Developing Usable Experiences

Hidden Complexity

September 8th, 2008 10:56 pm —  34 views

Over the weekend and a bit tonight I spent some time studying how Perl does regular expressions. It’s a beautiful thing because of it’s simplicity and complexity.

It’s thundering outside right now and I’m deep in my basement thinking about programming in Perl, upcoming weekend travels, and homework assignments. Add to this the obligations I have in a scribbled list on my desk and things start to get complicated. I’m not terribly worried though. I know that things will flow just fine…with some furious paddling on my part.

Today wasn’t the best of days. Only one week into school and I’m fretting over whether I’m doing enough, not doing enough, or being too eager. Then at work I’m wondering the same thing. I talk too much at my status meeting which tends to make my life ever more complicated. “In silence can a man maintain his integrity.” I need to keep reminding myself of that.

W. just booked a trip to Chicago for our 8th1 anniversary coming up in a few weeks. Even though school is going on and there is this vicious schedule at work, my fall weekends are getting stacked up. It’ll be fine though. Things like projects, programming, reading and homework will get done. I just remind to stay focused on what is in front of me and to avoid thinking too much about the complexity of life, the universe and everything.

Image: A section of campus is tore all up while workers make repairs or something to the inner workings. This image made me think of the hidden complexity behind what goes on under the sidewalks and how it compares to the complexity programming hides from the user. Simple is just the complex hidden by efficiency.

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  1. Just a note…we’ve been together for about 17 years…but only married for 8. I’m just sayin’. [↩]

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3 Comments 

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3 Responses to “Hidden Complexity”

  1. Ma on September 9th, 2008 11:29 am

    “Michael Motor Mouth” that is what Spike was called as a youngen’. I like that “In silence can a man maintain his integrity”.

  2. Old Dog on September 9th, 2008 12:55 pm

    Spike, what your looking at in your pic is chilled water lines that are resonsible for the cooling or air conditiong in the building adjacent, or another builing possibly across campus that supplies and returns water to what is called the Central Plant. I am currently doing a school and dormitory on the Navajo Res in north east AZ. that is very similar. I’ll send pics if your interested. Happy upcoming Anniversary.

  3. Spike on September 9th, 2008 10:51 pm

    Kind of funny…when I was looking at them I was thinking, “why would those pipes be exposed that way?” Makes sense they’re cooling lines. My first (ignorant thought) was so they could be worked on our accessed for some reason…but that just didn’t make sense.

    I’ve always considered heating and cooling systems to be very similar to programming and engineering complex information systems. In an electrical engineering course in undergrad I wanted to build a box heated with a hair dryer and use a computer to control valves to maintain temperature. The prof thought it too ambitious so I build something that calculated the speed of an object passing between two beams of light…oh those were the days.

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