I have had a lot of Aha! moments in my life where I used my mind to recognize something.
The aha moments:
1970: My dad was working on the circuit-breakers in our house. He had removed the circuit-breaker box and rearranging them for some reason. He was down at his workbench in the basement (where the neatly-organized tools were) and was grumbling that he would have to shift five or six of the full-width circuit-breakers in a row up by a half-width just to make room for one more halt-width one near the bottom. I pointed out to him that all he had to do was install the half-width one at the top where the space already was. A big smile broke around his space and he said "Andrew, you are a genius." I liked hearing that. In a global sense, yes, shifting all of the other breakers would have been neater, but it was not necessary.
In the Fall seasons of one year of my childhood, one day I lost my wrist watch in the leaves that covered the backyard lawn. It was a birthday present (by birthday was July 25) and I was always losing things. We made (my older brother was the primary creator of) an ice skating rink in the backyard most of the winters of my later childhood. I require regular maintenance and watering to keep it going, and cold Buffalo winters allowed it to last a long time. That spring, I was raking leaves again. I found the my wristwatch. I wound it up and it was still work. It was a Timex and I wanted to contact the company to see if they wanted to make another "It takes a licking and keeps on ticking" commercial, but I never got around to it.
Facts of life.
Pythagorean triplets.
Circuit-breaker shift
Piano
The way things work, EB
St. Joe's and Animal Farm
RPI CICG and Olin Lathrop. IBM 3033 and EBCDIC . Cobol, TI Explorer, Scattering
Elizabeth Morgan
P&S glue factory
Nuke critical mass and EDS
Shuttle disasters.
Brake pads.
Music
Geom class full schedule of coursework and homework on first day
Physics: interference project
Read about Fortran and CPM
Deluxe course: VAX/VMS (ISBN of Vax book)
RSX and Baseway system header files and image IDENT tag
Alpha architecture and 8-ply execution, look-aside lists, registers etc.
EDS DC and Usenet
VMS related file spec and VAX exec mode at STScI
Quaternions
Astronomy. 1987A Supernova. 5K Astronomers n the world.
BFMS and Lisa and music
VMS mailbox and IO$_NOW
Objy and signal/AST diag (UCB/SysV) alarm bug (re-assert signal handler) Decnet sockets
More Usenet
Gain: get something done. Compiler bugs, VMS X11/malloc
Rad: HP strings, three platforms, Galaxy software, MacsBug, MPW, OpenFirmware
Neurondata:
Strings in X11R6 Xterm and AFS/NFS style automount paths
Solaris/SunOS, copying OS (tar vs. dump)
DHCP and ethers
Sequent computer boot
CPU not overheat, noising phone line, check rather than direct deposit
IRIX xterm and korean input method
Email UUID fix
Mapping out network ports
Network Cabletron failure and quick recovery
AS/400 and network card, and client-side SW and RAWT and Batch multi-thread (and JNI)
Java 1.1 exit bug after multithread
Mainframe and MVS (OS/390)
Moving to San Jose and Nyugen friends
CTO vs. CFO as head of IT
Linux
Fiddling around with CPU clock and time-limited evals vs. make
SJMV and many Mac problems and MPW http://www.goingware.com/tips/dbintro.html
Appletalk. Retire 68K
CPU datapath re-architect
Neuvo and kSSL. Mobitex
Afrah, Sam
2005, email, FBI
2006 TS
2007 Martinez
2008 Alison
Password at CMU
Capacitor blow on TI card for Dr. Birnboim
RS-232 insights at EDS. (3 wires)
Getting the Sequent system to boot up again.
Avoiding mainline EJB app server BEA weblogic because there were already many experts. Finding out the hard way about the env var for the path of the custom class loader.