Breaking the Rules Pt. 1

Back in my days as a flight test engineer, we’d spend countless hours in meetings discussing things like pointing radars and flight paths.  Plan the flight and fly the plan was our mantra.

During our flights, we’d share the skies with some “special” kind of aircraft or missile that had barely made it off of the drawing board.  During these meetings, the contractors and program managers would stress to us the secrecy of what we would be flying against and how we weren’t supposed to know what these things looked like.

The flight paths were usually set up in a head on configuration.  That means, you’d fly toward each other and at the last second, veer away so you wouldn’t collide.

We would watch our computers and were able to tell when these near mid air collisions would occur.  So what happens when you tell a plane full of geeks not to look at something?  Seconds before the target would fly past, everyone would unstrap themselves, jump out of their seats and press their noses up against the windows to catch a glimpse of something that might make it onto the cover of Popular Mechanics in five years.

Now if we’d never been told not to look, we probably wouldn’t have bothered to sneak a peek.

This week, a colleague of mine and I had to access a super secure building.  We had to take a class and sign all kinds of forms in order for the security manager to let us in.  After being assigned our badges, my friend decided to see what would happen if he broke just one of the rules.  Now he didn’t load a computer virus or take pictures of stuff he shouldn’t have, but he did purposely miss a step in signing out of the building; just to see what would happen.

Nothing for the first two times.  The third brought down wrath from above with a personal visit from the senior building manager.

MLB owner Bill Veeck once said, “I try not to break the rules, but merely to test their elasticity.”  No one is ever remembered for keeping the rules, but we always seem to revere those who break them.

So why did God take the time to make up 10 rules for Moses to deliver to the children of Israel?  If he knew that every one of them would be broken, then why write them down?

I’ll try to figure that out before next week.  Feel free to steer me in the right direction before then.

Hockey, Spartacus and Evolution

I don’t know if it was a coincidence or not, but last weekend I watched Spartacus for the first time on Hulu and then went to my first hockey game later that night.  What I found interesting was the parallel between people’s lust for blood way back then and now.

Sure, the gladiators were slaves and forced to kill each other so that doesn’t have much in common with mostly rich kids in their late teens trying to make it to the NHL.  But the thirst for blood by the fans was fascinating.

The local hockey team is kind of like a minor league baseball team.  There are scouts in the stands looking for the right players to call up to the big leagues.  You can imagine that each player is trying to stand out both to the scouts and the local fans; mostly made up of young teenage girls screaming their favorite players on to victory.

So back to the game.  Within the first minute of play, a fight breaks out between two players that escalates into a full-out knock-down brawl involving all 10.  I looked around while the punches were flying and the teen girls were on their seats screaming things like, “Kill Them!” and “Make em Bleed!”.  Now some of these kids I know from the local Christian school and to be honest, I’d never heard them speak before because they act so introverted.  But put a puck on the ice, add some testosterone filled males and it’s Rome all over again.

People will always put down what happened in Rome as something that those barbarians did for entertainment.  Today we’re much more sophisticated.  We wouldn’t even think of urging young men to kill each other for entertainment.

Maybe it’s the chemistry that I find most fascinating.  Men watch fighting like MMA stuff and hockey with this attitude of; how would I react in this situation to gain the upper hand?  It’s all about survival of the fittest and if you don’t survive, then you die; or at least get kicked off the team.  Women watch for the sake of picking out the mate that will protect and take care of them.  It doesn’t hurt if their cute too.

As a Christian, I hate to say this, but it’s all about evolution.  We want our genes to thrive and getting emotionally connected through the actions of violent players seems to fill that need.  We were built for survival even though most of the time it’s acted out in the nose bleed section with a bag of popcorn.

Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams Pt. 2

When I started working for the Dept. of Defense out of college, I met up with a man who would be my boss for many years.  He was an engineer’s engineer.  Always tinkering with stuff at home and trying out new products and how they could best fit into his work.  He purchased an Amiga computer and told me to take it home and try it out.  I didn’t know anything about Amiga computers but was soon multitasking and working with a drawing program called Lightwave 3D.

With it you could build three dimensional stuff and then make it come alive through animation; things that are common place now, but back in the early 90s, it was very new and exciting.  The first model I built was an F-18 jet that we had been testing at work.  I showed it to my boss and he was astounded at the detail and how this would forever change the stale presentations we would make for the Pentagon.

I also showed my plane to a startup company that had just begun to sell 3D models to a special effects industry that was just starting to embrace computer graphics.  I licensed my jet through them and we began a relationship that would last for years; and several hundred 3D models.

One of the things that bugged me was the lack of interaction with customers.  I never knew who was buying my stuff.  While attending a computer graphics conference in Los Angeles, I stopped by the licensing company’s booth and one of the sales staff pulled me aside and said, “You know that one of your jets was used in The Rock movie?”  I gulped.  To hear that news was a shock and an honor.  I had made it; I was part of the special effects industry.  BTW, you can see the clip here.

More movies and video games followed.  I was riding high with my second career that I did after the kids were in bed.  As the computer graphics industry grew, I saw prices of software and hardware plummet and more people get into content creation.  What I was doing was no longer unique.  The market was being flooded with plane models.

Ten years ago, I stepped into reverse engineering full size objects.  Video game companies were creating driving simulations that needed accurately detailed cars to support consoles like Playstation and X-Box.  I jumped feet first into scanning cars only to find the industry had again caught up with me a few years later.  Just like before, the market had become flooded with cars to the point that my work was falling into the noise.

It feels now like my work has gone the way of the buggy wheel.  Just not that much of a need for it when any high school kid will give his content away for free in exchange for being recognized.  For 17 years, I was part of the industry that I had dreamed of working for when sitting in the library looking at Star Wars books as a kid.  I can truly say that I fulfilled that childhood dream.

What’s next?  I’ll feel my way with the 3D thing, and am still hoping for a resurgence with possibly the mobile community of applications like those found on the iPhone.  I’m not holding my breath though.  With my kids just now starting college, it would be nice to go back to the good old days.  Maybe it’s time to revisit my childhood list of dreams.

Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams Pt. 1

I just finished reading the book The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch; I know, it’s been out for a while, but I’m slow.  In it, Pausch tells an audience from Carnegie Mellon University, where he is a professor,  that he has terminal cancer and goes on to recount his childhood and how he dreamed of being in zero gravity, being Capt. Kirk of Star Trek and working as a Disney Imagineer.  With the exception of playing in the NFL, all of his dreams came true.

What was interesting to me was the computer graphics aspect of the speech.  Pausch describes attending these conferences where he’d give lectures, many of which I also attended back in the day.  (Tangent) I can still remember sitting in a lecture given by a young director named James Cameron (back in the early 90’s), where he described how many parts of future films would be replaced by computer graphics; even people.  Just a few years later, Titanic hit the theaters full of digital ships and people.

After reading The Last Lecture, it struck me how at least two of my childhood dreams came true.  As a kid, I was always wasting my time and money down at the local Radio Shack.  Back in those days, they used to sell electronic kits where you could make lights blink and counters count.  I built model railroads, but was more interested in how the power made it from the transformer into the tiny motor inside the engine.  As an electronics engineer now, I guess you could say I fulfilled that dream; with the exception that the transformers I deal with now supply enough power to light a city.

Another place that held my interest as a kid was movie special effects.  My brother and I were raised in a religiously conservative home and weren’t allowed to go to the movies.  Now this was around the time when Star Wars came out, and you can imagine how painful it was for us to hear about it from our friends.  Now for some reason, there is a natural law of attraction to things you are told to stay away from, so what did we do?

My brother immersed himself in building miniature sets from famous movies.  His prize achievement was a model of the Towering Inferno.  With all the time he spent building it, he never got up the nerve to set it on fire for me to film.

Speaking of film, while all my friends were saving their money for bikes or skateboards, I was saving for a movie camera.  I’d stare at photography catalogs for hours trying to pick out the perfect Super8 camera that would fulfill my movie making dreams.  I settled on the Canon 512XL with autozoom and stop motion, and when it arrived, I locked myself in my room where I’d draw out animated birds or recreate a drag race with my model cars and a handful of cotton balls.

The forbidden attraction also found me at the local library pouring over newly printed books about the making of Star Wars.  Sure my friends had seen the movie 20 times, but how many of them memorized the life story of George Lucas?  I was entranced with the pictures of the miniature sets and space ships.  That was how I wanted to spend time as an adult; making movies and building models to blow up.

High school came and went, and my roommate from college ushered me into the wonderful world of movies by taking me to Return of the Jedi.  I was hooked!  All the books and articles came alive for me right there in the theater.  I could have probably told you how most of the special effects were created given how much time I’d spent in the library.

Only a few short years out of college, would I get the privilege to become part of the special effects process in not just one, but many motion pictures.

As a serial movie might say, you’ll have to come back next time to see my rise and fall in the entertainment industry.

If Thy TV Offends Thee…

All the engineers from our utility across the northwest have convened for the yearly meeting this week where we gripe, gripe and gripe some more.  Everyone has their favorite place to stay, but a colleague of mine surprised me with his choice.  It sounded more like a community center than a hotel.

Seems he can’t stay in a room with a TV.  He says that if he does, he’ll end up staying up late into the night where he’ll flip channels with reckless abandon.  So instead of living with the temptation, he completely avoids it by staying in a place where it doesn’t exist.

A pastor once told me that when he stays in a hotel, his first order of business is to find a bath towel and drape it over the top of the offending TV as a symbol to not turn it on.  Other friends have told me that they’ve gotten rid of their TVs altogether because they found that their families had become addicted to it.

For the life of me, I can’t figure that one out.  There’s really nothing on TV anyway, so why is it such a temptation?  Then I got to thinking.  I’ve got stuff that tempts me that I give in to when it’s placed in front of me that doesn’t bother other folks.  Put a box of donuts within the sensory range of my nose, and I’ve got a problem.  And let’s not even get into the subject of chocolate.

Everyone is different and each of us has stuff that tempts us.  Temptation isn’t a problem, as Jesus was tempted in every way we are.  The problem is following through.  I can sniff a box of donuts all day, but eating that second one is where I fall into gluttony. (ok, I can’t sniff a box of donuts without having issues)

So if your TV offends thee, turn it off.  If your hand reaches for that second piece of chocolate, make sure someone else gets it first.

Is Rick Sanchez the New Dan Rather?

Yesterday, Rush Limbaugh was removed from his interest to become a part owner of the St. Louis Rams.  It seems as if he was becoming a distraction to the process of buying the team.  Now if you listen to Rush on any regular basis, you’ll know that he’s the NFL’s biggest fan.  With an audience of millions, he promotes the NFL like no one else and without taking a penny for it.

Why then would the owners and the media and ultimately his business partners get cold feet?  In this day of being politically correct, you can become an easy target for a smear campaign.  People who had no idea what they were talking about came out of the wood work to bring Rush down.  Angry players leaped in front of the cameras, quotes that had never been associated with Rush were plastered all over CNN even though they knew he never said them.  The racial spotlight addicts like Sharpton and Jackson got their face time by trying to associate Rush with injustice and bigotry.

No wonder everyone got cold feet.  And that makes this story have an even sadder ending than just a guy whose business deal fell through.  How is it that the media can control what happens in the private sector without any negative repercussions?  Because people who swing toward the side of racial bias can be pushed even further through false stories and fabrications.

Yikes, what if any one of us tried to buy a small business in our home town and the local newspaper editor thought that the church we attended was too different than his so he launched a smear campaign to stop the transaction?  Do you think the lawyers at the county attorneys office would take notice?  Absolutely!  What if a person of color tried to rent an apartment and was turned down because of something that was made up about them?  Would Sharpton and Jackson show up?  Absolutely!

So why is it that the pundits and media can get away with bringing down a business deal because they don’t like one of the partners?  For his part, Rush says he wants to take the high road and not pursue any legal action.  If it were me, I’d make a stink and call out every owner that wanted to vote against me.  What, they don’t have any issues in their closets that might have caused them to be disqualified to own an NFL team?

For CNN’s part, Rick Sanchez has become the new Dan Rather.  If you remember a few years ago, Rather plastered memos on the CBS news that called into question the National Guard service of George W. Bush.  Even when the documents were shown to be bogus, CBS and Rather defended the story.  Why?  Because in their minds, it had to be true.  Sanchez has taken the exact same path.  Limbaugh must be guilty of racism, so let’s plaster bogus stuff about him on the news; because after all, it fits CNN’s template of his character.

Phoneless Phones and the iPod Touch

I’m going to take a break from relationships and religion this week to focus on tech stuff.  A man can only take so much emotion.

Has anyone noticed the iPod Touch commercials that seem to dominate bathroom breaks these days.  As of September, Apple has supposedly sold over 20 million of these time wasters along with who knows how many $1 applications to fill them up.  When the iPhone first came out, there was grumbling about how Apple should have made a version of the iPhone without the phone.  Well they came through with results that were beyond anyone’s expectations.

So here’s my question.  With all the success of the iPod Touch, why hasn’t anyone else tried to copy Apple?  The Palm Pre has been out for several months now, but you have to go to the cell phone store and sign up for an expensive data plan to get your hands on one.  Sure you could pay $500 for an unlocked version, but the Touch will only set you back $200.

If you buy an unlocked Google Dream phone, you’ll shell out $400, but for some reason, you won’t be able to download applications unless you sign up for cell service with a subsidized version.

As a Touch owner, I’d like to send a message out to Google(or whoever makes Android hardware) and Palm.

Make a phoneless version of your phones!

I refuse to purchase a smart phone with a huge monthly fee, so instead I have my Touch and a toilet phone.  You know, the one you can get a Walmart for $9 with a pay as you go plan.  If it falls into the toilet, you just get another one.  Try that with a Pre.

So Google, and Palm; please make a PDA version of your devices.  There is obviously a huge market for phoneless phones if you observe Apple’s success.

Gender Parity, or Do Christian Men Idolize Women?

As many of you who read this blog know, I love listening to New Life Live each day.  The advice they dish out is a great combination of getting to the core of each problem with a healthy mix of humor.  There is however one thing that bugs me about the show and that is how different the advice is based on gender.  Let me give you a couple of examples.

A woman calls in looking for direction;

Woman:  My husband and I have recently separated after 20 years of marriage because I found out that he’s been having an affair.

New Life:  Oh, my.  We are so sorry and we can feel the hurt in your voice.  How can we help you?

Woman:  I need to know what to do next to reconcile this marriage.

New Life:  Well your husband is going to have to call off the affair.  He’s going to need to get into several programs before reconciliation can even begin.  He’ll need to be in Celebrate Recovery, Sex Addicts Anonymous, Every Man’s Battle etc.  He’s also going to need weekly counseling and belong to a men’s Bible study group.  Only after he’s in recovery for several months and is truly remorseful can he be trusted to let back in the house.  If you do take him back, make sure he works these programs for the rest of his life or he’ll fall back into his sinful nature.  After he does come back, the both of you need to see a lawyer where he will need to sign over all property into your name to insure that you’ll be protected if he strays again.

You get the point.  So what happens when a man calls in?

Man:  My wife and I have recently separated after 20 years of marriage because I found out that she’s been having an affair.

New Life:  What did you do to cause her to have an affair?

Man:  Maybe I don’t communicate well?  I’d like to reconcile.

New Life:  In order to get her back, you need to seek out counseling to see why you caused her to stray.  You also need to be in a men’s group where they can make you accountable for your emotional failings.  Only then can you contact her to take full responsibility for the affair and ask her forgiveness.

I hate to say it, but this isn’t a bunch of hyperbole.  If you listen to the initial question by either man or woman, you can guess with much accuracy what the advice will be.

New Life isn’t the only Christian group that believes in “man humility” no matter what the scenario.  If you watched the movie Fireproof, you’d have gotten a good dose of it.  If you remember, the husband is a jerk, is remorseful, tries to make amends and gets his wife back.  The wife however, has an emotional affair with some guy she works with, and ends up being portrayed as the saint of the movie with no accountability for her behavior.

Other Christian groups believe that the only reason a woman would sin is because of the actions of her husband.  Does this mean that single women have no need of a Savior?

My problem isn’t with the course of action that jerky men need to take, it’s that women in the Christian community are given a pass when it comes to sin.

Are men who made women idols through porn or affairs still making them idols through one way humiliation?  Are we as Christians so uncomfortable with the “submit” passages that this is our way of making up for the abuse women have suffered at the hands of bad husbands?

My Bible says that all have sinned and are in need of a Savior.  So help me out Christian community.  If I’m off course, show me the way!

Purell, H1N1 and OCD

When working for the Department of Defense, we used to have a saying.  Crisis creates cash.  Whenever we needed funding for a project, we’d have to convince an Admiral or General that such and such a device would save lives.  While I worked in a navigation lab, we convinced the Pentagon to fund putting GPS devices into missiles because they would find the target more accurately than existing technology.  Two years later, we asked for funding to study the effects of jamming on GPS, because they were very susceptible to outside interference thus causing missiles to go astray.

The media does this all the time.  If you can put enough bad news on the front page, then people will buy your product and you’ll stay in business.  I can’t help but think about this swine flu thing and if it really is bad news or just another way to sell soap.

When I was taking my daughter to get her license at the local DMV, we took a number and waited our turn to be helped.  The counter was lined with bottles of Purell as if they were Christmas decorations.  At one of the stations, a father was standing with two small kids; a boy and a girl.  The boy who looked to be all of about 6, would reach up and give himself a squirt of Purell every 30 seconds or so.  I lost count after 10 squirts, but that bottle would have been drained had not the father finished his business and left.

I can imagine the school that this little guy attends where the teachers and staff are walking around with Purell bottles squirting hands all day and telling the little ones that if they don’t, they might die from swine flu.

I can also imagine there’s Purell located in the cafeterias of schools everywhere so that these same kids can eat their burgers and fries in peace knowing that they’ll live a full and active germ free life.

The stock holders of Johnson & Johnson must be giddy, knowing that degermifying your hands has become an obsessive compulsive disorder.  An entire industry has grown out of a petrie dish of panic.

Then I got to thinking; how did civilization ever survive without Purell?  Sure there have been bugs that have killed thousands of people, but will H1N1 kill that many without Purell?  Many of the students at Washington State University have swine flu.  But instead of wringing their freshly scented hands about it, many are actually trying to catch it.  Seems that the flu lasts a day or two and then they’re back to life.

So instead of red colored Purell or Cougar embossed face masks, the WSU kids are doing this thing called living life.  They aren’t letting the flu take control of them in an effort to avoid it, but instead having faith that their God given immune systems will do their job.

I’ve heard about studies done with kids whose guardians are germaphobes, vs. those who let their kids play in the dirt and aren’t crazy about hand washing.  Seems the dirty kids end up as much healthier adults while the bubble kids are much more prone to things like asthma.

So will the Purell phase come to an end soon?  Probably, but we can all say that without it, we’d have never beaten back the evil H1N1.

Behind the TV

Every year at the Consumer Electronics Show, companies from around the world will try to sell you on the latest technology and give you a behind the scenes look at what you’ll be spending your money on next year.  In 2007 Sony introduced an Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) TV that was brighter, thinner, had more contrast etc. than any other LCD or Plasma on the market.

They claimed they’d have these sets launched within the year and that this would usher in the new age of TV.  Well it’s almost 2010 and these new TVs aren’t here and most likely will never be.  What’s the issue you might ask?  Seems the life span is but a mere fraction of current televisions and consumers would have a fit if their new TV went dim after a couple years of life.

A friend of mine who works for a major American based electronics company told me recently that the OLED TVs have a problem with physics that engineers will probably never be able to solve.  So where is the disconnect?  Marketing departments will tell you the next biggest thing is just around the corner while the design department will laugh, off the record, and tell you that they’re not even close.

Environmentalists will tell you about the awesomeness of wind power, but talk to a power dispatcher and they’ll tell you the things cause more damage and headaches than people know.

The great physicist Richard Feynman was part of the commission that investigated the shuttle Challenger disaster.  He was disturbed to find a huge disconnect between NASA management and the engineers on the ground.  Management told him the odds of a catastrophic shuttle failure was 1 in 100,000.  The engineers told him is was more like 1 in 50.

So who do you believe?  We as the hopeful human race want to believe good stuff is just around the corner, but when faced with reality, we’re bound to be disappointed.

Matthew 24 talks about management and marketing types;

^23-25“If anyone tries to flag you down, calling out, ‘Here’s the Messiah!’ or points, ‘There he is!’ don’t fall for it. Fake Messiahs and lying preachers are going to pop up everywhere. Their impressive credentials and dazzling performances will pull the wool over the eyes of even those who ought to know better. But I’ve given you fair warning.

^26-28“So if they say, ‘Run to the country and see him arrive!’ or, ‘Quick, get downtown, see him come!’ don’t give them the time of day. The Arrival of the Son of Man isn’t something you go to see. He comes like swift lightning to you! Whenever you see crowds gathering, think of carrion vultures circling, moving in, hovering over a rotting carcass. You can be quite sure that it’s not the living Son of Man pulling in those crowds.

Bottom line; Christianity is no place for idealism.