Mechanic's Logic

A group of us were working on a project and suddenly something was wrong with the code. Immediately one of the coders said "What was the last change that was made!? Put it back the way it was!"
I was laughing inside, because we frequently used this logic back when I was a teenager. You always figured that the last thing that was done was the culprit. We summed it up well in a situation where my junker car wouldn't start one morning. We all scratched our heads about why the car worked the day before, but now wouldn't start. "What was the last thing you did to the car? " my brother asked. "I put air in the tires. " I replied.
"Well, then let the air back out!" he exclaimed, as if the issue was patently obvious....

Better Than A Win

I watched this soccer match the other night and the opposing team was getting stomped, but what I remember even more than the score or the goals made, was this young woman. I know they were down three points and I don't remember noticing her that much before, but it seemed like suddenly she was ON and played like this was the final match in a big tournament.
I knew the feeling well. Once long ago I played in a doubles tennis league and we were getting stomped by a couple of guys that had sandbagged their way into our recreational league. My partner had already given up, and the guys on the other side of the net were laughing and joking to each other about where they were going to get beer after they finished with us. I don't remember the score or much of anything else, except that feeling of cold water running down my back and my eyes bulging. I never left the net except to serve after that and my only purpose was to hit the ball right between their feet. I didn't want to win...I wanted respect. I played about 30 minutes of the best tennis I ever played in my life and only now wish that I could summon that feeling whenever I wanted it.....

The Microscope And The One Thing You Have To Do Well

Although I don't own a microscope right now, I must admit that I can't hardly walk past one without taking a peek down the lens. I've always been a bit of a lab rat. As a young child some of my favorite toys were a chemistry set and a microscope. I still like to admire Pyrex glass and microscopes whenever I come across them. They have pretty much disappointed me though. Most of the time I can see just about nothing through the lens and shake my head wondering if I still haven't figured out how to use one or if I need the really good ones you see on science programs, the kind that that fill up half a room and display everything on a TV monitor.
A number of years ago, I had my young children at the local science center for some show that involved dinosaurs. We were in the little shop where you could buy science center souvenirs, and there was this cool microscope. It was very crude looking, like something from the middle ages, a brass tube mounted on a piece of iron with a mirror on the bottom for light. I saw the price tag, $90 and thought, "Man, they have some pricey toys in here."
A young young woman that noticed me checking out the 'scope, came over and told me how this was created by a local man that had spent a career in the optics business, working for a company I recognized as a maker of quality binoculars. She said that he spent all of the money putting in the best optics you could get and fabricated the rest in a machine shop. Well, it sure looked like that's what he did. I peered down the lens and could not believe it. I called my wife over and we spent the next 30 minutes grabbing everything we could find and sticking it under that microscope. You see, I looked at microscopes for the visible details that would make them valuable; light source, stereo eyepieces, multiple lenses for varying amounts of zoom, etc. This microscope had none of that. Like I said, it even looked homemade, or like something you might find in one of those nautical antique stores.
But, it did one thing right. I saw images that I had only seen before on television, on those science programs. This guy was smart. He thought, what is the one thing that a microscope has to do well? If I do that, then nothing else matters. If some people won't buy it because of it's looks, then they are the people that buy microscopes without looking down the lens....I'm not sure I want them as customers.
I want to be as smart as that guy.

What I Learned From A Dead Fish

I remember being young and frustrated in my job and while out fishing with a friend I remarked that I felt much like the fish that were making a lot of noise in our cooler. We were catching mackerel that day, and those are some serious fighting fish. Long after they were brought into the boat and hook removed, they were still banging around in the cooler. "They just aren't smart enough to realize that it's over.", I said, thinking that it was very much like my career.
Then, on the way back home, as we were bumping across the bay, we hit a bigger piece of chop and the cooler lid flew open and a mackerel went flying out into the water. I stood there with my mouth open, realizing that the intelligence of the fish wasn't what was in play...it was their unwillingness to be dead....

Meetings That Really Count

As we rode back from the beach, talking of surfing, photography, girls, life, business and
even a bit of politics, it came to me that this meeting was full of content. Nobody was
checking their email and everyone wanted to contribute. More than I wanted to talk,
I wanted to hear what my friends had to say. We really were a team. We were
all out their doing our own thing, but always ready to share, always ready to save
one of us if we needed help.
My kind of meeting.....perhaps the next evolution in business will be to make it more like surfing. Instead of cubes, we will have towels on the beach...

The Professor

It was my first class in school that used an auditorium and my school was pretty small at the time, something like 7,000 students and most classes had about 30-40 kids in them, but there were a few of these introductory classes that held over 300 and this one also happened to be an emerging new subject; Sociology.
The professor walked on stage and he immediately became my perfect stereotype of what a professor should be; in his 50's, wild, white bushy hair and a big white mustache. I still remember his first words as his assistants busied themselves passing out papers to all of us in the audience.

"If all you are seeking is an A in this class, merely look up the answers to the questions on the papers I am passing out. If you want to learn about Sociology and the world you are living in, come to my lectures, because nothing from them will be on the test."

This guy tapped into my head like no other had before and created a longing in me to learn for it's own sake. It was as if he knew that there were people that didn't see a grade equalling a good job, and were after knowledge itself.

I learned a lot from him in the 4 years I attended that school. He became my advisor and I remember him predicting that someday there would be machines that would spit out a whole book for us instead of having to borrow them from libraries (this was back in the early 1970's). He knew that computers were going to be big, but it was still too far away in the future.

Dr. Burton Wright retired from UCF a long time ago, but his influence upon me still lingers..

The Garden By The Lake

My friends and family groan whenever I trot out another analogy, but this one presented itself to me quite simply. For years I lived near my grandmother-in-law, who had a nice old house on a lake. I loved to learn from people, especially older people, and she had many things to share. She was getting on in her years and they had finally taken away her driver's license. Her days were spent puttering around the house and in her garden. When I went to visit her, I had to listen while she went on in detail about her garden and all the things she was doing and going to do with it. You could definitely see that she was bringing peace and order to that little spot of land. All around for three acres things were growing wild, but right here in this one designated place, things were just the way she wanted it.

Then, as happens to all of us, she got too old and feeble to do the gardening, and the weeds came in. Finally she passed on and the house was vacant for years, waiting for the next property owner to come tear it down and create his own version of peace and order.

The strange thing was, that for a couple of years I would walk my dogs down to that vacant house and just look at the garden and remember what it had been. Nature has it's own beauty but it wasn't here in the garden. It needed it's gardener and she was gone.

We took some of her plants and put them in our garden where we tend them now. I see that the peace and order is actually inside us and the beauty of the garden is that outward sign of it. Sometimes I wonder if all of our life is an attempt to bring order to chaos, even knowing that we only do it for a while.

 

The Slowest Zebra

The image of a herd of zebras quietly munching the plain grass while a nearby lion munches on the slowest member of the herd has haunted me for a while. Are the zebras just plain stupid, or do they know that at least for now they are safe, because the lion has food and nobody else has to worry for a while? Maybe the lion, being there, will keep other lions from coming around and trying to get some more zebra steaks.
What suddenly occurred to me recently, is that sooner or later, every single zebra in that herd will get older and slower and someday slow enough to be the slowest zebra in the herd. It makes you think a little harder about the 'survival of the fittest'. One day, we will meet that end, and the rest of the herd will keep on about their business, mostly glad it wasn't them.

Gorilla Smart

Gorilla Smart, i.e., guerrilla smart (intentional misspelling, which is something that the gorilla smart person might do, making a joke that we don’t get).

We all know that dogs can hear things we can’t. So we know that sounds exist that we can’t measure with our senses, although we can make machines to measure it.
We know that our vision is limited, some more than others, as I can attest to. For me, can I truly say that something off in the distance is really fuzzy, or is it my vision that can’t get good focus?
My brain tells me it is my eyes that are wrong.

We measure intelligence with tests. We know that we have given tests to people that are smarter than we are, but have we given test to people that are smarter than the people that made the tests?
Could you be too smart to want to be a part of MENSA?
Could you be so smart that you deliberately camouflaged yourself so that you don’t get singled out? (think about the kids in middle school that go from straight A to D-F students)
Me, I think I’m just smart enough to spot these people sometimes, like the kid in movie, Sixth Sense was able to see ghosts.



I think, just as Lance Armstrong, with his superior physical abilities, can ride up a mountain at 30 mph, while I can barely maintain 15mph in flat Florida for 2 hours, there are people with substantially better minds. I don’t mean geniuses. I mean smart enough not to cooperate with the people testing IQ’s. People smart enough to make themselves appear ordinary to those of us that can’t spot them.


Now, the fun part. If there are people that smart, what are they doing with their lives? Where are they? We know that they don’t want to draw attention to themselves. Now the guys I have written about before, the Hummer-driving computer guys, are not part of this group. They are several rungs down the intellectual ladder, the people that don’t brag, but are using their superior intellect to gain material things. They show up on the radar of normal folk and would probably be aware of the ‘gorilla smart’ people if they cared to look around. The Hummer-driving guys have the intellect, but the ego didn’t quite match up, so the need to be ostentatious shows.


We know that they, for the most part, aren’t presidents, CEO’s or just about anybody that you might read about in the paper. The whole idea of being famous or notable would be something they would avoid. What makes this not a conspiracy theory, is that I don’t believe they have a club or sit around making decisions for the world any more than Shaq goes to club meetings for the Extremely Big Men Society. I believe that these people are doing altruistic things, volunteering, reading a lot, and mainly seeing the world whole, instead of that narrow tunnel of getting up, going to work, and going home at the end of the day. Maybe they are involved in church groups, or maybe they stay as far away from them as possible, but I’m pretty sure that they are always in a situation where they are helping others that are less fortunate.


I tried this theory out on a young man that I thought fit the profile. Surprisingly, he went right to it. He said, “Yes, I want people to think I’m some dumb redneck. I want people to underestimate me. It gives me an advantage.”

Sometimes I wonder just how many of these people are out there and are there even smarter ones that I can’t spot?

Is it possible that what we sometimes see as a decline in intelligence in our world is actually that the really smart ones have gone underground?

And Sometime Your Teachers Pick You

This is my best Paul Harvey imitation.

The year was 1970 or thereabouts. In Orlando, Florida, hippies, demonstrations and the revolution in general were pretty much something you read about or saw on the news.

I think they were building Disney World and we pretty much thought it would be a cool place to work until we found out about their dress code.

At high school, you were in trouble for having your hair touch your collar or having bangs touch your eyebrows (if you were a guy).
For girls, the big deal was how far your hem was from your knee. I was trying as hard as I could to distance myself from the ‘advanced classes’ and fully become part of the surfer group.
Most of my high school did not have air conditioning, which wasn’t fun, but then some of my friends didn’t have central air at home either.
My school was about 99% white and probably 75% redneck, although we didn’t say that back then. Mostly we worried about the big guys from the woods to the east of town.

One day, I walked into my new class of History.
Here is this big black lady, with a monster afro hairdo, loud voice, and very casual demeanor.
We were going to learn black history and we were going to learn things in a fashion I was unfamiliar with. I think you could call it organized chaos. I learned facts, but mostly I learned to like her, and went on to become one of her assistants for the next couple of years. I remember how much I enjoyed just being around her and she seemed like our own smalltown rebel. I would have voted her Most-Likely-To-Get-Fired-From-Her-Job and that made me like her even more.

I later found out that the teacher that made so much difference to a bunch of us white kids in our old school in the east end of town, far from any black neighborhoods, had much more to do. Miss Kegler got married while she was teaching us and that might have been why she was smiling so much when she wasn’t teaching us about the world.






I believe that Kattie Kegler became Kattie Adams in 1971.
(from a news article)
Former Orange County School Board Member Kattie J. Adams lost her battle with a long term illness on Thursday, July 24, 2003.
In 1980 Adams became the first African American elected to the Orange County School Board and served for 20 years until she retired in November 2000.

Before she was elected to the school board, Adams was a dedicated classroom teacher. She began her teaching career at Jones High School in August of 1962 and later taught at Colonial High. Both schools are located in Orlando. She worked more than 38 years for Orange County Public Schools and was the job developer for the Women's Center at Valencia Community College.

During her life she worked with zeal and passion to improve the quality of education for all children in Orange County and across the nation. "We have lost a person who truly cared about our children," said Superintendent Ronald Blocker. "Kattie Adams wanted to make sure all students used their minds, not only to process knowledge, but also to make good decisions in life."

Taking The Hit

If you were ever a Boy Scout or Girl Scout, you got the indoctrination to be prepared for anything. I thought were talking about camping and making sure that you didn't forget the mosquito repellent, but now I see the larger implications.
Although I have often made fun of my Dad and his clipboard checklists for every little outing, I see how there is comfort in being ready for the unexpected. Truth is, no matter what you do, something can change all that, but at least you can be ready. In my mind, it goes back to us kids playing Monopoly and trying to make sure we had enough money to handle it if we landed on Boardwalk with a couple of hotels on it. We referred to it as "how many hits we could take". Nobody could be positive they would win, no matter what strategy they used, but the guy that could take a hit and keep going was someone to look up to. I've done it once in real life and the feeling was incredible. I felt positive, strong, and ready to take on the world. I can see those hotels on Boardwalk up ahead and I will own them someday...

Tableau And The Art Of Thinking Differently

After many years of writing Crystal Reports, SSRS and Jaspersoft Reports, I first ran into Tableau. I struggled to create spreadsheet-looking documents for a while and then relaxed into what the product is really for: Analytics.
Instead of trying to decide what I wanted in a SQL query and then deciding how to group the rows and which columns I needed, I just started dragging stuff around. I started getting strange results, and then I started seeing crazy charts, and finally started getting results I liked but wasn't really after. I'm still on the journey, but one thing is for sure. I can give this product to a user with some data and they will come up with impressive results. My thinking now is that you are better off with no idea of what you want to create. Better to think, how are sales? How am I doing with inventory? Are we better off than the last few years? Then start dragging the fields onto the page. Not all of it is intuitive, but TableauSoftware.com website offers a lot of free training.
Now they have a Mac version...it is great, not 100% of the PC version..but very close. Tableau seems to have brought the sizzle AND the steak with this product..

Keep your eyes on these guys...

The Very First Thing I Should Have Done

I sat there and watched as my wife's wildly successful business venture: Mini Munchkins took off like a rocket. I was there to move things, take money and mainly see how it is done. It didn't take long before I decided that I had to do something similar. We attended a lot of special outdoor events and I saw all of the long lines at the food vendors and thought, man, I could make a killing doing that and I already know all about these outdoor events, so what could possibly go wrong?
The VERY first thing I should have done is figure out how much money I could make in a single day if I worked as hard as I could and sold as much as it was possible to sell, and decide if that was worth the work. Too late I realized that if I sold a bag of donuts and a cup of coffee to a person every minute of the 12 hour day and then paid the bills and split the money with my partner....let's just say it wasn't ever going to be worth it.
Real world: People don't drink coffee and eat donuts all day long, and sometimes it rains and you don't get refunds from the shows for rain-outs.
It was worth it though, because I now look at things that look wildly successful in a whole different way....

Game Changed By A Surfer Dude

It is interesting how our life is cross-pollinated by events at work, home and play. Many times through the years, I've had lessons in being adaptable and when you spend your career in the IT industry, you'd best be ready for anything that comes along. As far back as I can remember, we were being told that we would eventually be replaced by some kind of automation, most specifically, software that would "write itself!" or software that "doesn't require a programmer!!" ...and yet, we still managed to find work. Even knowing that, it was pretty easy to see that you had better be ready to learn the next great piece of software that came along in order to still be useful. In fact, you can see that I now do Tableau work as opposed to being a Novell Admin..which was supposed to be the big deal, once upon a time. So, I'm pretty good at staying loose and thinking outside that box...but every once in a while I still get my mind blown by someone that shows me that I have created my own limitations.
Paddlesurfing is an old sport that is coming back. It is great for me. I have great boards, and my years of surfing played a big part in me getting to where I am now. One of the downsides of the sport is that most Stand Up Paddleboarders own giant boards that do not surf well. There are special boards for surfing, but they are difficult to stand on, and even with my years of experience, I found myself challenged with a new board that surfed great, but I could barely keep my balance in the semi-choppy waters that we usually have. In fact, I spent more time falling in the water than surfing. I went to the local surfshop in search of the fins that I might find that could help solve the problem. I explained at length to the young owner of the little shop, telling him everything was great except that I had trouble staying up on the board between waves...maybe I need some really big fins? Do I need 4 fins? Do I need 1 really big fin? I could not see a clear solution.
His reply was "Who said you need to stand up between the waves? I think it is silly that stand up paddlers think they have to stand up all the time. We surfers are just sitting there waiting for the next set." He was right, I just sat down between sets and life was better right away....it was so simple, but I couldn't see it because they call it "Stand Up" paddleboarding....