human nature

Traditional Visual Still Artists The artist who draws or paints on canvas or paper, can take very high resolution photos, and sell prints for some amount of money. That same artist may decide to sell the original painting for a fairly decent sum of money. Every artist is different, and some are lucky enough to never NEED to sell those originals. Similarly, a film photographer can sell a first process photo along with the negative, after making sufficiently high resolution copies....

I was reading my twitter feed, when I stumbled upon this: If a process is broken throw it in the trash and start over. Nothing is set in stone. The simplicity of the tweet is absolutely true.  It totally reminded me of a problem I've seen multiple times though.  The process is rarely the difficult part of fixing a problem. A long time ago, when I was a team lead, the group I worked with had an automated build system that was extremely complicated, built entirely in-house, and didn't follow the conventions of any of the standard build-systems that exist....

I can no longer count the number of times that I've been able to re-invigorate a problem investigation, even if I have zero visibility on the actual problem.  This takes some self-discipline that doesn't come easy, especially during an urgent investigation. Here's that one weird trick:I do the depth of reading myself.  If I see multiple threads, I'll read all of them.  Then I will write as short a summary of all of the facts that I can....

Went for a walk (more on that after the jump).  So, back in the hotel... watching TV.  There's an advertisement for a women's beauty product that seems to promise itself as a skin lightener.  I thought of this as crazy (even though Indian friends of mine have mentioned this before), so while writing this paragraph, I found a blog describing skin lightening products for men.  Of course, products that market to a 'better self-esteem' are popular everywhere, but ....