Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values

I have finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig and I quite enjoyed it. At the end of the edition I have is an excerpt of a speech given by the book's editor when the book was first launched. He summed up the theme of the book as "... a book about living, about how to live and ... about why". I agree with this. I have numerous pages marked that contain thoughts or descriptions I immediately found relevant in how I live my life. Over the next few weeks I will write some posts expatiating these topics.

The first topic relates to the story the narrator tells of taking his motorcycle to a mechanic to be fixed. He had an immediate sinking feeling as he arrived to find the radio blaring in the workshop. He surmised that the workers were listening to the radio to make the work and workplace "funner". Such an environment is unlikely to yield quality workmanship as the mechanics aren't interested in doing quality work. Sure enough, when the motorcycle is returned it is not repaired.

Regrettably, I find myself to be similar to these mechanics. I regularly listen to music (and even video) while I am at work. If I am honest with myself, I do this to make my work "funner". The music provides a distraction from work I (for some reason) consider dull. When I am really interested in my work I will either completely loose track of the music or I will deliberately play something non-distracting such as Ambient 1: Music for Airports by Brian Eno, or I just won't listen to music.

What I have taken from "Zen ..." is that I should be striving to direct my life towards Quality. I am not enough of a writer/philosopher to give a good account of Quality. The book provides an analogy to the notion of "excellence" in ancient Greece. The heroes of the time where those that strove for excellence in all they did.

And this is the major thing I take away from the book and what I hope to apply to my life. Whatever work I have in front of me I will strive to do it with excellence. How will I do this? The author proposes that the main way to achieve this is through "gumption". This is a topic I'll get to later.

2000 books

An often declared New Year's Resolution is to read 50 books over the coming year. This is a fairly logical number as it works out to about one book per week. However, it dawned on me that being 32 years old now, and having perhaps 40 years left of life on this ball of dirt, then I would only read 2000 books in the rest of my lifetime.

Only 2000 books!

And I've already read one this year so I only have 1999 left.

So depressing.

Though, perhaps I've come up with a cunning way to cheat death. I'll read 1998 more books. Then I won't read a book again. Since my lifespan is 2000 books, I will have become immortal.

Though, I think my logic is flawed somewhere there.

Perhaps I should read a book on logic.

Description of the Scientific Method

I have been making my way through Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and have just encountered a good description of the scientific method. Chapter 9 describes two types of logic (inductive and deductive) that are applied in a broader framework in an attempt to unambiguously solve a problem.

Inductive logic is described as starting from observations and inferring a general conclusion. Deductive logic is described as the reverse as we start with general knowledge of a system and predict a specific observation.

The use of these reasoning tools need to be applied in a formal context so that any results obtained can be defended. This is the scientific method and the book breaks the method down to six steps:

1. Statement of the problem;
2. Hypotheses as to the cause of the problem;
3. Experiments designed to test each hypothesis;
4. Predicted results of the experiments;
5. Actual results of the experiments;
6. Conclusions from the results of the experiments.

One key point when working through this process is to not jump the gun when stating the problem. The problem statement must not imply a cause of the problem. The statement should be as general as possible and then possible causes can be stated in step 2 and tested in the subsequent steps. Once a particular hypothesis is proved to be true, it can then form the problem statement in a new round of experimentation to further isolate the source of the problem.

This art of correctly stating a problem is also raised in Conceptual Blockbusting: A Guide to Better Ideas where it is stated that an incorrect problem statement can impact on the creative process by limiting the number and type of solutions generated.

I wish I had a better understanding of these ideas seven years ago when I started my PhD!

Changing development tools?

During the post-Christmas sales I picked up a copy of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (3rd Edition) by Aaron Hillegass.

I have read the first seven chapters and it is well written and very engaging. I am surprised by how much I have learned and how much Cocoa can do in a small amount of written lines of code. This is due to the GUI programming environment provided by Interface Builder. In fact, I have been so impressed I am considering shifting over to Cocoa and Objective C and Xcode and Interface Builder as my main development platform (outside of work).

A problem I have with this is I do not know any of the Objective C frameworks and tools that support the other aspects of software development such as unit testing and automated builds. These are things I am sure I can pick up but they are areas I already know about when developing in C++.

I am in the middle of trying to decide what I really want to achieve from my personal software development projects. A few months ago the goal was to develop experience in the actual art of software development/construction from requirements through to release. I am concerned that throwing a completely new development platform into the mix will drag against the other learning I hope to do in requirements capture, design, test planning, and general software process.

The opposing force in the decision is the thought that I should just get in and develop as many applications as possible in order to improve my skills in the creation of the actual software product. From this point of view I would be better served to go with a tool that I enjoy using and can support rapid development. Objective C/Cocoa fits that bill nicely.

I still have some time to make the decision as I don't plan on getting to development until after my thesis has been submitted.

A step towards submitting the thesis

I made a small step towards finalising my thesis tonight. I added some navigation and positioning information to the start of each section in the first chapter. Basically, I have the table of contents for chapter 1 at the start of each section in chapter 1, with the current section highlighted in bold.



A quick review of chapter 1 after this addition and I feel it is a significant benefit. It provides a continuous reminder of what has already been read in the section, and what is still to come. I've pinged it to my supervisors to get their opinions on this addition before I push it to the other chapters.

One thing I don't like about how I've implemented it is that I've basically manually created the contents in a LaTeX table and have copied and pasted it into each section. If anyone know of an automated way to do this, please let me know. I could have put the table in an external file and included it from the start of each section, but I also wanted to highlight the current section in the table. Copy and paste was the only solution I could think of.

Resolutions 2009

I have a few general, ongoing resolutions for this year:

• Writing here on this blog;
• Photography, uploaded to my Flickr stream;
• Read, read, read (currently reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (P.S.)).

In addition to these I want to work towards definite goals and I want to work on these goals one at a time. My first goal for this year is to submit my thesis. This goal is complete once the thesis has been printed, signed off by my supervisors, and sent to the examiners. I want to complete this by the end of February this year.

Goals to be pursued later this year:

• Lose weight. This is also an ongoing thing, but I want to take some dedicated time at some point this year to concentrate solely on reducing my weight by some amount ... perhaps 10%;
• Learn Indonesian. Again, something that I could be doing throughout the year, but I need that solid block of time to allow for concentrated study and practice to get over the current hump in my learning where I just know words;
• Develop software applications. I need to develop a list of applications I want to write and use each as a goal;
• Website development. I have a few other websites that I have been neglecting and want to rejuvenate.

Each of these need a block of time to kick them into action and then regularly scheduled time to keep them maintained.

But the thesis is first.

Resolutions 2008 Evaluated

Summary: Fail.

I made some belated resolutions about a year ago. Didn't really achieve any of them. Here is a run down:

• Thesis: some progress was made in the last year ... but I am still not finished. Trying to polish the thesis and make it a bit more readable. But I am also looking at some experiment reruns. This will be on my resolution list again this year.
  
• Weight: I did get down to perhaps less than 110kg but am back up now to between 110 and 115 kg. Another one for resolution list this year.
• Finances are not as bad as they were but overall my net position would still be in the red.
• I know a quite a few words of Indonesian but I can't really put them into sentences.
• Community ... not as I intended. I have been drawn into the local Indonesian community a little bit with my wife.
• Write a complete application ... nope.
• Read, read, read ... not really. Still have stacks of unread New Scientist magazines. I did read Outliers ( Malcolm Gladwell) which I can recommend.
  

So, based on those stated resolutions the year could be described as mediocre at best. However, the year did contain a lot of travelling. In March I (and some of my family) were in Jakarta for my wedding. My wife returned with me to Adelaide in mid-March. We spent some time in Queensland for our honeymoon including a trip to Australia Zoo.

In May I travelled to The Hague, The Netherlands for work.

Return from The Netherlands coincided with the conclusion of the first three months of my wife being in Australia. That also happened to be the maximum continuous period she is allowed in the country (she is here on a multiple entry tourist visa valid for 12 months but only for 3 months form each entry). We were expecting to be able to extend the three months but were denied. So we put in a rush trip to Singapore for a weekend in June.

The end of June found us in Grafton for my Nan's 80th birthday. We also started planning for our next trips out of the country. September saw us return to Jakarta to visit my wife's family and our new niece: Kenar.

September also saw my first true Muslim experience: fasting for the holy month of Ramadan. I converted at Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta in December last year in order to marry my wife.

Returning to Adelaide from Jakarta at the end of September. The end of September also brought the end of Ramadan. My wife wanted to attend the traditional Id-al Fitr prayers and after some quick searching we found an Indonesian group was celebrating at Flinders University. Attending we were introduced to some local Indonesians and later that day were at the house of the `matriarch' of the community. We now attend someone's house at least once per month.

The end of November took us back to Grafton for my Mum's 50th birthday. This time we went by road, via Canberra on the way to Grafton. Five days on the road.

December was the time of the end of my wife's third three month period in Australia. For this trip we had more time to plan and we went to New Zealand for 8 days. See my previous post for what we were planning to do (and actually did).

And now we are here. Based on this narrative, the year has been quite full. I've also taken a lot of photos this year (as evidenced by the images in this post) and have learnt quite a bit about photography.

So, though I didn't meet my stated resolutions, I did get married, travelled to three different countries, and took a bunch of photos which (I think) have improved significantly. In retrospect, it has been a very good year.