Action Figure Daniel

Author: Daniel

  • If it were a snake it would have bitten you! part 1

    Some time ago, right before I left for school, my employer purchased the inside of a few stores from another company that was liquidating them. Among the items purchased were several Cisco wireless access points, scanners, copiers and other expensive equipment. I left for school and Renown helped oversee the removal of said equipment. When I got back from school I commented that our new stores should have wireless because we bought new Cisco wireless devices. The owner agreed but didn’t know where any of the devices were. In fact, he commented that we should have a plethora because of the new ones that we bought and thought we have sent back and the used ones we bought that he had personally watched the removal of.

    I searched every IT room we had and for months had no luck.Finally, mid-summer I was in desperate need of a CAT5 cable in one of the new stores and found a box that had several such cables. As I dug through the box I also found the once lost wireless devices that we had bought new. I was so excited and got them setup right away. The owner however, grew anxious because we were still missing the used wireless devices. “We sent the Ciscos with the antennas together,” he kept saying. I kept thinking “Antennas, I would think that I would have noticed if there were a bunch of antennas laying around:

    A couple of weeks later I was cleaning out the IT room at the warehouse and realized that if the old Cisco wireless devices had been hungry snakes they would have bitten me, spit me out, bitten me again, then they would have eaten me before I even realized they were there. As I went into the IT room I looked at The IT shelf, and there, right in front of me, were six Cisco boxes. Two were for the wireless in the warehouse and were empty. The other four each had a single device in them each marked for the location we had removed them from. They had been right in front of me, and I had in fact been looking at them, the whole time. I had found most of the missing technology, but we were still out antennas.

  • Non-predictable analytics

    Each of us builds a matrix of predicted outcomes based on specific incomes. We use these to guess how early we should leave for an event, what time we should go to bed, when we should eat lunch, what the weather will be like. Key to build a good predictive matrix is getting good data, reliable data through a process called indexing. I have noticed that some things that should be simple to index and prove nearly impossible to index.

    First example, the traffic patterns for the section of the city my parents live in. One morning I can leave at 9:45am and face nothing but solid traffic. The next morning, still a weekday, I can leave at the exact same time and face nothing but open roads. This varying of traffic seems to have no tie in to the day of the week or even hour of the day. Though I am sure that if one set far enough back to look at enough data one could find enough of a pattern to build an acceptable matrix. Such is, however, beyond my skill.

    Second example, perhaps even more unpredictable is my sisters’ wakeup time. They seem to go to bed at nearly the same time each night. But come morning, the wake up times vary by hours, which I am grateful for. Sometimes my sisters wake up at 7:30am and sometimes they don’t wake up until after 9:30am. Sometimes they wake up at the same for a whole week. Other times they wake up at different times each morning.

    As a whole I have realized that some things are really easy index and thus predict, some things are not.

  • Wondering what a non-two-wheel bicycle is

    I went to the Library Saturday to get a book to read. Because I had no quarters to pay to park in the parkade I parked on the street a little ways past the library and enjoyed a nice sunny walk. From the place I parked to the Library I walked past City Hall and the following sign:

    My first thought was “oh, they don’t want anyone getting ran over, this makes sense.” Then I stopped and walked back to the sign to reread it. My second thought was “what kind of BIcycle has more than TWO-wheels?” If it has three wheels we call it a TRIcycle (tri meaning three) and if it has four it is fondly known as a ‘quad’ and is usually motorized. Further, it has just one wheel it is a unicycle and a bicycle with training wheels is exempt as it has four wheels.
    My third and last thought on this sign was “why, exactly, did they (meaning whomever had the sign made) clearly and precisely distinguish between BIcycles in general and TWO-wheel BIcycles?”
    As I was wondering this I got my camera and took a picutre.

  • The Lessons I Never Was Taught

    I was thinking the other day of all the things that my parents and the world they came. It was a very different world. A world that was a lot harder than the one that I grew up in. Not in the sense of the peer pressure and the bad things all around but in the sense of the personal tradegy and lessons that one goes through as a child. When I grew up it was towards the end on the time when a child could actual injure themselves on toys.

    As I have gotten older I have realized that my parents have given me a lot, they have also taught me a lot of extremely valuable life lessons. I am grateful for these.
    Perhaps equally importantly, I am grateful for the lessons they didn’t teach me. The lessons that hurt so much they clip your wings and make you not want to fly any more. The lessons that take an incredibly strong person, like my parents, to survive. My parents didn’t just survive, they carefully kept their child from having to go through the same painful experiences.
    This is not to say that I have led a sheltered life. It has been somewhat sheltered, enough to keep me safe but not to much that I can’t stand on my own. But the dark, bitter moments of life, the ones that are so easy to pass on, those haven’t been passed on. They were carefully hidden so that only as an adult, with my eyes opened to the world, can I even see hints of such moments from their lives.
    I am forever grateful for the lessons my parents taught me. I am also forever grateful for the lessons my parents didn’t teach me.

  • A Most Fortuitous Encounter

    I stopped by the Canary Compound to get some of the bottled water I left there, noting that I was found myself fortunate to have purchased it before the bottle deposit, because the stash in my trunk had been depleted. As I loaded the water into Elazar and couple of cars drove past and I thought to myself “how fortunate would it be if one of those car had the lady that bought the house next door?” In the time it took me to arrange things to make room for the water a lady exited one of the cars and came over. It was indeed the lady who had bought the house next door. We talked and swapped important information. It was indeed a most fortuitous encounter.