I often feel like I internalize stress by putting limitations on myself. This is an attempt to channel my focus into something useful, to force myself to be productive. But it seems to only partially work, as I get frustrated with my own limitations. Example: during the day I may tell myself not to waste time doodling out ideas, but really if I just gave myself a little time to be creative it would reduce some stress and help unblock progress.

There are lots of reasons I haven’t been blogging much lately. And lots of excuses. Definitely one of them is that I have been traveling a lot more.

I thought last year when I had my first intercontinental business trip was remarkable. I’m just a kid from a small town in Oregon, so getting to travel to Dublin for an OpenStack PTG was mind blowing. I got to see a real castle and eat local foods. And got stuck in a record snowstorm. #Snowpenstack

But since then I’ve been to Denver twice for PTGs, did a 2 week Agile training and cloud team gathering in Nuremberg, and have made several trips with my family. And in another week I’ll be in Nuremberg again.

I didn’t imagine myself being a world traveler when I was growing up, but I do like it.

What prompted this post is that recently one of the OpenStack PTLs and a long time contributor posted to the openstack-discuss mail list that he would not be traveling to Shanghai for the next conference. He made a bigger deal about it than necessary, and you could argue some of it was motivated by driving traffic to his blog. [UPDATE: I reread this and it sounded much more accusatory and harsh than I intended. Chris is not that kind of guy.  Sorry about that.] (He included a link in his email. Just Google for “Chris Dent remote maintainer”) You could also see it was politically motivated, as he listed out his environmental concerns with air travel and social concerns with China.

While Chris raised some valid concerns, I don’t totally agree with his conclusion. I have some ill-formed opinions about politicizing weather science and fear mongering, so I won’t go on about that. And I agree with his points about the conferences being exclusive parties. But I believe that there are still good reasons to travel.

If a country is misbehaving or worse, abusing its citizens, I think cutting it off from the rest of the world is going to make things worse, not better. I tend to take the attitude of Rick Steves that travel can be a political act. Yes, ther can be many negative things about tourism. But the simple fact that getting someone out of their small corner of the world so they can recognize there are other people in other countries is huge. Not everyone can be the head of a country, but if you get to know the people in a country (or many countries) it will influence your view and that spreads out to people around you and influences your voting. And when the people are engineers you are sharing code with, it makes your interaction with them so much more effective.

So if my presentations are accepted to the Shanghai summit are accepted, I will try to go. Of course I will be cautious about what I pack. But if I can help influence some engineers in China that Americans are not all just big jerks that should be taken advantage of, then I will try.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone tries to explain their modular or componentized system as being “just like Legos”. That is almost never true.
One of the first misuses of the term was back when I first started working on web services hosted in Tomcat. It seemed like anyone who made a tiered system or one that talked through SOAP liked to describe it as being ” just like Legos”.
Often it is just a lazy way to report on a new technology. Like this article, which prompted this rant.
http://www.engadget.com/2014/10/03/google-x-giant-modular-displays/?ncid=rss_truncated
Now while I’m a huge AFOL, I’m not so picky that not using the official term “Lego brick” instead of the common “Legos” bothers me. So what is the problem?
First off, Lego bricks, with a few Mindstorms exceptions, don’t care what they are connected to. If the stud fits in the hole, that’s all it needs. Contrast that to a web service, where the format and intent of the connection is critical to the function. Or contrast to the displays mentioned in the article. While they don’t give details, even in the most modular of display applications, you need to know which display is connected to which port and what orientation so you can render an intelligent image onto the combined layout. Lego bricks don’t care what the brick on the other side of it is – no information passes through them.
With a Lego model, studs are studs. You can connect them together however fits, and whether it is good is evaluated externally by the viewer (art is in the eye of the beholder). A web service can’t have its display layer and its database layer swapped and still function.
Yes, I’m probably over analyzing it. But it dies bother me and I wish people would just put a little more effort into accurately describing systems.

I got my copy of the new Information Society album _hello world today.  So good once again.  Synthesizer , their last album, is my favorite album of the last decade.

I really enjoy synthpop and Insoc music when I’m coding.  I think of it as the computer singing back to me as I work. 

I share a cube space with a very talented engineer, and his work music of choice is classical.  While I like classical music, I find it relaxes me too much and I tend to drift off.

I’m typing this on my HP Slate 7 tablet in the WordPress app.  This is a small 7 inch Android tablet.  The app works pretty well to post short simple posts, but the editor does tend to goof up.  I’m finding that if I go back up a few lines and start typing that the rendering of the following existing lines gets jumbled into what I just typed.  But if I rotate the tablet it defenders correctly.

I suppose I should get out my Bluetooth keyboard and try typing on it, but I’m happy to use my thumbs for now.

I definitely need to use this app more.

I probably should do several posts on the feats of Information Technology that Disney pulls off in their parks.  And I’ve got a major rant about time management, time wasting, and the bus system, but I’ll spare you for now.  What I do want to discuss first is the new Magic Band system and some of the cool things it can do.
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I know that is the default title for a WordPress first post, but it oddly enough fits the theme of the site, so I’ll go with it.

I suppose a theme statement for this blog is in order, so I’ll just start with something short.  I’m a Computer Scientist by way of college, but a Software Engineer by trade.  I like to say that “Everything relates to Computer Science”, but really computer science can be applied to just about everything in life to try to make the world better.  CS has so many broad topics – security, logic, distributed systems, human/computer interaction, design, just to name a few.  And topics in CS can be traced back to a real world problem that someone wanted to solve or make simpler or faster.