Joel did a nice cut and paste job selecting the best writing about software he could find and published it in dead tree form. If you google these articles, they are all found on blogs and such, so there's no need to drag your ass to amazon for a drop of wisdom. I was making my way through the list, when I had quite the unusual reaction to one of the pieces. Paul Graham writes about Great Hackers, about half way through his article he says "To drive design, a manager must be the most demanding user of a company's products." When I read this, I literally said "yes, yes, YES!!" Rarely do I see anything put clearly and perfectly accurately like that. The hammer striking the nail in the exact center. I react that way, because that's how I've always felt about design. As a user I think about problems I face as a user, as a coder I want to solve those problems. It takes both to solve them, though, it also takes input from a lot more people to solve a problem for more than one person, but this is the very core truism that underpins the whole science of design, at least to me.

If James Bond movies had less shooting and explosions, we could hear the music they play in dramatic scenes much better and everyone would be happier.

Yep, that's the new show on CBS. At least it should be. I came up with a great new idea for a show today, a reality show. The premise is simple: "Life at the post office". There is not a group of slower moving, less enthusiastic, barely among the living group of people than the bunch working at the post office. And if I worked there, I would be like that too, cause how else could you possibly survive a job like that?

The show would present their daily lives, their work day as it is with no embelishment. Packages delivered, mail sorted, customers standing in line for 30 minutes.. And people would watch it and love it, because people are idiots and will watch anything that's on tv that they haven't seen before.

..you realize how little it is you know. I'm starting a Master in Software Technology at Utrecht University in about two weeks and I've done some surfing on their website to find out what I should expect and how (if at all possible) to prepare myself.

Good news first, the site says Master students get office space. :cool: That can mean a lot of things, but since that just became known to me today, I'll be hoping for something nice. Next, the group of ST students is small (5 people registered), so it won't be a huge group of people I don't know. Next, Master students work alongside/sometimes with PhD students, postdocs etc, so the learning environment should be inspiring. Furthermore, the subjects offered all seem very interesting.

Bad news? As I looked through the websites of current PhD students (to get an idea of what they accomplished and what it takes to be a "good" Master student), I was in awe. These people have written a thesis I couldn't even understand, but they have also published many reports, some publications, held lots of presentations, written complicated software, in short: not only done a lot of work, done a lot of difficult work. If I try to compare who I am to that, well the gap is astounding. Invincible, seemingly. The thought of me being expected to do that kind of work is (how shall I put it) grossly intimidating. A challenge I wanted and a challenge I'll be getting, but I don't walk into this without a care in the world.

Which is a nice parallell to what I felt when I first started college. Before that, in fact. I didn't know anything about computer science, I wanted to know as much as possible, I kept asking people who were doing it and never was satisfied with the answers, always wanting more details, more everything. Right now I face a similar problem, I realize I don't know much about what I'm getting myself into. What seems apparent, however, is that it will definitely change my life. And it will be difficult and I'm ready for it. Hopefully if I get through this, I will finally feel that I have accomplished something in academia.

For now, I know nothing, let the games begin.

Or simply: "a little" vs "a lot". It's amazing how the perception of magnitude changes from one instance to another. Half a cup of coffee is not a lot of coffee. To drink. But it's a lot of coffee to spill on your desk and speaker and computer. Good thing the case is metal and doesn't leak. Ugh, now I have a sticky desk. :lazy: