Elves took over my house, cleaned, and took pictures

The listing

Yes, there's Kitchen-Aid porn in that picture.  Jealous?

Picture Day

Nothing like a deadline, I guess.

So, we've known we needed photographs of our house up on various MLS/Zillow.com sites, and our realtor scheduled a photographer for today.

Today?!

Yeah, lots of work had/has to be done.  We were up last night until after 1am, and back at it again this morning ~7am.  I had a Diet Mountain Dew influenced crisis of confidence at 11pm, but...uh...pushed through it.  I stuck my head in our oven.

I left at 9:15 to go to work, with Whitney still at it.

If you hear a thud followed by a snore, that's my head hitting the keyboard, asleep.

House is on the market!

So, my home sweet home is on the market.

It's been a long road getting here.  Whitney's been feeling the tug to get out of the house since before the housing crash (!), and she's been a steady force there throughout financial crises.

Anyway, so it's up.  We're supposed to be hosting a photographer Thursday, so it's been continuous clean/declutter/reclutter/clean/declutter since New Year's.  I'll give Whitney all the credit--she's got the place looking great, especially the paint, staging, and her attention to detail.

We're not after any specific place at the moment, though we have some stringent requirements.  Okay one: Must have a basement, preferably in our current area.  Given that our area is a huge limestone dome from the Orodivcian period, "basements" are few and far between.  Also, our water is hard enough to chew, but our bones (and those of our famous Kentucky Thoroughbreds) are stout from all that lime/calcium.

Proof: Sometimes, you need a Salesman

Prove: Authoritarian Decision-making is myopic
Assume: You work in a engineering-centric corporation with attendant corporate hierarchy.

1. Engineers believe no one is as intelligent as an engineer. (Dilbert's Razor)
2. Engineers view non-quantifiable job skills as unimportant (Scientific Postulate)
3. Engineers age and seek more salary, responsibility (That's life)
4. Engineers become managers (by 3)
5. Engineers often communicate poorly (self-evident)
6. Persuasiveness is not quantifiable (self-evident)
7. Charsima is not quantifiable (self-evident)
8. Persuasiveness and Charisma are unimportant (by 2, 6, 7)
9. New idea implementation requires persuasion (The "He who has the Gold makes the rules' axiom)
10. Engineer managers must persuade to promote new ideas (by 4, 9)
11. Engineer managers will be told 'No' (by 5, 10)
12. There's no point in resubmitting the idea; all pertinent facts were included, by definition. We were told 'No' (by 2, 8, 11).
13. Those in power will only see an idea once, no matter change in market conditions (by 12).
14. Those in power will not be given a chance to change their mind (by 8, 13)
15. THEREFORE: Authoritarian decision making in an engineering-centric corporation is myopic. (13,14). QED

* * *

Another way of putting it:

• Salemen get told 'No,' and hear, "Wow, thanks for talking to me, please seek to change my mind at your earliest opportunity.  And, hey, nice polo shirt & cologne, sport!"
• Engineers get told 'No,' and hear, "YOUR LOGIC WAS INSUFFICIENT TO CONVINCE ME.  YOU SUCK.  GO BACK TO YOUR CUBE AND THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU'VE DONE."  (Okay, maybe that's just me.)

::sigh::

Missing: Honesty -- the "Puck" problem

I can't be honest.   Not anymore...not since 2008, basically.  My honest, analytical opinion would hurt too many feelings and likely get me fired, or sued, or jailed.

Suffice it to say, there are things I'd like to get off my chest and express that I just can't.   That's hard, because my blog has always been the place where I did that, consequences be damned.  Well, these days, "consequences" includes four other people.

I've considered abandoning blogging entirely, in true "omit needless words" tradition, but I've resisted it thus far.  Dunno.

Sayonara 2011

Perhaps I came out of the womb worrying.

Pehaps it's learned behavior.

Luke 12:25 says:

⁵ And which of you by worrying can add a single ^[a](C)hour to his ^[b]life’s span? ²⁶ If then you cannot do even a very little thing, why do you worry about other matters?

What does this have to do with 2011, anyway?

I worried alot this year.  I worried about myself, my wife, my kids, my parents, my job, my church obligations.  And, frankly, I freaked-out.  Often.  So often, that yesterday and today, I talked myself through "this is usually the part where I freak out," because the triggers were all there. Self-awareness is all that I have sometimes whenever I see fear, rage, selfishness, hate, guilt, jealousy, betrayal, disappointment, anger, etc. building.  I finally can see it coming  and I believe I can choose something different.

In summary, in 2011, I stopped believing life was fair.  The church-y answer there is, "I'm glad life's not fair; it it was fair, I deserve death and Hell."  True enough.  Still, there's enough cocky Protestant in me to believe that Providence might shine my way.  Well, sometimes, that's just not going to happen, at least not in my time, per my expectations.

This is probably blasphemous to quote, but here it is (Luke 22:42)

⁴² saying, “Father, if You are willing, remove this ^(A)cup from Me; ^(B)yet not My will, but Yours be done.”

 God didn't want me to have a motorcycle this year.  He didn't want my wife to worry every second I was on one that I was going to die.  He didn't want me to have a new car this year.  He didn't want strife in my household.  That was my will there, through and through.

Things I feel He did want:

• My wife and I to talk and love one another, to be vulnerable.
• Me to be home for my kids' things.

The Good from the year:

• I got a new position at work, exposing me to more and more of how the Software Business really works (or doesn't)
• I got to do a campout with my son in September.  I really enjoyed that.
• I got to do a man trip with him earlier in the year to Bowling Green.  Great time there, too.
• M started preschool this fall.  She's growing up, sociable, never met a stranger (how'd THAT happen?)
• G began walking and talking.
• Bella really has the house looking great--new carpet, new paint, fixes for most of the issues that were driving us batty. Ready to sell (we hope!)
• Bella and I both lost weight.
• I got to attend the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference in Columbus.  What a fun time, and mentally challenging.
• I've watched two of my mentees go on to great things, both at our company and outside.

There's plenty of bad.  Reams of it.  Some of it was my fault, either by commission or omission.  Much of it was just the way events unfolded.  Mostly, I miss people, people who've moved on to bigger and better things, old friends and support who've moved to other areas of the company.  Some friends I just can't have anymore.  That's my regret, I guess, exiting this year with more acquaintances and fewer trusted friends.

There's a cynicism brewing within me, a hardness at how selfish and hurtful people can be, how extreme.  I'm beginning to expect it.  Partway through the year, I began to answer leading questions with, "So, are you looking to screw me?"  People move like a rote chess gambit, often.

Technology lets you forget all that nasty wetware and escape to a place of puzzles, logic, and order.  Except of course, when it let's you capture your thoughts on the disorder.

May you have a happy beginning to 2012.  Christ's peace and blessings be with you all.

Stream of Consciousness Randomness

Some things are stories.

Some things are not.  There are facts I remember about my idiosynracies and ticks, and those of my fellow humans that just don't go anywhere.  They're kinda just...there.

These are those:

• I once roomed with a guy D.E.F.  D had this curious Pavlovian response to riding in a car for any length of time > 2 minutes.  He'd go to sleep.  My other roomie once took him on a road trip from Georgetown, Kentucky, to Jackson, TN.  D slept the entire way there and the entire way back.
• I hate the blue ring optometrists use for glaucoma checks.  Basically it goes like this: They dilate your eyes, you can't open them for love or money, and then you need to open like a droog from Clockwork Orange so the optometrist can move this DEATH MACHINE towards your eyeball.  Really, it looks like a scene out of a Bond Movie, complete with bad dialog.  Only here the thing--it's not Sean Connery's penis they're going to ginsu, it's YOUR EYEBALL.  Usually, this procedure takes like 2 minutes at the end of the exam.  Poor Dr. Jones in Jackson, Ky used to devote 20 minutes to this and we both dreaded it.
• Supposedly, there's a puff-of-air thing they can do to check for glaucoma.  I believe this is a lie perpetrated by optometrists, cruelly giving false hope there will be no more BLUE RING DEATH MACHINE.
• Once something reaches a certain level of messiness, I mentally refuse to deal with it.  I focus my attention somewhere else, like a pair of shiny keys or maybe the weather outside.  This drives my wife nuts, part 1.
• When I'm upset, I fold things.  I've compulsively folded an entire load of towels without realizing it. 
• When I'm REALLY upset, I clean things.  I once reorganized my DVD collection at 2am while listening to PCHH
• I have an extreme fear/fascination thing with knives.  Once when I was 2 or 3, I got my dad's jacknife out and cut my fingertip to ribbons.  Whenever I see my kids near one, I'm sure the same thing will happen to them.  Yet, I like knives very much--my father and I used to bond over them every Christmas--and my cherished birthday present this year from my wife was a Ken Onion Chive by Kershaw.
• Segue: I used my pocket knife in lieu of scissors when wrapping all my gifts this year.  Yes, I'm unaccountably proud of this.
• I seemingly can't do household chores without music or a podcast playing.  This drives my wife nuts, part  2.
• I have a mental block about the following things:  Housepainting, Barbecue Grilling, Drum Brakes, carburetors, general carpentry, automatic transmissions, audio/visual equipment, HVAC operation & repair.  I'm sure I could think of others.
• People with explosive tempers and feelings of paranoia oughtn't own firearms.  I do not own firearms.
• Tempur-pedic isn't all hype.  Try one for yourself.
• As I get older, I find increasingly fewer things offer any escape.  Video games, meh.  Kids...sometimes.  Joey's gone this week, and I miss him pretty badly.
• My phone is like a security blanket.  Seriously can't believe how fast I got here from May 'til now.  This drives my wife nuts, part 3.
• I basically couldn't care less what I wear, provided it's decent and has < 2 holes in it.  #tdmwn

Death by Pound Puppy

When I was about 5 years old, my mom decided to drop me off with my aunt at her office while she did business in town. As my aunt worked in the District 10 Department of Highways in Jackson, Kentucky, her job was utterly regular and somewhat dull unless something extraordinary happened-->lots of overtime, somebody got fired, that sort of thing.


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 As it was the middle of summer, nothing like that happened. Anyway, my mom rented a VHS video of Pound Puppies and dropped me off.  My Aunt took me to the big conference room in the middle of the cinder-block building and plopped me in front of the television, daring me to move.

Of course, I moved.  I was a fat, indolent kid, but curious as hell.  The room was fascinating--there was a huge map on the wall showing the toll plaza at Slade, Kentucky, an IBM PC/XT with a Daisy Wheel printer in the corner, and the TV itself.  The TV was a pretty big jobber for back then--probably 25", and atop it sat this massive VHS VCR, pride of 1984.  I thought the TV stand was interesting too, as it seemed to have a hinge...

Yeah, it wasn't a TV stand.  It was a drafting table, jury-rigged to support the television.  I did a few practice arm-ups on the thing and by the 3rd one, it tilted at an unexpected 50 degree angle.  The television slid off, catching me square in the torso, and the VCR was smack in my face.  The whole works probably weighed 90 pounds, and I had most of it against me.  I couldn't push it back up, and I was struggling to keep it where it was.  Once gravity had its way with my (lack of) muscles, I thudded to the floor, TV atop me.  Pound Puppies--the episode where they had a dog from a firehouse who tried to squirt water on everything--was still playing.

That's right.  I was dying by bad 1980's cartoon.  Fitting, considering how much time I spent in front of the TV. In hell, I'd get the same, only it'd be "Three's Company" with me not realizing Jack was gay.

Anyway, I managed to lever the TV off me and plop it tube first (yeah, still playing) on the ground.  I gained my feet and considered my options.  Never seeing my aunt again seemed paramount; she wouldn't kill me, but she had an evil, witchy voice when she was pissed that made you wish for some stones to cover you.  I thought for a minute of running out and finding my mom.  I considered crawling back under the TV, just for the "he's not dead" relief to cushion the "You're about to get fired from a cushy state job" reality.

Don't remember how, but I think I shuffled the 25 feet back to her office, walked her down to see the TV, bore her hysterics on how I'd screwed-up, the bore her explanation to my Mom on what happened.

We did get the VHS video back to Radio Shack on time, as I recall.  My aunt didn't lose her job.  I don't think I spent much time at District 10 after that.

Outrageous statements on Java: Guava, Modularity, Build

I'm rolling off a 16 month stint as the sole proprietor of a Java library used internally where I work.  Yep, it was an almost unheard-of situation within corporate America: I had no project manager, no marketing rep, no support staff, no unique testers.  I was responsible for API design, test plan, interfacing with multiple teams, delivery, support, infrastructure.  The works.

In short, I loved it.

I loved getting to code 6 to 12 hours a day, every work day, working through design decisions, collaborating with other teams.  I'd go to bed noodling on design problems, I'd often get insight into them over coffee, then I'd have them implemented by that next night.  Most of the people I worked with were colleagues of mine from way back.  My only mandate was "make them happy," and take care of my own stuff.  I had a project manager for the first month or so; once he was satisfied I had my stuff together, the reigns were off.

(Insert maniacal laughter here)

Prior to this assignment, I'd had an uneven career path--I was a (non-coding) team lead for a product amid an unclebob-esque phase of bit-rot, mostly dealing with customer issues.  Then I took an assignment doing C++ / Win32 comm work in our driver group for a year.  It was a very mature subsystem, so again--most of the work was break/fix and stability.  After that, I hopped on a classic deathmarch project for 18 months, and did utility infielder work while trying to lead/architect a system on the fly.  I coded where I could, the largest piece of which was a small application written in ActionScript 2 (!)

Anywho...

So, I'd been out of Java since 1.4.  Right when I stepped out of my project to go to driver-land, they were looking at going to Java 5, with its myriad syntax oddities:


Also, having just come off ActionScript, which has the same root as JavaScript, I'd gotten used to asynchronous programming.  It took much pain, but I broke myself of needing a new Thread to do everything, instead learning to live in callback land.

That is all to say, my perspective on tackling a J2SE 1.5 library were somewhat fresh and unbiased, other than a deep-seated hatred for the Singleton pattern

Without further ado, some random ruminations on Java in 2010->2011:

• Yes, it's verbose and ugly.  Use Guava, and it's less so.  It's also standard, powerful, and runs everywhere.
• Logging is still a heterogeneous mess.  Use slf4j and it's less so.  Okay, that's a cop-out: It's still a mess but your library will be insulated from whichever religion...er...method your consumers genuflect before.
• Modularity, in a word, sucks.  I understand this is a hard problem that no one has solved satisfactorily.  Still yet, I imagine there's something more advanced than java.util.ServiceLoader yet less-onerous than  Spring, Guice, or (heaven help you) OSGI bundles.  I ended up combining ServiceLoader with a bit of hand-rolled setter injection (a la Guice) to manage it without requiring another library.
• (Nonsequitur) Git is indescribably cool, while remaining unintelligible to the untrained.  That is, I've taught managers and graphic designers to use Subversion ("download Tortoise...now click here..."); I couldn't imagine doing the same for git.  Granted I'm no Matthew McCullough.

* * *

Build.  Ah, Java build.  If ORM is the Vietnam of Computer Science, surely build management is the Land of the Lotus Eaters for Java/JVM devs.  In the time I'd been away from java, the zeitgeist moved from (deep breath now....): Ant, Maven1, Ivy, Gant, Maven2, Gradle, Maven3.  I probably missed a few in there.


Build gets its own section, because this is one where I can't make a pithy epigrammatic recommendation, at least not in good conscience.  Here's some ways I slice at it.

• Right out: Maven1 or Gant.  Obsolete given the others on the list.
• Ant: most mature & crufty.  Most Java devs can work with it, unless they've been suckling the teat of IDE for years.  Easy to do non-standard stuff.  Verbose, since Ant makes you spell-out explicitly everything you want it to do.  Ironically, then, it's not programmable unless you're masochistic.
• Maven2/Maven3: It pains me to say this, but these are probably the most mature and tractable of the bunch.  They move you into the Transitive Dependency (warning, math ahead!) world and simplify your build.  They also shackle you into the "maven way."  Structure your files, tests, resources, and build steps just so, and maven will make it trivial to build, test, release, document your module.  Need to do something novel, and maven will make you long for the "freedom" of ant or even makefiles.
• Ivy: I haven't messed with ivy too much, but it seems like a good compromise between ant and maven.  You get dependency management and transitivity, without giving up the control inherent in an ant file.  It has ALOT of moving parts to understand and since it's so customizable, it's easy to get wrong.  I had one top notch dev and one poseur (me) looking at an ivy file problem for three days before we figured out it was a missing '->' operator.  Yep, finicky, and the docs aren't the best, mainly because most people use either maven2 or....  
• Gradle:  Gradle burst on the scene recently, and as of today, it hasn't hit 1.0.  It's an amalgam of every good idea in the above, and dumps XML in favor of a Groovy DSL.  It's terse--not Scala terse, but small, and does most things for you, in the style of Maven.  The big difference: It's actually Groovy code, so you can put as much imperative logic in there as you like.  That's a double-edged sword.  It gives you ample opportunity to shoot yourself in the foot, and its free-form nature brings us (ironically) back to Ant:  It's easy to do non-standard stuff.  Dince it's not at 1.0 yet, it's almost CANNONICAL to do non-standard stuff.  (hope you enjoy reading mailing lists...)

That being said, one opportunity in being a one-man-show was I had no one to convince if I wanted to try something out, so I switched from Maven2 to Gradle.  My unvarnished opinion at the moment is, it's not ready for prime time.  As of today, we've had 6 milestone releases moving towards gradle 1.0, and each has been less stable than the last.  Milestone 5, in particular was so problematic that they pulled it from the downloads section.  

If I had it to do over again, I don't see the ROI in converting a working Maven2/Maven3 build to Gradle right now for these reasons:

• The plugins aren't there, or they're duct-tape & bailing wire bolt-ons of Ant tasks.  This is where Maven really shines: If I want to add a plugin to my build (say, Cobertura) I find the Cobertura plugin, I add it do my pom.xml in the plugins section, and it's there, pulled-down from MavenCentral the next time I build.  Gradle, it's not that easy, and it's almost PERL-like in its TMTOWTDI-ness.
• There's churn.  They're racing for 1.0, and they're adding features not just at the 11th hour, but at 11:55. 
• I happened to like the site generation & documentation features of maven, and gradle doesn't have anything to match.  Granted, I may be in the minority, as Maven3 ditched the default site stuff from core moving it to a plugin. Look, Pluto is a planet, Han fired first, and MAVEN CAN BUILD A SITE, okay?! /rant

Suppose, however, that you have a greenfield project, or one that's on Ant or Maven1?  Go Gradle, in my opinion.  You'll need to dedicate one person to learning "The right way to do it" so you don't end up with a spaghetti build.gradle, but that's pretty much the same way in everything but maven.  In maven-land, every pom.xml is equally mired in verbose angle-bracket hell.

* * *

So, there you have it, my (mostly unsupported) ramblings on doing a java library in 2010 and 2011.  Tools are great and I hope some of the suggestions I have above either help you or help you pity the sorry state of things before people had ____________ in year __________, when you're reading this.  (Suggestion: "neural programming, 2016")

Wow, the blogger.com interface sure has changed since the last time I posted!

Well, to catch-up a few things:

• My job title is now 'Software Architect'.  This is avowed to be one of the most despised roles in all Software, since Developers resent architects' unrealistic, out-of-date ideas, and managers resent anyone besides them directing their teams.  Yay, me.
• I had a motorcycle residing at my house for ~1 week in late June.  This was one of the worst episodes in  my life, and rocked me to my very core.  In a true case of 'be careful what you wish for', I lied and manipulated my way to take advantage of a tragic situation (my uncle's motorcycle accident) to come by a bike that I didn't really want.  My inner King Baby came to the fore in many ways.  I hurt everybody.  The bike left a week later, and relations with my parents haven't been the same since.
• Joey is now a Webelos II, the last stage of Cub Scouts before becoming a Boy Scout.  We attended the district camp-out at the R.J.Corman property this past weekend and had a blast.
• Gracie is now walking, taking 27 steps unassisted yesterday.
• Maria is now in pre-school at the First Methodist Church in Georgetown 3 days a week.  She's loving it, and seems to be flourishing amid the social interaction and learning environment.  
• Whitney and I are making the first halting steps toward selling our house and buying another.  This is possibly the worst time to sell a house since WWII, but hey, when you get The Call, one needs to answer it.  We already absorbed several huge maintenance issues with our disaster of a house by ignoring this leading.
• Whitney currently has car fever, and if you read this blog you know I *always* have car fever.  Current target de lust is a Toyota Prius 5.  Fifty one miles per gallon sounds pretty ideal for the day-to-day operations of Whitney and the kids, plus it would make my bi-weekly trips to Louisville cost 1/2 as much versus the Camry of Doom.
• Whitney believes the Camry of Doom has a terminal mold problem.  I can't smell any mold, which she says is part of the problem.
• Andy Rooney is retiring from 60 Minutes as of this weekend.  This man has been doing weekly essay commentary my entire life (1978-present).  Wow.
• My current daily car fix comes from www.thetruthaboutcars.com The site is everything I always wanted www.autoextremist.com to be, and has one awesome refugee from VWVortex, Jack Baruth.
• I ramble sometimes.
• My current work notebook is a 13" Macbook Air, with a 128GB SSD.  This thing is pure sex, and I love it.
• I hit an all-time adult weight low of 190 lbs a few weeks ago, at which time people started asking me if I had cancer or something.  I don't--the tests came back negative.  Basically, the meds I'm on increase your metabolism, particularly of protein.  In short, my body's been eating my muscles since March.  Since my last doctor's visit, I've been eating Cliff Bars and mainlining protein like an Atkins Addict, and my weight, muscles, and energy level seem stable.  
• I'm involved in an addiction accountability group that strengthens me every week, and if this were an anonymous blog, I'd love to tell you all about it.  If you're interested in details, please email me.
• We got a new dishwasher at home.  It's the little things that make you smile.
• I think Google+ is a great idea, but it's like a bar with no women--not that interesting. 
• I'm a twitter fiend.  Love it and the immediate access to some of the best minds in the world, particularly in tech.
• I no longer sleepwalk or wake up exhausted.  Yay, modern chemistry!
• I no longer feel the need to disrupt, destroy, or be defensive all the time.  Ibid.
• I still love my Motorola Atrix 4G, and think Android fits my mind better than iOS.  My wife loves iOS.  God has a sense of humor, what can I say?