I was thinking today about habits. Those things we do all the time. We usually think of bad ones, like someone biting his fingernails or tossing her clothes on the floor. But habits can be good, too: flossing your teeth, keeping your desk clean, or riding your bike to work every day. And its definition (a regular, recurring behavior) tells you how to acquire a new one. Once you have found the habit you want, do it regularly–act like you already have the habit, in other words–and it will be yours.

How long does it take? 21 seems to be a magic number–three weeks to own it.

Why would you want a new habit? Shouldn’t we spend our time trying to be better people? Think for a moment about what it means to be some type of person. How do you identify a funny person? Or someone who is honest? A responsible person? Or a productive one? There is no sign around our necks or a registry where we can look each other up. We are what we do. Aristotle said:

Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting a particular way… you become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions. Aristotle

We can develop the habit of kindness, or patience, or integrity. But we can’t become gracious simply by thinking about it and giving ourselves a Picardesque command to make it so. If we want to be compassionate, we must do the things that a compassionate person does. And we must do them consistently.

I was thinking about ways to save water today. I grew up in East Tennessee and they have had a severe drought this year. Steven Vore shows how bad it is in Atlanta at Lake Lanier. I can’t save water just by deciding it’s something I want to do. That is the place I have to start: like good old Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “the ancestor of every action is a thought.” But saving water–or using less water, in fact–is a behavior and that behavior must be established by doing things that use less water. It might sound like a tautology, but it’s not.

I already do a lot of little things that reduce the amount I waste: I take short showers, I don’t run the faucet while I brush my teeth or shave, and I don’t have any leaks or dripping taps. But I noticed the other day that I let the water run the whole time I wash my hands, even though much of that time is spent rubbing soap on them rather than holding them under the running water. So now I turn the water off while I lather up. That’s a specific act I can choose to do, and one that I intend to adopt as a habit, so that I may become a person who uses less water.

Habits take time to develop and they can’t be acquired in big clumps. That’s been a failure of mine in the past: when I get on a self-improvement kick, I identify a thousand ways that I could be better and I try to do them all at once. It never works. My behaviors–good and bad–have developed slowly, through patient repetition.

Maybe it’s like exercise. Even the infomercials tell you to give them six weeks for results.

So think about acquiring a good habit as exercise for your mind. Focus on specific actions you can perform regularly so that, by doing them, you become what you want to be.

As I was heading into the weblog meetup last night, a father and daughter were walking out of Crossroads mall. The father was a big man, probably six-four and two-fifty or more. His daughter looked like she might be in middle school or junior high.

Father: …if I didn’t, I would just blow up.

Daughter: <something I couldn’t hear>

Father: I did look. There was no one around.

Daughter: But what if someone came around the corner? Then they would have heard you!

At the Eastside weblog meetup tonight, we talked some about cameras and photography and I told Anita and Jules that sometimes the expectations I have set for my photography are more burden than benefit: I can hardly bring myself to just take a snapshot anymore (although you might not believe if you look at my Flickr photostream — at least I don’t intend to take snapshots).

I’m not saying I want to take snapshots. But along the way I lost the joy of taking photos, or I forgot why I liked photography in the first place. I have managed to replace enjoyment with a burden of responsibility. Each time I pick up a camera, I have to think about the composition in the frame, and I want to make sure that the edges of the frame have strong forms, and I don’t have washed out highlights or shadows lost to unrecoverable blackness, and I’m looking for lines or progressions of shapes that will lead the eye through the frame but not out of it, and I’m wondering whether the picture would be stronger if I took it from over there instead, or from down on the ground, or from up on those stairs. And, oh yeah, what’s this photo actually about? What mood or emotion or idea am I trying to convey? Now what can I eliminate from the frame so that the idea is stronger? Is this idea better communicated through a wide angle, a normal field of view, or with the compression of a telephoto? Do I want the whole frame in focus from front to back or do I want to open up the aperture so that I selectively focus on only a part of the frame? Is there enough light for that aperture to keep the shutter speed up and avoid blur? Do I care if those trees in the background converge because I’m not holding the camera perfectly parallel to the ground? Is the horizon straight? In scenes like this, does my camera tend to meter them high or low? So how much exposure compensation do I want to dial in? Would a bit of fill flash help? How much ambient light do I want to let in?

And on and on. Read that paragraph again — did you notice any concern about what I was taking a picture of?

I came home after the Meetup and, while Dawn was playing Elebits, I popped up Bloglines and saw that Timmy Corkery had a new post. With a scan of this wonderful Polaroid photo from years ago. Since I hadn’t been checking Flickr in a while, I had a look at the rest of his photostream.

Timmy has fun with his photos. And I have fun looking at them. He doesn’t try to make “fine art” photographs: he takes photos to tell stories. He tells stories about the food he loves, about his bicycles, about his friends. There’s this joy of life — of his life — that sings through Timmy’s photos.

Somewhere along the way, in my quest to make better photographs, I went off into the weeds. I decided that I wanted to make art, not photos, or not just photos. So I spent a lot of time studying the techniques and theory of fine art photography and sought to produce photos that would stand on their own as artistic creations: photos that would be appreciated as art on their own, not for their content. In fact, it was almost as though the subject didn’t matter: that I would truly have succeeded when I could make a great artistic photo of anything at all, where the question “what is this a photo of?” is irrelevant.

But I forgot, or never learned, that a true artistic photo doesn’t choose the forms and the shapes instead of the content: it starts with the content and adds all that visual grammar of art to it. It intensifies the beauty or the emotion of the subject with a strong composition and interesting shapes and forms.

Maybe that’s why I can’t enjoy so many of the fine art photoblogs: like me, they think the design is the message, not a way of clarifying it. There are a few art photographers whose work I enjoy: Billie Mercer, Paul Butzi, and Doug Plummer. There’s a common thread for all three: they shoot what they love and let the art follow. Billie has her adopted town of San Miguel de Allende in Mexico; Paul has fences and rural landscapes (and before that the rocky beaches of the Pacific Northwest); and Doug has contra dancing and sticks.

So maybe I should just open my eyes, stop pretending like I know everything (or anything) and let the joy I feel everyday come through my photos. Let go of the pretensions that have produced my recent spate of drivel and just tell a few stories like Timmy.

Maya sleeps on the couch while Dawn watches hockey

The Oilers lost 2-1 to Vancouver but Dawn still enjoyed watching, especially since it came from an Edmonton station and she saw all the local commercials, including a few of Frank and Gordon.

During the first quarter of the Arkansas-Auburn game:

Tommy: I think these are the two top rushing offenses in the conference.

Dawn: There shouldn’t be any delay-of-game penalties, then.

We had a big turnout for the weblog meetup at Crossroads last night but I probably made sure that one new member won’t be coming back.

There were two new people there last night: the prolific man behind ~C4Chaos (he’s got three different blogs and posts four or five times a day) and Jules Maas, who had the bad luck to sit next to me.

Danny (I think that is his name — I’ve seen him once or twice before at the meetings but I don’t have a URL) wanted us to actually talk about something related to blogging, so he asked everyone about our blog hosting. Do we use a service like Typepad, Wordpress, or Windows Live Spaces, or one of the communities like LiveJournal, or do we use a hosted account, or do we have a dedicated server somewhere, whether at a co-location facility or at home serving pages over DSL or cable? He was taking notes so once I find his post I’ll point to it.

It was a good meetup and, even though we didn’t always talk about blogging (though we mostly did), we didn’t mention science fiction once.

I got a beef-and-rice bowl from Bulgogi and they gave me a lot of food. I had eaten what I could and, as I stood up to get rid of my tray, Jack said, “You didn’t eat much of that.”

“You should have seen how much I started with,” I said. “There was this much.” As I made a motion with my hand over the bowl, I hit the glass of Sprite — the half-full glass of Sprite still cold enough to have unmelted ice — and spilled it all over Jules who was seated to my left.

She was remarkably gracious about the whole mess and even refused my offer to pay for dry cleaning.

Welcome to the Eastside Weblog Meetup, Jules. If you will come back again, I promise I won’t sit next to you.

Almost everyone else has posted a note about the meetup last night (Anita, Jack, Dennis, and Ram – but not Alex), so I’m a bit behind. We somehow manage to spend little of our time talking about blogging at these meetups but we still enjoy ourselves immensely. I’m disappointed that Anita (and Jack, I presume, though I didn’t get a chance to ask him) hasn’t been following Battlestar Galactica this season. The other folks I usually talk to about the show are still catching up from the first half of the season. I would love to know what they think about the Baltar-Six developments in the past few episodes.

Dennis — a.k.a. Orcmid — dropped by and left a comment this morning. He asked whether I had tried compiled JavaScript in .NET or not.

In the case of my strong typing epiphany, I wasn’t writing a script from scratch. Instead, I was modifying an existing script. Basically, I was changing it from doing a set of things once to doing that set of things multiple times, but with slight variations in the options. There was a bit of new logic in the program, but it was mostly refactoring. And it was the refactoring that got tough without strong typing as I converted repeating blocks of inline code into functions and corrected assumptions the original author had made (but that no longer were true). I had to change the scope of variables, create parameters, and document each new function. There were a lot of opportunities for typos.

One of the cardinal rules of modern programming is never to copy and paste. If you have two or more blocks of code that are identical, or even nearly identical, a subroutine should be made and then that subroutine called in place of the inline blocks of code. The reasoning is this: if the logic is duplicated in the code, if that logic is ever changed, it may not get picked up in all the places.

For example, pretend this pseudocode is a meaningful program:

if something equals "a" then
    doFunctionOne(using "a")
    doFunctionTwo(using "a")
    doFunctionThree(using "a")
if something equals "b" then
    doFunctionOne(using "b")
    doFunctionTwo(using "b")
    doFunctionThree(using "b")

There’s an example of copy-and-pasted code. It could easily be turned into a subroutine:

subroutine doFunctions(parameter)
    doFunctionOne(parameter)
    doFunctionTwo(parameter)
    doFunctionThree(parameter)

And then the main part of the program would look like:

if something equals "a" then
    doFunctions("a")
if something equals "b" then
    doFunctions("b")

Or even simpler, in this trivial example:

doFunctions("a")
doFunctions("b")

Imagine this kind of change, but across several hundred lines of script code.

Getting back to Dennis’s question: I have done some things with JScript.NET, but it wouldn’t have helped here because I was modifying existing code rather than starting from scratch and I needed to work within the already-established parameters.

If I have to touch this bit of code again, for anything more than the most-trivial change, I’ll most likely invest the time to convert it to managed code. It will save me — or whoever comes along after me to maintain it — more time than I’ll spend doing the conversion.

Now, another question that the devil’s advocate in me has been asking: when is copy-and-paste better than factoring code into subroutines? Let’s forget about one-off, throw-away code. For stuff that’s meant to last and be maintained, are there any situations where copy-and-paste is preferable? Perhaps I will address that in the future or, even better, maybe some of you will provide answers in the comments.

Update: I’ve got to do something to remind myself to insert the tags on the posts before posting. I need to figure out how to hook Blogjet to remind me.

Tags: meetup, programming, refactoring
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What are you giving up for Lent? Me? I’m giving up impatience.

I know this is supposed to be a season of penance rather than an indulgence in self-improvement. But then I’m not Catholic and impatience must be one of my pleasures since I’ve indulged in it for so long.

I don’t like to wait in line — not at the grocery store, not at a restaurant, not at the border. I’m frustrated by people driving below the speed limit and the time it takes to pass all the security checks when making a RAS connection at work.

I’ve been trying a thought experiment the past few days and I have been surprised by the results. Every time I feel impatient or sense myself rushing, I ask, “Why are you impatient? What’s the value of hurrying?” There are some valid answers to those questions — diarrhea or free Krispy Kreme donuts among them — but mostly there is no good reason. What am I missing if I don’t make the traffic light? Especially what am I missing if Dawn and Maya are in the car with me? So all the tables are full. That’s just an opportunity to study the restaurant’s decor or watch people come and go.

Most of all, though, I value grace, dignity, and kindness — not characteristics usually associated with impatience and rushing about.

It’s going to take a lot of practice and a lot of discipline, but I hope to emerge a better person. And isn’t that really the spirit of Lent?

Tags: Lent, impatience
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Kathy Sierra says it’s important to blow your mind on a regular basis. Well, she just blew mine with a post about neurogenesis and the discoveries that learning heals the brain.

You see, this month, as I think back on the DRI work, I can tell that my mind has healed. Really. I can almost feel it. I couldn’t put it into words until I read her post, but that is what I gained this month: a healthy mind.

In January, I thought I had just gotten tired of software, or Microsoft, or something. But I couldn’t articulate anything else I would rather do. I know that the first step in achieving something is to know what you want, but I had no goals, no dreams, and no visions of what I might want to do. My mind was dull and lifeless. I had never experienced this emptiness before.

What had happened to me?

I worked hard this month and I learned while I did it. That combination of duty and learning sparked some kind of renewal inside me. The flurry of ideas and projects and possibilities that have always been my constant companions are back in full force and I’m acting on them.

For something that I dreaded so much, the DRI work has been an absolute blessing to me. Hawai`i was transformative in one way, but I wasn’t ready to learn what it had to teach me: the lesson was incomplete. But I’m ready now. As I re-evaluate that experience, I’ll be writing about it here.

Tags: learning, healing, mind, work, duty
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There had been a bit of snow and freezing temperatures overnight — very rare for the Pacific Northwest. Coming out of my neighborhood, all the streets were just wet with no ice. But I hit a slick patch that was in the shade of trees coming around a turn. My helmet did its job. No headache, but those abrasions (there’s one on my knee as well) will be sore pretty soon. And based on past experience, I’ll be stiff tomorrow.

Tags: bicycle, accident, abrasions, photo
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A couple of weeks ago, Randy got a new Gillette Fusion razor – the one with five blades. I got one at the same time.

I was using products from The Art of Shaving. With the Fusion, I found the combination of the shave oil and the nice creamy lather to be too thick. I wasn’t getting a close shave and I had to work to clear the stuff out of the blades between strokes.

So I decided to try the Gillette Complete Skin Care “Shave Multi Gel” and after shave. By the standards of drug store products, they’re a bit more expensive. But compared to The Art of Shaving, they’re almost free.

And after a week with the new shaving gel, I’m going to stick with it. The razor moves more easily across my face, it rinses cleanly, and I don’t have any skin irritation. It’s surprisingly good.

The difference in cost between the shaving products will probably be more than offset by the cost of the Fusion Power blades, but I’m just glad I have found a shaving combo to be happy with.

Well, as happy as I can be about shaving….

Tags: Gillette Fusion, shaving, razor
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