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2004.Jan.22 Thu
Eric Benson's quicklinks are almost always very interesting. Today he linked to this paper on Cognitive Overload. One footnote says:
Multi-tasking is a term drawn from computer science to refer to systems which handle many tasks seemingly at once. An operating system multi-tasks by rapidly switching between tasks and placing in an intermediate store all state knowledge required by each task. It therefore interrupts each task at a stable moment, and then later swaps back the state it was in before the interruption and carries on from where it was. Humans need to be able to stabilize their state knowledge when they are interrupted or they risk losing their place when they attempt to pick up the task later.
One thing that Kent Beck mentioned in Test Driven Development was that if he's not finished test-driving a chunk of code, but has to leave it for a while, he'll leave one test failing. When he gets back to pick up where he left off, he runs the tests, sees the failing one, and by making that test pass, gets back into the mindset needed for that design problem.
Of course, when working in a team, checking in a failing test is the height of bad manners.
Jerry Weinberg interview:
Are you working on any book[s] at present?
Yes. (I suppose you'd like to know which, but I've learned it's not a good idea to discuss your books before they're hatched. But I have about 30 books in process, so they cover a lot of ground.If you had a webcam on your shoulder throughout a "typical" workday, can you give us an outline of what we would see?
I don't have a typical workday. On writing days, you would see a computer screen with a cursor moving rapidly across spewing words, perhaps for 8 or 10 or 16 hours. On a consulting workday, you would see and hear lots of people talking and demonstrating their work to me, with a very small amount of time with people listening to me. On a training workday, you would be watching lots of people eagerly doing problem-solving exercises, laughing, scratching their heads, and undergoing various sorts of emotional turmoil. Some of the time you would see and hear them discussing what they just went through. One thing you would never see is PowerPoint slides.
Another writer is a women I knew socially (circa 1992): Roxanne Longstreet Conrad. Quoting her timeline:
1989: After another brief hallucinatory stint as a professional musician, which ends when she is required to dress in Liederhosen and play a fundraiser for the Republican Party, Roxanne's boyfriend suggests she attend a science fiction convention to meet people who might be equally deranged (other writers)....
1992: Roxanne hangs up her musicial ambition to pursue her writing. She sells her vampire novel, The Undead, shocking not only her boyfriend but her roommate as well (luckily in a good way). The boyfriend leaves, but Roxanne meets and marries Cat Conrad, long-haired artist and all-around great human being.
Good to see that she's still writing. I enjoyed her vampire novels, and I'm ordering one of her latest books (seems she's using a pseudonym for this.)