In Solitude the Mind Gains Strength and Learns to Lean Upon Itself

The tragic events surrounding the 2013 Boston Marathon have given me reason to reflect on a lost love—running. But, doing so also brought me to reflect on what seems a lost ability in modern man—running without headphones.

From roughly the late-80s to the mid-90s I was a competitive runner, at distances 5K-marathon, and bicycle racer, combining the two disciplines in the running/cyclng biathlon (with some success). Even after retiring from competiton, I continued to run until halted by a chronic back condition in 2002, and continued to road cycle until being hit by a car in 2004. Now I am left with trail riding on my mountain bike.

 

Distance running and cycling require significant time investment, and are often solo pursuits. There are interval sessions on the track, paceline drills, long runs of 1-3 hours, long rides of 4-6 hours. I looked forward to and felt restored by the time spent, engaged in the surroundings and accompanied by nothing more than my inner dialogue—noodling over private troubles, working through design problems (for most of my competitive years, I was a practicing software hacker nerd at Bell Labs) or deconstucting glories real and imagined (can't tell you under how many different circmstances I won the Tour de France).

 

Now it bothers me to see virtually every runner on the street, every fellow gym-goer, locked into earbuds, entombed in a coccoon of sound. Olympic swimmers can't even walk the short distance from the locker room to the pool without shutting out the world. "The zone" seems quite lonely.

 

You encounter quite different sounds running along suburban roads, through Little Italy and Chinatown in Manhattan, on the snowy streets of pre-dawn Toronto, in rural Ireland, or cycling the backroads of New Jersey and northern Michigan. Why homogenize them? The experience of running the Boston Marathon, as I did in 1990 and 1991, is one of literally being applauded every step of the way until the deafening din of Boylston Street and the finish. Why shut it out?

 

Just because high-quality weightless digital packaging make it possible to take your music everywhere doesn't mean you have to. Re-engage with the simple act of being alone with your thoughts.

 

             Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #56            

Title: Eagles

Artist: The Long Run
Genre: Rock
Year: 1979





Like many a marathoner, the Eagles had hit the wall before releasing their final studio album, The Long Run. There are a couple memorable cuts, new member Timothy B. Schmit's contractually-obligated songwriting and vocal contribution, and a lot of forgettable filler. But, like a wise marathoner, they should have known when to hang 'em up; otherwise that one-too-many effort is really painful.

© 2013 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.

What Bell Labs Taught Me About Effective Design

In his book, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, Jon Gertner offers a sweeping history of Bell Laboratiories (aka "Bell Labs" or "The Labs") that highlights its role as the birthplace of some of the 20th century's most influential technologies.

(Image credit: sixrevisions.com)

For me, Bell Labs is not an abstract American success story. It's personal. I spent the first decade of my career in the Bell Labs Signal Processor Laboratory in Whippany NJ. I can't really say I used The Labs as a springboard to change the world at large, but Bell Labs changed my world by teaching me that selfish design — designing for myself — is the catalyst for creating works that have meaning for others.

The Labs was a great place to be a young engineer. It offered a unique combination of freedom, responsibility, and access to knowledge and expertise. About 18 months after being hired out of grad school, I got the asssignment that would define my career. I was challenged to, within 30 days, design and demonstrate a prototype program for creating dataflow signal processing systems visually, including code generation.

Teletype 5620, nee Blit.

I immediately grasped in my mind what I wanted gred (as it was called) to be, inspired by months of experimenting with the Blit graphics terminal, which ran Bell Labs research scientist  Rob Pike's landmark ovelapping bitmap layers windowing system. Studying the Blit source code taught me everything I ever needed to learn about guru-class programming.

There are two approaches to design. Either make something so simple there are no obvious defects, or make something so complicated there are no obvious defects. (C.A.R. Hoare) The Blit source — compact, elegant, every element stripped to its essence — showed me that the path of simplicity not only satisfies, but also educates and enlightens.

I also came to realize, from studying designs I admired from other Bell Labs researchers, that establishing your own guiding principles for the success of a design and holding to them — selfish design — is the surest path to "fitness for use," a definition for product quality championed by our Laboratory Director, AT&T Fellow Caryl Pettijohn. If something works perfectly for you, chances are it will work for others; conversely, if something doesn't work well for you, it probably won't do better for anyone else.

Armed with these principles, I got the gred prototype for the Blit done on deadline, and it went on to become a great success with many spin-offs, the project that defined my career at The Labs. I was able to continue working on it at least part-time for the better part of 5 years increasing its capabilities and scope until it was perfect. And I can say gred was perfect because I was its #1 power user. I designed it for me. It had effective symbology, the exact number of features it needed, and I could readily defend why every feature was incorporated into the design, and why others were left out. More importantly, gred never went offline during these design iterations, and at every step it was the best solution available.

Rob Pike is famously quoted regarding his team's motiviation to invent the Blit: "it wasn't that we wanted high-performance graphics on everyone's desk; we just wanted high-performance graphics on our desks." I didn't start what has become In Aurem because I wanted everyone to have high-resolution digital restorations of their analog audio titles; I just wanted high-resolution digital restorations of my titles. And, by again selfishly staying true to my guiding principles for audio restoration, the effort has paid benefits to others as well.

            Vinyl-to-Digital Restoration #26           

Title: Building the Perfect Beast

Artist: Don Henley

Genre: Rock

Year: 1984

The same summer I set out to build the perfect visual editor for signal processing graphs, ex-Eagle Don Henley released his first solo record, a hit-making machine. The Boys of Summer became one of the gred project theme songs, eternally linked through my Bell Labs colleagues' rewrite of a line involving "a Dead head sticker on a Cadillac." I can still hear it in my mind.


© 2012 Thomas G. Dennehy. All rights reserved.