Here is another math story to tell a different story. I do have non-math stories. They just are not as relevant to my current events. Late in my high school years, a friend and I got into a discussion about if 1 divided by 0 equals infinity. I do not fully remember how, but we ended up trying to prove this on the chalkboard. It was after a test or something. Or perhaps a large portion of the class was excused for something. Mr. Hampton did not say if it was right or wrong. He let us go at it till the end of class, at which point we had filled half his chalkboard filled with work. He was encouraging and only interfered when we made a mistake, but not when we went down wrong paths. He laughed at us for what we were doing. Not in a funny ha-ha way, but in the joy that we were having a good time trying to figure it out. Here were students trying to use the knowledge he had given us for the pure joy of it.
We begged him to not erase our work. He agreed and taught the rest of the day using only the free half of the chalkboard. We had inconvenienced him, but he saw value in letting us have the thrill of learning. I remember going back later in the day, either after school or during a free period. We continued to work at it until one of us had to leave for something. Perhaps it was another class or sports practice or bus or ride home or somewhere else. We did not finish definitively proving it true or false. But that is not the point. The point was that Mr. Hampton gave us the space to try. He knew we would not be able to do it. We would have needed differential equations to even come close. We were not going to get that far in high school.
After taking differential equations in college, I remember thinking about our endeavor. I never went back and tried completing it. This may be totally wrong, but I think you can neither prove nor disprove it. You do run upon an axiom that states that any number divided by zero is undefined or something like that. Mr. Hampton certainly taught me to not be scared of math. Math does not have all the answers.
So this week has been filled with experimenting, spinning some wheels, and figuring out that time was up and to move on to something else. I thought last week that getting Maze Pseudo for Apple TV was going to be as simple as uploading and pushing some buttons. Turns out something went bonkers with Apple's development environment. I got a strange error message that was not helpful. I emailed developer support, but they just referred me to several web pages that did not help. I got it working. My fix was not the right way. I have been working with Apple as a developer for close to 40 years. You would think I know by now that Apple does not make it easy for developers. It has been submitted. No idea how long it will take to get approval.
The next project has been derailed as well. It is the one I started almost 5 years ago. At the time, I needed a way of tracking what books I owned, wanted or had read. I wanted this information on my phone so that when coming across books for sale I could determine if I already had it. I used to use a database application on my Palm for that very thing. That is the simple description of what it was. When Apple initially released iCloud, the framework for utilizing it was not compatible with the way I wanted the data to be structured. Because of iCloud, the expectation would have been that the book data would be sharable between devices and machines. Another conflict was that I wanted the data to be available even if you did not have connectivity. That was something iCloud does not natively provide. I abandoned the project at that point.
After last year's WWDC, I realized that Apple was now providing functionality that would allow me to do what I originally wanted. When time allowed, I revived the project, modernized it, and started working integrating it with iCloud. Unfortunately, I have discovered that while what I want to do is possible it is not trivial. It will take a significant amount of work and rework to get it to the right place. Now 5 years later, there are other products available that do most of what I want. They do enough that I do not feel that spending the significant amount of time on my version is beneficial. It is still possible, just the cost outweighs the benefit.
I have learned a lot from it, so I do not look at it as wasted time. And this is how it connects to the story I started with: Sometimes you have to explore a path because it is a path you want to see. The path may not go anywhere. As long as you do not walk off a cliff, you hopefully garnered some benefit.
This is another facet to why I dislike talking about my personal projects until they are close to being something solid. The feedback I get is rarely useful and sometimes down right discouraging. Suppose you were painting a picture and someone asks you what you are painting. You reply, "I am painting a bowl of fruit". To which you might get a variety of responses: It doesn't look like a bowl of fruit. Wouldn't it be easier to take a picture of a bowl of fruit? Ever heard of Picasso, he has some wicked fruit bowl pictures. You do know that apples are supposed to be red, right? Meh. I do what I do because it is right for me. If it is right for me, then it will be right for someone else. It does not have to be right for everyone.
Now onto a much bigger problem: which of the four plus one projects am I going to work on next? Probably time to do a plus minus chart with a sprinkle of math. At least there are not an infinite number of projects on the list and no time to work on them.
