MME: The Story Of Stuff…

I just watched and read through the site The Story Of Stuff and basically it is awesome! It is very very well done. This is not “new” information, but information that has been well put together to provide a whole view of the system that we are in. I for one think this should be compulsory viewing for everyone participating in this system. Well over 6 million people have viewed the site already, so if you haven’t get on it.

There should be something like that for teaching people how to use, or better yet, NOT USE credit. Credit (specifically, credit cards) is such a key part of this whole consumption society (the golden arrow). If people were educated about money and about their roll in this system then people would not behave the way they do. (Yes, I hold out faith that people will do the right thing once armed with the right information.)

I feel we need to return to a responsible, more thrifty society. When I was a kid, I knew that I could not afford to get something and break it or loose it or be irresponsible with it, because quite frankly there was not another one where it came from. Well, first of all we couldn’t afford to replace items since things that we had were so hard to earn, as we were not well off. We had to be thrifty. Perhaps the fact that the economy is going down the shitter is a ‘correction’. It is the uber wound up economy going through a natural metamorphosis to get us all back to it’s lower energy state (can you tell I took college physics and chemistry ). These days we should be extolling the virtues of conservation and thrift. We should be holding teachers in these venerated positions now occupied almost exclusively by entertainers and athletes. Education is truly the only way we are going to save ourselves. With emphasis on education, accountability and the Golden Rule we may be able to get ourselves out of this mess. We should not be told how to feel and what to do and how to be by corporations through their advertising mind fucks. Along those lines see if you can get your hands on the DVD “The Century Of The Self (1-4)”. It is a great documentary.

Those that know better must do better to demonstrate to others how to walk the path. Teach by example, and never be ‘too smart’ to learn from anyone. Some folks that I talk to, that feel that same way I do, and share this truth with others get discouraged because they don’t see their audience “listening”. Please don’t be. You can’t change people, you can only give them information. Don’t get hung up on changing people, or at least having them change in some way that is demonstrable to you, for you to feel validated that they heard you. If you said it, if you walk your path, you will be heard and seen. If we all do that, hey, before you know it the world gets closer to a true more perfect union.

Anyway, I have to return this soap box now. All the best.

MME: Working From The Home Office…

So, I set up the home office. Actually I decided that I should work from home at least a day a week and figured I should probably have a dedicated place to do said work. I have my computer here, I am all VPN’d in and everything. I have installed my tools, everything is set up and I am ready to get down and dirty. It is actually a refreshing thing to have a work place at home. My set up is sweet; I have two 23″ cinema display, flat panel monitors (put side-by-side vertically, like all the cool coding kids are doing these days). I have a huge desk, nice space, and my machine at home is virtually identical to the machine I have sitting at my desk at HQ. (uhmm… “home office”: read – garage… Hey, that’s how everyone does it out in Cali).

The first thing I noticed was that I am able to think a bit more clearly and my bandwidth for learning and looking up things for myself has increased quite a bit. It is all too easy to ask ‘that guy’ at work that knows a bunch of stuff, questions. But when you are at home you have to take the moment or two to actually RTFM and *learn* the information. It is true what they say, that something earned is something learned. I am feeling quite accomplished with my newly set up work environment. When I work in solitude I work more steadily, with fewer interruptions. I can take my breaks but only when I am at a good place, a cadence, in my work… not just because I am pressured to because everyone else is taking a break now. I look forward to going into the office and picking up where I left things at home and also being able to participate in company ‘stuff’ and necessary face time… the interesting thing is that working at work is now an extension of the work that I thought about and pondered and laid out at home!

I highly recommend folks working from home. It takes discipline but, actually not that much. For the unruly folks out there, take it from me, the novelty of not being in the office wears off quickly… so no matter what, you’ll be working. The upside is that you get to poop in your own toilet and make lunch for yourself in your own kitchen and maybe even step outside and go down the street in your neighborhood. These little things really do make a difference to the quality of life. Also, you get a better feeling of ownership over what you are doing… the kind of ownership you wish you could feel at work every time you disgusted by your boss taking the credit or actively not appreciating your hard work from two doors down. I used to work almost completely from home a few years back. Now that I am working sometimes at home and sometimes at the office it strikes a nice balance.

Things to beware of: Don’t stay out of the office too much and when you are in the office don’t let on how much you enjoy being at home. It turns out when you are not in the office that things may tend to happen, opportunities may miraculously make themselves available. So you have to always keep one eye open. I recommend not having a specified work from home schedule. Keep them guessing, this way it will take just a bit more energy for folks to try to screw you over. Hey, perhaps it’s the Brooklyn in me but, I never put it past people to try to screw you.

Anyway, those are my observations and recommendation. And hey, by working at home, you are being pretty darn GREEN (and you save on some gas money).

Tech: The answer is… Functional Distributed Programming

Okay, so let’s take a look at technology and let’s talk about where we are heading. Being both witness and participant in the technology revolution/evolution there are some fundamental characteristics I have noticed. Bear with me as I muse on where I see us going.

In the ‘early days’ of computing we were enamored with this new device, the computing machine that could do an amazing amount of calculations. The way we saw it was essentially as a great calculator. We used it to solve problems much the same way students use calculators for a problem sets (oh the good ol’ days, HA). Much of the knowledge and context of the problem was in the head of the user, using the computer solely for assisting in the computation. The next evolutionary step was using the computers to actually model problems. The user’s job now was to convey to the computer not just what calculations needed to be performed, but also how.

Programming languages were awesome. They allowed us to codify our problem in such a way that the computers could understand, imagine that! There are many different programming paradigms but this Object Orientd thing caught most folks attention. The dawning of Object Oriented program was a boon. Object oriented programming gave us a more ‘natural’ way of modeling the world around us. Today OO is all the rage and for good reason, it is a powerful paradigm for modeling. So what do we do with these models? Well, we put them into our big multi-purpose computer and have the models run. Even today we still look at computers as a sort of stage on which our models / software perform. As networking became more reliable and ubiquitous we have taken advantage of it… connecting our computers and distributing our software. I assert, the vacuously true statement, that ‘it is only the beginning’.

Today we are at the beginning stages of seeing computers take different forms. With the advent of laptops and PDAs and more sophisticated cell phones etc., we are at the burgeoning stages of what will shape the future of computing more to the point of this essay, shape the future of *software* and how we think of it.

So… We use OO to codify our modeling of the world… we put this model in motion on our computers. Now imagine that computers get even smaller and even more sophisticated, which they are and as they evolve we begin to embed them into our world, into the physical objects we interact with. Yes, the OBJECTS we interact with. When a model becomes THE THING is ceases to be a model. For example, say we are modeling a simple stereo. We would create our model by deconstructing it into objects that represent it’s constituent parts. Then we would have these parts sewn together in our software and run that software on our computer. What happens when the computer is small enough, and is embeded into each of the real-world constituent objects? We no longer need to model the object because the object is already there, tangible in the real-world. What we now care about is getting this real stereo to work by having the physical components actually talk to each other. What we care about is what they DO and how they interact. We care about their function. The actual name of the object becomes not so important, the partitioning of actions in encapsulated objects becomes not as important as exposing the actions to those who want to act on it.

Essentially the new shape of computers / computing hardware will begin to shape how we write software… and more importantly how we think about software. If objects no longer depend on software constructs to define them then the role of the software construct goes to zero. The key point of interest are the functions. So, in the distributed computing landscape, in an object oriented construct, we have objects that expose through “well known interfaces” the methods that they implement. The problem, as you’ve already gathered is that all interfaces are not “well known”. The problem then becomes a matter of how to discover the actions an object can perform. Probably a better way, certainly a simpler way, is to have one invocation mechansm that can be invoked that would execute some action. I know you guys are thinking what I am thinking… right? Well having functions as first class entities would allow functions to be passed around in an distributed environment to create the desired effect. Hence the future looks to be going the way of functional distributed programming. The evidence is already here when you look at these next generation scripting/programming languages that allow you to create enclosures and lambda functions, well the writing’s on the wall… we are moving closer to LISP.

Think about it…
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MME: Blog Pressure

It is 4:49 am on a Sunday morning. I am surfing the web and ran across a blog of a friend of mine that I knew from a while back. Though I have not spoken to him in a while I couldn’t help but be impressed by him through his blog. He had pictures and all kinds of blogs entries and I started to feel a lil’ blog envy. I guess I’m gonna have to get my blog weight up (and finally buy a digital camera). But I hate those blogs of folks that just prattle on about nothing… but alas… I think that’s what I’ve just done. Hmm….

MME: Huxtable

The fundamental goal in my life is live “Huxtable”. I know you all remember the Cosby Show… well it was shows like that and A Different World that really helped solidify a generation of young black people and give them weekly examples of living a good life. When I say I wanna live “Huxtable” it is in reference to living a just an good life enjoying the fruits of the rewards that come from honest living and respect for others and being tuned into the comedy of it all. Living “Huxtable” has become a term I use that serves as a pithy reminder of the virtues I want to embody as I live my life.

So, I am not old, but I am old enough to know and do better. When I look at the younger folks out there… I really wonder what in the current zeitgeist do they have to anchor themselves in the way that the 80′s anchored me. It is pretty clear to me that the culture in the modern techno world has become splintered. As there are more outlets and venues there are more things to hold our attention there seems to be fewer things that bind us. For example, when I was younger, there were only 3 networks on television and everyone watched pretty much the same shows, c’mon, who didn’t watch the A-Team! There was Saturday morning cartoons (you can’t tell me you didn’t watch the Smurfs!) and other shared experiences that as a group bind us. Many of my good friends in college that came from all over the country did exactly the same stuff I did as a kid and watched and listened to the same things that I listened to and it immediately gives us a connection. In the today’s world, I wonder what people find to bind themselves? I am of the opinion that we are niching ourselves out of any identity at all. Things just seemed a bit more substantive when I was younger. Cool people were really cool, and you couldn’t buy cool on a rack. I do recognize that I can’t really tell if the world was better because I saw it through younger more naive eyes or if our current state is imperically worse. I just get a strange feeling in my stomach when I observe how people now-a-days don’t really venture out and spontaneously make new friends, because they bring their friends with them wherever they go by way of cell phones. I dunno… I’ll leave it for your to muse on. I just think we are niching ourselves into the crapper (IMHO).

MME: On A Mission…

I am on a mission… I am on a mission to make a difference in this world, in a real and tangible way. I am on a mission to take my talents and somehow (I am working on that part) have it manifest the future that I see so clearly in my mind’s eye. I also want to share what I have learned, during my laps around the sun, with others. Perhaps these posts will be thought provoking, revolution inspiring, earth shattering. The kind of thoughts that will make people name streets and ships and children after me, mistake me for the second coming, have me be admired by paupers and kings alike!!!! Or… perhaps not so much. Suffice it to say, I am here and so are you so let’s blog!