Sunday, October 27, 2013

Perspective

Blog Picture

It’s been a pretty eventful year.

That picture you see up above? We’ll get back to it, but for now let’s talk about some other things.

Like I was saying, it’s been a pretty eventful year.

I won’t get into the specifics of it but as you can imagine I’ve been able to take advantage of a lot of opportunity that’s made itself available to me by my move to California. New technologies to research, machines and programs to get proficient in and the availability of like minded individuals whom I have been able to communicate with and get ideas from. The promise of a new future and better tomorrow seems to be right around the corner and every day has been a task to maximize each hour in my day and pack as much as I can into each hour and minute that I’m able to be in California.

All this aside however and of all things that I’ve dealt with, I’ve had something come out of the woodworks and absolutely rock my world recently.

And that simple thing… was Chess.

Yes, that chess. The game that takes a minute to learn and a lifetime to master. Chess has always been somewhat of a dark art for me, and with other more enticing activities to distract me I’ve never gone beyond the game aside from the fundamental rules of the pieces. I’ve never felt that the game was really relevant in any matter in my life.

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AS IF IT NEEDED TO BE ANY HARDER

Well, that changed when I was challenged to a game of chess by a co-worker. We had some time to kill and he had the app on his iPhone, so we started playing a game. What transpired was really a brawl in the most basic essence of the term. There was no strategy, there was no thinking, we just blindly threw our pieces out there. We both took way to much time to over analyze the game and we both made blunders and mistakes. My pieces got massacred in short order but somehow I was able to still stay outside the confines of his players field of movement. My king danced around his bishops and knights and he increasingly grew frustrated because he couldn’t quite make the check. It got personal real quick, with him making rather obscene remarks about what he was going to do to my king once he managed to checkmate him.

2013-03-28-Chess

NOTE TO READER: There are no funny chess comics.

Eventually, I lost. And it stung. It wasn’t so much as the losing part more so then the fact that we both really had no idea what we were doing and it was just a painful process. It felt like it I just had an iota of preparation then it could have worked out a lot better for me but I didn’t. So I did what I generally do when I’m confronted with something I just don’t quite understand and getting my ass kicked in it all the same

I jumped right at it and confronted it head on.

I really had other things to do but I made the conscious decision that this was something that was important for me and I made time in my schedule to deal with this particular problem of the month. I looked up chess material on the internet and eventually found (which shouldn’t have been a surprise) the chess.com website. Free membership allowed you to play against other players from across the world and you were ranked based on your wins and losses. You could play several variations of the game including timing limitation, tournament rules, etc.

The ranking system starts the players out (what turned out to be a very optimistic) 700 points. As you play the game your opponent was represented by a username, an avatar picture and a flag of his home country. I played against opponents from Kazakhstan, Egypt, Brazil, and a host of other flags that I didn’t recognize.  As it turned out, it didn’t matter where the opponent was from because I was getting my ass royally handed to myself. It was bad, it was worst then any other ass kicking I’ve ever had on any other game, Nintendo, arcade, or even Playstation 3. My anger turned turned to rage then turned to legitimate concern that maybe the US really was that far behind on the education scale.

How on earth could I have played seemingly every variation of logic and electronic games just to turn around and get owned by this ancient game that predated anything other game that I’ve played up to now. This was not good. Forget everything that Mario, Doom, and  Half-Life taught me about strategy and spatial situational awareness. This was applying a digital mindset to an analog environment and it was just not working.

 

Legend-of-Zelda-Screen

USELESS

Doom-2-screenshots-3

USELESS

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SLIGHTLY LESS USELESS

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USELESS

After my ranking dropped from the 700’s to the 400’s then to the sub 300’s, even the game was having issues matching me up with a similar ranked players. When I was getting consistent mid to high 400’s players and I was getting brutalized in every game, I realized that I had reached a point where outright repetition and drill was not going to cut it. It wasn’t too hard to imagine some kid on a monochrome 486 leftover owning me on this game. Hell, Dora the Explorer was probably making an example of me on this game. I needed to strategize and start figuring out the underlying system to the game and get some control of the situation here.

So I researched and discovered an entire rabbits hole of information on the game. What I needed to find out was where I was weak on the game and that was obviously my openings. I just did not have a firm ground strategy for getting my game off the ground.

I will not go into detail on it but suffice to say this particular video ended up being a major game changer for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kURU67G98O8needed something else.

The tactics behind chess are just ground shaking and phenomenal. Never have I experienced a medium where every move and aspect of the game has been calculated and recalculated to such a finite degree. Every possible move has a labeled variation to it, and the game of chess itself can be broken into different sections; the opening, the middle game, and the end game.

But the point of the blog wasn’t to particularly talk about chess itself, as I’m sure that can be left to your own devices if you ever cared to go that direction.

More particular, the point of my interest was the actual presentation of the chess board itself. One of the constants in the adventure has been the otherwise digital presentation of the chess board itself.

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This presentation that you see above has been pretty consistent with the digital chess environment. It’s a top down view with clearly defined pieces with absolutely no visual overlap. When presented like this, it breaks every single piece down to it’s core element, and a user can easily imagine the pieces in terms of data points on a line graph, and not so much as the chess board itself. This is what I was used to.

Which made me all the more surprised when I was checking into a hotel over the weekend and they had a chess board out on the table. It looked like this.

IMG_20131026_110015 

Maybe it was just me, but despite these two photos picturing the exact same game, it looked like complete night and day differences to me. Maybe the pieces were manufactured wrong, or the symmetry just seemed off, or a multitude of other factors but that chess board just did not correlate with my experience with the digital chess board. I pushed around some of the white pieces experimentally, playing with some openings that I had practiced but everything just looked wrong. I couldn’t really tell the pieces apart at a glance and it was difficult to see if the bishop was clear to move or not.

It’s just amazing how just the difference in angle or presentation can have just such a staggering and shocking difference on the perceived aptitude of the game. Even though all the data points were still there, the game seemed completely different and alien in comparison to the digital aspect that I was familiar with.

Referencing the first photo, it makes you wonder how powerful of an effect this is when applied to other aspects of our lives. I guess that just goes to show that no matter how used to the data we are, never underestimate the ability of a fresh outlook on this. We just may notice something that we never have before.

Oh, and I’m doing considerably better in chess now.

Friday, July 12, 2013

My Ode to Android

Android has been a really spectacular operating system for me, and I've had (notice the past tense here) nothing but love for it. Surprisingly, the decision to give it the boot as my primary go-to OS of choice has been nothing short of a life changing decision. It doesn't seem that dramatic until you realize that your entire life is wrapped in these little "Choose your own Adventure" Novella sized Electronic devices that we carry around in our pocket.

To date, I've had Android operating experience since the old T-Mobile G1 days. It happened when my brother gave me a G1 as a gift, and growing up in the old 386-486 days I could appreciate the sheer, ground breaking potential of what the Android operating system could offer. Before then, smart phones each operated in their own little universe having it's own interpretation of an operating system, and things, frankly, were a mess. You paid a ton of money for what resulted as a science experiment. Android blew the cover off the whole thing. They put a GUI (Graphical User Interface) on the Linux operating system and essentially brought the power to the people. It was the magic move that toppled tech empires and made people re-think what the modern computer was all about. 

So, after my personal experience with nearly five years of Android operating systems spanning from the G1 to the G2 (Currently still in use) and the Nexus 7 tablet, nobody could have predicted that I would have skipped the ship and left Android, especially after the years of nearly flawless service that it delivered

So what happened?

If I had to pin it down on one statement, I would have to say that I was finally tired of getting 80% of a product for 10% the price. It sounds weird that I would consider that a bad thing but lets think about it. Let's use the analogy of a car, because I'm a guy and that's what works. 

Let's say you can buy a car that only has 4 of the 7 body panels painted. The 4 panels that are painted are perfect and superior reflecting the best paint technology of the time, but the other 3 are bare sheet metal and you have a ton of body shops out there offering to paint the other three panels, but they are all going to vary in quality, some will do the job for free but have questionable quality to the work. Others will offer to paint the panels in a manner that closely represents the factory job but will never quite represent that factory paint job. Now lets expand on this a little and say that every six months the car company in question changes the chemical composition of the paint and their version of "Red" six months down the road is a little different then the "Red" currently out on the market.

You can start seeing the mess that can transpire. 

The chief argument may be that it doesn't matter because at the end of the day it's still a car, and it beats walking. That may be true, and that's what kept me on the Android OS for the past five years. 

At the end of the day though, when you need to get a job done and you need work to transpire to the next level, the biggest thing I've found is that I need consistency, predictability, and quality control. 

For that, Android simply does not get the job done. Microsoft, on the other hand, does. Like the Tortoise that races the hare, they offer they steadfastness, quality, predictability, and electronic infrastructure that business people and creative thinkers need to get their projects off the ground and into the real world. They offer it, and charge for it, and if your really serious and you need it, you'll pay for it. 

I have, as I find myself typing this blog on a Windows Surface Pro. 

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Misdirected Adventures of an Amateur Mechanic turned Ametuer Engineer

I have a membership at a group workshop/hacker space known as a Tech Shop, which features 5000 sq/ft of workshop space with nearly every machine needed for manufacturing available. These machines include Mig/Tig welders, CNC mills, powder coaters, grinders, pipe benders and even a water jet that can cut through steel with a high power water stream. Additionally, we have vacuum formers, laser cutters, a machine press, 3D scanners and printers and even a full computer lab with Autodesk software to help render your creations in a 3D environment.


You would think with all these machines available, that any project that gets started should easily reach fruition, with money and materials being the only limiting factor. However, surprisingly enough there is a very high amount of projects that get started but are never finished. These are not done by amateur’s either, but rather professionals who are well versed in the area of expertise in which their projects are based and have the financial means to finance the project.
So what happens?
On the surface, it’s very easy to get caught up in the atmosphere of the whole thing, and would be inventors immediately run out and start buying equipment and tools with only an inkling of an idea of what they want to build, or if it’s even viable to create such a project. They just want to build something and they just start the process with a hope that it will somehow start putting itself together after a few initial steps.
For example, most projects that I see get started and fail spectacularly are mostly revisions to existing products with either a solar panel added or an electric drive system replacing a gas motor. Most of these fail to reach fruition because mid-way through the project the inventor realizes that aside from fulfilling the ever rampant “green agenda” that seems prevalent in the Bay Area, adding a solar panel or electrical drive system to an existing product serves no other purpose other than decreasing the reliability of the product while increasing the manufacturing and purchasing costs associated with it.
It seems that if people took a step back and understood the implications of what they were trying to put together before they actually stepped into it, then a lot of heart ache could have been saved.
Another problem that I see is miss application or complete disregard of any type of design systems metric or planning. Another example that I saw when I joined was a college student who was attempting to assemble, from scratch, a one-seater electric car. He had a pretty good show going on with close to 3500 dollars of raw materials laid out on the shop floor. This included aluminum beams, brand new wheels and tires, suspension components sourced from ATV’s, and other associated products like a seat and a steering wheel.
However, as good and impressive as it looked it quickly appeared that aside from having the credit to source the materials, there was actually no plan to build the vehicle. Every day he would be at his parts, trying to piece together these raw materials into a vehicle that would one day be flinging him down the road at near highway speeds. I offered to help him one time, and I asked him where his notes were. He had no notes. What was his plan? He had no plan other than to seemingly make it up as he went along. Additionally, he had no experience with working on or building cars so he had no practical wrenching experience, therefore he was making very seemingly elementary mistakes. It seems strange that he would take on a project of such magnitude without having at least an iota of practical experience in the automotive field itself.
Lastly, another problem that I see is the failure to incorporate teamwork into the process itself. Many people for whichever reasons they see decide to one man band the projects on their own accord. They take on the entire project with the idea of tackling the aspects that they don’t understand and learning as they go along. This usually results in a very strained timetable as they haphazardly build the project up, and usually end up having to incorporate a new person on an accelerated timetable to reverse engineer their project or correct previous mistakes that were made.
When putting together a project, even one on a very small scale a newfound appreciation can be gained for the ability to take a project from concept to prototype. You develop a respect for projects that are conducted on a grand scale and the sheer amount of moving parts that must be synchronized to come together at the proper times to form a final product.