Entries in Life

I thought Joel Spolsky had jumped the shark when he revealed that he was using a language that his company had developed: “Wasabi, a very advanced, functional-programming dialect of Basic.” Ok… Guess who I don’t consider an authority on anything but Excel and MS DOS any more? (I am not alone in this thought.) Still, he is a great thinker and, I imagine, a great manager. He still has good ideas. And this article on Evidence Based Scheduling is very, very attractive. If I started doing more detailed planning up front for any task I was going to do and gave those tasks estimates, I could easily fit that with the time tracking that I already do and come up with decent estimates for my time. Right now, I when I look at a days worth of tasks in Planner, it looks something like this:

@9:00 Finish up Database creation for iHRIS @10:30 Read up on how to use i2ce @13:00 Create simple address book in I2CE @19:00 Paint Kitchen @20:00 Refactoring Code @21:00 Notify Users of Move

If I add an estimate for each task, then I’ll be able to use Joel’s Evidence Based Scheduling pretty quickly. Of course, it is designed for teams of people, but, I have a feeling it would be useful for just one person, too.

Last night my brother and I had a good long conversation. It started off innocently enough — what the kids were doing, our plans for the holidays, etc. — but somehow we got onto the subject of economics and the Little House on the Prarie. Now, I know very little about either. I have a smidgen of understanding about Economics from reading various things and a smattering of knowlege about Little House on the Prarie because dvfmama is always reading the books to our kids. My brother knows about as much about the subjects as I do. Still, like any good conversation, that didn’t stop us from talking about them. He made two claims that I found outrageously ridiculous:

• Pa Ingall’s sod house had just as much “value” as my home, and
• The impact of IT, unlike modern medicine which was positive, was neutral.

Now, admittedly, we were talking past each other much of the time, and he claimed he was talking about “imputed value” (by which he meant the pride Pa took in a house he had built with his own two hands). Still, although I enjoy circular argument as much as anyone, eventually I was got tired and begged off. It was only later that I remembered a conversation I had today with dcm that provided me with ammo to crush both of my brother’s points into dust. As a bonus, I’ll try to give a real world example of what kind of impact IT has. First, the value of Pa’s sod house. By almost any objective measure, any house that he built would have been valued lower than a modern home. There was no running water, no electric light, no bathroom, no shower, a floor made of dirt and on and on. It didn’t matter how much he worked, it was technologically impossible for him to create as much wealth for his family as your average American home-owner has today. Our families are warmer and healthier today in part because of the modern house. I mention this to provide a concrete example of how improved technology makes a difference. I think this is something we can all agree on — I don’t know of anyone that would choose to live in a prarie home without plumbing, insulation, electricity and heat. I’m sure they’re are some weirdos out there, but they’re few and far between. I’ve a feeling that my brother felt IT had a “neutral” effect because technology “eliminates jobs”. Robots will replace people and of course, that’s morally wrong, isn’t it? Well, no, it isn’t. Just as the gas-powered engine eliminated the demand for the less efficient draft horse by providing more efficient transport, so technology will continue to materially improve people’s lives so that they don’t have to do repetative, exhausting and boring work. And, yes, even what we call IT today provides improvements that are just as real and just as much of a paradigm shift as the average modern American home is compared with Pa Ingall’s sod house. One example is the work I’ve been doing with IntraHealth. I’ve included a couple of pictures here from Mali and Uganda. The Ugandan picture shows haphazardly-stacked paper-based HR records that we hope to digitize and provide via a web-based system so that Ministry of Health officials can get a better understanding of where their health workers are and what they’re doing. If the project is successful to any degree, we will have a real chance of dramatically improving the health care in these countries by helping the health care workers get better access to training and by ensuring that they are deployed where they are most needed. This, from something as mundane as providing better access to personnel records. Oh, did I mention it is Open Source, too?

From Things Need to Change, quoting Rick Warren (via):

The American church as a whole needs to move from selfish consumerism to unselfish contribution. Those are poles apart. To start with a woman who’s most interested in how many diamonds she’s got in her tennis bracelet, and move her to sit under a banyan tree holding an AIDS baby- that’s a giant leap.

One of the things that frustrated me the most about the Orthodox church I initially encountered was (as this observer also noticed) what seemed like a lack of concern for the poor. In the nine or so years that I’ve been Orthodox, I’ve come to understand the situation a little better, but I still see a need for more awareness. That said, I witnessed just such a transformation in my local church. The church is not poor and has several lawyers, doctors, and business owners in it. Many of these people have homes worth half a million or more dollars. But every year, a group of people from our church joins Project Mexico in building modest homes for the poor of Mexico. This year, one of those lawyer and his family went. After they come back, the people who participated in the project all give a little speech in front of the church about their experience. Most everyone else had gone once before, but what this family said was amazing. “Before we went, we would invite friends over to check out the new addition on our house or our new plasma TV. But, in Mexico, we built a home for people without one! The difference for them is so much more significant than anything we could buy for ourselves!” They had gained an incarnate understanding of poverty. Yeah, this is just another example of the the failing Church. And how people in the Church are saved from failure.

In this excellent little message to baby boomers and gen-xers, Steve Olson writes:

When I mention that you refuse to let your kids ride their bikes to the park, you say, “Things are different today. There are more crazies out there.” Yep, and the crazies are us. Middle-aged people are so riddled with anxiety we are eating Paxil, Zoloft, and Prozac like Copenhagen at a rodeo.

He points to Mike Males op-ed on risk-takers:

Today, the age group most at risk for violent death is 40 to 49, including illegal-drug death rates five times higher than for teenagers.

I knew this generation was more protected from risk than those before it. I didn’t realize that the older generations were still taking (and losing) such big risks. (via) Now, don’t misunderstand me. I think people should take risks. I think young people and children should be allowed to take more risks. I think my children should be allowed to take more risks, but I’m not the only one who has a say in that.

Father Stephen writes:

When we look across the Christian scene, however, we should be accurate in what we see: failure. Not by counting numbers (they may tell us very little), but by how well Christians in fact show forth the faith that is within them. That the Church is a mess is a good description of history. The Catholic Church says one thing, but has a hard time finding a parish that actually believes and practices the magisterium of the faith. Protestants have launched into a sea of splintering that can only be justified by positing a deficient ecclesiology. The Orthodox, despite the accuracy of their historical claims, remain in the backwash of collapsing empires (both the Byzantine and the Russian). … The failure of the Church, to put it clearly, is a result of works – a triumph of flesh over Grace.

Read the whole thing (plus the comments, which include how the Orthodox fail the poor) and then read Why I am not Concerned.

This past year or so, I’ve been working at home with my four children (three school-age, and home-schooled). Besides the kids, who really aren’t that bad, I have the struggled to avoid the distraction that is the Internet. I instinctively compare myself with my heros, and, of course, my heros always win the comparison. Sacha Chua is one such hero of mine. While seeking out ways to be more productive, the gregarious filipino has evangelized PlannerMode like no one else could have. I’ve always admired her energy, drive and focus. She seems to accomplish so much, so easily. I have potential, but I’m have an extreme lack of focus. Finally, this week, while being distracted, I came across this on Digg: “Plan your day the night before” Doh! It finally clicked. I saw how everything I knew about planning would actually work. I had found the missing ingredient. I did it that night. I planned my next day’s tasks. Until then, I’d been using Planner primarily to keep track of the billable hours I worked. This week I finally understood how to really use all the scheduling and planning aspects of Planner. I had tried it before, but it didn’t work — because I didn’t do it the night before. Maybe someone said it and I missed it. Maybe I wasn’t properly motivated before. Doing it the night before means I’m anxious to get to the things I’ve scheduled. I’m motivated to do them because my subconcious has been dwelling on them for eight or so hours. Sacha Chua has been writing about using PlannerMode and Emacs for productivity for some time now. Shes written a lot of code snippets and done some heavy lifting with PlannerMode itself. Finally, she is combining her enthusiasm, her skill at writing, and technical saavy to write a “Wicked Cool Emacs book” that will cover PlannerMode, OrgMode as well as many other bits of Emacs. I wish I could pre-order a copy now!

In the Open Source world we talk about how different projects organise themselves. Some are called “Benevolent Dictatorships” because a single person has the final say over what goes into the final product. Even those these are dictatorships and you have no way to get your work into the official release if the dictator doesn’t like you, you still have options. Because the source code is free, you can fork it. If you feel that Linus Torvalds is just being mean by refusing your great work, you can release your Linux patches to the world without him. It is a little extra work, but, in fact this happens all the time. Linux distributions maintain their own patch-sets for extended periods of time because Linus won’t add them to the “Real” Linux. Such is not the case with Apple. Most Apple users wouldn’t know what to do with source code if it hit them over the head, but the closed nature of Apple still has a dramatic effect on them. Many people love Apple simply because it looks pretty and it isn’t Microsoft. But, even Windows smartphones let you hack them. But, if you hack an iPhone, Apple will break it. Steve Jobs isn’t a benevolent dictator. He’s an egotistical control-freak. Sure, his company makes pretty software, but as we are learning more Apple wants to control what its users listen to and watch. Sure, Steve Jobs made some noise about freedom but he sounds just a little too draconian most of the time.