And now, a pet peeve of mine.

DVD cases. You know how DVD cases have those four depressions around the perimeter of the DVD that seem clearly intended to let you get your thumb on the side of the disc so you can easily pull it out of the case? Why is it that, nine times out of ten, there’s a thin plastic wall between the depression and the disc itself, so that in fact the depression is useless and you have to somehow hook your thumbnail into the little crack between the disc and the case?

I don’t get it.

Quite a few years ago now, a pen-pal of mine created the first personal weblog I ever saw. It was at the late “EditThisPage.com”, and he called it “The View from Dry Creek”. It was a logical name, being as he and his family were living adjacent to a creek with that name. I signed up for one as well, just to try it out; and not having any better idea and given that I live in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains I decided to call mine “The View from the Foothills”. I didn’t post very much there, and a year or so went by before I started blogging in earnest here at wjduquette.com. When I did, I decided to keep the name.

When I chose the name, it was with the notion that I’d be sharing my views on various matters. Recently, though, it’s taken on a different meaning–the images I’ve posted today and sporadically over the past six months are mostly, and quite literally, views from the foothills. Fancy that.

Paul Graham has posted an essay on how to earn a living doing something you love to do.

As it happens, I earn a living doing something I love to do, and as it happens I got here more or less the way he describes.

It’s Thanksgiving today, so let me grouse a little before getting down to business.

I’ve had a cold for the last couple of days. It’s not a horrible cold; I feel pretty good, so long as I quaff Robitussin regularly and don’t try to do anything strenuous, like sleeping. It’s a head cold, see, and I don’t sleep well when I can hear–or worse, feel–myself breathing. Last night it gave rise to what I’ll call nightmares of worry.

I have nightmares of worry every once in a long while–not nearly so often that I dread them, but often enough to have a name for them. They come in two flavors, one of which is, I suspect, familiar to lots of folks: the dream in which you spend a lot of time running around, trying to accomplish something for which the deadline is already passed, and you can’t find the place you need to be. In my case, I’m usually in school (high school or college, or something that’s supposed to be “college” but really looks more like high school), and I’ve just realized that there’s a class that not only have I forgotten to do the homework for, I’ve also forgotten to attend. And I can’t find the class room, or my books, or my locker, or my locker combination, or whatever.

The dreams I had last night were mostly of the second flavor. In this kind of dream, I’m trying to accomplish some kind of intellectual task–usually, working on some kind of software, but it varies. I’m not physically present; instead, I’m somehow interacting with a physical representation of the task. Sometimes I’m trying to make it do what I want it do; sometimes I’m just inspecting it to see if it’s the way it should be.

Don’t ask me to explain that, as whatever the task was never makes any sense at all when I wake up.

Whatever it is, it’s always very important that it be right, and of course it’s never right for long, and that makes me worry. And since I usually have this kind of dream when I’m only lightly asleep (because, for instance, I have a head cold) the worry makes it even harder to relax and sleep deeply.

What it comes down to is that it’s Thanksgiving morning, and I’m tired and sniffly, and if I’m not grouchy yet it’s still early in the day.

But, you know, Life is Good. Let me say that again: Life is Good. I’ve got a lot to complain about at the moment, but discomfort is relative, and it’s always easy to find things to complain about. Blessings, on the other hand, blessings aren’t relative. If I examine my life seriously, my emotional state consists of minor fluctuations on top of a huge tower of blessings.

So, without further ado (and congratulations if you’ve read this far) here are some of the blessings I’m thankful for.

• I will never, ever, be able to say “My wife doesn’t understand me” with a straight face.
• My wife makes me laugh.
• I make my wife laugh.
• My kids are glad to see me when I come home from work.
• AYSO soccer is over for the year.
• I live in the house where I grew up.
• My kids go to the same school I went to.
• The smog’s not nearly as bad as it was when I was a kid.
• We’ve got four neat kids.
• We aren’t expecting a fifth kid.
• I’ve got a good job working with interesting people.
• Jane and I both have family in the neighborhood.
• My two older kids were playing peek-a-boo with the baby this morning.
• Metroid Prime 2 rocks.
• I’m currently reading a Nevil Shute novel. (Pied Piper. Thanks, Ian!)
• Lands End is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, so I can obey the Biblical injunction to give no thought for what I’m to wear.
• I’m regularly in touch with old friends.
• I’m regularly in touch with new friends.
• We go to a church where we know all the long-time members and people I’ve never laid eyes on before know my kids by name.
• We go to a church where the faith received from the Apostles is still preached.
• Thanksgiving Dinner is at someone else’s house this year. (That’s not unusual, but I’m still thankful for it.)
• Jesus is my Lord and Saviour.
• Jesus isn’t simply an anthropomorphic metaphor for some remote, passionless, philsophical “ground-of-being,” but rather is the Living God who died that we might have life and have it abundantly.
• Pixar makes great movies.
• J.R.R. Tolkien.
• C.S. Lewis.
• Lots of other authors.
• VeggieTales, especially “Silly Songs with Larry”.
• Tcl/Tk.
• Kleenex.
• Lego.

I could continue, but one of my neat kids has just asked if he can watch me play Metroid Prime 2, so it’s time to go battle the Spider Ball Guardian. Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Has anybody tracked how the expression “Oh, the
humanity!” because a cliche cry of horror and dismay? I first heard it,
so far as I can recall, maybe five years ago, and I assumed that it was a
silly riff on “Oh, the inhumanity!” If anybody has any ideas
please e-mail me, as I’ve been curious about this for some time.

But any way, I’m crying “Oh, the humanity!” because Jane’s new computer
arrived today, and naturally it runs Windows XP, and I’m the guy who gets
to set it up.

For the last six or seven years, Jane’s been using a Gateway desktop
machine. It was bought as “our” computer, and was pretty ritzy when it
was new; at that time, it had the best graphics hardware I’d ever seen.
Jane used it for personal finance and her tax accounting work; I used it
for games, digital photography, and programming projects. We both used
it for the Internet. Then I got a laptop and started doing almost
everything but Internet access from it. And then three years later I
replaced it with another laptop, which I now have, and about six months
ago I started doing all of my Internet access from it. Meanwhile, Jane’s
had this crufty old desktop Windows 98 desktop with all sorts of garbage
installed on it, and lots of stability problems.

So, in the interests of conserving space, we ordered her a laptop,
and it arrived today.

Windows XP is better than I feared, in most ways; it’s certainly more
tractable than Windows ME. And the machine’s power blows mine out of the
water; it’s pretty sweet.

But there’s a bad apple in every barrel, and the bad apple showed up when
I started trying a copy my collection of digital photos (family
snapshots, mostly) from my laptop to hers…or, more precisely, from the
backup CDs I’ve been burning to her computer. Every so often it would
find a file on the CD that it simply wasn’t willing to read. I put the
same CD in my old machine, and was able to load the erring files…but the
picture was corrupted in each case. So either the CD was bad to begin
with, or the new laptop’s CD drive was damaging it. The new laptop’s
drive is a CDRW drive, so the latter is possible, but it seems really
unlikely. So I grabbed a couple more CDs I’d burned and checked those;
they had problems too. Ouch.

I ended up copying the pictures from one laptop to the other, 100 MB at a
time, swapping my external Zip drive back and forth.

All this left me with a question: was it the old drive, the new drive, or
the cheap CDR media I’d been using? So I decided on an experiment. I
took an unused CDR from the spindle, and burned a disk full of photos
using the new laptop’s CDRW drive. Then I attempted to copy the contents
back onto the new laptop’s hard disk. It didn’t work! The disk I
had just burned was unreadable. OK, says I; I found an unused
Verbatim-brand CDR I’d gotten ages ago, and tried it again. It got
about a third of the way through the disk, and hung there. I had to
reboot the machine just to extract the bad CD. Interesting, no?

That, by the way, is my primary complaint about the new machine and OS so
far–it doesn’t cope with CD problems very well. Of course, if the CD
drive itself is faulty then it’s not entirely Windows XP’s fault if it
doesn’t behave properly.

Now, the Verbatim discs are pretty old; they are 74 minute discs while the
current standard is 80 minutes; it’s possible (though scary) that they’ve
degraded over time. Also, some peculiar things had happened with the
first disc, and I hadn’t rebooted. I decided, I could easily afford to
destroy another disc, so I rebooted and tried it again.

It recorded just fine, so far as I could tell.

I put the new disc in my old machine, and copied its contents to the hard
disk. No problems–but then, the new machine had been noticing problems
the old one didn’t. So I put the new disc back in the new machine, and
again copied its contents to the hard disk. My hope was that it would
find a bad file, and that checking that file against the copy I’d just
made onto the old machine’s hard disk would reveal that the new laptop’s
drive was eating CDs. Then I’d know where I stood.

It worked perfectly.

So now I don’t know where I stand, and it’s getting late. More tomorrow,
probably.

In a comment in a recent thread on
the 2Blowhards blog, I
admitted that I was an
economics major in college. Michael Blowhard asked, “How did you manage
to migrate from econ over in a more lib-arts kind of direction?”

By the time I saw the question, the thread was dead, and I’m not sure
Michael saw my answer. So I thought I’d answer it here, instead, and
point him at it.

The fact is, I didn’t migrate from econ over in a more lib-arts kind of
direction. Far from it. I started as an econ major, and somehow, by the
time I graduated from college I was an econ/math double major. I
completed the required General Education requirement, but took no
elective literature, history, or philosophy courses. (I now regret that
I didn’t take Prof. Rick Quinones’ Shakespeare class, which was famous.
The chances of Prof. Quinones ever seeing this post are slim and none, I
suspect, but if he ever does, he should know that his Western Civ class
was a hoot, and I appreciate it far more in retrospect than I
did at the time. Ah well.)

Then I did a year at Stanford University, where I got a masters degree in
an esoteric field called Operations Research. Those of you who are old
enough will remember the days when you went to the bank or the post
office, and there was a separate line in front of each teller. The guy
who persuaded them to use a single line instead was a practitioner of
Operations Research.

And from Stanford I went to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is
just a hop, skip, and a jump from where I grew up. Originally my intent
was to do Operations Research stuff there, but after about three years
the scales fell from my eyes and I started doing what I’m still doing
almost fourteen years later: writing software.

So all-in-all, I find it amusing that I can masquerade as a liberal arts
kind of guy well-enough to fool Michael Blowhard. A lot of credit no
doubt goes to my alma mater, Claremont McKenna College, and the quality
of its core curriculum; even if I focussed on mathematics, it’s still a
liberal arts school.

But mostly, I think, it’s because I read a lot. I don’t suppose that
surprises anybody who’s been following the site for any length of time.

For some time now, Jane and I have been pondering
a quality that we’ve noticed that some people have and some don’t. While
we could easily agree on which of the people we know have it and which don’t,
we’d been quite incapable of putting a name to it, and so for a long time
we referred to it as “that quality that some people have and some don’t.”

Oh, there were symptoms we could point to. I have a much easier time
talking with people who possess this quality. They get my jokes. More
to the point, they can tell when I’m joking and when I’m not. They are
easy to talk to, because they are quick to see the implications of things
they or other people say. They seem to have brighter eyes than other
people. They tend to have a way of
looking beyond the surface of things from a sideways direction that
manifests itself in quips and
humorous asides. Usually, they aren’t benign. (I don’t mean to imply
that, being “not benign”, they must therefore be malign. It’s just like
when C.S. Lewis
says of Aslan that he’s not a tame lion.
Aslan isn’t benign. Neither are any of the members of my family.)
People who have “it” tend to be clever and innovative, and good at
solving problems. Not all of the software engineers I know have it–but
the best ones all do.

On the other hand, there are some things that clearly are not part of
this quality. Intelligence, to begin with: I know many extremely bright
people who don’t have “it”. And amiability for another: I know dozens of
very nice, friendly people who don’t have “it”, whatever “it” is.

But Jane and I were out on a date the other night, and as we were waiting
for our table we were discussing a person of our acquaintance who
manifestly doesn’t have “it”. And I happened to say, “And of course she
has no imagination whatsoever.” Jane agreed, and in a sudden rush of
insight I said, “That’s it! That’s the quality that some people have and
some don’t! Imagination!”

That bald statement probably doesn’t convey the depth of excitement I
felt as that word snapped into place. And after we’d gone through our
lists people of who do and don’t have “it” and had agreed that “imagination”
was the mot juste, I realized that I’d often seen the word used
just that way–in books. How often have you read about one character
who comments about another something like, “He’s an outstanding
officer–but he has no imagination at all.” It’s the ability to look at
things from more than direction: to move beyond the obvious answer, and
pick up the situation in your head and turn it around.

Usually when one person calls another imaginative, they mean that
either the second person writes fiction, or simply daydreams a lot–two
things the speaker never does himself. I’m not sure that imagination in
that sense is quite what I’m talking about–but perhaps it is, especially
the daydreaming part. But more on that later.

What he said.