Browse: Page 40
By J. Timothy King on June 22, 2009
I’m readying for the release of my latest book, Love through the Eyes of an Idiot, the true story of a romantic idiot who was lucky enough to find love.
I just finished a first cut of the cover copy. Continue reading “The Secret to Happily Ever After…”
Posted in Books, Love and Relationships, Love through the Eyes of an Idiot, Self-publishing, Writing | Tagged offers |
By J. Timothy King on June 20, 2009
Forty years ago, on June 20, 1969, at 2:00 in the afternoon, I first came into this world, probably kicking and screaming, but not going anywhere fast. Since then, I sometimes whether I have gone anywhere ever.
When I was a teenager, one of my older friends turned 40. I could hardly believe it.
“You’re 40?!” I said.
“Yes.” She nodded.
I remember, I thought that was so old. And since then, from time to time, I myself have felt old. But what does that mean, “old”?
“Old” means obsolete, yesterday’s relic.
“Old” means tired and broken down, worn by time.
“Old” means showing the signs of age, wrinkles around the eyes, a paunch on the belly, love handles hanging off the sides.
“Old” means disease, closeness to death, a course of medications to take every day, the fear of time itself, keenly aware that time is escaping.
Why? Continue reading “On Turning 40”
Posted in About Tim King | Tagged birthdays, growing old, over the hill, wisdom |
By J. Timothy King on May 13, 2009
A police investigator enters the house as Mavis Phillips reacts outside the scene of a double murder, Sunday, March 29, 2009, in Milton, Mass. Phillips said she was a co-worker of Regine Revelus whose son murdered two of his sisters and injured a third before being shot by police on Saturday. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer)
On March 28, at about 5 PM, 9-year-old Sarafina, probably in tears, talked to the 911, while her 23-year-old brother was stabbing her two sisters with a kitchen knife.
When police arrived, less than a minute later, he was decapitating 5-year-old Bianca, the youngest of the family, while Bianca’s uneaten birthday cake still lay on the kitchen table. Then he turned on little Sarafina herself, stabbing her several times before police could put an end to his rampage, shooting him dead right in front of her.
Happy birthday, Sarafina.
She was taken to the hospital and eventually recovered from her physical wounds.
My brother was one of the paramedics who witnessed the aftermath and carried her out to the ambulance. Continue reading “Interpretation of a Nightmare: A real-life murder turns into a dream”
Posted in Personal Improvement, Stories, True Stories | Tagged crime, dream interpretation, dreams, psychology, Sarafina Revelus, true crime
By J. Timothy King on May 6, 2009
Ever since man has been able to think, he has tried to understand his dreams. He has called on dreams for divine guidance or for self-understanding. Many methods have been put forward for interpreting dreams. Some theorists have written off dreams as mere random thoughts that intrude into our sleep. Others have gone through great lengths to control their dreams, in order to experience them as entertainment or as paranormal phenomena.
One of the most persistent misconceptions regarding dreams is that they represent wishes. This notion was first popularized by Freud, and since then, it has stuck to the pop culture like Super Glue. Every one of us has at one time or another dreamed of a romantic encounter with some partner other than his spouse. And every one of us has been afraid to share that dream, lest she get the wrong idea.
But dreams do not, as Freud supposed, represent wishes. Rather, as recent research has suggested, dreams represent unfulfilled emotional expectations. That is, during the day we expected to feel a certain way, to have a certain emotional experience, and we didn’t. Someone did something or some event occurred to emotionally arouse us, but we never acted on that emotional arousal. In the meantime, our brains are geared up for the feelings that would have resulted had we acted on our feelings. Dreams are the result, dreams about those feelings, but not about the same people and events that caused the feelings.
This is called the Expectation Fulfillment Theory of Dreaming, first published in 1993 by psychologist Joe Griffin, who first stated the theory. Since then, the theory has gained support, as more research has borne out its conclusions and predictions. Since I’ve been keeping track, in my own informal research, it has also consistently explained my own dreams. Continue reading “The True Meaning of Dreams”
Posted in Personal Improvement, Stories, True Stories | Tagged dream interpretation, dreams, Ivan Tyrrell, Joe Griffin, psychology |
By J. Timothy King on April 21, 2009
(This is a continuation from part 2 of “Depression and the Software Developer”.)
[Note: This is a recounting of an experience from several years ago. Read the story from the beginning in order to catch up.]
According to psychologist Joe Griffin, the cycle of depression starts when innate needs are not being met. Among these are a sense of achievement and knowing that we are valuable to others. Setbacks like this, however, are just a part of life. What turns setbacks into depression is when they dominate one’s thoughts, they overwhelm him, and he loses hope.
Unfortunately, if my previous work situation epitomized camaraderie, this one did the opposite: Continue reading “Depression and the Software Developer (part 3)”
Posted in Confessions of a Veteran Software Developer, Personal Improvement, Software Development, Stories, True Stories | Tagged biography, depression, Ivan Tyrrell, Joe Griffin, programming, SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Software Development, software engineering, stress |
By J. Timothy King on April 20, 2009
(This is a continuation from part 1 of “Depression and the Software Developer”.)
If one of the most powerful weapons against depression is hope, one of its most powerful fuels is hopelessness.
I attacked my next job with gusto and enthusiasm. The company had previously outsourced a project to an offshore contractor, and now that the fit had hit the shan, they were looking to bring it back in-house. The product was a stand-alone box with embedded software, and they hired me to take over the hardware diagnostics, which are used to ensure that the units sent to customers actually work.
Somewhere, I read that it takes six months for a new employee to become situated in a new job. But I did it in four. And then I crashed. Hard. Continue reading “Depression and the Software Developer (Part 2)”
Posted in Confessions of a Veteran Software Developer, Personal Improvement, Software Development, Stories, True Stories | Tagged biography, depression, programming, SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Software Development, software engineering, stress |
By J. Timothy King on April 20, 2009
I’ve created a new blog at stories.JTimothyKing.com, at which I’ll serialize fiction and creative non-fiction that I’m writing. If you subscribe to that blog, that will allow you to keep up to date with my newest stories, in bite-sized chunks.
-TimK
Posted in About Tim King | Tagged blogs
By J. Timothy King on April 17, 2009
Knowing what I know now, I wonder how I avoided depression for as long as I did:
- Stress causes depression.
- Perfectionists are more prone to depression.
- Isolation reinforces depression.
As a software developer, those frequently go along with the job description. Seasonal Affective Disorder has gotten the rap for at least some of the funk, because many software guys spend most of their time indoors, duty-bound to their office chairs. But surely SAD can’t take all the blame. Long hours of solitary work in front of a computer screen, the amateurish demands of tech-heads-turned-managers, the over-constrained projects, the intolerance we have toward bugs, the widespread myth that software is “free,” and (most importantly) how we as developers respond to these pressures, all these must take some share of the blame for developers’ depression. Continue reading “Depression and the Software Developer”
Posted in Confessions of a Veteran Software Developer, Personal Improvement, Software Development, Stories, True Stories | Tagged biography, depression, programming, SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, Software Development, software engineering, stress |
By J. Timothy King on March 24, 2009
Software developers have a wonderful explanation for why there are so, so many software bugs. Unfortunately, it’s a highly technical explanation that’s very difficult for the layman to understand. I’ll try to summarize, but be aware that the following is a gross oversimplification.
The root problem is that software is complex. And it’s not just that software has complexity. It has a lot of complexity. And there are different kinds of complexity. For example, there’s necessary complexity and unnecessary complexity, architectural complexity, design complexity, protocol complexity, and API complexity. And then you have process complexity, such as whether you are able to deliver working software or whether you blame your manager and call him a dork.
Needless to say, software developers like to blame bugs on the complexity of software–or on their managers–but mostly on the complexity of software. However, that’s only part of the real cause of software bugs. Software developers have a dirty little secret: most bugs are simply caused by simple human error, and many of these can be prevented. Continue reading “Software Bugs, Crawling Everywhere”
Posted in Confessions of a Veteran Software Developer, Software Development, Stories, True Stories | Tagged bugs, programming, quality assurance, software engineering, testing, unit tests
