I wonder a lot about my own motivations, which might be an odd
thing to admit. In particular I wonder about the technical projects
that I embark upon, usually electronics, either for business or
just for myself. I think you can either create for the social
reward of being respected, or just accepted, or you can create for
a love of the things you create, or the skill of creating them. I
expect there's usually some balance between these two desires which
varies between people (perhaps biased by gender), but for me the
latter one is far stronger.
What I like is to create something that I can look back on in awe.
Something that represents skills that I personally respect,
exercised at a high level. This really dwarfs the emotional impact
of any opinion received from other people, where indeed other
people actually comment at all, seeing as many things either go
completely unseen, or onto some web page that gets under ten
(possibly robotic) views a month. I do still desire that social
aspect, hence all the trouble of making the web pages, but it's
scarcely rewarded, and the reason is that I don't generally pick
projects that are easily appreciated by others in the first place.
It's primarily the personal, private, joy of making something
unique that makes me happy. But there is a nagging feeling at the
same time that I'm wasting my energy. These obscure creations make
me happy, but by insisting that they are so unique and tailored to
my own desires, I'm directing my energy away from the path of
making money. To make money, I'm really starting to appreciate that
you usually need to be making things that are 90% identical to what
other people are making already, if for no other reason than that
buyers can understand them without significant mental effort.
For me there's no joy in that though. Indeed the way electronics
are going, in most cases it's downright unenjoyable, being so far
removed from the sort of skills I really respect, mostly around
technically efficient and/or elegant design. It's hard to think of
an alternative industry where I'd be happy in that way either. I
think rather than selling products from a particular design, I
should be designing new technical solutions to providing an
existing service, one that I can run myself, better and more
efficiently than existing approaches. A new way of delivering a
product, rather than a new product itself.
That is the sort of thing that I've been leaning more towards
lately. Unfortunately the first such project has been put on hold
because it was really taking too long to develop all the aspects of
it. Others are also likely to involve a more regular commitment of
time, which would be hard to find while continuing my current
business activities. So I really need to just switch over to them
and abandon my previous business strategy (and current income)
entirely. Or just work _really_ hard. But then the risk of them not
working seems a lot scarier.
I think in part I was talking about this in my earlier "Skipping a
Step" post.
[runs out of time, never really got to the point, this has been
happening a fair bit with Phlog posts lately. Now I'm picking up on
it a week later]
But those ideas are all based around websites, websites which I'm
_excrutiatingly_ slow at writing (to be fair I've only written a
single interactive one so far, and I was learning PHP as I went,
though I've forgotten a lot about it already now anyway). Even
avoiding the horrors of client-side scripting or complicated
frameworks, web programming really resists being properly elegant,
I think. It's mainly just a big user interface for displaying and
modifying data in files and databases, littered with complexity
designed just to survive both the idiocy and the malice of its
expected users. It might just be me though, I don't think I'd ever
really be able to call a computer program I wrote "masterpiece"
unless it was written in assembly.
Ah, I'm rambling. Honestly there was something specific about the
idea of a "masterpiece" that I originally wanted to write about
before getting off-track with my own woes, and a week later I
really can't quite grasp it. Something about a craftsman
(specifically a cabinet maker, in my mind), with the historical
meaning, and linking that with art, then to engineering. A physical
representation of a specific set of skills at their peak. With
digital electronics I did something a while ago that represented
it, really pushed myself to the limit, and although the design was
a product to sell, it really was my own little masterpiece, for
myself to admire. But to that end it had to be really unique,
something that I came up with from bare principles rather than just
an improvement on an existing design. So I haven't had much luck
selling it, and from a business perspective it was a huge waste of
time and money (well, about $1000, but that's a lot for me - at
least I do find it handy to use myself though). But it's my
masterpiece, working exactly how _I_ want it, a display of
practical analogue and digital electronic theory combined on a
marvelously economic PCB layout. I'll never look at a website that
way, maybe not even a successful business, I guess I just don't
respect those skills the same way. I guess I don't really care to
truely master them.
It was damn hard though. I worked for weeks trying to get it all
working right, with all sorts of things interacting so that the
same parts would provide a number of differnet functions depending
on the mode the device was in. Relying on resistive voltage drops
and capacitive timing delays, but still staying within the signal
specifications of the digital logic ICs. The trouble is that I need
to work that damn hard on this other stuff as well, the stuff I
don't have that passion for, which I know won't turn into a
masterpiece to look back on. I mean, at the moment I'm trying to
figure out C++ again, which I never liked and correspondingly
forgot soon after first trying to learn it (from a 2nd hand
textbook bought for a few bucks at an Op-Shop), so I can modify a
library that would be too difficult to write myself but is designed
for different microcontroller hardware, and the only free C++
compiler supporting it is actually an unofficial hack of a C
compiler so who knows what problems I'll run into with that. But if
I get all that right, then I'll be able to make a product cheap
enough that I can compete with other similar products (because it's
back to a 90% like everything else rule).
If I do succeed with that, maybe someone would, probably out of
ignorance, look at it as a masterpiece. But I wouldn't. I'd call it
a cobbled together mess, achieving something that I don't actually
even desire for my own use. But I need to go at it with that same
passion, somehow. It's a pain in the neck.
Oh and just to confuse me, suddenly a few of those "masterpiece"
electronic devices did start selling over the last few months,
after years of failing to attract any interest (I'd given up on
it). Not enough to be anything like worthwhile though.
