Ten Things I Learned from my Dad

1. Reading is fun. Novels can move people. Challenging books are worth the effort.
   
   Some of my earliest memories involve seeing my dad read and finding his books lying open around the house. I remember him talking about Sacajawea when he was reading a novelized account of her life. And he was the reason I kept trying to read The Hobbit until I finally got mature enough to be caught up in the magic.
   
2.  Adults can have hobbies too.
   
   Dad introduced me to photography, Russian embroidery, goat raising, gardening, solar energy, and fly tying, among others.
   
3. Technology is not scary.
   
   When I was eight and nine, Dad would bring home a computer from school during Christmas break and summer vacation. He pulled up a chair beside his and my sister and I took turns reading lines of code out loud while Dad typed them in. If we did it correctly, we ended up with a working version of Brick Out we could enjoy for the rest of the vacation.
   
4. Conversely, you can walk away from technology.
   
   When I was five, my parents got rid of our TV. They didn't get one again until I was a parent. As I work to find the right balance of technology in my life and the lives of my kids, I am so grateful for this example that just getting rid of it is always an option.
   
5. Appreciate the irony in life.
   
   Dad's wry sense of humor and love of irony prepared me well for working in the software industry. I don't think I could cope without them, and I definitely wouldn't relate as well to my coworkers.
   
6. The earth is important.
   
   I loved to go down to the recycling center that Dad ran with his junior high students and "help" sort bottles. (I think I was five or six, so I'm not sure how much help I was.) I remember the period when Dad biked to work. When I was ten we moved to an earth-sheltered home with passive solar heating. Although I constantly fall short of doing as much as I should, Dad provided me with a great example.
   
7. When faced with a problem, ask questions.
   
   When I got stuck on a math problem, I'd climb the stairs to the loft, perch on a stool, and ask Dad for help. (Now that I'm the parent in these situations, I have new appreciation for just how rusty algebra or trig can get, twenty years later.) Dad taught me to take a deep breath and start asking questions. What do you know? What do you need to know? How can you find out? Almost always, the answer came.
   
   Not only do I use this approach when the kids come to me with their math homework, some of my best moments at work start when I ask, What do I know? What do I need to know? How can I find out?
   
8. Great parents have high expectations but low pressure.
   
   I'll admit it. I'm still working on this. I think my kids would tell you I have a long way to go. As a kid, the worst discipline was to be sent to talk to Dad. Not because he would yell at me or berate me, but because I would have to look him in the eye and see his disappointment. However, even at those times, I knew that my Dad thought I was great and nothing I did or didn't do would change that. He had complete faith that whatever it was I had done wrong, it was a temporary glitch.
   
9. It's not a failure if you learned something.
   
   Dad's standard response to a bad test grade or a project that didn't work out was, "Did you learn something? Well then."
   
10. It's cool to be smart.
    
    Dad was one of the teachers for the Talented and Gifted program in his school. From his stories about students he admired, I internalized that smart, curious kids were cool. I still consider "getting to spend the day with smart people" one of the best things about my job.

Happy Father's Day, Dad!

Books 2, 3, and 4

Our book group book for January was The Swerve, the account of Poggio Bracciolini discovering a manuscript copy of On the Nature of Things by Lucretius in 1417. The details of ancient Rome, the destruction of the library of Alexandria, and Renaissance Florence and Rome were interesting, and yet my overall reaction to the book was only pleasant enjoyment. I am glad that we own a copy, since I think I will want to look up certain anecdotes later. The book also contains illustrations, including an example of Poggio's amazingly beautiful handwriting, which became the basis for our modern roman typeface. I find it ironic that a book in which Epicureanism plays a significant role was so physically unpleasant for me to read. The cover had an almost soapy film to it that made me not want to hold the book.

Michael, on the other hand, read it in a day and a half.

My exercise book was The Handmaid's Tale, a book I had heard mentioned so often I was half convinced I had read it before. I hadn't, and I found it engrossing. I was glad when it was time to get on the elliptical so I could find out if the unnamed handmaid was going to escape Gilead.

I also finished Happier at Home. I like to read something in January that inspires me to live a better life. I share many of the same challenges as the author: a tendency to not show my love for my family as I'd like to, a sometimes excessive interest in my work, and difficulty staying present in the now. Although I didn't always like what I saw in the mirror this book held up, I'm grateful for the insights I gained.

Jargon part two

It was another week full of meetings. Not all weeks are like this; we're just in the meeting-heavy section of the cycle. I had five meetings on Wednesday alone, and there were at least three times this week when I had to choose which of two conflicting meetings to attend.

And as it turned out, I chose wrong at least two of the three times. One missed meeting apparently involved an intense argument, according to water-cooler talk the next day. "The most entertaining call ever." And another missed meeting resulted in a developer sending me an instant message: "Are you on a different call? I can't believe you're not objecting to this."

Fortunately, most of my meetings this week were valuable discussions resulting in good decisions.

However, they also reminded me of a word I missed in my net-net post: ask.

"Ask?" you say. "Ask isn't jargon."

Oh, but it is in this sentence, "So the ask is, what do you need from the other team to be able to implement this feature?"

Question. The word you are looking for is question.

The net net is, I need to decouple from the jargon

My employer (who, please note, is staying nameless on my blog) is notorious for its use of jargon and acronyms. If there were an award for this sort of thing, the military might beat us, but it would be a close race.

When I first joined the company, there was one coworker in particular whom I literally could not understand because her speech was so infused with company jargon and acronyms. Two years later, I fear I have become the person new employees can't understand.

Lately, I've caught myself using leverage, impact, and circle back. I've even gone so far as to tell Michael that he is just going to have to learn what a GA is, because I'm not going to stop saying it. ("Just call it a release!" he says.)

So you know the jargon is bad when I still notice it.

The two terms that drove me crazy this week:

Decoupled--if you are talking about train cars, go ahead and use decoupled. But two software suites that were going to be released on the same day and now are going to be released on different dates have not been decoupled. The release dates have been separated or split. (To keep the blog honest, I should tell you that I am pretty sure I said, "They are considering decoupling the releases" in a meeting this week. This is what makes jargon so insidious. Even when it makes your brain shudder, it comes out of your mouth anyway.)

Net net--this one drives me even crazier than decoupled, and it seems to be all the rage among product management these days. What is wrong with the bottom line? Or the point? Or the takeaway? At least I understand where those terms came from.

If you hear me say "the net net is" just shoot me. Please.

No wonder there's a draft

Today I got off a conference call to find Michael eager to show me something.

Come stand on this chair and look at that wall and tell me what you see.

Up I climbed, turned to the wall, and froze in shock. "Daylight. I see daylight."

Cracks of daylight, to be precise. Running right in between every board in the wood paneling.

We've known since the first chill of autumn in 2011 that this corner of the house was drafty. As I pieced together the series of additions that resulted in the current house, I had decided that this particular area had clearly originated as a lean-to, and that it was inadequately insulated when it was incorporated into the main living space.

Inadequately insulated is one thing. No insulation is another. And from the cracks of daylight, it is clear that wall has no insulation.

We live in northern New England. It was -1 last Thursday at 1:00 in the afternoon. ("Fahrenheit?" My co-worker in California asked me. Yes, Fahrenheit.)

And I can see daylight through the wall.

This leaves us with three questions:

1. How did we not not notice this before now?

2. How did our home inspector not notice this?

And finally.

3. What on earth were they thinking?!

Book 1: Moby Dick

When EM announced in disgust that he had to read Moby Dick for his American Lit class, I decided it was time for me to knuckle down and read it myself.

I expected to hate it.

Michael expected me to hate it, and braced himself for more ranting. (I ranted to him all the way through Les Miserables and The Brothers Karamozov, so there was some basis for his assumption.)

Imagine my surprise on discovering that I like Moby Dick. Ishmael is a delightful and funny narrator, the look at whaling life is interesting, and the last three chapters are gripping.

To give you a taste of Ishmael's wry voice:

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. (chapter 49)

I had heard that Melville's information about whales is famously erroneous, but having read the book, I don't think we are meant to take Ishmael's science or history as reliable. No way, for example, are we supposed to believe that the narwhale uses his horn to fold pamphlets (chapter 32) or that St. George fought a whale instead of dragon (chapter 82) or that the whale's spout is mist caused by deep thinking (chapter 85).

The only drawback to the book is that it is about the killing of whales, which is more sickening, not less, the more you know about it.

The reading of Moby Dick became somewhat of a family affair. In addition to Michael being forced to listen to passages I found particularly amusing, LW got interested when I pulled out his illustrated book on whales. (I thought Ishmael was exaggerating his description of how ugly the right whale's head was compared to the sperm whale's, so I wanted to see pictures of both whales. I was forced to admit Ishmael was telling the truth.)

And so I offer up LW's contribution to this blog post: a whale, hunter, and harpoon made of sculpy clay. As you can see, he hasn't yet gotten scale down.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should tell you that EM does not share my love of Moby Dick and has begun to question my sanity.