A commonplace book
Notes from someone who keeps starting over as a beginner in one field or another, and has stopped apologising for it.
Taken apart this year
Nothing has improved my main work like taking up something I was plainly bad at. Being a beginner again, in public, with my hands, resets the part of you that has quietly started assuming. I recommend it about once a year, and I have never once enjoyed the first month.
A German saloon assumes you will follow the procedure exactly and punishes improvisation. A Japanese off-roader assumes you are a long way from a workshop and forgives nearly everything. A small hatchback assumes nothing at all and hides the one fastener that matters behind something unrelated. I have learned more about design intent from three service manuals than from any book about design.
Under magnification a circuit board looks like a city from an aircraft, and the fault is almost always a dry joint or a lifted pad rather than anything dramatic. Four boards this year. Three came back. The one that did not is on the shelf where I can see it, which I think is the correct place for it.
Take the history before the examination — most of the answer is usually in the history, and most of us interrupt it. Then narrow the field, change one thing, and write down what you expect before you look. Distrust the first theory you fall in love with, particularly when it is elegant. This turns out to hold for engines and for networks, which I did not expect when I started.
The trick is not endurance, it is scheduling. Start before first light. Stop when the metal becomes untouchable. Sleep through the flat part of the afternoon and begin again at dusk. Everything difficult I have finished in summer was finished at one end of the day or the other, never in the middle.
Three evenings on a fault that turned out to be one wrong number, typed correctly, in the wrong place. I would like to say I found it by insight. I found it by reading every line out loud until one of them sounded strange.
The hardest skill in any of it is stopping. There is always one more adjustment available, and it is usually the one that undoes the previous four. I now write the finishing condition down before I begin, which feels like a lack of ambition and has saved me a great deal of work.