Right now we’re supposed to be having a lot of meetings using a mix of telephone and Internet for voice and video, screen sharing, all other sorts of technical goodies.
But it’s been odd. I haven’t seen anyone from the office online yet. No IM’s, no emails. Meeting is supposed to start but no one is around, nor is anyone calling me into the meeting. I pick up the telephone and start calling. Every line is busy. That’s odd. I call mobile phones, they all kick immediately into voice mail. That’s really odd. I tried a few people’s home phones (reach the spouse, ensure I have the right mobile number) and they were busy. Now things are just getting weird. Of course any attempts to connect via the Internet to the office (e.g. VPN) aren’t happening.
I called the company’s main office down in southern California. They confirm the other office seems to have no phone or Internet. This sometimes happens, so I think no big deal, but coupled with all the other inabilities to get through (e.g. mobile phones), I hit Google.
That’s basically the area where the office is located. So best I can say is this is the problem. So who knows how long we’ll be high and dry.
Think about the implications of this:
An AT&T fiber line was cut. As a result, 50,000 land lines were down, mobile phones are down, Internet is down. This leaves a massive number of people without any means of communication to anything further than shouting distance.
Report says that people may not be able to contact police. They are saying if you have an emergency to go to the nearest police station. Think about that. If you ever counted on the police coming to help you, how can they know to come help you if you can’t tell them to come help you…. again, unless they’re within shouting distance.
If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you can probably figure out what I’m implying here.
Of course, emergencies aren’t just police. What about medical emergencies? What if your house catches fire?
How are hospitals coping?
If everything can be brought to a screeching halt by severing one line, what does that say about infrastructure? Lack of redundancy?
How much commerce is affected? Not just our company’s inability to do business, but think about simple credit card transactions. I doubt those can go through. No grocery shopping, no buying gasoline, no nothing. Heck, I’m sure ATM’s aren’t working. Got cash?
And there are many many other things that you can imply by the fact that one line was cut and all this goes down.
Technology is great, but how much do we depend upon it? And how fragile is it all?
Updated: Word I hear is that this is now being view as vandalism. That someone maliciously cut 5 fiber optic cables. It’s created all sorts of chaos, it demonstrates how reliant we are upon such technology, and it shows how fragile things can be.
“We would never condone any kind of destruction like this,” [Communications Workers of America union] spokeswoman Libby Sayre said. “We didn’t do it this time. We would never do it.”
My day job entails working as a software engineer writing Mac software. I just went through an ugly experience dealing with a particular 3rd party API, so it was a welcome experience to deal with a well-written bit of 3rd party code.
Jay Tuley’s CocoaScriptMenu is a terrific piece of reusable software. It does one thing: allows you to add a Scripts menu to your application, and it does it very well. I obtained the code, made a few small modifications to fit it into our build environment, dropped it into my application, and viola… it just works. Furthermore, it has just about every bit of functionality and customization that one could want. I mean, as I was thinking about how to implement this feature on my own I came up with a list of functionality, and CocoaScriptMenu satisfies every single one of them and a little bit more. Plus the licensing terms are reasonable.
Thank you, Jay Tuley, for creating this and releasing it. Good work indeed!
Getting in the car with the children. It’s dark. They struggle to put their seat belts on in the dark. “Dad, wait… I don’t have my seat belt on… I can’t see the thing the buckle goes into!” My response? “Feel for it.”
I’ve been teaching my kids the importance of doing things by feel. You don’t always need to use your eyes, as you can accomplish many things by just feeling. In fact, sometimes it’s better to use your sense of touch, leaving your sense of sight to perform other duties.
For instance, the reason I opted to write this blog entry is because I was just doing dry-fire practice with my handgun. I was working on malfunction drills and reloads. Everything I did, I was doing by feel. Why? Because I’m practicing on keeping my eyes on the threat. I can’t use any other sense to mind the threat (maybe hearing) so I really want my eyes to be focused on that task. If I have to avert my eyes and focus to the malfunction/reload process for even a second, that takes my eyes off the threat and who knows what they might do the moment my eyes are averted. Thus I need to use my sense of touch to manage the reloading. Sure, there’s a small bit of peripheral vision being used for the reload, but for the most part, it’s touch. In fact, you can get to a point where you could do a reload with your eyes closed, because our body does like to naturally bring its hand together.
This also raises the importance of index: that something is placed in a manner that naturally aids your ability to find and complete a sequence of actions. and in this case, by sense of touch. For example, my reload magazine is positioned with the tip of the top bullet “facing front” so when my left hand grabs the magazine the tip of my index (!) finger is on the point of the bullet, which ensures the magazine is naturally aligned for the reload (no flipping the magazine around in my hand), and my hands and fingers all naturally come together and go to the magazine well at the bottom of the gun for a fast reload. It may be difficult to see in the picture to the left, but it’s there. You’re able to keep you gun’s muzzle between you and the threat, your eyes are up there on the threat, so the gun is in your peripheral vision, you feel for the magazine release with your right/shooting hand, drop the empty or problematic magazine to the ground, meantime your left/other hand is going for the fresh magazine, magazine grabbed and properly indexed, eyes still on the target, magazine brought up and seated, left/other hand racks the slide (no, you don’t use the slide lock as a slide release), and off you go. A bit of vision involved, but it’s all mostly feel, aided by proper indexing.
Another illustration of indexing is if you wear a folding knife clipped inside your pants pocket. Where do you want the knife to be? You want it as far back, as close to the “end” of the pocket as possible. Why? This is a known, established spot. You can hook your thumb anywhere inside the pocket, slide it towards the back of the pocket, and you’ll find the knife. If the knife was clipped anywhere else in the pocket, you slam your thumb into the pocket and then what? Where is the knife relative to your thumb? Do you know? Can you know? Is the time spent finding the knife time well-spent, or precious time wasted? Again, this is indexing. You can place your thumb in the pocket at any point, slide to the rear, and allow yourself to index to that spot where the knife is and off you go. The need for a knife doesn’t always involve the luxury of seeing where your knife is or even an ability to use two hands. And this isn’t just defensive use of a knife. Just mundane things like cutting open a box can go faster and smoother if you can keep your eyes on the task and let your sense of touch, with indexing, help you acquire your tools.
If you’re not using to using your sense of touch, if you’re not used to indexing, take the time to learn. Yes it’s a little uncomfortable to give up reliance upon your eyes, but if you force yourself to do it and allow yourself to go slow and learn and get better with consistent practice, AND if you allow yourself to trust your other senses, you’ll eventually get quite fluent. Being able to spin off other tasks like this to secondary threads (yeah, got my programmer-speak going here) can be a huge help towards more efficient processing and accomplishment of tasks.
Updated:Karl Rehn, wrote me a response to this correcting some stuff. I’m happy to be corrected, and let me share with you what Karl wrote. The words are Karl’s, I just retyped for formatting.
>> Because I’m practicing on keeping my eyes on the threat.
Danger Will Robinson. I have seen more people go down this wrong road with regard to reloads.
Learn to do the reload with the gun held up at nipple level, and look as little as necessary — but nobody that is good at reloading the pistol does it purely by “feel”.
Google “Travis Tomasie reload” and watch the video of his reload, which is the fastest ever recorded. He looks at the gun just enough.
It’s a risk analysis problem. The risk of blowing the reload (empty gun, mag on the ground, lost time) is very high. The risk of getting shot because you took an extra 0.1 sec to look at the mag being seated is not going to be decreased by not looking. Why? Because you are only reloading for one of two reasons: (1) You believe there is a lull in the fight that provides you sufficient time to replace a partially spent mag with a full one. If this is the case you don’t believe you are about to shoot, thus you have to look. (2) Your gun is not capable of shooting because it’s out of ammo or has malfunctioned. In this case you are defenseless until you get the mag in the gun, and what’s critical to you in that situation is time, not awareness. If the gun isn’t shootable and a threat pops up, there is nothing you can do about it until you get the gun loaded. You should already be using the best cover available so it’s not like you are going to stop loading and duck behind cover, since you should have ducked behind cover first before starting to reload.
Looking back at what I wrote, I did give too much impression of doing things totally by feel and involving the eyes as little as possible. My mistake. I am using my eyes, but I will admit I was trying to use them as little as possible so that my eyes were being focused elsewhere. But Karl is right. Depending on the situation your focus ought to shift to the reload itself so that you can ensure a successful reload, or the problem is big enough (e.g. malfunction) it will be what requires your focus and attention. The shift of focus may be quick (that 0.1 seconds to ensure the mag is seated), but still there’s a shift.
Being a software engineer I’m fortunate that my job can be performed anywhere in the world… so long as I’ve got a computer and an Internet connection. As a result, I’m happy to work from home and telecommute full time.
While there certainly are disadvantages to not being in the office, there are also advantages. IM’ing with an office-bound co-worker this morning he tells me about 1. some new computer that another engineering group brought into the office for testing something (dunno what, but apparently the fans are wicked loud), 2. someone had a potpourri thing in the office yesterday and it stunk the place up so bad they had to ask her to remove it. Ah, the joys of the cube farm. The sounds I get are those of my wife and kids working and playing, and the smells of my wife’s cooking. This is quite the advantage. 🙂
In pursuit of knowledge,
every day something is added.
In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.
When nothing is done,
nothing is left undone.
True mastery can be gained
by letting things go their own way.
It can’t be gained by interfering.
Translation by Stephen Mitchel.
As a software engineer, I understand that “simple” and “easy” are not the same thing; in fact, usually to arrive at simple is very difficult. Antoine de Saint-Exupery said:
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
We live our lives striving for more, collecting more, gathering more. Bigger, better, faster, more. Then how often do we step back and look at what we’ve amassed and feel overwhelmed and wonder how did we get here? Be it the amount of stuff in our houses, or the number of things we do in our lives, our constant running around and “having no time” and “being so busy”.
Strip away, discard. You’ll discover what’s extraneous, you’ll retain what is necessary. The simpler life becomes (or perhaps think of it as the less complicated you make your life), the more we can enjoy it.
Stuff From Hsoi 