"Class roots" marketing

I'm pretty tough on headphones, or at least have been since the dawn of the ear-bud era. The heaviest made it nearly two years, but has been sporting a splint of masking tape around a split in the plastic covering for the last couple weeks. My husband said that he'd planned to pick up another set to tide me through the next couple of birthdays. But--having more than a bit of sugardaddy in him--splurged on a set of noise-canceling headphones with detachable--i.e. replaceable--cord. Something I found interesting, though, was the "courtesy cards" tucked into holder inside the case: "Customers tell us they're often asked about their ____________ headphones. For your convenience, this courtesy card is yours ot pass along. Learn more at ____________." In other words, an attempt to back the power of word of mouth with the tangibility of the written word. Too discreet to be objectionable, at least to my way of thinking.

Contrast that with the robocall and mailer campaign recently run by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina in an attempt to influence the health care debate.

In both cases you have two companies trying to convince people to do something for them. But while one company shows a little outside-the-box thinking inside the case, the other falls back on throwing great wads o' cash at ham-fisted techniques that are traditionally low on yield and high on annoyance factor.

In business as well as life, class comes from a position of confidence, and I think that the above contrast illustrates that nicely.

No Sunday post

Just a heads-up that there will be no post tomorrow (Sunday, 29 November 2009) because company is due: It's the Thanksgiving that my family's schedules could agree upon.

I hope that everyone has had a fulfilling--as opposed to merely filling--holiday and weekend. Cheers, all, and see you Monday!

A lesson from Tuesday's gate-crashing

I can only imagine how heads will roll--if they haven't already--at the Secret Service, following the black eye they took from the gate-crashers at Tuesday's state dinner. (As if the spectacle of the former President dodging shoes wasn't embarrassing enough...) As the 90's most notorious hacker (Kevin Mitnik) demonstrated time and again, no policy manual in the world will bullet-proof security. Mainly because policies and procedures are a cookie-cutter for the irregularly-shaped mat of dough we fondly call Reality. Those leftover bits of dough can include data errors, gray areas, new circumstances, unforeseen circumstances, emergencies--even the obligatory unguarded reactor exhaust vent on every Death Star. And most especially the alchemy of human personality itself. All combine to create the need for the ability to override policy/procedure. And that's where any self-respecting gate-crasher (or desperate Rebel Alliance) will home in.

That being said, paranoia combined with inflexible adherence to procedure is not a valid response. Period. Ditto betting your security on writing an absolutely perfect policy manual that covers all contingencies. Because, paradoxically, human beings can also be the strongest point in any security system. Particularly when they are trained and exhaustively experienced enough that their gut instincts are more reliable than pure metrics (e.g. ticking off boxes on a checklist). In other words, cameras and scanners and policy manuals and what-have-you are only as good as those who use them--a point ably illustrated by the fact that planting over ten thousand security cameras in London have not significantly boosted crime-solving rates, at least not as of 2007 and 2008.

Fortunately for the Secret Service--and the USA's political continuity--President Bush has decent reflexes (not to mention that insult, rather than injury, was intended) and Mr. & Mrs. Salahi were basically joy-riding. But the take-away boils down to this: If one of the world's foremost security organizations can have such glaring lapses, how realistic is it to expect that we can keep what we consider "valuable" safe from all who would steal or vandalize it? And, more importantly, what are we willing/able to do about that?

Frivolous Friday, 11.26.2009: Always a fool for old school

A few weeks ago, my husband's co-worker graciously agreed to house-sit while we had to venture out of town. The polite thing to do, of course, a thank-you note for taking care of the place and the plants and the cats and the finches and, well, everything except the bees. But because he's into medieval/fantasy stuff, I thought he'd be amused if I embossed the thank-you note with sealing wax and insignia. I already had those on hand (welcome to the world of strange hobbies). Which is when I noticed that I didn't have much sealing wax left. The internet being what it is, it's not much trouble to find more. That and a bottle of calligraphy ink arrived today, which pretty well commits me to figuring out how I'm going to refurbish my pen for doing holiday cards. Yay for useless talents.

Later on in this leisurely evening, I ended up digging out the good ol' mending basket and taking needle and thread to jobs that were just too close-quartered for a sewing machine to handle. For most of those repair jobs, straight-line stitches won't do. If you want cloth to stay repaired, you find yourself falling back on stitches that normally show up in embroidery manuals: Buttonhole or blanket stitches to keep raw edges from fraying (or fraying further), and back-stitches to lock seams in place with just a little "give" to prevent the seam from blowing out (again).

But as much of my life as I spend in the 21st century, it didn't feel particularly anachronistic to sort of double-down on "old school" tonight. Half of any skill is knowing what tools are available and which is actually best for the job--or, at least I like to believe so. And I also believe that one side-effect of our infatuation with gadgetry and "Teach Yourself ______ in 24 Hours" books is an appreciation of things that don't come at the speed of light. Maybe even perfectly frivolous stuff like calligraphy. But for all that, never, ever send wax-sealed envelopes through the U.S. Mail. Trust me, I know why.

The "stunt post" for Thanksgiving

It's a fairly disjointed holiday weekend here, b/c Mom & whatever of my sister's tribe is available won't be rolling in until Sunday, and only then will it be Thanksgiving...at least in this little cubbyhole of the Universe. But, by grace of Fortune's mixed alms-purse, I was able to see maternal relatives by the boatload yesterday. New second-cousins-by-marriage, new third-cousins-by-birth, one first cousin I haven't seen since Bicentennial Year--that sort of thing. Was hugged half to pieces, played "stunt child" for an aunt/uncle temporarily bereft of their own brood, was looked after by second cousins I used to look after when I was too old for their Mom to look after me. If you come from a big family, you probably know what I'm talking about. (If not, just trust me on this, 'k?)

Earlier today I was noodling the cognitive dissonance in the notion of a national day of thanks-giving in the cult of the self-made man/woman. I.e.: If one is indeed self-made and all are created equal, for what (tangible) benefits can we actually give thanks? IMO, it's not blasphemy to ask that question of the American psyche. After all, it could be the kind of Zen-question in which the pondering is more important than an answer. Or, more likely, its reconciliation is a matter of pure pragmatism--not unlike the advice to "always trust your fellow man, and always cut the cards."

Granted, I take a certain pride in being the family oddball. But the lingering effects of yesterday's proximity to shared DNA make me pity those who consider themselves entirely self-made and sui generis. It's enough work to make something of oneself; why put the extra work into denying the raw materials one had to work with (or against)? And, therein, is perhaps the reason that Thanksgiving is an overwhelmingly communal holiday: Alone, it's much easier to believe that we are the sole architect and engineer of all good that has come to us. But among our kind, we can't help but acknowledge the good that's been done for our sake...and which we are thus obliged to pay forward.

Respecting "Giants"

Think for a second or twelve about the "giants" in your life: Personal, professional, whatever--it really doesn't matter. Sometimes "giants" are large only to the people who choose to look up to them, but mostly I think that they fall into one of two categories:

1. People who are just wired to be larger-than-life, even when they've had to do their own wiring--from scratch and with no blueprint
2. People who live for many years around giants and (gradually or suddenly) find themselves having to grow into giants to do what needs doing

It's that latter phenomenon I want to talk about. There is, IMO, a crucial distinction to be made between being able to count on giants and relying on giants. Because giants are not immortal: They can falter, weaken, and even die. And because relying upon them also teaches those who might grow into giants that they needn't bother to learn how.

Unless management is utterly convinced of the infallibility of its judgement and implementing its vision--and has a means of transfering it to the clones growing in vats in some boutique laboratory--may I humbly submit that the primary business of "leadership" is actually giant-rearing?

Another riff on the difference between transactions and relationships

I started reading "For Firms that Cut Wages, Keeping Workers a Worry," wondering it how it could possibly be such a slow news day that someone had time to connect Dot 1 and Dot 2 for their audience. The payoff, however, is the last third or so--an eyebrow-raising illustration of the difference between leading and managing. Scratch that. The difference between leading and inspiring.

As with their customers, employers have to decide whether their employees have transactions or relationships with the firm. Obviously, I'm biased in favor of the latter, simply because I think that treating people like the adults & professionals you expect them to be is far more efficient than micro-management--quite apart from the purely human payoff. But it's a choice that must be made with the honest acknowledgement of the trade-offs unique to each. Anyone who insists upon having the upside of both quite frankly deserves the disappointment that results.

Don't let the door hit'cha where the Good Lord split'cha...

Okay, I'm missing definitely missing something here. The Murdoch publishing empire is apparently thinking of paying Microsoft for--as I understand it--selective search engine optimization. In other words, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, etc. will graciously allow Redmond to pay them for what other media outlets will throw ridiculous sums of money at SEO snake-oil salesman to get.

Obviously, Mr. Murdoch knows a thing or three about packaging content, and the related Financial Times blog post by John Gapper makes the excellent point that traffic from paid subscribers trumps any random pair of eyeballs that the Google cat dragged in. Also, Bing isn't DOA as some predicted it would be, even without Microsoft baking it into every copy of IE in the same fashion that the Google toolbar is baked into Firefox and Opera.

But--and I'm just running with gut feeling here--partnering with a company that's has clearly lost its edge to shore up a business model that's clearly on the ropes doesn't sound like the smartest decision I've heard. IMO, it's like the dinosaurs deciding to form a commune after the meteor's already hit.

Hulu, the generational glue(lu)

A long-time friend--my age plus a few years--recently discovered Hulu, and her friend (appropriately enough for Thanksgiving) suggested she find the iconic turkey-bombing WKRP in Cincinnati episode. Actually, my husband and I still go round-and-round about whether the Funniest Moment in TV History is its "Oh my God! They're hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement! Oh, the humanity!" or a curtain-clad Carol Burnett sending up Gone with the Wind. Anyone who grew up with TV in the 70s (or re-runs in the 80s) knows exactly what moments I'm talking about.

In the case of WKRP, it's likely you caught all or part of it (in re-run form) while waiting for Thanksgiving dinner to be ready, making it redolent of human associations. At least, that's my first memory of it, coming from small-city Wisconsin, where "channel-surfing" meant twisting the dial to find the four non-static channels among the 13 available.

But it occurred to me (with more nostalgia-infused wistfulness than I want to admit to) that such generational solidarity of cultural experience will likely run a bit thinner as time goes on. How many of todays tweens, teens, and twenty-somethings will reminisce about where they were & what they were doing when Ashton Kucher beat CNN to the million Twitter follower milestone? Granted, I haven't raised any tweens or teens (much less twenty-somethings), but I'm guessing that won't happen all too often. This isn't the internet's "fault," per se--the cable TV explosion seems, to me at least, to have been the thin end of the proverbial wedge, splitting a phenomenon that began with the family gathering around a wireless whose choices were more limited than the ABC/CBS/NBC/PBS menu of my childhood.

Not that I consider this diminishing commonality any blow to civilization, much less the coup de grace. In fact, if it makes it more difficult for manufactured celebrity and buzz (or over-processed mediocrity in general) to make it far enough off the ground hit my radar, I'm on top of it. Diversity isn't free, although it may often seem that way when its price is compared to that of conformity.

Eggs and chickens revisited

I followed a lively Twitter exchange over Paul Graham's "Apple's Mistake" blog post. The iPhone app. developer half of the Twitter discussion noted that the App. Store is not controlling the apps. so much as the experience. Good point, but it's also hard to argue Graham's slam-dunk observation that "VisiCalc made the Apple II." I read that snippet of the article to my husband, who opined that the two were more or less synonymous Back In The Day. Just like Windows and Office were the peanut butter and honey--it's "honey," not "jelly," in our house, anyway--pairing of 1990s offices.

In other words, if you wanted Microsoft Office, you had to buy a Windows PC. And if you bought the Windows PC alone, chances are that you ended up buying Office just to shut up everybody who sat down at that PC and wanted to know where Office was b/c they needed to write a document. I'll leave the question of which of the two (platform and killer app.) is the chicken and which is the egg to poultry-farming philosophers, but you get the idea...

I'm not sure that iPhone-Blackberry comparisons are spot-on, though. Blackberry (as a platform, albeit a more closed one) has its "killer app.", namely nomadic email that can be synchronized with settled community email. The "phone" part of the Blackberry was an afterthought, really. By contrast, the iPhone has no killer app. In fairness, neither do Android phones, nor any other wanna-be gadgetry. And until that killer app.--assuming that it's geared to one platform over all others--lands, I think we're basically looking at a Western Front trenches-and-barbed-wire-style stalemate.

Near the end of the post, Graham puts a twist on the question of developing for the gadget market by wondering whether someone will write an application that allows you to develop software for the gadget directly on the gadget,rather than having to use a PC or Mac to write and actually install it (and possibly the intermediary of a "store" or "marketplace" gatekeeper besides). Apple certainly wouldn't allow such roll-your-own software to darken the doors of the App. Store.

I don't want to imply that the roll-your-own-software application that Paul Graham describes meets the definition of a killer app. That term is reserved for software with mass appeal. In the mass-market, there will always be a tug-of-war between style/polish and the bleeding-edge cool factor. A roll-your-own environment leans heavily toward the latter. Additionally, the reduced friction in the development process (even without gatekeepers and related red tape) means that developers have a bit of an edge in the first-to-market race. That's more than a passing concern to anyone who might be providing outside funding.

Would a frictionless, venture-capitalist-friendly gadget software development environment be enough to tip the balance away from Apple's carefully-managed menagerie and toward the wilder jungle of an open platform? I won't presume to guess. Like most folks, I'll probably figure it out when the chicken and egg are at last in sight.

Frivolous Friday, 11.20.2009: The Robert Louis Stevenson edition

[The original version from "A Child's Garden of Verses." I am soooo kicking myself for not thinking of this while under the weather two weeks ago.]

When I was sick and sat in bed,
To nurse a bored and stuffy head,
The laptop close beside me lay,
To give my NADD* its wicked way.

I Googled, for an hour or so,
So much I don't have time to know:
To get my geek on, for the thrills--
And brushing up my coding skilz.

With Facebook friends I traded greets
And caught up on their recent tweets,
And emailed pals a long-due shout
(For vocal cords were down-and-out).

Confined to sick-room, warm and still,
The upside found in feeling ill,
In one day free from stress and strain,
A rested body, busy brain.

* NADD = "Nerd Attention Deficit Disorder," coined by Michael Lopp (@rands on Twitter, blog: http://www.randsinrepose.com/) in Managing Humans.

Karma Kommenting (NSFW)

It's definitely not safe for work, but I'm afraid that, IMO, no one has summed up up the downside of internet "anonymity" better than Penny Arcade's illustration of the Greater Internet @#$%wad Theory. Sorry.

Hopefully that's changing a bit. A couple days ago, I was leaving a website comment, and noticed the option of signing up for a Disqus account. It's hardly a novel idea--Slashdot has had the notion of user "karma" for I don't even remember how long. You always have the option of posting as "Anonymous Coward," but at the price of forfeiting whatever "karma" you've accumulated under a habitual ID.

That's not a bad compromise, and I see that things like OpenID, Google ID, and so forth, are being enabled here and there. The mechanism allows you to carry the "karma" you've accumulated elsewhere to new forums. Yes, you give up your anonymity when you do so, and that's sort of a gear-shift from the way the internet's been running for the last decade-and-change. But I also see more than a little good coming from it, particularly if it's coupled with the appropriate forum software tweaks. Currently, I think that the opinion of the Anonymous Coward is given far, far too much weight. As people carrying their identities from forum to forum becomes more the norm, I think that the appropriate discounting of anonymous opinions will likewise become the norm.

Yeah, everyone needs to blow of steam from time to time. And smacking down "wrong-headedness" just feels goooooood. No question. Y'know, in the sense of Babylon 5's G'Kar: "That was great! No moral ambiguities! No hopeless battle against an ancient enemy! We were right; they were wrong...and they made a most agreeable 'Thump!' when they hit the ground!" That sort of thing.

But. A few moments of escapism aside, the internet would be pretty pointless without actual human interaction behind it. And human interaction has rules...or at least guidelines that evolve at a glacial pace. For that reason, it's important that the opinions of those who stand behind their words is given precedence over trolling. (As if comment-spam weren't lowering the value of forum discourse even further.) As long as people still have the option of anonymous commenting, I'm totally down with the notion of a voluntary Grand Unified Internet ID. After all, the game was always supposed to be about meritocracy. Sure, the classic Anonymous Coward might be as insightful as someone who puts their karma behind their comment. On one forum, maybe. But karma--meaning legacy--always means more than the proverbial flash in the pan.

Voodoo computing

An ill-timed software update hosed scheduled jobs on "twin" servers sometime late Monday night or early Tuesday morning. The essential problem was that the updates required a reboot, which is something I (and the programmer who works most intimately with those servers) can do. But there's a catch: Only the two administrators have logins, and for those scheduled jobs to be manually restarted, someone would have to log in after the reboot.

Naturally, that was the day when one administrator was out of town on business and the other was out sick. Luckily, the out-of-town administrator could be reached by cellphone, and between us, we dealt with it. But the funny thing is, as much as I logically knew exactly what was wrong, what had caused the problem, and what had to be done to fix it, I couldn't help feeling--superstitiously--that the timing was just a bit suspicious--as if the gremlins had been biding their time to pounce when the karma of administrators no longer hung so thickly about the server room.

So I never, ever sneer at people who think that their computers are "out to get" them. Particularly after two years in system administration and desktop support, wherein the gremlin had so often decamped by the time I was at the desk of the person who'd shouted for help. In the absence of a logical explanation, people fill their gap in understanding with the mental caulk most familiar to them. These fractious boxes already seem to have a mind of their own; thus, attributing ill intent to them isn't so great a leap.

The illogic, in a sense, is a logic unto itself. And you have to respect that--meaning respect the reality of it. Because until you fill the information gap with actual facts, the made-up explanation is the reality. And anyone who works with both computers and humans has to square with that if they want to be effective. Why? Because you never, ever want people to be afraid of bringing problems to you--or, worse, trying to fix them with zero-to-little technical knowledge. That situation's a time bomb, technically and organizationally.

"Hacking" the hive

(Meaning "hacking" more in the sense of homebrew solutions rather than in the breaking-into-computers sense)

It was definitely Show 'n tell night at the La Crosse Area Beekeeper's meeting. For instance, one person brought out two different mechanisms for collecting pollen for human consumption (which, by the way, is something you do judiciously because that starves the bees of protein). And then there was the beat-up "super" (i.e. the upper stories of the hive in which the bees stash the honey that their humans later harvest) that was recycled into a mechanism for absorbing the condensation which can kill a winterized hive during particularly cold snaps.

But tonight's top hacker was, far and away, the most resourceful scrounger. He used to work in a cheese plant. and for reasons of sanitation and safety, the food industry does not reuse a lot of equipment. Thus perfectly good thermometers (important for making sure that honey is not heated past the surprisingly low temperature that devastates its floral characteristics) were rescued from the trash. Ditto food-grade plastic buckets (previously home to food coloring) which made straining, storing and gently uncrystalizing (with the mere heat of a light bulb) honey so much less bulky.

And, although purchased second-hand rather than scavenged, the most interesting specimen (to me) was the homemade top-feeder. Essentially, that was a box in which a chimney had been constructed to allow the bees to come up from inside the hive (on which the feeder is placed). The feeder what can only be described as a wooden raft that fits inside the feeder (with a hole cut for the chimney) and floats on top of the sugar water that bulks up the bees' stores for the winter or tides them over until the maples and other early-blooming plants & trees provide the first nectar of the year. The raft helps to keep them from drowning, something to which they are prone even when they're not groggy from the cold.

Listening to other beekeepers talk about their inventions/acquisitions is quite different from flipping through catalogs and/or browsing the vendor tables at the state convention, namely because the gadgets (and the ideas behind them) have already been through one round of vetting by survival of the fittest. Understand that in beekeeping--as with most things--there is no such thing as One True Way, so you have to factor in style.

I can't begin to tell you how much fun it is to see other people's brainchildren, even when you know that it probably won't work with your setup and/or philosophy. Beekeeping certainly has no monopoly on that sort of thing, but it's a livelihood under siege from many different quarters. Which--I like to believe--tends to bring out the ingenuity of those who don't abandon the field to colony collapse disorder or a distinctly unlevel global playing field.

A thought from the dinner-table

Tonight table = desk, because I wasn't home until well after eight. I made hummus yesterday, so that and pita bread were thrown together to take the edge off the appetite. At its base, hummus is a pretty humble food: Chickpeas (a.k.a. garbanzo beans) are ridiculously cheap. The most expensive ingredient in the recipe is tahini, i.e. sesame seed paste, and I'm paying a "premium" for that b/c the only kind that's stocked where I normally shop is organic. But slap that on slices of whole wheat pita bread, and the nutritional return on investment is considerable (protein and fiber), far more than its "tapas" vibe would suggest.

However, it's extravagant in that the chickpeas have to be boiled for nearly two hours...and that on top of soaking overnight in the 'fridge. It wouldn't have been a big deal back in the days when the stove was probably going 24/7 to heat the house. Central heating changed the underlying economics of hummus, but has certainly not catapulted it into the league of foie gras. Even the jazzed-up "roasted garlic this," "roasted bell pepper that" versions at the deli are still pretty cheap...in terms of price and the obvious overuse of filler corn products.

On a slightly different tack, think about what you most often see carried out on plates when you have breakfast at a "family-style" restaurant. Simple starches (pancakes, toast, french toast, potatoes, not to mention flavored corn syrup), pork products (bacon, ham, sausage), eggs, and animal fats (eggs, bacon, sausage, and the inevitable butter for toast, pancakes, french toast). Basically, we're still eating like we've just come in from feeding and milking the cows, and mucking out after them--and all by hand. Except that precious few of us will burn through those calories before lunch. Again, our cultural perceptions/habits have not caught up with the caloric "economics" of an urban lifestyle.

All of which makes me wonder what other mismatches between habits and economic realities are out there. Not necessarily involving food--those were just the examples that jumped to mind. How many billions are lost to unthinking habit or norms. And, conversely, how much money is there to be made from leading a culture past wasteful attitudes and norms that no longer apply? I wish I had an answer for you--we might then all die rich...or at least accomplished. But maybe cultivating the habit of looking for obsolete habits--organizationally speaking--isn't the worst thing you can do for your career or business.

You can't outsource decisions

You can outsource creativity, depth and/or breadth of expertise in a particular industry, school-of-hard-knocks experience, and raw talent.

But not decisions. Why? Because decisions are predicated on knowing what you want to achieve. That, and decisions carry the responsibility for their consequences. If you have to outsource that, why is anyone paying you?

(This <snark>blinding flash of insight</snark> was brought to you courtesy of me having to figure out what will make a logo I almost like into something I do.)

Kevlar and computer code

It's been awhile since anyone's managed to break "my" application at work, given all the bullet-proofing code that's accreted over mumble-six-mumble years. The "broken" web page is set up to submit the user's input to the web server if the user clicks the "Submit" button or (as a convenience) presses the "Enter" key. Nothing fancy.

But what happens when the user clicks the "Submit" button and then hits the "Enter" key a short moment later? As it turns out, this submits the same input form twice.

Oops.

So far as I know, this is the first time a user's done that in the four-plus years that this web application has been my baby. (Perversely, I was delighted to learn that it still had quirks I hadn't known about. Of course, the fallout from this bug is pretty minor, because the duplicate request was easily deleted. If you're going to have a quirk, that's a good kind to have...)

My odd joy in quirkiness aside, the incident plays up how very difficult it is to test (and thus to bullet-proof) software that relies on humans to input data. Part of the problem is that professional software testers generally understand how the application they're testing is supposed to be used. This makes it less likely that they will think to "push the wrong buttons," if you will. Programmers who do all their own testing are even less likely to find those kinds of bugs, because programmers also know what's happening inside the black box. Even the afore-mentioned user who accidentally submitted the form twice is quite familiar with the system.

I'm sure that my programming elders can easily one-up my itty-bitty bug that only took four years to find. But for non-programmers and those just starting, the takeaway is: Never consider code unbreakable. When we talk about "bullet-proofing" an application, we're mainly talking in terms of Kevlar vests, not the Popemobile.

Frivolous Friday, 11.13.2009: A red-letter day for a red wine

If we were living in France, this upcoming Thursday would be known as Beaujolais Nouveau Day, the day when the 2009 vintage of the wine by that name hits the Parisian market. If the name of the wine doesn't ring a bell, for pete's sake do not ask your local wine snob. Any "right-thinking" oenophile will likely repress a shudder at its mere mention.

If you don't like red wine because of aspects like the hot alcohol taste or the bitterness of the tannins that can leave the insides of your cheeks feeling leathery, you won't find that in Beaujolais Nouveau. Partly because of its fermentation process and partly because it isn't aged in oak barrels, which is where most reds (and some whites, like many California Chardonnays) pick up that bitterness that ranges from piquant to did-I-just-lick-the-barrel?!

I like regular Beaujolais because it's sort of an oddball among wines, and I'll drink Beaujolais Nouveau because I admire its cheekiness in a snobbish industry. We'll get to the cheekiness in a bit, but first a little background: Currently, the Beaujolais region of France is considered to be part of Burgandy (which you'll no doubt recognize as expensive-sounding). Classic Burgundy wine is made from the Pinot Noir grape (which everybody of course knows from Sideways, riiiight?) The grape that goes into Beaujolais, however, is a varietal called Gamay. Gamay isn't fussy like Pinot Noir is. For that reason, once upon a time a lot of Gamay was planted in Burgandy, in the days when Beaujolais was just a neighbor. But in the year 1395, the Duke of Burgandy (Philip the Bold) ordered all the Gamay in his domains ripped up and replaced with Pinot Noir, which he deemed a better wine (which of course would fetch higher prices and greater tax revenues for him).

Gamay is sort of an outsider in another sense. Normally, red wine is produced by first crushing the grapes and allowing the whole mess to go through a primary fermentation. Then the solid parts are pressed to squeeze out (a.k.a. extract) the juice and tossed aside. The juice finishes its fermantation without the skins, stems, seeds, etc., often in oak barrels to add even more tannins than would be found naturally in the grape skins.

Beaujolais is made quite differently. By law, the grape must be picked by hand, specifically to avoid crushing the grapes (as mechanical harvesters would inevitably do). The grapes and any juice incidental to handling are dumped into tanks where the oxygen is replaced by carbon dioxide. The lack of exposure to oxygen means that the yeast have to rely on the oxygen within the flesh of the grapes themselves to ferment the wine, a process called carbonic maceration. The result is fruity, light, easy-drinking wines. There is a downside, however: The lack of tannins means that the wine will not keep for long. Red wines are normally prized for their longevity, so that's considered a huge knock.

The ethic of the industry also looks down on shortcuts, which runs completely counter to something that is good for the vintner--i.e. moving grapes to bottles on store shelves as quickly as possible. In the case of Beaujolais Nouveau, that's where marketing stepped in. The fundamental "weakness" of a nouveau (a.k.a. primeur) wine was transformed into its strength by confecting a great show of getting the wine to market as quickly as possible--making a race of it, in fact. Moreover, the wine's characteristic freshness typically comes an expiration date: Most labels are meant to be drunk within six to eight weeks of bottling. This of course, plays upon the "seasonal" appeal of the wine. And I have to tip my hat to all that, no matter how gimmicky.

Now, the race to market--while great for the vintner's cash flow--is not entirely guiltless. Rushing wine (a bulky commodity) to all parts of the world via airplane bears a carbon footprint that slower methods do not. Fortunately, we in the Upper Midwest have a way around that, assuming you're willing to make do with regional grapes. When I called The Wine Guyz yesterday, Don said that the only B.N. they're stocking this year comes from Wisconsin's own Wollersheim Wineries. Unfortunately, Don was a bit misinformed: Wollersheim does make a traditional Beaujolais from French grapes. But their "Ruby Nouveau," is made primarily from Wisconsin-grown Marechal Foch grapes, albeit via the carbonic maceration method. (Which is still very cool--don't get me wrong.) My husband and I have made a wine based on the Foch grape, and (in its heyday) it was more than serviceable. But it wasn't anything you'd hoard in the cellar for 20 years. Something I wish we'd understood before I popped one of the last few bottles a couple months back. Truth be told, it was pretty horrible. (I just hope the garbage disposal doesn't hold it against me.)

Whatever your sentiments about carbon footprints, picking BN up for eight or nine bucks a bottle and drinking it on its own terms is still like spitting in the eye of the self-appointed arbiters of taste. A habit I like to encourage, in myself as well as others. But I also believe that before you break the rules, you really should understand them...and when and why they can be broken. That's what tonight's post is really all about: Giving you, gentle reader, a free pass to drink a very friendly, breezy, approachable red wine--that IMO rocks with spaghetti, by the bye--without the worry of shriveling under the criticism of the Miles Raymonds of this world.

Selling the relationship first, product second

Huzzah: Whatever's been borking Dilbert for the last several days has apparently been fixed. Because my own brand of cynicism and sarcasm is so bush-league, I missed my daily dose of the All-Pro stuff, y'know...

Tuesday's strip is no exception. Sometimes my boss seems to live out of a suitcase, criss-crossing the USA and wearing out the battery on his cellphone, all to convince potential clients that we really can make life simpler for them than they could make it for themselves. Various co-workers sometimes tag along as backup for the particularly nerdy pow-wows. From the perspective of a lowly "project manager," whose instincts are to cut to the chase, the process is mind-blowingly Byzantine. I honestly don't know where the patience comes from.

But it really illustrates the point that when money and managerial karma is on the line, relationships matter. More than blingy technology. Surprisingly often, even more than who pitched the smallest bid and the biggest promises. At the root, it's a trust of sorts--trust in who seems most likely to make good on the implicit promise that their understanding of what needs to be done mostly overlaps with yours. Because that's really where it counts. Not how many rent-a-coders you can throw at the specifications and deadline.

Minimizing the bleeding from a cutover

I don't remember a whole lot from the class on Systems Administration that I needed for my degree. Mainly because it was a matter of rote memorization, and that semester was pretty programming-intensive. But one of the few things that pops into mind from a decade ago is the set of options and trade-offs involved for cutting over from one software system to its replacement.

Option 1: Parallel systems transition Both systems are fully operational during the cutover time. The good: Output from the new system can be validated against the old one. Plus, if the new system isn't working as planned, it's simply switched off until the bugs can be worked out. The bad: Something like double the work (i.e. expense) will be involved, not to mention a certain amount of organizational disruption while things are sort of in wait-and-see limbo.

Option 2: Cold turkey cut-over You switch off the old system and switch on the new. The good: No double-expenditures, and the sheer act of cutting over is its own incentive to make things work. The bad: Not for the faint of heart, because if the new system is not working as designed, firing up the old one and bringing it back up to speed with the new data is pretty much guaranteed pain.

Seem pretty simple, don't they: The trade-offs between cost and peace-of-mind? But it boggles my mind to see how many people--even those who should know better--think they can have Option 1's safety-net for the price of Option 2. It just doesn't work that way, and I can confidently tell you that anyone who says otherwise is either a naif or a liar. Don't fall for it. Whichever cut-over option you choose, decide up front how much pain you and the organization can handle. Budget (time as well as money) for hiccups and for pete's sake make sure folks know the backup plan (you do have a backup plan?) well ahead of time.

This is probably old news to the veteran of even a single rollout. (Although I've noticed that cut-overs are like child-birth for some people in that you forget how gut-busting it can be until the next time around.) But for anyone who hasn't ridden that roller-coaster...don't say you weren't warned.

Something I hope you'll see (if you haven't already)

Because this involves my employer, I trust that the reader will understand that I can't go into much detail. But the aftermath of a conference call this afternoon was too interesting not to share. "Interesting" in the sense of watching the realization that we're jumping to the next level really sink in. That it's not all hand-wavy anymore. That it's not gonna be all glamorous. That there's no easy path back to the safe, familiar way of doing things. And that there's no other way to get what we've been shooting for.

It's tantamount to moving away from home, knowing that a younger sibling will be moving her/his boxes into "your" room (or part of a room) the minute the last of your boxes is loaded into the car. It's incredibly scary, and incredibly exhilarating. Not something that happens often in the life-span of an organization, so it's exciting as all get-out to witness.

Deciding to decide well

Had a minor "epiphany" today, a notion no doubt self-evident to any fair-to-middling manager, but an epiphany to the likes of me: Decisions are the lifeblood of an organization. To take it one step further: An organization should be structured around removing all possible decision-making friction at the organizational level most relevant to the decision itself. Period, full stop.

I normally distrust simple prescriptions, which is why browsing the business section at the bookstore is particularly painful. But I've been turning the above idea over in my head since late afternoon, and still can't think of a single counter-example. Whereas the examples of friction are legion (although I tend to think of them as falling into basic categories):

• Bottlenecks (for which I largely blame the Cult of the CEO) due to tactical decisions being doled at the strategic level.
  
• At the other end of the spectrum, the Cult of Consensus, in which the organization hemorrhages productivity in meetings specifically designed to postpone decision-making (and spread the blame for any consequences of decisions that manage to slip through).
  
• Or (my personal favorite) the proverbial "re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titantic" schtick that likewise bleeds productivity with the bonus of allowing the slackers and martinets to contribute even less than normal, while sapping the morale of those responsible for getting work out under deadline.

So my plea to management types is this: If you don't have time to consider all the information involved in a decision, please, please, PLEASE delegate that authority to those who do have that information.

Another private eye who works for free

Well, "internet free," anyway.

This is more or less a follow-on to yesterday. If you're looking to scope out a potential customer/employer/competitor and the company is publicly traded, you can consider your tax dollars well spent in the SEC's second-generation "Oscar" tool. The link for viewing "Insider Transactions" is particularly useful as a "Who's Who" for both inside the company as well as who's pulling the strings from the outside.

Anyhoo, the base link for searches is here: http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html. Booyah for transparency.

WHOIS: Private Eye

LunarPages emailed me yesterday to remind me that domain registration and hosting renewal time is shortly at hand. Sure, the account's set for auto-billing, but it's good form to give your customers the heads-up that you're going to ding their credit card, even when you're pre-authorized to do so.

But I kind of took a step back at this sentence in the reminder:

When renewing your domain(s), consider this: Did you know that you can increase your Search Engine Rankings by registering your domain name for 5 or more years at a time? Although a 5 year registration may seem excessive, search engines such as Google and Alexa appreciate and heavily weigh the longevity and stability of websites. Extending the length of your domain registration will help improve your search engine rank and to allow others to find you more easily!

Now, I haven't bothered to corroborate the SEO claim, but it tripped the switch for a small light bulb in my brain. A case could definitely be made for using the WHOIS record for the company's web domain(s) (e.g. acme.com) for trying to get a better sense of a company. Maybe you're about to do business with it; maybe you just want to. Maybe you're a competitor or are trying to become one. Maybe you have a job interview with it. In any case, domain information is just another tool in your belt. Given that much of the information is "free," I think you'd be a fool not to take advantage of it.

It may be a matter of chance in timing, but if the renewal date's waaaay out there, you can make an intelligent guess as to whether the company prefers to invest up front to save money in the long run, or whether it prefers to live in the present. Did the company register the domain under its own name? Or did it register it anonymously? Or was the name registered by a third party, most likely the web designers?

If you have any sense of the various domain registration companies (a.k.a. registrars), it can also help fill in some of the pieces. Is registrar fly-by-night? Or a venus flytrap for the un-savvy? Bargain basement or boutique? Similar questions apply to the company that actually hosts the company's website, with the additional possibility that the company owns the server that hosts the website, which says something else entirely.

If you use a thorough tool like http://whois.domaintools.com (the free version of which rawks, by the bye), you can find out other interesting things about the history of the domain. Has it jumped around or stayed in one place? If the information's worth your coin, you can also find out where and when those changes happened.

Of course, if you're primarily interested in aspects of the company that don't have anything to do with their web strategy, the above will likely be a complete waste of time. But for anyone else, it's a peep through the keyhole at where I/T (particularly the webby bits) fit into their vision of the company. For me, that's very valuable information.

Frivolous Friday, 11.06.2009: Freaky Factoids

Prior to Halloween, I'd been hoping that the Weird Wisconsin website would return after being boarded up since sometime in 2007.  Mostly because I've been a sucker for quote-unquote "true" ghost stories since grade school.  (This despite certain..."incidents," such as the cat extruding herself from her hiding-place right next to where I was engrossed in a book of such stories. D'oh!). In addition to hauntings and other "unexplained" phenomena, Weird Wisconsin also featured the bizarre side of the state's history, in keeping with their motto:  "When you go looking for the weird, the weird comes looking for you."

For instance:  In 1912, Teddy Roosevelt was on campaign stop in Milwaukee while running for President under the Bull Moose (Progressive) Party ticket when he was shot to "avenge" the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley.  The would-be assassin of (McKinley's) then-Vice President Roosevelt believed that the McKinley's ghost had asked him to settle the score.

Roosevelt went down from the shot, and the surrounding crowd tackled the shooter (John Shrank). Then Roosevelt--always larger than life--jumped up, shouting, "Don't hurt the poor man!" Although the bullet had entered his chest (where it was later deemed too dangerously lodged to remove), its force had been blunted by Roosevelt's eyeglass case and the fifty page text of the speech he was about to deliver.  And deliver it he did, judging that because he was not coughing blood, the bullet could not have entered the lung.  Only after his 90-minute spiel was he admitted to the hospital, where he greatly annoyed his neighbors with his snores.

But shuttered website aside, there's still plenty of weird...or at least lots of stuff that challenges our modern sensibilities and what we think we know about the past lurking in just about every nook of history.  In this case, I'm reading Nancy Unger's Fighting Bob LaFollette, and thought I'd share some of the nuggets I've found, merely 1/3 of the way in:

• Bob LaFollette's paternal grandparents were neighbors of Abraham Lincoln's Mom and Dad.
• In 1875, the University of Wisconsin boasted 345 students, and the number of four-year university students in the United States was 27,000.
• However, even in 1875, the UW was co-ed:  LaFollette met his wife as a fellow student.
• In 1860, the year the Civil War began, Wisconsin's African Americans could own property, attend public schools, sit on juries, and marry white spouses.  However, the popular referendum denied them the right to vote, which was ultimately given by fiat of the Wisconsin State Supreme Court a year after the close of the Civil War.
• Cranberries were at one time an experimental crop, intended to diversify agricultural output in the wake of war shortages and crop failures.
• Ditto for hops, which contributed to the hundreds of breweries that made up Milwaukee's leading industry (in the 1870s or so)...and a 30% spike in Wisconsin's overall alcohol consumption.  (And Oktoberfest begins!)
• In LaFollette's childhood, Wisconsin's sheep population outnumber its cows.  However, by the time he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, Wisconsin was sufficiently "the dairy state" for for the frosh Congresscritter to attempt to protect its interests by arguing for a tax on margarine.
• Railroad titans were the Wall Street bankers of LaFollette's youth and early career, most notably for helping themselves to public land, and for fixing prices to the detriment of farmers and the cities that relied on their produce.
• (And speaking of corruption...) The safeguards against politicians abusing their powers were pretty much nonexistent.  For instance: Philetus Sawyer, lumber baron and the senior Senator from Wisconsin during LaFollette's first term, ran through a law to sell himself timberlands belonging to the Menominee tribe.  And it was considered routine business by all but the reformers.

Apart from the chance to collect oddball trivia ('cuz my brain is like flypaper for that stuff), I like to think that going on "weirdness safari" (particularly in history) is an excellent stretch for the brain.  It counter-acts the too-easily and spuriously-used rationalization of "that's the way it's always been." I can't recommend the experience highly enough.

But for pete's sake, just make sure you know where the cat is.

A few thoughts on digital tree-houses

The concept of online communities" is by now definitely mainstream, which hopefully means that the hype will finally die off soon. More hopefully, it's because the metric of "How much does this group accomplish in the real world?" will be more rigorously applied. Sure, folks like Guy Kawasaki can snort at people with few followers/tweets when they unfollow him for his redundant posting of the same link. Personally, I would rather withhold judgment until I see how gelled that person and their contacts are and what they do with that network of relationships. (And even then, I certainly wouldn't snort.)

As an example of what I mean by "gelled," the guy who owns Orange Computer in La Crosse--I didn't think to ask permission to name names, so you'll just have to check out http://orangecomputerlax.com for that--is hosting a Linux (Ubuntu 9.10) installation-fest this weekend. He's already following and being followed by several "techie" types in the area, so Twitter makes a natural medium for getting the word out. If the online and offline worlds of @OrangeComputer didn't overlap, the installation shout-out would be a complete waste of 140 characters.

It doesn't just apply to social media. For instance, folks with a number of skill-sets (programming, testing, documenting, building, etc.) can all roll the next iteration of Linux without ever meeting each other (much less Linus Torvalds) in the physical world. But they all have the secret password that allows them into the tree-house, because of their contribution to the software that ultimately powers real-world hardware for the real-world benefit of people and organizations.

The dot-com crash again tied the viability of a business to (gasp!) actual profits, rather than eyeballs or its prospects of being flipped to Yahoo!, Microsoft, whatever. Similarly, the more egregious abuses of Facebook, Twitter, etc. for spamming, virus-propagation, time-wasting inanity, and superficial "networking" will--I believe--place a greater emphasis on the offline value of an online community.

But there's the rub: How is that value quantified? How do you put a dollar figure to the amount (or lack) of trust that the members of a network have their alpha, betas, or each other? If I had a crystal-clear set of answers to those questions, I'd probably already be a millionaire with a viable shot at billionaire-hood. But I think one possible metric is this: How much is the community interested in their own numbers? Because a focus on the numbers is, in my opinion, an indication that there's no substantive vision there. In essence, the message being communicated to the outside world (i.e., would-be members) is the Web 2.0 equivalent of a chain letter.

Which, IMO, should be mere common sense. But every time I see someone swaggering online purely on the strength of her/his avatar-collection, I just cringe. Bottom line: Could you trust each and every one of your peeps to water the plants and feed the cats while you're on vacation? Do you even know them well enough to know whether or not you could make that kind of judgment in the first place? Because if you can't, you're basically expecting to pay the bills with Monopoly money. And we all know how well that worked out for Web 1.0...

Taking a sick day

I sounded worse than I actually felt this morning, so I called in to say that I'd be working remotely. Which worked well enough for a few hours, but I should have known from my inability to concentrate (in a very quiet house) that there wasn't as much brain-juice in the tank as I'd originally thought. The red light isn't on yet, but the needle is bobbling around "E," so I will beg off for tonight.

Wandering onto an alien planet

It's one of those things that a programmer should know, but I've always managed to make excuses not to dive into. If you're not familiar with the term "regular expression," no worries--they merely provide a way to search for specific text patterns, something that comes up time and again in programming. Regular expressions are incredibly powerful, and any number of programming languages are optimized to make them lightening-fast. And best of all, they don't require lines upon lines of code.

There's a price, though: The incredibly lean and flexible syntax is quite dense, and completely alien to someone raised on languages from the C and BASIC families. Also, the web tutorials I've encountered today don't seem to bridge that language barrier very convincingly. As in, "Wait! Pattern? Modifier? Just tell me which one's the needle and which one's the haystack." As usually happens, much of even the proverbial 30,000-foot understanding finally hinges on a web browser, a code editor, and the elusive uninterrupted half-hour, 15 minutes of which is typically wasted on just resisting the urge to punch just one more word combination into Google rather than settling in with the three or four open browser tabs.

Which makes me wonder what professions outside of I/T do their real learning like that. Not the required number of hours/year spent pretending to take notes on a PowerPoint given in a hotel ballroom. Not memorizing enough regulatory updates long enough to pass re-certification. The real deal. Picking their way through foreign terrain, on bivouac and quite often living off the land. Not the tour bus and a guide with a microphone. Or is the contrast just more apparent in I/T? I've spent too much time there too know anymore.

The best magic is sometimes simple

I spent several hours today doing HTML tricks that are probably cutting edge in the same sense as the original Hamster Dance website and The Blair Witch Project (and probably co-eval with both, come to think of it). I don't know as I'll ever be ahead of any technological curve, but the opening of William Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" jumped into mind anyway:

I put the shotgun into an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can aspire to crudeness. I'd had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock, on a lathe, then load them myself; I'd had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand-loading cartridges; I'd had to build a lever-action press to seat the primer--all very tricky. But I knew they'd work.

As much as new and shiny appeals to the magpie that dwells within most programmers/techies I know (myself included), today's exercise was just plain fun. Getting HTML to do what you'd normally expect of blingier platforms like Flash, Silverlight, etc. also forced me to learn a few more things about a language I normally take for granted. Not a bad thing either.

But there were more than a few times when I could as easily have been sitting in front of a TRS-80 or Apple II, tinkering with snippets of code, poking here, prodding there--all to see what would happen. Regardless of how many error messages or unexpected behavior happened, learning occurred more often than not. Learning and the extra reward of coaxing "magic" out of the fractious contraption perched on the table in front of me.

I suppose the explosion of one-off languages and whole platforms is, in this light, a blessing rather than a discouraging thing. No one person will ever be able to grok them all, but the flip side is that tinkerers will never run short of magic.

A pointless, but necessary protest

First off, I want to apologize for two highly snarky posts in a row. Anyone who knows me offline knows that sarcasm is a hobby, not a lifestyle for me. But hoo boy, does Putnam Investments ever deserve it--I could clone myself ninety-nine times, and still not give them all the sarcasm they deserve.

Backstory: A previous employer went to the trouble of setting us (meaning the employees who opted in) with Simple IRAs, and given the employer matching, I would have been a fool to turn it down. The financial advisor from Putnam somehow couldn't be bothered to take my calls after our meeting, in which I asked for info. about socially responsible funds. But we were locked into a single vendor, so to minimize the blood on my hands, I took the option of small cap funds on the rationale that smaller companies would probably do lesser harm than large corporations who have been known to bribe (or outright buy) public officials and whose Third World union-busting and/or land acquisition techniques are indistinguishable from terrorism (which is not a word I use lightly, btw).

(Now, before I completely come off all goody-two-shoes and all, please humor me long enough to let me state that I strongly believe, in principle, that it is better than to be good than to be pure (because purity = dogma = evil). And, with equal strength, I also believe that there is no way to do business and keep 100% of the evil cooties off you. In the end, it boils down to a mentality not unlike Integrated Pest Management.)

But.

Then this year's shareholder proxy statement arrived in the mail and I came eyeball to eyeball with the mentality that should have had me dumping my shares a few years ago. Bad Doreen! Bad, BAD Doreen! (Although there's more than a pinch of penance baked in the fact that I'll have to drop them in this market.)

Let's take take the voting proposals point-by-point. But beforehand, just make a note that, at the head of the proposals was the following advisory (in all caps emphasized with boldfacing and underlining the word "FOR"):

THE TRUSTEES RECOMMEND A VOTE FOR ALL APPLICABLE PROPOSALS OTHER THAN PROPOSAL 5

Proposal 1 is merely a matter of voting for the 14 eligible trustees. My reaction after skimming the profiles: You're all white and the youngest of you is 58 years old. Yeah, that's going to promote a lot of diversification in thought in a global economy.

Proposals 2 and 2A - 2C are intended to approve a new management contract for funds, including breakpoints and performance fees. My reaction: Granted, the same-old-same-old is what drove the economic bus off the road. But the management fees for a fund are tied to the net value of the fund's assets, and in some cases, fees will be tied to a benchmark. Both of which I think could be bad because I view them as an abdication of judgement. We've already seen what "too big to fail" has done; the saving grace of the net aggregate asset-based fee is that the "performance period" is a Methuselah-esque three years. But benchmarks? Bad. As I read it, these are calculated monthly, which completely negates the long(er)-term thinking of the thirty-six month performance cycle. Now the idea of the breakpoint, which is based on the performance of a fund family as a whole, I like because it spreads the incentive.

Proposals 3 and 3A through 3E essentially remove self-imposed restrictions and enable things like investment in commodities, reducing diversifications in some funds, owning a higher percentage of securities, borrow a higher percentage of a fund's total asset value, and lend a higher percentage of a fund's total asset value. My reaction (in Sam Kinneson-esque decibels, minus the profanity): WERE YOU PEOPLE NOT PAYING ATTENTION LAST YEAR?!!?!! Because we all know how well de-regulation combined with (cough) innovation in "packaging" worked out. (Saving, of course, the die-hard Kool-Aid drinkers who still believe that spritzing the lawyer-ese equivalent of Lysol on bad debt and paying brokers/managers/"regulators" obscene amounts of money to pretend that it was good debt is part of a giant plot by ACORN.)

Proposals 4 and 4A through 4B remove the cap on the lifetime of a trust. Currently, a trust's value must be paid out to the surviving descendents of the person who set up the trust twenty-one years following the death of the last of his/her named children. The proposals allow the trust to continue indefinitely. I don't have an opinion on the basic principle; my reaction is to the proviso that gives Putnam the right to buy out the trustees' interest whenever they feel like it, based upon "thresholds" set--surprise!--by Putnam itself. The redefinition of both "trust" and "indefinitely" is breathtakingly Orwellian, no?

Proposal 5 is a shareholder-initiated resolution that would require Putnam's Board of Directors to implement policies designed to prevent investing in companies that "contribute to genocide or crimes against humanity." Should be a no-brainer, you'd think. Yet, recall that this proposal is the one that the Trustees "unanimously" recommend all shareholders vote against.

In fairness and balancedness, here is the collective Trustees' response in full, with my reactions spliced between paragraphs:

The Trustees condemn genocide, crimes against humanity and similar egregious violations of basic human rights. However, for the reason set forth below, the Trustees, recommend a vote against the shareholder proposals.

Why only "egregious violations" of human rights? Condemning only genocide and crimes against humanity puts you morally north of, say, the KKK, the CIA, the KGB, and The Mob. Good job, there.

The U.S. Government maintains a comprehensive set of laws and regulations governing business relationships with countries that are believed to be responsible for egregious violations of basic human rights. These laws and regulations reflect consideration by experienced foreign policy experts of the nature of the particular problems in each country and often involve complex judgments whether certain types of business relationships might contribute to the problems in a particular country or, alternatively, might contribute to improving the conduct of the political regimes involved and the living conditions of the local populations. Putnam Management is commited to complying fully with all such laws and regulations currently in effect or that the U.S. Government might enact in the future with respect to investments in companies doing business with or in particular countries.

First off, doesn't that beg the question of what kinds of evil Putnam would bankroll were it not for government regulation? Btw, that would be the same government that apologists for unfettered capitalism insist is unilaterally baaaaad, because the market will eventually correct itself. Oh, and also the same government that has, shall we say, "selective" definitions of genocide, even under allegedly "liberal" watches (see also: Rwanda).

The proposed shareholder resolution calls upon the Board of Trustees to establish procedures and exercise its own judgment on these matters. The Trustees believe that this proposal would involve the Board in making judgments on matters that are beyond the range of its expertise and would inapproriately involve the Board in the process of making investment judgments for your fund's portfolio.

Question: Isn't the Board being handsomely compensated for its "judgment" when fund managers are supposed to be motivated purely by the numbers? Second question: How "beyond the range" of any thinking person's "expertise" is it to determine that people being killed for their ethnicity/religion/whatever is, technically "genocide"? Presumably Trustees are not only watching the same news as the rest of us, but also have the global contacts and the money-trail kind of information that most of us shamble along without. If knowledge is power and with great power comes great responsibility, refusing to exercise it in where and when it can do more immediate good than reams of U.N. resolutions is a direct act of collaboration. Period.

As a general matter, the Trustees also believe that imposing constraints on the range of investment opporutinities legally availble to your fund solely because of political or social considerations would not be in the best interests of shareholders. Under your your fund's management contract with Putnam Management, Putnam Management has a fidiciary duty to examine the entire universe of potential investments to identify attractive securities in its efforts to deliver superior long-term investment results for clients. The available investment universe for each fund is defined by its stated investment objective and policies, as limited by applicable laws as noted above. Putnam Management has advised the Trustees that the process of identifying attractive securities for a fund's portfolio includes an assessment of all relevant factors that could impact a security's future value, including, for example, the risks associated with doing business with or in countries that are accused of egregious human rights violations. The Trustees believe that shareholders have invested in a fund that would pursue the broad range of investment opprotunities described in its prospectus and that it would not be appropriate to begin imposing additional limitationsat this time based solely on political and social considerations. The Trustees believe that such limitations would be contrary to the interests of shareholders who are relying on Putnam Management to exercise its best investment judgment tohelp them meet important personal investment goas such as financing education, retirement and other critical personal needs.

So I take it you all skipped that day in Psychology 101 where they talked about projection? Call me naive, but I think you would be challenged to find one person of a hundred who would openly defend putting their child through college with blood money. Or themselves retiring on it, for that matter.

Moreover, "fidiciary responsibility" is a single ethic, which in turn is based on one or more purely subjective value-judgments. It is most certainly not a law of the universe. Which means that it has to compete with any number of other ethics in a given culture, purely on its own merits, with no special perks or precedence. Enough people will be made hungry, sick, illiterate, homeless, brutalized, and even dead by pure dint of dogma and lust for power. And that without bankrolling by rich white people. Don't we put people in jail and take away their money when they finance terrorism? (Because if genocide isn't terrorism on an industrial scale, what the heck is it?) Or does calling it "duty" absolve a person? Or is it okay as long as terrorism is merely the means and not the end of the financing?

Okay, enough ranting and sarcasm for one post. Suffice it to say that I logged onto Putnam's site and cast the most contrarian series of votes possible. Not that it will matter; I fortunately don't hold any shares of the two stocks affected by Proposal 5 (Putnam Asset Allocation: Growth Portfolio and Putnam Voyager Fund, in case it matters). Also, it's not like I will do any appreciable damage when I find another home for those dollars after November 18th (the date of the shareholder meeting). But I refuse to give my tacit consent to a mentality that considers it "duty" to bloody its hands, and mine in the process.