QST de N7GMT

So my buddy is in China. Normally he is someplace much less exotic but this summer he decided that the family togetherness activity should be “live in China for two months.”

This isn’t actually as bizarre as it might sound. Each year our company has us set, well, personal growth goals might be an appropriate description. We have a portion of our yearly bonus tied to these … things. (I HAET the word “goal.”) Anyroad, my buddy decided a couple of years back that he was going to learn Mandarin Chinese, as he was going to be in charge of one of our development teams in Beijing. He did quite well, actually. On his trips over there he was able to hold his own in the little markets and managed to purchase interesting snacks like fried scorpion (yes, on purpose; he says they taste kind of like popcorn. We share this love of funky food, btw.) His wife even got on board and started learning Chinese as well.

To cut to the chase, they decided to take the whole family (four boys ranging from about eight to 17, and known collectively as The Busters), rent an apartment in Beijing, and live there for two months. He will spend the week in the office, more or less, and they will spend weekends (and some evenings, I’m sure) exploring bits of China and havening [sic] what, IMO, could be best described as “a blast.”

Wait, I still haven’t gotten to the point of this post. I mentioned he’s kind of in charge of one of the software development teams in our Beijing office, right? Well, not so much for the project we’re on, but he is one of our senior developers and well versed in some of the more important “good engineering practices.” So one of his primary tasks, while in Beijing, is to train our coworkers there in some of the techniques we’ve been learning here. Mostly it’s stuff we’ve been (slowly) learning from Ye’ Olde Skool of Harde Knocks, but we’ve had some formalized training (read “paid good money for”) in things like design patterns, test-driven development, Qualities, the importance of automated testing, and a whole bunch of other things.

[When is he going to get to the point?!]

One of the Qualities of good software design is proper use of cohesion and coupling — that is individual chunks should be highly cohesive (all the little bits should be highly related to each other and do exactly one primary thing), but have low coupling (the chunk should not require extensive knowledge of other chunks, and the chunks they do use should be easily replaceable with other similar chunks). He was trying to explain these concepts, in English and broken Chinese, to his Chinese co-workers — who, coincidentally, speak excellent Chinese, but speak levels of English ranging from “broken” to “conversational.” Many were unfamiliar with the English term cohesion so he asked one of the senior Chinese developers for the proper Chinese word used to convey this software engineering concept. Everyone seemed to be more comfortable with the concept after that.

Not to be left out, however, my buddy had to know the etymology for the Chinese word (for cohesion) and how it translated back to English. The Chinese-English dictionary software he was using provided him with the word coacervate.

I quote from dictionary.com:

co·ac·er·vate – [n. koh-as-er-vit, -veyt, koh-uh-sur-vit; v. koh-as-er-veyt, koh-uh-sur-veyt] noun, verb, -vat·ed, -vat·ing.]

–noun

1. Physical Chemistry. a reversible aggregation of liquid particles in an emulsion.

Pretty wild, eh? How about this one:

co·ac·er·vate (k-sr-vt)
n.

1. A cluster of molecules.
2. A cluster of droplets separated out of a lyophilic colloid.

and one more:

Main Entry: co·ac·er·vate
Pronunciation: kO-'as-&r-"vAt
Function: noun
: an aggregate of colloidal droplets held together by electrostatic attractive forces

But personally I like the definition my brother graciously volunteered when I informed him via IM that coacervate was the word for the day:

definition: a soothing cocoa based bromide

So there you have it. Coacervate is a whole bunch of things kind of like cohesion … or possibly something soothing involving the same stuff from which chocolate is made.

Which one will you remember?

OK, so recently I did the nigh-unthinkable: I bought an iPod.

I know, I know.

But it still has the best user experience of all the (stock*) MP3 players out there.

(*I hear you can put Linux on some of them and it can make ‘em that much better, but I’m not there yet.)

Sure, iTunes is a real pain for anyone with more than six braincells—well, more than six computer-savvy braincells. Sure, it uses an internal, non-user-replaceable battery. No, you can’t just mount it as a flash-drive and drop music on it and have it access them. (You can just use it as storage, but that seems like a bit of a waste of an 8GB iPod nano, which is what I got.)

But it’s tiny. And you can watch movies on it. Yes, the screen is small, and pixels are so small as to be nigh undetectable by the unaided human eye, but it’s pretty cool to be stuck somewhere, waiting for someone to show up so you can do whatever it is you’re there waiting for them for, and just whip out the ol’ iPod and watch the next ten minutes of whatever it was you were watching when life interrupted.

I got it right before taking off for the weekend with my boys for a fathers-and-sons outing …

(note to self, write about that, too)

… and only had time to throw on a few albums before heading out to the western Utah desert. (They don’t call it a desert for nothing, let me tell you.) I played with it a little while out there and a little when we got back before my Sweetie noticed and asked, “When did you get an iPod?”

I eventually had to let her try it out. She had it in her possession for all of—and I’m not making this up—exactly four seconds before asking “So, when are you going to get one?” Yeah, exactly.

So either I have an über-cool new toy, or I’ve finally sold out to the iPod generation. The jury is still out.

(Did I mention I got a “reconditioned” one, so it was, like, 30% off?  Does that make me less of a sell-out?)

We had a birthday bash—well, “bash” might be a bit too strong of a word … a birthday binge might be a better description. My sister invited us all over for Mom’s dinner birthday … “and we did partake.” They had shrimp fettuccine and fresh-picked, grilled asparagus (pronounced aas-pah-RAY-gus, like in Looney Tunes). No joke, grilled. It was nummy beyond expectation. I mean, the fettuccine was really tasty, don’t get me wrong, but my bro-in-law outdid himself with that asparagus dish.

Anyway, after eating ourselves into a stupor (and oh and my what a well sated stupor it was) we plopped ourselves down in front of the Idiot Box and viewed a few things they had on their DVR. After watching bits of this and parts of that, we overrode all objections and got “Bill Cosby, Himself” put on.

Now, my kids have never seen or heard Mr. Cosby himself (not to be confused with “… Cosby, Himself”), but only my weak, partial renditions of The Chicken Heart, and Noah, and the like. I discovered him when I was about nine; my folks had some old LPs and I rooted around in the family storage shed (a.k.a., garage) and found their old turntable and stereo receiver. I nearly wore the grooves out of the vinyl. I had a cassette tape that was eventually at least 15% longer than originally manufactured, I played it so much.

Anyway, my kids seemed to get quite a kick out of Bill Cosby. I think this is an excuse to go buy some CDs. It’s a family building exercise, you see.

[I've never gotten around to finishing this, and knowing me, I never will. Publish what yeh got. If I get any requests to finish this … <hint><hint>]

You never know what you’re going to see on back roads in the middle of the night, even here in Utah. Who would expect to see many cars driving out into the desert—as a destination, mind you—at midnight? Not me, that’s for sure.

Apparently the Little Sahara Sand Dunes (35 miles west of Nephi, Utah) are quite a popular spot around Easter/Spring Break time. I’ve been told that you see all kinds of craziness if you go, including runners-up for the coveted Beverly Hillbillies award. This award would go to the vehicle with the most stuff straped, roped, tied, or piled on their vehicle. Couches are, I’m told, a not-infrequent item, worth quite a few points towards your final hillbilly score.

Heck, I got to see honest-to-goodness ’shrooms for the first time Friday night. Yes, that kind of ’shroom. I know, you’re thinking to yourself, “What kind of a sheltered life has he led?!” but I make no excuses.

It was part of a traffic check-point. In my duties as a member of the SCATeam, I occasionally get to help the Sheriff’s Office with things like traffic stops. I pulled the late shift (2200h – 0230h), and thought it was going to be a pretty quiet night … I’d never worked this traffic check-point before, and was I ever mistaken.

At that time of night, nearly every other car had someone begging to get in trouble with the law. I lost track of the number of drunks we pulled out from behind the wheel. The deputies made several impressive catches of people “under the influence” of some mind-altering agent or another. I’m just glad I wasn’t driving with these idiots.

The best quote of the night was a conversation in the MICC about 2330h. A deputy, looking out the window (and probably hoping we could go home a little earlier than planned), noted that it didn’t look very busy outside, and was answered by another deputy who had just come in from the cold to warm up:

“Well, the traffic seems to be thinning out.”

“Yeah, but the quality is still there.”

Things yet to comment on…

• K9 units
• list of drugs
• running mini-dispatch
• vargal (sp?) nerve
• “barfin’ up coffee grounds”
• meat thermometer

“I don’t do this for the entertainment factor.

“I’m here to try to help the people who have proven they are incapable of making good choices. I want to get them into a system that can hopefully help them learn from their mistakes and start making good choices.

“But I’m not denying it’s not a hoot sometimes.”