This evening, we were driving home from Saint Paul to Minneapolis, traveling West/North, passing through Minneapolis. On I94, we passed close to the Skyscraper Forest that is downtown Minneapolis and, before getting to the Lowry Tunnel, I got a good really look at the city skyline.
One very pretty feature of the skyline is the beacon on the top of the Target building. It is a light array, a continuous wall of light that displays continually changing designs. The designs continuously display and shift according to some chaos-based algorithm such that the same design never appears twice (at least to the perspective of the viewer).
This holiday season, they had placed up there a new design, with holiday colors; red, green, white, etc. It looks really pretty and as I was driving past, I thought about the change in the display. What had it taken to change the display software? How was it done? Was there a process behind it?
One thought usually leads to another. For a moment, I thought about a programmer, somewhere - probably a team of them - updating the algorithm, changing the lighting sequence. I wondered whether someone had written a change request, updated the code, reviewed the modifications, checked the changes into the build, ran the regression tests to verify the change and...
WAIT!!! STOP!!!!
Stopping the flow of thought dead in its tracks, I reminded myself - Craig, you don't do that any more. You just left your job as a computer programmer and software engineer. You are a hypnotist and a writer now - Remember?
Oh yeah, I forgot... :-)
Laughing about this internal/imaginary dialog, I told Gwyn, sitting on the passenger side, about it. Like me, she got a good laugh. Then, saying no more, we continued on, the highway taking us into the tunnel. The light show passed from view - and just like my job up until this week, it disappeared into history.
