My Quest for Automation

How do I know that I am a super geek? Well let me just tell you about the ways I automate my life. I built a database application to plan my wedding. I built software to track all of my contacts, addresses, christmas card lists, remind me of birthdays and the names of my friends's children. I made an application for tracking my recipes, meal plans, generating a weekly menu, and generatting my grocery shopping list.

Now, I don't have my curtains and lights hooked up to a single remote control as some of my geeky electrical engineering friends, but that is only because I don't know how.

I believe that everything that can be automated, should be automated. I would love it if my refrigerator could automatically detect when food has gone bad and throw it out for me. It should buy me a replacement while its at it.

What is such a paradox about who I am is that at the same time, I prefer to make my own candles, crochet my own afghan, and hand craft my own birthday cards. Clearly, it is much less efficient to do these things by hand when there is mass production equipment out there to do these things more quickly and more cheaply.

Maybe it is not such a paradox after all. Maybe I just like to make things. Maybe creating a Meal Planning software is just an electronic manifestation of my need to do crafts. Maybe writing a VBA procedure to email me my grocery list is not so different from figuring out how to do a dcfps (double crochet front post stitch).

Smalltalk

What do you think employees talk about on the elevator ride at the National Weather Service?

Total Cost of Ownership

In the past few years, I have evolved in a new approach to buying clothes. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Maybe this is coming from my years of software development and evaluating every design decision on how it will affect maintenance cost of the software. Now, when making fashion design choices, instead of just looking at the price tag, I look at the "care" tag.

If it has a "Dry Clean Only", I think "I have to add $8 a month onto my total cost of ownership. Now, this wool suit that is on sale for $60 doesn't look like such a great deal if it will cost me $156 in the first year. If a sweater says "Hand Wash Only", I think about the opportunity cost of owning these clothes. That is 1 hour a month that I can't spend with my kids just to own this piece of clothing. Since 1 hour with my kids is priceless, I guess it makes this sweater more than I have in the bank. Okay, I am taking this to the extreme here.

My favorite solution to these TCO woes is the wash and wear suit. These have popped up all over the place lately. You can get a perfectly good suit with lining and all that you can just throw in the washer and dryer. It is the best! I've found them at JC Penney's, Kohls, and some catalogues. I will have to see how fast they depreciate. That could affect my whole TCO calculation!

This whole TCO perspective does making shopping a little more complicated. Maybe that's a good thing because one thing I'm sure I don't need is any incentives to go shopping.

Bloggers Block

I know I have been completely inactive lately. The truth is that I've had bloggers block. (And I had only just gotten started!)

I dwell on "Is what I am saying worthwhile?" "Will it be held against me later in my life?" "Am I going to offend?"

Which is wierd because maybe only one or two people are actually reading this.

Anyway, I'm going to try again and see how it goes.