by Gene Turnbow | Dec 25, 2012 | General
It’s time to rediscover who you are. It’s the secret to life, the universe, and everything, and I can tell you now the answer is not 42.
Right, and you think you know who you are. You don’t know anything, and I’ll tell you why it’s time for a quiet sit with a nice cup of tea and a rethink. Got your tea? Oh, you don’t drink tea. Time to start. Do yourself a favor and pick out a nice orange pekoe, they call it Constant Comment at the supermarket. Go get some, come back, brew the tea, pour a cup, then come back here.
Have a careful sip, it’s hot.
Now where were we? Oh, yes. Rethinking.
You know that thing you’ve been telling yourself? I’ll do this or that when the time is right, I have to wait for things to get better, I’ll be able to make my stand then, well guess what?? That day is never going to happen. Quite a shock, I know. But trust me on this, it’s never going to happen.
You’re never going to be smarter than you are now. You might be wiser later, or you might not be. But the important thing is that whatever you’re hoping to be able to do, now is the time to start doing it. If you want to go open a restaurant, it’s time to start not only thinking about recipes, but making a business plan and finding out what it takes to do it. Want to paint, but don’t know how to draw? It’s time for the foundations – go take life drawing, color is nothing more than a wet pencil with tint. Trust me on that one. Want to act? Time to start dreaming, not stop – but do it with your eyes open.
Have you ever felt like there is a big secret to life and that everyone knows it but you and that nobody’s talking? I’m talking, and I’m going to tell you what it is: no matter what it is you want to do with your life, no matter what it is you want to become, it’s a solvable problem. You can solve it in tiny bits and pieces, but it’s up to you to figure out what problems you have to solve and what doesn’t help you move forward, and that’s a very very easy test. Think of something you think might help you. Then think about how that’s going to move you closer to your dream, and if it isn’t, don’t do that right now. Move on to the next thing. And if you don’t know what to do, make a list of all the things you don’t know, write them down, and start asking questions of people who know more than you. Amazingly, most people who know more than you do are anxious to pass on their knowledge. It’s a sign to them that they’ve been on the right path, and they’re generally very happy to do it.
But the big secret is that success is a matter of figuring it out. It’s a puzzle, yes. But it’s a puzzle with finite rules, learnable ones. Have you ever assembled a bicycle? Remember how hard it was, but you had those instructions to help you out. Success in real life is just. Like. That. The instructions are out there, and each step, each problem you have to solve, I can promise you somebody has done it before you and written down how they did it. You have to have the persistence and the determination to keep looking things up as you go, but if you do that, and keep doggedly at it, and you don’t let anyone tell you that your dream isn’t worth while, inch by inch you will succeed. And it will be ungodly slow. You’ll feel like it’s like pulling teeth sometimes, that there has to be a faster way, and there just isn’t. This is how it’s done – this is how it really works, and there is no faster way of doing it.
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by Gene Turnbow | Apr 22, 2012 | Art, General
I’ve been trying to raise the quality bar of my illustrations lately. No, this image is not unique, it’s from the cover of a Supergirl comic I saw in a store today. However, I did pencil and ink this myself.
Supergirl
by Gene Turnbow | Jan 16, 2012 | Code, Historical
I used to work for Technicolor Videocassette back in the day. We’re talking about 1990 here. Back when the videocassette was king, and the Intel 486 pretty much ruled the world. In those days Technicolor made about 70% of all the VHS cassettes in the world (including all of Disney’s stuff).
Anyway, we were flying out to Westland, Michigan every week, doing our development work on their videocassette packaging and shipping pipeline that they were integrating with Walmart for what’s called “JIT” delivery (“Just In Time”) services. This meant they’d get the order for the specific video tapes, pick them from inventory and ship just the ones the store had requested.
So we were working on a database driven system that fed a monstrous device called the A-Frame, which was little more than a big conveyor belt from which video cassettes were picked from the stacks standing along its pathway. The cassettes would be selected by computer, be popped off the bottom of the stack, hit the belt, and end up in a box at the end. It made the job of finding the cassettes in the warehouse for each order moot, and saved a lot of steps for the people who had to run around and fill the individual orders. We had spent months on the project, and were working in a small long room with windows in one side that had previously been a shop floor production office. We called the thing The Aquarium because it resembled nothing more than a big fish tank, about the same proportions and glass on the one side, you get the idea.
We had sort of a pointy-haired IT manager, who shall remain nameless (partly because I don’t remember his name, so it’s just as well). We put a sign in the window of the Aquarium that said Do Not Tap On Glass, just like you’d see at a pet store, but when he saw it he didn’t get it at we had to explain it to him. Not the brightest crayon in the box, this guy.
The real story was the database server. Today everybody talks about SQL servers, and they’re commonplace, but back then it was brand new and nobody really had a good handle on what they could do and how they worked – except this one guy in his early 20’s we’d hired away from Microsoft, because he was an expert in SQL. You pronounce it “sequel”, but back then nobody could agree on how it was pronounced, and this ex-Microsoftie called it “Squirrel”. It was as apt as any other pronunciation, and we liked the confused expressions people got when we talked about it in front of them, being the incurable geeks that we were, and so for us, it stuck.
Then came the problem of connecting the SQL server to the A-Frame. In those days we had pretty bad networking. The best you could get was something called ARCnet, and the cards cost about $300 each, and that was in 1990 dollars. They failed a lot, and these days your average cable modem outperforms it by about ten to one or more. So to cover the great distances involved in the warehouse where we were, we needed something better. There was no wifi then, but there was optical fiber.
This was the glass stuff. It was expensive, and fragile. Once a forklift ran over a cable and broke the fragile strands, and a thousand dollars worth of this glass cable had to be restrung. Finally, the networking problems and the SQL server and the A-Frame were all connected together, and we ran our first communications test. We all held our breaths, and sent the message from the control station. The A-Frame responded.
We had been working for months getting to that point. you never saw a bunch of programmers whooping and hollering with excitement as we did that morning.
While all this was going on, the Pointy Haired IT manager happened by and asked what all the commotion was about.
“The Squirrel’s up on glass in the aquarium!” we happily exclaimed.
Mr. Manager just looked quizzically confused, and not wanting to admit that he had no idea what we were talking about, gave us a vague, slightly open-mouthed smile, and excused himself.
-- Gene Turnbow
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by Gene Turnbow | Apr 20, 2011 | General
All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity’ but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.
~ T. E. Lawrence
Dream big. Seriously, dream big. Everyone has dreams, but most dismiss them as undoable, unworkable or unrealistic. And these people are the ones whose dreams never come true. Explore, find out what you were meant for. Shake the box and tip the crumbs out and see what’s really there. There’s more potential inside you than you realize, and the difference that makes a success instead of a failure can be surprisingly small.
-- Gene Turnbow
by Gene Turnbow | Mar 10, 2011 | Music
I recently got an email from one of my coworkers who wanted to know what she should be looking for in a good used guitar in the $100 range. I thought I’d share the answers with you, because people get asked this a lot and it’s one of the most common questions a new guitar player asks:
Hi Gene,
I’m going to start looking for a full-sized guitar, for myself.
In looking at used guitars, what brands do you think are better than others? Or, does it matter?
I’m going to try and find something that is around $100.
At the $100 price point, your best measure of the quality of a guitar is you. You can often get a little better quality if you get a used one rather than a new one, but here are things to look for:
- Does it feel right in your hands? Everybody’s hands are different, so get a guitar that feels good in yours.
- Does it sound right (even playing all the way up the neck)?
- Does it have a cutaway so you can reach the high notes (if that’s important to you)?
- Are the machine heads (the tuning heads) firm or do they slip or rattle? (“What the – where’s that buzz coming from??”)
- How high are the frets compared to the fretboard? Taller frets make a guitar harder to play than slimmer frets and will require more energy to get a clean sound out of them. The difference can be small, and you can often only see this by comparing one guitar to another.
- Does it speak well? Some guitars are quieter or sound tinny compared to others, some guitars are brighter, or have a stronger bass content in their voices. Remember that there are things you can do to make a guitar’s voice change depending on how you play it, but that its fundamental character will remain fairly constant.
- Does it have a truss rod in the neck so that the bow in the neck can be adjusted? Surprisingly, some at this price point don’t. A guitar with a truss rod in the neck will have a little hex bolt head inside the sound hole just under the end of the fretboard.
After that it’s more like picking out a comfortable pair of shoes than anything else. Listen to the guitar’s voice, and find one that sounds like an old friend. That’s the guitar you’re going to get the most out of.
Brands to look for are Taylor, Martin, Ovation, Yamaha, Fender – but there are dozens more really excellent brands, and again, at this price point the well known name brands are as likely to be lemons as any other guitar.
If I get a nylon string guitar, will it have the same great twang as your guitar? Or, will it always be softer?
No, it will always be softer. Nylon is uncommon, most guitars are steel string. They have an inherently softer sound than metal does, and they tend not to break strings as often (but a guitar string usually costs a bit under $2 and can last years).
I just don’t want it to sound like a harp, like the little 1/2 size guitar that’s my daughter’s. And, if I buy a nylon string guitar, can I get it strung with steel strings, in the future? Or, is the guitar just made for one type of strings?
A guitar is made for one particular kind of string, and you can’t use nylon strings on a guitar made for steel strings, and vice versa.
That said, I used a Kawasaki nylon string guitar (with no truss rod in the neck) for about 25 years before it finally broke in half on its own standing against the wall one day, just from the string tension.
A last point to mention is that at the $100 price point, adding an extra $20 – $60 can make a huge difference in the quality of the guitars in your price range.
Guitars can range from a hundred or so into the thousands of dollars. The difference between a $100 guitar and a $150 guitar can be substantial – the difference between a $2000 guitar and a $3000 guitar may be one only a professional musician could appreciate.
Good luck in your search!
– Gene Turnbow
It’s time to rediscover who you are. It’s the secret to life, the universe, and everything, and I can tell you now the answer is not 42.
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