Category Archives: Miscellany & Minutiæ

Am I the only person who thinks coaxial cable connectors suck?

It’s no secret that I hate cords. In fact, one of my earliest blog entries, dating all the way back to April 2002, covered the topic. That’s how much I hate them.

But what I really hate, even more than cords themselves, is the craptastic connectors on coaxial cable (i.e. the kind of cable used for cable TV). They suck! They are utterly terrible! The push-on kind are at least somewhat easy to use, but they can slide loose very easily. The screw-on kind, the much more common kind, are just plain absolutely terrible. If the cable isn’t lined up precisely, you can turn it and turn it and it won’t screw on. Other times, the moving screw-on tip doesn’t move freely enough, and when you try to turn it — if you can at all — it causes the entire cable to turn with it. Worthless!

I’m just in the process of mounting a flat-panel TV on the bedroom wall and moving our cable modem to a new room, hence the need to deal with these stupid cables and, as usual, piss and moan about how much they suck. But now, the whole world can know that I hate them! Am I the only one???

The merits of a fresh start

It’s hard to start over. Make a clean break. Go back to the very beginning and build things from the ground up. I experience it all the time in web development. Most of the time, starting over from scratch in this field is seen in a negative light. “Reinventing the wheel” is the standard metaphor. Why do something you’ve (or someone else has) already done all over again? Better to take what you’ve already built once or twice or a hundred times before and just reuse what you can, tweak as needed, give it a fresh coat of paint (so to speak) and call it a day — to keep the clichés coming, fast and furious. Check.

But… on the other hand… did you really do it the best you could on the very first try? Is it another coat of paint on a sturdy, reliable structure that’s stood the test of time, or just another layer of lipstick on the pig? Well, for better or worse that’s what I do, most of the time. It’s what most of us do. Because even if we have the chance, starting over from the beginning means a lot more work, and isn’t what we’ve already got, good enough?

Maybe. But is “good enough” really good enough? Really?

Today my 5-year-old son was bored. BOOOOORED. And he asked me what he could do. I spotted on the shelf above my desk the bulk Legos I had purchased several months ago to keep on my desk at my old job. They’ve pretty much just been sitting in their containers since I’ve been working from home, and I decided it was time to break them out.

So we sat at the table and started building. I had packed them somewhat hastily back when I left that job, and they were still mostly clumped together into the odd, improbable configurations I always liked to build when I was sitting at my desk mulling over a coding problem.

As we began putting the Legos together, I mostly kept these proto-creations and just added on to them or made slight modifications. It seemed too time-consuming and counterproductive to take them all apart and start over again. But then I stepped away for a few minutes, and when I returned, I discovered he had completely disassembled them all. Everything. Nothing but individual pieces, and we had to start over.

I grabbed a few pieces and began to imagine the configuration of whatever it might be that I was about to build. And then the ideas began to flow. I started seeing arrangements I never would have imagined — or, more precisely, bothered to imagine — otherwise. The end result was probably one of the most interesting and (dare I say it) whimsical Lego creations I’ve ever come up with. (And I don’t use the word “whimsical” lightly. Or at all.)

And it never would have happened if I hadn’t gone back to square one and started over.

Thanks, kid. Those of you who are registered users can see more pictures from our Lego project here.

Mormons and magic underwear

Wow, the things you discover on the Internet. It all started out so innocently. I was just trying to locate a photo I saw once before. It was of a one-lane road, in Germany I think, with a security arm. There were no barricades on the sides of the road though, not even a curb, and you could see in the photo a well-worn path in the grass median next to the arm where cars had simply driven around it. A great metaphorical image.

Unfortunately, I can’t remember where I saw it. It was a couple of years ago. So I resorted to just trying whatever keywords I could think of in Google and hoping for the best. No luck. I was thinking it might have been on a Demotivators poster, so I added that word to my search. I still didn’t find it, but I did find a page devoted to testimonials from “recovering Mormons” regarding their former church’s practice of requiring its members to wear special undergarments at all times (even in the intimate company of their spouses). This is the kind of seemingly ludicrous (to an outsider) practice that you occasionally hear about regarding “other” religions and think they must be jokes concocted by detractors. And yet, it turns out to be true.

Now, I can certainly understand the church’s (less than noble, in my opinion) motivations for imposing this kind of restriction on its members. I just can’t believe anyone would actually go along with it.

Kids’ vocabulary

I love what comes out of kids’ mouths sometimes. Last weekend we joined the YWCA, substantially to be able to take the kids swimming whenever we want (or whenever they need to burn off some energy). We’re going to go back again tonight, and my 5-year-old son was explaining to his 2-year-old sister why we won’t need to spend as long when we get there before getting in the pool as we did the first time:

That was just for our remembership. But now they remember us.

Cute. Dangerously close to “Family Circus” territory, but still cute.