Dual views of God

Today's liberal atheistic (is that even communistic, that social experiment that proved to be a failure?) view here in the US, where the attempt to separate religion from the government is a radical misinterpretation of our founding fathers.

Einstein's famous work on physics and the theory of relativity were based in applying the clean discipline of mathematics to the order of the Universe. Einstein made no secret of his belief in God and saw no conflict between that belief and his occupation as a scientist. One of Einstein's difficult conflicts was between classic physics and the new developing discipline quantum mechanics. In classic physics things are neatly explained in mathematics, but in quantum mechanics, the mere act of trying to measure things introduces unusual unpredictable behavior at the smallest levels. This was fundamentally bothersome to Einstein and he was quoted as saying:

"God does not play dice"

In an effort to offer an alternative to this "messy" new quantum mechanics theory, Einstein embarked on a "Theory of everything". He continued to his dying day working on this theory, even when sick he covered bed sheets in calculations. He wanted a clean theory that would "read the mind of God" and replace the unpredictability of quantum mechanics. Even today the quest for the "Grand Unification" theory continues. As Stephen Hawking explains in "A brief History of Time", this achievement is so important it will give us a "glimpse at God". But the proponents of quantum mechanics, despite its unpredictability, responded with a quote seeming to taunt Einstein with this quote:

"Stop telling God what to do with his dice"

Ironically the closest thing to the Grand Unification Thoery today is String Theory, which incorporates quantum mechanics.

The other thing that I find very ironic is that the most gifted scientists can admit the existence of God, so why can't our government and the liberal secularists?

And then there's just not working at all

So here's an update to the previous post from two weeks ago...

First Unaddressed Problem

Not only is the LCD panel still missing after 2 weeks, but the PC is there as a constant reminder of it... I wish I would have had the chance to do the cable swap, because if it was the cable, we're talking $20 at the closest computer store to keep another seat in the lab open. I'm surprised to see an LCD panel less than a year old fail completely, but if it did, it seems it would be a warranty replacement. And even so, since this is a lab for the whole school to use, you'd think they could find an LCD panel somewhere to put in its place...

I've been in both the public and large scale private sector. In my last private sector job, where downtime meant lost money, spares were kept in inventory. If you need a computer to do something, then it should always be available. It's not like a toaster where you eat your bread untoasted for a while. A well run business (and the public sector can be viewed as a very big business) understands this and takes the needed actions to accomplish it. The public sector sometimes forgets that is has business needs and that is why it can be heavily criticized at times.

Second Unaddressed Problem

In the last class, all the third grade teachers had a common problem. They had a file on the teacher's LAN they wanted to make available to the students. Ideally they wanted to make it available on the Internet through the school's site. They were having trouble understanding how they could do this. They have a mechanism to request help from the guru, which I'm guessing they don't find to helpful. So when I arrived I was asked if I could help. She signed me onto her teacher's ID, showed me where the file was. In just a few minutes I was done.

Since I stayed to fix these other problems I saw another of the teachers and let her know it was fixed. She was thrilled and asked who are you. One of the other teacher's aids and a student in her class answered in unison, oh he's [---] Dad, he's a computer expert. At least they didn't refer to me by the offensive title of guru... lol

Third Unaddressed Problem

In one of the recent classes the students where printing some graphics and it all came out black and white. Now this being the fourth year in that school system, I know they have excellent high volume color printers and the students have always had access to color output. We've long passed dot matrix and plain black and white output. The students knew it too and were complaining and asking us why it wasn't in color.

I ran some tests on the printer, it had ink, its color quality was poor but possible. Hmm, check the PC configuration... Yep, deep down in the settings was an over ride forcing all output from the student lab to be black and white. I conferred with the teacher and said I could override it, she conferred with someone who said the "guru" must have set this up because they were low on ink. Great, explain that to the 20 kids who never ran into this "problem" in their last 3 years in school.

So I do a little more checking... This printer uses a multi-color dry ink system that insures good quality color for the full run of the ink. You can see the ink levels and keep at least one block ahead of empty and you should not have color shifts that are typical of single ink cartridges. So why are there color shifts and poor quality. Time to run diagnostics. Oh boy, this puppy has not been maintained for some time. The test sheet looks like shit. So I run more advanced diagnostics to look at color strips and the ink nozzle performance. Blocked nozzles, drifting color strips. I run through the first of several cleaning cycles, I get the brown to turn yellow again, I get the black nozzles unclogged, but I would need a bunch more time to clean each of the other colored clogged nozzles. Plus it burns through ink in the process, so I'd need someone to get me some ink blocks to use for cleaning. I read the diagnostic manual further, yep, there is a whole recommended cleaning process with disassembly and a maintenance kit.

Now mind you I am not a PC jockey or guru, and don't you call me that either, its offensive, so that's how I handle the situation, and I'm an unpaid volunteer. How does a guru handle it? Turn off the color option in a windows driver and lie to people that its low on ink. Even the 3rd graders knew this didn't sound right, why would grown adults accept that bullshit? What did I do next? I put a status message on the board that ink levels were fine, yellow quality had been restored, and a full maintenance cleaning was required. Yeah call me a rabble rouser, I've been called worse.

Fourth Unaddressed Problem

Between breaks a teacher was telling me of lost LAN data that took over a week to restore. I know how that can happen, I also know why and how it can be prevented. I just shook my head as I thought back to when I first saw the PC/Enterprise generation gap. Well over a decade ago when LANs were new, everyone was going gaga over them and their superiority over the "dying dinasour" Mainframe, I saw the the perfect example of this short sighted thinking which is still applicable a decade later.

Mainframes are the heart of a fail safe infrastructure. Oh I know people have tried it on other platforms and I have seen the various levels of partial success they have achieved. But mainframe systems just come that way, industrial strength, ready for the challenge.

So over a decade ago, we have temporary disk error threshold being exceeded... Yes the disks actually detected, corrected and reported when they were having problems and we had predictive failure and replacement processes. Why? Cuz people don't like to hear the computer is down. So they got bad quick and we had to take a database offline, close its journals, and run sector diagnostics to locate the bad portions of disk and relocate them to spare sectors. This would be 15-30 minute emergency operation over lunch time. Done it a hundred times, it will work, we'll bring all data back online, roll the journals forward, not missing a beat (transaction).

So the IT director is standing there breathing down our necks. I rolled back from the master console and bumped into the clown. I looked up at him and said you know this would go quicker if you gave me a little room, ya think I could call you when I'm done. See I was a smart ass back then... LOL. Meanwhile the LAN everyone was going gaga over lost a disk without any warning and after several weeks of fooling around they declared the data gone forever. Where was the director then, why wasn't he breathing down their necks? Oh it was "new" technology, it was OK to have failures. Why?

And here we are a decade later, oh the PC disks are cheaper and a little better. But ya know what, so are the mainframe disks. The stuff I did back then, taking the databases down for 30 minutes, happens on the fly, hot recovery, no downtime, and the disk controller calls the vendor to tell them which component failed. The dispatcher calls the data center after obtaining the part from the closest parts depot and schedules a technician to install the replacement.

Lessons (jqisms)

• Given the choice between time engaged and time in chair, always go with engaged, you'll be much further along.
• There are two kinds of knowledge, real and imagined. Real knowledge possessed by a person who cares will solve problems. Any other combination doesn't matter.
• There is no particular correlation between having the job, being promoted, and actual useful output, for that to occur life would have to be fair and Peter's Principal would have to be false (and of course neither statement is true).
• if the answer sounds like bullshit, it probably is, keep looking.
  

Time Engaged vs Time in Chair

I was at my son's computer class and sure enough a PC was still out of service for two weeks. So after his class, I thought I'd take a closer look... Now my specialty is the gigantic systems, but even though I'm not a PC jockey as we Enterprise Support folk call them, I can hold my own quite well.

Maybe it's starting and spending a good part of my career at a University, but I've always been somewhat of a go getter. I walk fast, talk fast, do stuff fast. I'm always reading (big boring tech stuff), learning and doing new things. Lucky thing, the equipment I started on is in a museum and has less computing ability than a PDA.

So first thing is to isolate the problem, nothing on the monitor, adjust brightness and contrast (even though I couldn't see anything), check connections, reboot PC, looks like the monitor, swap out for the monitor next to it, works fine, OK, its the monitor or the cable. Just ready to swap cables when the next teacher comes in.

First Pet Peeve

OMG you can't do that, our main tech guy is here, oh he'd be mad. The "I'd rather suffer for the process" problem, the artificial barrier of in the box thinking. This is the same teacher that was bitchin she didn't have enough PCs for the class last week. But oh lets not try to do something to fix it, we have a process. Fill out a form and wait...

Now to be fair she probably doesn't realize that I've worked with computers for 30 years and usually have at least one PC being torn apart or rebuilt at any point in time... But technically my resume may not be good enough to get me a job as a PC jockey. It almost didn't get me a job selling them after I was fresh out of selling IBM''s small business computers (in the startup consulting company) that go for $50-500 thousand dollars. That's another post... Well OK, I almost have it, I'll send my son's teacher an email. So I hang out a little longer to check out the new configuration the school installed this year.

Second Pet Peeve

Here comes the PC Guru. Oh boy. What is the etiquette for greeting the exalted one? Any one who calls themselves a guru or a czar and isn't at the top of a mountain or in a Russian grave is full of shit or full of themselves or both. (jqism)

Third Pet Peeve

He moved in slow motion. Have you ever seen that? This guys a little younger than me and moves like an 95 year old man. Ya just want to go over there and get him moving. He looks at his one sheet database list for at least 10 minutes, then he's gonna leave. The frustrated teacher stops him, points to me and says "Ask him". Should a guru have to ask? Would it be so hard to walk around the room to the only PC that wasn't in use and assume that's the one that could be broken?

I don't know how someone with so little logic can leave the house in the morning let alone get a job with computers. So, I can see this is the lowest form of PC Jockey, so I make it easy. "The processor is fine, it's the LCD panel or the cable". He fidgets for the longest time and I see that all he is doing is disconnecting the LCD panel. Thank God I saved him the trouble of shooting the problem, that probably would have been weeks. Then in classic single tasking fashion, he's gonna come back to straighten up the little mess he made on the desk, being unable to watch this snail in action anymore, I told him, "Don't worry, I'll take care of it". He grunted and left with the LCD and cable. I would have done a cable swap right there and have figured it out for sure if that teacher was just a few minutes later. I can hardly wait to see how long it takes the "guru" to fix it.

In Summary

Engaged	In Chair
Watches results	Watches clock
Enjoys solving problems	Enjoys being praised
Works quickly to get to next problem	Works slowly to avoid next problem
Thinks out of the box	Should be put in a box
Life Long Learning	Life Long Lazing
Obsolesce Avoidance	Work Avoidance
Legend among peers	Legend in their own mind
Enterprise Strength	PC Wimp

Feel free to give me suggestions for more Engaged/In chair comparisons in the comment section.

Benefits of being engaged

• Reduces boredom
• Enhances self worth
• Prevents Alzheimer's Disease
  
• Reduces risk of being mistook for dead when you stand still
• Should enhance your employment opportunities, but that's only if management is engaged and that could be rare indeed (another post)
  

On the lighter side

There were some funny moments during my son's computer class.

• My son's friend called me over to show me his bandaged finger and he explained how it was slammed in a door, how it was all black and blue, how his fingernail was kind of slimy and then with excitement on his face he said, "Ya want to see it?", "Oh gosh no, I'll take your word for it, it will heal better if you don't fuss with it". Then several more times he asked, "Are ya sure?".
  


• Apparently his teacher talks with her hands too (and neither of us is Italian), I was standing next to her while she was giving instructions and she unexpectedly pointed at the computer projector output and I (with quick reflexes) leaned backwards to avoid being poked in the face. She said, "Oh gosh [my Son's name] I almost hit your Father".


• The children occasionally raised there hands for permission to go to the bathroom. So while we're walking swiftly around the room to answer questions, the teacher leans towards me and asks politely, just like the students, "Can I go to the restroom?" And I replied as usual "Sure, I'll tell the teacher", with a giggle.

Status: First Draft
Almost done if Blogger would respect my Table HTML... OK, one Blogger Bug Fixed, Back to writing...