortly afterwards I finished and left. Morale: Maybe I should do my community service very early in the morning as part of my run so no one will know.

Note: I was unable to fix the light blotch on the middle left.

Got this letter today.

Yes, the painting continues, but now I need to do repairs before the final push where I power spray the large flat areas. Today I ripped off the old scuzzy siding on the side of the chimney that was moisture damaged and replaced it. I also had to replace the trim and some of the soffit. That’s the stuff in the red circle. Tomorrow I’ll be putting the remaining trim back on, caulking edges and maybe painting it. I also need to add some flashing near the chimney on the roof to direct rain water run-off away from the siding so that it doesn’t happen again. Moral: Don’t ever try to block water, only redirect it. Nevertheless, it’s getting there…

My father was a late starter when it came to art. He began working at Bell Aircraft which later became Bell Aerosystems as a draftsman. Early in his career he was a member of the team that built the Bell X-1. Drafting and technical drawings were a part of his life. A clear sign of this is his beautiful distinctive hand-lettering. Yet he did not express himself with art during this time, whereas my mother was expressing herself daily.

In 1963, while my mother and father were attending the “Old Mill” art school for my mother, he drew the school’s center. Having lived for many years with hundreds of painting and sculptures by my mother, this pen-and-ink drawing is a unique surprise, and is a cherishied piece.

Years later after his retirement, and my mother’s passing, my father took up painting in earnest. He took numerous classes and practiced each day. His medium of choice is watercolor. Beautiful landscapes flowed from his brush. Now twenty years later he is quite an accomplished artist.

My mother always wanted to be an artist. When I was a child she showed me her high school art course notebooks with drawings in them. She never went to college. Her parents didn’t feel that art was an appropriate path to follow. Also they didn’t have money to send her to art school. Instead they said she should became a hair dresser. I still remember her disappointment having not pursued her art earlier. She was driven to be an artist.

Her favorite medium was sculpture. I clearly remember one Christmas when I was about eight years old that my father bought her a fifty pound block of clay and placed it on her lap. She couldn’t guess what present could be so heavy. Up until then she had devoted herself to being a wife and a mother. That clay was the beginning of her rediscovery of art that continued for the rest of her life.

With that original clay she did Mother and Child.

Sorry to keep delving into this, but today at work we were setting up and configuring the system that was now working (see previous posting). We spent several hours testing and retesting the configuration. We had one more thing to do – getting the scripts working on Windows – but we called it quits until the next day. I stayed a few more minutes waiting for my ride home while everyone else left for the day.

At the last minute I was looking at the code I had gotten working yesterday and I suddenly realized that we were using the wrong version. Instead of using the current version (my assumption) we were using an old build from weeks ago. So in the last five minutes at work I swapped in the newest code and the system failed. Ugh! All I could think was that my work this weekend was for naught – I had fixed the wrong version. Leaving work I was deeply worried and depressed that our team’s heady optimism of a few minutes ago would be dashed tomorrow morning when they realized that they were working with the wrong build.

I got home, ate, logged on to work, and continued. I got the latest build and installed it on the same machine. I checked to make sure that it was installed properly, and ran the installation verification. This time it worked and I checked the system output logs to make sure. It looked good. So I breathed a sigh, looked up, said a little prayer, logged off, and went to watch some TV. I gotta stop having these deep lows and sudden highs within hours. They’re not good for me.

Up early and into work, again struggling to figure out what’s wrong with this software. Instead of working on the original machine which was owned by the test team and I shouldn’t muck with, I switched to my development machine where I can do what I want. The issue is that a completely different set of problems showed up. So now to solve the original problem I felt I had to fix these other problems. Each minute seeking insight caused me two or more minutes of repair work. I was making progress in the wrong direction. The original problem was getting obscured in the mass of secondary problems. I felt I was losing my way.

At different times I would switch back to the test machine trying different things. I keep focusing on why that system could not load a specific Java class. This problem had not shown up on my development machine. I had assumed that the class library was not accessible. Instead what I failed to do was check the contents of this class library. When I did I found it was empty, contents nada, length zero. No wonder the system could not load a specific Java class. The person doing the installation had failed to load the class library properly, that is, it was empty when it shouldn’t have been. So I correctly reinstalled the class library and TA-DA the system started working. I would never have guessed that this was the problem. It was one of those small assumptions that kept me baffled for two days. Morale: Do not assume, instead check your underlying assumptions.

Well I went to work today to figure out a problem. Just what I like. I arrived very early, but I spent hours and hours trying to figure out what went wrong. I started in trying to understand the scope of the problem by varying the program through recoding the software in different ways. For each variation I would write down what I did, what I expected and what actually happened – a kind of a simplified scientific method. However, each thing I tried did not change the problem much, thus, providing little information. I got more and more frustrated. Nothing I did was helping.

Finally I left for lunch when Katie and Matthew arrived home from their long drive back from North Carolina [straight through for 18+ hours]. It was nice to see them, listening about their vacation, and I’m glad that they’re back safe and sound.

After lunch I returned to work and worked past dinner. Still nothing helped, and I was running out of ideas and getting really frustrated. Finally I called Candice, one of my co-workers, for ideas and got a few good ones. I tried one and it didn’t help. But the next one was to go back several versions (what we call a build) and see if it fails. When I tried the first one it worked successfully, so now I know more – from that version to the latest something has gone wrong.

But I had to leave because I needed my TV fix, that is, Big Brother. Now I’ve got something to do tomorrow – try each version one by one and find out when it begins to fail. So tomorrow is another weekend day at work, oh well I’m not as frustrated as I was before.

I don’t like being bored. I like to be mentally active. A good problem that somebody needs solved get’s my juices going. When I was a main-frame computer operator during college I found that it never really challenged me, yet it required just enough thought that I couldn’t do anything else – something I didn’t like. Instead computer programming, keeping the whole software system in my head, is more to my liking. The best is when the hours pass in the blink of any eye. For example tonight I told my wife that I’d be finished in 10 minutes and then I’d leave for dinner. I didn’t realize that when I thought 10 minutes was done it was actually 30 minutes – my kind of time warp. What can I say – I just like being busy.