I finally made it to the gym yesterday. Life, late nights, and my love of sleep have kept me away from the gym for several weeks. It felt great to bet the blood pumping. It felt even better because I’ve been becoming more and more sure of the direction I want to take my life next, and things always seem clearer after a good workout.

As I waited for someone to finish their last lap so I could use a pool lane, I noticed a sign on the wall that said, “In order to achieve something, you must first expect it of yourself.” I had seen that poster before, but never really thought about how true it is. The secondary effects of doubting yourself are likely to result in failure reaching almost any sort of goal. If you don’t think you can do something, you’re right.

Sometimes it’s hard to be honest about what we expect of ourselves. From the time I stepped off the bus at the Academy, I knew I was going to be miserable there. Because I knew I would be miserable, I instinctively didn’t expect to be a top cadet. Because I didn’t expect to do well, I didn’t put in as much effort at some times that turned out to be pretty critical. Many cadets with much less leadership training than I had got a lot farther simply because they expected to and therefor did what needed to be done. Now, I’m not saying they were any happier than I was - everyone was pretty much miserable there - they were just better at expecting great things from themselves even though they were unhappy.

Whether I expect a lot or a little of myself, I live up to my expectations. When I was younger, I expected good grades and always got them with what seemed like little effort. In high school, I expected to learn how to be a good leader, and I left feeling like I could conquer the world. When I got my first job in tech support, I expected to learn a lot about computers. Due directly to that expectation, I have learned enough to give me a ton of experience and a great job.

This is a good time in my life to start expecting something big of myself. I’m happier than I probably have ever been. I have a fantastic wife that I love, and who makes me feel loved. I have more control over my life than I ever had before, and I have all the resources I could possibly need to take on new challenges. There’s no reason not to expect big things of myself, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

The New Scientist has an article that makes a really good point about the technology being developed by spammers. Currently, spammers are working really hard to break CAPTCHA - those annoying pictures with letters you have to type in before you can sign into some websites or submit comments on blogs. The point of CAPTCHA is to try to make sure there really is a person filling out the form and not a computer - helping avoid spam.

Spammers are willing to pay big $$ for software that read the pictures in CAPTCHA. This would be a bad thing for your inbox in the short term - allowing spammers to send additional emails and FaceBook messages, etc. New Scientist points out that a huge benefit could come from it - an advancement in computer optical character recognition (OCR.) OCR is useful for scanning books and digitizing documents.

Locking the spammers back out just means coming up with another AI problem that hasn’t been solved yet - something computers aren’t good at yet - and using that to prove its a human at the keyboard. What hard AI problem should we force the spammers to solve to continue their craft?

Some of you have heard this particular ramble before from me. I’m slowly becoming one of the many people who believe that our education system is too old to be effective. To begin with, we have made any significant updates to the classroom environment since we stopped allowed teachers to hit children. The world has changed a bit since the lat 1800’s. More than that, we’ve since learned that there are many different learning styles, yet we’ve done nothing to prepare or empower teachers to be able to accommodate the 65% of the kids in their classroom that don’t learn best by taking notes from the blackboard.

Really, to me, the place where we are really loosing out on enabling people to learn at their full potential is by teaching the exact same thing to every student. Not everyone has the same interests/skills. Granted, everyone needs a basic education. Elementary and Jr High schools are working hard enough just to get students up to speed on basic grammer, math, and science. But in High School, I don’t think we are helping ourselves by teaching everyone chemistry and biology. It would be nice if everyone understood it, but the fact is that a lot of kids will get nothing out of those classes, no matter how hard the teacher tries. It’s just not what they are into. When we try to force it on them, all we do is waste their time and distract the teacher from being able to teach the kids who really do have an interest in it.

If you ask me, the problem starts as deep as society’s view of intelligence. If you ask anyone to describe an intelligent person in one word, the word ‘genius’ will no doubt cross their mind. Now, technically speaking, a ‘genius’ is someone who scores above 140 on an IQ test. My problem with that, and our school system, is that there are a lot of types of intelligence that the IQ test (and our school system) don’t take into account.

Stephen Hawking describes intelligence as the ability to adapt to change. The more you think about it, the more sense that makes on a biological scale. The difference between me and my cat as far as thinking ability is that I can recognize changes in patterns and consider an appropriate change in behavior much faster than she can. But I think intelligence can also go deeper than that. An artist with incredible vision and skill could be a genius but still be uncomfortable with change. Maybe thinking of genius in terms of computing power would be useful - intelligence could be defined as being able to take in information and interpret how bits of information relate to each other, and then form a response. That’s getting better, but I’d still have to do some playing with it to work in the idea of creativity and how it relates to intelligence.

It’s a big problem, and solving it in this economy won’t be easy. What we are doing now is efficient in terms of dollar spent per student to push them through, and we’ve spent several hundred years tweaking it. I just don’t think it’s efficient in terms of what kids know when they are done and how prepared they are to be productive citizens in their own way. The rewards for fixing it ought to be huge. Look around you sometime and estimate how much of their potential the people around you are using. Try to come up with an average. Granted, hard numbers are pretty much impossible, but let’s just throw a number out there like 30%. If we could raise that to something like 60% (and no football coach would be happy with that, but I’m trying to be reasonable) that would mean we could double the positive things produced in our country. What would that be worth in terms of quality of life?

I’ve been thinking about ways to fix it at a systematic level. None of my ideas are really fully fleshed out enough to share yet. One thing I have decided is that I will have to solve this at least for my kids. I can’t rely on the school system to give them what they need, so I’ll have to find ways to make sure they get it. I think the school system would have a lot easier job if more parents took responsibility for the overall education of their own kids.

I decided to take the leap and learn Java, despite a lot of negative vibes from technical friends. I want to be able to write apps for my Android phone, and the coolness of that trumped all vibes otherwise steering me away.

I started with an “Insert subject you want to learn here” for Dummies book my mom bought several years ago when she feared she would become obsolete. She never really started the book, and hasn’t become obsolete anyway. My got about half way through before deciding it wasn’t worth the pain. “Dummies” books spend as much time trying to keep you comfortable as they spend providing information. I don’t want to be comfortable, I want to be informed. Overall, I felt they were keeping some things clouded in mystery for the purpose of not confusing me, and so I never got a clear picture of how the language came together.

I started Googling for the best Java book around, and ended up on Sun’s site. You can read more of my opinion on Sun’s Java Trails, but the short story is I didn’t feel like they were headed in a obvious direction.

After searching a few local bookstores, I found O’Reilly’s Learning Java, 3rd ed. at Boarders. I’ve gotten a lot of use out of several other O’Reilly books, and they have a solid reputation for publishing top-quality technical books. I compared this book to others at the store, and happily paid cover price.

I’m about 2 action-packed chapters in and finally getting a good feel for Java. I’m actually excited about the language. It has a lot of features other languages just don’t offer - like uniform access to hardware through the JVM and graphical tools built right into the language. The book itself is dense but easy to follow and immediately useful. With over 900 pages, this book alone can help me make Java the first language I learn in depth. The features of Java, like allowing you to run the same application on many different platforms, appeal to my inner-lazyness (hey, why should I have to re-write MY app just because YOU want to run it on BeOS or something equally silly?)

So far, I recommend Learning Java for anyone with any scripting/programing experience. If you are completely new, give it a try and see if you can keep up. If not, try learning Perl or Ruby first and then give it another shot. (Note, many people would recommend Python as a good beginner language. Indeed, there are many good beginner texts for Python, but the language itself isn’t much simpler than Perl and Ruby and is missing a lot of features of a modern language.)