AmethystRSS Blog

Nice commentary on Right Work (AKA Craftsmanship) with nods to “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.  And links to additional resources on speeding up a Website.

Scott Adams has an interesting article on rooms, buildings, etc as brain extenders and repositories of intelligence.

Years ago I heard a tale, perhaps apocryphal, of a business consultant who’s client wanted to go computerized. He knew that the computer salesman was overselling and would under-deliver, but nothing he could say changed their mind, they had to computerize their accounting. So he told them they needed to regularize their accounting, clean it up, and put standard procedures in place, “for the computer”. He had been telling them that for years, but now he had a lever. So for months there was a big push to clean up their accounts so they could go “computerized”. When everything was ready for the computer, he sat down with the company owner and showed him that they were already realizing all the benefits claimed for computerization without the costs of the computer.

As I noted in a previous post, my adaptive RSS reader, Amethyst, is running too slow. So in preparation of moving the CPU/time intensive operations into C, I centralized them in one class and started working out the raw SQL that the C code would need. It’s ugly but it works, it approximately 7-10 times faster, has the potential for even more speed, and is done in less time than researching relational database access from C would have taken. Yes, I can probably get even more speed by going to C, but right now it isn’t worth the additional time. Plus the framework I developed for a realistic benchmark can also be used by the test code. Nice.

In Taking a Smoking Break… For Non-Smokers, Vlad Doleza makes a case for taking a 20–30 minute break every 90 minutes or so at work. The claimed benefits are:

• You will be more relaxed
• Your concentration will improve
• You will accomplish more

I’ve been trying it for a week. I think I’m more productive in my work, but one thing is clear, I’m less tired at day’s end leaving energy for other things outside of work. So I’m certainly more productive at life.

This is the title of a cut on the new Ray Wiley Hubbard album. “Momma cried and Daddy burned when I told them what I learned … Live and die rock and roll, it ain’t something you control.” I love music, but I’m not gonna die if I can’t play it. This is the difference between a musician and a wannabe. Ray Wiley Hubbard is a musician. I may be a musician wannabe, but I am an honest to God engineer. I want to build things and get very grumbly when I can’t. I’m always looking for a better way to do things, whether it’s a better route to somewhere, a better way to cook a dish, a more elegant solution to a bit of code, whatever. I see an oddball wheelchair and I want to know it works better than the standard design and in what ways.

“Maybe follow your bliss” is a description of parts of the path, maybe “Do what you can’t not do.”