Another choice quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

Substance doesn't change. Method contains no permanence. Substance relates to the form of the atom. Method relates to what the atom does. In technical composition a similar distinction exists between physical description and functional description. A complex assembly is best described first in terms of its substances: its subassemblies and parts. Then, next, it is described in terms of its methods: its functions as they occur in sequence. If you confuse physical and functional description, substance and method, you get all tangled up and so does the reader. (p. 305)

I've been having trouble with some documentation I'm reviewing at work and I think this insight may help address the bad feeling I have about it. I'm sure his idea translates directly to complex software systems as well. They too have "assemblies" that interact with each other. It's important to understand that the assemblies exist and then learn how they interact with each other.

Yahoo! News - Israelis Refuse to Meet Resurgent Arafat: "In Gaza, Palestinian security said its agents arrested seven Hamas activists on Thursday after a security officer was kidnapped a day earlier. Dozens of Hamas backers demonstrated in Gaza City to protest, burning tires. Palestinian police opened fire, wounding three, witnesses said. Two police officers were hurt by rocks."

This paragraph was tucked away at the end of the article. Isn't it interesting that Palestinian police resort to the same crowd control methods as the Israelis? Oh, the irony.

Master of None has a short story "symposium". Here's my submitted micro story.

A Life Lived

I really hate my life. Most days are just dark, but there is the occasional bright day. I like those best and wish I had more of them, but it's not something I feel I can control.

I don't do much except work in the morning and at night. Work is all that keeps me going, but I'm afraid it's wearing me out. Without someone to keep me company, I'm afraid I'm going to snap any day. However, just the other day, the standoffish cat finally decided he would play with me. That made me very happy while it lasted. It really brightened up my day and I hope he lets down his guard again.

Of course, I do have a lot of time to think as I sit in my ivory tower of sorts. Since I don't get out much, all I really think about is my situation, which just gets me down. One day, inspiration will strike and that single thought gets me to the next day.

Ah, he's home. I hear him coming this way... He usually visits my room when he first arrives. Ouch. That light really hurts when you're not expecting it. What's that crinkling sound? I'm still seeing stars and can't make out what he has in his hands. It looks like he's coming for me! This is not part of the routine at all. I'm not due to work for another couple hours, yet. I hope he's OK.

Now I can see again. He's got something in his hands - tall and slender and he's putting it down next to me. It looks strangely familiar, but I can't recall what it might be. Look! There's writing! It says, "G-U-M."

The visitors are still wondering through. If you blog, please link to me and drop me a line - I'll link back.

Hurry now while the link list is still short!

Somehow my site is now listed on BlogShares. It even got some extra valuation from Master of None's link - thanks, I think.

It all seems harmless enough.

Like I mentioned almost a month ago, I'm slowly reading through Faith After the Holocaust by Eliezer Berkovits. I'm about half way through and Berkovits is explaining that the Holocaust (and any "bad" event) was not a direct manifestation of God's will. Nor was it a case of God turning away from the Jews. He talks a lot about the nature of God and shows, via many quotes from the prophets, that God does not actively participate in humanity's day to day life (painfully obvious to most of us).

He also discusses good and evil and basically says that you can't have one without the other and that God created both. This brings him to an interesting statement.

In a sense, God can be neither good nor bad. In terms of his own nature He is incapable of evil. He is the only one who is goodness. But since, because of his very essence, he can do no evil, he can do no good either. God, being incapable of the unethical is not an ethical being. Goodness for him is neither an ideal, nor a value; it is existence, it is absolutely realized being.

If God is incapable of good or evil, how can we say that He is goodness? Maybe He is only apathy? How can He be incapable of good if He gave us the Torah, which, by definition, is good? Perplexing. He then writes that all the qualities we assign to God, He can't actually embody. "Justice, love, peace, mercy, are ideals for man alone. God is perfection."

He ends the section with a ray of hope, though. Earlier on he stated that God's "hiding" means that he is present by definition. He suggests that God is present and acting in subtle ways to ensure his creation doesn't destroy itself. But isn't that a good thing?

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Pirsig's main character describes his intellectual quest to unite classic and romantic thinking. His argument comes down to an elusive characteristic he calls Quality. He explains that Quality exists outside of subjects and objects and, in fact, is the event that creates both mind and matter. This Quality can also be perceived. He spends much of the book working up to this definition, so I cannot do it justice here. However, to simplify things, Quality can be thought of as the degree of excellence an object is perceived to have (the typical meaning).

After defining Quality, Pirsig goes on to analyze why many people have issues with technology (from our daily frustrations with our gadgets to outright revulsion and rejection of modern technology). He writes:

Thus, if the problem of technological hopelessness is caused by absence of care, both by technologists and anti-technologists; and if care and Quality are external and internal aspects of the same thing, then it follows logically that what really causes technological hopelessness is absence of the perception of Quality in technology by both technologists and anti-technologists.

He later speaks about how technology today is supplemented by a layer of "style" in an attempt to disguise the lack of quality.

I think he's bang on in his analysis and you can see it today in lots of software. There are some software programs that are a joy to use. They look great, they're functional, easy to use, and just feel right. A couple examples include iTunes on the Mac and Picasa on Windows. The opposite is true of many more packages. Applications like SAP, Microsoft Office, and others are all pure function with pretty icons. They aren't a pleasure to use, but we tolerate them because we're forced to.

How do we create these elegant programs? That will be the subject of another post. I need to think on it.

I am an addict.

It's Sunday morning and I've been up for 45 minutes, but it feels like a lot less. You see, I've just snapped out of my "information fix," a strange, sometimes frantic hunt for news and updated blogs. This is a big problem for me (and others, I suspect) which affects both home and work life as I end up wasting an inordinate amount of time searching for the next neat idea or well-written piece. Instead of working on what is really important to me, I end up surfing from site to site, trying to take it all in. I must stop.

(Speaking of addictions, the next door neighbor just lit his morning smoke and the stench is drifting into our place. Thanks a lot, buddy.)

I realized my problem was worsening when I caught myself returning to the same blogs multiple times per day hoping that they had been updated. Maybe Hasidic Rebel has just posted a new article on his departure from chasidism! Or, maybe Steven Den Beste has posted his latest monster essay that I don't have time to read anyway! I know Tal G. hasn't posted anything in over a week, but maybe today's the day! I better check! The time wasted loading unchanged web pages started to catch up with the reading time. I think I'll call this speculative surfing.

I think I have a bit of an addictive personality. Before blogs it was computer games. When I was a kid, you couldn't pull me away from games like X-COM:UFO Defense or Civilization. I played these games and others like them to the detriment of school and friends (luckily my grades didn't really show it and my friends understood it). However, I never received more than instant gratification and always felt empty, and sometimes guilty, afterwards. The emptiness is easy to explain. After all, what had I accomplished? The guilt was most likely a combination of having used the games to procrastinate or knowing that I could have spent that time on something "better."

Today is a new day and I am determined to kick this habit. I will spend more time writing, helping my wife, reading books, updating this blog, and focusing on work.

I have more ideas about my addiction which I may tackle in future entries.