Advice for new programmers: The art of "change management"

(In case that it's not immediately obvious a couple seconds from now, there's a whole lot o' sarcasm going down here.)

1. First and most importantly, make sure you're the programmer who complains most loudly about the existing system being a "waste of time," with the "proof" being your passive-aggressive, obstructionist "use" of it.
2. While you're at it, also make sure that, were it a contest, you'd be voted "Programmer Least Likely to Comment Her/His Code."
3. After considering exactly zero input from your co-workers, find a tool on the internet that seems to best suit your notion of "How things should be done around here."
4. Install it on the local network.
5. For pete's sake, don't actually test it!
6. Create user accounts for everyone.
7. Set the software to spam everyone every time you do something that "involves" their account.
8. With neither heads-up nor--perish the thought!--documentation, launch the software in prime-time.
9. Sit back and watch your co-workers drop everything to help your project succeed.

(Okay, seriously now.) The takeaway for both programmers and non-programmers: It's not the technology that matters, it's the underlying real-world relationships modeled by the technology in question. If you've spent years blowing off those relationships...well...don't be surprised if the Field of Dreams premise doesn't quite work out.

Frivolous Friday, 10.30.2009: Ghosts

As much as I enjoy the frivolity of Halloween, it takes on a serious side after the doorbell has ceased to chime and I'm already thoroughly sick of waxy chocolate spray-painted onto over-sugared goop. Historically, though, Halloween is the night to remember and make welcome the spirits of our dearest among the departed.

But tonight is not All Hallows Eve. And it's Frivolous Friday to boot, so I'm memorializing the bits of geekhood that have been lost to me in the stampede to our information auto-firehosing, there's-an-app.-for-that, hyper-friended present.

• Pong. No, I'm serious. Technically, the first--and last--"computer" game I ever played with any alacrity. Yes, I know you can play it on cellphones, but sometimes you can't go home again. This is one of those times.
  
• The BASIC programming language. At one time, I seriously thought that I could, theoretically, fire up any computer in the world and start coding in BASIC. (This, not coincidentally, was also the last time I ever thought that it was possible to know everything there was to know about computers.)
• The ability to make fun of other people's music by playing a 33 RPM album at 45 (or 78, if you had the really old-school "phonograph" like my parents did).
• For that matter, playing a vinyl record backwards, mocking the idea that you'd hear Communist and/or Satanic propaganda.
• The cultural meme that programmers were too smart, too freakishly creative to have their jobs offshored to people who are treated like interchangeable code monkeys.
  
• Swapping cassettes with a friend without worrying that s/he would run into DRM issues (or you'd have the RIAA goons kicking your door down in the wee hours like the Soviet KGB).
• Being able to watch a movie in the comfortable knowledge that only the spaceships and laser-bolts and light-sabres were CGI'd.
• The handy supply of doodling paper Mom brought home from her job as a punchcard operator.
• Being scolded for wasting time writing a few dozen PRINT statements to make an ASCII art Christmas tree on the 6" wide silver roll-paper the TRS-80 printers used. (Use * for the foliage, | for the trunk and @ for the ornaments.)
• A culture where pornography was opt-in. 'Nuff said.

Granted, there are many, many more things I don't actually miss, but technology-wise, I consider the tradeoffs a big ol' net win. But nostalgia is nostalgia. And no better time for it than the time of year when our private ghosts leave their finger-tracks through the dust of intervening years, revealing how much of our past selves they have taken with them into whatever waits for us all.

The revenge of talent

No doubt I already spend too much time on the internet, but I nevertheless managed to miss Dave Carroll's rise to internet celebrity status. You can read the full backstory in the Toronto Star's United loses luggage of "United Breaks Guitars" guy. Oh, and the video the article links to is worth its four minutes for the humor alone, not to mention the band's talent.

While you're watching the video (should you decide to watch it), understand that you're staring into the eyeballs of a sea change in corporate public relations. Yeah, there's a whole lot of noise out there, and there will be more all the time as Google (the owner of YouTube) and its competitors bring more servers online every hour. But talent wins. Talent with humor wins bigger. Because we not only like to laugh, but we also like to make other people laugh, and forwarding an internet video's URL is almost as frictionless as it gets for doing that.

Major props to Mr. Carroll and crew for their most entertaining revenge. Not least of all because it actually turned into a net win career-wise. But in the larger scheme, it forced a big, faceless corporation to notice someone it would have been able to scrape off the bottoms of its shoes in a pre-web world.

So rock on, Dave Carroll...however that translates in the country music world.

Situational Luddism

Personally, I have a pretty strong independent streak, so the time-worn adage "Take in laundry before you take in partners" probably makes more sense to me than it does to others. But the whole point of partners (or, rather, their money, which you don't have ready to hand) is that they are effectively outsourcing their work ethic and judgement to you. In short, it's delayed gratification with interest.

In the long term, being a Luddite doesn't make sense. Then again, just because something's powered by machinery doesn't necessarily make it superior to what humans can do. Buying and selling the same stock within seconds--if, indeed, it actually takes that long--strikes me as one of those cases. The chiefest reason being that it doesn't make any sense from the standpoint of management...and partners are ultimately managers.

Admittedly, it's not an original management principle--in fact, I'm shamelessly stealing it wholesale from Joel Spolsky's Joel on Software blog. But the central idea is this: When you establish metrics, people (and in this case whole companies) will work toward those metrics--but the metrics are in fact only a sliver of what you actually want to accomplish. To illustrate: You want your call center to be more "productive," and you define that as the number of calls taken per caller per hour. So you establish rewards and punishments based upon the metric of calls/hour. Congratulations: You've just incentivized (to used management-speak) your phone-jock minions to hang up on your customers. Moron.

The one thing you need to understand about the buy/sell decisions of stock trades measured in microseconds is that computer programs--a.k.a. the algorithms--are just metrics. Ham fisted metrics. Why? Because algorithms can only model so much human behavior. Or, more to the point, so many possible outcomes. If you don't believe me, snag a Computer Science graduate and have her/him explain, say, the classic "Traveling Salesman" problem to you. It's an eye-opener regarding what algorithms can and can't do. Then throw in the tendency of options-compensated CEOs to cook the books, and you'll have as much faith in the base numbers as you should in sports records in the age of steroids.

So, in the meantime, I trust that you'll forgive me for not mistaking trades driven by algorithms as a functional substitute for actual investment guidance. Because so far as I'm concerned, that ain't capitalism. And, moreover, it's not something I'll gamble my golden years on.

Instructor, teach thyself

This certainly isn't an original thought, but there's nothing like having to teach something to other people to force you to learn it. I'll be the first to admit that my business card should bear the title "Professional Dilettante," and the programming facet of my life is no exception. Too many times, adding a new trick to my bag works something like this:

1. Find code that does something similar (either from the work repository or the internet).
2. Copy and paste.
3. Tweak until I break it so badly that I have to learn just enough to un-break it.
4. Convince myself that I actually know what I'm doing.

Then comes the moment of truth, when I have to explain the technology/technique to someone else. Which is when I realize just how much chewing gum and bailing wire is holding my understanding together...and how many assumptions I've made that don't necessarily withstand questioning.

But for all that, that's not a bad experience to have. Not that I'm offering, y'understand, but it'd do me whole buckets o' good to have to pitch a presentation at my fellow programmers every month.

The freedom to fail

I think I've already riffed on the ridiculousness of thinking that any software can be bulletproofed with tools or processes or incentives. Or by convincing yourself that you can hire a team that's too smart to blow anything up. Or that a new language platform will come along that will make failure impossible. So, alas, there are no silver bullets there. Plus, the fact that too many technologies have self-appointed "evangelists" doesn't help when it comes time to make a management decision on the direction a development team will take. Particularly if you yourself don't spend a whole lot of (if any) time in the coding trenches.

But here's one thing that I can confidently recommend, something that probably won't be limited by language, platform, tools, or even so much the quality of programmer: Give your developers room to fail without bringing other people's work down with them.

Practical example: At my first "real" programming job, we each had our own copy of the database, the website and the compiled code that did the heavy lifting for the web pages. Our copies of the code was automatically backed up to the server before the server itself was backed up to tape. The "authoritative" copy of the code was checked in and out of source control, and the "authoritative" version was pushed up to a server for integration & testing before it was demo'd to a potential client or pushed up to the live server for the paying customers.

For the programmer, having your own little universe meant that you could do your work without worrying about tripping up anyone else. Which--perhaps counter-intuitively--is a great incentive to create higher-quality code. Two main reasons behind this reasoning:

1. The programmer has complete freedom to fiddle with other parts of the system (be they database values) or code that, technically, is not "hers" or "his," but affects or is affected by what s/he is currently workingone thing that's drilled into you when you have to take on.
2. Reason #1 removes any excuse for not performing these kinds of sanity checks. Sure, there's every possibility that another programmer could have changed the upstream/downstream code, but that's why its' all pulled together on an internal testing server before anyone else sees it. And if the other programmer wasn't regularly checking in her/his code, then there's no doubt where the finger needs to be pointed, hey?

Mind you, giving each programmer her/his own sandbox doesn't come without cost. Some of it may be in licensing, depending on what languages/platforms. More likely it will be from setup/maintenance. But the fact is that the cost of a software bug grows as it moves (undetected) up the development cycle. And by "grows" I mean like the archetypal Giant Irradiated Critter straight from the Cold War era monster-flicks.

The fact is, nobody wants to spend the day as "The one who blew up the database." Or "The one who forgot to check for ..." But when you give people the freedom to fail often but also the means to fix it before anyone else finds out, they should be more likely to spend their time checking out those what-ifs, rather than convincing themselves that their code is too l33t to worry about it.

Another sign that you're a computer geek

You accidentally kick over your water glass while working from the couch, and your first reflexive response is to hit CTRL + S to save your work before setting down the laptop and fetching a rag to sop up the mess.

A lesson from camp

No, not computer camp. We're just home from a friend's birthday party, the theme of which was truly bad movies. (That kind of camp.) We arrived in time to polish off an MST3K (an episode that mocked one of the worst movies I've seen, actually--which is saying something). Then we proceeded to do our own MST3King of that 1938 (cough) "classic" now known as Reefer Madness. (I don't think I exaggerate by much when I say that its writing values were so low that you almost feel relieved for our forebears in that they shortly had WWII to take their minds off its sheer dreckishness.) And so on.

But I can forgive the awfulness of a movie when it's evident that the people making it didn't take themselves seriously and were obviously having fun with it. To me, that speaks more of professionalism than a group that clocked its time and hoped that the whole mess went direct to video before anyone noticed.

One of the buzzwords of software, particularly in the startup space, is MVP, or "minimum viable product" The gist of MVP is that you release only the absolute bare-bones of the produc and let the customer decide what should be fleshed out next. Which is a wonderful tonic for bloatware and all, but I think that the austerity of the principle neglects the fact that fully-fleshed out human beings are writing the code, creating the graphics, pulling together the documentation, etc. And people like to have fun--not as an excuse to not work, but as part of work itself. In fact, if the main point of shoving a lean product out the door is to be first to market, that urgency will create more stress than usual for a software release. If the culture frowns on making the process fun, that only adds to the stress. Because that kind of culture is ultimately frowning on a facet of the creative process itself. Which might work long enough to roll out version 1.0. But I strongly believe that the cost will be not only felt, but compounded as well, with each subsequent release.

So if there's a certain amount of campiness to the process, relax. People who can work and play hard at the same time are the professionals you want for your team.

Frivolous Friday, 10.23.2009: Dueling metaphors

First off, apologies to those who have already viewed this YouTube video where marketing's Master Yoda (a.k.a. Seth Godin) responds to a question about the value of social networking in business. The takeaway sound byte:

The internet is this giant cocktail party, with all these people swarming around connecting much as they can because they're keeping score: "Who likes me today?" "Who's talking about me today?" But one day when you need to ask them to authorize a $100,000 contract, it doesn't matter. What matters is: Where are the real relationships?

I've been turning that metaphor--social media as a cocktail party--over in my head earlier today. The thing is, I can't even remember being to a bona-fide "cocktail party," ever. If I eventually do attend one, I'm liable to be disappointed, thanks to my co-workers. Because sometime in late 2005, The Teasing That Would Not Die led to an upping of the ante that has become the tradition of the Liquid Potluck. Which is as close as I've come to the cocktail party ritual that was part of the mysterious grown-up world when I was a squirt in the '70s.

And to me, the Liquid Potluck seems more to the point than cocktail party, mainly because the "liquid" part is sort of a misnomer. Sure, the wine/beer/etc. has pride of place--that was originally the point of the joke, after all. But (come to think of it) I still need to snag the recipe for the artichoke/spinach dip that C. brought. Then, too, M's girlfriend has a standing invitation--and it's because we like her. Honestly! Although the taco dip she brings tends to vanish pretty quickly. Certainly, no one objected to being a guinea pig for J's salsa recipe. And it's fun to see people's eyes light up (and the 'fridge mysteriously fill with refreshment over the lunch hour) after the crockpot of artery-clogging Lil' Smokies is fired up around 11 in the morning. Ditto seeing how adventurous some taste-buds can be, even with oddities like pickled garlic.

Initially, there were a few kinks to work out, namely the folks who didn't grasp that this was a true "potluck," rather than an on-the-house treat. And a few potlucks have been co-opted for other purposes. Oh yes--and some attempt was made to regularize the scheduling once upon a time. But, ultimately, they just happen. When they do, you can sometimes learn things that you never would have guessed about people you thought you knew. And you also learn things that you wouldn't have thought to ask about in the first place.

All of which sounds awfully like social media, at least as I've experienced it. Yes, there will always be folks who expect to consume more than they contribute. On the flip-side, the medium lends itself to the tendency to "overshare," certainly. Clicques coalesce, break up, and re-align in the not-quite-predictable patterns of a kaleidoscope. When the Important People put in an appearance, the dynamic changes...albeit not as much as it should. There have been a few times when someone's missed the bus back to The Real World. In other cases, people who would have much to give and gain from the swirl of chatter choose to stay away.

It's not that the original cocktail party metaphor isn't apt; I just don't run in the same circles as oracles of marketing--that's all. I've spent my life in the Upper Midwest with extensive family on both sides (and that before marrying someone with a similar abundance of cousins), so the "potluck" meme just feels more natural.

A tune from the B-side

One of the important folks was in the office today to talk financial stuff with us all. Theoretically, I could have blown his presentation off, but when I saw the alpha-geek (who is never not insanely busy) grabbing a front row seat, I scurried into the conference room to claim my own.

I'm glad I did. Obviously, management's job is to rephrase anything negative. You all know the song 'n dance: This economy doesn't "suck"; its "challenges" present us with "opportunities." But apart from that, the numbers were laid out in layperson's terms, and the reasoning behind certain strategic decisions was explained quite credibly. And when I had a question that visitor couldn't answer, his response was to insist that I email the CFO. (Which I did, btw, and received a reply within a couple of hours.)

I think--but don't quote me--that it was Robert Townsend ("Up the Organization") who wrote that the mark of a good manager was not how soon you hear the good news; it's how readily your underlings will deliver the bad news. I didn't really think about it until today, but that maxim has a B-side that basically works in reverse. If we'd had to attend that "lunch & learn" on our own time, I think it would still have been worth it. Partly to understand how the firm is managed at the global level. (Hey, anytime you can figure out how those who sign you paycheck are gonna jump, it's A Good Thing.) But also because I picked up a couple inside statistics that will come in very handy for indie. work. But don't tell The Powers That Be I said that. ;-)

Man of La Mancha motivation

Admittedly, I never did watch an episode of Pinky and the Brain--largely because cable TV wasn't high on the list of spending priorities through most of its run. But I've always been charmed down to the toenails by the eternal optimism of the cartoon's opening dialogue:

Pinky: "Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?"
Brain: "The same thing we do every night, Pinky--try to take over the world."

Naturally, if we woke to find ourselves subjugated by two lab mice, I think we'd actually be less horrified than we would be absolutely crushed at the story being over. It would be almost--almost!--as devastating being invited over to Wile E. Coyote's house for Thanksgiving and finding stuffed Roadrunner as the main course. (Admit it: You'd mortally freak out. You would.)

But there's something to be said for dreaming the impossible dream, in tonight's case being a return to the gym, tilting at the windmill that is over a decade's worth of desk jobs, plus no great love of physical activity that doesn't have an ulterior motive...such as trying not to become the target of the paintball graffiti artist lurking behind the next tree.

Yet being the least fit person at the gym is kind of liberating, in the same sense that it can be liberating to be the least informed person at a meeting. In both cases, all you have to compete against are your own limitations. Temporary, mutable limitations that will be pushed further and further to the perimeter as the heart-rate stays at higher numbers for more consecutive minutes each week. And the number of reps as well as weights inches up from month to month. And the ankle that was severely twisted less month (and the knee that had to take up the slack) takes the stress with less griping. And, most importantly, the gym-mates become as familiar as the equipment, you understand at a truly subcutaneous level how much willpower and time trumps magic berry diets or whatever the snake oil du jour happens to be.

Granted, I seem to be a magnet for hand-me-down t-shirts, but finding a brand-new Pinky and the Brain t-shirt on the internet wouldn't be the worst purchase I've made. After all, walking or biking in place isn't that much different from running in a wheel, something that rodents do quite proficiently. Perhaps even with the understanding that the value of the journey has zero to do with the proximity of Point A to Point B.

Sharing the nifty

Tonight was the (nearly) monthly meeting of the La Crosse Area Beekeepers Association. Now, to understand beekeepers, you have to understand that when they congregate, they are (in my experience) a very tight team. To watch a small handful of couples put up and take down the county fair exhibit, for instance, is to watch a small hive in action: Out of seeming chaos comes order.

But that has its downside. There were a few new faces at the table tonight: One a cousin of a current member, and others souls brave enough to walk into a meeting full of people they didn't know. There have been new faces at previous meetings that did not reappear. That's understandable (to a degree): You don't have to scratch much beyond the surface to reach the decidedly unromantic aspects of disease and parasites and neighbors obsessed with golf-course-calibre lawns. Not to mention the vigilance and know-how and ability to roll with Mother Nature's sucker-punches that literally takes years to develop.

But that's not to suggest that we don't have (ample) room for improvement. And one of the long-timers (my husband and me being but greenhorns of six years, you understand) kicked the "New Business" door wide open just as it was swinging shut by merely by asking why the demonstration portion of the meeting had seemingly fallen by the wayside. He was absolutely spot-on in that. Now, it crushes my inner bibliophile to write this, but there are, in fact, many, many things that simply cannot be learned from books. Even books with really good pictures. Wrangling thousands of tiny six-legged livestock most especially ranks among them.

But what happened in the wake of that suggestion darned near raised my hackles. You could feel the electricity go through the room at the prospect. Within minutes, the Secretary had dug out years' worth of group calendars, and was ticking off a list of past presentations. Ideas were batted back and forth (occasionally refined), the new faces were put on the spot to articulate exactly what they wanted to know. And, I fancy, each of us with bees was taken back to that moment when we stood with the hive equipment in front of us, wondering how we were supposed to transfer this package of insects from their tidy little box into their new home...and wondering still more how in Mordor we'd ever mistaken this for a Good Idea.

That's not to say that there isn't some ulterior motive in the enthusiasm. With all that evolution and globalization and human short-sightedness are bringing these days, a hidebound beekeeper is an out-of-business beekeeper. So I'm not surprised that I've seen presentations that were, frankly, kind of grueling for the presenter--more from the Wall O' Questions that came their way than from the natural fear of public speaking. But these folks have done this often enough to realize that it's a pittance to pay for their chance to tap others' curiosity and tinkering and--perhaps most of all--passion.

Maybe you don't care about honeybees or pollinators in general--although I seriously cannot grok why you wouldn't. But, doubtless. there's something in this world whose mere mention will capture your undivided attention--and never more so than when you can share it. Alas (for me), it's been awhile since I've seen that level of electricity in a crowd, large or small. So I wanted to share. Because the world needs all of that it can get. You know what I'm talking about: Don't waste any opportunity to help make more of it.

An expensive theatre ticket

I spent 2+ years as "vendor scum" (to use my friend Bob's term) at IBM. In some senses, it was better that way in that I earned overtime for the pre-release marathons--so I'm not complaining about that particular "caste system." Besides, employees and vendor scum were equals when it came to the nonsense of "security theater."

For instance, my team lead came in for a important-ish meeting during her parental leave...and was required to obtain a security pass for the newborn that she had been carting around hands-free just a few weeks before. (Apparently, it's the emergency C-section and month-premature birth that makes them potential security leaks.) Similarly, using a cellphone for a personal call inside the building was verboten for all, never mind my next team lead's single best source of inside information came from outside the building during her cigarette breaks. Yep: Welcome to Security Theatre. (Absurdist? Deconstructionist? You have to decide for yourself. Because if we told you, we'd have to make you disappear.)

So you can safely say that I was not at all amused to be greeted this morning by the headline IBM veteran exec on leave after inside arrest. You can also safely say that the lawsuits that are coming Big Blue's way will make the protracted wrangling with SCO look like appealing a parking ticket. Oops. Betcha'll have a little more to obsess about than who enters an "unauthorized" building to pick her friend up for lunch, won'tcha?

But--that being said--this is one bit of security theatre that I'll enjoy watching. Part of the problem--quite apart from the quasi-incestuous relationship between regulator and regulatee--is the fact that the SEC cannot bring criminal charges. They can only refer a case to the FBI for that. At best, the SEC has the power to fine a company. But guess who really pays that bill? Of course, the FBI has had its own credibility problems during the past several years--and those on top of playing its own part in the post-9/11 security theatre. And the private sector watchdogs? A leading player in the fiction, as a it turns out. Even the venerable Warren Buffett had his bacon burned--which, IMO, speaks library shelves of volumes about the culture.

The upshot is: Never trust security measures that don't go all the way to the penthouse level of an organization. For that matter, don't trust any organization that doesn't enforce rules bottom to top. Particularly as the gap between bottom and top grows. Even the most overstuffed pockets might not cushion you against that landing.

Human duct tape

Apart from an only half-successful visit with the bees this afternoon, today has largely been a two-part exercise in software integration. The first half was trying to make UNIX-based programs and Windows-based programs to "play nice" together (i.e. make Apache's web server and the PHP programming language work on Windows and talk to Microsoft's SQL Server database system--I'm currently 1 for 2 on that). The second half was the (seemingly) never-ending saga of translating a "legacy" subsystem at work over to its shiny new incarnation...despite the fact that they're not so much apples-and-oranges as apples-and-bananas.

To be honest, the first part was muuuuuch more fun, mainly in the kid-in-a-candy-store sense. (Free code on the internet seems to do that for programmers.) The second part? Meh, not so much. But I realized that there's a certain comfort (in this job market, anyway) in the fact there will always be work for the integrators--a.k.a. human duct tape. The simple reason being that people in general--and geeks in particular--are very tribal by nature. The neutral parties--i.e. those who don't have any proverbial skin in the game--who can also become reasonably bi-lingual are, in my experience, anyway, comparatively rare.

That's not to say that the job of being duct tape is entirely layoff-proof; it depends on whom you know in addition to what you know. Or, at least, who's being kept in the proverbial loop. Just like everything else at the office.

Here we go again...

I need to test PHP-based web pages against Microsoft's SQL Server database, because that database system (and not its open source MySQL equivalent) is the standard for the organization that will ultimately used the web application. Microsoft provides a free version of SQL Server 2008 that is intentionally limited in capacity, because it's meant for development and testing.

Downloading the actual server wasn't too much trouble because it was bundled with the development studio software that I also wanted. The only hitch was that I had to go into the Administrative settings to change which user profile actually controlled the database server and its flunkie processes. That's something a database administrator should know, so I shan't grumble too loudly about the out-of-box experience sucking in that regard.

The real frustration came, though, trying to find and set up the tool that allows you to manipulate databases within the server and the tables, functions, etc. that they contain.

First question: Why would anyone at Microsoft not think to include that with the Web developer bundle?

Second question: If I'm forced to download the management tool a la carte, why make it, literally, a four-step process involving four separate downloads?

Third question: Why should one of those prerequisite pieces of software (Windows PowerShell 1.0) require you to validate your copy of Windows? The database server is clearly the most valuable batch of bytes; the time for that was when that was installed.

Fourth question: Why should any Windows software that's not a Service Pack have to issue big, scary warnings about making sure that your system is backed up?

Fifth question: Why is it too much to ask that they actually work? This completely unrecognizable "management" tool gives me the option of installing additonal features. The one I need is not one of them; in fact, the page that tells me to select the one and only add-on I can install doesn't actually let me select it.

So the upshot is that I'm completely uninstalling SQL Server 2008. Luckily, my husband had ordered a copy of the Developer Edition, and left it to collect dust. If all goes according to the setup plan that's grinding away now, I'll be buying my own copy and handing it over to him. Given how wretchedly the process has gone, I'm not reaching for my wallet just yet.

Okay, so I know that I sound like a prima-donna right now. But the point is this: If you want programmers to write software for your platforms so that people have to keep buying your operating systems and the programs that go on them, don't make it difficult. I mean, if you want to be a software tools pusher (as in "The first hit is always free"), don't scare the customer straight, for pity's sake.

I won't pretend that I can't have the same types of grief on the Linux platform. But here's the difference: When all the head-banging and Googling and forum-skimming is done, chances are better than even that I've expanded my understanding of *NIX-based operating systems. That's something that I can apply to later problem-solving. In this case, absolutely zero learning occured. Had I ultimately been successful in installing the free (as opposed to nominal fee) version of SQL Server and its helpers, chances are better than even that none of it would apply to the next version of the software. Granted, my brain is an almost Smithsonian-scale collection of useless information. But even this kind of "information" is too useless to hang out there.

Frivolous Friday, 10.16.2009: Another nerdy intersection

I don't know how my husband discovered the irregularly updated cross between a blog and web comic known as 2D Goggles but I'm glad he did. The premise is that a time-traveller has visited the England of the 1830s and given "a few ideas" to Charles Babbage (detailed bio. here), designer of the first programmable (mathematical) computer. Because the integrity of the space-time continuum has thus been compromised, those in charge of it seal off that branch of the continuum. The comic lives in this alternative history, one in which Babbage's design is fully built, and in which the person who wrote the first program for his computer (Countess Ada Byron King) lives to provide much-needed bearings (and brakes) for the hamster-wheel in his brain.

The joy of the comic--beyond the delightfully whimsical premise, of course--lies in its inside jokes, as well as the slyness with which it can make them. Ms. Padua has clearly done her homework--with a passion that can only come from a love of leaving fingerprints in the dust of the great attic that is history.

Given my 'druthers, I'd dearly love to see the comic branch out to include other Victorian "girl geeks," among them Mary Somerville, who was one of Lovelace's mentors (and who probably introduced her to Babbage). Somerville was self-taught in mathematics, and she could not only absorb vast quantities of scientific ideas, but had the (much) rarer gift of making them accessible. And, whereas the Countess' life was cut short in its thirties, Somerville just was hitting her stride in her forties.

And, although their timelines would have barely overlapped, it could be quite fun to see the mathemetician/statisitican side of Florence Nightingale besides. Although she probably was not, technically, the inventor of the "coxcomb" graph (a variation on the pie chart), her influence on history (and standards of hygiene that you and I now take for granted) would have been much more limited without her considerable number-crunching abilities. I was surprised to find such a big deal made of her "pioneering" of the uses of graphs until I realized, "Oh--right. You had to explain facts & figures to Parliament. Oh dear. I'm so sorry."

But I'm sure that Ms. Padua's not unaware of the possibilities, given how much she's already invested in imbuing her "alternative" history with the real deal. Nerdy fan-girl that I am, I'll just sit back and enjoy whatever flowers upon that charming branch of the space-time continuum.

A "revival meeting"--of sorts

Okay, you know the joke about the platypus (or giraffe--take your pick) being designed by committee, right? Now, normally, I'd disagree...but only because neither the giraffe nor the platypus have gone extinct. Mostly, though, I think that the success of group problem-solving is:

1. Inversely proportional to the size of the group, and
2. Directly proportional to the concreteness of the problem being solved. (Something like the Despair, Inc. "Meetings" lithograph, subtitled "None of us is dumber than all of us.")

Ah, but get a group of Linux users--a.k.a. incorrigible tinkerers--together, and watching them attack a well-defined problem is an unqualified joy. In the case of tonight's Linux User's Group meeting, it was the response to a simple, off-the-cuff question of how to make OpenOffice (an open-source clone of Microsoft's productivity suite) stop trying to think for you. Maybe it's a time-saver in an office environment, but nearly all tinkerers know precisely what they want to do, thank you very much. Thus, having OpenOffice impersonate Microsoft Office by automatically turning your typed list numbers into auto-formatted, auto-indented lists, or flag your correctly spelled acronyms and/or technical arcana as typos is a frustrating distraction from the problem at hand.

The meeting's presenter still had his laptop connected to the projector, and a few others fired up their laptops (and OpenOffice) to tackle the problem (which, it turns out, had annoyed more folks than the person who raised the question). And, lo! Within a few minutes, an answer had been worked out between various groups' trial and error. And there was much rejoicing. And at least one person's faith in the power of groups to solve (rather than embellish) problems was significantly boosted.

(Thanks, folks!)

Paging Product Manager Yoda

With the impending Borgification--yeah, I know I'm mixing sci-fi metaphors--of Sun (and thus Java) by Oracle, it seemed logical to hedge my cross-platform programming bets with .NET. A few months back, Microsoft more or less agreed to remove the legal cloud that had been hanging over Mono, an open-source, cross-platform implementation of parts of .NET. Big ups to them for that.

So I returned (after a multi-month hiatus) to the Mono website tonight, all set to start downloading and installing and "Hello, World!"ing, and...wait a minute...whaddya mean that Mono 2.2 implements something between .NET 2.0 and .NET 3.5? That's a little...imprecise. And, uh-oh, not all the APIs are documented...I don't even know what some of them do. Oops, and the on-site articles haven't been updated since 2007. A couple big red lights started flashing.

Okay, open-source usually means volunteer work: I get that. (I've taken enough flak about the deficiencies of code I've written on my own time--trust me, I understand the limitations.)

The problem I actually have is that the project is officially sponsored by Novell. It's not a SourceForge-hosted effort. Nor is it the silver standard, meaning a project under the wing of the Apache Foundation. (The gold standard being, of course, the Linux kernel itself.) I mean, we live in an age where companies will pay obscene amounts of money to slap their name on a ballpark. But here, Novell (a software company) has the opportunity to make a highly professional impression on a highly relevant customer demographic (programmers), but it puts its logo on a clearly under-funded, under-staffed effort.

The upshot is: Whatever money Novell has put into this effort in the name of marketing has had negative returns. I've blasted Adobe for the moldy crumbs it throws as "alms" to Flash/Flex developers on Linux. Novell doesn't come off as quite so high-handed, but it's the same essential bone-headedness at work. Unlike Adobe (who spawned Flex), Novell has the option of disowning their support of the Mono effort. Sure, they'll take some flak, but is that really worse than being so tight with their actual support? Me, I don't think so.

Closed-source companies supporting open-source projects isn't always so lame. True, I prefer Ubuntu Linux overall, but few years ago was successfully running OpenSUSE, which (ironically enough) is also sponsored by Novell. (I only went back to Ubuntu after the OpenSUSE had issues with a new motherboard.) Then, too, I see the regression test results from Sun Microsystems come through the Derby mailing list every day--which is all the more remarkable when you consider that Sun is thus supporting software originally developed by IBM.

I'm not arguing that companies that make software are in any way obliged to supply open-source project with money, staff, hosting, code or other resources. But, for pity's sake, none at all looks better than treating the open-source project like the proverbial red-headed stepchild. Master Yoda had the right of it: "Do or do not. There is no try."

What's the cost of doing business...with you?

First things first: Hat tip to @tracymgoodson for the link to the Reuters article, Pepsi, Anheuser to Jointly Buy Goods, Services.

One cynical way to read this is, "Hmmm...I wonder whether this is the first step toward a merger?" Another is, "Great. Two 800 lb. gorillas become one 1600 lb. gorilla--it's not like we have enough of that in Corporate America..."

But the non-cynical takeaway for me was, "Wow, two corporate behemoths actually managed to get over themselves long enough to grok co-opetition!" But the point I want to hammer on is that one of the most sustainable ways to cut costs is to make it easy to do business in the first place. In the case of this partnership, a vendor only has to negotiate terms with one company, or send out a single invoice. Understandably, that reduces overhead for both customer and vendor. Which is a win-win if ever was. But. It requires giving up a certain amount of corporate self-centeredness. That, of course, is the difficult part. Companies like WalMart are notorious for squeezing vendors without taking any responsibility for reducing the cost of selling to them.

Although I've pretty much outgrown my taste for Mountain Dew and am extremely picky (and Wisconsin-centric) in beer, I do hope that the Pepsi-Anheuser partnership becomes a model of sorts. Assuming, of course, that this isn't just yet another exercise in racing to the bottom. Because there's a lot to be said for co-opetition. Most notably that it belies the zero-sum nonsense that passes for business strategy.

Why I can't afford discounted work

I was working earlier tonight with a lady who's trying to get her freelance career off the ground. She seems to be in the proto-business state, and her main objective is to build a client base. To that end, she was willing to work for half the rate she thought she should charge, something that wouldn't result in a living wage (particularly not with a three year-old involved).

Not to be all goody-two-shoes and conspicuously polish my halo in front of everyone, but I told her that any work she does on my behalf should be at full price. There are purely selfish reasons for that. One of which is my strong opinion that higher billing rates tend to demand leaner, effective processes, simply because each tick of the clock is so much louder at full price. When time costs less, there's less incentive to invest in what ultimately leads to an end-product that's worth the price. Similarly, triaging the non-negotiables vs. the nice-to-haves is sloppier when the lower rate gives you more flexibility in turnaround time. (You know, Fast, cheap, good: Pick two.) So I'd rather people working in a top-billing mentality, because anything else tends (in my experience) to encourage false economies.

To me, the only two choices that make sense are: A.) Charge full price, or B.) Do it for free. The reason for this binary attitude is simple. At the two far ends of the free-vs.full-price spectrum, you know exactly for whom you're working. When you're working for free, you're working for something other than money, which means there are no purse strings--in other words, you're working for yourself. In contrast, when you work at full price, you're working solely for the customer. But neither is 100% true anywhere else in the spectrum.

That's a problem. Maybe the customer won't recognize it as such, but the discount is a powerful incentive to discount the value of your work in your own mind. The cut-price mentality that results does little to nudge you toward ways of working faster and at a consistently higher quality level. Nor does it encourage investing--in the coin(s) of thought, money, or the pain of process change--in the longer-term relationship with the client. Why? Because the work--your fundamental connection with the client--become a means to an end (short-term cash-flow and/or portfolio trophy) rather than an end in itself (the longer-term collaboration).

Obviously, it's her career to develop as she sees fit. But it's not a path I'd willingly trod: The conflict of interest is virtually unavoidable, which doesn't jibe with the ultimate goal of forging partnerships.

An all-too-Graceless evening

One of my "mentors" on the UWEC Forensics team and I ran into each other a few times in the two decades or since I lagged behind him on the Commencement stage in the arena, and we recently re-connected on Facebook. We're alike in that we both landed in technology despite majoring in something completely different. We likewise have a special appreciation for people who are fluent in both computer and human languages, which is probably why he linked this vintage David Letterman interview with Adm. Dr. Grace Hopper. The nine minutes and change capture the essence of a lady who was not merely brilliant, but a force of nature--and thus worth your time for that experience alone.

But what's not quoted in either the interview nor the Wikipedia biography is something that's stuck with me ever since I read it in a recap of her life. Namely that inventing a compiler and an English-like computer language (COBOL) were merely a means to the end of letting mathematicians get on with the work they are actually trained (and prefer) to do. Which is certainly not twiddling bits on and off. In the proverbial nutshell, computers should get the heck out of your brain's way while it's trying to solve the actual problem at hand.

That's hardly a new thought, and is by no means original to me. Yet as I delete and re-import a CD w/in iTunes (to force it to recognize the cover art for more than the last two tracks) while re-writing a whitepaper to stop it from obsessing over a feature that our product just happens [wink, wink] to have (as opposed to its actual benefit to the potential client), the ethos of keeping the computer out from underfoot is conspicuous by its absence. So I'm grateful to the afore-mentioned mentor for once again reminding me of what's really important in our industry.

No Saturday post

Today's a household holiday, namely the infamous "Carve Pumpkins and Watch Army of Darkness" party hosted for seven of the last eight Octobers that we've called La Crosse home. Thus, no "official" post.

Frivolous Friday, 10.09.2009: "SchadenFriday" limericks

The humorous "If error messages were haiku" email probably made it to your Inbox at some point. While I admire the spare and often lyrical beauty that is haiku, absolutely no form of poetry can top limericks for sheer snarkiness. Perhaps all bad news would sound better rendered in the loping meter of the limerick. To that end, here's a handful of tech-related schadenfreude:

Just now you're as mad as a Hatter:
The flash drive that backed up your SATA
Had Cheetos dust flushed
When it went through the wash
Which likewise scrubbed all your data.

Its details would be quite profound
In running this gremlin to ground.
Alas, IE6
Is back at its tricks:
Stating merely, "Object not found."

These slides you might want to re-do:
No amount of transitional glue
Could bind graphs and charts,
Pimped fonts and clip-art
With more bullets than World War II

When tracking a bug to its lair
Adds grey to a programmer's hair,
It's not the bug's kind,
But, rather, they find
It lodged between keyboard and chair.

Though far more artistic than lewd,
These photos of folks in the nude
Were not meant to thrive
On a networked hard drive:
Your career here's officially screwed.

Kudos I didn't expect to give

My first associations with the Wisconsin Department of Motor Vehicles--most notably flunking my first drivers test with distinction--started the relationship off on an underinflated tire. (So to speak. Saying that it got off on the wrong foot wouldn't make sense, now would it?) So I wasn't looking forward to winding through a velvet-roped maze to pose for a worse-than-usual portrait photo, particularly when I have to arrange to be away from work for that time.

As it turns out, I had my new license less than fifteen minutes later. Partly, I was lucky and just beat the early lunch-hour traffic. As I was leaving, I noticed an electronic sign that gave estimated wait times for those in line, a customer service amenity I don't recall from the last time I had to upgrade that all-important bit of plastic. But what I thought more interesting was the posted notice that the branch will be closed next Monday while its staff is on "unpaid furlough." Apparently, this affects all WI state employees via the budget. (I've worked for places that didn't offer paid vacation, but at least the actual timing of the vacation was on my terms.)

In short, it was a bit eye-opening to see how well our local DMV branch has adapted its processes (and deployed relatively simple technology) to serve more people with less time-wasting. And I thought that it deserved a shout-out for that.

Among the many "why?"s I have...

1.) With all the possible interfaces (QWERTY keyboards, mouse wheels, iPod dials, touch-screen drag-n-drop and 3D Wii interaction), why is the most effective timer in the house still the one on the stove?

2.) Again, given the plethora of memory-augmenting gadgetry, why is the most reliable means of jogging my pre-caffeinated brain a matter of putting something in front of the door?

I mean, it's not like I wanna go all William Gibson-ish with nano-chips or whatever in my head and all that. But. When a relatively inexpensive smart-phone can web-browse, message, email (for private and/or work accounts), play music (and maybe video), take photos, double as a flashlight, and tell you who you know (and probably what they just said on Twitter or Facebook), well...that adds up to a lot of distraction. And a corresponding need to stay on track.

It's probably just a testament to my own dorkiness, how fascinated I was with the little plastic counter (ones, tens, hundreds) that Grandma--Mom's Mom--used to record her stitches in knitting/crocheting (because, after raising seven kids, distraction becomes a lifestyle). Ditto the hourglass-style egg-timer on the windowsill behind my Great Aunt Verna's stove.

Simple devices both, with equally simple interfaces. Because multi-tasking (and, thus, the need to keep oneself on track) is hardly a new phenomenon. If you tried suggesting its novelty to my party-line, pre-microwave, wringer-washer, whitewashed root cellar ancestresses, I won't say that they'd laugh in your face. But that's only because they were Midwestern Nice--almost to a fault.

And, so, this rather flibbertygibbety scion of their otherwise hardy bloodline can't help but wonder why the titans of gadgetry try to one-up each other in the power to distract. That just doesn't make any sense...at least for those who (as my Grandmas and Great Aunts would probably say) "need a keeper."

A bibliophile's truism

It's not the books you read that truly matter to you; it's the books you read more than once that define your mind's evolution.

Sometimes it's not only true that "you can't go home again": You learn that you never truly lived there at all. That's okay. Occasionally harsh, but okay.

An equally humbling lesson will come from the realization of how much you failed to carry away from your first stroll from front cover to back.

Eh. So you lose a few Smugness Points--but call it a bargain anyway. You absorbed. You had the luxury of re-evaluating pure ideas in the cold, hard morning-light of intervening experience.

In both cases, you're actually ahead of the game. And that's never anything to sneer at.

A detour into Marketing space

I'm always flattered when I'm asked to "look over" something that someone else in the office has written...or even called in to give the [giggle] "authoritative" final word on a point of grammar or punctuation. Plus, it's gratifying to think that all those literature and writing classes Uncle Sam and I paid for are worth ~something~ in this Lolspeak world. That was the case today, when another incarnation of a Marketing white-paper came to me for tightening-up.

As much as I do enjoy the exercise for that bit of my brain, I honestly don't know who--in a time when one person is expected to do the work of two or three laid-off co-workers--has time to molar-chew enough fake-vanilla nougat to find the few crunchy statistical bits. And, for that matter, the knowledge that all crunchy bits have been meticulously cherry-picked dulls any appetite for that first bite. The rub is that my "audience" here is, technically, not the potential customer. It's the PR higher-ups. Knowing that distinction is critical from a political standpoint, but there's still the nagging sense of duty to the readership at large...and the self-interest in wanting to keep the lights on so that I can keep working with the same (mostly) awesome crowd.

So here's the workaround: There will, ultimately, be three versions turned in. One is merely a tightened-up version of the original, dressed in its Sunday suit, with hat and white gloves. The second is a brutally streamlined version with call-out text heading every other paragraph or so. The third--provided I can swing it with the graphics dude--is peppered with graphics and is driven by the question that should be one of the two central quarks of the innermost proton at the nucleus of any piece of software intended to make workers more productive: "How can we get you home early on Friday (without your boss knowing the difference)?" (The other question being, "How can we help you score a raise this year?" But, given the cynicism bred by the jobless recovery we get to look forward to, the former question will probably pack more wallop for the next dozen months.)

Because that's where the rubber hits the road for most folks who work on the clock. The target demographic in this case doesn't own; it manages. It could probably care less about saving the owners' bling unless it's fairly sure of a slice of those savings. To be sure, that information has to be included, preferably in a detachable form. Why? Because the potential client needs something to sell the idea up the organizational food chain. But, ultimately, being home well in advance of the Friday traffic is--in my considerably-less-than-humble opinion--what's being sold. The actual software is incidental.

At least until the job market doesn't suck. Then it's a different story. But it's a story for another day. And another post. Hopefully it's one I'll be writing sooner than my cynicism permits me to believe.

A fundamental lesson in action

I stopped at Festival North early this evening, something I typically do after a full day of work when my brain is still processing things. That wasn't the case today, so I had to wonder whether I had just missed the plastic bag recycling box right inside the door. I mentioned it to my husband after hauling the groceries in. "No, I'm pretty sure they just started that," he said.

Last time I checked, the only place that offered that amenity was WalMart, and it seemed more than silly to have to expend extra amounts of a petroleum-based product (gas) so that extra amounts of other petroleum-based products (plastics) aren't needed. If reducing the dependency on foreign crude can be spun into a matter of national security, then surely you can make a patriotic case for escorting those bags and newspaper sleeves into their next incarnation (as opposed to the waste-bin). Problem is, that still doesn't bring WalMart any closer to the coat-closet that doubles as the household plastic bag corral.

If it's true that, as Herman Hesse put it, "Only the ideas that we live by are of any value," then I think that it's also important to remember that if we want others to hew to those ideals, then it's best to make it painless--yea, even convenient--for them to do so. Recycling plastic is merely another of many examples.

Celebrating the "Bottle-washer-in-chief"

You've heard the metaphorical title for an entrepreneur: "Chief Cook & Bottle-washer." Which, when you're into home wine-making, takes on another dimension. I'd be lying if I said that, since we took up that hobby, the second half of the phrase doesn't kind of annoy me.

See, our household has a sort of symbiotic relationship with the folks at the Train Station BBQ on St. Andrew's Street, who give us the wine bottles that would otherwise end up in their recycling bin. (Granted, some bottles end up in the recycling bin after all b/c their labels won't soak off--which basically makes us middlemen; no doubt the gentlemen who collect our recyclables think we're winos with very specific tastes. Oh, well...) Similarly, my co-workers have been known to leave at least a half-dozen empty bottles at my desk...although, mercifully, not on days when the office has had visitors.

But before wine goes into bottles, those bottles are subjected to a multi-step cleaning process. The first involves several hours of soaking in a solution meant to clean out any goo one the inside of the bottles as well as dissolve the glue of the labels. My husband has done so much of this type of cleaning that, even minus the labels, he can usually tell you the brand and type of wine. Then, immediately prior to bottling, we clean/rinse the bottles inside and out, and sterilize them (and the corks and all bottling/corking surfaces) in an iodophor solution.

But the thing is, even when bottles are recycled multiple times, it still takes much longer to sterilize them than it does to actually fill them with wine and punch a cork into their necks. I wish I could bring myself to think of the glass as "artisanially cleansed," but the sad fact is that our culture considers bottle-washing a second-rate activity. Why? Because--according to my stab at armchair sociology, at least--we're culturally programmed to aspire to an aristocratic lifestyle, one in which we are too important to clean up after ourselves. Thus, washing bottles--or plates or pots or linen or floors or what-have-you--is left to the untermensch scullery-maids and sundry lackeys.

Which, when it's said and done, entirely misses the point: When I'm cleaning a bottle, I could really care less about who previously sipped the wine that once was in it. I'm not working for them--even when "them" was me and mine. No, the "them" in question is the next person who tips wine from that bottle--be it someone in my house or friends or co-workers. Partly from sheer principle, and also because one of my first experiences with home-made wine tried rather hard to poison me. By "poison" I mean me literally having to crawl to the bathroom in the middle of the night to throw it back up...and being delighted at the feel of the bathroom floor against my cheek, because the tiles were so wonderfully cool. (At the time, I was too inexperienced to know that the wine's off-taste meant bad ju-ju, and I was trying to be polite to the person who offered it. My bad.) Needless to write, the experience made quite an impression on me, and it's not one that I would wilfully perpetrate on others. Thus, the obsessive focus on germ genocide.

But I don't think that it's merely "spin" to consider so-called "menial" tasks in their larger context. When businesses--particularly in a recessionary climate--talk about "returning to their core competencies," one of those "competencies" had darned well better be taking care of the customer. Because when that "bottle-washing" is trivialized (meaning outsourced), it says volumes--thicker than the Oxford English Dictionary--about the difference between corporate self-image and the capital-R Reality its customers inhabit.

Frivolous Friday, 10.02.2009: If geeks ran the world

In place of keys, cars would have a "Start" button. (Windows programmers only)

Legislatures would be replaced by "standards committees" with term limits imposed via the amount of free pizza, Mountain Dew, Cheetos and Pocky provided on the taxpayer nickel.

Green-bar toilet paper: 'Nuff said.

International disputes would start as flame-wars over operating systems, programming languages/methodologies, and which "Star Trek" series was the best. Major disputes would be settled with WoW raids. Minor disputes would be resolved by simple D20 rolls.

Spamming would be punishable by death. Internet trolls would face a fate even worse than death: Being banned from the internet for life.

The Statue of Liberty would bear a suspicious resemblance to one of the following:

• Sarah Michelle Gellar
• Gates McFadden
  
• Felicia Day
• Carrie Fisher
• Jewel Staite
  
• Lucy Lawless
• Jeri Ryan
• Claudia Christian
• Gina Torres
  
• Katee Sackhoff
• Terry Farrell
  
• Kari Byron
  

Political candidates' bumper stickers would display avatars rather than names. The genteel tradition of the losing candidate calling the winning candidate to congratulate her/him would be replaced by the winner simply texting "dude u got pwnd" to the loser.

The jobs of lawyers, executives, senior bean-counters, stock-brokers, commodities traders, (non-satirical) political talking heads, and investment bankers would be off-shored to the lowest-bidding contractors.

"2.0," "2.1," "2.2," etc. would be legal names for children. After they're born, anyway. (Any self-respecting geek will, of course, have a cool-sounding project name for the child before its "release date.")

The "I'm a PC" and "I'm a Mac" guys would be required to finally settle the question in gladitorial-style combat...with bat'leths.

Ridiculous names for paint and makeup colors (e.g. "Derby Red," "Dusty Lilac," "Tropic Sunset") would be replaced by simple hexadecimal codes. (I mean, is a paint labeled "#FF1122" gonna look any different on the wall? I don't think so.)

Hollywood would stop insulting our intelligence by referring to a "T3" line when it's clearly a CAT-5 cable (The X-Files). Or referring to "parsecs" as a unit of time (Star Wars, Episode IV). Or showing 12 year-olds effortlessly hacking UNIX systems with velociraptors breathing down their necks (Jurassic Park). Or implying that the natural result of mixing acidic and alkaline solutions is an explosion (The Simpsons). (Hey, if the writers didn't pay attention in science class, it's their problem, not ours!)

Household appliances would be controlled with joysticks and/or remotes. (For Mac programmers: Everything in the house would be controlled by gelatinous-looking buttons...and the handle for flushing the toilet would be conveniently located inside the medicine cabinet.)

GenCon and ComicCon would be universal holidays--not unlike the entire month of August in France. Halloween would become one giant LARP-fest.

The tombstones of Windows programmers would be rectangular, landscape-oriented, painted blue, and engraved with the image of Clippy: "You seem to be decomposing. Would you like help with that?"

Tax forms would be filled out as Soduku puzzles.

One metric (of many)

I'll know I've "arrived" as a programmer when I can predict that problem I think will be trivial to solve is actually trivial--or one that I dread is an even worse pain in the backside than I think it will be--and be correct at least 75% of the time. (Without it being a self-fulfilling prophesy, of course.)

I suppose it's a metric that applies to any number of crafts. But in my little nook/cranny of the universe, it's something to which I can only aspire at the moment.