Frivolous Friday, 07.31.2009: Brought to you by the Crazy Idea Factory

So, I'm sitting at Peaberry's on its final day of business, thinking that what La Crosse needs is not yet another coffee boutique, but a Kinkos that serves coffee, sandwiches and offers wireless access. Not the caffinated equivalent of a bar, with music too loud to hold a conversation, but a place set up with dampers (such as call center cube farms use) to keep you in your own bubble. Heck, if the real estate's cheap enough--which it should be for some years to come in a lot of markets--why not throw in the conference room version of Japanese capsule hotelling for those who want even more quiet?

I mean, how many startups are all-but-launched in a Starbucks or Caribou Coffee or other coffee shop? Someone needs to find right business model for startup incubators disguised as coffee/copy shops and run with it.

How not to generate new business, Part II of the T-Mobile version

Look, I'm not trying to carry on a vendetta. There are far too many better windmills at which to tilt. But you can hardly blame me for being distinctly unamused to discover that @TMobileDeals had decided to follow me after I posted last night's blow-by-blow account of how impossible T-Mobile made it to become a Sidekick Prepaid customer.

I can certainly understand deciding not to click the URL for the full rant. Don't think I don't know how tiresome I am when I'm ranting. But you'd think that the title alone would be a big tip-off. Apparently not. The "award winning customer service" strikes again...

How not to generate new business, the T-Mobile version

So, I had the unwelcome news that Sprint--they of the appalling customer service reputation--is buying out my prepaid mobile carrier, Virgin Mobile. Which would amount to survival of the fattest, except that Sprint's reputation seems to be catching up with them. Which in turn means that two companies, rather than one, will eventually crash and burn. Three, if you account for Helio being bought out by Virgin Mobile not so long ago. Go, capitalism. [wry look]

Thus, I'm in the market for alternatives. Tracfone's phones are decidedly un-sexy, even for frumpy ol' me. (a QWERTY keyboard, generous texting plan and web browsing are absolutely non-negotiable). T-Mobile looked somewhat promising, and a pre-paid plan to go with a cute little Sidekick phone seemed to fit the bill. (Scroll, if you will, to the bottom of this page to see that I'm not making this up. Yep, you see that it says "Unlimited domestic email, texting, IM and Web browsing" with $0.15/minute calling, right?)

Except that their website made it totally impossible to actually purchase a Sidekick plus a "Sidekick Prepaid" plan. Here, verbatim, is what I typed in their pre-chat questionnaire:

Why does this website make it so difficult to 1.) Buy a Sidekick and 2.) Sign up for the prepaid $1/day plan? The prepaid plans list that as an option, but nowhere do I find it, not even with the search feature.

When I pick the Sidekick and try to select a prepaid plan, the website just sends me in circles. I want a phone with a full QUERTY keyboard. I text and browse waaaay more than I talk. I'm looking for an alternative carrier now that (sucky) Sprint is buying Virgin Mobile.

Don't you think it would be a more viable business model to make it easy for me to send you money for a service I have come to value? Just askin'...

That generated a "no answer found" result, and gave me the opportunity to chat with a live representative. Except that this required a valid account number. Which I, as a prospective customer, don't have. Never mind that I'd selected "No" from the drop-down list in the pre-chat list that asked whether I am an existing customer.

The second time through the process, I faked it with my existing number and a bogus quartet of SSN digits. At the time of writing, I'm #80 in the queue. Ten minutes later, it's down to #60. At twenty minutes, I'm at #48. At thirty, I've clawed my way to 41st place. At forty, I'm averaging almost one place per minute, clocking in at #32. Fifty, I'm knocking on #26's doorbell. After a full hour, I'm 21st in line, and with that I lose my admittedly morbid curiosity to confirm that T-Mobile's [cough] "Award-winning customer service" is, in fact, a Darwin Award.

Mind you, I've been occasionally banging around the T-Mobile website the whole while, even going through the motions of pretending to add a Sidekick to my cart and running the advertised "$1/day" Sidekick plan to ground. No dice. It is simply not an option. I begin to suspect that I'm party to an experiment rather like the rat in a maze, except that there's no exit and the walls move like the trash compactor in Episode 4.

For the life of me, I can't remember the name of my Macroeconomics prof. from back in the tail end of the Reaganomics Decade--you know, the one engineered by the guy who just lost $13 million of his own money alone and barely escaped an SEC prosecution. Otherwise, I'd look her up and ask her to remind me again how capitalism is "the most efficient system for allocating goods and services."

Would you work for stickers?

After seven years on the high school and college speech and debate teams, it seems odd to remember that I had extra lessons in kindergarten, seeing a part-time speech trainer to correct the lisp I acquired by losing my two front teeth nearly simultaneously.

A sunny-tempered, individualistic child of six would not have worried overmuch about the lisp, at least not until too late. She was in it for the foil star-stickers placed beside her name in the grade-book if she made it through the lesson without a slip-up.

Obviously, people who work need to pay the bills. But beyond that, what motivates people is as different as the people themselves. No news flash there. That being said, why are fringe benefits too often served as a single Hobson's Choice happy meal, rather than a la carte?

Delegating upwards

Most folks already know this, but problems aren't created equal. Even problems that are--all other things being equal--equal really aren't. At least not in terms of getting themselves fixed. In a perfect world, we would just do the right thing out of hand. In a merely improved world, we would soberly weigh the cost-to-benefit ratio with a full accounting of human factors. But in this particular world it so often seems to boil down to who loses the most face by admitting the problem vs. who loses the most face when the problem becomes public knowledge.

In such cases, the surest way to fix a problem that you don't have the tools to fix is to make it the problem of someone who both does have those tools and who also has some skin in the proverbial game. (I can gratefully say that I've never had to work in a situation that's forced me to break something more thoroughly in order to guarantee that it's fixed.)

Finding ways to delegate problems up the food chain rather than downward is, I would argue, among the top ten problem-solving skills you'll ever learn. It's also a good cure for the folks who like to create cozy little sinecures by making themselves "indispensable" (and, inevitably, bottlenecks).

At work, three of the lynch-pin people are out for the whole week, which leaves our alpha-geek plus your faithful blogger to figure out what these folks "just know." And I will have to be out of the office most of Friday as well. I'm looking forward to seeing what procedural changes and mandatory cross-pollination/documentation will come of this.

Of loss-leaders leading to losing

One of the reasons I prefer to watch most movies on DVD is also one of the reasons I don't watch TV anymore: Commercials. But my husband and I are Harry Potter fans, so we dodged the crush of its pubescent fanbase by waiting until today to take in the series' sixth installment.

Now, I understand that TV can only be freely available because it's commercially sponsored. But the fact that my eyeballs being pimped to advertisers when I've paid for the content brasses me the heck off. As it should brass off any consumer. Sure, you can time your arrival and choose to skip the advertisements, at the cost of losing your shot at the best seats.

That and the perennially overpriced refreshments can't help but make me wonder if the movie itself isn't in fact what's called a loss-leader--i.e. a product/service deliberately priced at or below cost so as to generate traffic, and make up the difference on add-on sales.

Kindly humor me and assume I'm correct in that surmise, because I think there's a larger point to be made.

Okay, I understand that cinemas are facing stiff competition from DVDs and content on the internet. But, to my thinking at least, the proper response is to focus on emphasizing the added value--i.e. the social dimension of going to the movies--rather than setting up an environment where the patron darned near hears "CHA-CHING!!!" every time s/he walks through the door. If I want to feel like a wallet with legs, I'll go to a casino, thank you very little.

How about installing seats with arms that flip up for couples out on date night? How about club cards that give loyal customers first dibs on screenings of highly anticipated movies after so many swipes? How about pitching highly discounted Friday afternoon viewings to local businesses as performance incentive/reward programs? How about having the DVD of the original movie available for sale the sequel/prequel is being shown? How about "theme" showings (by no means an original idea on my part)?

The other route, of course, is to go a bit higher-end, which means not just showing any-old-garbage that the Hollywood factory cranks out. Granted, I'm a snob, but killing time by looking at the posters/displays for upcoming movies almost set off a facial tic at a couple of points. Oh, yeah, I'm gonna believe that some anorexic-looking chick can fire a fully automatic weapon in each hand and not be on her backside a second later when Newton's third law kicks in...riiiiiiight...

The reason I'm dispensing (completely unsolicited) advice to an industry about which I know next to nothing, is that once in a great while I do actually want to see a first-run movie on the big screen, and I'd rather prefer to preserve that option. So I'll be presumptuous enough to assume that the rest of America is like me in that they go to movies for one (or more) of four basic reasons:

1. Because other people are going, too (either as a group of friends or as part of a date)
2. Because the movie might actually be worth the time spent watching it
   
3. For the general ambiance (for historical/community-based theaters)
4. To kill time
   

$5 buckets of popcorn and blaring ads play into none of those motivations. Neither, in general, does being open at one in the afternoon on a Tuesday in the middle of winter.

I'm probably talking out of my ear here. But that doesn't contradict the fact that flat screen TVs are growing bigger all the time even as their cost shrinks. And for the price of two or three tickets, you can pick up the DVD. Not to mention that being mistress/master of the remote means that you can always rewind if some fool's cellphone (or mouth) goes off at the wrong time. Oh, and the popcorn from the kitchen is much cheaper even with real butter on it.

Even if this post is merely another manifestation of a typical American consumerist entitlement mentality, the central point stands: If you don't truly understand what it is you're selling, your business model is doomed.

Test anxiety in the real world

I discovered test anxiety later than most, the result of an infatuation with my own (highly over-rated) bookishness and relatively low hurdles. I paid for it early-on in college when faux-cleverness wasn't enough to compensate for lack of preparation. Sometimes--perhaps oftentimes--there's a rather sizeable difference between being clever and being prepared. So I have learned to hedge my bets by over-preparation. In the process, I've turned myself into a problem-solving automaton on Math tests and an oversized Pez dispenser of memorized minutiae on standardized tests. It works well enough for the "education" I'm paying for these days.

This week, the "education" was a little different.

Today's test involved two pages of multiple choice questions, one page of True/False questions, plus a few revolvers and a live ammo., courtesy of the La Crosse Gun Club's "Women on Target" handgun safety course. Apart from passing a driver's license exam, I've never taken a "test" that carried so much possibility for real-world mayhem. I'd used rifles for target-shooting twice before. But that was when I was twenty and immortal...as were those around me. Paintball was no help, as it carries the triple-assurance that the guns have safeties, barrel-guards and can't kill anyone. Worse, when we handled unloaded guns on Thursday night, I discovered that I'd picked up a baaaad habit from paintball, namely curling my finger reflexively around the trigger. That scared me.

In short, over-preparing wasn't an option, and neither was my competitive streak which drives it. Friday evening involved a certain amount of soul-searching, because the stakes were so high.

Fortunately, the folks who offer this training can and do over-prepare. Which makes it so much easier to stop freaking out and do what actually matters--namely shut up, listen, ask questions until the answers make sense, and, for pity's sake, focus.

All in all, it went rather well. I was twice reminded to keep my finger outside the trigger guard when I had the .22 pointed down in the "loaded but not yet firing" position. I found that I'm absolutely unfazed by the bang of a gun and its kickback, at least for .22s and .38 specials, and that the shockwave of a .44 magnum going off like small cannon next to me is only somewhat distracting.

But, of critical importance, absolutely no one was hurt, unless you count a few hammer-bites on the thumbs that are the wages of gripping a pistol too high. Although I can't help but think that those are almost a rite of passage, a form of symbolic scarification in a tribal initiation ceremony. ;-)

And it's all thanks to folks who make it as safe as possible to learn things that can't be learned any other way. Big ups to the La Crosse Rifle Club (and the NRA education programs that back them up) for that.

The takeaway from this, believe it or not, is not self-congratulation. While learning a modicum of gun safety can easily and literally be a matter of life or death, it's also probably moot because I'll likely stick to archery for target practice "therapy." No, the take-home is that Corporate America could learn quite a lot from the folks who hang out at the clubhouse out on North Chipmunk Road. Basically, there's only so much of practical use that can be picked up from schoolwork and seminars. The rest, particularly in I/T, is picked up on-the-fly. Hopefully you won't break production systems or whack live data while you're learning the useful stuff.

But the responsibility for setting up that "over-prepared" environment is definitely not that of the rank and file I/T folks. Sure, you can have every right to expect your people to be self-teaching (and I hope you'd have the great, good sense to fire anyone who walked in claiming to know it all). But if the only available "lab" is live systems, the fault for any mayhem rests directly on management. In other words, the folks who couldn't budget the money or person-hours to make it safe to learn from mistakes--much less the resources to rectify them before they become disasters. Bottom line: If those you count upon to be self-taught live in a perpetual state of test anxiety, you can kiss real problem-solving, not to mention any hope of innovation innovation, goodbye.

Frivolous Friday, 07.24.2009: If Shakespeare had been a Java programmer

import Mind;
import Armament;
import OutrageousFortune;
import Sling;
import Arrow;
import Trouble;

public class Hamlet()
{
   . . .

   private void soliloquy()
   {
       OutrageousFortune oF;
       Mind mind;
       Armament[] arms;
       Trouble[] sea;
      
       . . .
      
       if(!2b)
       {
           mind.suffer(oF.getSlings(), oF.getArrows());
       }
       else
       {
           for(int i : arms)
           {
               for(int j : sea)
               {
                   arms[i].takeUp(sea[j]);
               }
           }
       }
       return;
   }
  
   private class Mind
   {
       public String suffer(Sling[] slings, Arrow[] arrows)
       {
           System.out.println("Owwie.");
           return new String("nobler");
       }
   }
  
   public class Armament
   {
       public takeUp(Trouble[] sea)
       {
           for(int i : sea)
           {
               oppose(sea[i]);
           }           
           return;
       }
      
       private oppose(Trouble trouble)
       {
           trouble.end();
           System.out.println("Buh-bye...");
           return;
       }
   }   
}

Expanded grumbling

Just a quick follow-up to this afternoon's tweet-trashing of a computer program called SQL Data Examiner. For anyone who doesn't work with databases, the product allows you to synchronize data between databases (particularly on different servers), a process that would normally require writing impossible amounts of code with a significant risk of screwing up.

Synchronization failed a couple of times when I tried to copy the entire database (which included two tables with over seven hundred thousand records each). My workstation had been running for many, many days in a row, so I rebooted in hopes that this would free up memory. No dice, even when I tried synch'ing those tables individually. Attempting to copy the code generated by the utility (to run it directly on the destination database) caused the utility to crash before I could even view it. Allowing the utility to perform the synchronization eventually resulted in the program hanging (hogging the screen the whole while). The lockup probably means that I have incomplete and/or corrupted data on the target database, which is worse than the program crashing.

No other processes were reading from or writing to the destination database, so the FAIL rests squarely on the SQL Data Examiner product.

The reason I think that a grouchy tweet deserves to be upgraded to a post--other than the fact that I'm still brassed off and I don't suffer in silence--is that this, in a nutshell, is precisely what is wrong with software that styles itself "enterprise."

For tasters, the fact that Microsoft doesn't ship a utility like this with their database server product is inexcusable. That leaves the field to (relative) amateurs, and in this case "amateurs" translates to "rank posers." But that doesn't stop them from charging over $200 (with current Euro to dollar conversion rates) for a slow and rather unfriendly product. Sadly, this is not the only product in that space, and it is far from being the most expensive.

But I'd be willing to put up with slower performance, and possibly even a few of the painful quirks of the interface itself if it actually worked as advertised. Why? Because it's transferring data, for crying out loud. You know, the lifeblood of darned near any business. That's the working definition of "enterprise." Not faddish little iPhone gew-gaws. Not even mass-market personal computing applications. Maybe not launching the space shuttle or running a nuclear power plant. But there was a not-inconsiderable amount of billable time (mine) wasted today. And, in a shop that does these sorts of synchronizations all the time for development and testing, let me tell you--it adds up quickly.

And so I am highly unapologetic about trashing someone else's software. If it's classified as "enterprise" software, it should be held to higher standards of reliability. It doesn't have to be pretty; it doesn't have to be particularly intuitive, although that would be nice. But it does have to be darned near bulletproof, particularly when it comes anywhere client or internal data.

Giving "flower power" a whole new meaning

Something that made me go "hmmmm," courtesy of Guy Kawasaki's alltop.com website, was Toyota Motor Corporation's Prius promotion. The marketing involves solar-powered wi-fi hotspots (and laptop charging stations) touring the United States this summer, disguised as giant daisies.

Now, before I go loping any further into this post, I should point out that my work life for the past four years has been intimately bound with Toyota. Not so much lately, but that doesn't stop my boss from nicknaming me "Ms. Toyota."

It's public knowledge that auto sales are not faring well, and also that TMC is taking even slightly more of a beating than the market as a whole. Moreover, they weren't bailout beneficiaries like the Big Three. I can't put my finger on the reason, but something about those daisies set my antennae a-quiver, thinking that perhaps Toyota is dipping its feet into the waters of household--meaning off-the-grid--power-generating equipment.

As crazy as it may sound, it makes a certain amount of sense. There was a time--and for all I know it may still be that time--when Japanese corporations took a very long view of markets and macro-trends. I'm sorry to say that I haven't been paying enough attention to know whether that mentality survived "the lost decade." But if long-range thinking hasn't, in fact, gone by the wayside faster than a BetaMax copy of "Gung Ho," peak oil certainly has to factor into planning. If, by some miracle, emissions standards for coal are enforced, the associated energy costs will spike. That leaves natural gas and nuclear fission among the non-PC dinosaurs of the power industry.

Decentralizing and diversifying the power grid makes tremendous sense, particularly from the standpoint of redundancy. If the "smart grid" is hacked, the lights dim, but don't completely go out. Ditto for monopolistic Enron-esque chicanery--the kind that helped drive Grey Davis out of office. And smoothing out the spikes in natural gas prices can't be a bad thing, so that folks on fixed or low incomes aren't forced to choose between food/medication/etc. and just staying the heck warm.

Understand that I don't expect off-grid power to keep everyone's lights on 24/7/365, at least not within my lifetime. Yet, even as a purely supplemental supply, the potential for transformation should be quite pronounced. Once installed, household energy production is perceived as "free" (because any extra cost is wrapped into the mortgage or rent), which is a huge incentive to purchase leaner appliances, computers, lighting, entertainment devices, etc. Its effects may well leave a deep mark on the design of any structure: residential, manufacturing, office, retail, etc.

So, while eighteen-foot-tall daisies probably won't amount to more than splashy marketing in the near term, don't be at all surprised to see renewed interest--and, hopefully, capital investment--in household power generation. Perhaps Toyota won't be the company to push it...at least not under the Toyota name. Then again, who would have predicted that a guy who invented an automated loom would dabble in automobile manufacturing? That probably didn't make much sense at the time, either.

The cost of too many top priorities

You'd think that a recession--i.e. a real crisis--would make folks take a step back, draw a breath and triage priorities. But, if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, that's not at all the case, be it a recession or other "challenge," to use the tortured pidgin of Corporatespeak.

Case in point: Someone I know through work spent a significant chunk of time setting up a test cloud computing environment--time that could have been spent actually doing his job, which is keeping the I/T infrastructure humming along on a shorter-than-usual shoe string. Why? Because customers (and potential customers) for his company's SAAS ("Software as a Service") application insisted that it have more uptime than the company could support by hosting it on their own servers. Now, I know enough about the software in question to know that it is quite useful within its niche. But there is absolutely no way that it could be mistaken for "mission-critical." Bluntly put, the client's representative was inflating their fiefdom's--and thus their own--importance.

Now rewind, if you will, about ten years to the Y2K run-up. I was working as a tech. writer at a tech. company whose name you'd recognize. It took the Powers That Be until the middle of second quarter of 1999 to hand down the decree that we--meaning the documentation folks--shouldn't have to worry about being on call for New Year's Eve and Day. Which, to any rational person, should be a no-brainer, but that's what a company run by lawyers and bean-counters (in that order) will do. One of the graphics folks got big laughs at that announcement, mocking the Y2K doomsday scenario: "Somehow I just can't imagine someone calling tech. support: 'My computer doesn't work! I need art!'"

Bottom line: The "hard choices" that our "leaders" like to invoke during the tough times are really always with us. It is their job--to0 often abdicated--to set priorities. Insisting that "it's all critical" is one thing if you're launching a space shuttle or running a nuclear power plant, and even those have margins of error baked in. Anyone who cannot do that has no business managing her/himself, much less assuming any responsibility for the capital and livelihoods of other people.

Living your Greatest Hits

Yesterday I decided to invest in some new music for the workaday soundtrack, and spent most of the visit to the big box electronics store in the CD section. I'm still fighting my Top 40 wasteland upbringing in that I often have to make a conscious effort to look beyond the Greatest Hits of "established" artists--scolding myself that paying $8 - $15 for an album that sucks will not, in fact, bring the world to its end.

But, even with the pull of habitual frugality, the onset of middle age makes me view these "filtered" compilations with more than a little cynicism. It can be somewhat depressing, too, the way an entire career can be condensed. Viz: If most folks merely recognize your name and and maybe remember the refrains from a couple chart-toppers, your life's work fits on one CD. If you're a superstar, you'll have two.

But, in a sense, each of us is our own band, driving our parents nuts from the garage. And it doesn't matter, really, whether our venues ever grow beyond the garage-gigs. In the end, it's the Greatest Hits that we leave behind us. What did the fresh-faced kids show the old hands? What was the signature sound from the top of our game? How did we branch out...or did we just lose our way? Did we sell out, or was the love of the craft enough?

What will your Greatest Hits sound like? Because we're all playing, like it or not. And the tape is rolling, which is something I could do with remembering far more often.

Never underestimate the hive-mind

Believe it or not, this isn't actually about bees, even if it really is. If yesterday was largely spent on honey producers at the state level, today we were back to local, doing another turn at the "bee booth" at the county fair. Our shift ended about ninety minutes before closing time. I should have known better than to take our replacements at their word that we'd be packing up at six. By the time my husband and I returned at two minutes until six, everything had been packed up and folks were shooting the breeze before heading out. The hive-mind strikes again.

Yesterday's WHPA meeting was also a pretty solid demonstration of the power of small, committed groups--particularly as the meeting had to rescheduled on rather short notice. These people do so much with so little. Naturally, there's also the flip-side of that to deal with--namely the predictable small-group politics. All the same, I'm not convinced that it's possible to salary that kind of commitment and stretching of shoe-strings. I don't mean that rhetorically.

Which, if true, leads me to a similarly non-rhetorical question: How can we reasonably expect the carrot of a paycheck and/or the stick of unemployment to be the most efficient means of producing wealth? I'm not denying that it's "good enough." Obviously, it's served for millennia...when and where slavery hasn't been an option, anyway. Just don't try to tell me it's optimal, 'k?

The two faces of regulation

I must be attending too many meetings lately. I suspect this because I actually managed to refrain from banging my head on the table during a presentation this morning. My husband and I attended the summer meeting of the Wisconsin Honey Producers Association. Don't get me wrong: The presentations and reports themselves ran the gamut from competent to excellent. It was just so frustrating to watch my elders--in raw age as well as beekeeping experience--so oblivious to the irony they were wreaking.

Our guest speaker shared an anecdote about a honey producer losing his sole client (a grocery store) when a FDA (?) inspector decided to throw his or her weight around and informed the store that the honey had to be removed from the shelves because the producer's facilities--what we call a "honey house"--hadn't been inspected by any health agency. Talk quickly turned to other regulatory issues, up to and including the possibility of the Department of Homeland Security even sticking its nose into "our" business. I'll leave you to imagine the more heated tone this gave to the chatter.

On the heels of this, however, the talks turned to frustration with the FDA's foot-dragging on the issue of declaring a standard for what, exactly, constitutes honey, despite pressure from beekeeping and honey producing organizations. Later in the afternoon, the WHPA President informed us of how well the work to legally define honey for a voluntary certification program was working on the state level--with a commendation for how easy our bureaucrats were to work with.

So, the takeaway, in broad brush strokes, is: Regulation is bad. Except when we want it.

Now, you're probably wondering why honey needs to be legally defined when humans have been harvesting it for thousands of years. Simply put: As long as it isn't, anyone--domestic or foreign--can bottle a sweetener and call it "honey," at least under the status quo. And, of course, with agriculture department budgets being slashed at the state level, we all know how strict the enforcement will be for something that violates a non-existent standard. Without a standard, honey producers and consortiums don't even have a legal standing to sue for redress. That leaves the market wide open for anyone to (fraudulently) dump (cheap) flavored corn syrup or sugar syrup onto the market and put the producers of honest-to-pete honey out of business. The industry is already stressed, due to drug-resistant diseases and parasites, some of which may be feeding into the colony collapse disorder you've probably heard about.

What you need to understand, the next time you see honey bottles lined up on the supermarket shelf, is that not even half is produced in the United States. The figure I heard to day is between 30 - 40 percent. The balance is, of course, made up from imports. "Dumping" is already a problem, even without questions of standards.

I don't intend to exclusively knock China, because U.S. producers can just as easily engage in shady tactics. For instance: I could, if I wanted, "help" my bees through a dry spell (or cold and wet spell) by feeding them sugar syrup, which would make its way into the honey that's harvested later this summer. And, likely, no one would be the wiser. The real concern, however, is "adulteration" on the same level as melamine in baby formula, lead paint on toys, and deadly substitutes for glycerin. Only in this case, we're talking about banned anti-biotics (among other contaminants), and the problem has been recurring for over 11 years.

The point of this post is emphatically not to scare anyone away from their 1.1 pound annual dose of honey. If you feel in the slightest bit squeamish, the farmer's market or local co-op should be able to take care of you. Honestly, I don't have any skin in this game--at least not from a financial standpoint. My husband and I don't sell any of the honey our "ladykins" produce for us. It goes onto our toast and cereal, into custards and other baking, and replaces cane sugar in the fruit wines we make. Some, of course, goes straight into mead. ;-)

But I do eat foods made with honey, and in principle I just believe that you can't have a truly "free" choice in the marketplace without accurate information on the label. And I think that's a principle that that even the love child of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand could get behind.

Frivolous Friday, 07.17.2009: Have computers programmed people?

My first word processor was a DOS-based product called PC-Write, which ran off a 5.25" floppy drive (after you'd booted into DOS and removed that disk to insert the disk off which the application ran). It didn't support the (serial) mouse I acquired for my shiny new 8088, so I lived and died by key-combinations.

The one I used the most I learned the hard way--namely, CTRL + S. Because someone in one of the Schneider Hall PC labs bumped a cord and knocked an entire bank of PCs into segmentation fault. And there went my Econ 101 paper.

Not that CTRL + S saved me when my copy of PC-Write--I am not making this up--sucked most of my final project for History 402 into its Help files. The lab tech on duty was highly impressed ("Wow, I've never seen that happen before.") but otherwise unhelpful. I called my best friend (an MIS major) in panic. "Didn't you have a backup?" she asked, as if such an idea would, naturally, occur to a Liberal Arts major. My boyfriend (now husband) and I spent a goodly chunk of Spring break re-typing my work from the (mercifully fresh) dot-matrix printout that I had made for proofreading. I've since graduated from redundant floppies to key drives, but the important stuff still rides around in my backpack to this day.

I've been using tabbed browsing since the early part of the decade, when I chucked free IE and Netscape for payware Opera. I still catch myself using CTRL + T to spawn a new tab in my testing version of IE6. And, worse, in SQL Server Management Studio, which works about as well as CTRL + W does to close tabs in either application.

The Windows key plus the letter M doesn't work so well in Ubuntu either, although ALT + TAB does carry over from Windows (as I just now learned), as does the fabled three-fingered-salute.

Fortunately, CTRL + F, C and V seem to be almost universal, as does F1.

It's with no scant chagrin, then, that I realize that my fingers will probably be twitching in some key combination as my corpse goes into rigor mortis, most likely CTRL + END. Hmmm. Maybe the question is not so much how much I've been programmed as hard-wired...

A rant done right

About a decade ago, I encountered my boss just as he was reviewing his tax bill for the building in which we had our office. He was not in a good mood, because the rates were--if I recall correctly--about three times their residential equivalents. When he grumbled over the disparity, I said, "Well, people gotta have someplace to live; businesses are using property to make a buck." And he really didn't have an argument for that.

I remembered that conversation when I bumped into Why I (A/L)GPL (NSFW, btw) on the stopover at Cafe Au Lait during this morning's news crawl.

Normally, I'd prefer my blog posts to be more than a link and a "Yeah! What s/he said!" In this case, I'm not sure that I can add anything much from the standpoint of philosophical underpinnings.

However, it hits a nerve that maybe I and some other programmers (and self-styled hackers) don't share. That's because I more or less backed into programming by way of a History/English degree and a bit of professional writing. In the writing-for-humans universe, the penalties for plaguarism are steep. You can fail a class, be kicked out of school, be fired and seriously undermine a career by publishing someone else's work as if it were your own. That being said, understand that I have no problem sourcing code from the internet when I find an excellent example of what I'm trying to accomplish. But. When I adopt someone else's solution, you'd better believe that an attribution is included in the source code. (To be fair, I've known other programmers who do this as well; I've also just known others who don't.)

Yes, I'm quite aware that there's more than a little machismo wrapped up in coding--driven, I suspect, by the fetish our culture makes of innovation. And it's quite misplaced, IMO. C'mon: English majors don't have the same spitting matches over single-vs.-double quotation marks as programmers do over where to put the curly-braces. (In any case, writing instructions for humans is much harder than writing them for computers when you can't afford to be misinterpreted. Trust me--I've done both.)

But machismo is no excuse for taking credit for someone else's work. And it's even less of an excuse for making a buck off someone else's work and expecting to do so for free as a permanent business model. Of course software is expected to provide an income--or at least bragging rights--for those who make it (unless they choose anonymous altruism). But the same is true of writing. The New York Times can't troll the internet and copy and paste indie content into its own publication without attribution. I certainly can't hope to make bank from a seven-book series about a boy wizard and his two best friends fighting an evil enchanter. There's absolutely no reason that the plagiarism rules for source code should ever be any looser than for any other writing. Most especially--and I cannot hammer this enough--when it is done for profit.

"Take me to the Fair"

I'm probably biased, because La Crosse's Fair is comparable to the one I remember from my adolescence and early adulthood in Eau Claire. But I still think that ours is about the perfect size, with the perfect balance of exhibits, livestock, vendors and rides. If I didn't volunteer to staff the beekeepers' booth--in the dairy building--meaning the building where they sell ice cream and malts and root beer floats--and where you can also feel less guilty about the ice cream by stopping by to see the (educational) bees and buy locally-produced honey--yes, of course that is a shameless plug...

Ummm...so...yeah. Where was I going with that, again?

Oh, right. If I weren't staffing the bee-booth, I'd probably still come out to have my annual corn-dog and chocolate malt, and marvel at the boundless ingenuity humans have shown in combining starch and cooking oil. And for an occasional sense of timelessness in this event that seems to have its roots in both the trade fairs of the Middle Ages and the riot of color and revelry from the Venetian Carnivale. I've been to a couple themed "fests" in the Twin Cities and elsewhere, and the completely urban versions are lacking something. Which makes me pity the metro set in that regard.

If you're in the La Crosse vicinity, I'd recommend taking a couple hours of this weekend to appreciate the treasure that a smaller fair can be. You mostly won't find it on the midway, mind--it'll be in the exhibit halls and milling around the barns, on either side of the stalls: Younger folks in their best riding gear, old-timers catching up on the gossip in the shade, wide-eyed little ones coming eye-to-eye with critters that previously only existed in their Speak-n-Spells--that sort of thing.

Seriously--think about it. The weather's supposed to be cooler than normal; admission is free, and you don't have to walk far from the parking area to the gate. And, best of all, the bees can't go anywhere. ;-)

Moore's Law in the age of mobile computing

[For the benefit of non-technical readers: Moore's Law predicts, that the capacity of computer chips--the parts that do the "thinking" and short-term "remembering"--doubles approximately every two years.]

I was thinking about that today, and wondering whether CPU speed, in the main, will be so very critical in the coming decade as it has been in the last thirty years. Certainly, servers will continue to need every resource that can be thrown at them, particularly given the proliferation of virtual servers. Gamers probably won't complain of too-fast processors anytime soon, either. And you can never have too much memory, of course...

But as computing steps away from the office, replacing desktop with notebook, notebook with netbook, and netbook with phone/pda/entertainment chimeras, low power consumption may count for more than pure computing brawn.

Which leads straight to the question of batteries--their charge times, the number of times they can be recharged, the time it takes to refill them, and that sort of thing. After all, if we're relocating our "office" to the coffee shop or beach or what-have-you, why not make a day of it? The most bleeding edge CPU, after all, probably won't make a skinny latte's worth of difference.

Playing into the interval between recharges is of course solid-state memory breaking out of its original role for sneakernetting and cheap personal data backup. Solid state drives (SSDs) of course, don't carry the power-sucking overhead of moving parts, but it can take more time to find your data on flash memory than with a traditional hard drive. That its lag in total storage capacity will, IMO, be more of a concern than processing speed. Because, of course, our iPod Touch should have as much space as our classic iPod, yes?

Additionally, extra attention needs to be paid to the screens. Time was when a large CRT monitor could bogart nearly as much electricity as the 'fridge. That's changed quite a bit, but it's also another potential roadblock to mobile computing. Two cases in point: I like the brightness of the laptop I'm currently using, but it comes at the price of a two hour battery life. Similarly, the larger inner screen of my cellphone (think big, pretty, Christmas card postage stamp vs. the "Forever" ones you use to snail-mail the bills) will often drop a bar on the battery when I pop the phone open to use the QUERTY keyboard. Anecdotal, to be sure, but I think that most laptop owners would concur that slimming down monitors' power usage would likewise make them feel less tethered to an outlet.

I guess the bottom line is that the less time and attention we have to spend watching battery levels, the more natural mobile computing will become. Not to detract from AMD, Intel, etc., but pure number-crunching horsepower isn't central to that experience anymore. Of course, on the backend, it may well--and probably will--be. Naturally, we want those gadgets to connect to the internet and work with something like the responsiveness of a full-blown desktop. Why? Because that's what computers have trained us to expect.

Understand that I'm certainly not trivializing Moore's Law. For a trend to have held up forty-four years and counting is quite staggering, really, given how widely distributed and complex (and, sometimes, fickle) computer manufacturing has become since the 1960s. But my gut feeling is that its relevance is waning (in comparison to other considerations), even as the explosion of gadgetry has us taking our inner and interpersonal lives with us wherever we go.

Just sayin'...

If there's something more lame than being handed a laughably unrealistic deadline, it's being pressured to give it to yourself.

"Vesting" executive compensation

My husband had an interesting idea for combating the problem of CEOs (and their posses) looting the company while running the proverbial ship aground. The basic premise for a new "industry standard" is that the bulk of compensation--be it salary or stock options--is put into escrow. The shareholders and/or their representatives set a target average stock price that must be maintained for an given number of years before executives are allowed to touch the escrowed funds.

To this I would add that perhaps the notion of "vesting" would apply quite fittingly. The basic idea is to remove all or part of the incentive to artificially inflate a corporation's stock price or otherwise--shall we say--engage in fiscally unsustainable behavior.

Understand that this is not a call for regulation--although I'd find it impossible to feel sorry for the sad-sack suits on Wall Street--but rather a call to make vesting standard practice for the Fortune 1000 crowd.

After all, ESOP programs typically require vesting periods for "normal" employees. Why should the rules be any different for those at north end of the org. chart?

Thoughts on "training"

On this morning's supply run to B&B Honey Farm in Houston (MN), my husband and I caught part of the interview with Alan Bean and Andrew Chaiken about Apollo 12 and NASA's lunar missions. Mr. Bean--no relation to the Rowan Atkinson character--was quick to point out that although his title was "Pilot," he did not actually land the lunar module. He further noted that after the module had safely touched down, his partner (Charles Conrad, Jr.) said that the last 100 feet of descent had taken every bit of skill and training he had.

Later in the interview, the performance-under-pressure theme resurfaced in the recap of the nerve-wracking last-minute manual override landing that Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong had to perform. At that point I (finally) understood something that should have been obvious: The "peaceful," "scientific" lunar explorations were made by combat veterans and test pilots for a darned good reason. That reason being not so much the training, but the instinct to let the training take over when nothing is going right and everything is on the line.

The irony of that realization is that it didn't sink in (for me) until it was too late. An hour or two later we popped the top off the first hive, and the "Bzzzzzzzz!!!" that rose from within had an owly edge to it, an edge I recognized from years past, but never from this crew. But I brushed that thought aside, and continued fiddling with the brand-new smoker, which was leaking smoke from under the lid--and into my eyes.

We had just started to check the Queen's egg-laying pattern in the bottom-most of the two brood boxes when I felt the "Zaaaap!" above my right knee. She'd stung me right through my jeans, something none of them has ever done before. Which is also when an errant blast of smoke hit me square in the face.

What I should have done immediately is pump smoke into the vicinity (particularly where I'd been stung), so as to mask the bee pheromone that tells the other hive-defenders: "Hey! I found a vulnerable spot! Sting here!" What I did--beyond uttering one or two unprintable things--was to scoot off about five feet to check for a stinger, incidentally leaving my husband more or less in the lurch. He called, "You still have two after you: Better blow some smoke around yourself." So I did, and plenty more besides as we reassembled the hive that should have been left alone today.

The palm-sized spread of crabby-looking, lotion-slathered skin above my kneecap is the wages of ignoring the "training" I've been given by generations of honeybees since 2003. And it also made me think that, of all the "training" that I and Wisconsin/Minnesota/US taxpayers have purchased for my benefit, perhaps only Math matches the "real world." On Math tests, you're rarely asked to spit out memorized facts or to compare and contrast anything or to critique an algorithm. No, you're given a limited amount of time and a limited amount of information (and a limited amount of work area) in which to construct a solution according to accepted sound principles. Which sounds remarkably like problem-solving on any given workday.

Now, I won't claim to know whether or not it's possible to make the tests/quizzes for other subjects quite so anxiety-inducing as Math tests can be. But I do know that, while I'm doing well if I remember to use the first derivative on maximum/minimum optimization problems (because I don't do that for a living), and I certainly don't remember how to use the law of Sines or the law of Cosines to figure out missing angles, I do know how to keep a lid on test anxiety for any certification test I may take during my career. That's training. The rest is stuff I can look up.

Frivolous Friday, 07.10.2009: If timesheets were honest

One pitfall of working in a firm whose business model basically amounts to "renting out brains" is the weekly ritual of the timesheet. Now, I don't care how productive you actually are, the account of your doings can only fall into the category of fiction known as "based on a true story." How truly autobiographical it is, is of course, left to the individual author. But I suspect that, if we were allowed to speak truth to HR, entries might look something like:

• Humored the office's "hermit-crab" programmer with a lengthy discussion of the continuity errors between the first three "Star Wars" movies and the prequels.
  
• Goofed off on Facebook/Twitter/Myspace/etc. waiting for The Powers That Be to finish their meeting so that I could start the meeting that I was supposed to have with my boss. Twenty minutes ago.
• Filed documents--documents that really should stay at my fingertips just now--to look busy for the last half hour of the week when nothing I start will be remotely recognizable on Monday.
• Goofed off on Slashdot/TechCrunch/CNet/Ars Technica/Tech Tribe/etc. waiting for the control freak project lead to return from lunch and bless the code before it's committed (not merged!).
  
• Trolled the network share, my hard drive, and even spelunked Deleted Items for the code I was told to "forget" months ago because the office prima-donna was "already working on something like that." Until s/he quit, anyway.
• Goofed off via IM while pretending to be taking notes during a meeting which is a the same meeting we always have when no one wants to tell the product manager that boiling the ocean is not a viable business model.
• Rewrote a proposal (again!) to demonstrate to the client that no matter how we rearrange the line items, their total cost stays the same.
• Goofed off by playing "The six degrees of Kevin Bacon" in my head while stuck in mandatory training sessions that honest-to-Pete do not apply to anything I do or will ever do.
  
• Squandered no trifling amount of energy and morale squashing the Sales Dept's pretensions to software design b/c there's neither budget nor room in the schedule.
  

Adventures in micro-development

The alpha-most Alpha Geek informed me that the silver bullet software that was supposed to replace my adopted home-brew project won't, after all, do all it was expected to do. The good news is that I have a non-trivial project (rewriting a small website in PHP) on which to hone some new skills. The bad news is that I will be doing it on my own time for the privilege of doing it "my" way. The worse news is that I have about two months, and this summer is crowded.

So I'm embarking on an experiment in coding. Basically, I'm coming in half an hour "early" (so as to log my sacred 40 hours) and spending the last half-hour of each day (when the office is relatively deserted) on the project.

The basic idea--taking a page from 37Signals' playbook--is that the daily ration of 1800 seconds for the project will force me to focus in a way that the much more generous 28,800 does not. Granted, those 1800 seconds come at the end of a full work day. Then again, only a rock star or a vampire would consider me a "morning person." Maybe.

For me at least, this should be an interesting exercise. As I understand it, one of the co-founders of Hotmail worked on the project for only an hour every night, so there is precedent of sorts for this work style. I'll report back at least once on the success/failure of this venture, in case such anecdotal information could be useful to others.

Documentation Elves

I realized today why I'm glad I left technical writing, at least as a full-time gig. I actually enjoy it as a break from coding and project management. But the simple, sad fact is that documentation is expected to be part of the package. And consumers have been well-trained to conflate "part of the package" with "free."

You know, as in: "Buy a set of Ginsu knives, and we'll send you The Juicer, absolutely free!!!"

(Ummm, no. The "low, low price" of said Ginsu knives was actually jacked up a skosh to cover the Juicer. But shouting simple logic at the TV screen doesn't seem to convince the mountebank shilling cheap kitchenware. Funny, that.)

The external (i.e. the consumer's) perception of "free" tends to drive down the internal (i.e. the producer's) perception of the value. Thus, though gathering all the information for documentation, organizing it, and publishing it in usable form is one heck of a lot of work, it's somehow supposed to magically happen within an organization. Like the Documentation Elves left it in the package or something.

Intellectually, most of us who aren't in upper management realize that there are no such things as Documentation Elves. But oftentimes, just knowing something on an intellectual level doesn't seem to make much of a dent in the perceptions we carry around with us. And documentation is just one of those things.

Monetizing behavioral data in Web 2.0

I'm not ashamed to admit that I've been blindsided. Via the Twitter-stream, I caught a whiff of a founder's debate over whether or not to open source one of their projects, which in turn led to a description of their newest business venture.

But let's begin at the beginning. Fog Creek Software co-founder Joel Spolsky had--and to a degree still has--a rather diverse set of forums on his blog, Joel on Software. In my Sys. Admin. days, it was a decent place to hang out when I had nothing better to do during backups and such. In fact, two of my Facebook peeps are JOS alumni. That's not to say that things didn't go a little crazy every so often. For instance, I remember when the moderators threw out one of their own, and the lopsided food-fight that ensued. And I remember Mr. Spolsky closing down one of the forums because it was too troublesome. But the JOS forum universe was generally a good place to toss around ideas...or to just plain waste time.

We've probably all witnessed how a single person can poison an online community and how more than one troll can even kill it. Mr. Spolsky mused on various technological and sociological workarounds for this problem, both via his blog and in tandem with Jeff Atwood, (lately his partner for StackOverflow) on their weekly podcast of the same name.

StackOverflow.com is a "free" alternative to paid question-answer sites like Experts Exchange. As I see it, it is also Spolsky and Atwood's leveraging of their follower base, as well as the leveraging of the lessons of the JOS forums. The lessons of StackOverflow, are in turn being leveraged in the pay-for-play StackExchange web application. StackExchange is a version of StackOverflow meant for other, possibly non-technical audiences. Without knowing anything beyond what's on the website, it sounds suspiciously like an attempt to revive the concept of knowledge management software, with the value-add being that the "bugs" of human interaction have largely been worked out.

I'm not discounting the value of single data points--what Twitter terms are trending, what Facebook groups draw the most members, how often does the tag "peanut butter" coincide with the tag "jelly," etc. But the fuzzier data (such as what conditions trigger an online community to splinter, or which techniques are best for IPM'ing trolls, comment-spammers and similar scum) may be more valuable in the long run. That's something that the Stack Overflow founders seem to think is the "monetizeable" part of Web 2.0.

I'll definitely give them both credit for long tail thinking. But if thinking about MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc. just made you feel like a lab rat, you have me for company in that.

Oh yeah, and what happened to my free toaster?

Heads-up: You're staring down the business end of a cranky-old-fogey-type rant. Don't say you weren't warned.

I'm certainly old enough to remember when I could access my own friggin' money via a cash machine without having to think about whether the bank will ding me for exceeding their meagre and arbitrary "limit" of monthly transactions. (Heck, I'm even old enough to remember a time when banks paid 4% interest on garden-variety savings accounts--as opposed to not-quite- zero-point-four percent.)

But, in this day, my paycheck does not even pass through my hands on its way to my account. Similarly, many of the checks I write are not even physically routed through the credit union. The only time I interact with a human teller is when I need traveler's checks or foreign currency or something else out of the ordinary. I realize that ATMs aren't free. But people and branches are far more expensive to keep. So I'd like to know how banks rationalize charging their so-called "valued customers" extra for the privilege of reducing their overhead. Good grief--if I'd kept my first cash machine card around, it'd be old enough to buy its own beer. It's not like there's any novelty factor left, folks.

It's interesting, though, that places like gas stations and grocery stores have become defacto ATMs by asking whether you want cash over an above your purchase. I figure that not only does it save me from being nicked for about ten percent of what I'd normally withdraw (not being one for cash), it also saves me the extra stop at the cash machine.

Which, for the bank means one less interaction with a customer. Which, for the bean-counters, is one less "transaction cost." For the marketing department, however, it's one less chance to imprint the "brand" upon the customer. And for the overall institution, it is one less opportunity to delight with stellar customer service. Which is tragically short-sighted. Because FDIC insured deposits take away any competitive advantage of a reputation for "security." ATMs and internet banking take away much of the face-to-face interaction that was part of a bank's character. The only thing left to compete on is price, and grocery stores are effectively giving their customers a free pass to their own money. It's pretty tough to compete with free, but banking--much like insurance--is not exactly known for being bleeding-edge innovative.

So, as much as folks are banging on about the demise of newspapers and magazines, I have to wonder whether banks--at least the local brick and mortar variety--won't be next in line for adaptation so radical that it will be almost impossible to recognize them.

In all seriousness, I do not want to revert to the days when you couldn't buy a house without putting up roughly half of the money up front. Or where only people who didn't really need them qualified for credit cards. I agree whole-heartedly with Muhammed Yunus that access to credit is a fundamental human right. And I don't want the access to come via the friendly neighborhood loan shark.

But I am also tired of people sitting on the money I earn, high-handedly dictating the terms under which I can access it, while the whole time using it to make money for themselves. Something broke in the last thirty years or so. We can debate for days whether the free market itself or lopsided deregulation or what-have-you or some combination thereof is to blame. In the end it won't matter. Evolution in finance doesn't care. Money will always follow value--something that banks or credit unions don't seem to be doing much business in anymore.

An embarrassing bit of irony

It will be a few years before I make it to Italy, particularly Venice. Which is actually a mercy, as I neither read nor speak Italian, and that will take some time to pick up. Additionally, for all I've studied the history of the city--I come back to Norwich's classic ever several years for a refresher--my sense of what's where is muddled at best.

To correct the latter problem, I picked up James McGregor's Venice from the Ground Up plus a city map, preparing to stick the push-pins of History onto the canvas of the modern city. What a disappointment! I would have done better to reach for a Rick Steve's guidebook and work from there. McGregor positively obsesses over the minutiae of architecture. And--far worse--he uses that as the thread that binds the locales he describes jumping from palazzo to palazzo with no more pretext than their facades. The result is an absolute mess for anyone who needs to figure out the major landmarks, and who would--with a few glaring exceptions--rather prefer to dodge the dumbed-down touristy parts without the risk taking a wrong turn and stepping into a canal by mistake.

I finished that yesterday, which was a quiet Fourth due to my husband feeling under the weather for most of the day. Last night I started on the presentation I'm giving Thursday on Mantis (an open-source bug-tracking web application.) When I picked up the presentation today, I was quite chagrined to realize how bogged down in minutiae I had already become, and how far I'd strayed from the basic question(s) of what problem was being solved, what were the constraints, and why was this an optimal solution.

Sigh.

A non-post

Whoops--should'a mentioned yesterday evening that there are no posts for Independence Day. But, ya'll probably figured that anyway... Happy Fourth, folks!

User-centered design...with a twist

The name Zaccaria Briani is one you likely won't find in any Who's Who of architects. Yet when a wealthy city comissioned a prestigious architect to replace an existing structure, those who ranked among the most powerful in government insisted that the architect consult Briani.

The resulting structure was not a showpiece by any means. However, it was not only a huge improvement on its predecessor, it was also vastly ahead of its time in terms of lighting, ventilation, exercise facilities, and even plumbing.

The expertise that Briani brought to his consulting gig was the bare fact that he carried a life sentence in Venice's prison system. The "new prison," or "Prigione Nuovo" in the Venetian dialect--the product of his collaboration with Antonio da Ponte (of Rialto bridge fame)--was completed in the year 1614.

Source: "Venice from the Ground Up," by James H.S. McGregor, Cambridge MA:2006, pp. 226-227.

The last throes of an organization

I really should throw in the towel on higher education. After all, why pay someone to make you smarter, when there's plenty of money to be made from stupid? Not only is the American Society of Composers, Authors and Performers (ASCAP) stupid enough to think that they can shake down mobile carriers for ringtone "performance" royalties, some were apparently even paying it.

Don't get me wrong: I fully understand that the ASCAP is functioning like a court-appointed defense attorney who is professionally obligated to bend whatever testimony and procedure can be bent in her clients' interests. However, IIRC, these were the scumbags who tried suing the Girl Scouts for royalties on campfire tunes. [Consults with Almighty Google] Yep, I was right. (Wow, it doesn't seem like it's been that long...)

Anyhoo.

But here's what. The ASCAP's stupidity lies not in the fact that it's picking this battle, but rather that that it's declared war on the entity that should be its ally. Currently, the mobile carriers are licensing the music from the record companies, rather than individual artists. The ASCAP should, ultimately, be working to cut the record companies out of the deal. It should be scoping out the indie bands--combing YouTube, Viddler, iTunes, et. al.--and working to bring content from those artists directly to ringtone, even to the point of putting itself into the ringtone market.

Sure, it'll be an uphill climb. But the only other road leads to extinction. Why? Because the financial barriers to entry have dropped to almost nothing.

To put things in perspective: Elvis Presley paid four bucks--which was a lot of money for many eighteen-year-olds in 1953--to make one single record. Maybe a few dozen people could listen to it at any given time...at least until the vinyl wore out. Nowadays, for a few hundred bucks (between computer, internet connection, and a halfway decent webcam), a performance can, theoretically, hit the eyeballs of millions of people within a few hours.

Case in point: When Joss Whedon (of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," etc. fame) released the self-produced, self-financed mini-musical "Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog" last year, his servers crumbled under the onslaught of downloads. I know: I couldn't watch it until after the dust from the initial stampede had settled. How did I find out about it? Word of mouth. Actually, no. Word of email, actually. From someone halfway across the continent.

Now, granted, Mr. Whedon had already made his reputation within the entertainment infrastructure. (But, for all we know, he may be giving the bird to the ninnyhammers who grossly underfunded "Firefly" before unceremoniously yanking it off the airwaves.) So did Prince, who's been self-produced (and taking home a significantly higher share of the profits) since he broke with Warner Brothers in 2001. The point is, however, that fifty-five years of technology makes more than a little bit of difference. Oh, yeah: And I'm still hoping that J. Michael Stracynski ("Babylon 5") does the same thing to flip off Ted Turner for what TNT did to "Crusade."

Ultimately, YouTube and its ilk and even marginally professional personal websites will do more damage to the entertainment industry than Napster, Pirate Bay, et. al. ever dreamed of doing. And not through piracy, either. But because enough talented people put in enough sweat equity backed by enough technical and marketing savvy to make a serious dent in the market for synthetic content. I won't call myself much of a music-lover, but I'm down with that. Not least of all if it keeps the next Britney or The Spice Girls off the airwaves.

Mind you, the middlemen, the gatekeepers, and self-appointed taste-makers will not be entirely cut out. There are too many people with more talent than actual dedication out there, after all. But the playing field has been globalized as well as made more level. Sure, your music video's chances of going viral are probably slim to none after you first toss it out onto the interwebs. But. You have the tools to lead people to your work. (Please use them respectfully and politely!) Better yet, you don't have to move to LA. You don't have to pay anyone to "represent" you...and hope that they take your calls once in awhile. And, for Pete's sake, you double-dog-don't have to be "vetted" by some "Oh by the way, which one's 'Pink'?" suit who wouldn't know The Jonas Brothers from The Mills Brothers from The Bacon Brothers from the Bellamy Brothers (or, for that matter, from The Pointer Sisters, The Mamas and the Papas or even Sly and the Family Stone).

And when the revolution engendered by Web. 2.0 itself "goes viral," it's Game Over for the likes of ASCAP. They'll be like the John Birch Society after the fall of the Berlin Wall--a.k.a. the textbook definiton of "lame." Personally, I'm too cheap--and, let's face it, too mortally un-hip--to pay for a ringtone m'self. But the larger issues do touch on the things I care about. Rather passionately, in some cases. And, in that wider perspective, I frankly don't see any other accolade than a Darwin Award for folks like the ASCAP. And when I see the screen door print on their backsides posted on Flickr, I'll call this soggy little marble we share an ever-so-slightly better world.

Be careful what you wish for, the employer version

* If you wish that your people would care about your clients/customers, don't penalize them for going to bat, much less going to the mat for them in bad times.

* If you wish that your people would "think outside the box," don't put them in fabric colored boxes and boxes on org-charts and otherwise corral them via the martinets and gate-keepers that infest any workplace that's even slightly less than cutting-edge.

* If you wish that your people were more entrepreneurial/innovative, don't hand them a four-inch binder of Policies and Procedures. And for cryin' in yer beer, keep upper management and legal in the dark as long as humanly possible.

* If you wish that your people would think as if they ran the business, let them. Or at least open the books up to scrutiny so that anyone with basic Algebra skills can follow the money trail.

* If you wish that departments would cross-pollinate, fire the empire-builders and promote people from outside each department. Repeat as needed every so often.

* If you wish that your people would do a better job of communicating, check your ego at the door, shut up and listen.

Sheesh. I shouldn't have to be writing this. I mean, it's not like I'm some management savant, after all. I'm certainly self-directing. But I know my limitations when it comes to having to keep tabs on other people. I suck at that, truth be told.

But I am also So. Bloody. Tired. of the spiels--actually, make that the same spiel ad nauseum--about how global delivery--a euphemism for off-shoring in my circles--will change everything. Why? Because I know too darned well that management imagines that globalization magically stops at the middle management tier. Which basically means that expecting flunkies to morph into the satraps of your "colonials" in Taiwan, Eastern Europe, Russia or India is a doomed proposition. Simply put: You can't expect people to think (much less act) like managers if you continue to treat them like first-line employees. Something has to give, and that "something" needs to be the authority that goes with responsibility. Or you've just added another layer of inertia to your company.

Because to the flunkies who live outside the management bubble, it's the usual game of the company trying to have it both ways. E.g., be on call all weekend, work from home during parental leave, but don't even think about putting that internet connection to non-business use. Of course, I flatter myself that I'm adult enough to know that what people want, what they think they want, and what they say they want are typically three different things. (And management critters are people, just more brainwashed by B-school codswallop.) Lamentably, evolution in our species doesn't seem to select for self-awareness any more than it selects for, say, proficiency in Twister.