Distance

I left my family to study abroad when I was very young. The homesickness has always followed me. Whenever I thought about how I felt thinking about home when I was growing up, the phrase from the movie title "the unbearable lightness of being" comes to mind. Of course, it was not about being that had the unbearable lightness; I was too young for that. It was the unbearable lightness of the feeling of homesickness. It was all-engulfing, like the air, to borrow another phrase from a song, surrounding me all the time. I went home once every six months at that time. That usually made it worse when I had to leave again for the new term.

Going home can no longer change that feeling. I have been away for so long that every time I went back, I felt the feeling of not being at home, even when I was sitting at home. Like I said before, I truly cannot go home again.

Two days ago, when I heard about the tsunami that hit Indonesia, India, Thailand, Malaysia, and other countries, I felt a little panic, for my sister was supposed to be visiting Kuala Lumpur. I still have not received any word from her, but I think she is safe, given how far away Kuala Lumpur is from the epicentre. At that time, however, I had no indications about the magnitude of the quake and tsunami. That was the first time I felt the distance between me and my family. The distance is so vast that I forgot how it built up in the last twenty years.

The distance is not measured in miles or kilometres. Nor is it measured in the amount of time I can hop on a plane and go there. It is measured in the difference in outlook on life, in the mundane daily challenges we will go through, wherever we live.

Drive

I was reading another Stephen J. Gould's books these two days, when I came across an observation he made about the great people he knew. He said these people shared one characteristics: that they were all so committed to what they were doing that they would labour long and hard to accomplish their goals. He was saying that innard intelligence and lucky circumstances ranked lower than having the drive to succeed.

Being the biggest underachieving person in the world, I totally agree with him. It is very difficult to have a different opinion. It is very difficult to oppose the prevailing wisdom. It is very difficult to defend a different position. It is very difficult to create something out of nothing. It is very difficult to convince myself that my own ideas are worth something. It is very difficult to not agree with other people when they think my ideas total bunk; and who do I think I am anyway. It is very difficult not to think that I am over my head with all these things that I think should change.

Actually, nothing of these difficult things faze me at all. I am not being arrogant; I simply know that I have always had weird ideas. That I don't think in the same way as other people even since I was a small kid. My problem is that I do not have the drive to do the deeds; especially if there is no deadlines looming.

When I was writing my two books, I had to write 13 to 14 pages every day to meet my deadlines, imposed by myself. I had no problem finish writing both books, even though only one of them has been published.

The drive to think through ideas is much harder, as you can imagine. To be able to do that anyway, I resolve, is what I am going to do from now on.

Hobbies

The other day I was talking to a colleague. When I mentioned that I liked reading, he immediately suggested that I should reserve a copy of the new installment of Harry Potter series. This book will be published in the new year, and I am sure we will be reminded over and over again on how many copies it has sold, right until and after it is published. There might even be dramas about leaks, etc.

But no, I don't read novels. Actually, I don't read fictions. Well, I don't read poetry as well; the last time I tried, I could not make the head and tail out of the book of poems I bought. I have no rhythm, and if I can't even pronounce the words correctly, I guess I will never get it. I will only be able to read Chinese poems.

Yes, I only read non-fiction, and dull non-fictions at that. Come to think of it, I only watch documentaries, news, and sports on TV. I don't watch movies; they bore me to death and give me headaches. Oh, I don't play video games, although I love watching people play video games. I don't play cards. In fact, I can't. I simply can't remember rules. I don't play chess, any kind of chess. I wanted to learn the game of go, but never got around to learning it. I doubt I would be good at it at all.

There is a reason to all this: I find the real world much more fascinating. The real world is so much more interesting that fictions simply can't compare. Video games are no comparison to actually playing with an operating system like Linux. Heck, I have the source code that I can read. And games. Well, if I can find out how humans think, that is a much more exciting puzzle than any game in the world. And it is open-ended too.

So, what am I trying to say? Nothing. I am just a boring person.

Maturing Java

Java has been around for around 10 years now. From the little language it started from, it has grown to be a very big "platform". There are so many Java related "technologies" around, so much noise, so many patterns, so many frameworks, so many architectures, so many buses, so many orientations, it is becoming, for me at least, a very unwieldy beast. Every where we turn, there is a technology we must use for even little open source projects. And if we don't like the technology used, well, tough; we can always create our own projects and use our pet technologies. So, we all strive to know EJB, SOA, ESB, Aspect oriented programming, POJO, JMS, JMX, Servlets, struts, maven, ant, JSP, JSF, Tiles, tapestry, maverick, JDBC, not to mention vendor specific stuff, Websphere, Weblogic, JBoss, Tomcat, Orion, Resin, Sun Sudio One. We are supposed to be an expert in all of these, we are supposed to have at least five years of experience in all of them, all the time 100% working on them hands on, and 100% doing design at the same time as well. Of course, I exaggerate. But not by much, if you read some of the job advertisements in the last three years.

Why is this diversity not a good thing? May be it is a good thing? It is not a good thing for one reason: humans can only be very good at only a few things. When only a polymath can see the landscape fully, most people will be locked in ghettos of isolated technologies, requiring the small subset of people to breach the divides. Specialization will be needed. That would have been a good thing, if not the amount of complexity every single programmer must confront day to day. And the way the technologies interact, you must know all the technologies used, or you don't understand part of the system. Except that for the way we program, not understanding part of the system can be fatal.

We muddle along.