Forums IMPORTANT: PLEASE READ PhotoReading, Memory Optimizer Newbie / Infomercial (long)

I saw the Infomercial last week, which inspired me to order the Photoreading self study course. I've been trying to find it again so I could videotape it. Well just saw it again. I live in Utah, MST, and saw it on the E! channel, and TechTV at 2:00 A.M. MST. So if your looking for infomercial you might look at these channels in the coming days.

Some background on me is that I have been a senior software engineer for the last 15 years. 6 years at Hewlett Packard, and 9 years at Novell. At Novell I worked on NetWare 4, NetWare 5, and NetWare 5.1 before going into retirement for the last year due to burn out. If your not familiar with NetWare it's used by companies for file/print sharing over the local area network. My job was performance based, writing alot of assembly language, counting clock cycles, reducing network traffic.

The last 2 years I literally worked 16 hour days, 7 days a week. We had tests where we were running 100's of clients against a single server which had to run for days to exit QA. As you can imagine there were alot of bugs to fix, many of them my responsibility due to changes I made to file system to improve performance. Sometimes it would take literally 20 hours of hundred's of clients stressing out a server before a bug would manifest itself. Once it happened you had 5 seconds to stop the lananalyzer trace of the network traffic in order to see what happened. If you didn't the trace would overflow and you would have to start the test all over. In most cases you only got clues to the problems. No Eureka going off in your head at the time. Now your sure I'm going someplace with this right?

What I found out is that I had studied the code so much that many times while sleeping during dreams my sub-conscious would take over with these clues and I could spot the problem areas whether it was a single line of code or the architecture being blatently wrong. Other times while driving home (I lived about an hour away) while listening to music I would get in a relaxed state, get halfway home (it actually occurred at the point of the mountain more times than not, this is a small mountain pass separating SLC county and Utah County) where the same thing would occur and I would have to turn my car around and go back to work. I'm anal I couldn't wait until the next day.

So I'm hoping that PhotoReading will help unleash these natural abilities more readily. Not the least of which is I've decided to enter a new field of 3D-Game Programming versus writing network filesystems. There is alot of material to cover and to be quite honest I got to the point that I hated reading computer literature because of my anal personality I want to understand everything and not just take it for granted. To read a technical chapter could literally take my hours. So I'm hoping with this course I will be able to discover a better way to manage my time more efficiently so I won't have to spend 16 hour days. Anyway that's my history I should be receiving the materials this week and look forward to communicating with everybody in the near future once I have the material. Have a great day.

Jimmy

I just started my PR course today after much anticipation. I too am in IT field and am very curious to see how PR techniques can be applied to programming. Being a consultant, I've learned the only way to stay marketable is to constantly learn new "black magic" technologies that nobody else has a handle on yet. Naturally one ends up constantly reading, studying, and applying these new technologies to refine ones skills.

Your description of how solutions to coding problems come to you while doing other tasks is so familiar. I've found that for me, anytime this happens I'm usually in the shower. I suppose since I'm relaxed in the shower, it's conduscive to these subliminal revelations.

A lot of times however, answers to coding problems came to me in my sleep. Every now and then after a particularly long day, in my dreams I would actually watch myself coding. And sometimes it would actually be a solution to a problem that had me stumped for long periods of time. Usually after such episodes I never felt rested, almost as if I had been working instead of sleeping.

Interesting stuff. I haven't gone far enough into the course yet to draw any parallels between these kinds of subliminal events and the exercises given on tape 1.

I hope you would post your results here on the forum and share with a fellow codemonkey your findings and any techniques we could try. In my current project, I'm responsible for daily code reviews of other programmers. I'd be curious to see if one could PR the code and draw upon experience in the language to notice any flaws when activating the material.

As I said, I just started the course. The first game you'll play involves PRing a dictionary for a few minutes, then concentrating on a word and visualizing where on the page in the dictionary that word is. To my surprise, I got around 2 out of 4 dead on, and one was pretty close.

Statistically could I have gotten those kinds of results? I don't know yet, but it certainly has increased my enthusiam about the course.

Keep me updated Jim! Let me know if you've the next Quake killer ready for beta testing =) Hey, maybe PRing is Carmack's secret

-Keith

It's always good to hear from a fellow programmer. I got the materials today and am working on the photofocus part.

I'm hoping to be able (in the future, mind you I realize you have to take baby steps first before you can walk) to PR the Intel manuals for the number of clock cycles to perform an instruction. This was a task that I always had to do in my previous job since my task was to pump packets out as fast as possible on the network. I expect to be doing this for 3D-games programming since the goal is to renders polygons as fast as possible to achieve a high frame per second count. My Intel manuals are worn and greasy from constantly having to look up the clock cycles for various instructions and their forms.

I also hope to be able to PR code sections also. In engineering one of the best tools available for the programer is to have code reviews from peer programmers. It's much easier to fix problems upfront during the development cycle than to wait for the testing cycle. Unfortunately most programmers are busy coding there own sections of code and can't usually spare the time to code review someone else's code. I can't tell you how many times we would have a code review scheduled in a conference room and then have to cancel the code review because no one had time to review the code before hand. Trying to do it in a 2 hour meeting just was not productive. This is sad because the process will save tons of time in the testing part of the project life cycle by indentifying faulty code, algorithms, and bad architecture at a time when it's more readily fixable. The other advantages is that it makes your fellow programmers familiar with your code so theyt can help out if your sick, you go on vacation, or you move on to a different project. But probably the best benifit is exposing other programmers to coding methologies. When you work with other bright programmers your programming can only become better by being exposed to other works. So I'm hoping PRing will help in this process. If it does I believe a consultant could make alot of money by teaching the system tailored specifically for code reviews to engineering companies. I've always been interested in software engineering processes since most companies really handle the engineering processes in a bad inefficient way much like reading one word at a time is an inefficient way to absorb information.

Well enough for now. I will let everybody know my progress. I need to practice the photofocus some more. Happy PRing.

Jimmy

[This message has been edited by jimjwright (edited July 26, 2001).]