Waiting for E-mail

It is a little after 6am here in Tokyo this morning and I am busy going through my morning ritual. One of the best ways I know on fighting jet lag is to try and stay on your old schedule as much as possible. So in Japan that means waking up at 4 or 5am and going to bed fairly early. The time difference is as much as 8 hours from home and so that is not a foolproof way of dealing with being a third of a way around the world, but it does help.

I have been up since 4:45 this morning and running through my daily routine. I start by trying to sleep as long as possible. Then I sit in bed and read the daily newspaper that is delivered to my hotel room. English papers in Japan are only about 10 pages and so that is a quick read. The stories haven't changed much since I was last here about 2 months ago. After the paper I sit down and read e-mail. I start with my personal e-mail and even though I received about 45 messages, thanks to a good spam filter, there were really only 2 or 3 messages that were important to me. Then I log into my work e-mail and that is where I am now.

Unfortunately it takes a while for Microsoft Outlook to sync with the servers and so I am patiently waiting for my e-mail to download to my laptop. Once that is done, I can attack all of those things from the office back in the States that have been happening while I slept. After all, it is a little after 1 in the afternoon back there and everyone has had an entire morning to flood my inbox with inquiries and requests. Perhaps now is a good time for a shower.

Keep It Simple

This past Tuesday I received a call from my father-in-law, Ed. He is in the middle of an engineering project and needed some help with some electrical engineering. He is a mechanical engineer and often comes to me because of my electrical engineering degree. He described his problem and I took notes. I then informed him that I was tied up for the next couple of days with a project of my own but that I would do some thinking and see if I couldn't help out later in the week.

Yesterday my software project finished up before noon and so I had time to think about Ed's problem. However I was reluctant to start on the project because it has been over fifteen years since I have done any real electrical engineering. Sure I mess around with computers and build fun little projects every couple years or so, but this was real engineering work. I was going to need to create a digital state machine complete with reduction tables and a bunch of stuff I would need to relearn. So I put off starting the project until after dinner.

In addition to being a Scoutmaster, I also sit on the Snowbird Ski Team's board of directors. The official organization name is the Snowbird Sports Education Foundation but everyone knows us at the Snowbird Ski Team. Our monthly board meeting was last night and so I continued procrastinating Ed's project. I didn't get home until after 9pm and thought I could start in the morning.

Everyone went off to bed but I found myself with a slight case of insomnia and so I figured I should do a bit of reading. If there is a cure for insomnia it is reading old college books and so I pulled out one of my electrical engineering texts that I was planning on using as a reference to help with Ed's project. I skimmed the first five chapters and I started to remember the class. Then I started to remember some of the basic elements used to create digital state machines.

Thirty minutes after I picked up my text book I had reduced Ed's complex engineering work to two simple elements. I pulled out a piece of paper and drew up a quick schematic diagram. I have the parts in an old lab kit from back when I was in school and so I think I can build a prototype today and makes sure it works.

Sometimes we have a tendency to look at technical or computer problems and think they are too complicated. We then procrastinate getting started. When we finally develop the courage to attack the problem it turns out to be a lot simpler than we thought.