From Where I Sit: A Tale of Force and Finesse

By Larry Eiss

My father will be 88 this June. Since Mom passed in 1993, he has lived with one of his younger brothers (86 this year) in our family home. This is the same small bungalow in the boonies of upstate New York where I lived from age six until I married.

Dad's home is something of an oddity these days. It's one of the last places where you can find a large wood- and coal-burning "octopus" furnace. Dad heats his home with wood until late December or so. During the coldest months he burns coal, and when temperatures moderate a bit he switches back to wood. This is the way it has been since before I was born.

This year he plans to have an oil furnace installed as an auxiliary heat source. He is doing this because he has begun to have concerns about his continuing ability to cut and split enough wood to keep the place heated. I don't blame him. I am 40 years his junior and I couldn't do it! He also wants a backup plan in case he becomes unable to keep the fire burning during a period of illness.

Dad gets his wood delivered in log form. A large truck drops off several tons of logs averaging around 12 feet in length. These my father cuts to stove length with a chainsaw and then splits into manageable chunks with a sledgehammer and wedges!

He could convert completely to oil. Or he could stay with wood and at least use a hydraulic splitter, but this is work he prefers to do using force rather than finesse. I am confident there is a lesson for me somewhere in this about longevity and physical health.

At my place we decided last week that the time had finally come to remove some thorn-bearing and overgrown bushes planted along the walkway to our front door by previous owners. Having some experience at pulling bushes with my farm tractor back at Red Fox Run, my wife and I prepared for battle. When that tractor dug in and pulled, it tore up the grass something fierce. Consequently we shared a concern about the state of our front lawn should the tires of the truck dig trenches in it. Still, we decided to try pulling one bush anyway.

We selected a day when the soil was moist. We dug around the base of the bush to loosen it. I wrapped a log chain around the base of the bush and attached the other end to a towing hook on the truck.

Jumping inside, I put the truck in low range four-wheel drive and began to apply pressure to the chain. Increasing the tension slowly, before I knew it, the bush was out! Not one tire slipped and the process was so easy that we decided to pull the others without digging. Soon each was removed, and all without incident.

I could have dug and chopped at the roots and, with significant bloodletting from contact with thorns, eventually unearthed these prickly bushes. I'm glad that I removed the bushes with finesse instead of using force.

Dad and I each had a choice about how to accomplish our tasks. We could use force or finesse. Creating graphs in WebFOCUS 7.6 presents you with the same choice. The new Graph Assistant is the culmination of a lot of hard work and careful thought shared by many people and spread out over many months. It makes available in a very intuitive framework much of the incredible power of the WebFOCUS Graph Engine.

	Creating graphs using API calls: Force
	Creating graphs with the new UI: Finesse

The choice is yours. From where I sit, it's time to give finesse a try.