Initial impression – I like the iPad. Let’s not forget how far hardware has advanced in two years.
Me and My iPad (Awful Photo)
I bought an iPad this morning.
I have a model with WiFi and 16 Gigabytes of memory. As most people already know, it doesn’t have:
a phone
3G
a camera (neither video nor still)
GPS
After only a few hours:
The screen is great.
This is an excellent televiewer.
There are many books I can download and read at no cost.
Watching videos I made of my grandson are worth the price alone.
The battery life is wonderful.
Speaking of price…
The ASUS eee - Only Two Years Ago
Here is a photo of the ASUS eee – the “first” netbook computer. It had 4 Gigabytes of solid-state disk. It ran a flavor of Linux and came loaded with a few free and open source pieces of software. The screen was 7″ diagonal. The ASUS made our mouths water, especially considering the price.
Price: $400
Today’s iPad has a 10″ touchscreen, runs some sort of Apple operating system with loads of applications, and has 16 GigaBytes of storage.
Price: $500
What amazes me is that the ASUS is from only two years ago. Hardware has advanced more leaps and bounds in only two years. There are other companies out there who are making devices like the iPad for the same price with more hardware in them than the iPad.
It is easy to forget where we were only two years ago.
This question comes from time to time. Actually, it comes more often than I wish it would. People are looking for one answer:
Quit now, write full-time, and you will make loads of money.
I disappoint a lot of people because I never give them that answer.
There was once a really famous, really successful science fiction writer. I forget his name, but not his story. He taught physics at a college and wrote science fiction in the evenings and weekends. He asked this question of himself often. His answer:
When my writing earns me greater than or equal to my teaching salary for two years in a row, I will quit teaching and write full time.
He followed that advice. In a few years he earned as much writing as teaching two years in a row and switched to writing full time. I find that to be excellent advice, and that is the advice that I give.
An oft-stated reply is, “but I hate my job. I will die if I don’t quit and start writing.”
My advice for these folks is, “find a way to cut your living expenses by a large amount – say 90%, at least 75%. Then you will be in a position to quit your job and try writing full time.”
An oft-stated objection to this is, “but I can’t do that.”
My final piece of advice is, “find a rich person who will give you three-years salary so you can live your lifestyle and write.”
The reply is, “but I don’t know anyone who will do that.”
Then we go back to the story of the physics teacher.
Sometimes I veer off to a story of Stephen King who taught English in high school in Maine until he wrote a book that paid several years salary in advance. Once he had years of salary in the bank, he quit teaching and wrote full time.
Sometimes we feel that we cannot do what we want to do unless we go somewhere else. Most of the time, however, we can do just fine right where we are physically. We merely have to move mentally and emotionally.
Find a job that you could do from anywhere you have an Internet connection.
Work that job.
Leave your traditional home.
Hit the road.
Work here three months.
Move.
Repeat steps 5. through 6.
As a government retiree with some guaranteed income and a desire to see different things, this is intriguing. What is “holding me back” is that I love to see me kids and grandkid(s). My wife really loves to see our family, and I don’t want to hit the road without her.
Ah, lots of wisdom there. I have heard that message from many wise people over many years.
Do you want to write a novel? Start writing one today.
Do you want to write a song? Write one today.
If you have a pile of paper and a pencil, you can do these two things right now right where you are.
“But it would be more inspiring if I…”
Maybe. The trouble is, if you moved to a more inspiring place, you wouldn’t experience the place you are now and you wouldn’t be able to write about it. I once wrote fifty-something short stories. Most of them were about living in Tangipahoa Parish Louisiana. That has to be the most not-inspirational place on the planet. Or is it the most inspirational place on the planet? Sometimes I confuse the two.
As a designer and writer, two of my favorite tools are the blank sheet of paper and the pencil.
I love a blank sheet of paper. I love to have a pencil in my hand when I’m looking at a blank sheet of paper. This is freedom. There are no guidelines, no rules, nothing in the way. I can do whatever I can imagine.
I start projects with a blank sheet of paper – literally with a blank sheet of paper. This is true for projects at work, projects at home, and papers and books that I am considering writing. I draw mind maps, well something that vaguely resembles a mind map. Shown below is the mind map I drew before writing a recent paper. There are a some lines connecting ideas, some sentences, some of this and some of that. It contains whatever I was considering at the time – no rules, no guidelines, just whatever I imagined.
And then there is the pencil. I can erase what I write with a pencil. I can also smudge it a bit, scratch through it, and do just about whatever I want to do.
I think these tools – the blank sheet of paper and the pencil – are under-appreciated. We have only had these tools a few centuries, and that isn’t long relative to the course of human history.
Let’s hear it for the blank sheet of paper and a pencil.
A challenge in systems engineering is tracing from requirements through design and implementation to testing. This is done in almost all development methods (often people do this without realizing it). I show a method of tracing that uses Microsoft Word features and link to a video demonstration of the technique.
A Requirements Verification Traceability Matrix
One of the tasks a systems engineer performs is tracing. The SE starts with a requirement for a system, move to where that requirement is met in a high-level design, moves further to the detailed design, and then to the implementation of that design. Further, there is a test to show that the implementation works properly.
Tracing provides an organized and systematic approach to ensuring that
The system does everything that people want it to do.
The system doesn’t do anything extra.
There are cases when we violate either or both of the above, but for now we won’t go into that discussion.
A tool that helps the SE trace from requirements through design, implementation, and test is a Requirements Verification Traceability Matrix or RVTM. The RVTM looks like a table. Click on the following link to see such a table.
A “hole” in an RVTM, i.e. an empty cell in the table, indicates that we have skipped a step or left something out of the system. Further background information on requirements tracing can be found in the Wikipedia article on the topic.
Make an RVTM Using MS Word
There are various tools you can buy to make RVTMs. There are also ways to make RVTMs using basic office tools. The RVTM linked above was made using a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet works as a display, but has limitations in helping the SE read the actual requirement, design, and so on.
A desire in many projects is to use Microsoft Word to build and hold an RVTM. This is because many projects use MS Word to hold all the requirements, designs, and test plans and procedures. MS Word has its limitations in this area, but still, it is the standard word processor and many projects use a word processor for just about everything.
A technique to building an RVTM is to use the Word table to hold the table. That makes sense. I want to build a table that has “click-able” links to the actual content. One way to do this is to use Word’s bookmarks and hyperlinks.
The following video demonstrates how to do so. The video was made from MS Word on an Apple computer using OS X. The same technique works on any computer using the MS Windows operating systems.
This video is posted on youtube.com. You can find it there by clicking on the link to the left or going to YouTube and searching for “RVTM.”
Old guys should keep learning. I like to write computer programs, so one of the things I am (re)learning is programming in Java.
I am spending some time each day studying the Java programming language. Some of my background:
I have written thousands of lines of FORTRAN code
I have written thousands of lines of C code
I have studied object-oriented everything for decades
Java is object-oriented (please no arguments from the purist of OO). Java looks a lot like C and C++. The concepts are all about the same. You have algorithms and data structures. Okay, now I have probably angered all the fans of Java. Anyways, some thoughts from an old guy looking at a newer programming language.
The computers today are much faster than they used to be
The computers today are much cheaper than they used to be
All the needed programming tools for Java can be downloaded at no cost
All the needed documentation for Java is available online at no cost.
One more point on freely available information:
I can type questions into a browser and find answers on the Internet.
For example, I can type
java copy a text file
and have a few dozen pages of examples to read. This is great. Which leads to the question
why should people pay money to colleges to learn this stuff?
Hmm, a topic for another day.
. . . . . .
For reference, I am reading two Java books from O’Reilly:
The FCC released its National Broadband Plan this week. Sigh, where do I start with this thing?
The Front Cover
The PDF version that I downloaded from broadband.gov has no date on the cover. Does anyone at the FCC understand configuration management? Silly question.
Go to the first line of the Preface:
The staff of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) created the National Broadband Plan.
This is a usual tactic in the Federal government – don’t put any names on the report. Dilute the accountability and responsibility by saying “the staff” wrote it.
Next we go to the first line of the Executive Summary:
Broadband is great infrastructure challenge of the early 21st century.
State something grandiose and obvious.
Follow that with contradictory statements to confuse the reader:
Fueled primarily by private sector investment and innovation, the American broadband ecosystem has evolved rapidly.
If the existing system is a result of private sector efforts and has evolved rapidly, why involve the government?
Include items that you are sure the President will like:
Broadband-enabled health information technology can improve care and lower costs…
A broadband-enabled SmartGrid could increase energy independence and efficiency…
Find ways to fund yourself
The plan calls for new funds – the Connect America Fund and the Mobility Fund.
Hide tax increases
The plan calls for new government services and new funds. The plan also claims that it is “revenue neutral,” i.e. won’t require money. If you are offering new services, you are spending money. If you claim that you are going to pay for those services, you need new revenue. That is new taxes.
Redistribute Wealth
Broaden the Universal Service Fund (a tax paid by some Americans) and keep broadband affordable to low-income Americans (a benefit available to some other Americans).
Grow the Bureaucracy
Create a National Digital Literacy Corps.
Use subjective terms
For examples, affordable (used countless times), robust, safety, clean, etc.
The Price Tag
Where do I end with this thing? The price tag. How much did this cost to w rite? What happened to transparent government? Why doesn’t the FCC answer that one?
Oh well, so much for a plan. This is all just too bad. The American taxpayer deserves more from our government. I know there are good, smart, caring people at the FCC. Such is not worthy of them.
Design reviews can be important parts of projects. At design reviews, we attempt to communicate clearly and minimize misunderstandings. There are several design reviews that are important to the success of a project. This essay describes one design review that people want to have but should never be allowed.
We have design reviews In the project management and systems engineering world where I live. A design review is a big meeting. People gather to tell what they have done, what they understand, their current view of the technology of the project, and what t
hey plan to do next. Other people think about these things. Work does not progress until those in authority approve of the situation.
The main goal of a design review is to reduce misunderstandings. We hope to avoid a conversation late in the project where one person says, “I thought you were going to…” and another replies, “No, I never intended to do that,” and the first concludes with, “But then this whole thing is worthless without that.”
Two of the key design reviews are the Preliminary Design Review (PDR) and the Critical Design Review (CDR). Both of these are misnamed as the Preliminary Design Review is about requirements and answers the question, “Does everyone agree on what we want?” The Critical Design Review is about the design that is to be built. The Critical Design Review answers the question, “Does everyone agree that this is the right thing to build?”
Another frequently occurring design review is the Dinner Design Review or DDR. I hate DDRs; I have seen millions of dollars wasted because of DDRs, and I urge you to avoid them and never listen to anything that comes from a DDR.
Allow me to list the events that precede a DDR:
We board a west-bound flight on the East Coast at 7 AM Monday
We land in California at 11 AM Pacific Time
We eat a big lunch
We meet with a West Coast organization from 1 to 6 PM Pacific Time
At this point, we have worked 14 hours. It may be hard to consider this work as we have been sitting all day, but believe me this is tiring. Our bodies are completely off schedule. The events continue:
We go to a restaurant and eat a big meal
We go to our motel to sleep
At this point, our bodies believe it is 1 AM and we are stuffed with a big meal. We don’t sleep well. The events continue.
We wake at 4 AM Pacific Time (7 AM East Coast Time) after three hours of restless sleep
We eat a big breakfast at a restaurant
We meet with a West Coast Organization from 8 AM to 6 PM
We eat snacks all day and a big lunch
We go to a restaurant for dinner and drinks
Now the Dinner Design Review begins. Let’s summarize our mental and physical state: we have worked 24 hours in two days on three hours of sleep and consumed large quantities of food and drink.
At this point, someone starts the DDR by saying, “I’ve been considering an aspect of this project and I think we should…”
I urge you to terminate the DDR immediately. Nothing good will come of this. What seem like good ideas are actually catastrophic. Interrupt the well-meaning but misguided chap by saying, “Oh I don’t feel so good. I need to go to the motel right now or I’m gonna be sick here.” Loosen your tie, unbutton a few buttons of your shirt, and pull on your belt for dramatic affect.
Whatever you have to do, leave the DDR. When you return to your East Coast office ignore any suggestions that begin with, “We thought of this at that Italian restaurant, you know the one with the red-and-white checkered table clothes…”
One task which many of us either choose or have thrust upon us is predicting the future. We usually perform this task poorly. An aid to declaring “the future will be thus” is reframing with a few introductory words.
The future will be awful.
There is no way out of this. We are doomed.
We will run out of oil reserves before 1995.
I have heard these and countless other predictions of the future. The third quote came from a fellow grad student in 1985. He had worked several summers for oil companies and had seen inside information on oil reserves. He had inside information; he knew we would run out of oil. He was buying bicycles and parts now while they were cheap because once 1995 came around bicycles would replace cars and cost tens of thousands of dollars.
As a systems engineer and sometime project manager, I predict the future daily. I tell people that our system under construction will be:
Three weeks late
On time
A day early
And so on and on, all variations of
The future will be thus.
I wish people would insert a phrase in front of the future will be thus. Change it to
Unless something happens, and something often happens, the future will be thus.
I know this has more words, takes longer to say, longer to type, and sounds like your are “hedging your bets” and every other bad indecisive quality we can imagine, but it is much more accurate.
My fellow grad student’s prediction from 1985 would have been
Unless we find more oil reserves, and people have been finding more oil reserves for a hundred years now, we will run out of oil reserves before 1995.
Many of today’s predictions of gloom can be reframed.
Unless we have a breakthrough in battery technology, and breakthroughs happen, hybrid cars will not be practical.
Unless we make gasoline engines more efficient, and efficiency improvements often occur, we will all have to drive hybrids.
Unless we have some true leaders in Washington, and such leaders come around every generation or so, we will never get out of our financial mess.
The last reframe above is the least likely, and unless we beat all the odds, and we tend to beat all the odds now and then, we may be in trouble.
Just a thought on health insurance from an engineer.
I see that President Obama doesn’t like what existing health insurance companies are doing with their rates and policies. It seems that the president wants health insurance companies to be non-profit and insure everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions.
Health insurance seems to be a pretty simple concept (at least from the perspective of a little-knowing engineer).
A group of people pay into a fund.
When someone is sick, money is pulled from the fund to pay the bill.
If a lot of people become sick in one year, everyone has to pay more into the fund to cover the expenses.
If few people become sick in one year, fewer funds are withdrawn from the fund and people don’t have to pay as much that year.
There are expenses to managing the fund and collecting the contributions.
A non-profit health insurance group manages the money closely so that money in equals money out.
A good non-profit health insurance group operates efficiently by employing smart, well-meaning people and keeps costs really low.
I think it is legal to start such a non-profit health insurance company. A good, efficient non-profit health insurance company would offer better and less expensive services than the existing for-profit companies and people would flock to it.
Perhaps President Obama could start such a non-profit health insurance company himself. At least he could use his position of influence and leadership to inspire others to start such non-profit health insurance companies. Pardon my ignorance, but I think that is what a President of these United States should do – state his beliefs and inspire others to follow those beliefs.
History shows us that it is incredibly difficult to pass legislation that requires people to be good. There are also many unintended consequences of such laws. Just a thought.
I invite comments on this thought. Perhaps the discussion can lead to someone beneficial.
