The wife is out jammin’ with her band tonight. That sounds a bit impersonal. I need to think up a nickname for her. Whenever you introduce someone as “The Wife” it seems to connote an entirely different person than the one you had married. With that noted, a truly unique nickname is hard to come up with, so I will have to just move on with the admittedly impersonal moniker of “The Wife.”
So, where was I. Ah yes: The Wife, The Jammin’ Wife. With the kids in bed, and the cats taking their pre-nighttime nap, this leaves me with some spare time. It was hard to decide what to do with myself. I had resolved to write more, and being only January 9th, I can’t give up on that resolution yet. But at least one post in the blog is about how I want to be more of a photographer, so maybe I should take some photographs. But really, how many interesting photos can I make out of items that I find in my cupboards, or under my couch. I just started a flickr account, so maybe I should upload some of the photos of crap that I have already found in my cupboards:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/73910193@N03/
Or given that my combination of cedar and cat allergies have prevented me from sleeping for the past week, maybe I should just shave the cat, and turn in early.
What I really want to do is to take some data from work and make a graph. Surprised? I understand. If you were my wife, (The Unsurprisable Wife, to be more exact), you wouldn’t have been surprised. For the past year, I have been obsessed with visualization of data. I have been reading Edward Tufte, browsing visualization blogs, reading interesting posts mentioning William S. Clevelands’ work, and learning R and the wonderful ggplot package by Hadley Wickham.
With my recent obsession I have realized that data visualization has always consumed a bit of my internal CPU. Every time I have come up against a large data set, I have spent some time trying to determine how I could make a worthwhile picture out of it. Some times I succeeded through sheer force of will, and manually created tables and charts. Other times, I looked at the tools that I had at hand, and rather than try to chisel a replica of stonehenge with a butter knife, I decided that my time was better spent doing what my company actually paid me to do.
Within the second half of the past year, work was slow. So very slow. What my company was essentially paying me to do was to drink coffee and read my email. Lucky me. I hate idleness. I hate wasting my time. Lucky me, a small part of my responsibilities was to help the product’s performance architect. He made some wicked cool plots. I spent the second half of the year working out how to make some relatively cool plots that no one really needed. My wife, The Patient Wife, was subjected to all of my plots and graphs. Each time, she would listen as I started to tell her what the graph meant. I was never able to bring her to an “AHA!” moment before she fell asleep. ( The narcoleptic wife )
We have had this discussion several times. When I am looking at hex dumps, and she is talking about chord signatures, when I am looking at trace logs, and she is looking at flats and sharps, xkcd vs Phish, source code vs. musical notation.
Each of us has tried to explain again what the other has failed to grasp with that “AHA!” level. Several months ago, ( Before I showed her my last plot and before she tried to explain what “Natural” notation meant ) we had agreed that I would never teach her computers, and she would never teach me music. That is really a promise that can’t be kept. No matter how outlandish your vision, your passion, may seem to other people there is an innate desire to continue to explain that vision until others reach that same state of passion.
Luckily this drive isn’t always fruitless. I have found some interest in data visualization in my new group. We started exchanging some examples, and found some common appreciation for each other’s work. One of my colleagues scheduled his vacation to start on his wife’s birthday. I had forgotten to send him a link to the wicked cool plots that my friend, the performance architect had created. I sent an email to my new colleague after dinner so I wouldn’t forget while he was on his vacation. I didn’t expect him to read it until he returned. As I was sending it, my wife expressed that what was really interesting to her was not the plots, but the psychological differences in how our respective brains were wired. Mine was wired to be fascinated with pixels on a glowing screen. As we talked about it some more, a reply came back from my colleague ( On his wife’s birthday) that the plots were indeed wicked cool. In the rest of our discussion, my wife changed her grouping from “you” to “people like you.” I think she really meant: “crazy people like you.”
As I have already mentioned my wife, The Musical Wife, has tried to explain musical concepts before. Tonight she explained that she is most successful playing a piece by feel. She can sight read music for flute, or guitar, or even voice. The reading is somewhat difficult though, until she hears and feels the piece played the way it was meant to be played. After that time, she uses the music for hints, and plays mostly by feeling. I don’t understand. Not one bit. Only way I feel music is to sit on the speaker.
But I am glad that she has found a group of people who seem to get it. To have the same AHA moment.
Not Your Super Hero 