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It’s been an interesting 2009 so far. With my daughter learning to walk and the new job and lots of travelling, every day has been very busy. I would like to take it easy for a change. I fear that there’s no more time available to take it easy - but I will certainly try to organize my time better and concentrate to the things that deserve the most time.

One such thing is friends. It’s been so awfully difficult to find time to meet even the closest ones. It’s not entirely my fault since they are quite busy too, but having a small child and hectic work is not helping at all. It’s easier to meet those friends with children since they typically have similar schedules, but again, having the kids around makes it more difficult to really be together. There’s always interruptions and things to organize and take care of. I have started to feel quite lonely lately, so I will definitely need to do something about this soon. And the fact is still that it’s so damn difficult to make friends that keeping the existing ones should be a priority.

Another such things is peace of mind. I find myself constantly worrying about things that I really don’t have that much control over. I won’t give you examples since those are too personal to be shared in the internet. But nowadays I spend a good part of the day working and taking care of things that I must to do. Things such as shopping for food and clothes, cleaning the house, helping others with their things, maintaining myself in a good shape and generally just trying to manage. During the free time I have, I spend way too much time worrying over things. This needs to stop since it really really makes my life shitty to say at least. I just need to find a way to actively concentrate on things that I can solve and simply drop the rest.

And finally the third topic is work. I will not take it so seriously anymore. This meaning that I will keep demaning that work is done in a sane way and properly and not with the constant fear of failure. The explanation that I hear everywhere: “We’re constantly suboptimizing, doing things in a crazy way and generally acting like  a scared bunch of rabbits because OMG there’s a recession” has at times caught me too. This will change. The recession, when I look at it, seems just like a scam to keep people scared and push them to do even more unpaid overtime and give up benefits and job satisfaction. I have never been paid more or gotten more attractive headhunting attempts than during this so called recession. I don’t know anyone whose job would be in danger because of the so called recession (that being the real reason) or would be unemployed because of the recession. The prices are just the same as before, the people keep buying and selling just as before and everything else, when looking through my eyes, seems JUST AS BEFORE. So, from now on, I make a holy promise to do the work the best I can and actively keep improving the way the work is done because just grinding teeth and pushing overtime is not working out too nicely. For anyone.

Spring is a time of renewal. I’m not entirely sure what this means for a thirty-years-old working nerd father, but I’m extremely certain that I’m off balance. The kind of balance I’m talking about is that of body and mind. Currently they are closing to a divorce, yet both longing for each other but not finding the time to meet and talk things through.

I raise a toast to body and mind and hope you both successful spring!

Start with logic gates created from transistors.

Continue towards boolean algebra operations.

Too difficult? Try representing integer and float values and basic arithmetic operations.

Now code that in assembler.

Hard to follow the flow of the program? Move to a sequential programming language.

Hard to write correct code? Maybe some functions and scoped, automatic variables?

Hm, still quite difficult since you can access all the stuff in the program and create unexpected dependencies?

Should we try to do a object oriented program to protect access to object or component internals?

What, now you need to actually still reserve memory (and most importantly, free it when there’s no use for that particular data)?

How about running the code in container and have the code managed by a virtual machine?

Ok, but now you still have that nasty code you need to compile and change.

How about making a generic code framework on top of the virtual machine engine that you can dynamically command using a higher level language that you specify from standard building blocks?

Ok, now you still need to worry about the underlying hardware resources like having enough memory and disk space. How about virtualizing that?

Sigh. Now we have everything virtualized and you can add hardware resources to your virtual system that’s running virtual machine-managed script code. How on earth do you know what piece of virtual code depends on other piece of virtual code? You need to capture that as a standard metadata that you can again use to know what’s really going on.
How on earth do you now make sense to all this metadata? Let’s standardize what are the pieces that make up the virtual system and expose that logic over a standard layer and call it service orientation.

Hm. Seems like a lot of services… We surely don’t want to make those services be called from sequential or object-oriented programs, we need to make higher level “processes” that can be dynamically configured and run in another container so that you can actually relate those to the processes that organizations are made of.

… and this is pretty much where we are now. Automating processes which call services organized into strictly governed building blocks and use standards-compliant interfaces. All running on virtual machines on virtual hardware.

Good enough for you?

No, think not. Next we make the data itself virtual and standardized so that you are not restricted to doing calls to it from any particular (virtual of physical) location but you can just call it by name and the underlying framework locates the data, the process that needs the data and services which actually operate on that data.

Next step would be to virtualize the data generation logic so that it finds it’s right standard and virtual call handle so that the creator of the data doesn’t need to anymore know the data.

At this point we can probably hand it all over to semi-intelligent virtual software layer which can do all the stuff we tell it to do starting from the data generation to the actual usage.

Next, only logical step is to write and artificial intelligence layer using quantum computing on top of the stack to know what we want to actually do with our systems before we even know that.

At this point, you don’t need to calculate how much money you will have on your bank account the next week after all the bills because every possible scenario is already calculated.

Maybe then I will have time to develop that game I have always wanted to develop. Oh wait. It was already developed by our ultra-virtualized, standards-compliant quantum AI overlord. Nothing left to do anymore. Doh!

For a long time now, I’ve been meaning to do an entry or two about my feelings and thoughts on being a father. I have many times thought what are the areas I want to cover in the entry and what is best left unsaid. Turns out that there’s surprisingly many things that actually need to be left unsaid. And this doesn’t seem to be a cultural thing, it’s more like an evolutionary thing. I intend to make a list about the things that are best left unsaid. I know this has the potential of making a lot of people pissed off. Nevermind, it tends to be so when you criticize things that are better left unsaid.
In the first part I want to mention the lack of freedom of expression. No matter what you do, you can’t speak about feeling bad, at least in public. A man is supposed to take care of the family no matter what. It’s a completely binary thing. You either are a bad father (meaning that you express any negative thoughts publicly) or you are a good father (if you keep your worries to yourself and never open your mouth). Society has advanced enough that it’s ok for a mother to say that she’s tired or is feeling down or downright depressed. This is fair and ok, after all, this is healthy.

The same does not apply to fathers. It’s ok to sigh and say “Wow, I have not slept in three nights. Man, I’m tired.” However if you say, “Wow, I have not slept for three nights, because I keep worrying whether we can make the next payment of the mortgage and I worry constantly about work. For the last three months I have spend either working in the office or at home and I don’t think most of the people I once held dear even remember me.” NO you cannot say that. This would make you a bitch whiner who is not a man and as such not suited for a father. It actually goes beyond this. This is where evolution comes into play. It’s not ok to say this at home, at work, at the doctor’s office.

It’s not that I personally feel all these negative things. But what I gather from observing the environment is what makes me argue the point of part one. It’s quite obvious really. The age-old “stop whining and be a man” argument applies to being a father more than to anything else. It’s hard to point the finger who is to blame because it seems to be an evolutionary thing, so I wont even try.
Nevertheless, it’s good for others to understand this the easy way. For me, since I have always bit naively thought that being a man is not such a binary thing, it has taken a while to realize this. It’s really that easy. Never speak negatively of fatherhood, mothers, children, family or anything related to these. Don’t believe in equality or that anyone would understand your pain. In the end, you are always alone with that since you can’t fight evolution. If you are lucky enough to have friends with whom you can talk freely, they will listen and understand, but the problem is that they can’t do anything about it. Talking may help, but so may the realization that this one is something that you just need to take and be happy about it. Even if you are not. Or then there’s the other side of the coin. You don’t take it - and then you need to face the music.

Its almost the end of January and this is the first time it is actually snowing outside. This sight calms me a lot. This is what we are going to miss because of the climate change. Sigh.