San Diego

I went to San Digeo yesterday to visit one of my best friends. We ended up in a music store where I spent some money on sheet music. I also saw a horn there, a 1960s Conn. Of course I asked if I could play it, and being without a mouthpiece I borrowed one they had there. It wasn't really like mine, but after lessons with Rick over the summer I didn't feel nearly as awkward as I thought I would have. And the horn was actually really nice. I would like to have bought it, but I don't quite have enough saved up to make $2500 vanish on a whim. And I'm still a Yamaha man. Despite rumors to the contrary. I just need to clean mine. And maybe a new leadpipe... Or a descant...

I also met a friend of Rico's, I think a band director. As soon as he heard I was from Etiwanda, and from "back in the day", he got totally curious. It's funny how being there 20 years ago still makes me a celebrity in some circles. And he only really saw the show the year after I left. I chatted a bit with Amy and Mike, and they're shocked. Apparently the last show I did was one of the better ones, and some after the next one too, but they seemed to think that particular year wasn't as good. No accounting for taste, I guess. That was so long ago now... I only remember that it happened, but I don't remember it happening. The memory is funny.

And I took a few snapshots of the Fred Rogers picture I lost in one of my misadventures and uploaded the best one. I need to borrow it and scan it the next time I'm down there...

Acceptance

The end is known, even if the path is not. Even the flashes of rage and anger, and the volatility, and the pain are part of the story. The drugs, the addiction, the schizm of man, woman, logic, art, all are just footnotes, important to the author but not the story. It will continue until it ends. And it will continue elsewhere after that. It has, and it will. Always is always by it's nature. The beginning was when consciousness sprung into existence, fully formed, the Athena of existence. Always will die with the end of the world, leaving the universe to continue, unmoved, in the bliss of nullity.

You are afraid

I want to hate you. I want to feel like you are my enemy and must be destroyed. I want there to be some sort of Divine Retribution because you are fearful. But I can't. I'm too curious. Too damn curious...

I saw you decide two days ago, and saw the fear spread like fire, and I saw it grow stronger today when you voiced what everyone had come to believe. You found reasons, and you were compelled to state them. You were also compelled to point out my disappointment. And to prevent me from discussing my thoughts because clearly everyone agreed with you.

Of course they did. They made the same decision you did, and for the same reasons, and they needed your justifications much more than my analysis and understanding. There is comfort in the fear of the masses. And you have the masses on your side.

You also see my dependence on psychoactive medication as weakness. I don't know if it is or not, or if it is any more a weakness than living in fear so much that when you have a chance to do something you clearly want to, you choose not to, and use your fear and the fear of others for comfort.

It would be convenient if I could hate you, but I'm compelled to understand, as irrationally as you are compelled to mistake fear for knowledge.

Heroism

An interesting topic came up at lunch yesterday. Someone asked what exactly it was that makes our generation unique. My response was that we don't have heroes. At some point, someone else mentioned Steve Jobs.

This is actually interesting to me. I think after thinking more on it, what I really think is that we don't idolize the "heroic worker" anymore. We don't value hard, long hours as much, or voluminous output, or the personalization of work. In essence, we're the generation that has realized that applying linear resources to exponential problems just doesn't accomplish anything except frustrate the resources and annoy the problem.

So what does Jobs do that is heroic? The same thing Linus Torvalds does, or Mark Shuttleworth does, or any of a number of people who can lead intractable people to work together consistently for years, or to lead constantly changing teams, or even random collections of people never together long enough to bond into a team. They all are heroic because they don't do the work. They lead other people in doing the work. They delegate shamelessly, especially management and production. They have absolutely no fear telling people working for them what the plan is, and have no fear coming up with the plans and keeping the body of workers and managers focused. They have found a way to harness the boundless energy, talent, intelligence, and complete lack of focus and commitment that seem to be the hallmarks of this generation, and which will be the traits that finally moves humanity squarely in the new direction of construction instead of continuing down the path of destruction we seem eager to tread.

Inverse Meta Rondo

Form

Since running into some issues of concept names at work, and taking way too long to figure out even how to explain the issue as a result, I thought that spending some time writing and musing about the problem would be well-spent. I'll be experimenting with multi-post form as well. I'll alternate posts between general unstructured musings, and more specific and detailed writings on a few topics from past musings. In the spirit of being a musician as well, I'll call this form the "Inverse Meta Rondo". Instead of returning to a theme after digressions, I'll be returning to the theme of digressions between the theme of the theme.

We faced an interesting problem with Mercurial at work. It had been occurring more frequently as the team grew. Occasionally, changesets would be "lost". Then they would be found, remerged, and everything would be fine. I realized it was caused by nonlinear history merges, which shouldn't be possible, but yet it was happening. I initially spent some time trying to explain the issue, but then realized that there were more differences in terminology than I thought.

Ramblings on Abstract Terminology

This is my first attempt to describe the atoms of change management using connotation-free words that can be applied to understanding existing systems. Much of the confusion regarding these systems seems to center on overloading terms such as branch, repository, changeset, and many others.

The data set is the set of all information that is being managed by the change management system. This does not include information created by the system as a result of managing the data.

A state is a sample of the data set at a point in time recorded by the system. This can include metadata created by the system to describe the state, and other metadata describing the relations this state has to other states. All metadata is an optimization, however, and as such is handled differently in different systems.

The predecessor of a state is the state immediately before it. The successor is the state immediately after it.

A sequence of states is a state line. The first state in a state line is the origin and the last the terminal.

A state line diverges at state having more than one successor. This state is the point of divergence, and the successors are each the origins of divergent lines of succession.

Two divergent state lines can converge when one state on each line shares a successor. The shared successor state is the point of convergence. It is also the terminus of both the state lines.

Concert Insomnia

The orchestra I seem to have fallen in with played a concert this afternoon in Tarzana. It was really hot. And silly me bought a car without air conditioning. Wow. HOT.

The horn section was really good today. Helen was there, of course. Alvin, too. And a student from Long Beach who is damn strong. Definitely in playing shape, and practicing hard. Helen was perfect, as always, making sure to pick up when I'm totally lost somehow, and when I'm just resting. It's an interesting mix, with Alvin and I strongly representing the rabid amateurs, and Helen and Adrian showing clearly the benefits of regular practice.

Let me ramble a bit about Dvorak. As a friend, also a musician, and one I've recorded for, said afterwards, it's like listening to calculus. And as a performer too familiar with Dvorak, it's also like performing calculus. I feel particularly qualified to make that assertion, having studied both Dvorak and calculus extensively. Dvorak is one of the staunch post-classicists. He followed Beethoven, Schubert, and was contemporary with Brahms. He composed music with form being one of the important foundations. Except he also wanted to explore chromaticism and romanticism. So his works are long. And very structured. And very long.

And he never quite figured out that the horn, while amazingly beautiful, is tiring. And dangerous. So, as our principal trumpet said, his works end up being horn solos with orchestra. Need a sweeping line to underscore the Celli? Add the horn. Need something with power to darken the brass choir? More horn. And since the principal horn is, well, principal, throw it all onto his/her part and let the other three rest.

I digress. And actually, I love playing Dvorak. Hopefully I'll be playing another of his works this summer. And, this last concert we'll be playing again on June 1, but here on the west side, safely distant from the hellish furnace that is The Valley.

Dynamic Languages Flame War Fuel

Steve Yegge from Google posted a blog entry transcribing his recent talk given at Stanford. It's not necessarily formal, but really seems to capture what I've been believing more and more over the years. Computers and humans are different. They are so surprisingly different as to be mutually incomprehensible. Trying to model computers mentally is no longer possible. Or even necessary.

Because computers are in a very alien sense self-aware. And they understand our attempts to model their behavior better than we do. They are also unimaginably better at it because they understand their own "psychology". And we understand ours. But the two are mutually incompatible.

And computers are absolutely stunningly good at solving problems that our brains aren't even equipped for. Like calculating complex paths that aren't known until they've been traveled. Or determining the probability that a certain event will occur based on other observed events. Or doing absolutely nothing, then immediately doing something, and then doing nothing again. Without lapses in attention.

And since optimization of code is really just a mathematics problem, computers are great at it. So why try and outsmart them at it? They are provably better at it in every way. And they are absolutely useless unless they are being used to extend the abilities of human minds, and not just the minds of an elite group who can walk with them. Let them work.