Life lessons from a "dead" language

I think that today's status meeting was a reality check for the alpha Alpha Geek, when he realized how much actually needs to be done and how little isn't. He made the mistake of saying, "Let me know if there's anything we can do." I couldn't resist: "Hire ten more programmers...Well, you said, 'anything.'" He didn't seem to appreciate my lightning wit [eyeroll], so I added, "And I want a pony, too." Which is the point where I stepped into the generation gap between me and one of my co-workers. "So are you going to ride the pony for ten minutes every hour?" he asked, clearly puzzled by the failed humor.

The thing about being raised in the seventies is that what you watched after school (in the days when grade school didn't assign homework) was basically leftovers from the fifties and sixties. You were rather too young to appreciate quite how much frost and freezer burn the TV stations had scraped off before re-heating these relics. Thus, you had no defense against the ethos of decades past as "Petticoat Junction," "The Munsters," "Dusty's Trail," The original (as in Annette Funicello) "Mickey Mouse Club," "Father Knows Best," etc. became your touchstone for reality. And, within that ethos, there was no greater indulgence that parents could bestow on a pre-adolescent girl than her very own pony. Not that I had anything more than a passing interest in horses, mind you. But the pony was the ne plus ultra of parental indulgence. And that's all that mattered.

I drew a breath before trying to explain this to my nine-years-junior co-worker, then decided to just let it go. There are some things you can't explain in the forty-second walk back to your cubicle-pod, and this was one of them. Particularly as I would have slipped up and actually used the term ne plus ultra, which would have only made things worse.

There's another Latin phrase, sine qua non, which popped into my head as I weighed the viability of writing a blog post on ne plus ultra. "Sine qua non" roughly translates as "That without which there is nothing." At least "nothing" within a specific context. It's the life of whatever party is at hand--without it, everyone goes home, the chips grow stale and soggy, and the dip acquires extra colors/textures in the 'fridge.

But I thought that they're really two things that need to be defined when you're looking to branch out into entrepreneurship. Because unless you have a rich relative at your back, starting your own business is a lifestyle choice, among everything else that it is. It's critical to define your ne plus ultra, even when you think you have zero chance of meeting it. Because if you're wrong and you do, you're off the edge of the map--the locale of "Here there be dragons" (a.k.a. hic dracones sunt) In that place, dragons be the least of your worries. At least until you dedicate some introspection toward defining a new ne plus ultra, anyway. I believe that it's just as critical that the sine qua non--i.e. the minimum standards--is clearly and realistically established. Otherwise, what's the point? Seriously.

But what I think would be the most interesting part of an introspective exercise like that is to measure the distance between sine qua non and ne plus ultra. I can't begin to guess whether or not it's germane to the chance of entrepreneurial success, but I think that it might tell you quite a bit about the entrepreneur.

Disclaimer: College Latin kicked my backside but good. Both semesters. Which is embarrassing, considering that I should have learned my lesson during the first semester--the "lesson" being that having had both French and Spanish in middle and high school weren't enough to prepare me for the horror that is noun declension.

Now THAT's what I call "QA"

On the way home from work tonight, I had the radio tuned to the tail-end of NPR's Marketplace. Closing tidbit: Britain's Royal Mint flubbed the stamping of ~100K twenty-pence coins and issued them without a date. Presumably, that's a considerable loss of face. Why? Because the mint hasn't made that mistake since the year 1672.

That's right: About 337 years between making the same mistake twice. Roughly sixteen generations, in purely human terms. Kind of mind-blowing, really. And not a little humbling.

Commuter economies

Yesterday's paintball outing was held west of Chippewa Falls, WI, which is bit north of my old stomping-grounds, a.k.a. Eau Claire, WI. In "my day," the two cities were connected by State Highway 53, which also ran through the town of Hallie. What I mostly remember about Lake Hallie is the Farm and Fleet store, RV dealerships, used car lots, a VFW, and a wonderfully low-key, unpretentious Mexican restaurant (Pancho's Place).

That's the route my husband and I took, because backtracking to the new Highway 53 after a run to the military surplus store would have been counter-productive. The new bypass has made a palpable difference along what's now officially called "Business 53." Pancho's Place stands boarded-up, and there's an inescapable "ghost town" sort of feel to the real estate on either side of the road. In fairness, a couple new office complex buildings have gone up at the southern end of that route (meaning the northernmost part of Eau Claire), and the Farm and Fleet seems to be doing okay. But, all in all, the bypass seems to have been no blessing to that part of town.

I suppose that cities with mature mass-transit systems have their own variation on the malaise when routes are rearranged and stops are closed off. But what intrigues me is the notion of telecommuting, and how it will impact both. That phenomenon, I very strongly and cynically expect, will not grow nearly as quickly or as large as predicted. Yet, assuming it did, the change would likewise have a very real impact on commercial real estate and transportation. When enough people simply nuke leftovers in their own microwaves rather than pop around the corner to the sandwich shop for lunch, the sandwich shop closes its doors. When it's both faster and less frustrating to hop on the highway and grab a ream of printer paper from the office supply superstore in the mall area than it is to fight for a downtown parking spot to buy the same paper at the Mom-and-Pop variety store, Mom and Pop go out of business. I'm sure you can think of other scenarios as well.

One adaptation to telecommuting that would not surprise me, however, would be the re-emergence of the corner store, at least in places that are used to cars for transportation. Heck, if gas prices spike (and stay that spiked), it might even be more expensive to make the trip to Wal-Mart than to pay a few more pennies at the corner store (which would make me, at least, happy on a few different levels).

But it's largely a moot point, I think. It's true that professional firms could save money in the short term by having a percentage of their staff work from home. (And only a fool would underestimate the attraction of short-term savings.) But that scenario involves management not having their direct-reports under their eye forty-plus hours of every week. I thiwaynk we all know how likely they are to relinquish the illusion of control...

That being said, I still predict that telecommuting will have some tangible impact on neighborhood and mega-mall economies. It just won't be catastrophic like a highway bypass or subway stop closing. If it helps reverse the overspecialized wastelands of strip-malls and McMansion suburbias that highways have engendered (at least in this part of the nation), I think I can get behind that with few to no reservations. (Of course, if "telecommuting" translates into my boss requiring me to hook up a surveillance webcam up to my workstation, all bets are off...)

Technology evolution in microcosm

A couple of mutual friends talked my husband and me into trying out paintball circa 2000. After we made a modest investment in equipment and gear, we learned that another friend also plays. The latter crowd (Cory and gang) are a little more hard-core b/c they play in tournaments, although they are all quite good at switching into "friendly game" mode when Cory decides to celebrate his birthday by having his friends shoot at him.

My husband was in the preliminary phases of shopping for new gear today, because my paintball gun (usually called a "marker" nowadays) failed, despite a rebuild last night. Wow, has the technology of those things evolved in the last decade!

When Dennis and I started playing, Terry's young son Alex had just graduated from a hand-me-down single shot (meaning pump action) gun to something semi-automatic. (Unfortunately, by that point he had, of necessity, become preternaturally accurate...and preternaturally stealthy.) Our guns were lower-end, but still quite serviceable: CO2-powered, gravity-fed, semi-automatic, wrench-adjusted to fire at a "friendly" 250 - 275 feet per second. (Tournament speeds, IIRC, are usually in the 300 feet per second range.)

Fast forward a couple of years, when Cory started regularly playing in tournaments and also assuming responsibility for helping his girlfriend (now wife) acquire equipment. We found ourselves up against paintball guns with hoppers that fed the paintballs with little battery-powered motors to feed the paintballs into the firing chamber.

Various commitments on both sides meant that we didn't play with (or against) Cory on the traditional birthday weekend in either 2007 and 2008. Today I wandered into Cory demo-ing the paintball gun he was using to my husband, explaining the modifications he'd made since buying it off eBay. Not only are we talking battery-powered motors, paintball guns now come with electronics and touch-screen programming. In today's play, for instance, Cory dumbed it down a bit, so that it would only go into fully automatic mode--spitting fifteen paintballs per second--after he'd hit the trigger a certain number of times within a given time-span.

I should know better, but I was a little freaked out by how much technology goes into a game. Especially when I reflect on how many centuries elapsed while arquebus gave way to matchlock, matchlock to wheel-lock, wheel-lock to flint-lock, flint-lock to machine gun.

But stepping back and looking at it from a geeky problem-solving standpoint, you can discern how problem led to solution led to problem led to solution and so on. The thought progression can be more or less summed up like:

1. "Hey, my friends and I want to shoot at each other in good clean fun, but BB guns will put your eye out. Why don't we try splatball?"
2. "Uh-oh, I'm the fox in this game of 'Fox and hounds.' Single-shot sucks. I need something that fires a paintball every time I pull the trigger."
3. "Ugh: I can smack the trigger faster than this thing can drop paintballs. I need a motor to keep up with me."
4. "Uh, oh, other people can smack the trigger faster. Going fully auto will even out the playing field."
   
5. "Uh-oh, not everyone wants to play against the Wall O' Paint. I need a way to level the playing field for them."
   

Of course, you can see the downside of those advancements, can't you? For instance, batteries dying in the middle of a tournament is guaranteed to land you in a world of bruise if you don't or can't call yourself out. And let's just say that technology geared toward an obstacle course of bunkers in a clear field doesn't always slog through the woods and the occasional rain-shower as well as the "old-school" gravity-fed kind.

Oh, and one more major technological advancement: Supporting pressurized air rather than pressurized CO2. Because the CO2 of your accelerated respiration will draw quite enough mosquitoes without help from your paintball gun. That, folks, is real progress. ;-)

Frivolous Friday, 06.26.2009: Robert Frost edition

Whose code this is, I think I know:
He left the firm some time ago.
He cannot cringe to see its scope
So exponentially grow.

I skim his lines, think "What the heck?"
I cannot grok this--much less check
For proper place to splice my work:
I'm in spaghetti to the neck!

With second read--and Google's grace--
Each function falls now into place
And though our styles are night and day,
My brain becomes a smarter space.

To learn all night I have the urge,
But at my deadline must I surge
With code to test before I merge.
And code to test before I merge.

When something is better than anything

After scampering around the office, collecting signatures for the card that I bought a couple nights ago, it was my turn to find something to write in it. I think that the easiest thing to say in a situation like this is something like, "please feel more than welcome to consider me as a reference." (Unless, of course, you don't mean it. But we're not going down that road tonight.)

I like that offer partly because it nods acknowledgment to reality, then immediately points the focus at what's next. But mostly I like it because it's something. Too many folks like to say, "Let me know if there's anything I can do." (Which always makes me want to channel Henny Youngman with a comeback like "Pay my mortgage.") In that regard, I'd rather offer a discrete "something" than the "anything" that really means "nothing."

Yet despite the such an offer seeming (to me, at least) the simplest, even most obvious response to someone having the proverbial rug yanked out from under them, it seems to be shamefully neglected--at least from what I've observed over the years.

I don't know if anyone can say that the worst of this recession is over. Even if it were, job (re)creation, historically, lags behind GDP growth. So I would strongly suggest to anyone who reads this to consider doing "something" rather than "anything" for the next person they know who needs a lifeline back into employment. Thanks much.

Leaders vs. managers

Don't conflate the two.

• Leaders stake their credibility on their decisions, and abide by the consequences--expected as well as unintentional.
  
• Leaders understand the full-time balancing act between the man and the mission (to couch it in military terms).
  
• Leaders understand that giving subordinates responsibility without authority is not, by any stretch of fevered imagination, "delegation."
• Leaders get the truly useful information (a.k.a. the bad news) as quickly as (perhaps more quickly than) the good news.
  
• Leaders are not threatened by superior skill or raw brain-power, because they don't mistake either for leadership.
• Leaders keep a part of their brain reserved for what-comes-next while dealing with here-and-now realities.
  

That's not to say that someone who carries the title of "Manager" isn't actually a leader. Sometimes leaders carry no title at all. (To me, they're the truly interesting sub-species.) But I'm becoming cynical enough to think that the safest rule of thumb is to consider anyone with a title as "Manager" until proven otherwise.

I'm sure that the leader vs. manager dichotomy's been dissected to death (and the bones picked clean) over the years. I'm only leaving my own flogger-print on the proverbial horse-carcass because today I found myself staring down into the gulf that separates the two. Fortunately, our contact should be minimal.

Missed business opportunity?

I could have stopped at the slightly more "convenient" grocery store on my commute home tonight, but I needed to buy a card in addition to the usual supplies. The client contact with whom I've worked most closely will be gone after nearly a four-year relationship. (It's the result of the species of accounting which decrees that, if you show vendors (rather than official employees) the door, you're not really "laying off" anyone.)

So tonight I browsed the ten? fifteen? feet of wall that the northside Festival Foods devotes to greeting cards, not a little disgusted by the navel-gazing that passes for "occasions" nowadays. A "congratulations" card specifically for earning a driver's license? Or going off to summer camp? Seriously--I'm not making those up. But, equally seriously: What the ----?!?! What "milestones" will we next memorialize in dead tree stamped with Burma Shave quatrains? Jury duty? Tapper-chugging your way to unconsciousness at your first house party? Menopause?

What I emphatically did not find, however, was any condolence card created specifically for someone who has to move on to another job, be it imminent or purely hypothetical. Funny, there seems to be a bit of that going around these days. At a time when we're happy to hear that the growth in unemployment has merely slowed--heck, when you can get anyone in this math-averse nation to pay attention to numbers, much less the second derivative from Intro to Calculus--you'd think that there'd be a market there.

Yes, I understand that the place to purchase a condolence card for a job loss/transition would certainly not be the local grocery store. After all, their objective is to surround you with the idea of abundance to induce you to open your wallet as wide as possible. The very last thing they want you to think about is scarcity...or how precarious your own employment prospects could be.

Yet, surprisingly, the Omniscient Google didn't turn up and abundance of greeting card alternatives. Interestingly, though, it did yield Hallmark to Employees: Sorry to See You Go. So maybe that's the answer...

Value of human life < 1 music CD, so sayeth the math

For the record, I do not, Not, NOT condone stealing content. For that matter, every byte of music, video, and podcast currently residing on my MP3 players is either free or has been paid for. Nor do I want to open the whole "situational ethics" can of fish-bait.

But.

What I do have a problem with is the double standard of "accountability" in our culture. Particularly when those who profit most from criminal behavior can hide behind a corporate shield when petty criminals don't have that luxury. But I'm riled most especially when that double standard highlights how much [cough] "justice" [cough] deep pockets will buy in a country where we are all--so the conjecture goes--created equal.

Exhibit A: In February of last year, thirteen employees of Imperial Sugar died in an explosion which injured forty of their co-workers--three of whom were in the burn ward months later. OSHA imposed an 8.7 million dollar fine (which the company is contesting) for safety violations dating back six years. Were we to discount the wounded who may spend the rest of their lives disabled and/or disfigured by corporate greed, $8.7 million divided by thirteen dead works out to just under $670,000 per human life. Keep in mind that the fine goes to the government, not to anyone actually affected. The bereaved are left to bury their dead and the injured are left to heal on their own dime while those responsible devote their resources to whittling down the fine by way of the appeals process.

Exhibit B: Contrast that with the $80,000 per song in last week's Jammie Thomas verdict and you see why I'm furious--and why I strongly think that you should be, too. Ms. Thomas (now Thomas-Rassert) stole 24 songs from the major labels. By the math of OSHA fines and the RIAA jury verdict, one human life is worth approximately 8.37 songs. That works out to something less than a CD, at least in this day and age. (The 1980s? Meh, maybe not so much, when you had to factor in the extended--a.k.a. "dance" versions of the stuff you heard every hour in the Top 40 wasteland in which I grew up.)

Now, like I said, I'm not gonna go skippin' down the path of moral relativism. But you know what? I don't have to. Such messed-up priorities should speak for themselves, once you punch a few numbers into a calculator.

Thoughts on the demise of the service-for-security employment model

It's an exaggeration to say that I'm back from Death's Driveway (not to mention its door). But when your major accomplishment of the last 48 hours is keeping your dinner down without having to sleep your stomach into submission, it's tempting to cast it in hyperbolic terms. I just want to go on record saying that Gatorade and Zantac are tied for second place--albeit a distant second--in awesomeness to Dr. Husband.

Anyhoo, I'm just off the phone after wishing Dad both a Happy Father's Day and a Happy Birthday besides. Dad's retired, so you can definitely keep a conversation going by mentioning the stock market or the economy in general. I sometimes question whether all financial behavior is, in fact learned. Despite the fact that my sister and I were primarily raised by our Mother (who tends toward being more generous than she can afford), I'm more of a tightwad like my Father. For all that, he and I don't always see eye-to-eye when it comes to the reasons for opening our respective wallets. I've come to the conclusion that it may be partly generational.

Both Mom and Dad grew up in the age of The Company Man, where the assumption was that you'd work for the same company for X number years and your pension would take care of you after you pocketed your gold watch. The chicanery of pension-raiding since the 1980s and the number of companies who will walk away from those obligations via bankruptcy in the 2000s and 2010s has voided that assumption. (Fortunately, I think that Mom and Dad and my Stepmom, all having made their careers in the health care industry, should be pretty safe.) Employer-sponsored 401K programs and ESOPs, being less entrenched in The American Dream, will probably melt away with less fanfare.

And that leaves us at an interesting--not in the good way, mind!--juncture. If there's no long-term incentive to stay with an employer, my guess (and it's just a guess) is that it will cost companies more in training and hiring (next to none of that on the books, mind you, which is the problem) than it would to fund some sort of retirement benefit.

Moreover, what will the shift in mentality do to a company's long-term value when everyone has to think of her/himself as a temp. in disguise? Bad enough that the number-jigglers at the top of the corporate food chain can't see past the end of the fiscal quarter. What happens when the rank and file learn that there's no point in looking beyond the next paycheck or the next raise/promotion date? Most predictably, the risk-taking that, at the ground level, drives innovation will be discouraged because no one wants to set back her/his financial future. And I think you can safely say that older workers--i.e. those likely be be in management--will be even more averse to risk, because they have less time to reboot their careers if fired. Almost ironically, I think that the risk-taking that will occur will be more an exercise in stampeding after the same main chance as most of the market-sector, with no regard to the long-term viability of any investment.

On the long-term, macro level, that probably wouldn't be any great loss. There are any number of unimaginative, unremarkable and criminally thick-headed companies--heck, make that whole industries--that I would dearly looooove to see pwned by cheeky startups. Barring competition-stifling regulation, that's pretty much a given in some cases. And that's the B-side of the proverbial coin, when by "the coin" I mean a work culture that no longer operates on a service-for-security compact.

Between those two scenarios, the classic American corporation may not only be digging its own grave, but also carving its headstone besides. If it weren't for the disruption that it will cause, I'd say good riddance. But, historically, social and economic upheavals almost always translate into the rich becoming more so at the expense of the middle and lower classes, so I'm not at all anxious to see that happen.

Swag done right

As if home winemaking and keeping bees aren't weird enough hobbies, one of my other passions is costuming, particularly medieval and renaissance. For the past fifteen years or so, I've found much of my costuming/needlework "library" at a mail order company called Hedgehog Handworks. Its proprietor, Joady Gorelick, is beyond awesome in terms of customer service.

But she's also slightly evil. I mean, I already live in a household that's co-dependent when it comes to books, and Ms. Gorelick is a certified book-pusher. (Good thing it's only my husband who has the little "problem." I, on the other hand, can quit any time I want...) ;-)

Anyhoo, a batch of books arrived tonight, and when I opened the second USPS box--stop laughing, you!--I found a Hedgehog Handworks tote bag. The third I now own. That's just plain diabolical. See, if you're not into sewing or embroidery or craft-making of any kind, what you need to understand is:

1. Books give you lots of ideas for new projects.
2. Very few projects can be completed in a day, or even during a (rare) open weekend.
3. Projects need someplace to live (preferably shielded from cat fur) while you're not working on them.
4. Under absolutely no circumstance does the Code of Crafty-things allow you to cannibalize a tote bag from another project. (I'm not actually sure what penalty the Demi-gods of Crafty-things dole out for such blasphemy, and I'm certainly not about to find out by being made an example by Them.)
5. Because the project is safely stored away, there is now no imperative to finish it, and workaday practicalities are free to devour your disposable time.
6. Books on costuming, needlework, etc. go in and out of print with alarmingly short notice, so you need to keep an eye out, and snatch them up during that window of opportunity. (Not to mention that buying books about hobbies you don't have time for almost--almost--soothes the annoyance of not being able to actually work on your projects.)
7. Books give you lots of ideas for new projects.
   

I trust that you detect the vicious cycle at work here, yes? Now throw in free project tote bags, and you see the evil genius at work here. This, friends and brethren, is a lady who knows her clientele, down to its deepest, darkest motivations.

And now, if you'll kindly hold off your snickering until I'm gone, I need to find a project to put in my new tote bag...

Flamebait, Part III: In defense of proprietary software

I feel for Jo Shields, even as I applaud his writing--and probably send more jihadists to his blog. Honest to Pete, though, reading the comments following Here we go again - why Mono doesn't suck feels like I'm living out some socially-arrested version of Groundhog Day.

Feh. If software is a religion, I want to join the Unitarian Jihad. Look. I'm writing this with Firefox running on Ubuntu, and I still want to wedgie the FOSS fanatics. How many of those, mewonders, pay for their hardware and bandwidth by programming for The Man? In that Major Barbara scenario, is ranting about any software cootie-fied by contact with a proprietary vendor rooted in the same self-loathing as Larry Craig or Ted Haggard bashing homosexuals? Or, alternatively, how many are currently living off their parents? In either case, they don't have a teaspoon of credibility between them until they figure out how to pay their own bills with open source software.

Bottom line: Proprietary software and open source software both have licenses--something that the FOSSistas conveniently forget. Licenses, by definition, bind people to a contract. In the case of proprietary software, the buyer's contractual responsibility is discharged with money and an implicit promise to leave the software as-is (and, of course, not share it with anyone else). In the case of open source, that responsibility is met by "paying forward" any brainpower added to the software. Which is not necessarily inconsiderable--something that I think is too often hand-waved away. Knowing what I know about people and how Newton's First Law applies to their endeavors, I would--almost--be willing to bet that, as a percentage, the second contract is violated more often than the first.

Moreover, the Microsofts and Adobes and Apples of this world wouldn't be even 400-pound gorillas, were it not for the broken patent system and the oligarchical country club mentality that infests Washington DC and fifty state capitols besides. If proprietary software is indeed an eeeeevillll, it is the symptom, not the disease. Judging the entire licensing model by the ham-fisted cluelessness of the big dogs is no different from judging a city's "livability" by skimming the local police blotter.

One absolute statement that I'll make, though, is that arguing the superiority of one license over another for all scenarios is just stupid. As is the paranoia. Microsoft is laying off employees, and Apple can't possibly sell enough phones to pay for Congress to outlaw free software. And even if they could, this is the same government that can't keep its own data stored and safe, much less put everyone else's "tubes" under lock and key. The hackers would win, no question.

So I really wish that the energy and passion that went into these online food-fights could be channeled into something productive. Like, say--oh, I don't know--maybe...writing the next killer app?

"Overpaying"

In today's junk mail, something from Traveler's Insurance warned my husband that he "might be overpaying for auto insurance every year." (Exclamation point and all caps omitted.)

I'll grant you, that bit of direct mail was considerably more on the up-and-up than some we receive: The envelope identified who had sent it and it used the term "might," rather than making a definitive statement. If you pay the most fleeting attention to the senseless holocaust of tree-pulp that finds it way to your mailbox, you should know that this is saying something these days.

The brass-tacks issue, however, lies in Traveler's definition of "overpaying." I've been buying my car insurance from the same guy since 1991, knowing darned well that I can pick up the phone and know that a problem will be Dealt With. Case in point: When I moved to another state that had higher insurance rates, Dan bent the rules to "grandfather" my Wisconsin rates for as long as possible. When a deer ran into my car--not the other way around, mind you--the claims adjuster's second question (after "Is everyone alright?") was "Does anyone need a translator?" (which weirded me out enough that I blurted, "Not unless you speak deer.")

But I emphatically do not play an entire sonata in touch-tone to reach a person whose job it is to stall me for half an hour before transferring me to the next person with the same job description. When I saw the deer barreling Hell-bent-for-election toward my car, my train of thought was basically:

1.) The stupid thing's gonna head-butt my quarter-panel.
2.) There's no way it can end up in our laps.
3.) Oh well, this is why I pay for insurance.
4.) [BAM!] Yep, the stupid thing just head-butted my quarter-panel.

I'm not exaggerating, not even for humorous effect. But that, friends and brethren, why I pitch a check to American Family every single month.

Understand that, when you purchase insurance, you actually pay in two currencies. One is straight bling (however that translates to what you have to do to coax it into your bank account). The other is the time and frustration that you'll spend holding your insurance company to the terms of their bond. It's that second currency that constitutes the price-to-value ratio that should be the basis of all purchases. Particularly of intangible services such as insurance.

Now, I don't recall whether Citibank--whose executives are presumably stimulating the Bermudan economy with my tax dollars--bought out Traveler's or vice versa. And I frankly don't care, because I have no doubt that they're financially joined at the proverbial hip in the shell games that brought this recession to pass. What I do care about, however, dates back to the last recession that bit me, and Traveler's attempt to nick me when I was already bleeding. Even a decade and a half on, they could offer me free insurance, and it would still be too expensive. Why? Because knowing that I might have to fight--to the point of calling for legal backup--for what is contractually mine is not a bargain at any price.

A nice bit of bravado

Yes, I understand that this is the kind of thing that "leaders" are paid to do, but I rather liked the way that the boss phrased something this afternoon: "I refuse to cooperate with a recession." Not a bad attitude to have, all things considered.

A six-legged perspective on risk vs. reward

I was surprised this afternoon by my husband being less than happy after we checked in with the bees. The hive that we re-Queened last month has apparently changed management yet again, this time on its own initiative. Because of the earlier disruptions, it's difficult to tell whether it swarmed (in which the old Queen and about half the hive leave to found a new colony) or a superceded (the honeybee equivalent of a coup d'etat). For our purposes, the point is purely academic.

Despite having their third Queen in as many months, though, it looks as though that hive might finally be making some traction on ramping up its population. We're lucky that the workers have been putting away nectar and pollen during the interregnums, so there's no reason--barring drought or disaster--why we shouldn't be able to harvest honey two months hence. It just won't be a bumper crop, and that may have been what irked my husband, particularly after the gamble of introducing a new Queen. (Fortunately, we don't count on making money from this hobby, or the $23 might have been the difference between profit and loss on the hive's 2009 balance sheet.)

Fortunately, by the time we left for home, he had found the silver lining in the situation, namely that the new Queen's children would likely be at least half-Wisconsin in pedigree--the new Queen having mated with drones from local hives--and thus more likely to survive the winter. Me, I was just happy that, for the first time in several weeks, we could button up the hives and go home without feeling the need to rush back with more equipment, insects or what-have-you to nudge Mother Nature toward doing things our way. And, if the hive survives the winter, we can reasonably expect to let its Queen take care of business in 2010 without any interference from us.

But the incident highlights the implicit expectation that investment always equals return--as if there's some cosmic quid pro quo for any venture at which we pitch our money and/or time. Intellectually, we know that there's not. But what I don't understand is why, when investments are sanitized (as mutual funds, 401Ks, etc.) for mass consumption, that publishing the oh-by-the-way-you-could-lose-your-shorts warning before the historical performance numbers isn't mandatory for the investment portfolio booklets. Because the risk needs to be driven home, well before anyone breaks out the dollar-goggles. Always. Either that, or perhaps investing should be barred for anyone who hasn't farmed. Or kept bees. But, then, I might be a wee bit biased about that...

Artificial economies

A year or two ago, I was in the local Big Box Bookstore and, on pure whim, picked up Ancient Rome on Five Denari a Day. It's pure cultural history: There's very little in the way of chronology or the serialized biography that sometimes passes for history. The gimmick is that the book is written as a travel guide to the Rome of about the second century C.E. I need to read it again, because too many of the details have slipped already. (That, and the book just rocks.)

But one detail that has stuck with me is the fact that a traveler to ancient Rome had the option of what we would consider a traveler's check of sorts. You, the traveler, would go to a merchant known to have frequent and reputable trade with in Rome and pay him a given amount of money, for which you would receive a letter to his Roman connection, authorizing that person to give you a lesser sum on your arrival. That letter solved the very real--and to this day applicable--problem of having to carry significant amounts of cash while on the road.

By this time in history, the cash revolution was already passe, but it bears considering the full scope of that revolution nevertheless. Think about it: At some point, civilization collectively decided that bits of shiny metal possessed a value equivalent to far more tangible goods and services. That sheer level of abstraction, for a largely subsistence world, is pretty mind-blowing. The notion of a bit of parchment or papyrus having the same value as a bunch of shiny bits of metal that have the same value as a certain quantity of goods and services is merely another layer of abstraction because, well, the proverbial cows were already out of the barn at that point.

Fast-forward a couple of millennia, and mere bytes can represent a person's wealth, and some digits of those bytes can be traded for other bytes representing, say, the ownership of a web domain--something upon which entire companies have flourished (Google.com) or foundered (WebVan.com), depending upon their ability to deliver value in the real world. Or, perhaps less understandable, people pay people they know only through the internet for items that exist only in the context of multi-player online games such as "World of Warcraft" or "Eve." (In that light, the games that investment bankers play with default credit swaps and such shouldn't seem quite so ridiculous...except that they were passed off as real items of value, of course.)

In all scenarios, though--across this evolution in abstraction from barter to cash to handshake to bytes--there are two key components:

1. At the bottom of the transaction, some equivalence in real-world quote-unquote value: Food, shelter, amusement, one-upping the neighbors, etc.
2. The fundamental trust that quid pro quo is going down. Either all parties involved are on the up-and-up, or are sufficiently armed against a double-cross.
   

So far, I'm with all that. What I fail to understand is the "economy" that is lacking component #1. The example I'm thinking of is Facebook "gifts." Redneck gifts, Pagan gifts, Bellydancing gifts, Pirate gifts: I've been proffered them all and more, from folks I consider myself to trust. But I can't help but wonder whether I'm ignoring another shift in our concept of commerce as I ignore these purely digital "gifts" as silly. I honestly don't--and won't--claim to know. But I know that it can't hurt to keep that in mind: As a History buff, only think how embarrassed I'd feel to mix the next revolution! ;-)

Frivolous Friday, 06.12.2009: Filed under "Be careful what you wish for"

Ugh. I caught just a whiff of politics this week, and it annoys me whenever it encroaches on my obliviousness and forces me to arm myself against it. And, inevitably, returns me to the futile wish that people could act like rational adults they're supposed to be.

To a programmer, people are maddening because they don't follow instructions--assuming they can be bothered to read them at all. (Mind you, computers are maddening because they do follow instructions. To the letter--yea, even down to punctuation and whitespace.)

Yet, science fiction persists in creating computers with emotions. I understand the raw impulse to anthropomorphize our handiwork, to create things in our own image. It's a meme that's likely as old as storytelling itself, really. Witness Galatia, Pinocchio, Mechanical Turks, Vasilisa's doll, the "familiars" of many fairytale witches and wizards, Star Trek TNG's Data and his own creations Lol and the holodeck incarnation of Dr. Moriarty, and Star War's fussy and easily flustered C-3PO. That sort of thing.

What blows me away is that we, who live and work with computers, could possibly think that giving them emotions to make them "more like us" could be anything other than an egregiously baaaaad idea. You think the "'I'm a PC.' 'I'm a Mac" (and its considerably less family-friendly online variations) is bad when humans do it? Imagine the chaos if the machines themselves were capable of such tribalism. Or, worse, if UNIX splintered repeatedly with the same rancor as various religions have done over the centuries and millennia.

The essential problem is that computers would be capable of every human foible--only with a speed and efficiency orders of magnitude greater than our own. That's a sobering thought. Not because I think it's likely to happen, but because it brings us up short as we blunder our way through technological progress. Or at least it should, if we are in any way introspective. Best to account for (and amend) our own deficiencies as a species before we wish them on anything else.

"Sparkiness"

My favorite webcomic is Phil and Kaja Foglio's Girl Genius ("Adventure, Romance, Mad Science!"), which is a lovely gas-lamp themed melange of nuanced good and evil, love and loyalty, courage and destiny, and occasional bouts of pure silliness. Near-fatal doses of silliness. (If you click through to the link, it's even sillier than normal, being on holiday from the main storyline's arc.) The underlying premise of this steampunker's dream is that innovation is driven by "sparks," who are people with the ability to invent and--under duress--build nearly anything out of nearly anything.

I didn't realize it until tonight, but we're living among sparks here in the Coulee Region. The owner of the place where the La Crosse Programming Users Group meeting are currently held is one of them--the "poster child," as he joked tonight. (In case there is any ambiguity, yes, that is, indeed, a shameless plug for the LCPUG.) A big part of what makes Brian so amazing is how matter-of-fact, Point-A-to-Point-B his "sparkiness" is.

That's something I could definitely use more of in my day-to-day work. When you're the kind of programmer who deals directly with users, you sometimes start to get a bit paranoid, looking 'round corners. You try not to paint yourself into corners with overly-simplistic design assumptions. But sometimes it seems like the more blades and corkscrews and toothpicks and can-openers you put into the (software) Swiss Army Knife you're building, the more likely it is that someone--be it customer or management--will come along and say, "That's nice, but it doesn't have a cappuccino-maker. That's gonna be a deal-breaker, you know."

Now, I won't go whole-hog and declare myself a fan of Agile Programming. Why? Because I've had the joy of making that kind of code scale. As in: "Don't complicate things--we need to get this code into production. That'll never be anything other than a 1:1 relationship." Riiiiight. That being said, I strongly suspect that I am, via sheer cynicism, drifting too far toward the other end of the spectrum. And so I'm glad that my world is blessed with the species of spark who just gets stuck in without a lot of fuss and fanfare, and just *creates*.

A generation gap vignette

I had to search for the proverbial needle in a haystack of Visual Basic (a.k.a. "VB") legacy code this morning. It was one of the few times that being able to jump to a specific line number would have been really handy. But of course CTRL+G does something completely different in Microsoft's IDE.

I remarked to one of the slightly younger programmers how ironic it is that Visual Basic doesn't have a "GOTO line number" feature like the its ancestor, the Basic language of the TRS-80s and Apple IIs upon which I first learned to code. (That flavor of Basic lived and died by line numbers.)

The other programmer looked at me blankly, so I had to explain that, back-in-the-day, you couldn't just GOTO a named block of code; you had to jump to a specific line number. "But if the line number changed, you'd have to change all those GOTOs," he said, "That would suck." "Yes, yes it did," I replied.

It sucked almost as much as feeling that generation gap whack me upside the head. But I didn't mention that.

Unwelcome vocabulary-builder - not quite safe for work

An employee of "my" client apparently clicked the "Reply to All" button on an email today. There's no way of knowing that without reading the email, of course, so no one can call it eavesdropping. Without going into the specifics, I will mention something that disturbed me a bit, and that was the phrase "rolled off" used to describe someone's assignment being terminated.

I realize that being unemployed is far less dishonorable than it was a generation ago for the sad fact that it's more common. Career counselors cheerily inform us that we can expect to change careers something like three or four times...as if that's somehow good for anything other than broadening our perspectives. None of that, though, means that I'll ever like the euphemisms for booting someone out the door. Scott Adams riffed on this in one of his books that the term "downsizing" was sanitized to the more Orwellian "rightsizing," and we could shortly expect to hear it called "orgasmasizing."

When you think about it, it's not unlike the way we pussy-foot around the fact when someone dies. (Cue the obligatory George Carlin: "We lost him." [Looks around] "But he was just here a minute ago!") In both cases, the platitudes are designed for the survivors, if only to make them feel that they somehow earned what may well have been dumb luck. Me, I'd rather have it straight up, if only so I can take full credit for my own delusions. And I consider myself lucky that my relatives just "died," rather than "turning into angels" or "going to live with God." That was Mom's doing. Mom also gave me the straight (as in right between the eyeballs) dope on how babies are made. "Lucky" in retrospect anyway: Trust me, the "Eeeeeeewwww!!!" factor with the whole babies thing was pretty high when I was nine years old. I never looked at my second cousins in the same way again. (Which, come to think of it, may or may not have been the point. I'll probably never know.) But you understand where I'm coming from when I opine that it's better to just face the truth up front. Sure, you can outpace the truth for awhile. But when it does catch up with you, you can pretty much bet that you won't be any better for the running.

So let's call a spade a shovel. Most folks who are "let go" were probably not trying--consciously or subconsciously--to get away in the first place. I would guess that they are now trying to remember whether they put any major purchases on plastic in the last billing cycle. Or bracing themselves for telling their parents, friends and significant others, not to mention strangers who may hold the key to bringing in a steady paycheck once again. Or, when the panic has subsided, fighting off the sense of the world moving on without them.

And, while the unvarnished truth won't bring down the unemployment numbers--just as calling a dead person "dead" can't do them any good--it may help to stop desensitizing us to the loss of an income and the effects it has on someone's life.

Shopping trolls

I think I already mentioned how much I need to at least dabble another programming language that isn't merely a dialect of one I already know. So I've done a bit of window shopping here and there, reading blogs and by searching phrases like "Scala tutorial" or "Ruby on Rails introduction."

Yikes.

The internet-powered proliferation of programming languages may be a good thing in any number of respects, but I can't say that it's exactly improved the discourse--most of which boils down to "X rulz, Y droolz!" I'm serious. It makes me embarrassed to call myself a programmer when the "discussion" might as well be a booger-flicking contest.

Take this "shopping" out of the programming context for a second and imagine yourself at the mall food court, where the paper-hatted minions of McDonald's and Burger King are trash-talking each other. With bullhorns. Or, instead, maybe there's a cat-fight between the employees of The Limited vs. The Gap. Or more aptly, the shoppers from each store are the ones scrapping, while the habitues of Victoria's Secret stroll by, wearing superior smirks and pretending not to notice.

Weird, isn't it, that you'd rarely-to-never see that kind of behavior where non-software products are concerned. I'd say that I just don't understand it, except for a half-joking remark that one of my History profs. made: "We academics aren't paid all that well, so all we have is our egos." Given that many languages (and the tools to write code with them) are open source or at least an open standard, I can imagine that the ratio of ego gratification to wallet gratification is pretty steep, overall. Let's face it: No one can corner the market on a language any longer: If others aren't invented to fill its niche, clean-room implementations will be made.

Plus, it is no small feat to learn any language well enough to write and debug and augment non-trivial programs. That simple fact explains quite a bit of the tribalism, IMO. That and the fact that programmers are feeling the downward pressure on wages--thanks to abuse of the H1-B visa system, offshoring, and no shortage of naifs who think they can build their company's software infrastructure via rentacoder.com. Which lends a certain similarity to the pay-vs.-ego trade-off my professor described.

But for all that, it's still depressing, juvenile, and highly unproductive. Every language sucks in its own way, so there's plenty of room to pan them all on the merits of their own deficiencies. You can even be witty about it, viz. Eliot Rusty Harold's description of Groovy (quoted from memory): "...the blazing speed of GW-Basic, with all the sparkling clarity of Perl." That at least gives me an idea of where Groovy's "gotchas" might lurk.

Sigh. I'm cursing the darkness again. I know. Sometimes knowing that I know better doesn't stop me, though.

Idle wondering

How much overlap is there between the folks who want to put the proverbial stake through the heart of "antiquated" software like Windows XP or Internet Explorer 6 and those who are celebrating the 25th anniversary of Tetris this week? Just askin'...

Progress for breakfast

It's June in Wisconsin, which means that approximately 1/4 of the state's smaller cities are hosting their annual "Dairy Days" celebration this weekend. My husband and I made our first appearance at the Vernon County pancake breakfast, on the invitation of our "landlady," meaning the lady wife of the (theoretically) semi-retired farmer (we all know how that story goes...) who graciously allows us to keep our hives on their property.

Despite the cold wind driving the colder rain, they were packing 'em in to the huge tents. Five smacks bought you pancakes (naturally), sausages, fresh yogurt, orange juice, milk, cheese curds, string cheese, and coffee. (Aside to non-Wisconsinites: Cheese and coffee is a perfectly acceptable breakfast combination, yo.) The polka band was in full swing onstage, despite the rudeness of the weather. (Or maybe they just felt the need to keep the blood moving--can't say as I blame them.) A couple of young ladies in tiaras were making the rounds, and no doubt the local politicos and other movers and shakers were doing the same.

Normally, the sense of timelessness in the community pancake breakfast or county fair or ice cream social or what-have-you sort of awes me. Something about those gatherings unchains the sense of the years' flow, of the interlocking of generations. But this breakfast was different for one simple reason: Nearly everything on my plate or in my cup was organically farmed. Even the coffee was fair-trade, and roasted in Viroqua.

In other words, these people get it. That it's time to stop wasting our energies dreaming up ways to inflate bean counts to make this quarter's books look good. That it's ultimately more efficient do do good and do well at the same time (contrasted with the "robber baron" model of the Carnegies/Vanderbilts/Rockefellers/Morgans/et. al. trying to buy their way into Heaven after a lifetime of rapacious chicanery). And that, friends and bretheren, is the kind of shareholder value I can get behind. So you can bet that the 2010 pancake breakfast is on my calendar. Hope to see you there!

Frivolous Friday, 06.05.2009: Murphy's Law for Programmers

Just a small sample of the law's sub-clauses:

1. If your boss bought the office a book about it, it's already obsolete.
2. The backup tape you need the most is the one that's corrupted.
3. Hard drive crashes will occur immediately before a major source commit rather than immediately afterward.
4. The "WTF" code you just ranted about in front of your teammates will always turn out to be your own.
5. Bugs resulting from weekend rollouts lie dormant until Monday morning.
6. Any user granted the power to screw up data will.
7. Your duct-taped-together proof-of-concept demo. will be in production faster than you can say "Screenshot for a Marketing Power Point slide."
8. ... and you won't be informed until it corrupts the second client's production data with values you hard-coded for the first client.
9. There is a strong relationship between a salesperson's technical ignorance and her/his pretensions to software design.
10. Impending release dates are merely evolution's way of culling robust and forward-thinking features from the weak and sickly herd.
11. You say, "It looks like we'll make the target date." The Powers That Be hear: "We have time to add features."
12. No feature/fix should ever take very long...so far as the person delegating it is concerned.
13. Documenting code is not the same thing as writing code, and thus must be considered a drag on your productivity.
14. There is a direct correlation between the importance of an infrastructure/design/security/etc. decision and the amount of effort put into avoiding it.
15. Ultimately, these decisions will be made by the person or committee that possesses the least relevant information.
16. Management's favorite method for introducing new technologies is to hire someone who knows bupkis about your legacy infrastructure, but is beady-eyed and slavering over the latest programming fad.
17. The most promising result for your esoteric Google search was copyrighted five years ago, or links to Experts-Exchange.
    
18. The people responsible for your code's dependencies will always be too busy working on something else to fix the bugs you found.
19. The "cowboy" programmer with no consistency in style is actually "sourcing" code from the internet. This person will invariably be hailed as a miracle-working "genius."
20. The Richter-scale-registering sneeze will only come when your finger is on the F5 key. And you're logged into the production database.

Software and "the elevator pitch"

Lest anyone think that I prefer to trash-talk about open source and free software, here's something that applies equally--if not more so--to their proprietary cousin. In marketing, there's something called an "elevator pitch," which means a description of your product or service short enough to relate to a potential client in the course of a (short) elevator ride. If the client doesn't understand what, exactly, it is that you can do for them by the time the door opens at her/his floor, the pitch fails.

In my previous job, my company signed up for a developer partnership program with Microsoft. Which basically meant that they sent us a copy of darned near every bit of software they make. Or at least it sure seemed like it. And in case that wasn't enough encouragement for us to peddle their dope to our customers, we were also sent marketing materials. Let's just say that it was awfully tempting to take up skeet-shooting as box after box of CDs piled up in my office. Or--better still--to hang the shiny silver disks by fish line from the ceiling tiles, add multi-colored and ultraviolet lights, and redecorate in a disco theme. (Which, in retrospect, could have been really cool. For about a day.)

What made the whole thing so darned ridiculous, however, was the fact that I didn't know what even half the stuff was supposed to do. BizTalk Server. Commerce Server. SharePoint Server. Looking at Microsoft's current list of "server" offerings, those three look familiar. I can probably make educated, if somewhat vague, guesses at what these might do. But others? Antigen. Expression. Azure Services Platform. There's absolutely no way of knowing what you're supposed to accomplish by using them without further information. And that species of information, let me assure you, was not included in the heaps of prettily-packaged CDs. (Sometimes, without reading the fine print, I couldn't be sure that the CD in my hand was the actual software or its talking-points.)

Even for the deep pockets of Microsoft, that's a considerable waste of money--assuming that this program is still in force. Because not supplying the "what's in it for me?" kind of information is like neglecting to build the last ten feet of a bridge: It doesn't matter how much has already been invested, because it's useless. The two sides are not connecting--i.e. no communication is taking place. Why? Because mailing a box of digital mulligan stew cannot be dignified with the term communication. Most especially in what's allegedly a "partnership."

True, I can look up each software product/suite and have a reasonable chance of concluding whether it could A.) Lower our costs and/or B.) Increase our revenues. (And, in fairness to Microsoft, they seem to have improved their ability to summarize a product without competing for the gold in the Buzzword Bingo Olympics.) But at that point, Microsoft switching from "push" to "pull," just doesn't make sense. It's like trying to reel in the fish before you've set the hook. If I can't zen the value in what's being dangled in front of me (preferably in the equivalent of an elevator ride), why wouldn't I just swim on by?

I probably bang on about this too much, yet I can still find too many examples of the understanding gap between the people who make the software and the people it's intended to serve. Software companies throw so much money at the programming side and the marketing side, but the "bridge" so often seems to be left to build itself.

Last night's leftovers

Last night, I came home determined to make forward traction on re-writing a (Java) Swing form to that it is created (with a variable number of fields) on-the-fly based on an XML file. The idea is that the .class file would not have to be regenerated, re-JARed, and re-distributed as the underlying platform evolves. Only fixes (and of course the XML file) would need to be downloaded. That's what I'm trying to achieve in the proof-of-concept anyway.

The roadblock is my complete lack of experience parsing XML in Java--coupled with the fact that I haven't paid attention to that technology niche in many years. The decision to choose a DOM-based model vs. and event-driven model was pretty straightforward. Which means Xerces. Okay, great. I know that I can get download that from Apache--should be a no-brainer. But then I see it mentioned--in passing--that oh, by the way, that's been "bundled" with Java for the last couple of versions at least.

And that's where the annoyance really blossomed. I checked the 1.6 APIs, and those packages are mainly composed of interfaces, rather than classes. Interfaces, in Object-Oriented terminology, an interface is merely a pattern. You (or someone else) has to supply the actual cloth--i.e. the code--to make anything useful. Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) is quite similar in its preponderance of interfaces to classes. But the deal there is that you need a separate piece of code (known as the JDBC "driver") to actually work with a database. Which made me wonder whether I wasn't being misinformed. So there was some time wasted sorting that out.

Once it was established that yes, you could somehow parse XML in Java using Xerces without having to download anything extra (unless you absolutely must have the bleeding-edge version), it next became a question of where the heck do I look for it. Rather than pile everything including the proverbial kitchen sink into one steaming pile o' bytes, Sun--the folks who make the leading Java brand--splits the "extra" features off into separate files. Thees are called JAR (which stands for Java ARchive) files. However, knowing which JAR holds the code you need is the issue. Some--if not most--software development programs install with the bare-bones JARs, however, and you have to manually add in any extras. That was the second, and--as it turns out--the most time-wasting issue.

Because, frankly, trying to find this rubber-meets-road information suuuuuucks. You'd think that the people who invest such sweat into the code they want others to use would put a small fraction of that effort into making installation painless. But nooooo. At least not if half a dozen different Google searches can be counted as evidence of that.

I've forgotten where I read the usability adage, "If you can't click it after three beers, it's too small." But that makes a wonderful baseline for the usability of software in general. And I likewise think that if you can't find the software you want to install in fifteen minutes or less, is it really worth your time? And from the side of the software purveyor--free or not--do you really want your developer's first experience with your product to be one of frustration?

Writing and management

If you want people to do things "your" way, it is your responsibility to ensure that absolutely no one misunderstands

• What needs to be done
  
• Who needs to do it
• How--and, if applicable. where--it should optimally be done
• When it's due
• Why it needs to be done at all.

No excuses. You could learn that to pass an English class: Surely you can learn it when your management job depends on it.

That's all that really needs saying, I guess.

An odd contradiction

The office where I work (during the day, anyhow) sits atop a lighting/furniture store. The proprietors maintain a public restroom, and don't waste the real estate in any marketing sense. The mirror and mirror's lighting are regularly replaced and--like Minnie Pearl's trademark hat--they bear price tags. I availed myself of the facilities tonight when I realized that I had arrived downstairs before my husband was there to meet me. I don't recall the coat stand in the corner of the restroom having been there the last time I checked, but I had opportunity to appraise it (and its price tag)--by mere coincidence of placement, no doubt.

From a functional standpoint, I can understand why the coat stand uses so much faux wrought iron on the base which doubles as an umbrella stand: The mass lowers it center of gravity and thus makes it more stable. However, the problem is that I can't remember owning a "full-size" umbrella since...well...it was clear plastic and had Disney characters on it. That would have been about 1971 or 1972, and Mom's side of the family still called them "bumbershoots." I remember how thrilled I was to have a prop with which to "play grown-up"...until I opened it once, and pinched my finger but good: I was leery of umbrellas for years afterward--seriously. Which I suppose makes me a tad biased on the virtues of full-size umbrellas. And I can't recall seeing too many umbrellas that aren't double-jointed nowadays. So I surmise that the design is a deliberate throwback to the days of parasols and walking sticks.

From the window shopping I do on my way up to work, much of the furniture for sale has a decidedly "antique" bent, in style and/or fake weathering. "Antique" projects the air of stability--i.e. we have roots in this place--as well as the ability to recognize quality/craftsmanship--because we all know that no one makes anything like they used to--and the security in the correctness of one's taste necessary to defy the tyranny of fashion.

All of which, when you noodle it, is almost exactly 180 degrees off our attitude toward the gadgetry we like to flash. In that case, Heaven forfend that our toys be even one-point-nine-nine-nine-nine-etc. (Although, in fairness, there is more than a little "retro" cachet to the Commodore 64. But that's only in certain circles, none of which can be called "mainstream.")

Tonight's drive (or in my case today, ride) to the beehives that needed to be checked and re-arranged is a half-hour one way. So there was time to turn over that contrast in my head. Yet, despite that, I can't quite reconcile the dichotomy of those two value-systems. For all I know, Hegel himself might not be up to synthesizing this dialectic. Nevertheless, I think it's an interesting commentary on what people do with their disposable income. Particularly when they think that other people care.