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Posted: January 19
(Rome) My Uncle Connie has a theory, one he developed over all the years living through long cold winters in Conneticut and Massachusets. His thesis is that bad weather leads to greater achievement—basically, that it is easier to stay inside and study the more disagreeable the weather is.
I thought of him this afternoon as I was creating some new pages for our intranet here at the Curia. I was calculating how to insert information into our database in Rome so that it would end up in the correct place on our public web pages. I sat there flipping back and forth between a program called Cold Fusion which controls the web pages and the SQL database that holds the information we have. A steady patter of cold rain outside encouraged me to concentrate. The work went quickly. Eventually the winter daylight faded away without my getting out of my chair or venturing out into the cold hallway. I finished two pages in only four hours—not bad at all.
It's much harder to sit still in May or June. My bicycle would have tempted me, or the garden --there's always one more thing to do there, and digging in the earth is much easier than patiently reading through lines of code, looking for the errant comma or single misspelling that triggers the error message which I have grown to hate. Of course, the only way to get a web page to work properly is to attack all the bugs one by one. And that demands the kind of concentration that Uncle Connie was talking about.
He should know. Before he retired as dean of computing science at the University of Massachusets in Amherst, he lectured widely. A young professor queried him after one conference, asking him how he was qualified to lecture since he had not taken any computer courses that the other man could find on my uncle's CV. Conrad Wogrin was one of the early researchers and developers of computer science; he left his faculty position at Yale to help found the computer program at Amherst. He was developing things before there were courses to take. I remember him visiting us in Denver when I was in grade school and very interested in model trains. He explained the machine he was working on, big enough to fill out living room, and powerful enough to control the model train I was working on at that time.
How could I have known that I would today have a machine on my desktop much more powerful than that early tube-driven computer, or that I would spend so much of my time as a priest trying to get this computer to behave. Uncle Connie did not give me any hints about Cold Fusion, or about the web, which would not be invented until several decades later, but his advice on bad weather makes a cold winter day in Rome seem like a blessing.
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