Going Backward to go Forward

Yesterday I did a blog post. I did not advertise it. It just did not feel right. I took it down and this is its replacement. It was long. It was too much soapbox, although all of these have a soapbox. So the theme now is going backwards to go forward.

The day before yesterday, I finished a piece of functionality for Maze Pseudo that has been on the list for a while. I have done it before in previous incantations of the game. But this time, it worked out differently. The feature actually destabilizes the game and makes it less fun. So what am I going to do? Remove the feature for now and until I can figure out how to make it so that it does not detract from the rest of the game play. This is going backwards to go forwards. I will not delete the feature, just mask it out of the production version.  Yesterday, this was going to have the impact of I would be done with the Apple TV version within the week. That was a inaccurate estimate, because today I am done with it. I have sent the bits that need proofreading to the appropriate people. Once those changes come back, I am already to submit it to Apple.

This also means that I get to focus next week on my next project. It is the project I started years ago, abandoned, revived it a couple weeks ago, and will now try to finally finish it off. So in a sense, I am going backwards to go forwards again. I hope to finish work on it by the end of May or before heading to E3 in June at the latest. After that, I have not decided. There are still four other projects I want to do. Five if you count a non-computer related project I want to figure out how to do.

Yes, here comes the soapbox. But keep reading. It is not that bad. Two days ago was national tell a story day (April 27). I only know this because of an old friend's blog post I read yesterday. Yes, already one day late and now two days late. So my story is going backward, to show that we really have not gone forward.

For me, elementary school was grades K thru 7 and high school was grades 8 thru 12. I did not have a middle school and high school had 5 years instead of the normal 4 years. In 7th grade, the school system gave us standardized tests for the various core subjects: math, English, science, and the like. The test results were used to place us into an appropriate level core class.  For math, science, and English, I was placed in the on-level group.

In 8th and 9th grades, I had the same math teacher. She and I were definitely not on the same page. I do not remember the reason at the time, but I refused to do home work or participate in class. It was not that I did not like or respect her. I just did not want to do the work. When tests came around, I routinely got 100% on them. I think there was even a test where I got something marked wrong that turned out to be wrong on her test key and that my answer was correct. She wrote notes to my mom. She called her. I think there were even a couple discussions with councilors and principles. Yea, it was bad. Even when I did my homework, I would not turn it in.  She could not bring herself to fail me, even though the zeros for class work said she should. I obviously knew the material.

At some point, she figured out that I was in the wrong level and told me that. Unfortunately, there was no way to put me into the right level because they had already moved too far ahead. Looking backwards, I was bored; very bored and frustrated. At some point, she just let me be. A willful teenager is hard enough to manage as it is. And here all of my high school years were going to be spent in the wrong level of math. Each math teacher after that knew this. They did the best they could for me.

But all of that is an effect. As far as I know, nobody actually determined the cause. In hindsight, I am guessing that something went wrong with the standardized 7th grade math test. It was one of those number 2 pencil shade the boxes tests. I probably skipped a question or answered one twice and got the boxes marked wrong. I think that the 7th grade teachers had an impact on placement. But if I did poorly enough, the math teacher would have only been able to put me in one higher level, not two. Regardless of what happened on the test, it was the test that placed me wrong.

I hate standardized testing. The best you can hope to know is that someone is good at taking a standardized test for a particular subject. This only comes to mind as I see my teacher friends congratulating their students on getting through two weeks of testing. That is sad to me. Here 40 years later, we are still using standardized testing to determine the fate of someone's future, including teachers and schools. Parents are supposed to have the option to opt their children out of testing. School systems do not make that easy. Teachers cannot discourage the testing for fear of loosing their jobs.  It is federal money on the line.

For me, it was not until my brief period of attempting college late in life that I realized I actually enjoy learning. Why could I have not gotten that in primary school? Education should be teaching children to love learning. Knowledge will come naturally from that base.

Debunking Facebook

Yes, it's been a couple weeks. First there was spring break, where I was only working half days. Then the past two weeks have been where I have been working 10-12 hour days. No problem, just into what I am doing. That is porting Maze Pseudo to work on the Apple TV. The tasks I started with have been easy. It has been the gotchas along the way that slow me down. Like artwork. To get something already functional on iOS to work on Apple TV required me making between 8 and 18 sets of 3 images. These are the new parallax images used for all the icons. I should have done 18 sets. I did 8. Took me two days. And they are not that good. Anyway, my task list has less than two weeks left.

Facebook doesn't understand when you change your habits very well. About 6 months ago, I unfollowed most news sites. Just after the beginning of the year, I started tracking how much time I was spending with Facebook a day "Catching Up With The World". About 2 months ago, I did another large unfollowing of most of the things I was previously. I spent a week looking at what a particular feed was posting. If it was not engage me a lot, I unfollowed. Do not worry, I did not unfollow friends. In fact, it is family and friends postings that I wanted to be sure I was still seeing. I still have things that I follow because they engage me. At some point, I moved to only looking at Facebook once a day. It used to be 2 or more longer sessions.

All of these shifts have not had a dramatic impact on time spent. Beginning of the year is around 2 hours a day and now it varies more but usually around an hour. What this says to me is that I am still engaging (reading links, watching videos) for about the same amount. I have also noticed that I see more things people like or comment on than before. Those I do not want to see. I wish we still had the option to turn them off. Share something if it is worthy of sharing. Like, err React, is for communicating back to the poster. I don't really care if a million people Haha something. There is also sharing too much or being to myopic in your posts. Twenty thousand cat videos gets you none of them watched or many of your other posts even looked at.

There are a couple of interesting things that have occurred. Right now, I do not have a real source of general news. I only see what people are posting/talking about. Top of that list is famous people dying. I tend to find out with a lag. But then that is all I see. Other news, like flooding in Texas is almost non-existent. Wait, there was flooding in Texas? Must not have been all that important in comparison to Prince. Prince is bigger than Texas. *nods knowingly to self*

Another interesting thing is politics. You would think it would overwhelm my feed. It actually doesn't. Most things posted are thoughtful or funny. Yes, there is the occasional spammer. I have friends that are obviously in most of the major camps. Except Cruz. I get nothing from Cruz people. Maybe Cruz people is an urban myth.

Lack of news doesn't seem to bother me. I do not stress about things I have no control over. I wish I had a candidate. I wish Facebook gave better controls over content. I want more meaningful unique commentary on the world! That or cat videos (apparently).

All The Printers Have Died

An almost funny thing happened to me yesterday: I discovered that we no longer have a working printer. That is not the funny part. I only discovered this when I was enabling some two-factor security and one of the steps required me to print a code. Yes, actually required me to print something that was equivalent to a password. Passwords are not supposed to be written down. That defeats the whole purpose of passwords.

We actually have two functioning printers. How do I know? Because I just bought cartridges for both of them to make them work. A couple weeks ago, I upgraded my PC to Windows 10 from Windows 7. Did it tell me then that the printer I had attached was not going to work? Nope. Didn't tell me anything until I tried to print to it from my Mac. Yes, the Mac speaks to that printer, but only when it can do so through another computer. That other computer, my PC, no longer speaks to that printer. The other printer worked with Windows XP and worked somewhat with my Mac. But when I went to try it, it decided that printing only some of the colors on the page was appropriate. Specifically, the color for the border and the color for the text saying you should keep this paper in a safe place. Forget anything else that was needed.

Both printer manufacturers have refused to build new drivers for the printers, despite the fact that both still sell new cartridges. Being a software developer, I wonder why it is not just someone needs to push a button to compile a new driver. Perhaps do a couple tweaks to meet new Windows or OS X demands. How much more complicated can printer driver technology get? Oh, Apple is releasing a new color, which means all the existing color printers won't work. Microsoft will shortly be scrabbling to make a faux color of the same color to keep up. Microsoft being Microsoft will make 10 shades of it that only a lithographer can see the difference between.

This all got me to thinking: 50 years ago, we were not going to need paper any more in 10 years and all the paper trees were going to be gone anyway. Maybe it was 40 years ago in 15 years. No, that does not make sense. Perhaps it was 30 years ago in 20 years. Well, shoot, so much for predicting the past. In the 1980s, computers actually caused us to use more paper than ever before.

After doing some research, I have discovered that the Paper Manufacturers have Lobbyists. Yes, Paper Pushers Pushing Paper. Apparently it is a misconception as to what the Paper Pushing Lobbyists do. It is not fighting to allow Paper Production Plants to Produce Pollution. It actually is to get congress to create a Anti Paperless Economy Society or APES for short. APES forces computer hardware and software manufacturers to perpetuate the requirement for paper. The U.S. Post Office exists only to deliver paper in various varieties. Packages wrapped in paper. Paper charging you for paper. Paper to convince you to buy more paper. Our landfills are overflowing with PAPER! Oh, yes, that is right, you recycle paper. You know what happens to recycled paper? Straight to the dump. Think of all the paperless children in China with nothing to draw on.

Meh.

Maze Pseudo has passed the App Store review, but releasing it on Spring Fools Day seems wrong. Perhaps I will remember to do it tomorrow. Does mean that I will wrap my current old project up for a couple weeks while I go back to Maze Pseudo for Apple TV next week. That and buy a new printer and new paper, since I doubt a new printer works with old paper. Can't teach Old Paper New Tricks.

The App that I want

Status first: I never remember this, but once you submit an app to Apple for review, you really do not want to be changing that code in case you need to make changes. So now that Maze Pseudo 1.1 has been submitted, I do not want to immediately work on Apple TV enhancements for it. Additionally but not really a roadblock is I need to alter the service name registration for Maze Pseudo. That should take another week or so. Good thing I have multiple things on my list of projects.

I started an iOS project 5 years ago and abandoned it when Apple released sharing data via the cloud amongst several devices. The mechanism to share data was going to make the app not function very well and the expectation that it would share the data. I realized recently that last summer, Apple made enhancements to their cloud infrastructure that allows the app to be viable again. So I have been spending some time working on that code to move it forward into current technology. And behold, I ran into a registration issue with it and Apple. Nothing that is earth shattering, but until I get that straight with Apple, I cannot test the functionality to be done next on it. I can write code for it, just not test it.

As for the app that I want: I cannot have it. At least not right now. Social media generally has gotten unmanageable.  Various platforms have gone to a model of determining for you what you want to see, how you want to see it, and how you interact with it. Mostly this is driven by the desire to get advertising dollars by keeping you constantly engaged with it. I want social media to occupy less of my time, not more. It should make my life easier, not harder. To that end, I want an app that takes various social media platforms and combines them into a single place. Pull Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, a couple free standing forums, and some blogger feeds into a single combined source. From that source, allow me to divide it into groups of items. Groups would be customizable. For me there would be a group of important items that would be family and friend's postings (not sharing, liking, commenting), but actual posts about themselves.. It probably includes a couple people that I follow that are important to me. This group would be the one I would check frequently. I would have a group for News, i.e. the networks, newspapers, etc that I used to follow until it made reading my feed impossible. I would have a group for games, just so I could find those posts when I was in a place to play the games. And lastly a group of other interesting things for times when I have more time to catch up, i.e. friends shares and feeds that did not fit into one of the other groups.

I want the items in the groups to be ordered oldest first. I live time moving forwards, not backwards or in some random order that a computer thought I might like or worse in an order that someone else paid you to put it in.  I want to be able to swipe right to save an item for later. Swiping left would mark an item read and I would never see it again. Some other action would allow me put the item in another group or mark the item as liked or to post a comment or reply or to follow it more closely to see future comments or replies.
I want to be able to set up filters to hide, mark items as read, or move them to a specific group based on word content and/or type of item. This way, I could remove those postings about Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump and still see the things from fans of those people that are not related to politics. Yes, the blog post just got filtered away. So sad, said nobody.

I want to be able to move from device to device and share the state of items across all devices. This way, I could check the important group on my phone while out and on my iPad while watching TV, watch the videos and read longer items on my Macbook, and play the games on my PC. Or just mix it all up and do whatever wherever.

I want social media to enhance life, not take over life. The social media items that are most important to me probably do not contain a picture, video, or URL. They probably do not have hundreds of stars or likes or retweets. They are the hand typed short editorials by people I care about. They will say happy things like I had a great day today or its beer-o-clock. Or the sad things like I had a crappy day yesterday or beer-o-clock ended an hour ago. Or the funny things like somewhere in the world right now it is beer-o-clock.

In the Zone

Several times over the past two weeks I have caught myself being in the zone: that state of ultra productivity and high focus where time drifts by without notice. Things like food and breaks get forgotten. It is nice to see that I can still get to that state while coding.

As to where things are, I have finished the performance network related changes, adding encryption to network layer, and help information to Maze Pseudo. I am close to a release point for it. After getting it released as is, next up is porting Maze Pseudo to work on Apple TV. Same product, but some additional requirements that strictly benefit the Apple TV environment. Some of the recent changes have been to support going in that direction, so it is not exactly a new project as much as a next milestone. In the grand scheme plan, I am about two weeks past where I wanted to be. Two weeks at this point does not concern me.

100 Different Directions

Everyday we are bombarded by having to move in different directions. That does not change when you work for yourself. Every action becomes an evaluation in what you are doing next. Last week for me was mostly occupied with speeding up the networking code for Maze Pseudo. While that does not mean much to many, it is a direction that I choose to follow. It is and was such an engaging task that I decided to not write a blog last week. So that covers the direction not taken. I have a little more to do on network and then it will be on to a help view. There are other tasks left, but that is probably enough for me to want to do a release.

Choosing what to blog about recently has become more challenging. Not that I do not have things to blog about, but choosing which one. Even spending the few minutes to do this gets interrupted with E3 housing contemplation. Sometimes these distractions are useful in that they give our brains more time to workout in the background other tasks. This is why I find myself particularly productive on Mondays. Other people are too busy on Monday to bother me and I have had a two-day break.

I want to talk about politics. I really do. But probably not in the way you think. In past years, it felt like there were a couple bad choices and it ultimately comes down to choosing the lesser of two evils or throwing chance to the wind since my vote rarely counts: I don't think I've voted for the winner in many years. But this year, I really want a good candidate to vote for. The top runners scare me. Good people do not run for office. Or perhaps they are only good because nobody has put them under a microscope. How do you find someone in politics to believe in?

Perhaps I do not want to talk about politics. Distractions. Back to working on things I have more control over: Squirrels!

Difficult and Self-confidence

Many years ago when speaking to a professional colleague, I said if it is difficult to do, you probably should not be doing it that way. It was in reference to doing Java coding for a piece of User Interface. That one statement has come back to haunt me many times, as well as being repeated back to me. But perhaps it needs a better explanation, as the sentiment applies in more situations than just programming. Back to that thought in a moment.

I have for some time noticed that people do not seem as self-confident as they once were. This seems to be particularly true of the younger generations and of females. If you are young and female, then you seem to get a double dose. I am not sure where this came from or how we got here. When I was in high school, I had many self-confident peers and role models. I am not sure they would have identified as themselves such then or now. But I still see, read, or hear of those people today and my impression of them has not changed. This is especially true of the females from that time of my younger life. Today they are still people to look up to.

So where did things go so wrong? I have my own self-confidence issues, but I usually recognize them and have my own method for dealing with them.  I do have a couple suspects: school testing and social pressure.

Tests promoted as a means of measuring your worth as an individual. Wrong: You can only be successful if you pass the tests. Right: Knowing how you failed a test makes you a better person. So perhaps the thought is you cannot fail if you do not take the test. I was in a chat room recently where a younger college aged female shared one of her New Year’s resolutions. She wanted to show more of her creative self this year, as in sharing artwork and videos she had made. Another female chimed in that she had you tube videos she had not published. The sentiment being these works were "not good enough" to share. I was floored. I did not know what to say.

Social pressure also causes angst. In order to be found worth in the current social world, you have to be perfect and never make a mistake. If you are not perfect, anything you create is not worthy of being seen. This is where females seem to get an extra dose. The expectation is that females have to smile and look their best in order to be taken seriously. Where did that come from? Nothing could be farther from the truth. I have done artwork. Some of that artwork has received praise. I am not an artist. I am not perfect. I do not want to be perfect. I do art when I must and it is some of the most time consuming work I ever do.

So what does self-confidence have to do with difficult? Something that a person finds difficult may cause them to loose confidence in themselves. Something being difficult means either you have not learned an easier way to do it or that there is a better way to do it. Just because I find artwork difficult, does not mean it is difficult for everyone. Some people are just better at artwork than me. There are things that I find easy that others find difficult. You should not let it being difficult diminish your self-confidence. Programmers are notoriously lazy, but this is with good reason. Lazy programmers make things that are easy to use.

Homework: If someone you know has a creative hobby, encourage them. Get them sharing. A lot of creative endeavors are easily shared in today's connected world. Yes, they will probably get the "it sucks" comments. But hopefully at least one person sees and appreciates what they are doing. If you are that creative person, are you sharing pictures or the work itself? You do not need to share 100 a day, 1 a week is enough. Share a picture of a work in progress of that sock you are knitting or wall mural you are painting. Post a character description from that story. Post that epic clip of you majorly messing up your lines for a play. Or share your latest completed awesome work.

Extra Credit: Find someone not famous who is sharing their creative endeavors that you do not personally know or know that well and complement them on their work. If you can't find a complement find someone else. There are plenty of people out there looking for validation and encouragement that you should be able to find something you like.

Short note on where I am: Still working with controllers for Maze Pseudo along with other enhancements. Current target is to be done with that in a week or two. Then it is on to Maze Pseudo for Apple TV for two to four weeks. After that is not determined, but there are several candidates. Lastly, I plan on doing this type work for the rest of the year. At the end of the year is my first decision point to determine if things are going in the right direction. Till then, I already have a job and have plenty to keep me busy.

#beawesomebeyou or #beyoubeawesome