THE MASTERPIECE

I wonder a lot about my own motivations, which might be an odd 
thing to admit. In particular I wonder about the technical projects 
that I embark upon, usually electronics, either for business or 
just for myself. I think you can either create for the social 
reward of being respected, or just accepted, or you can create for 
a love of the things you create, or the skill of creating them. I 
expect there's usually some balance between these two desires which 
varies between people (perhaps biased by gender), but for me the 
latter one is far stronger.

What I like is to create something that I can look back on in awe. 
Something that represents skills that I personally respect, 
exercised at a high level. This really dwarfs the emotional impact 
of any opinion received from other people, where indeed other 
people actually comment at all, seeing as many things either go 
completely unseen, or onto some web page that gets under ten 
(possibly robotic) views a month. I do still desire that social 
aspect, hence all the trouble of making the web pages, but it's 
scarcely rewarded, and the reason is that I don't generally pick 
projects that are easily appreciated by others in the first place.

It's primarily the personal, private, joy of making something 
unique that makes me happy. But there is a nagging feeling at the 
same time that I'm wasting my energy. These obscure creations make 
me happy, but by insisting that they are so unique and tailored to 
my own desires, I'm directing my energy away from the path of 
making money. To make money, I'm really starting to appreciate that 
you usually need to be making things that are 90% identical to what 
other people are making already, if for no other reason than that 
buyers can understand them without significant mental effort.

For me there's no joy in that though. Indeed the way electronics 
are going, in most cases it's downright unenjoyable, being so far 
removed from the sort of skills I really respect, mostly around 
technically efficient and/or elegant design. It's hard to think of 
an alternative industry where I'd be happy in that way either. I 
think rather than selling products from a particular design, I 
should be designing new technical solutions to providing an 
existing service, one that I can run myself, better and more 
efficiently than existing approaches. A new way of delivering a 
product, rather than a new product itself.

That is the sort of thing that I've been leaning more towards 
lately. Unfortunately the first such project has been put on hold 
because it was really taking too long to develop all the aspects of 
it. Others are also likely to involve a more regular commitment of 
time, which would be hard to find while continuing my current 
business activities. So I really need to just switch over to them 
and abandon my previous business strategy (and current income) 
entirely. Or just work _really_ hard. But then the risk of them not 
working seems a lot scarier.

I think in part I was talking about this in my earlier "Skipping a 
Step" post.

[runs out of time, never really got to the point, this has been 
happening a fair bit with Phlog posts lately. Now I'm picking up on 
it a week later]

But those ideas are all based around websites, websites which I'm 
_excrutiatingly_ slow at writing (to be fair I've only written a 
single interactive one so far, and I was learning PHP as I went, 
though I've forgotten a lot about it already now anyway). Even 
avoiding the horrors of client-side scripting or complicated 
frameworks, web programming really resists being properly elegant, 
I think. It's mainly just a big user interface for displaying and 
modifying data in files and databases, littered with complexity 
designed just to survive both the idiocy and the malice of its 
expected users. It might just be me though, I don't think I'd ever 
really be able to call a computer program I wrote "masterpiece" 
unless it was written in assembly.

Ah, I'm rambling. Honestly there was something specific about the 
idea of a "masterpiece" that I originally wanted to write about 
before getting off-track with my own woes, and a week later I 
really can't quite grasp it. Something about a craftsman 
(specifically a cabinet maker, in my mind), with the historical 
meaning, and linking that with art, then to engineering. A physical 
representation of a specific set of skills at their peak. With 
digital electronics I did something a while ago that represented 
it, really pushed myself to the limit, and although the design was 
a product to sell, it really was my own little masterpiece, for 
myself to admire. But to that end it had to be really unique, 
something that I came up with from bare principles rather than just 
an improvement on an existing design. So I haven't had much luck 
selling it, and from a business perspective it was a huge waste of 
time and money (well, about $1000, but that's a lot for me - at 
least I do find it handy to use myself though). But it's my 
masterpiece, working exactly how _I_ want it, a display of 
practical analogue and digital electronic theory combined on a 
marvelously economic PCB layout. I'll never look at a website that 
way, maybe not even a successful business, I guess I just don't 
respect those skills the same way. I guess I don't really care to 
truely master them.

It was damn hard though. I worked for weeks trying to get it all 
working right, with all sorts of things interacting so that the 
same parts would provide a number of differnet functions depending 
on the mode the device was in. Relying on resistive voltage drops 
and capacitive timing delays, but still staying within the signal 
specifications of the digital logic ICs. The trouble is that I need 
to work that damn hard on this other stuff as well, the stuff I 
don't have that passion for, which I know won't turn into a 
masterpiece to look back on. I mean, at the moment I'm trying to 
figure out C++ again, which I never liked and correspondingly 
forgot soon after first trying to learn it (from a 2nd hand 
textbook bought for a few bucks at an Op-Shop), so I can modify a 
library that would be too difficult to write myself but is designed 
for different microcontroller hardware, and the only free C++ 
compiler supporting it is actually an unofficial hack of a C 
compiler so who knows what problems I'll run into with that. But if 
I get all that right, then I'll be able to make a product cheap 
enough that I can compete with other similar products (because it's 
back to a 90% like everything else rule).

If I do succeed with that, maybe someone would, probably out of 
ignorance, look at it as a masterpiece. But I wouldn't. I'd call it 
a cobbled together mess, achieving something that I don't actually 
even desire for my own use. But I need to go at it with that same 
passion, somehow. It's a pain in the neck.

Oh and just to confuse me, suddenly a few of those "masterpiece" 
electronic devices did start selling over the last few months, 
after years of failing to attract any interest (I'd given up on 
it). Not enough to be anything like worthwhile though.

 - The Free Thinker.