Geek Drivel

Oh great, now everybody will have to worry about dressing-room cameras and amateur paparazzi…

A few months ago, I thought I’d found the answer to my motivation problems. A tweak to my purpose, thought I, and all would be well. As usual, things weren’t that simple… it helped, but after the initial surge of enthusiasm wore off, I discovered that it didn’t make enough difference to keep me moving.

Earlier this week, while working through my read-it-later list, I came to an article that perfectly described the problem:

Goals do need a context as well; otherwise, they’re irrelevant too. A goal without a meaningful larger context is pointless.

One context that makes goals matter is human need, branching from the basic root need of survival. [...] But if all our goals occur only within the context of physical and emotional needs, then all we really get out of life is survival and mediocrity. [...] The second problem with having need as your only context for goals is that you’ll have a hard time pushing yourself beyond the point where you feel your needs are already satisfied. [...] for most people, at some point that context of need runs dry. You can tell if this has happened to you if, when you think about big goals, they just don’t seem to matter; they appear to be more trouble than they’re worth.

When I read the sentence that I’ve highlighted in bold, I felt something akin to an electric shock run through me. That’s exactly the problem that I’ve been having! I don’t have anything in particular to fear anymore. I have achieved financial security, which in itself eliminated most of the fears that drove me most of my life. And I have the freedom to do pretty much anything I wish, which was my second-largest desire. Project X, which seemed so compelling to me since my teenage years, seemed the perfect path to fame and fortune… but since I’ve realized that I already have enough fame and fortune, it has lost a lot of its allure. I still want to do it, very much, but the reasons that fueled that desire have lost a lot of their strength.

When you reach this point of stuckness, it’s time to move beyond the context of need. [...] if you’re now living in a situation where your needs are adequately met, and you don’t seem to be getting any more mileage out of need-based goals, then you need a new context for goal setting. [...] The next context beyond need is purpose.

Nice idea, but I thought I already had a purpose: dealing with problems. Project X is an attempt to preemptively deal with a whole class of problems, knocking out hundreds of birds with a single stone. But if it doesn’t inspire me to action, then what does that mean? That Steve Pavlina is wrong? While that’s certainly possible, a lot of the articles he’s written have been a perfect match for my own experiences, and take their ideas even further than I have. If he’s wrong, then I probably don’t have much chance of finding a solution. Assuming that he’s right though, the only answer is that I haven’t discovered a purpose that inspires me yet.

The more I think about it, the better that idea looks. I have some thoughts on where to look for one, which I’ll describe in a later posting, after I’ve had a chance to explore them further.

Hm… I could use a few extra healthy decades…

Oh, GoddessJ and several of our more feminist-leaning friends should have a field day with this one.

I can believe it.

I was born in 1970, the year after the first moon landing. Throughout my entire life, every reference I heard about it silently reinforced the assumption that mankind had been to the moon. So when I heard that some people thought that it was a hoax made in a movie studio, I was perplexed. I wanted to know what evidence they had for it.

Well, I finally found it — and a site that discusses and debunks each point. I don’t understand some of them, like this one…

The lunar dust has a peculiar property: it tends to reflect light back in the direction from where it came. So if you were to stand on the Moon and shine a flashlight at the surface, you would see a very bright spot where the light hits the ground, but, oddly, someone standing a bit to the side would hardly see it at all. The light is preferentially reflected back toward the flashlight (and therefore you), and not the person on the side.

…but overall, they make perfect sense.

Sorry, conspiracy theorists, but I’m still convinced that we’ve been to the moon, and that the footage provided from the first Apollo mission is authentic. You’ll just have to try harder.

They say reality is stranger than fiction…

This week, after more than six years of effort, I finally solved what seems to be the last theoretical problem to Project X. I have the entire high-level design now. Parts of it may still need some tweaks, but the whole thing hangs together remarkably well. It’s both a lot simpler overall, and a lot more complex in the details, than I originally expected.

And I find myself utterly indifferent to it.

I’m sure this is simply a reaction to how long I’ve been working on it, and the number of times that I’ve previously been on a promising track, only to have one or another of the thorny little pieces of the problem derail everything and send me back to square one. My conscious mind knows that the hardest part of it is finished at long last, but the rest of me is still tiredly slogging along, humoring me and hoping that I’ll finally give up soon.

GoddessJ and I are going to go see a movie tonight, a ridiculous but amusing-looking piece of fluff. Maybe I’ll take a day or two away from the computer entirely, and see if my enthusiasm returns after that. But come Monday morning, enthusiastic or not, I’m going to start writing code.

Wish me luck.

Ploni Almoni sent me this link recently. I read it, amused and agreeing with almost everything — until I got to the end:

In short, I hate software — most of all and especially my own — because I know how hard it is to get it right. It may sound strange, but it’s a natural and healthy attitude for a software developer. It’s a bond, a rite of passage that you’ll find all competent programmers share.

In fact, I think you can tell a competent software developer from an incompetent one with a single interview question:

What’s the worst code you’ve seen recently?

If their answer isn’t immediately and without any hesitation these two words:

My own.

Then you should end the interview immediately. Sorry, pal. You don’t hate software enough yet. Maybe in a few more years. If you keep at it.

That test works for people who are skilled enough to recognize their own lack of skill — a major step forward, and one that it took me five or six years to achieve. But it would exclude those of us who have actually become competent at it, which takes a lot longer. Apparently Jeff hasn’t reached that stage yet.

I see far worse code than my own on a weekly basis, so I’d fail Jeff’s “competent software developer” test, despite being a lot more competent than most professional developers I know. While I may not always be completely happy with my own software, I certainly don’t “hate” it. In fact, I trust and prefer my own software to anyone else’s, because by the time I finish writing it, I know it like the back of my hand, and I know that it’s good and solid code. If it isn’t, then it isn’t ready to be used by anyone, including and especially myself.

It’s a truism that a programmer usually can’t accurately judge whether another programmer is better than himself, only whether he’s worse. Maybe in a few more years, Jeff. If you keep at it.

I’ve been working on my chess game lately, in an attempt to improve my logic skills. It has apparently worked… previously, any computer chess game would mop the floor with me on any but the absolute lowest skill setting (and sometimes even then). Now I can beat the Caissa Chess program on my iPod Touch at level two most of the time (though level three still beats me easily), and I’ve made some large strides on Project X as well.

But that isn’t the purpose of this post, which is to point out this page of fun facts about chess that I stumbled onto recently.