I can actually trace where, in different parts of my history, from living day to day sleeping on the train, to going to Chubb Technical Institute, to meeting Richelle, to becoming a Dad, my perspective has changed.
It reminds me of a short video I posted to my Facebook account I tripped upon earlier that is worth posting here again (2 minutes – watch it): YouTube: “The Unsettling Truth About Life”:
You can tell what orientation Alan Watts thinks we are all being distracted from.
Both of these are worthy of your time – thought provoking stuff.
Unfortunately I did not know of Martin Gardner’s work until watching the embedded video. He inspired many and I’ll be looking to read some of his books, articles, and trying to learn some magic myself. We can all use a little magic.
We just concluded a lab week at CIM that was awesome. No other short way to put it. Read Jon’s post for the details.
For this lab week I worked with folks from QA exploring a tool (a MIT research project called “Sikuli”) for its applicability in functional testing. I’ll have a post sharing how well it went soon. We learned quite a bit, had a great exchange of experience across a departmental boundary, and now have an additional tool in the tool belt that we will be using in some cases.
I had an interesting mountain to climb to become familiar with the challenges faced in QA. What helped set the stage for me was a great Google Tech Talk by James Bach on becoming a Software Testing Expert. His video is really about becoming an expert in almost anything but the slide on “Perfect Testing” made me take pause (literally – I paused the video to consider the slide because it is so expansive and almost poetic):
Perfect testing is…
Testing is the infinite process
of comparing the invisible
to the ambiguous
so as to avoid the unthinkable
happening to the anonymous.
In other words, perfect testing is a challenge.
That’s quite a statement!
Bach goes on to fill in the picture around this statement. Watch the entire video for the context.
After taking part in this lab week, a lot of what James Bach said in this presentation has sunk in further.
I had thought I was empathetic to the work that is encompassed in software testing. What I found out was I wasn’t even close, and this experience has left me a bit humbled and inspired.
I love this thing. It’s not perfect, at this low price point ($170) nothing is, but I’ve been able to take some amazing short videos so far. I maybe will post something to YouTube someday soon. I’m running out of excuses with this level of convenience. Speaking of that – the billing is that this has one button posting to YouTube – but you only get that if you install software from Kodak (free) on your machine. Still, the videos are pretty much upload ready right from the camera, which is awesome.
