John Lindal’s Blog

HDTV

I knew it had to happen some day. Our Admiral CRT TV (you’ve heard of that brand, right? ) finally started going fuzzy. My wife was the one who noticed, of course. She shopped around online and decided that the choice was between CircuitCity and BestBuy. (We would never buy a TV without first seeing it.) Then she realized that she had thrown away the 10% BestBuy coupon! Luckily, I manage to find a copy of it online. We ended up buying a 32″ Sony M-series HDTV which was already on sale at $150 discount. And the store had mislabeled the $32 surge protector as $21, so they had to honor that discount, too!

It’s a very nice TV. My wife is still tuning the color and sound

Gazebo — Part 2

I finally opened the huge box on the living room floor and put up the gazebo frame. It only took about 1/2 hour. Pre-fab kits are designed to be ridiculously easy to assemble. The delay was mostly due to discussing whether or not we really wanted to put it up. Now comes the hard part: bolting it to the concrete. I forsee lots of drilling

Quality Assurance

All software companies have Quality Assurance (QA) departments. It seems impossible to function without QA. Why is this? Programming is a very detail-oriented art. Shouldn’t programmers therefore be good at catching their own mistakes during development?

I think the answer is that programming also requires an incredible lack of perspective. Only an incurable optimist wearing rose-colored glasses would be willing to undertake the task of building anything as complex as what is routinely built these days. Or perhaps only an arrogant fool would do so. The result is the same.

The complexity is the root of the problem. Our brains are unable to keep track of it all, so we often miss the larger picture, it never works the way we expect the first time around, and even after we have tested our creations as thoroughly as we can — assuming we bother to do so — there are still use cases that haven’t been considered.

Simply put, we need QA to take an unbiased look at what we are trying to accomplish and what we have built, and after they pee their pants in sheer terror, coldly analyze the goals of the project and test if the system meets those goals. And then dig in with wild abandon and try every crazy action they can think of to break the system!

Devil’s Advocate

This movie is scary, but it would be even scarier if somebody watched it and didn’t get scared because the main point is that the battle never ends. Every time you overcome one temptation, another one comes along before you have time to blink. Satan is infinitely clever, beyond anything we can anticipate, so we stumble over and over again. Without the forgiveness offered by Jesus Christ, we would all be lost.

I didn’t like the fact that the main character said no to Old Scratch by committing suicide, since that is itself a sin, and I have philosophical problems with the idea that time could rewind, but neither of these detract from the main point. It’s an awesome, terrifying movie.