Circle Problem

Multi-Tasking

I am a guy. One of the things that guys do is solve problems. Not that women aren't capable of doing so, but I believe it is more of a dominant factor in the male mindset. Women tend to be more nurturing, men tend to be more analytical. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus...yadda, yadda, etc., etc,.

As I have matured over my lifetime these differences have become more acute. One of the things that has driven me nuts about my jobs, both past and present, is the inability of my co-workers to solve problems....on their own. It would appear that most have the engrained reaction to seek help for anything that happens out of the ordinary...... and yes, most of my co-workers are women.

When I was younger, I didn't mind helping others out, but after a while I started to realize something. I was enabling them to fail. Every time I helped them solve a problem (sometimes, the same problem multiple times), I was reinforcing their mindset to seek me out to solve it. No one was requiring them to analytically think through the problem. Ergo...this ended up making me a 'resource' for other people to do their job.

Therefore, my favorite saying these days is, "I am not a resource for you. Figure it out."

There is a reason I am so stingy with my knowledge and abilities. Besides the fact that I am enabling my entire office to think they are entitled to instant support for their problems, it also takes away from my ability to get my 'jobs' done. I say jobs in the plural sense, because I rarely ever work on one project at a time.

That is what computers are for. They allow you to multi-task on a huge level. While I am writing an e-mail, my query engine is pulling data, and my printer driver is printing a large report. Throw into this mix, my coworker 'Erin Entitlement' coming to me because her printer isn't working...and I get a little miffed.

By the time I have un-jammed 'her' printer, I have forgotten about the data pull and my copies sitting on the large volume printer....not to mention my train of through on the e-mail. I have to stop and think about exactly what I was doing, and often times start over on complex equations that I was in the middle of. Most frustrating.

Now mind you, asking for help is perfectly acceptable.....'IF'...you have tried to solve the problem yourself, or 'IF' what you want to do requires more than one person (I don't expect you to move a piano by yourself.). It is not acceptable if I have showed you how to do it (both in person and in writing) five times already.

An example of this multi-tasking is the graphic for this post. While it may seem like a rather random ray tracing graphic (it was drawn by a computer), it is small triumph for me. It is a problem / puzzle that I have been trying to figure out for weeks.

This is a POV Ray tracer rendering of a spiral. In fact, it is a ray tracing of a circle, extended along it's z-axis. I have been trying to figure out how do to this for sometime on the 'old Macintosh' that sits in my office. It took the Mac about 2 days to render this (newer Core Duo machines can do it in about 5 minutes).

It is just one of the multi-tasking things I do in my office.

For the techie among you, the problem was to get a single strand to spiral along the z-axis. All my previous attempts created multiple strands and it was baffling me, until I hit upon the idea that the 'while' statement was too large. For some reason when the iteration statement (while) exceeds 20, it creates multiple stands of the circle, most likely having to do with the way the sin and cosine functions work in the applications.

So remember, when you come asking me for something in my office, like how come the lights in your office won't turn on, or why the microwave doesn’t work, I am doing more than meets your eye. Like drawing curvy lines in make believe three dimensional space......or...pulling gobs of data......so try and figure it out for yourself before you come knocking.....please!

(and just because I am so tickled about the spiral, here is the actual code snippet that makes it work.....I am sure you will be very impressed)


#while (Counter<20)

light_source
{<2.5*cos(Theta), 2.5*sin(Theta), Counter*3.0>
color red 1.0 green 0.2 blue 0.2 // light's color
translate <0,4,0>
}


sphere
{<2.5*cos(Theta), 2.5*sin(Theta), Counter*3.0>
1.0
texture {T_Old_Glass} finish{specular 1}
translate <0,4,0>
}


#declare Theta=Theta+0.25
#declare Counter=Counter+0.25

#end