/dev/null/kevin

Chuism: Wisdom passed down from my father.

Chuism #3: Political Options

This one is short, but sweet.  I'm just going to quote him verbatim.

"Democrats want to make the poor richer.  Republicans want to make the rich richer.  Both of them want to do it by making me poorer, and I'm supposed to pick which is best?"

aka, the lament of the ever-shrinking middle class.  Two-class system, here we come, America! 

Chuism: Wisdom passed down from my father.

Chuism #2: The Law of Pre-Fallen Objects

This law is subtitled, "You can't fall off the floor."  I added that last part, making this a multi-generational Chuism.  In short, it means something can't fall if it's already "fallen."  i.e. Just assume something is going to fall and put it, gently, on the ground before gravity does it for you (and less gently).

This law originated with packing stuff into the car.  When moving or shopping my mom would load things into the car and put them in precarious places.  My dad would take one look at everything and reposition it all so that the bouncy car ride home wouldn't destroy half of what we'd bought.

The law really applies to putting things on the seats of your car.  It just takes one emergency stop to send it all crashing to the floor.  Items especially susceptible to this were:

• Flowers in vases or other wedding center pieces
  
• Fish in bowls (yes, this happened)
• That tuna casserole for a potluck
• Me and my sister (pre-seatbelt era)
  

These days you could probably add laptops to the list.

I learned the "you can't fall off the floor" part again from my college drinking days.  Better to pass out on the floor than a bunk bed.  Just saying.

My dad, as dads are want to do, has passed down years of fatherly advice.  Some of it actually makes sense - more as I get older.    So, for the benefit of mankind, I will be repeating some of his better gems.  I even added a new blog catagory!  For the record, he is a distinguished hardware engineer at Agilent (by way of H-P), although I still had to show him how to use the remotes for his new plasma TV setup.

Chuism #1: The Last Tuna Can

This metaphor stems from living in the woods with raccoons who would knock over our garbage cans looking for food.  There would be a huge pile of garbage that needed to be placed back in the cans.  We would clean over half of the mess, but it would still look like a huge pile of garbage.  In fact, it would look like we had made no progress at all.  It wasn't until the last tuna can was placed back in the trash that the area looked clean again.

I've taken this as a metaphor for measuring progress of any task, from programming from weight loss.  It's easy to spend lots of effort but see little tangible results, and that can be demotivating.  The Last Tuna Can rule is just a way of reminding myself to not get discouraged and to keep pressing on.  The results will come if you don't give up.  The code will work once you pushed through the debugging, and the GUI will look nice once it's been properly skinned.  The home remodel project will be less chaotic once you've cleaned up the mess, and the weight will start to drop once you've conditioned your body to do so.

It's also a reminder that there are other ways of measuring progress.  For example, we would look inside the garbage can to see our progress, and that provided some confirmation that we really were making progress.  It is important to find something to help make sure that you are not wasting your effort.  Perseverance is good, but you also don't want to be a damned fool about it either.  You can only say "stay the course" for so long without any kind of results (yes, that's a jab at certain political figures).

Also, get garbage cans with lockable lids.