I’ve used that phrase 2 or 3 times in the last 24 hours.  ”You owe it to yourself”.  Mostly out of habit, though it was used intentially in place of other phrases.  However, I just re-read my earlier post about the Town Hall for Hope, and realized my recent excessive use of this phrase.  This realization came with some self-analysis, of course.

What does this phrase mean when we use it?  We’re implying that a debt exists, as you can’t “owe” something that doesn’t include a debt of some kind.  Whether that debt is currency or something else doesn’t matter.  It’s still implies a transaction has taken place and you haven’t fulfilled your end of the bargain yet.  Thus, debt.

But how can you be in debt to yourself?  If you own yourself, as we believe in this country that you do, and any debt to yourself implies a transaction with yourself, how can you have a one-sided transaction with yourself?

We have a phrase in the world of computers and blinking lights called a “technical debt”.  A technical debt is a debt which you rack up with yourself by not being diligent about how you do your work.  If you don’t document properly or often enough, or you cut corners with functionality, you are building up a technical debt.  You will be forced to repay this debt later, with interest, through the difficulties your lack of documentation brings, or the bugs your corner cutting introduced.  Thus, the debt to yourself exists because it is a liability (in the accounting sense) - much like credit card debt, it will eventually prove a major weakness when trouble comes knocking.

You can be in debt to yourself by creating situations in which you leave loose ends or openings for trouble to expose your weaknesses.  If you see these unpatched holes in your life, you are just racking up interest by procrastinating on the maintenance.

Back to the topic at hand, regarding my usage of this term “you owe it to yourself”.  To answer my line of questioning: while not strictly a debt of work left undone, the debt we create with ourselves shares the same consequence - it will prove a liability when trouble comes knocking.  In the case of politics, the debt we create is a debt of ignorance.  The currency is knowledge.

“You owe it to yourself” means you need to repay your ignorance debt with truth and awareness.

I was attempting to do rebuild of a WPF client application I’m building, and started getting this all of a sudden:

A System.TypeInitializationException error occured at System.ServiceModel:
The type initializer for 'System.ServiceModel.ClientBase`1' threw an exception.

I have a client class that I use to put all of my service calls in.  This class inherits from System.ServiceModel.ClientBase.  It was the instantiation of this class which was throwing the exception.

Turns out I had changed the App.config to add some WCF logging in there, and had forgotten to enclose the bit in a <system.diagnostics> tag.  Oops.  Anyway, I’ve seen this before - configuration errors will throw type initializer exceptions in classes that inherit from ClientBase and ServiceHost.  Fixing the error in my App.config fixed the exception.

Teaches me to go longer than an hour without making a build!

My god, I can’t believe I’m writing a third post already. This blogging thing is really catching on. What’ll I do next, start a flickr account? Oh wait…done already.

I updated my about page too. Figured that’s probably with a higher priority since it was just sitting there with template text all over the place. That’s as bad as buying one of those picture frames with multiple places to put your pictures and filling up all but one spot, leaving somebody else’s baby/dog/brother sitting there grinning on your wall like there’s some kind of inside joke in the room that nobody knows about but them. But of course your friends come over and ask you who that dog/cat/squirrel on the wall is and why they’ve never met them. Then you explain that it’s not your picture of a dog, just the one that target bought from some poor asian guy on the street for a $2.50 exclusive license. Then you realize that it’s not a picture of a dog at all, but actually a baby, and you and your friends really feel like jackasses now, all because you didn’t bother to take more pictures and fill in all the picture frames. Lessons from this adventure? Don’t buy those multi-frames from Target. But I digress.

Here’s what I put up on the about page, in case you never click on about pages and actually want to know what I’m all about:

My name is Chris Carter. I work for Confluent Data Systems, Inc, a small software and consulting company based in Wenatchee, WA. I serve as the CTO. I’m also a founder of the company.

We started Love Washington Wine, an e-commerce and marketing company focused on increasing and selling the Washington Wine brand. Love Washington Wine sells a variety of labels from many incredible boutique wineries in Washington State.

We’re also helping to develop US West Energy Solutions, a green energy product distribution company, including the Hallowell Heat Pump, Proliphix Web Enabled Thermostat, and Energy Tracking Web Enabled Meter.

I’m interested in all technology, science, wine, photography, politics, and life. I’ll probably blog about most of those topics.

Most blogs start with a first post. So here it is. First. Primero. Zuerst. I guess you’ve got to start somewhere. These posts usually consist of the blogger excitedly talking about the future of their blog, expounding on how the visitor should check back soon for the next great article they’re going to write. Most bloggers write that next article, then maybe a few more. These articles center on the awesome shark they caught fishing, or their incredible skydiving experience, topping out with a magnificent lemon merengue pie they tried at some obscure bakery in a place you don’t live. Pretty exciting stuff!

Well, I vowed to myself that I’m not going to do that.

My name is Chris. I work for a small company in Wenatchee, WA called Confluent Data Systems. I’m the Chief Technology Officer there. I don’t fish for sharks, I’ve never jumped out of a plane, and to be honest, I’m not the biggest fan of lemon merengue (I had to look up the spelling on Google). I do take pictures though - I’m finally getting back into photography. I haven’t touched it really since high school, but I love it. It’s a great hobby, and I’d love to sell my prints some day for enough money to finance my travels.

There you go. Here’s a picture of a cat that I took. I’m so non-conformist when it comes to blogging that this isn’t even MY cat.