Larry Jaques wrote:
On Fri, 06 Nov 2009 11:49:41 -0600, the infamous Morris Dovey
scrawled the following:

Larry Jaques wrote:

Ouchouchouchouchouch.
No ouches.

Crapsman wobble dado = ouch #1, and that's a biggie.

Mine cost less than $15 and has done an adequate job at what I've wanted
it to do for almost forty years. For me, that's not an ouch.

That folks whose focus is building fine furniture don't like the
not-perfectly-flat bottomed kerf doesn't bother me. I don't build
furniture, and when I /need/ a flat-bottomed kerf I choose a different
tool. shrug

In retrospect, both efforts seem worthwhile - and both
programs nibbled at the edges of how something might be "known". The
first program dealt with knowledge and context in a "static" sense, and
the second dealt with some of the "dynamics" of knowing. I had planned
to write a third program to explore the interrelatedness of knowledge,
but ran out of time (I guesstimated that the third program would take
more than fifteen years to get right).

And if you don't think that constitutes an ouch, you're freakin'
nerveless!

Hmm - I don't /feel/ nerveless, and for as long as I can remember I've
thought that saying something was "impossible" was a poor excuse for not
making it possible.

The old saw about the impossible just taking a bit longer contains more
than a modicum of truth. I know people who spent more time developing a
better golf game, polishing their musical abilities, or perfecting brush
strokes than I spent on my endeavors.

Whether any of that was worthwhile for its own sake is uncertain - but
I'm quite sure that the effort added up to good learning experience.

In this case, it soitenly reflects the saying "Experience is what you
get when you didn't get what you wanted."

Not so in these cases - I produced demonstratable general solutions to
both entire classes of problems in a form that I could (and did) share
with other people. When I published the first, Steve "the Waz" Wozniac
flew out to take me to dinner and warned me there were perhaps five
people in the world who could understand what I'd done, but we agreed
that the solution was worth the effort - and that I'd opened a new
doorway for others to walk through.

The techniques and methods learned raised the quality of the work that I
did and allowed me to provide the folks who paid me to help solve their
problems with results that were universally better, faster, /and/ less
costly than they expected.

Resources expended are only an "ouch" if wasted. I don't think I've
wasted (or am wasting) much of mine - that's something everyone has to
decide for themselves (and, as Frost pointed out, there are /always/
roads not taken).

I have other things to do with what a stacked dado set would cost, and
other tools that do its job even better. I can live with my wobbler.

--
Morris Dovey
DeSoto Solar
DeSoto, Iowa USA
http://www.iedu.com/DeSoto/