Tag Archives: Problem Solving

A Tribute to Murphy…

Posted on June 23, 2009 | 1 Comment

Or better known as – what can go wrong will.

Those of you who know me well, know that I have a need for speed. I like fast cars and fast jet skis. I’m not so much about top end as the fun of getting there. I’ve earned the name “Linda Leadfoot”. As I’ve gotten older I’ve really really REALLY tried to ditch the car problem and drive like grandma. Cars are great toys. Cars are EXPENSIVE toys. That money can always go to a better place.

However, we still have one very fun very fast little car in the family. It’s an Audi S4. It’s not a new one, and it is coming up on the 100,000 mile mark, but it still looks and runs like new. 2.7 liters of 250 HP twin turbo joy under the hood, a 6-speed manual tranny, and quattro all wheel drive. My baby is as surefooted as a mountain goat in snow and ice and hugs turns like nobody’s business. However, we’ve been seriously debating selling it because we don’t need it and I’m unemployed. We inherited a nearly new car that gets great gas mileage from my dad and sadly the Audi sits in the garage more days than not. I think that the S4 knew we were going to try and take it to a dealer this week that is running a special “buy your car” promotion (limited time only! – uh yeah, right) to see what they will give us…

Yesterday while rounding a turn and doing some fancy footwork I was alarmed to find the (ABS) and (BRAKE) lights coming on along with a very loud warning beep. Uh oh. What was that? I wasn’t going that fast. REALLY – remember – GRANDMA! I wasn’t sliding and the (ABS) didn’t engage. Then, a little closer to home on a straight approach to a stop sign… there it went again. This can’t be good. This is not something you can have going on when you are thinking about selling a car. It’s like I have Herbie the love bug living in my garage throwing a fit.

I spent this morning diagnosing the problem with a little prodding from my husband who was at work. Gotta love him. He never says – “oh honey I’ll look at that when I get home – don’t worry about it.” He always says – “why don’t you see if you can figure it out?” He expects me to be able to do all of the mechanical and electrical things that he can do. Sometimes I can and sometimes I really screw things up – but that’s a story line for a different time.

So, this morning found me crawling around under the dashboard looking for the connector plug for the VAG so I could hook the car up to my PC and get the diagnostic codes out. Yikes. ABS controller problems. The bad news is that there really is something wrong. It is fairly common. If you take it to the dealer it will be about $2000 to fix. Double YIKES! The good news is that there are aftermarket solutions available that aren’t anywhere near that expensive.

I don’t get it. Why do cars decide to break down precisely when my severance and vacation time pay ran out? Murphy. Good old Murphy. Always have to watch out for that guy.

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Playing With Electricity

Posted on June 19, 2009 | Leave a comment

This morning I spent a few hours rewiring a bunch of outlets and switches in a room that I had just painted. When we built the house, we put in the ivory outlets… well, they have gone totally out of style so I’ve been working my way around the house replacing them all with white ones as I paint the rooms. I can’t explain why – but after you build a house or two you start to notice the little things that are off. For me this is one of those things. To do them myself only costs about a dollar an outlet. Not a lot of money for a bit of satisfaction.

Electricity is one of those things that a lot of people just won’t mess with. Don’t get me wrong – I have a healthy respect for it, but I’ve always lived in a house where doing wiring wasn’t something out of the ordinary. I think my dad taught me how to replace my first light switch when I was about 12. When I was even younger he used to let me play with batteries, pieces of scrap wires, switches, small motors, and low voltage light bulbs. I had a lot of fun, and I sure learned a lot about wiring circuits. Little things like wrap the wire around the screw in the direction the screw tightens so that when you tighten the screw the wire tightens down too. My dad never had a son, and he surely didn’t differentiate in how he treated me as a little girl. That’s something I have to thank him for. I helped him build out a playroom in the basement, I went on long hikes and sat in blinds looking for wildlife, I forgot more about SLR cameras and photography by the time I was 15 than most people ever know, and I was the kid who ran out into the yard to hold the snake in my PJs. Don’t even get me started about the deer mice I kept in an aquarium in my room – thank goodness we didn’t think about the hanta virus back then.

When I got a little older I remember a boyfriend getting pretty upset with me when I rewired the plug on a vacuum cleaner. I think he thought that women shouldn’t do such things. He didn’t last too long – go figure. I ended up marrying a man who was one of those kids who stuck things into outlets and tore appliances and clock radios apart to see how they work. I guess we’re made for one another, though these days he is the one who does most of this type of work around the house. Until this year I haven’t done any electrical wiring in a while. I’ve done phone and cable and pulled what felt like miles of bundle (2-cat5 + 2-coax) in new construction but nothing “live”.

Today was a “fun” day. After wiring 2 switches and about 10 outlets I flipped the breaker and it immediately tripped. Oh crap! The hunt was on. I ended up pulling every outlet that I had wired and inspected them all. Of course it was the VERY LAST one that I had botched. I short circuited the entire system. DOH! Not something that I am especially proud of, but the second I saw what I did I KNEW I found the problem.

There’s nothing like the feeling of solving a puzzle, it always makes me smile. When was the last time you did something out of the ordinary and had to solve a problem that was unusual for you? How’d you feel?

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“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” Charles Darwin

Posted on March 7, 2009 | Leave a comment

Recently I found a reference to something known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Basically the premise is that this effect is an example of cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”[1]. They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average.

The study made the following 4 predictions:

Prediction 1. Incompetent individuals, compared with their more competent peers, will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria.
Prediction 2. Incompetent individuals will suffer from deficient metacognitive skills, in that they will be less able than their more competent peers to recognize competence when they see it—be it their own or anyone else’s.
Prediction 3. Incompetent individuals will be less able than their more competent peers to gain insight into their true level of performance by means of social comparison information. In particular, because of their difficulty recognizing competence in others, incompetent individuals will be unable to use information about the choices and performances of others to form more accurate impressions of their own ability.
Prediction 4. The incompetent can gain insight about their shortcomings, but this comes (paradoxically) by making them more competent, thus providing them the metacognitive skills necessary to be able to realize that they have performed poorly.

Loosely translated this means that the more incompetent you are the less you are able to realize that you are incompetent and therefore the higher you rate your competence. In this study they found that people in the lowest quartile actually rated themselves *above* average. Conversely the more competent you are the more you know what you know and what you don’t know and you are subsequently likely to rate your competence lower than it actually is. Additionally the less competent you are the harder it is for you to be able to recognize true competence in others! I find this completely fascinating.

I have to give credit for this post to Steve Yegge’s blog where in this entry he talks about this phenomenon with respect to engineering hiring. He was a programmer at Amazon and at Google. Here are the links to his two blogs in case you want a timesuck that will last for days. He has a unique perspective and I really enjoy reading his writing.
Steve Yegge’s Amazon blog
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Steve Yegge’s Blog Rants

[1]Kruger, Justin; David Dunning (1999). “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (6): 1121–34. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121. PMID 10626367. http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf.

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Snow? also known as: How to Have a Really Productive Day

Posted on March 4, 2009 | Leave a comment

Well, it is always entertaining when snow is forecast in the South. It is even stranger when this happens in March – it’s supposed to be warm in March, this is when Spring starts.

How many accidents will there be on our highways before 7am? Will there be any bread, milk or eggs left at the grocery store? Doubt it! I grew up in the Northeast. I am used to making it to work no matter what. I also have fond memories of taking “snow” days and driving 4 hours in the worst possible conditions to Vermont to go skiing for the day. I was like the postman…. neither rain nor snow nor dark of night (or something like that). Boy times have changed. Now I won’t venture out if we get 2″ of snow. It’s not me – I still can drive in the stuff, I just don’t trust that anyone else around me has a clue. Here in Raleigh we had an event a few years back where over 3,000 school children ended up sleeping at their schools because the snow started during the day. People spent 8 hours on the roads trying to get home. It was insanity. I do my best to avoid it if at all possible now.

That said – a snow day isn’t all fun and games. I find that there is nothing better than a good snow day to catch up on work that I have been putting off. A lot of times these items need a long block of uninterrupted concentration that is hard to get at work. Some of those items are the ones that I’ve been dreading. I know they’re important, I know that I’ll be better off once they’re done, but they are difficult to start. Recently I spent a day creating custom reports that gave me the information that I needed to better assess product quality. My team already had a lot of reports, but none of them were giving me the high level dashboard that I wanted to be able to glance at and get a good feeling of the health of our software at any given moment. It was well worth the effort. I use those reports every day now.

Snow days are also really great for taking a break from the day to day work and looking at the bigger picture. I love being able to spend a day planning for the future and assessing risks. It’s great preparation that helps keep product on track longterm. Having the ability to disassociate myself from my regular work environment makes this type of thinking easier to do.

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