Gizmodo David

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Model / Reality Impendence Mismatch

As a newfangled dad, you’re blinded by idealistic visions. In these visions you see yourself teaching, guiding and building your child. Explaining things as you wish someone had explained them to you and revealing the secrets of nature as you have discovered them. You see your offspring sitting patiently, absorbing knowledge like a sponge. This is the Model.
As a newfangled dad, you’re faced with illuminating objectivity. Here you see yourself repeating lines (and mistakes?) your parents made and being bored to tears watching the episode of Teletubies for the umpth time. You see your child taking pleasure in deconstructing your (painstakingly glued and painted!) WWII model aircraft – deconstructing your Model. This is the Reality.
There are numerous schools of thought that pretend this impendence does not exist or that it is at least partially solved. You have your Attachment parenting, Balanced parenting, Christian parenting all the way to Quantum and Zen parenting. There are various commercial products (such as NAnny and They-Care) that purport to help you make the transition to model state completely transparent...
At the end of the day – it all depends on you. You are the system architect. It’s your job to make sure all deliverables are there on time. Be waterfall or be agile, but be there for your child. That’s all there is.

Implementing interfaces (IRespondable)

The most important aspect of baby development is the correct and timely implementation of various interfaces in the Human.Babies namespace.

This week David implemented another useful interface. Finally this enables us to have meaningful conversation with our flagship product. The interface contract is quite simple:

namespace Human.Babies
{
   public interface IRespondable
   {
       bool GetResponse(string question);
   }
}

Unfortunately David’s implementation is even simpler:

public bool GetResponse(string question)
{
   return false;
}

Project failure #1: DadoVac

I had this brilliant idea getting David to do a few house choirs. Considering his ability to break stuff I immediately discarded dishwashing and window washing. So I thought about vacuuming. Seeing how IRobots seem to be the industry leaders I thought I’d check out the competition.
I must say I’ve failed miserably. Here’s a short review:

Roomba	DadoVac
Vacuums dirt and debris from carpets and hard floors	Not enough surfaces vacuumed to make any analysis
Gets under beds and couches every time it cleans	Gets under beds and couches all the time
Knows where to clean—and where not to	Uses random cleaning patterns to catch your dust-balls unprepared
Works great on pet hair	Looks cute
Automatically returns to charge itself	Automatically asks for food when hungry
Try Roomba for yourself, with 30-day risk-free guarantee	No refund