Onwards towards mastery (not even .01% complete)

I’m still continuing with my project towards mastery of Java.  I’ve said this before, but that’s 10,000 hours of working on Java programs.  I should probably be working on something like C++, but I’d rather not.  I spent a lot of hours on C++, and I just got pissed rewriting the same program over and over.  Or forgetting what one section meant and having to rebuild the entire thing from scratch when something impossibly stupid quit working.

Anyways, after 4 and a half hours, I can tell a difference in my technical abilities.  Yeah, there is still a lot of things to do and places to go.   I can tell you I’ve gone off in directions I’ve only contemplated going before.  Now, those areas are becoming a reality. 

And I’ve picked up this blog at over 7 hours.  Yeah.   Can you say leaps and bounds?  I’m beginning to see what is described when mastery is discussed.  7 hours of programming later, Java makes a lot more sense and doesn’t seem to be causing me near as many headaches.  I’ve probably done things in the slowest and most backwards way, but I don’t care.  It’s been a great learning experience.  I wish I could code for hours and hours on end, but I don’t have that kind of time.  Though I do admit, what I’m working on would definitely be useful in the creation of things I do.  

It really feels good watching an idea come together, even though it has taken a considerable amount of time.  What was originally just some random pipe dream is moving towards half complete.  There’s still a lot of changes, and some hard information to go through.  But I’m becoming convinced the path to mastery is a worthwhile path.

Though mentally, there’s the realization that I haven’t even completed 1/10^th of 1 percent of the task.  But there’s a lot of fun to be had along the way.  Because really, the idea of staring at nothing and producing something great off the top of your head only works when you’ve done the prerequisite work.  And most haven’t.

But who cares about them?  You are either on a path to a goal, or you aren’t.  And all those other people who whine and complain need to decide what they want to do with their lives.  Because really, it’s nothing more than the application of time.  Malcolm Gladwell said it pretty distinctly: all you need to be a solo-ready musician is 10,000 hours of practice.  Anyone who puts in 10,000 hours of play can be a solo-ready musician.  Everyone that puts in 10,000 hours of play can be a solo musician.  Technically, anyone can do it.  It’s just a matter of putting in the time.  

Logical fallacies

I keep seeing posts wander through the Internet about a husband that wants to pay his wife to stay home with their child.  In the end, he’s mad because he can’t pay her his perceived salary of close to $100,000 per year and still pay the bills.  

Let me say this up front: my wife is a stay at home mom of three kids, not one.  She has a very hard job in taking care of the household.

The value my wife adds to my life is incapable of being counted.  If I lost my wife, my life would be devastated from the loss of her.  Not from the loss of what she does.  I love her to death.

But it’s not a $100,000 a year job on the open market. 

It’s a horrible argument that is used to trump up the job of stay at home moms.  It’s an argument made by people who don’t know business.  It’s an argument made by people who want money for breathing.  If any one of these people really forked out the kind of money they talk about, they would quickly change their standards. 

But let’s get to the real problem with the argument.  The original writer of the argument assumes that everything a stay at home mom does should get charged at a different rate.  That’s just crazy.  Let’s make an adequate comparison.  I have an office.  I keep it relatively clean most of the time.  I don’t get paid a dime to clean my office.  I clean it because I’m not a slob, and because I’m an adult.  I clean it because it’s part of presenting a professional appearance.  But I don’t get paid a separate rate to clean my office.  I don’t work for a union that says I can only do one single job.  I do it all because that is what I was hired to do.  I have to do my job, plus all sorts of other little things that seemingly have nothing to do with my job.  Clerical?  Tied in with the package.  Negotiation?  With the package.  Data entry?  Part of the job.

The major invalid assumption of the argument is that each service is being purchased ala carte from an outside vendor.  That can be done, but hiring ala carte is about hiring a professional.  And hiring a professional means you get someone who works faster than the average person at their job. 

Let’s compare laundry.  If I was to hire ala carte for laundry, then I would bag my laundry up, and leave for work a few minutes early.   I would stop by a laundromat and drop off my laundry, and pay by the pound to get someone else to clean my laundry.   I would come back on my way home to find my laundry complete and ready for pickup.  Total amount of my time: 20 minutes.  And laundry goes for about $1 a pound.  Given an adequate clothes supply, laundry could be dropped off once or twice a week without real problems. 

Following that same line of reasoning, you could easily negotiate salary positions to handle every single household task.  And once the child becomes school age, then the amount of time hired to do those tasks drops dramatically due to the child being in school.  The average day would go from 10 hours to 5.  Half the time involved?  Half the pay involved.  Unless the nanny is hired at salary.  And that’s what the intelligent nanny is going to do to even out their paycheck.

Now, I'm excluding places where living expenses are out of control  Those places are just flat crazy.  And $100,000 in those local dollars is really not the same amount in comparison to other locations.  

Realistically, I've had to think about what would happen if my wife died.  And in that case, what would I do?   Really, I could replace my wife with a 15 year term life insurance policy for about $500,000.   In comparison, I need about $800,000 on me.  That's from the purely financial perspective.  

Due to getting out of debt, I don't have $800,000 on me.  I have $400,000.   So should I die, my wife is good for 5-6 years.  Should my die, I'm screwed as I don't have anything on her.  Kids each have a $10,000 burial stipend tied to my life insurance policy.  And term life is cheap.  I pay about $35 per month.  

Speaking of Java and MySQL

So, I finally got my Java/MySQL connection working.

Hooray!


https://help.ubuntu.com/community/JDBCAndMySQL

Was where I learned to fix the "class not found issue".

After that, I dug up http://www.tutorialspoint.com/jdbc/jdbc-quick-guide.htm to get instructions on how to use/connect to the database.

Afterwards, I was capable of spitting out information to the system console from the database.  Holy crud!  

Definitely making progress today.

Yay.

The first two hours

In trying to program 10,000 hours worth of stuff in Java, I realized I was going to be building a whole lot of stuff.  After two hours, I’ve finished the first program.  It’s a translator that takes CIDR notation information and turns it into Snort rules.  The entire purpose is to block entire countries.  The problem is countries are large and have a lot of IP addresses.  Blocking China takes a few thousand lines of CIDR notation.   And aggregate it all into smaller routs?  Highly unlikely.  So you end up with 3,000 lines that you can either manually parse through or write a program to parse through.  I chose to write a program. 

And I’ve also come to the realization that in the run to get 10,000 hours, I’m going to program a lot of stuff.  That is a lot of time.  At 30 minutes per day, that’s 54 YEARS.  So at some point, I’m definitely going to have to put in a lot more effort than I currently am.  

 

So now that the Snort builder is done, what’s next?  Probably moving back to my automatic network test application.   Which is mostly writing text parsing.  From there, I’ve got to figure out how to design a database structure and get the information into a database.   From the database, I have to get data into a web form and display it on a web server that doesn’t exist. 

Just a slight bit complicated, but I’ve got nothing but time.  

After that, there's a SHA application I've been contemplating.  SHA is secure hash algorithm.  It's essentially a long number that indicates the properties and data of a file.  Well, if the SHA is the same for two files, then the file is the same.  So if you have a desire to back up data, you can create a SHA of every file on your system, and every file on the remote system.  Compare those two files together, and identify which files need transferred.  Do so, and you synchronize the data on both systems.

It's an idea.  Like I said, 10,000 hour is a lot of time.  A whole lot of time.  

side note: I realize this is April Fools Day.  I am not a practical joker.  

Pareto Principle in Action

My last experiment started as a practical examination of the Pareto principal, otherwise known as the 80/20 rule.  I had been making straight B’s on my Routing and Switching tests, and I wanted to consistently improve them to A’s.  In order to do that, I needed to know how much time I was spending getting that B. 

So I changed my study habits slightly, and decided to keep track of time spent studying.  I’d also read something about two competing South Pole expeditions.  One ran as much as they could every day.  Some days they didn’t go anywhere because the weather was bad.  The other went 15 miles a day, regardless.  They went 15 miles, and stopped for the day.  So I decided to try that principal with studying.  And the results were pretty remarkable.

I went from an average low B to a high A on the next test.  Hooray for me.   Anyway, this was the process. 

Read any previous notes I had made.

Grab a highlighter, and read 15 pages, highlighting what I thought was important.

Copy those highlighted notes into my printed notes.

Quit for the day.   Return tomorrow.

In doing this process, I found it only took about an hour a day, so I really had more time to work on other things.  Normally, I would have spent 3-4 hours straight on Saturday or Sunday reading and highlighting.  Granted, chapter 7 took me 387 minutes to complete, but that only averaged 64 minutes per day.  I have yet to take the test on that chapter, so I’m not yet sure how effective this process has been for that chapter.  But I do know the previous chapter resulted in huge positive results.

I think I missed a lot of the main part of this that makes it so effective.  The main effective part is that you study a little bit every single day.  It’s not a brain destroying group done once or twice per week.  It’s simply an hour per day, every single day.  In that way, your brain doesn’t have time to stop thinking about what you have studied.  On top of that, by the end you’ve read and reread your notes numerous times.  Then, the information is more likely to stick. 

We’ll see what happens with chapter 8.  Though I have to admit, single area OSPF just doesn’t interest me that much.

Outliers

I read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers.  I think I've come to a distinct set of realizations afterwards.  It's a collection of things rumbling through a head that doesn't quite understand what is trying to be said.

I've watched through the YouTube version of Patterns of Conflict once, and I'm working on watching it again.  I've often wondered if I could write distinct lines in my life between things I read or done with the realization that those things are the future points of tomorrow.  They are the points when life departed and the old fell away.

I know Patterns of Conflict will have an impact on my life.  It already has.  Several statements have already begun sticking in my mind, leading to wanderings down paths that just aren't normally taken.  The ability to deconstruct and reexamine thoughts gives way to new perspectives.  I've often thought going to college is like staring in through the wrong side of a peep hole into a three story house, without the realization that there is even a house to be looked at.

I've also began wondering what would happen if one intentionally went to spend the 10,000 hours it takes to reach mastery of a subject.  In doing so, I contemplated buying the www.10000hours.com domain name, but it was taken.  I don't even know what I'm going to do with it, but I think I've got an idea.  I think it's what Driven was initially created to do.  I just never finished that project, and it went by the wayside.

I guess the goal is then quite simple.  Pick a project, and start a timer.  Figure out how much of your free time you have spent on the path towards mastery.  It would be great if you could suddenly know where you are on that path.  But without extensive time management analysis, I don't think that's possible.

But it might make a good story here and there.

I've got a thought running through my head.  What if everything we do can be described as the difference between attrition warfare and maneuver warfare?

Attrition warfare is the tactical decision of the 19th century, and was codified by Carl von Clausewitz in On War.  von Clausewitz argued heavily for the kind of attacks seen during World War I, in which soldiers lined up and charged at each other.  These were heavily destructive battles that were exceptionally costly and ineffective.  This strategy persisted far into the Cold War and beyond.

It has mostly persisted due to simplicity.  It's a lot easier to teach Attrition War versus Maneuver War.  Now, jump back to the point at which von Clausewitz was writing On War.  He was a Prussian, writing about the battles of Napoleon.  Shortly after, the Prussian level of thinking also created the basis of the modern education system.   Prussia needed to move into the 20th century as fast as possible to prevent something like Napoleon from happening again.

Now, what the Prussians created was an attrition war versus the under-education of the the people.  In many aspects, that is still what the entire education system is based on.  But Attrition War has numerous problems.  It is costly in terms of human lives, and generally ineffective versus a decent defense.

Against the proper defense, attrition warfare costs thousands of lives.

Where does that all tie back towards Maneuver Warfare?  I think Boyd can answer that question.