Oh dear, what is going on? Particles race across my brain, trying hard to inflict a more permanent pattern of some kind of knowledge! Help, a rant is coming on!

Some time has passed since my last update. I've been reading. And contemplating. And philosophised. And concluded. The world, as I knew it, has gone from one to the other. A more technical posting is expected tomorrow. Until then;

There is no place like home!

Indeed, there isn't even a place that I call home anymore. I've moved pretty much all my life, and even though I moved overseas on a few occasions I always came back to my home town of Oslo. I can't say that anymore. Now, there is a new reality for me; home is where I place my hat (to quote an Australian song), not where my friends might be.

Friends. What an odd word it is; some times it means people we love, other times people we know, and then again it means someone we have some kind of association with no matter how opaque. Moving away from "home" to a new place makes you look a little closer at what friends are, and I can tell you that finding new friends is tough, really tough, especially for someone like me.

Someone like me

I've had a few issues lately about raising my children. Like most other parents, I raise my children in my image (like the good Gods we pretend to be), but lately I've looked at myself and thought that even as much as I like being me, I don't want my children to be like me. Odd thought maybe, but this is what I am;

I'm a knowledge experimenter with a fetish for epistomology, which mean that if you say "Did you know ..." there is a good chance I'll reply "No, and neither do you!" Any conversation built on the notion that we know anything (as in facts) just doesn't grok with me, and since I love to talk, discuss and propagate information, I blend my knowledge (Hah!) into the discussions, almost certainly losing people along the way.

I'm also a music buff; it is my passion in life! It guides me, shapes me, form my thoughts and emotions and occupies a great deal of what I'm all about, conversation or action. The problem is of course that I'm passionate about a very small fraction of all music; that which falls into certain categories within certain periods, like baroque madrigals for two voices or more, with continuo. How bloody specific can you get before you can't talk to anyone but your mirror about your biggest passion in life?

I'm a firm believer in the anti-methodology methodology. If someone comes along and suggests a methodology for doing my work, I will firmly tell them to shove it up their religious omnibus; just as in "knowledge" there are as many ways of doing things good as there are good ways to do things. There is no singular better, only the hazy plural! I just can't belive that people don't see this as nature shows us all the time. How can I "manage projects without templates" they balk! It is astounding that so few project managers don't see it as people management.

All in all, I'm somewhat of a bore! My wife, who is the social extrapolation of me, tells me all the time; stop talking about this high-level fluffy stuff, and try to enjoy yourself a little. She is wise, but I'm weak. I can't stop, and hence, I do not wish any of my children to become like me. I'm not having fun. I want to have more fun. But I can't.

What I consider fun

Fun is a fun word, and has as many implications as there are interpreters of the word itself. My own world is a bit skewed; I can't enjoy something I don't understand, which means that as I understand things I clearly see why it isn't funny anymore. Mystery works in that way, doesn't it? Something is mysterious and fun until you figure out that mirror A reflects hand-movement B smoking out foot-motion C, and voila! the trick goes from fun and entertaining to neat but logical.

So what things haven't I figured out yet? Well, why we think object-oriented programming is so cool, for example. Or why usability seems like magic to most people. Or why people can't get out of the way when I'm in a hurry, but more waddle along like cows on a grassy hill with not a care for what goes on around it. Also I haven't figured out how to make a million dollars. Nor why my kids can't be less messy eaters at the dinner table. Nor have I figured out why algorithmic citation-linked historiography should have any impact on the TAO methods I use in some of our bibliographical user-interfaces.

So there is tons of stuff I haven't figured out that has some potential of being 'fun'. And yet there are only three things in my life that I find gives me 'fun', and they coincide with the categories 'love' and 'drives me up the wall sometimes' as well; wife, child A and child B. Everything else in the universe is not important.

Permalink (Tue, 26 Jul 2005 13:00:00 GMT)| Comments (1) | General