Maybe I should design some lawnmower parts
This always makes me laugh.
I'm a programmer for a company that makes industrial lawn mowers. So I get an email from an engineer this morning... he wants to create a simple application that he thinks he needs a database for. And he wants to create it on his own because he wants to learn how to work with databases. He was just asking for the database from a demo I did for a project that was abandoned, because he thought it'd be good to learn from. Oh, and can he have the web pages from the demo, too, because he wants a web-based front end.
Now, how do you think he'd react if I called him up and said that I wanted to design a better bumper for one of our lawn mowers, because I wanted to learn a little mechanical engineering on the job and thought that the bumper could be improved, and would he provide me with the current blue prints and give me access to the CAD software? Heck no, mechanical engineering is his job... why am I trying to learn to do his job instead of doing my own!?
So why is it okay to call up the programmer and ask him to help you learn to do the programmer's job? Granted, we've been doing some major projects and a lot of smaller projects have been back-burnered until we can get to them... which means if he asked us to write this simple application, he'd be told to submit it to the steering committee and maybe we'd get to it in about six months or so.
So I get that he could probably learn to write a simple DB app and deploy it long before we'd get around to doing it... but he'd probably spend a full month on it, where I'd do it in less than a week. It wouldn't be as nice as what I'd develop, but it'd get done. Theoretically... I don't think he realizes what kind of programming it takes to build a web-based application.
Based on his brief description of what he wants to do, I can't figure out why he needs a database anyway. I think he wants to use a database just so he can learn how on the job. He's one of those guys that thinks he's a computer geek, and knows just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to really understand how much he doesn't know.
Pinewood Derby – Do Your Best?
It's Pinewood Derby season for Cub Scouts, and it's the first time I've met this from the parent side. I did it once as a kid, but I don't recall actually doing anything... I'm pretty sure my dad built the whole thing while I watched. (Funny, I don't remember being in Cub Scouts or Webelos, but I remember the Pinewood Derby... my car is still around here somewhere.)
Anyway, that's always been a problem with PWD... it's really a challenge for a second or third-grader to do most of the work and turn out something good. Many of them have never touched a saw, sandpaper, block plane or anything out in the woodshop. (And many of them don't have a woodshop at home, either.) So when it comes to PWD crunch-time, dad's thinking about winning... about how disappointed his son's going to be with his second-grade attempt at building a car that comes in twenty-third, when every kid just knows that his beauty is going to win. And dad's concerned because he knows that "every other dad" is doing most of the work, so letting his son Do His Best puts him at a disadvantage.
So being the good dad and Den Leader, my plan was to arm my son with as much teaching and guidance as I can, and let him really do all the work. I got my own car for the Adult Outlaw race on which to vent my need for perfection. (And I'll probably hide it from Nathan so he can't compare his to mine.) So wanting to get off to a good start, I went looking for tips.
I found more than tips. I found cheats. Not just "here's how to modify the car illegally without getting caught." You can go buy a completed car on eBay for about a hundred bucks or so by people who have built over a hundred winning cars... guaranteed Boy Scouts of America legal. Except in the one place it really counts... built by the boy who's racing it.
Now, if you can't bring yourself to just buy your son a car, you can spend thirty to fifty dollars to buy a set of modified wheels and axles. Oh, they're OFFICIAL BSA wheels and axles, of course... wheels turned on a lathe to remove material (lighter is better) and do everything possible that isn't likely to be detected (a lot of the rules about not modifying the wheels involve friction-reduction techniques that only an adult is going to be able to do accurately). You can get OFFICIAL axles with grooves cut in them to reduce friction, where the grooves can't be seen without disassembling the car. You can buy nickle-plated, pre-polished axles.
Now, there are lots of "gravity driven car" competitions out there, many of them just for fun, where anything goes... but these are all sold as being made from OFFICIAL BSA components and appearing to be stock components. The only reason for them to be made from official BSA components is to compete in official BSA competitions... for fathers to help their Cub Scouts cheat.
I can't imagine spending $50 to help my son win a competition so he can have a trophy he didn't earn. But apparently there are plenty of fathers who are willing, because I counted at least five of these companies out there selling modified parts.
But even if all these modifications were legal (some are, some aren't; the rules are local to the Units), the point of the PWD is for the Cub Scout to Do His Best. I don't think buying machine-modified parts is teaching the right ethics, especially in an organization that is shaping young boys to be good men.
This isn't about doing whatever it takes to win... winning isn't the point. Playing the game, Doing Your Best, and winning or losing gracefully... that's the point.
I lost my one PWD race when I was a kid. I don't remember how I felt about losing... I'm sure I was disappointed, but I don't think it was any big deal. And in retrospect, I'm glad I didn't, because I didn't build that car myself. Imagine how a kid must feel when he wins a District championship with a car his daddy bought on eBay for $150. What right does a father have to steal his son's chance at winning for himself? When my son races, whether he wins or loses, I want him to be proud of his car, because he built it himself.
Sansa + Rockbox
Humpf. For over two years now, I've loved my MobiBlu Cube 1GB MP3 player. It's tiny... a 1" cube. I use a Sony Fontopia in-ear ear-bud lanyard... it's lightweight and convenient.
It doesn't use proprietary software... it's just a USB drive I drag-and-drop files onto, which is a no-exceptions requirement for me.
So it only has a 1/2" screen... you can only see about five characters at a time in file names, but it beats the screenless Shuffle, right? And it doesn't read meta-data tags... the file name is all you get.
In the past, I've mostly listen to audiobooks, and it's been perfect for that... I don't really need to see anything but a track number, so the small screen hasn't been a problem. It doesn't support Audible directly... I depend on some conversion software to get it out of the proprietary format and into MP3. But that's never been too much of a pain. (It's odd that it isn't Audible-ready... the player Audible used to give away with memberships several years ago was from MobiBlu's company.)
But as my podcast list has grown, I've found that the screen is a pain to navigate when I'm driving. And that 1G limit can be annoying if I actually want to put music on my player at the same time. And there's always the battery problem... the battery is getting worn out and the playback time is getting shorter, and the battery is not user-replaceable. (I'd replace it anyway if I could find one, but I've not found a source for this specific one.)
So here's the deal... awhile back, I bought a refurbished 2GB Sansa e250 through woot.com for $45 after shipping. My plan was to use it for music... MobiBlu for audiobooks and podcasts.
But then I discovered Rockbox. An open-source firmware replacement for several MP3 players... the Sansa e200 series included, of course.
And Rockbox rocks. One of the big requirements for my MP3 player has been bookmarks... the player has to remember where you left off in the MP3 file. Very few do this well. Rockbox does it more than right... it has an optional bookmark manager mode that lets you maintain a library of bookmarks. So I can stop in the middle of an audiobook, catch up on a podcast, get tired of a podcast in the middle, skip to the next one, catch up on the previous one, then go back to my audiobook, always picking up right where I left off.
The Sansa supports MP3, WMA and Audible. Rockbox throws in Ogg-Vorbis, FLAC, AAC and others I've never even heard of... the processing power of the player is large enough to do real-time decoding. I've really wanted to give Ogg a try, but few players support it.
The one thing it doesn't support is DRM... no Audible, no "protected" WMA, no iTunes. But hey, I'm already converting those to MP3 now. And if I get in a bind, Rockbox dual-boots... I can boot the original Sansa firmware at any time. (I burn my iTunes to CD and rip them back to encode to MP3.)
The only real drawback is that the Sansa is a brick compared to the MobiBlu Cube... I can't sling it around my neck conveniently. And that's a pretty big drawback after the convenience of the Cube for two years. I'm going to have to find a way to deal with that... maybe a sturdier lanyard will do the trick.