Geoint 2006 -- Day 1 Yes, it has been a very long time since I posted something with any sort of substance. I have been distracted with other things; I think that is one of the things that i have a problem with--staying committed to a project until it is completed. Granted, there is no particular completion date for this blog but, all the same I have some what lost interest in it in recent months and that is why I have not posted recently. Anyway, I am currently in Florida attending Geoint 2006. It has been interesting so far but there is one striking difference about this community compared to the conferences I usually go to, no one has a laptop computer. At every other conference I have been too, everyone has their laptop out. Of about 3,000 attendees I have seen about 3 laptops including my own. I hope that this is not an indicator of the level of technological adoption in this community; but I fear that it does.
Technology Archives
Yes, yesterday was a very sad day for me. My Samsung S105 cell phones attenna broke off. For some of you this may not be a very surprising event, as most cell phones break so quickly these days. But for my phone this was a sad day because it has faithfully served me for the past 4 years. It's sad that a cell phone lasting 4 years is a long time in my eyes but sadly it seems that most cell phones don't live nearly that long. So last night I began my quest to replace my trusty old companion and what I found was mostly dissappointing. Of all the phones I looked at only 2 appealed to me: the Samsung a900 and the motorola pebl. It seems that manufactures have got it all wrong in my opinion. I don't care about watching T'V on my phone or paying for their overpriced music, I don't even really care if it has a camera or not, in fact I would preferr it didn't! I just want a small phone with good voice quality and good battery life. Is that too much to ask for? Unfortunately that's a tough bill to fill these days. It's almost impossible to find a phone without a camera (the sales folks argue that they sell more phones with cameras than with out but if you look at their choices without cameras the options are pretty meager.)
Of all the phones I looked at I wasn't ecstatic about any of them. The one I eventually ended up with was the Motorola PEBL. I liked it because it was small, had a nice look to it, and wasn't so wizbang as some of the other phones. I haven't gotten much of an opportunity to play with it yet but so far things seem OK. I like the way it looks and feels in my hand a lot. The keyboard is a little funky but nothing that bothers me too much, I'm sure I'll get used to it anyway. Thus far my biggest complaint is probably the volume. What they call maximum volume is pitiful. At best what they are calling max should be on the lower end of medium. Anything less than max is just about impossible for me to hear, that's quite annoying. The speaker phone volume isn't great but it's not terrible, in a quiet room it should be ok but a in a noisy environment I doubt I'd be able to hear anything.
After I've used the phone a bit more I will probably post a few more detailed comments.
It's funny how sometimes I have absolutely nothing to talk about at all and other times there are so many things on my mind that the sentences and words get all jumbled up so I don't even know where to start. Today has been one of those days where there have been a million and a half things that I have thought, "hey! I would like to write a little bit about that." Part of that probably has todo with the fact that I was reading the Communications of the ACM which always sparks ideas. But also I think it was just one of those days.
Now that I have gone on and on about how many ideas I have and want to write about I'm afraid that you will probably be fairly disappointed because I am not really going to talk about any of them here. The one thing that I do want to mention is that Ervin, the department director at my work wants to transfer me to the "Strategic Planning Group." I'm not quite sure exactly what that will mean but I suspect that Ervin will become my manager instead of Tim so he will be in charge of giving me my reviews and ultimately the priority of my assignments. I think that Ervin's intention for the group is to keep pace with the current state of technology in industry and to plan how those technological advances can be integrated into the things that we work on at Rincon or how they can benefit our research efforts. All in all I think that could be a fairly interesting group to be a part of and I think it will probably have a fairly positive impact on my career. I still get to work on my current project 75% of the time so I will gain valuable experiance from that and get to interact with very intelligent people; but I will also be able to maintain close ties too what is happening in the rest of the industry. Aside from a bit of aprehension I am excited about the change.
Mistakes in an unforgiving culture
Innovation comes with trial and error. I don't think that you would find too many people who would argue that point. Sometimes the cost of those errors is high. Sometimes it costs the very lives of those involved. We saw this with the tragedy of Columbia. By no way to I want diminish the tragedy or disrespect the dead but they knew going into it that space travel was risky business.
Our society has reaped great benefit from innovation over the last century. I think a lot of the innovation was possible because we nurished it. We didn't regulate it so strictly that somebody couldn't explore a dead end idea because that's how we eventually got to the right idea. How many times did the Wright brothers pursue ideas that were bound to fail? And yet they persevered and one of the greatest innovations of the 20th century was born. If they had lived today would we encourage inspite of their failures or would we kill it. I feel like we have become so concerned with things like fiscal responsibility and not fleecing the American public that we are beginning to stifle innovation and I fear what that might mean for future generations.
We would do well to remember Teddy Roosevelt's speech "Citizenship in a Rebulic" where he says:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantely, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but he who knows the great enthusiams, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause;who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew niether victory nor defeat."
Most of these ideas are not originally mine, they are from a conversation I had with my boss, but I thought they were worth writing about so here they are!
