The Definite Article

Over at MSN they have an article about how kids need time to "do nothing," unstructured play time that's theirs and theirs alone.

Then a pretty damning indictment of the modern conventional wisdom of parenting follows.

This led me to think four competing thoughts simultaneously. They are:

1. I wish I knew how to play a musical instrument.
2. Kids are much more resilient than we think.
3. Formulaic anything is never as good as original work.
4. It takes all kinds of childhoods to make all kinds of grownups.

I never learned to play a musical instrument, although I did give the guitar a bit of a try and gave up on it for reasons that elude me at the moment. Probably, it was complete and utter lack of talent. I do wish I'd learned how to play the saxaphone. That'd be so cool. Anyway, I'm forcing my kids to learn to play a musical instrument. My children will thank me for it later.

Those same children will probably also be like most other children: resilient. I expect to make a LOT of mistakes if I have kids. And I expect they'll be just fine if I do.

I'm also going to make a lot up. I figure that what I come up with might be wrong, but that's better than something formulaic that I don't understand. I'm not saying that I'm gonna ignore expert advice, just that I'm gonna use my judgement often rather than relying on the ideas of others.

Finally, I'm glad there's a cultural movement out there overscheduling their kids! We need all different kinds of adults, even fidgety insomniacs with lifetime learning disabilities as a result of childhood overscheduling. I'm grateful to parents who have their children's entire lives mapped out. I'm much happier competing against someone who comes from that kind of background than some scrappy guy who worked his way up from government housing to owning a chain of grocery stores. That first guy is going to fold within about fifteen minutes. That second guy will probably not ever quit.

Posted by Nate at 9:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (15) | TrackBacks (0)

I was perusing the great width of the World Wide Web and stumbled across a few heretofore unread pieces by my old friend Basil Valentine.

He talks about the importance, taught to us by Jesus himself (Jesus is Lord!), of the proper reverence towards food.

Amen, Basil, Amen!

Posted by Nate at 6:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I posted a couple of days ago about Hugh MacLeod's website.

If you mosey down to his post Flacked by Chanel?, you'll see that he's getting posts on his website that look like something that could have been written by the folks over at BzzAgents.

I myself was interested because I nearly got taken in by a corporate sponsored disinformation campaign.

There's a method for writing and deploying software that involves having a lot of the work already done. This method is pretty simple: you write a deployment platform and then host your applications on the platform. The various folks who vend this stuff are known mostly by three letter acronyms: IBM, CDN, BEA. JBoss, on the other hand, is a four letter word. More below.

Often, companies misrepresent the capabilities of their product. It's usually too subtle to be outright lying and if you carefully read what's written and construct everything that isn't written a more complete picture emerges.

One of the chief ways that I construct what hasn't been written is to read blogs and forums. Blogs, forums, Usenet News and IRC channels are a great way to get unfiltered feedback from the communities that actually use these products.

I did this. I got great insight into how various products work and was able to construct a rough map of strengths and weaknesses.

With one exception. A product that had substantial buzz turned out to have some serious flaws. The existence of these flaws had question marks all over them because there was considerable disagreement within the community. Both sides of the debate seemed, to my uneducated eye, to be equally knowledgeable and capable. Both were equally richly developed. Both evinced technical depth and emotional sincerity. Both were present in large numbers.

Imagine my surprise, then, when one side of the debate was discovered to be fabricated.

JBoss was fabricating the existence of a large, successful user group, a collection of technical experts who made their living consulting implementations of their product and an active base of competent coders who were willing to answer questions.

From a corporate point of view; astroturf organizations have been around for a long time and this is just a variation on a theme.

I would not have figured it out on my own; I'm grateful to some bloggers who gave their assistance:

Hani Page, Mike Spille and Rickard Öberg

Posted by Nate at 12:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (23) | TrackBacks (0)

Okay, so Hugh MacLeod is a monomaniac. But he's a good one.

I've been lurking on this guy's site for about six months and I always laugh out loud.

I haven't shared it with y'all because, well, he swears a lot and he's talking about things that I've tried to talk to folks about before and just gotten blank looks.

But if you'd like to read what Jesus Christ might have written if he was intent on making a living selling stuff instead of founding a religion and defeating the Romans, then this is the site to read.

Follow his links; it'll open up a whole world of blogs that are wonderful reads.

On the downside, it'll waste an entire day. If you wanted to go to Inverleith Park and play a pickup game of touch rugby, a blog like this can ruin your day, 'cause you ain't leaving your seat until you've read every damn post.

During the last two months, I was making a phat £300 for every extra six hours that I spent in the technology slave pits over at the ConHugeCo, PLC where my contracting firm has me pimped out.

That's outstanding pay, as far as I'm concerned, and although I might complain, I really do love it.

But at that rate, Hugh cost me about $10,000.

Did I say it would waste a day? I'm lying. I've lost over a week in there. A fun filled week, to be sure, but still, there are pints not drunk, conversations not had and girls who are still saving themselves for me because the one fateful moment that they could have met me I was too busy reading his blog.

As Hugh might say, just because it's an adventure doesn't mean you won't get crushed.

Posted by Nate at 2:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)