Etiquette

No technical stuff here today...let's call it a focus on the soft skills.

Been pondering this one for some time now. I wanted to add some of it to a recent post, but ultimately left it out.

How to Take Compliments
I've struggled with this one myself at times. Someone says something very nice to me and I'll hem and haw. It feels...embarrassing. Maybe I don't really deserve it? Am I conceited to accept this? Etc.

I try to accept the compliment, when given now, with grace. "Thank you, I appreciate that." instead of deflecting the attention away (from myself, as I'm wont to do).

Here's 8 easy steps...

1. Understand what deflecting a compliment is really about
2. Think about taking a compliment as an exercise in being assertive
3. See accepting a compliment as a compliment in itself
4. Decide how you'd like to take the compliment
5. Smile
6. If you suspect that the sincerity of the compliment is questionable or the compliment is confusing, you might want to open up an opportunity to explore it
7. Return a compliment later
8. Give credit where credit is due - I like this one. I usually have a lot of help at work and I try to make sure that others are included, if not by the complimentor then at least by me. I'm sure it has something to do with playing a lot of team sports growing up too.

How to Say You're Sorry
I dislike but-monkeys. What is a but-monkey? Someone who says something like, "I am sorry for what I did, but..." - the ellipsis could be something like, "you brought this on yourself" or "you did x, y and z." This isn't an apology. Say you are sorry and don't make excuses, period. I have become good at apologizing. I'm not sure that's a good thing as it implies I've made a lot of mistakes. Well, guess what? I have made mistakes in my life. Whether I realize it immediately or some time in the future, I do my best to accept responsibility and apologize.

The most common cause of failure in an apology--or an apology altogether avoided--is the offender's pride. It's a fear of shame. To apologize, you have to acknowledge that you made a mistake. You have to admit that you failed to live up to values like sensitivity, thoughtfulness, faithfulness, fairness, and honesty. This is an admission that our own self-concept, our story about ourself, is flawed. To honestly admit what you did and show regret may stir a profound experience of shame, a public exposure of weakness. Such an admission is especially difficult to bear when there was some degree of intention behind the wrongdoing.

I had one more but it seems to have escaped me at the moment.

Random Thoughts: #22

I haven't written much lately, six months in fact. Just trying to get my life in order...priorities.

Strangely, traffic to the site has increased during that time. I would think that any post during this period would slightly increase traffic. Nope. Opposite effect.

I like traffic (only child, I need attention), but it's not why I do any of this. If that were the case, I wouldn't post at midnight on Saturday. Anyway, amusing.

Here's a random video for you: Larry Smith - Why you will fail to have a great career



I have this really strange fascination with this one, Cheap Flights with subtitles



Finally this one which I have watched every other day (it seems) for the past 4 months: Jeb Corliss " Grinding The Crack"



If you made it this far. I'm sorry.

Dream Job

I saw it posted somewhere recently but I can't remember where.

I originally thought it would be something technology related, but I recently procured myself one of these:



See it in action here:



As a pitcher, I spent a lot of time doing nothing. Take a 3 hour practice. I throw for about 10 or 15 minutes, maybe a little bullpen work, I'm up to 25 minutes. Maybe some PFP (pitchers fielding practice), 40 minutes now. I might be asked to be a runner in situational practice, 1 hour. That leaves 2 hours. That time is spent shagging baseballs during batting practice (BP). While it can be fun, it can also be incredibly boring, especially if you're stuck on home run duty (all alone across the street).

I fought that boredom by becoming really good at hitting ground balls to infielders during BP. Freshman year, coach had wooden fungo bats. He wouldn't let anyone use them because we might break them. What did I do? I used them. I didn't break them either.

The pinnacle of being good with a fungo bat is probably the ability to hit pop-ups for the catcher, you know, the ones straight up that curve back towards the field. I can do that.

I've been hitting fungo to the 7-8 year olds where I'm the assistant coach. Sometimes I'll hit them hard, mostly soft, but I just remember how much fun it was.

Wait, one more thing to go along with that. BP pitcher. I throw great batting practice (I'm not sure if that's was a good or bad thing career wise, obviously doesn't matter now). It's fulfilling to be able to throw strikes and see how far people can hit them.

There it is, my dream job. Fungo hitter and BP pitcher.

I wonder if the Rays are hiring and if they'll pay me enough to support my family?

Father, Husband, Employee, Coach, Tutor

I had been pondering a post on how impossibly busy I have been lately. You know, the 45-60 hours in the office, the 2 hours on the road back and forth, coaching a bunch of 6-7-8 year olds and tutoring someone in database concepts. And blogging of course.

It doesn't seem to have quite the punch now.

Here's what it would have looked like anyway...

Father
With all that has happened in the last couple of years, I still get to come home to people that like me no matter what. LC and his battle stories with the girls at school and Kate...well, she just is. Her smile lights up the room. The infectious laugh...the hugging (finally!)...she just makes my day.

Husband
Intentionally left blank.

Employee
Move along...nothing to see here.

Tutor
It's been about 4 weeks since I began tutoring. I thought I would post more on it, but I've been so busy with everything else that I just never go to it. That should change now though, at least for awhile.

There is nothing like having to communicate complex systems to those who don't know the first thing about databases. Where do you start?

Last week was especially difficult. We had to diagram some tables based on one paragraph of requirements. This was more inline with logical modeling as well, which I don't have a lot of experience with. Which means, you have to represent (as I understood it anyway) your relationships without use of an intersection table. WTF?

Coach
One of the best things in the world. If you ever have the opportunity to coach young children, take it! Yes, it's painful at times. Yes, it is like herding cats. Yes, they do not listen. <-- does that even make sense?

But...you can yell at them for an hour straight. I don't mean the jerk kind of yelling, I mean the fun, obnoxious kind of yelling. Whatever that is.

For whatever reason, I'm naturally loud. Amazingly, I get louder on the baseball field.

There is no better way to turn your day around than by yelling at a bunch of kids. The best stress-reliever of all time possibly.

Learning From Failure

I think I began reading The Daily WTF about 4 years ago. I don't miss or skip a post.

I remember this one time, probably about the time I began reading the site, I had to automate a process to move files from one server to another. Originally, I had tried to create a network drive (yes, it was Windows) on the database server so that I could just use a simple Java class to read the directory and then load the files via DBMS_LOB.

I had ultimately decided on a service, but I didn't know how to write one for Windows. Then I found the Java Service Wrapper which would allow me to write the guts in Java and then install it on Windows as a service. Perfect.

Now that I had that settled, I had to figure out how to detect when a file was read to be moved. I decided on a looping mechanism, to check every minute or so, to see if a file was available. It looked something like this (I'm a tad rusty, so bear with me):

package project1;

import java.util.Date;

public class Class1
{
  public static void main(String[] args)
  {
    Class1 class1 = new Class1();
    Date d = new Date();
    long l = d.getTime() + 1000000000;
    String s = String.valueOf( l );
    
    for ( int i = 0; i < l; i++ )
    {
      //some sort of MOD "wait" here, then check for the file
    }
  }
}

It wasn't pretty, but it seemed to work.

Then I got a call from the server admin.

SA: "You've got something running on this machine that's spiking the CPU."

Me: "Really? I can't think of anything."

SA: "Well, take a look and see if you can find anything."

Me: "10-4"

Sure enough, go into Task Manager and there's java.exe hogging up all the CPU. WTF?

I just ran this on my machine and you can see the CPU start to spike:


Off to Google to see what I can find. During my research, I found mention of a small method called Thread.sleep(long). So I replaced my brilliant add 1000000 to the current date with Thread.sleep(6000), or whatever equals 60 seconds. Problem solved.

A short time later I read a post on The Daily WTF about the same exact problem (I can't find the exact post for the life of me). The "victim" did the exact same thing I did. The solution was the Thread.sleep() call.

Me = FAIL

One more short example.

Over beers, a friend (see last entry) of mine and I were discussing the failure of the North Korean missile launch. I said, "Idiots." He said, "They're going to learn a lot more from that failure than they would have had it suceeded."

Spoken like a true engineer I guess.

The point? You learn by trying. You learn my doing. You learn by failing. Whether you realize it or not, you learn. (Well, some people don't, but that's another post). If you're reading here though, that probably means you have a passion for what you do. That means that you are trying. You are learning (maybe not here specifically ;).

Here's to trying and failing and hopefully trying and succeeding.

What a Life...

Saturday afternoon I had scheduled to go golfing (I'm not a regular golfer) for a friend's bachelor party (believe it or not, no strippers). Saturday morning wifey was sick so I decided to cancel the day of golfing (drinking). For weeks I had also planned on attending the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) Tweetup Saturday night. Since wife was sick and there was a second event, dinner, I opted to go see my friend and celebrate with him.

My friend is a former teammate from UF (Go Gators!). Of the 8 people who attended, I was the only one not a high school (or further back) chum.

Anyway, one of his high school friends (and teammate) was a guy who played 12 years in the Big Leagues (MLB). He retired 2 years ago.

Me:
"So, what do you do now?"

Him:
"I chase my kids."

Me:
"Wow"

35 years old and his job is to chase his kids. How sweet is that? He never has to work a day for the rest of his life. I wonder if I had been fortunate (read: talented) enough to play MLB if I could handle doing "nothing" for the rest of my life? I couldn't imagine it now...I work almost non-stop. Either for work or just learning something new. Doing "nothing" would probably drive me nuts.

What about you? Could you retire at 35 or whatever your current age and do nothing?