There is a reason why Contented Delivery Networks live. They survive because the internet is a betterest efforts medium. The internet will e’er be a betterest efforts medium, if only if because of Last Neutrality. If all bits are made and delivered on an adequate basis, and so there is no way to be certain that the bits gestating your TV show will be delivered with any Quality of Service assurances.

For some reason, every Internet bigot out on that point appears to cerebrate that there is some charming bullet that will heal this problem. There is a reason why Cable companies expend so much money on equipment and engineers to make up certain that your favourite TV show renders up when you interchange the channel. Those same engineers do everything they peradventure can to do certain that you make that show at the eminentest potential picture quality. Delivery is not just now about bandwidth allocation, there is an unbelievable amount of engineering that gos in catching TV signals to your screen. It dos work because those engineers command the signal end to end. Its deterministic, not betterest efforts.

Its for this reason I have changed state forth from the internet as the future of entertainment and am centered on Digital TV, whether its delivered by a satellite, telco or cable company. While its dependable that the companies proffering TV oft tread all over themselves and reach things far more hard than they should be, all of the existent innovation is happening on the Digital TV side of the ledger. Why ? Because its a stable, deterministic platform.

With digital video, in particular for cable and telcos, there are specifications and tolerances that developers can utilize to plan interactive applications. Satellite has unlike advantages in terms of broadcast solutions.

in addition, those arranged top boxes that keep to be kicked upstairs and switched out more oft than you switch out your computers ? They are application specific platforms. They are being built at the software and hardware level to take digital video and interactivity. Contrast that with the Windows /Vista platforms that most users have.

Cable has Tru2WAY , Dish Network and DIRECTV have their development platforms. They are not stark, but the feature sets are expounding and the application base and number of developers are dilating as good.

Address me sick, but when thrown the choice of making grow fresh applications for a deterministic platform connected to a specialty application box connected to a high-pitched definition TV with a outside control or a betterest efforts internet platform connected to who cognises how tight a connection to a PC racing who cognises what runing system connected to a monitor and a keyboard, I will accept the first option.

But thats only me.

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Jerry (no blog) has been evidencing us all about a process they use for consensus  [link from Michael ] building in some standards meetings… evidently the Quaker vote is treated everyone voting on each item as one of:

a) Prefer
b) Can accept
c) Can’t live with

The idea being that fair people will more rapidly come to a decision with they realize what people are unforced to permit and not. Looks interesting.

Several of us in my group are plumping off to do some architecture planning and I intend we will have lots of challenges around consensus – we may have to assign this to the test.

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The book startles out with the basics of parsing and even expressions and all that jazz. But the extent of the code is a bunch of screen shots. We are droping a line a parser/compiler dang it, we aren’t WYSIWYGing our way through life at this point, you have to render some existent frigin code. What you terminate up with is a bunch of screen shots of many tools for droping a line a compiler, but not truly the code, unless of course you proceed snap up the CD and come out all of the code without a lick of explanation from the book. God I go for the code is good documented with comments, or you simply bribed an issue of Compiler’s Instanced and this isn’t the Swimsuit edition. I’ll let in some of my ain links at the bottom, where I present factual code for many of these processes.

OK, so you pay off to meet a bunch of tools, and what do you pay back? Well, you produce a bunch of half-assed tools (good-for-naught for the language if your kid is learning my highly technical blog… In fact, if he/she is I could utilize some interns, must typewrite 50+ WPM and be technical at C, C++, or C#). A numerical expression evaluator is the first. I conceive it is ever the first. People e’er trivialize math. Thence make sure enough you view all the pretty pictures and render to harvest some wisdom from the text. I have a numerical expression evaluator by the way, it’s sent for calc.exe and from what I can assure it has shipped since 16-bit windows. He as well makes believe an attempt at a even expression workbench. You can’t have enough of those (really I’m not being sarcastic hither, I constantly apprize a newfangled regex tool), but and so he ne’er spells anything or manifests compiler technology that utilises veritable expressions. Does he come in NFA/DFA technology? Well, he does discuss it for a few sentences. BNF format? Over again a few sentences hither and in that location. But await, another tool is what you get under one’s skin and this time it is a picture of a drop-downward menu with all sorts of truly teasing names (convert from BNF to XML, exhibit a BNF parse tree, display arranged docs, etc…). At this point use one of the pages to get the drool doing off your lip, because that is as near as you’ll make it this book to anything nerveless.

OK, thus block the tools. At some point he really begins talking about existent compiler technology. I think around chapter 7 peradventure? I rattling should dig out up the TOC on Amazon, but I’m just moving to squander enough time on this book to eat up this posting. Anyhow, they start up discoursing the assorted parsing techniques. Recursive descent (RD), Top-Down, Bottom-Up… I imagine there are some other peculiar names they throw in in that location to pose the reader. After taking all of the major compiler design books I shouldn”t be mystified by something that could classify as a 4 Dummies book (unless it is something like Cross Dressing 4 Dummies, I could probably use that after my Halloween party)…  Anyway, they really donn’t do the entire process justice, and I think at some point some more tools are used, Yacc might be mentioned, and bam, back to the pictures.

At this point I want to identify the worst problem I found throughout the entire book. Plainly the author didn’t have time to eat up the code so they led a bunch of exercises for the reader. Nah, nah… You don”t leave the compiler as an exercise in a book on how to write a compiler. You leave behind bits and pieces, but not the of import stuff. Experiencing my Knuth books, I’m really stormed when he gos away problems as exercises that ask more know-how than what has been provided in the chapter. I don”t mind exercises for the reader, but there is a limit people. Ideate catching backward from Home Depot with a 300 page picture book on constructing a house, that had a bunch of pictures of finished homes, and some text offering up that the building of the house will be resulted as an exercise for the reader. Doh!

At the end of the book, it is ostensible I’m not starting to pay off anything of use and so it starts up talking about code generation. Oooh, something with some meat. In reality, they’ve been mentioning their nodes for the calculator in such a way that the name of the node was pretty often the name of the op code that was rifling to be named. They may have some Fast Introductory implementation code spits as comfortably, but I’m confused at this point (and graveled) because I’ve been fingering this book for an hour. In reality the act of spewing IL is in all likelihood deserving an intact book of it’s ain (oh waitress it is Deep down Microsoft.NET IL Assembler and you truly should buy this one so I catch 50 cents). That isn’t just because that book is really how IL functions and not how to spew it. But I’d remember one does predate the other since finally your runing to go out of node names to match to IL op-codes and when opComplexOperation isn’t mirrored by OpCodes.ComplexOperation I simply don”t know what you’ll do.

How fair of a review is this? Well, I’ve interpret factual compiler books, quite a few of them. I’ve carryed out my ain parsers and compilers many times for many unlike circumstances. I don”t think it is a hard process and I think extending the process to a more general development audience is important. There should be a relatively approachable book on droping a line your ain.NET languages, but this book is for sure not it. I’ll hold searching about, I take heed there is another book focalized on.NET language generation and I’ll have to look it out. Perhaps an O’Reilly publication? Can you catch an accurate review from something in about an hour’s time? Well, I register tight, the words were quite big, most of the content was entirely conversant and entirely about 30% of the page material was text, so I’d go for indeed. Get hold of this for what it is deserving, but if I learn any referral money for that book, I’ll cognise someone is runing low to be expressing joy hysterically when they catch that book in a 2-3 days from Amazon. PS: I didn’t and won”t buy the book. I passed a couple of hours at Borders today working through two books that got my eye when I was very seeking a with child.NET Localization book. I take to dig up up Michael Kaplan, since I’m certain he has saved something someplace.

Lexer/Parser/Compiler   Code and articles for unlike types of parsers
Lexer, Parser, Compiler, Oh My!   Postings, with code, on even more lexer/parser stuff
ftp://ftp.cs.vu.nl/pub/dick/PTAPG/BookBody.pdf  A more tough-core text on parser technologies

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Taking “On Going a Leader” has been really interesting, more often than not because it intimates that a central differentiator of leaders is the vision that leaders allow for, while others are contented to be aimed. Interestingly I have been passing a lot of time at work stressing to see what I should be stressing to do… I have been taking a lot of people to strain and infer what my role should be, but alternatively I should have been specifying my vision. Coincidently enough I’ve been working a vision document around developers as a core customer base…

Thinking about my career path is interesting. I began software development in grade school. I indited a math quiz program that we used for about 1 day in class. I composed some interesting stuff in mediate school; Snake Bit, a Nibbles clone – although at the time I was cloning Snake Byte, an Apple II program, and a GUI environment… although I may have indited that closer to high-pitched school… In high-pitched school I settled that I was geting into architecture and carryed several classes. Finally I made up one’s mind that I passed more time configuring and reading AutoCAD than I was learning about architecture, so I made up one’s mind to carry on down the software course.

I have fermented a bunch of fastfood/retail jobs, but the one of interest for this story is Waldensoftware. When I went out they had just been corrupted out by Electronic Boutique (at present EBX). It was interesting to view a brick and mortar bookseller like Waldenbooks execute a software store… anyhow, more on that later – the interesting note is that it was at Waldensoftware that I started talking with lots of software people. At the time Waldensoftware was a fairly book pointed store, so we let lots of factual developers in. Hither I encountered Jim Flippin. He was a steady customer.

Years later (literally) I had a call out of the bluish from Jim. At the time I was handling a mail order role spieling game dealing company (RPGI, which has sense plumped out of business). Jim proffered me a chance to interview at Microsoft, which I jumped at. I purchased a suit, and ushered up for interviews as a contract tester in the IT department. I scantily had the job… seemingly I merely received 1 employ out of 4 interviews.

I spent about 6 months doing work as a tester. I interpret books on how to try software, I published a newfangled front end to our test case management software and saw close to T-SQL (since we were examining a database system). During this time I amazed to cognise the development team pretty good, and finally they set about me about moving replete time and turning a developer. I questioned and stupefyed engaged.

Nigh 2 months later a couple guys began talking to me about begining their ain company, and desired to cognize if I was mattered to. After some soul seeking I resolved that if I was of all time belonging to do it, at present would be the best time. I have the least to loosen. Therefore, I fall by the wayside Microsoft and brought together Versametrix – although we didn’t remember that name for another week or thence. Curiously enough, that was a couple months before my wedding… gratuitous to suppose, my wife-to-be’s family was a tad bit concerned about me hiting off on my ain.

We spent about 5 months coifing some pretty tough core development. We were working up a relational OLAP system and I was the basal coder. I wrote in IDL, C++, VB, and some Java – although Java was somewhat newfangled, and we weren’t to sure where that would get going. We all the same had a lot of contacts in at Microsoft and we began to hear about some newfangled developments in the OLAP space that Microsoft was runing low to be coming. We caught a bit marked, determined that we couldn’t in truth trade our software to people if we didn’t think it would last for years, and in the end I determined to return to Microsoft. Of course, with hindsight, I can fancy that not a great deal came of the MS OLAP solution, and we could have vied fairly easily. Still, I was well-chosen to return to Microsoft, as I found that I in truth escaped the company.

I came in backward to MSFT as a developer in developer division working at controls in the Ocular Introductory group. It was left over… when I resulted MS I was precisely startling as a developer, when I came back I was realized as a junior (but not unripe) developer. The people at MS in truth esteemed that I commenced my ain company, and the experience of performing it chiped in me a lot of credibility that college takes didn’t have. (did I remark that during my first turn at MS was when I adjudicated to overleap out of college?)

In any event, the controls team split, I worked at Ironwood – which so got WFC, Microsoft’s Windows Foundation Classes, a Win32 library for Java that shipped in Ocular J++ 6.0. That was an astonishing time. We had a peachy little team working under a vast deadline. The team had in the beginning game AWT, but we were ineffectual to bring forth somewhat performant code and the AWT stuff was exactly too circumscribed. We passed some time looking into AFC (another Microsoft Java library). That was feature deep, but was amazingly dull and tough to establish tools on. In the end we resolved to make our ain framework. I suppose “we”, but I had no part in the decision. I was just on for the ride at that point.

After we embarked VJ6 (and so had Sun process us, make said, called back product, etc, etc) the bulk of the WFC team moved onto working on the.NET project. At that time it didn’t have much of a name or identity. There was a lot of interesting discussions plumping on about frameworks and runtime libraries (like a newfangled practical machine for VB, etc.). The WFC team was part of the VB team at the time, and we had a hale young branch added to the WFC team that was revolved about server development.

After a reorg or two, we terminated up uniting a bunch of teams, and displacing over into what would turn the.NET Developer Platform (NDP) team. We had two independent pieces, the Framework team (FX) and the Runtime team (CLR). The WFC/Server team turned the web services, diagnostics, server process, etc, team… fundamentally a collection of feature teams on the FX team, while the WFC team turned the WinForms team. We contributed the ASP.NET team, Net classes library (NCL), and the Base class library (BCL) team finally.

We sent.NET Framework 1.0 with a bang… well, a really farseeing bang. One that started in 2000 at the PDC when we embarked Beta 1, but gave way on for a farsighted time as we embarked at long last in February 2002. Near the end of the V1 schedule I moved from a development lead on the team to a development manager – generally because I assume’t intend anyone else needed the job . I was grappling a team of 40 people through a monolithic security push during the net 4 months of the product. It was a really fun and ambitious task. Once we completed, I resolved to move backward to being a expert contributor alternatively of a manager, and was volunteered an architect position on the new organised.NET Client team.

A couple of interesting notes – Microsoft loves reorgs. We shake up teams all the time. I conceive it is one of the strengths of the company. When we completed.NET 1.0 we had it off that we wanted to focalize more on customers, and the developing size of the framework. So we made disjoined product units for the server portions of the framework (ASP.NET) and the client portions (.NET Client). In addition, we displaced a big team that was working in incubation mode into the NDP group. This is the team that has since brought forth all the GXA specs, and is labouring web services for Microsoft.

The second interesting note is more of a sidebar: the title of Architect. I’m not sure how other companies process this, but at Microsoft it is a kind of religion. There are immense proponents of architects and people that call up they are downy large sky thinkers that can’t ship anything to deliver their lives. Actual product team architects are somewhat uncommon – in all likelihood less that 5% of any development organization. I had ever desired to be an architect as a career goal – but I ever saw it as something far off in the ether. I viewed someone like Anders Heljsberg as what an architect rattling was. This is someone that could send product, has produced multiple languages in his career, and can enamour an audience of any size. I find that although I eventually caught the architect title, I was very very much an apprentice. I go for that in another 10 or 15 years I can quantify up to someone like Anders, Dave Cutler, Ray Ozzie, or any of the other architects in the industry.

After some time doing work as an architect on the Client team, I resolved to displace over to the core Windows Client Platform team. This group was working the next generation of client presentation technologies (I obviate the word “UI” because of inner bickering between the “Document” folks and “UI” folks…). Hither I began to rattling get under one’s skin a feel for how little of Microsoft I rattling cognised just about.

Anyhow, that is it, in a rather big nutshell. Hither I baby-sit as an architect in the Windows Client Platform team, stock-still an apprentice. Attempting to enter out what I should do. I’ve been with Microsoft for over 6 years at present. I stock-still find like a newbi. My late introduction to blogs and the rest of the industry has induced be very cognizant of the “ivory tower” that people e’er incriminate Microsoft of bing in.

My first and largest passion has been geting word. When I for the first time began the opportunity to interview at Microsoft I was enjoined this was a job working with SQL. So I ran out and greased one’s palms a book on T-SQL and learnt myself as much as I could over the weekend. I am continually confronted with newfangled opportunities to learn about things and I enjoy it!

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Why, oh why, did Radio adjudicate that an HTML page was the way to follow up a client application?? I have mislaid 2 big entries so far with Radio… once I intrusted the “sin” of snaping an icon on my desktop… IE navigated to that page, my entry was run… just at present, I unexpectedly snaped the back button on my mouse, boom! another entry run.

Paid that Radio is a “sassy client” application (being that it gos a all over WEB SERVER) on my machine, why couldn’t they really drop a line a existent client application to do editing?

Oh well… i real require to drop a line my ain blog authoring tool…

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Robert Rebholz is not but my boss*, he is besides my muse, ideologic sparring partner, change ego, and mentor. Bob is possesed by a extra kind of genius, with a sort of Jeffersonian breadth and intensity that haves it a pleasure and honor to collaborate with him, on a day-to-day basis. In my opinion, Bob is one of two people on Earth who can speak around the BIG idea that is Claimspace , with out-and-out confidence, competence, and credibility. If you have yet a reaching interest in on-line communities of practice, folksonomies , reputation systems, credibility, identity, recommendation systems, rewards, “course”, collaborative filtering, “societal search”, & interrelated areas, I promote you to sign to my RSS feed and Bob’s RSS feed.

Yesterday, Bob mailed an fantabulous post about Claimspace  that wades into the wide river of uses that it might one day support, for both users and “community owners”, across the Web. He quotes the coming after potential utilizes:

• “Tenacious tail recognition system”
• Solution to the “Who can I swear? issue”
• “Vulgarized canvassing mechanism” (and portable)

• “A bare REST API gives everyone (and I intend everyone — the mashup possibilities are exactly floundering — caveat, preserve the crawl, walk, execute idea in mind) the ability habituate the data in a manner best suited to their needs: community (MVP or other influencer) reward programs, product design input, product feature voting, taping prioritization, and on and on and on, all without a ton of custom code. Any Digg-like application would enjoy this kind of data. Can you envisage – red-hotest claims, red-hotest people cooking claims, most employed claims, novelest claims, by product, by solution area, by geographic region, and the list runs on.”

• Finally but not leastly… Bob describes the possibility of utilizing Claimspace as a bizarro substitute for a traditional, taxonomically gimped, binary choice or n-scale scabing system, which he keies thus: “Claims can be made and applied by anyone, including the people hosting the community. They could be worked up right into the forums application, for instance, to keep going assertions or laies claim such as “was this post helpful”, or “this post resolves the question enquired”. A library team could, for instance, make several received claims (a claim/assertion taxonomy) that relate to the quality or usefulness of the carryed library content.”

Alas, it is lawful. Perversion will come.

Alas, we must accomodate the taxonomy-doers and guide them to the right-hand path, if we can. But Claimspace is a folksonomy.

In person, I trust that the taxonomy-doers will add up to project the futility of their ways and that if they don”t, they will lose the vast majority of their customers, over time. For example, if Typepad forbids xClaims and Blogger leaves them, Typepad operates the risk of working Blogger seem to be a much better blogging platform than it in reality is, proportional to Typepad .

It’s charming and prosperous to levy one’s way of thinking on others; to divest one’s minions or customers of the ability to manipulate the means by which resources of their creation are printed, organised, seen, and evaluated by other people. The organization of information, access to publication mechanisms, and permission to reference, annotate, edit, and other than change the organization or substance of information resources or its metadata, both on-line and offline has ALWAYS been nearly and enviously defended. Those who keep in line ”the tree” of information control you. The taxonomy-doers gain personal benefits from that control, frequently at our expense and ofttimes, in the absence of compensatory benefits. In many cases, taxonomies are so helpful. But Claimspace is planed and is being grown in the first place as a “folksonomical” resource scabing system. As such, Claimspace has the likely to be medium of societal evaluation that authorizes the little people: you, me and millions of other self-publishers, to clear recognition and judge credibility, on our terms, sort of than in a way that is purely and uniformly defined by AOL or Microsoft or O’Reilly or Yahoo or Google.

Are you subscribed this blog ?

*Mention that this is the first time I’ve brought up Bob, in my blog. Talking about one’s boss in a public forum is catchy, both socially (wrt personal credibility) and from a career perspective. Notwithstanding, I find that Bob’s ideas merit your recognition, as they command my attention and respect, and not simply because he fronts like Zod.

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WPF’s MediaElement makes simple media playback pretty straightforward, but moving beyond the simple scenarios can sometimes raise surprising challenges. For example, I recently saw someone tripped up by the MediaElement when attempting to play several sounds concurrently.

As you’ll see, one solution would have been to use MediaPlayer instead of MediaElement. The difference between these WPF classes is fairly straightforward. MediaPlayer is the class that knows how to play media files – both video and audio. MediaElement is a wrapper around MediaPlayer that provides a simple way to connect it into a visual tree (i.e. a user interface), which in turn lets us hook it into things like the animation system or event triggers.

(Note: do not be misled by the class name. Although WPF and Windows Media Player depend on the same infrastructure for media decoding, the MediaPlayer class is not a wrapper around the Windows Media Player control. While they share codecs, the path by which decoded video gets onto the screen in WPF is significantly different from Windows Media Player.)

How would that get you into trouble when using MediaElement? If it’s a wrapper around MediaPlayer, surely you could use a MediaElement any place a MediaPlayer would work? In fact it’s not always that simple. To see why, we’ll start with a simple example.

One MediaElement

The simplest way to use MediaElement is to add it to a UI and point it at a media file:

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<Window x:Class="MediaPlayback.Window1"
  xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
  xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
  Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300">

 <MediaElement Source="file:///c:/windows/media/tada.wav" />

</Window>

This will play the file soon as the UI loads. If you want a bit more control, you can tell it to wait until you’re ready:

<MediaElement x:Name="audioPlayer"
 Source="file:///c:/windows/media/tada.wav"
 LoadedBehavior="Manual" />

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It’ll now hold off until you call audioPlayer.Play().

This approach is also often sufficient for playing multiple different sounds. you can change the Source property and call Play again. However, if you want to play multiple sounds simultaneously, this approach doesn’t work – setting the Source will stop playback if it is in progress. A single MediaElement or MediaPlayer can only play one thing at a time.

That’s OK, because we can always create multiple MediaElements.

Multiple MediaElements

Modifying the example above simply by adding multiple MediaElements to the Window will stop the Xaml from compiling, because Window can have only a single direct descendant. So we need to find something to hold the MediaElements. And this is where the example I saw tripped up: the developer put them into the UI’s Resources section.

On the face of it, this was a perfectly reasonable thing to do – the elements are all playing audio, so it doesn’t seem like they should need to be part of the visual tree, so why not make them resources? After all, WPF’s resource mechanism is designed to hold useful objects, right?

Well this is where the difference between MediaPlayer and MediaElement becomes important. Remember, the distinction is that MediaElement connects media playback into a visual tree. And it turns out that until it makes that connection, MediaElement won’t play the media. That makes sense for video – you don’t want that to start playing before you can see it. But while you might think a connection with the visual tree would be optional for audio, MediaElement sees it differently. (And there are reasons for that. For example, MediaElement can synchronize media playback with timelines of animations in the visual tree.)

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So in this case, the extra functionality provided by the wrapper has worked against us.

One solution is simply to give the MediaElement what it wants. As long as we put it into the visual tree, it’s happy. So we can put the elements into a layout panel such as a Grid or Canvas:

<Canvas>
 <MediaElement x:Name="mediaElem1"
  Source="file:///c:/windows/media/tada.wav"
  LoadedBehavior="Manual" />
 <MediaElement x:Name="mediaElem2"
  Source="file:///c:/windows/media/Windows Logoff Sound.wav"
  LoadedBehavior="Manual" />
</Canvas>

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The other approach is to go straight for the MediaPlayer – if we have no need for the visual tree integration features MediaElement offers, we may as well go straight to the underlying player. The only snag is that you can’t initialize MediaPlayer from Xaml – you must use the Open method to point it at the media file, and Xaml doesn’t do method calls. But it’s not a huge amount of effort:

MediaPlayer mp = new MediaPlayer();
mp.Open(new Uri(wavPath));
mp.Play();

That is all the code required; we don’t need anything at all in the Xaml. And to play multiple simultaneous sounds, you can simply create multiple MediaPlayers.

http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/2008/01/25/wpf-concurrent-audio

I just noticed that the good folks at Pixel8 posted a podcast I did with them a while back.  It was a fun conversation about a bit of.NET history as well as where we are going. 

Landing Page   Download show

I’d love the hear what you think!

Yesterday my coworkers redecorated my office.  Pictures
in this blog entry are photos of their work.  Strangely enough, I found myself
quite appreciative of their act of vandalism. 

Today is my 40^th birthday.  Like most other days,
I started by walking the dog and making a To-Do list.  However, today’s list
has a special item:

• Decide whether to have a mid-life crisis or not.

I’ll confess I am not entirely thrilled about being 40.  It
doesn’t seem that long ago that 40 seemed far away.  Now that it’s here, I
realize that it’s not what I expected.  I thought my life at 40 would be
different.

Many who know me would assert that I have nothing to
complain about.  And they would be correct.  My life has been filled with
blessings of all kinds, for which I am truly thankful.  I am a published
author.  Most would consider me financially successful.  I am in a career where
I enjoy my work.

But still…

As the old saying goes, nobody lies on their deathbed
wishing they had spent more time at the office.

Like most everybody else, when I was 30 I looked ahead ten
years and formed a picture in my mind.  My life today doesn’t match that
picture very well.  Examples:

• I thought by now I would be more solid in the quality of
  my relationships with my loved ones and in the practice of my faith.

• I thought by now I would be a better guitar player.
• There’s a messy pile in my study that has been there for
  ten years.  (Yes, we moved six years ago.  The heap moved too.)  I thought
  it would be cleaned up by now.

• I always assumed that by 40 I would have learned to
  exercise regularly and stop eating junk food.

I go could on.  And on.  But you get the idea.

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I am tempted to think about my regrets, the places where I
took a wrong turn, the places where I would have made a smarter choice if I
knew then what I know now.

But this whole line of thinking doesn’t seem at all
conducive to good mental health, so today I will choose to focus on two things
which seem more constructive:

1.  Tapestry

One of my favorite Star Trek episodes is called Tapestry. 
It is the story of someone given a chance to re-live a pivotal moment in his
youth so that he can avoid making the unwise choice he made the first time. 
But it turns out that his reckless moment was a critical ingredient in his
later successes.

Today I remind myself that there are no do-overs, and I’m
not sure I would want one anyway.  For every mistake I have made, there were negative
consequences and positive lessons.  I can’t expect to avoid the former and keep
the latter.  They come together as an inseparable package.

2.  Life Calculus.

Back in 2003 I wrote an article called Career Calculus.  In a
nutshell, it says that at any given moment in your career, what you know is far
less important than whether you are learning.

Today I remind myself that the same principle applies in
life.  I am confident in my first derivative.  Whatever I am today, I think I
will be a better person tomorrow.

So if I’m still blogging when I’m 50, I expect I will be
able to report progress on some of the items mentioned above.

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And just to be clear, if that heap of junk on the floor of
my study is still there, it will be larger than it is now, and I plan to report
that as progress. 

http://software.ericsink.com/entries/Life_Calculus.html

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http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/techtarget/tsscom/blogs/~3/248013264/thread.tss