Is there a dog?

The other morning I was sitting on the train when "Castles made of sand" came on my mp3 player. It'd have to be one of my favourite Jimi Hendrix songs - I'm not really sure why, maybe it's the backwards guitar solo. Anyway, as I listened, I began to think of how the song rang true for me.

Actually, I believe the sentiment is universally applicable. Think about how much you value your dreams - the thoughts and desires you've cherished, secretly, in the dark, alone, hoping against hope for their realisation. What would it mean if you lost them?

Our dreams, those fantasies for which we yearn,  define us, set us apart from those around us. They give our lives focus and meaning, purpose, a goal to strive for. And sometimes the achievement of that goal is not as important to us as the striving, the destination subordinate to the journey. And yet, the importance they assume in our lives is itself a danger to us - focus can become obsession, all-consuming, replacing everything else we value. At that point, we allow our future to dictate our actions in the same way as we can surrender control to the past, believing ourselves the victims of circumstance rather than masters of our own destiny. And of course, when the castles melt into the sea, the loss of something which never existed becomes critical, a disaster from which we can never recover.

Buddha exhorted people to dwell in the present moment, to find peace within rather than chasing dreams. I'm no buddhist, but it may be that he was onto something there. All the same, the search for happiness aside, I still have dreams which I will continue to cherish. I've lost dreams before, and I think I'll cope with losing them again.

After playing around with Ruby for quite some time, recently I decided to try applying this to web development. A personal recommendation from a friend to use the Rails framework led me to take a look at this course:

Free Online Course in Ruby on Rails


I've found it to be quite good so far - there's a series of podcasts which are quite accessible, although probably not quite suited to the complete beginner. And nice to have some free tutorials out there...

At present, I find myself in an interesting position.

I have been working for some time in our public sector, in various positions which usually have the word 'Analyst' somewhere in the title - at present I'm a 'Quantitative Analyst'. This work I find rewarding (in general) and also stimulating - there is no shortage of intellectual challenge and I like the people I work with.

However, working in the place I do is not so much a matter of choice as it is of convenience. Living in Wellington, a great number of the employers are government entities, so that's mostly where I've ended up. Another choice I didn't make is which tools I use to do the job - at present I mostly use SAS (proprietary data analysis software) and MS Office (primarily Excel, also proprietary). These are good tools, and in fact they are the best available that do what they do. I use these on a Windows platform, and Windows is a good operating system, perfectly suitable for use in our office environment, but is also proprietary. Actually the fact that this is all proprietary software is the only real issue I have with this whole situation - but for me this is a real problem.

I'll explain. For the last few years I have made the choice at home to use free and open-source software where possible. Why? Well, it's just the right thing to do, to my mind, to reward the community who have contributed thousands upon thousands of hours of work essentially for the public good, rather than a corporation which focuses just as many hours, if not more, to protecting their licence revenue so that they can make more money than their competition. So at home I use Ubuntu on both my computers, although one does have a Windows partition - and on Windows I have made the choice to use Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice in preference to the equivalent offerings from Microsoft. Here's Stephen Fry, with a piece he contributed to the GNU birthday celebrations recently:

 


Freedom Fry — "Happy birthday to GNU"

Now this is my dilemma: while I use free software at home, at work I am completely restricted (and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future) to the use of proprietary software. While I have no qualms about the quality of the software, or concerns about its suitability for use in our environment, I do object to its use on moral grounds. The trouble is, at this point I cannot see an alternative. It may be possible to use free software in places (for example, Python and MySQL are potential candidates in the work I do) but the platform seems likely to remain Windows, at least for the moment.

So in order to resolve this, I need to either a) push for a complete re-think of my employer's IT policies (yah, right), or b) find a new job where I'm not forced to use proprietary software. Ah, gee, that's going to be a tricky one...we'll see what happens - Mozilla's hiring, I see...

It's been a while since I've been here *blows dust off the blog pages*. Part of the reason was that my life has been very full for the last couple of years. A new baby (our second), 2 changes of job (actually, career), moving (twice), buying a house, learning new things, meeting new people...

Every so often, I look back at my late teens and early twenties with vague regret, thinking of all the wasted opportunities, all the time I spent slacking - but of course that's all changed now. My days are packed so full I'm lucky if I get 5 hours sleep most nights. I spend most of my commute time with my laptop out, furiously working away, and then every other night I do the same thing at home for a couple of hours after the kids are in bed and the housework is more or less done...I'm no slacker now.

Or am I?

One of the guys I work with has been working between 10 and 14 hours a day during the week, and then coming in at weekends as well. He's kept this up for a few months now, on and off as our workload ebbs and flows. One of my concerns (apart from my concern for his health) is how this reflects on the rest of the team. Are we not putting in enough time? Actually, as a rule we are. We all put in a lot of hours. The thing is, when someone consistently ignores their needs and works ridiculous hours so that they can meet unrealistic deadlines, the message that sends goes something like, "We don't matter. All that matters is that you get what you want. Whatever the question, the answer is yes." Sending that message creates an expectation in the customer's mind which inevitably leads to disappointment and frustration, as overwork and fatigue leads to mistakes and unmanaged workload.

So ok, I am a slacker. If slacking means I don't sacrifice my entire life to a job which is far less important than my family, then I am a slacker. Don't get me wrong, I love my job - I just don't love it enough to allow it to become everything in my life.



PS Good to see you back

...hasn't it?

I have been a wee bit busy lately, not really much time to do anything significant on here, just throwing the odd comment around. I have also been spending less and less time using Windows, because (a) it's crap and (b) I just got a new laptop, which I have now installed Ubuntu on, and it is a beautiful thing. A few teething problems aside (the sort of thing you always get with Linux, finding the right drivers mostly, plus a couple of 64-bit complications), I find it to be much quicker and far less system/resource-greedy than the ugly hog OS Vista which is now a thing of the past. If anyone wants the disc they can have it (don't tell Bill though ), although I wouldn't use it for anything but an undersized frisbee now.

As a result though, I am considering (although I haven't completely made up my mind yet) migrating this blog somewhere a little less Microsoft-oriented. To my shame I have left my foray into wordpress untouched for months now - I don't know why I thought I could update two blogs when I hardly have the time for one. However, I think I'll leave things as they are for now, as I am feeling sleepy...

Well, I am so glad this day is over. One of those I would rather forget, not that it was especially memorable. Then again, those sort of days tend to stick out in your memory...

First of all, I had to spend most of the day (nigh on all of it) coding a macro in Excel. Mostly, I don't mind that sort of work, as it often poses a challenge, keeps the brain active, and VBA is mostly fairly easy to work with - well documented and reasonably straightforward to debug. Excel, on the other hand, is a delicate little flower which really doesn't cope well with any more than about 10,000 rows of data for any operation more complex than copy and paste. Which can be a problem when you try and import 35,000 rows of data and perform another 50 calculations on them. As I found out...

So, as I was waiting for my macro to run to the next breakpoint, hoping (while touching wood) that I had broken the steps down to sufficiently small increments so that Excel wouldn't crash, again, I was reminded of an "urban legend" that did the rounds a few years ago - it's always the way, I honestly can't remember where I saw it, but it's true - apparently when Windows was in its infancy, the infamous "blue screen of death" (i.e. your OS has just died) was accompanied by an error message, in haiku form:


Just then, Excel crashed. Sometimes, the bear gets you.

People are often uncomfortable with the idea of introspection - we use dismissive terms like "navel-gazing" and talk about people having their "heads in the clouds". I think possibly people who talk like that are scared of what they might face, when they face up to themselves...

Quote

Learning to Fly...

 

 

 

I'm learning to fly....

 

 

 

 

 

Aiming for the horizon...

 

...

 

I spread my wings...

 

...

 

I'm taking a leap of faith...

 

 

 

And lunging towards the unknown.

 

 

 

 

But the winds have shifted.

The horizons I aim for have taken on new forms.

The experience I seek is within me.

 

 

I want to fly inward.

I want to fly into the black hole that is my mind and explore...

 

 

I want to fly and swirl

 

Into depths unknown...

 

Into depths be thrown...

 

And by my depth be throned...

 

 

I want to be owned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I find this hard to credit... after all the soul-searching after Columbine, and then Virginia Tech, ABC comes up with a solution: WE NEED MORE GUNS...

Of course! That's brilliant!  Why didn't someone think of this earlier?

I have been really disappointed over the last few months at the disinformation and reactionary fervour surrounding the so-called "anti-smacking bill". That more or less came to a head the other day when I happened to be walking through Parliament grounds while the Destiny church was protesting against NZ Traditional Family Values in Jeopardy.

I personally find it just a little disturbing that so many parents feel so strongly that they wish to hit their children. Of course, the marginally more palatable (but equally disturbing) possibility is that after the constant misrepresentation of the bill by sleazy point-scoring politicos, demagogues like Brian Tamaki may have actually managed to convince people that the bill is about taking away the rights of parents to discipline their children.

Wake up, people! The bill that Sue Bradford is passing is long overdue. Parents' rights are not under threat here. What is happening is that the right of any child not to be abused (while the parent hides behind the currently legal defense of "reasonable force") is being championed. What is happening is we're saying it is no longer ok for kids to be beaten with power cords and cricket bats. We're saying we've had enough of kids being subjected to levels of violence that would be called assault when inflicted on an adult, and the perpetrators of these crimes getting away with it.

I've lost count of how many times have people said in relation to the bill, "I was smacked as a child and it never did me any harm." Here's where the problem really lies - there is a fundamental disconnection between the people who are all too ready to protest any bill that outlaws smacking because they "don't see the harm in it", and the abusive cowards the bill is aimed at criminalising. The horrific violence done to our young people is jokingly referred to as a short, sharp smack. Meanwhile, the children whose welfare is at the heart of this debate have been put to one side. Politicians and media commentators who play on this discrepancy to their advantage are at best confused about the intent of the bill, and at worst are cynically uncaring. Shame on them.

The first edition of the Humanist Symposium blog carnival has now been posted at Daylight Atheism.

I would encourage everyone reading this to get over there and take a look - there are some brilliant essays there, promoting humanism as a positive lifestyle and an answer to those who believe that people living life without religion are somehow 'missing out'. My own post of a couple of weeks ago, Why be good? is included there, which I find quite humbling considering the quality of thought and argument that can be found in the posts making up the carnival. I won't single out any as I think you should go there and take a look for yourself, and I must admit, I'm still working my way through them all! Suffice it to say, I think I will find a lot of inspiration there for future ramblings.