Voices From The Past 3: Searching for the Holy Grail

My son was born in 1998.  I found parenthood an initially terrifying experience.  Like many you're bringing a new life into a world, that you have to admit "you don't really understand at times".  Having the next generation in your hands brings that into focus - at some point ideally you'd like to help this new life deal with the world as well, if not better than you do.

Over years I would call this quest for understanding by several names.  One I've come to like is "pathfinding", but back in this initial entry, I found that "the search for the Holy Grail" seemed best ...

The Search For The Holy Grail [1998]

This is a beginning, and as I write these words they pass on into history.  This is the way of things.

This is a book about the quest for a Holy Grail, in this case not the cup of Christ, but the quest for a truth which grips and defines our lives.  It is a record of my thoughts and feeling laid out on paper, not just for myself but for my son and any other children to come.

Our Family Motto  [1998]

Our family motto is this,

Nothing of steel is made without fire
And the trials of life are the flames 
from which we draw strength

Life can be full of hardships and difficulties - all too often they seem overwhelming.

Unfortunately life does not seem to be about finding a calm idyllic life, but instead dealing with one obstacle after another, and it's easy to lose faith and hope.

In facing each obstacle, you can find within yourself new abilities to cope with.  Abilities that you're not even yet aware of.  These challenges make us stronger people.  Hence challenges can make us stronger people.

From the day we're born, life is full of difficult things to learn - if we gave up after the odd failure we'd never walk, talk, or learn to read.  But as adults we forget how hard the learning process can be and get to fear failure.  [Interestingly I wrote something similar 12 year laters]

Never lose hope.  Burn our motto into our hearts when things look hardest.

Looking back  [2001]

I have found this book after having lost it since we moved from Portland.  Rereading it, I found myself thinking "wow - it really resonates with the choices I have made in the last few years.

Recently I have found myself "pathfinding", searching for my unique spiritual and mental path in life against the needs of day-to-day life.

Of course for me, rereading this is a weird feeling, and gosh (did I ever used to say "gosh"?) do I wish I could transfer my knowledge now to the guy who wrote that first page.

But you cannot pass knowledge back in time - only forward, and that is the aim of my writing ...

The Two Forces [2001]

Our life is gripped by two great forces which while balanced give us life and health.  They are known to us as renewal and decay.

The force of decay is constant and unfaltering and come from outside.

The force of renewal is generated from within - from our heart, our mind, our body.  One day it will fail and we will surrender to decay.  But for today, it is enough.

A few years ago I saw a dead mouse on the way to University.  Each day I passed it, it was a little more decayed than the one before.

I realised the that the mouse not not decaying because it was dead.  Every day of it's life it was decaying.  But at the same rate it's body was also renewing what was lost to decay.

When it died there was no more renewal, and only decay remained.

So?  Nothing is static, everything changes.  That's part of the trick of life - things that do seem static are in a state of static equilibrium (where two opposite forces are producing no net effect) or decaying at a very slow rate (mountains erode but over thousands of years).

In relationships particularly we can think that once we are married it becomes a static thing that will last.  No!  To maintain a relationship even after marriage we still need to put in energy, time and love to keep it alive.

Of course we should not be afraid of letting it evolve - as long as we are not letting it just decay ...

My grandmother who died this year kept a journal for years, which my mother is inheriting.  I know for myself, I'm not ready to read them yet, her loss is too recent.  But I hope one day I will.  With Violet, I have found her occasional writing, and it's a bittersweet affair to remember her words and thoughts.

Voices From The Past 2: The wannabe sci-fi writer ... what it taught me ...

On my last article I was talking about how I've discovered a box of my old writing, and how looking through them has been an interesting exploration ...

What I was really excited about though were a set of old exercise books that I found which have various ages on them.  The oldest date back to when I was 13, and are my attempt to write a "story bible" for the universe of space opera stories I tried to write.  Those ones are pretty dreadful - they describe the Space Scout Fedaration, and a starship called Zeko (there are a lot of words beginning with "z", classic bad sci-fi).  The whole thing reads like such a bad fusion of Star Wars and Star Trek, that I had to check the cover to make sure it was my name there, and not JJ Abrams (nope, not a big fan of what he did in Star Trek, so not looking forward to Star Wars VII).

What interests me most is how different the style is now compared to then.  A lot of that change came from my first writing coach who was my mother who gave me feedback to get better.

I would see something in my mind, and I wanted to describe exactly what I saw, so another person would see the same.  But the problem is it was kind of dreary.

For instance, if I was writing Star Trek fiction, it'd be "the starship Enterprise moved into orbit around the planet.  It was a large spaceship some 300m long, with a large saucer front section which housed its many crew which connected to a large engineering cylinder which housed two large cigar-shaped engines on struts just behind the main saucer".  Ouch.

Thanks to my mum, I learned to let go of trying to cram that kind of detail into people's heads.  It's confusing - most people know what the Enterprise looks like, and in actual fact it's typically not that important to reading a story.  However I felt I needed that detail "just in case".  Really you don't - if your ship has been hijacked in engineering and your bridge crew need to battle down there, you can always have someone go "but Captain, the engineering section is 13 floors down, and we don't have control of the turbolifts" (obviously someone has a fear of stairs).  If you really need to, you can have someone explain something (as with that "13 floors down" statement) as a method to explain to the audience.  In Star Trek The Next Generation, everybody seemed to need to explain everything in this manner to Riker - he always seemed a bit slow on the uptake (and he kept wondering why they stopped offering him his own command).

Some of this of course came back during Let;s Test Oz, where we had a workshop on communicating with Joanne Perold and Carsten Feilberg.  The aim of the exercise was as a business owner I had to describe a Star Wars ship to my team, and they had to build it from Lego.  Yup - we were back in "describe the starship Enterprise" territory as above.

For the first round - describing Luke's landspeeder, I just played along - "it's a vehicle like a bath tub, with half way down sitting for two people behind a glass windscreen ... there is a rocket either side at the rear, and another one above on a strut".

In the second round, the subject was now a pod racer from The Phantom Menace.  This time I decided to using my mother's teachings - I'd not describe in detail, but I'd give an overall impression of it and "leave it to the team to be inventive".  We'd actually been on a tour of Weta workshops recently, and it seems when a director such as Peter Jackson or James Cameron ask for a prop, they tend to explain what it does, and overall look and feel, but the fine detail is left to the designer ... because he's a designer and designing things well is what he has experience of.

And hence I went to my team with this, "I'd like you to think of Ben Hur ... in space.  Imagine a sci-fi chariot, only instead of horses, it has these two massive, and I mean giant rocket engines.  And tethered behind is a small cockpit being dragged behind by the poor guy brave enough to pilot this thing".  The team loved the challenge, and what they built really looked amazing (damn that I didn't take pictures).

There is of course a point of this, and it links back to testing.  Throughout this year we've been discussing scripting - when it's useful, and when it's not, together with the question of detail.  A lot of people will say "include a lot of detail, because then it leaves nothing to chance".  But although you can read my starship Enterprise description and agree it's technically correct, at the same time it's just not very helpful at all.  On the other hand, Douglas Adams in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy described the starship Heart Of Gold as "a sleek white running shoe".   And I tend to think what was good enough for Douglas Adams ...

For me a real awakening came in 2003, when I happened to be in a test lab during UAT, and heard someone reading aloud a script I'd written in 2000.  I'd come off an automation project, and felt that "loads of detail = GOOD".  But hearing it, knowing I'd written it, my heart sank, because it was dreadful and overdetailed.  Knowing the system better now than then, about a third of the description was really necessary.

This is why we live, we learn, we do better next time ...

Yup - I really did think is just this much detail ... but did a reader really need to know it?

Yup - this was how I described the starship Zeko at first.  A couple of years later I'd got better, and described it as  "a large, city sized disk, bristling with so many terrifying weapons".  Which I bet you can read ...

Because if you're building a ship that big, you're not going to walk ...

Voices From The Past 1: Introduction

Over the last couple of weeks we've been doing a garage and storage clean up.  I know we're not alone in storing personal items way past their "sell by date".  Hence it's time for a good clearup of items, some destined for sale or for dumping.

"What kind of things?", you ask.  Well I've found some VHS cassettes (we don't have a player any more), boxes of video games we kept "just in case" (we don't have the original game system), some old computer bits and pieces (128MB memory anyone?) and a text book on Fortran 90 (yeah Fortan ...).

What I was really excited about though were a set of old exercise books that I found which have various ages on them.  The oldest date back to when I was 13, some are from University, and others "relatively recently" after the birth of my son.  Sadly there was a couple I'd hoped to find, but they may well be MIA.

Some were short story attempts, some were lab notes (with poems in the back), some were role playing campaign designs.  I'm happy to see them all and reconnect in different ways with my past.

Most interesting to me though are the journals I've tried to create, and often been unsuccessful.  This wasn't helped by me keeping a diary during high school which got stolen, and basically the details passed around.  Ironically these days through this blog I probably live my life much more openly than anything I'd ever put into my diary back then - probably because age has taught me to not be afraid, and I realise sometimes you need someone to come out and be open about some of the key subjects I've chosen to talk about (thinking here about my mental health series).

Looking back at anything you've written over a decade ago has an element of fear around.  I know in testing over the 4 year life of this blog I've found my own attitude and understanding of testing has changed.  I'm sometimes tempted to go back and change or even delete some entries - I found this recently when I reposted The View From The Test Manager's Gallery which was originally published in Testing Circus in 2011.  There are subtle changes I'd make to that piece, especially the slight emphasis of metrics, whereas today I'd call it "reporting".  We live ... we learn.

But to my surprise there are things there that I've really enjoyed writing, and even worthy of looking at on this blog.  And hence this series where I look back at some of my writing from the past and either repeat it, or else analyse how it impacts me in the present.

What has surprised me reading - although I've only been writing about testing for 4 years, I've been trying to explore the big picture of "what is important, what matters, what is truth?".  These are good questions for testers - testing is about being the philosophers, scientists and explorers after all of the digital world.

Enjoy ...