Last week, I was in Eindhoven, in the Netherlands. I arrived Sunday afternoon, and my host took me to the Van Abbemuseum, a museum of contemporary art. It was great.

I geeked out in the elevator, however. We started at the top floor and went down to the bottom. The elevator had musical accompaniment. A high-pitched voice started at the top and went down to a lower-pitched voice as we descended the floors. I thought this was great, and when I couldn't hear a break in recording between floors, I decided we'd try a few more combinations. (Luckily, my host had a great sense of humor and wasn't upset by this :-)

We tried a few more combinations of starting at different floors and going up and down so I could reverse engineer the algorithm. I think I understood it. (I'm not sufficiently literate with music description to describe it, sorry.)

This kind of curiosity is necessary for developers and testers. I suspect that what we label geekiness is more often curiosity.

Labels: qualities

posted by Johanna Rothman at at 2:17 PM | link |