From Where I Sit
Continual Improvement
By Larry Eiss
Some of you may have noticed that spring has arrived. I can tell it has because a few weeks ago I was instructed to take the truck to the local garden center and get a two-yard load of mulch. This took place just before I was scheduled to leave for Sweden and Finland on business, so I escaped having to distribute all that mulch by hand.
That task was left to my son-in-law and brother-in-law. Upon my return from Scandinavia, another load was in the offing. The most wonderful woman in the world and I spent the next few evenings pulling weeds and putting this load onto the garden. The next order of the season was a few new plants.
Last year the gardens looked much better than the year before. This year they look even nicer. They improve year by year.
The wooded lot across the street from us was selectively cleared last fall, and a very nice house has arisen there. One day I noticed that this wonderful house had a meter for natural gas affixed to the side. We don’t have a natural gas connection over here on “the wrong side of the street.” Seeing the new neighbor was having it installed made us wonder if it would be possible to get a connection at our house as well. I called the utility company that provides natural gas in our area and they agreed to install a line to our house. Now we can change to a natural gas furnace from fuel oil and get a nice new gas stove in the kitchen. Moving to natural gas is a significant improvement over fuel-oil for heating and electricity for cooking.
Right near the end of last winter I had a furnace installed in my workshop. I know, I know, I should have done it at the beginning of winter. There were reasons for this timing, believe me. Anyway, with this new and better set-up I can now use my shop during colder weather. It’s a real improvement. I am beginning to enjoy woodworking again.
Not long ago there was a lunar eclipse. I tried my best to photograph it. My pictures were all less than stellar—pun intended—because my current tripod is simply not good enough to handle my big telephoto lens. That point was driven home again when a turkey flew into the top of a tree in our backyard recently. Try as I might, I could not get a crisp photo of that bird. The tripod was simply not stable enough. I need a real improvement in this area if shots like this are to be within my grasp.
I recently got a new photo-editing application. It does miracles compared to the program I had been using. This new tool allows me to correct certain mistakes in photos after they have been taken. If I got the perfect expression on our granddaughter’s face, but it happened when the flash wasn’t charged, I can now add up to two stops of exposure after the fact. The image data are all there and this program can get them to appear. So much better is the new one that I have gone back through many of my older images that I thought salvageable and brought them to life. What an improvement!
From where I sit, it should be the same with software. Both the applications and tools that build them need to undergo continuous improvement. I’ve been traveling around the world talking to companies that use green-screen code generators and 20-year-old reporting systems. Some of them find themselves in a quandary because they have never updated anything in their applications in all those years. Now they are hard-pressed to take advantage of compelling new functionality without throwing away much of their current solutions.
While I recognize that the pressures of business do not allow a lot of time for updating things that are working fine, it is wise to consider whether the cost of doing nothing might be greater than the cost of making incremental changes along the way. Much like my wife’s gardens, it is extremely difficult to go from weed beds to beautiful flower gardens in one step. The process has to be done one step at a time.
