January 2005 Archives

I was an idiot. I read an entry on one of Susan's diaries. And I gave my opinion. Thing is, like an idiot, I didn't check out my assumptions before hand. Generally a bad idea, I know. But every now and then, I do something dumb. I found out I was wrong. Acknowledged it, and apologized.

Of course, I considered just deleting the comment. I thought about it for....all of thirty seconds, I think. I eventually realized that I was looking down a metophorical road that started in that direction, and I decided I didn't like where that road led. So in the end, I decided that for me, deleting the comment was a bad idea.

You see, for me, it's too easy to treat the handy "delete comment" feature as an "undo button." I think everyone's familiar with the "undo button," right? I think we all wanted one when we were a kids. (Heck, I find myself wondering if you ever really stop wanting one when you're an adult.) If you did something wrong, you'd press your magic "undo button," and it would magically make it all right, as if what you did never happened. No guilt. No hard feelings. No lectures from Mom. No extra chores or days without television.

Even as an adult, I have to admit that I would love an "undo" button. I'd like to be able to undo the mistakes I've made at work and the problems I've created with coworkers so I didn't have to spend time rebuilding a sense of teamwork and trust with them, for one example.

And to me, that's what the delete option feels like. It's a way for me to go, "I can delete that comment and make it as if I never left it." In this case, I probably could've even done so. After all, Susan wasn't online. She hadn't seen it yet.

But the thing is, I did leave it. And I don't feel right about pretending I didn't. Even if no one else knows about it. I'd be deceiving everyone but myself. And I'd be trying to deceive myself in the process, on some level. And that thought bothers me a great deal.

The other thing is, it seems to me that an "undo button" -- even one that just let's you pretend you never did something stupid but doesn't really "undo" it -- would have the side effect of removing reminders of the lessons I learned from my mistakes. After all, how can I learn from a mistake I'm pretending never happened? How can I do so even if I just try to forget it ever happened?

To me, leaving that comment there is about character building the hard way. It serves as a reminder to me -- and let's everyone else know about it, which I think is good in some ways, too -- that says, "Hey, remember what happened the last time you spoke without making sure your facts were straight? Maybe you ought to make sure you're not doing that again."

It's painful, but then isn't that the nature of character building?

I think I spent five minutes laughing today. It was laugh or cry, really. I had one of those work-related moments where life itself becomes entirely absurd and you realize that there's nothing worth taking serious anymore. All because of an email I received.

You see, we're working on a new product at work. And the powers that be have decided that they're not comfortable with the risk involved in writing the firmware for the product for Linux. They've decided that they'd be much more comfortable modifying the code we currently use on other products that runs under VxWorks. So this means a complete change in firmware development. New compiler, new development environment, different baseline code.

That's all fine for the firmware guys because, quite frankly, they haven't really been working on the code for this anyway. So regardless of which operating system they go with, they're still at ground zero. Unfortunately, as I've already began working on the bringup code to verify that the hardware is functional (and it only makes sense to write the bringup code and operational firmware for the same operating system for the sake of code reusability), it means setting aside about a month worth of work that I've done and starting over from scratch. There's nothing like saying, "wow, look at all that work I've done. It's great. Now it can sit there and possibly never see the light of day again." As I said, I laughed because it was easier than crying.

The only thing that really bothers me about this is that I feel like I only found out about this change of direction on "accident." The program manager for this project just sent out an "oh, there's been this official decision, just so everyone knows." No one explicitly came out and said, "you know, this means Jarred needs to change gears too." So if Mark hadn't just offhandedly pointed it out, I wonder how much farther they would've let me toil away in the wrong direction before I found out. Now that would've irked me. It's one thing to tell me that I need to start over again. It's another thing to let me keep working in the wrong direction when a change of plans has been made.

In the long run, this really doesn't bother me that much. Sure, I have to let go of my work from the last month and acknowledge that it doesn't account for anything now (other than the fact that I'm a hard and dedicated worker). But that'll be a good exercise in ego dissolution. And my ego could probably use a bit of dissolution, anyhow. But on the true positive, it means that I can write the bringup for VxWorks. And in a lot of ways, writing bringup code in VxWorks is a lot simpler than doing it in Linux. Especially when you consider that I'm still really learning the ins and outs of the Linux kernel.

Of course, that does also mean that this project will be less of a challenge for me. I mean, hacking the Linux kernel, figuring out how to do device drivers, and everything else was new territory for me, so it required learning and a shift in thoughts. And I rather enjoy that. I was looking forward to it. Oh well, hopefully I'll get another project to do that with.