Month: April 2009

Gun Free Zones: Great for Criminals, Not so Much for You.

John Lott has a good peice about so-called “gun free zones” where he mentions:

“For years I would tell news people about the fact that every single multiple victim public shooting in the US involving more than three people killed took place in one of these gun-free zones.”

Every time I see a “no guns allowed” sign, I think of other really cool ideas for posted slogans, like perhaps “no home alarms allowed” at the entrance to a housing tract or maybe “locked doors prohibited” in a public parking lot. Better yet, how about one of those nice “KICK ME” signs on your back.

It is only common sense that banning the carrying of guns in any given area means that only criminals will carry guns there — and assuming they can read, they can do so with the confidence that there probably won’t be anyone there capable of stopping them.

Here’s an easy mental excersize: put yourself in the shoes of a burgler, driving down the street, trying to decide which house to break in to.  One house has a car in the driveway with a bumper sticker that says “Gun Control Means Using Both Hands.”  The next house has a car in the driveway that says “There is no room for guns in a civil society.”  Which house do you break in to?

If people having guns with them is such a big problem, when was the last time you heard of a “crazed gunman” going on a rampage at a gun show?

How to Beat Programmer’s Block

My own experiences programming are as a self-employed, generally self-motivated coder, designing software I want to design. If you are an employee writing code implementing someone else’s specifications, this may not be helpful.

For me, programming is usually a creative process. Unless I am fixing small bugs or making minor tweaks, writing software is no different from writing a story, a song, a poem, or drawing a picture. It is an abstract process by which I turn general ideas into something that doesn’t quite approach a true language. There is a purely creative process: coming up with ideas to implement. And there is a less creative, but often just as abstract a process: turning those ideas into little processes that a compiler can understand.

Since writing code is so much like writing anything else, a programmer is prone to “programmer’s block” just as an author of a novel can be afflicted with writer’s block.

Beating programmer’s block while simultaneously staying productive is something easily done as long as you keep these things in mind:

  • When you’re stuck, do something else.
  • It’s easy to do something else if you have more than one project.

It’s really that simple, at least for me. At any given time I have at least a half-dozen “things” I can do that constitute productive behavior.  If I experience programmer’s block when developing one application, I have several others I can go work on for a while. Or, I can write a blog entry or even read a business-related book.

The key is to have more than one thing to do at any given time, so that when project A gets stuck, you can go work on project B for a while.  It’s not hard. And for me, the goal is to take a break without becomming idle.  Sure, vacations and long-term breaks have their place, but with all those people on welfare counting on my taxes, I just can’t relax when I am truly doing nothing so I always have something else I can do when I hit a wall.