Life lessons from the IT world.

I just got the latest Info World (2.2.04).  On Page 24 Chad Dickerson has a 1 page article exploring the idea of simplicity in IT solutions.  Using RSS as an example he tosses out some questions that I think are really good to consider.  I am not sure if all geeks do this, but I actually brought up some of his ideas and applied them outside of IT last night in a conversation with my wife.  It went something like this:

Right now our lives are very busy and we are trying to manage the complexity of family, work, church, home education, activities, relationships, cleaning, cooking, surviving....  So in the traditional model each of us tries to find ways to coordinate all of this activity and shuffle schedules and people and somewhere find a little room for rest.  Why not spend the energy looking for simple solutions.  Perhaps that means finding the overlaps in life and consolidating them to single events.  (Multicast delegates might help.)   Perhaps it means relocating or exchanging some plug and play components in our day.  I don't know the answers right now, but that isn't the point.  (OO design concepts could really be exploited here, but time does not permit such musings right now)

During the conversation I found it interesting that my wife kept wanting to create an instance of my new life class and exercise some of its methods.  Perhaps she was really creating test cases in her mind and throwing some pseudocode at them to get a quick prototype built.  I kept seeing the the classic struggle of wanting to code without creating the requirements and talking architecture first.  Anybody have the simple life base class created yet?  I look forward to sub-classing it and tossing out the triage base class that I often find myself working against.