Who's your data?

I've been working lately with a less-than-polished bit of open source software that, unfortunately, was written to be used by non-technical users. The user experience is not enhanced by my ignorance, and my ignorance is not much abated by reading the instructions. So the upshot was having to do work over again because the software in question took the painstaking fruit of all that typing and clicking (and proofreading and fixing) and moshed it into a format readable only to it. Which would be forgiveable if I had been allowed to correct "mistakes" after they were published to the website and found. But I wasn't. And of course, some mistakes couldn't be caught until after the changes were published. (Nice catch-22, that!)

All of which left one option: Delete-and-do-over.

Needless to write, I was less than thrilled. Mostly because I have this entitled notion that, regardless of platform or software, the actual data is mine. My typing. My clicking. My wading through misspelled Help that would have had me on the curb Back In The Day. Which is to say, my time, darnitalready! Time that could be much more productively used. Thus, if data is time and time is money, I want my money back. Except that consumers have always allowed software--commercial and free--a pass on the havoc it can wreak, and changing that mindset is akin to boiling the ocean.

Yes, there's definitely a case to be made for making passwords unrecognizable through encryption--no question. But otherwise, a user should be able to take her/his data and go home anytime s/he wants. And despite the fact that the folks who wrote the software in question are more skilled at writing code than I, I can't say as I think much of their design. Or, for that, matter, their low valuation of their users' time.

Small failures don't always add up to big ones

My husband and I spent a few hours at our respective jobs today. Before I bailed out of my pod for the afternoon, I called to let him I know I was heading for the hizzy--which in the dialect of our marriage translates to, "Do I need to stop for anything on the way home?" And in the course of that conversation, I enquired whether he'd accomplished a lot in a quiet office. "Not really," quoth he. "Yeah, me too," I replied, "I think I mostly just got mistakes out of the way." "Well, that's progress," he pointed out.

And he's right. Probably not only for our trade, either. Yes, yes--I know Thomas Edison said, "I haven't failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." Which is great if you work for yourself; Unfortunately, bosses & clients don't always take such a sanguine view of failure on billable time.

All the same, it is a reality of industries that are expected to be innovative, and where a failure to fail in tactical ways ultimately means the strategic--make that epic--failure of obsolescence.

Frivolous Friday, 02.26.2010: Intellectual exercise at the gym

(Credits: Tonight I'm borrowing the concept and sometimes-straight-up-sometimes-sarcastic style of the "Oh, The Things I Know!" posts on the unapologetically left-leaning political blog DailyKos. After ~90 minutes of walking, stretching, biking and bouncy skiing, here are some of "the things I know.")

• Having TVs in the gym would be more effective if pedaling/walking faster would fast-forward through commercials and pre-game shows.
• It says much about our progress as a culture when a Friday Night Fight (SpikeTV) ends with dudes who were trying to pound the snot out of each other hugging after the winner is declared...and the loser kissing the winner on the top of the head.
• I'm convinced that more people than admit it watch the Winter Olympics for the same reason people go to the circus--namely, to see someone buy it.
• If Joy Behar thinks she's holding her piece of TV ground against upstart internet entertainment by obsessing on the lewd and vapid, I've got news for her: The internet's going to win.
• (That being said, the reason I get the overwhelming majority of my news and entertainment via the internet is because I have considerably more control over the level of lewdness and inanity I find there.)
• States in the Upper Midwest must receive three times the snowfall of New York City for it to receive national news attention.
• Purdah as practiced in other parts of the world has nothing on my gym's version: There, the genders (mostly) don't even share the same dimension. I know this because there are fourteen locked lockers in the women's changing room and I'm the only other chick in the place.
• When a guy works out by himself, it's a whole-body thing; when guys work out together, jaw muscles get the lion's share.
• When you neglect to fully clamp down the recline bike's seat and then pedal fast, the slight rocking almost achieves a "magic fingers" effect.
• Some machines display metric heart-rate, but no one can tell me the conversion formula.
  
• The difference between humans and hamsters is that humans pay for the privilege of alternating between running in place and drinking from oversize bottles. That and humans don't look nearly as adorable (or happy) munching sunflower seeds.
  
• When brain and body don't want to be in the same place, odd blog posts are born.
  

Two lessons from one presentation

Bugger: I neglected to obtain advance permission to recap tonight's presentation to the La Crosse Programming Users Group. So you'll just have to trust me when I say that a homebrew solution to a specific business problem kept its small audience informed and asking questions for just under an hour and a half. This even in light of the fact that the programming was done on the DOS--i.e. pre-Windows--platform because of its operating environment.

For this part of the audience, at least, it was also a good reminder that Cool Factor alone doesn't pay the bills. Unless you make your living writing about technology, of course. Sometimes that sounds like a fantasy job...until I think about how closely it equates to being a paparazzo. Blech. No thanks. Those who developed the "Who's up and who's down" instincts in high school (and before) are welcome to all that. But the time for paying attention to who's truly "successful" is at a reunion with a "0" after it. Technology's not so different in that respect.

So big ups to --- for a successful presentation and my extra thanks for the bonus "refresher" lesson. Good job!

Data without context is just noise

If you've worked in software tech. support, the thought of receiving a bug report (for three separate bugs) via a brief email forwarded by your main client contact probably makes your toes curl, yes?

It was actually pretty awesome. Insofar as learning about three bugs from a customer can be, anyway. Here's why. In each case, the reporter noted which web page she'd visited, what'd she'd been expecting to see vs. what she actually did see.

A little poke at the database, a couple prods of the web application itself, and I shortly had three answers: 1.) User error, 2.) You need to keep your data up-to-date, and 3.) Someone else needs to keep their data up-to-date. But not having to scramble to actually "fix" anything was merely the proverbial cherry on top. So when I replied to my contact, I asked her to pass along my thanks. I know I'm spoiled--when the folks I usually work with let me know about a bug, they typically include screenshots. But that doesn't mean that I don't appreciate it.

I've probably said this before in other ways, but it never, ever ceases to blow my mind how many intelligent, articulate and socially clever folks still expect mind-reading when they open a bug ticket.You can probably imagine the resulting hours squandered trying to debug the wrong problems. Simply put: If you don't have time to provide the context of your problem, you don't have time to have it solved.

"The thank you economy" in action

Not to be all goody-two-shoes, but I wanted to go on record with a small donation I made tonight. Some days previous, I managed to screw up an HTML image map--if you don't recognize the term, it doesn't matter--because I typed X-Y coordinates by hand without any validation. (I'm a fast typist, but at the expense of accuracy.) In retrospect (you know, that place where we're always so much smarter), I should have automated the process.

When someone else caught the error, it was time for someone to look over my shoulder. The Omniscient Google turned up this tool that allows you to upload your image, mark the areas on it that you want to turn into "hotspots," and kicks out the HTML code. In other words, zero danger of incorrectly transcribing something.

I may be giving away my time and training on the project in question, but that doesn't mean that I necessarily expect others to save my bacon without any recognition. So I thought that a shout-out was in order.

I don't think that was the intended outcome...

I clicked a link (courtesy of @traceymgoodson) to catch the latest news from the Toyota saga, and a Flash-based ad managed to break through the blinders developed over a decade-and-change. A narrow panel showed a night-time road out of which a Mercedes Benz bore down on the peripheral vision. The overall impression was that one was about to be run over a second hence.

Yes, I understand the concept of guerrilla marketing. The subtler end of its spectrum ambushes the sense of humor; the more extreme end goes straight for the lizard brain. Thus a men's room stall is co-opted to shill a crime show and a gruesomely life-like poster at the bottom of a swimming pool shocks parents into a heightened awareness of their children's whereabouts.

But the medium has to coincide with the message, and somehow, I don't think that Mercedes Benz want my visceral reaction to their 2010 E-Class series to be the impulse to dodge to the side. Marketing #FAIL.

A cautionary tale about outsourcing

As much political uproar as private "security companies" [looks pointedly at Blackwater, now rebranded "Xe" after certain flagrant behavior in Iraq] have caused, it's important to remember that the perils of outsourcing core competencies are nothing new.

Rewind European history back to the Italian city-states of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, and you'll be knee-deep in mercenary...errrr..."security services." Back in the day, the local name for them was "condottieri." The seafaring Republic of Venice--being pathologically averse to the idea of a conquering hero returning in triumph to be acclaimed ruler of the city--employed them in lieu of keeping a standing army.

The essential problem, however, was that such sell-swords worked for themselves first, and would happily switch sides for a better offer. But the great downside of the condottieri system of warfare was that hired mercenaries (from commander on down) had nothing to defend. Meaning that they had every incentive to live to see the next payday--even an age when the fall of a city gave even the lowliest foot-solder three days' license to destroy, loot or rape anything that crossed his path. Thus battles tended to devolve into inconclusive skirmishes which decreased the risk of war--for the mercenary, anyway--with every likelihood of continuing the pay-out in the next campaigning season.

But the most insidious side-effect of all, at least if Norwich's interpretation (p. 372) is to believed, was that the city-states had over a century of outsourced skirmishing to forget how to defend themselves in a larger war. And so the rather feckless King Charles VIII of France had little trouble making good a tenuous heriditary claim to Naples and rolling up Florence on the way. Inevitably, the disparity between conquering and administering chased Charles back to France--though perhaps too quickly to drive home the lesson that the French and Austrians were to give until the 19th century.

And in the light of that historical narrative, I wonder whether this will not, in fact, be the fate of American enterprise, as the so-called "wisdom" of contracting rather than hiring also outsources that sense of petty insecurity. As Norwich points out, the lexicon of the condottiero (with notable exceptions like Bartolomeo Colleoni) did not include the term "loyalty." Partly because the ultimate focus of the outsourcee is not the outsourcer's "greater good," but the next paycheck. But mostly because loyalty cannot truly be bought; it must be earned.

A curious fact of economics

Unless you trade in Tribbles, supply does not often beget supply. Yet demand tends to beget demand.

I was reminded of that when Dennis and I had to zip over to Rochester this afternoon to pick up an order from Wally Von Klopp. Such jaunts often involve a splurge at Victoria's on the way back to La Crosse. The lady who seated us gave us a four-person booth, which I found odd, b/c we passed any number of two-person booths en route. It was only later, when sidewalk traffic caught my attention, that the Clue Fairy paid her belated visit: "Our" booth had been the last of the open window-seats. Arriving at about four in the afternoon, Dennis and I were effectively window-dressing, advertising to passers-by: "Look at how many customers we have, even before the dinner rush! Better get in while the getting's good!"

That actually made me smile, rather than otherwise. More power to them. The food is excellent, the prices fair...and our waiter actually dashed out the door after us to hand off the boxed leftovers I'd forgotten--a bad habit of mine!--on the table.

Frivolous Friday, 02.19.2010: If geeks ran the world, Part II

The four major food groups would be: Pizza, Mountain Dew, Cheetos and Snickers bars.

Pale would be the new tan.

We'd be tuning in to the Wii Olympics right about now.

The only "Did-she-or-didn't-she?" implant debates would involve silicon, not silicone.

A-list science fair, spelling bee and chess contestants would sport corporate sponsorship patches...and have college recruiters coming to fisticuffs over them.

The Linus Torvalds Action Figure: 'Nuff said.

The bi-cameral legislature would be replaced by four Houses of Congress: Griffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff and Slytherin. Presidential candidates would chosen by the Goblet of Fire. (Bonus: Buh-bye, tiresome, polarizing primaries!)

To make social hour less of a minefield, nametags would include Myers-Briggs type assessments. The four most toxic personality aspects (e.g. narcissism, passive-aggression, etc.) would be rendered in HazMat notation.

The head of the National Academy of Sciences would be a Cabinet-level position.

Out with the electric knife at Thanksgiving, and in with the light-saber! (Bonus: Less time from oven to table, b/c the saber does some of the cooking for you.)

Rom-coms--particularly those starring Hollywood's golden children of the moment--would be automatic candidates for MST3K-ing.

The Louvre, Uffizi, and various National Galleries would add wings for anime and manga. And xkcd.

Two words: Exo-suit cagematches!

The isk (from the MMORPG Eve) would become the planet-wide currency.

Veterinarians would see a spike in cats named "Five"--thanks, @CyberCowboy!--and "Schrodinger."

All audio recordings of James Earl Jones reading The Bible would be replaced with another rendition. The Almighty should not have Darth Vader's voice--I'm just saying. ("I find your lack of faith...disturbing.")

- - -

Shout-out to my faboo husband Dennis for his help in rounding this list out!

A milestone

Organizationally, one sign that a software application has matured is that it develops its own vocabulary. One definite sign is the use of indefinite articles when talking about feature-sets, e.g.: "Just use the ... to do that," where " ... " is a phrase comprised of one or more recognizable words that make absolutely no sense whatsoever to outsiders. Worse still is a sentence wherein " ... " is used as a verb.

To the team whose idiom has gelled around that application and its weltanschauung, congratulations. It's no trifling achievement.

But milestones are useful for taking stock of where you are in relation of where you want to be. There's much good to be said of tightly-knit groups. But when their vocabulary is incomprehensible to outsiders, that's not necessarily healthy for the larger organization. And in many (if not most) cases, there's likewise much good to be said of cross-pollination. Just make sure you swap your bees wisely.

If I could rewrite the laws of Physics...

...any email that combined haggling over design details with concern over how close the deadline is would create a matter-meets-anti-matter-type collision, and wipe the section of writer's hard drive containing the email when its author clicks the "Send" button.

(Disclaimer: This happened outside of work, where folks don't necessarily know better. But the punishment would fit the crime nevertheless.)

A little bit of good news

A bad 24 hours or so, going by the front page of the La Crosse Tribune website. But one item added a little cheer (at least to my late afternoon): "Wis. Senate passes honey regulation." The only thing standing in the way of this labeling requirement becoming law is Governor Doyle's veto, and I have to think that even the Flavored Sugar Syrup Lobby--if such existed--would be hard-pressed to pull that one off.

Granted, I'm extremely biased (being a beekeeper, albeit not a honey-seller), but this is one of those times when the regulators and the regulated worked hand-in-glove to pull off rules that benefit everyone. (Peddlers of--ahem!--"mislabeled" syrup excepted.) When this was discussed at the 2009 Wisconsin Honey Producers Association's* summer meeting, the attitude toward it was much more than favorable. This despite the general understanding that there would be some sort of fee & the possibility of inspection requirements--not something that business people normally relish.

The difference in this case--apart from the sheer principle of truth-in-advertising--is market differentiation. Competing with other Wisconsin bee-ranchers is one thing; competing against fraudsters (who, incidently, artificially drive down the price of the legitimate product) is something else entirely.

I expect that the price of honey will bobble upward in the next year or two. Which, on the surface, doesn't seem like good news for Wisconsin consumers. But given that at least some of them weren't getting what they ostensibly paid for, it's hard to argue that such regulation isn't in the public interest. If people want to junk up their diets with cheap corn syrup, that's their choice. But those who don't also deserve to have their choice honored with the real deal.

- - -

* Full disclosure: My husband Dennis is the President for the WHPA's Western District. And once a year I take notes at the District meeting, which grants me the exalted title of District Secretary. I try not to let the power go to my head...really I do... ;-)

"Another brilliant thought"

While we cleared today's snow off the driveway, I suspect that my husband (again) felt a kindred spirit with Edmund Blackadder III, fictional butler to the future George IV in the BBC (and oh-so-NSFW) comedy series Black Adder the Third. Specifically, the following exchange from "Sense and Senility":

Prince George: "Oh, I just had another brilliant thought."
Blackadder (sarcastically): "Another one, Your Highness?"
Prince George: "Yes, another one, actually! You remember that one I, I had about, uh, wearing underwear on the outside to save on laundry bills?..."

Because my latest "million dollar idea" was chocolate-flavored gloves for dentists and dental hygienists, which I bounced off Dennis while he was hacking away at the dreaded plow-roll:

Dennis: "Um, they're not going to appreciate you eating their gloves."
Me: "No, no--not edible: Just taste like it. I figure that if kids learn early-on that dentists' fingers taste like candy, they'll want to go to the dentist more often."
Dennis: "Maybe you have a point there."
Me: "And if you could spike 'em with Oxycontin or something, so much the better. Except for the illegality part, of course."
Dennis: "Then there'd be a black market in them, and you could make even more money."
Me: "True."

But that's as far as this million dollar idea made it. As I was reminded today, dental gloves are actually pretty neutral-tasting, so it's not exactly a problem that's begging to be solved. Oh, well: There are plenty of other other million dollar ideas waiting to be tripped over. A chocolate-flavored glove probably just isn't crazy enough to change the world. Better luck next idea...

I heart EyeMart?

Just wanted to pass along a surprisingly good customer service experience from yesterday. I lost one of the little nose-pads on my glasses some time ago, but the Onalaska strip-mall optometrist where I bought them keeps inconvenient hours. So I finally broke down after work yesterday and braved the pre-Valentines' Day, Saturday night mall to seek out its chain-store eyewear shops.

No joy at VisionWorld--albeit not for lack of rooting around in a dozen tiny parts-drawers. So the nice lady spritzed and wiped my glasses and sent me across the hall to EyeMart, where a young lady in whisked my specs into the lab and returned several minutes later with a nearly perfect match installed. While she gave them their second spritz-and-wipe in ten minutes, I slipped a plastic card out of my wallet to hand to her, but she said, "There's no charge."

"Oh, no," I clarified hurriedly, "I didn't buy these here." "We'll take care of you anyway," she replied. And that was that. It's not like the place was dead, either, so that was doubly suprising. In any case, a national chain did an excellent job impersonating a Mom-n-Pop, and I thought that it deserved a shout-out.

Organizations and centers of gravity

The timesheet of a co-worker was forgotten at the printer sometime yesterday. Which, naturally, makes it fair game for checking out what's going on in the other niches at the office. I have no idea what the "Change Mgmt" line-item was about, and am not entirely sure that I want to. Thankfully, it isn't an actual billing code or (twitch, shudder) incorporated into someone's job title. I say "thankfully" because if you truly want to make a dent in the status quo, more often than not stealth and anonymity (rather than publicity and a spokesperson) are your best bet. Otherwise, change must start at the very top--with consistent message and tireless execution. Or it must be generated--with equally resolute execution--from the grass roots. But when it's delegated--or, on the flip side, awarded as a badge--to middle management? Pffffffftttt: Game Over.

In physics, the trajectory of an object is usually calculated from the center of gravity, and organizations are--in my experience, anyway--quite similar in that the center of gravity is located in the "middle." That's not to cast aspersions on middle management, mind you: Those are the traits for which the Darwinism of the promotion process typically selects. The folks who are paid to deliver product (however that's defined) on schedule and under budget have next to no incentive for intelligent risk-taking. (Understand, too, that the so-called "mavericks" are gambling with the company purse purely for their own profit. Never, ever forget that the potential downside for the company is so much worse than it is for them. Particularly in a day & age when flying an entire company--dare I allege industry?--into a cliff qualifies the miscreants for six- and seven-figure bonuses on the taxpayer dime.)

So when we talk about resistance to change in terms of "inertia," I'm no longer positive that this is the right Newtonian metaphor. Rather, I think that the distance between who's trying to change trajectory and the organization's center of gravity should be factored in even more heavily. Because understanding the impact of that distance is the difference between driving change and merely being along for the ride.

Frivolous Friday, 02.12.2010: Paying your dues

I won't mention a handle, because I was too lazy to get advance permission to do so. So let's just say that someone I know is morphing into a self-taught web programmer, and (from what I can tell) is doing so fairly conscientiously. In other words, the expectation that dues must be paid seems pretty clear to the fledgling coder in question. (A huge mercy, by the bye, to those of us who bristle at the implication that programming in three and a half languages for any web application worth the name can be picked up from a book in 24 hours.)

The bad news is that dues are not the kind of thing you can get out of the way with an up-front lump-sum payment (although dues tend toward front-loading). The good news is that everyone has to pay them, and even the brainiacs can bank on feeling like chumps from time to time. Here are a few examples:

• Being logged into multiple databases and accidentally updating the live one with test data.
• Deleting the production (i.e. prime-time) database entirely.
• Forgetting to add an exit condition to a code-block and being stuck in an endless loop. (Bonus points if you lock up the AS/400 shared by the entire school computer lab. Double bonus points if you knock the development database server offline--your fellow programmers will loooove you for that.)
  
• (My personal favorite) Driving yourself up the wall (and across the ceiling and down the other side) debugging a gremlin that's not your code at all, but rather a file/database permission problem.
• Spending weekends, birthdays, holidays, etc. at the office because no one else really groks that part of the code-base, and deadlines only care about one date in the calendar.
  
• Writing a boatload of low-level code before learning that the language in question already has an API to deal with that...in a handful of function calls.
• Having to modify crufty old code, and kvetching both loudly and publicly about how awful it is before realizing that you wrote it.
• Misplacing source code...or at least neglecting to archive the latest & greatest working version before you hose it up twelve ways to Sunday.
• The flip side: Fixing/improving/augmenting code and seeing it overwritten by the version control software (whether it's your screw-up or not).
  
• Watching some over-confident n00b make a complete mess of your code.
  
• Watching some over-confident n00b make complete code from your mess. (Frankly, I can't decide which is worse.)
• Seeing the programming language on which you cut your teeth become obsolete.
  
• Seeing "your" application retired.
• Having to learn a new language under a project deadline.
• Breaking the build.
• Missing a deadline because you thought, "How hard can that be?"
• Blaming the web server for caching obsolete code when, in fact, you forgot to promote your changes.
  

Not, mind you, that I've ever actually done of any of these things... [lily-white innocent look] And, doubtless, such dues can be paid in hundreds of other "currencies" besides. Fortunately, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the severity of any screw-up and the likelihood of it been made again (at least by you). But whatever the case, the silver lining of any mistake, mishap or misfortune is adding it to your collection of war stories.

Tolkein was not a programmer

As much as I adore The Lord of the Rings (existing as it does at the intersection of serious literature and geekhood), one line in particular does not jive with the programmer ethos. Specifically, Gandalf admonishing Saruman that "He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom."

Horse hockey. Outside of Middle Earth, there are two upsides to breaking stuff, dependent on how much bad juju said breakage could bring down:

• Minor breakage teaches any number of useful things that the user manual didn't cover.
• Major breakage--specifically the resulting panic--generates the organization's equivalents of urban legends, which become the reasons peeps don't knowingly break things that way ever again.
  

But apparently The Powers That Be are hewing a little closer to the "Gandalf" school lately, because for the second time in two days, I've trundled into my cubicle to find a email questioning changes to code on the lowly "development" database server.

(For context: Code progresses up the food chain while it's integrated, tested, possibly demo'd to the client, and finally released into the wild. The development stage is the most experimental of those levels. The reason those changes hit the proverbial radar is because monitoring software has been installed at each "level.")

So for the second time in two days, I found myself spending a few minutes to defuse the situation. In today's case, what I said was something like, "I was just sanity-checking something, and I changed it back right away. Don't worry--I'd never presume to actually change anything without dealing with all the downstream ramifications." What I thought was more along the lines of, "Sheesh--keep your hair on! How long have I worked here?!?!?! When it hits the QA servers, then you can freak out!"

Now. In all fairness to, and defense of, The Powers That Be, we have a serious rollout looming. Twitchiness is completely understandable, and--to a certain extent--healthy. You should see how I react to "surprises" in what I fondly consider "my" code: The Powers That Be are actually pretty tame by comparison.

But in the main, freakouts over day-to-day breakage are extremely unhealthy. Personally, the mere fact that someone will now be notified every time I make a change to the database is a bit chilling in a Big-Brother-is-watching-you sort of way. So the upshot is that, in lieu of changing a database object, I've adapted my technique to bring the relevant code over to another editing window, and do my breaking there. Which turns out to be a (comparative) time-waster, because I will normally have to add extra code to mimic the "real world." But in this case, I refuse to feel guilty about the nicks in productivity. Because, in organizational terms: You are what you incentivize (or disincentivize). It's raw Darwinism, period. And if the time and resources you spend on the illusion of command-and-control merely breed more clever rule-benders (and rule-breakers), well...tough on you.

Sunnyvale, Inc.

My husband Dennis was distinctly under the weather Monday and Tuesday, which translated into a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon. Over dinner, he passed along a few quotes he thought I'd find particularly funny, including high school Commencement speech in which the Mayor of Sunnyvale congratulates the class on having the highest survival rate in recent memory. (The congratulations--in inimical series fashion--immediately preceded him turning into a giant snake and eating Principal Snyder. Bummer, that: Snyder was a hoot.)

For context: If you're not a Buffy viewer, what you need to understand is that its locale, Sunnyvale, CA. is situated atop a "Hellmouth"--meaning a portal to the demon dimension. Despite the best efforts of The Slayer, her friends and her overeducated Watcher, people come to sticky ends. Often. (Now, if you can be seduced by scintillating writing--and have cynical and romantic streaks of equal breadth--you'll get past that. Trust me--Joss Whedon's good.)

But that's not to say this feature of the series isn't a perennial subject for mockery, and I'm certainly not immune: "You'd think that parents might pull their kids out of the school...maybe even, y'know, move away from Sunnyvale?" But a second later, a little epiphany hit: "Wait--what am I saying?! This is California we're talking about: People build on fault lines there!"

In other words, it isn't just fiction--nor is it confined to shaky--literally!--real estate. It's a very basic human tendency to use our "higher" brains to squelch the very sensible advice from our reptilian brains to fight and/or flee. Thus is the proverbial writing on the wall rationalized as statistical anomaly or freak accident--when it is not denied outright.

All of which makes me very glad I'm not working in a brand-name music, journalism, financial services or enterprise software shop just now. Because when your eyes are scrooged shut and you're chanting "Lalalalalalalalala!--I can't hear you!--Lalalalalalalalalala!" with your fingers stuck in your ears, that makes it awfully difficult to practice your roundhouse kicks or sharpen many stakes.

Snow-shoveling stream of consciousness

..."You only need to push it to the sides," [my husband] said. As if. That's not how I roll, jack...

...Wish that there had been someplace to park so the shovel doesn't bark against the tire-tracks on "my" side of the driveway...

...Wait--I'm not even a quarter of the way done: Why is my back complaining already?!...Okay, maybe that glass of leftover cooking-grade Chardonnay can be passed off as "medicinal"...

...Almost to the plow-roll (ugh!)...the only upside is looking back to that long trail of grey blacktop behind me...

...Attacking the plow-roll...Why does the snow have to get so high at the corners?...And why did the wind decide to pick up now?...

...Maybe it wasn't the smartest idea starting from the house--maybe it would have been smarter to get the dreaded roll out of the way first-thing. Then again, maybe warming up to it with one half the driveway was the best idea...Yeah, that's it: Attitude is everything, y'know...

...Disturbing, the size of that ice-chunk tossed by the snow-plow: It's half again the diameter of a basketball! Glad it wasn't moving fast when it tossed that bad boy off!...

...Gotta keep moving through the stupid roll, if only b/c the noise drowns out the inane cellphone conversation the neighbor's daughter is having right now. (Yes, I'm fascinated by what you had done to your hair, cupcake!)...

...Doing such a scrupulous job of keeping the corners clear...giving the plow plenty of room to fill in on the next pass...

...Ironic that by the time I was tall and strong enough to shovel this much snow, Mom & Dad were divorced and we'd swapped the house for an apartment...about the only upside to renting from a faceless landlord, I suppose...On the balance, it still isn't worth it...maybe that's why Grandpa Moon considered owning the land you lived on so important...

...Stupid! Should've figured out how to alternate my grip back on the other side of the driveway...Slow learner much?!...

...Oh fer' cryin' in yer' beer--she's still on the cellphone?!?! Why can't she talk inside? Oh--wait--I get it: Gotta come outside for the ciggie-treat. Chickie, your Dad just had all sorts of cancer cut out of him! Sheesh: Even I'm not that slow on the uptake!...

...Let's clear around the backwheels of [my husband]'s truck. There's probably 50 pounds of snow in the bed, but that thing "gets stuck in a heavy dew," y'know...

...Wonder how close to 9:00 it is. In retrospect, I should'a bribed the neighbor kids again...No, last time I had a solid reason...And, really, what's the point in capitalism if you can't bother to take care of your own property...Next thing you know, they'll be mowing my lawn and raking my leaves...and that's just so parvenu...(I've been lower middle class all my life, but I still know in my bones that it's parvenu.)...I'd scandalize my ancestors in so many ways, but not this one: They have not begotten an effete arriviste, darnittoheckalready!...

...[My husband] will scold that I "spoil" him by brushing and scraping the truck's windows, but there's less than a Hobbit's chance in Mordor that I'm gonna let him do it tomorrow morning when he's been home sick for the past two days...The neighbor kids probably wouldn't think to do this anyway...

...I think that the endorphins have kicked in...Woo-hoo! Shovelers' High!...

...Maybe that's the whole point in starting a company and making a bazillion dollars: Not having to worry about shoveling a driveway again...Sure, any fool with a few extra bucks and an enterprising neighbor kid or two can have their driveway shoveled--but how many will put a helicopter landing pad on the garage, I ask you?...Ha! Top that, Joneses!...(Bonus: My ancestors will be far too freaked out to be scandalized...)

Self-congratulatory navel-gazing

Last night, my husband (also a programmer) and I were laughing about the end of The Guild's first season, wherein Codex rescues Zaboo from his desperate attempt to avoid moving back in with his horrid mother by hanging himself...with a networking (CAT-5) cable. IIRC, my husband quipped something like, "That's about the geekiest way you can go." "No," I retorted, "a real geek would use a crossover cable." And scampered upstairs, giggling evilly, as he groaned at the awful pun.

Have I mentioned lately how awesome it is to be married to another geek?

Buying buzz

Surprisingly, I'm not talking about bees. Okay, not quite true--I will talk about bees later, but this really is about Superbowl commercials.

But first, let's really confuse things by jumping back in time to Baroque (16th/17th century) Poland. One thing you need to understand about the Polish/Lithuanian aristocracy is that it couldn't wrap its head around the notion of long-term saving. Or even stinting on keeping up with the Joneses in favor of pragmatic improvements to its estates. Because the Joneses might--horror of horrors--out-bling them. If you remember the 80s and the whole "perception is reality" codswallop, you know what I'm talking about. Case in point: Pages 174 & 175 of Adam Zamoyski's The Polish Way describe Prince Zbaraski's 1622 embassy to Istanbul:

At the front marched two regiments of Hungarian infantry, followed by a hundred laden waggons [sic] decked in the arms of the Zbaraski, then a group of servants, and two troops of light cavalry. Behind these rode ten picked youths, dripping with gold and gems. Their mounts, harnessed with pearls, covered in embroidered cloths, with colored horse-tails at their chins, foamed at the mouth as they champed at their golden bits. Behind them came the sons, relatives and friends of the Zbaraski, all in velvet embroidery with silver and gold thread. The envoy himself wore a cloak of cloth of gold and a fur cap with a beautiful diamond jewel clasping a tall plume. Six handsome footmen in velvet jerkins led his bravely prancing steed. Behind him rode twenty page-boys in Circassian dress, with helmets, shields and quivers. These were followed by fifty young men in Roumelian costume, with curved bows hanging from gold sashes, a troop of Cossacks and a hundred servants of the Prince, all in silk. The rear was brought up by forty mounted musketeers of the Prince's bodyguard, their horses wearing rich ostrich plumes, silver breastplates, and silver rings which jangled on their harness.

Zamoyski mentions subsequent embassies that could number over a thousand retainers and include camels, as well as horses shod with shoes of solid gold, loosely nailed so as to deliberately "lose" them among the thronging crowds. It did bupkis to change the fact that Poland, economically, was sliding into decline...not to mention a backwards-looking, parochial mentality that should serve as a warning to those who don't take present day "know-nothingism" ethos in politics seriously.

So folks who decide to spend $3 million merely to air a 30-second spot have--with notable exceptions--come to strike me not as shrewd (in the brand management sense) so much as afraid of "losing" that slot to a one of their rivals in the household brand aristocracy. In other words, no different from the 16th and 17th century Polish princes and potentates.

A commercial that's merely amusing/titillating/shocking (when the product itself is hum-drum) is merely buying buzz. Buzz is overrated. I know. When my husband and I crack the inner cover of the hive, it's a very distinct sound--and if the ladykins are in a bad mood, it's a hackle-raising one as well. But the point is that it's over within a couple of seconds, and our golden girls generally get back to taking care of business--even in the midst of a full hive inspection. In this case, I'm heretical enough to think that two-legged critters aren't much different: Come Tuesday morning, the buzz will be largely (if not entirely) silent.

For companies that can afford to spend over $100,000 a second on advertising, how refreshing it would be to see them choose not to--and, instead, chronicle what they did with the money. Keep more customer services state-side? Offer scholarships to the most promising interns? Match contributions for employees' community service work? Fund the shoestring budget of a team dedicated to finding the technology that will put the company (in its present form) out of business before someone else does? Each, I believe, would make a profound story with more staying power than the chatter over a half-minute of amusement.

The missing piece of communications training

Trust me, this isn't the kind of blog post that just comments on another person's blog post, although it starts with not one, but two.

First, there's the ever-amazing Seth Godin's "The relentless search for 'Tell me what to do.'" Right click and read it now. It's really short--shorter than this post will be, and if you can sit through that much no-name-brand bloggage here, you can manage a handful of A-list sentences. Go--read--this can wait.

Back? Good. You didn't, by any chance, happen to have a reaction similar to mine, did you? Which was something like, "Great point, Mr. Godin, but...betting your job on self-determined outcomes is only viable when you know what the organization's priorities actually are."

Now, Mr. Godin--as well he should be--is his own boss. So he has not only the overall vision, but the immediate goals mapped out. Some folks are smart enough to grasp grand strategy even while dodging bullets the fox-holes. I'm not one of them. To the point where I'm seriously considering scratching the phrase "communication skills" from my resume. Why? Because I've come to realize that it is sort of a lie. Sure, I can probably regain my public speaking skills with a little practice, and my ability to write so as not to be misunderstood is probably as honed as it's ever been. But I'm a mediocre listener, and (far, far worse), I put so little work into the fine art of knowing whom to talk to, particularly to triage long-term substance from ephemeral buzz. Good old-fashioned networking, in other words. (And, pointedly, not in the sense of the term that programmers and system administrators understand.)

Which is where the other linked item comes into play. It's rather longer than Mr. Godin's work, but Joel Spolsky's column for Inc. magazine ("A Little Less Conversation") nails the essential problem--and in terms anyone inclined toward math will grok. If you don't have time to read the entire thing, brand this simple algebraic formula into your synapses: n times n-minus-1, all divided by two, where n = the number of people in your organization. Ditch "e equals m times c squared." (When are you likely to need to compute Special Relativity anyway?) It's important because the result of "n(n - 1)/2" is the maximum number of connections that can be formed in a group of people with n members.

This formula, Janus-like, has two faces: For what we'll call "outgoing" communication, it equals the number of connections that could--emphasis on "could"--spread word-of-mouth originating from just one single person within that n-sized group. Pretty darned powerful (at least in potential), no? I can virtually guarantee you that this is the number that the self-appointed social media snake-oil peddlers are pitching...and the social media snake-oil buyers are salivating over.

However, its flip-side (for the person scanning for "incoming" communication about the organization) is that those connections are all places that useful information could--again, emphasis on "could"--go to die or be corrupted---with or without intent--before it ever reaches those who might be most affected by it. And maintaining n-minus-one relationships, while possibly rewarding in other aspects, ultimately just does not scale.

And that's where communications training (be it in college courses or seminars or what-have-you) ultimately falls down. In the "outgoing" sense, how do you locate the people most likely to spread your word? In the "incoming" sense, how do you develop the sense for maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio that filters out baseless rumor and useless chatter?

In fairness to Academia, I haven't had a Communications course in over two decades; thus, I could be slandering it. Yet, curricula tend to be reactive. And with the internet explosion of communication mechanisms, I would (were I the gambling sort) be willing to bet that CommSci departments are too busy coping with those phenomena to address the basic questions of network efficiencies. Presumably that's left to Marketing courses on demographics...and even then only in the most oblique sense. Or maybe a single course in Organizational Psychology that has several prerequisites not likely to be taken by Comp. Sci. majors. I do sincerely hope that I'm doing the Liberal Arts a disservice here, but I'm not willing to gamble so much as a semester of Communications coursework on it.

Thus, like most things that pertain to my career--beyond even my present job--this is something I'll have to pick up on the fly. As ever, acknowledging the deficiency is the first step toward correcting it. Who knows? Perhaps casting it in terms of simple mathematics--rather than of office politics--will make it seem less daunting. After all, figuring out who the idle gossipers are (and thus factoring them out of "n") has a powerful impact on the formula, which is cheering: Booyah for math.

Frivolous Friday, 02.05.2010: The Old World Mardi Gras

Oh, for pity's sake: One of my off-the-grid holidays ambushed me again this year. Don't ask me why, but I thought that Carnevale started next Saturday, but it in fact kicks off tomorrow. Which, on the plus side, spares me an extra week of torturing myself with escapist fantasies of donning costume and maschera and desperately trying not to be just another gawping tourist in the living fossil that is La Serenissima. (Which fortunately, IMO, also happens to be the most fascinating, oddball place in all of European history, period-full-stop.)

So tomorrow's "holiday" means a small splurge on a bottle of Prosecco and discovering how well the 70s-era (mustard yellow!) blender will puree canned peaches for the celebratory Bellinis. (Just a few more years, O--dethroned--Queen of the Adriatic, and I will happily brave the nebbia and even acqua alta to stroll your Ca's and ponti and piazze. Just a few more promises to keep, and then...)

Making the "want ad" advertise to the wanted

Tomorrow's my self-imposed deadline for deciding whether or not I want to offer to make a major shift in the programming platform I use day-in and day out. I'm normally pretty good with snap decisions, but the pros and cons are pretty steep and equally matched on each side. My sounding-board--who bears a more-than-incidental resemblance to my husband--made the brilliant suggestion of seeing what the mavens of that particular technology are pulling in these days.

I've so far (knock on wood!) had a charmed recession, so it's been awhile since I've really had to shake down the internet for this kind of information. Thus it re-surprises me how time is wasted by "the formula." Yes, I realize that when you need to bring someone new on board, the unknowns massively outnumber the knowns. No question. But it's no excuse, either.

But wouldn't it make so much more sense to pre-screen potential new hires by just letting it all hang out? And by "it all," I mean everything: Salary range, dollar value of the benefits, time off, overtime expectations, private-offices-vs-cube-farms, dress code--the works. To the disgruntled employee looking to better her/his salary with a competing job offer, the new employer becomes that more real and less an interchangeable playing-piece. To the person with a new baby on the way, the compensation/bennies rendered in hard numbers makes it a no-brainer to jump ships, something that a weasely "competitive" most definitely does not accomplish.

The formula, like all mediocrities, is a huge waste of time and resources. Largely because of the way in which it shifts the focus from people to process. And process, as we know, is more about consistency than it is excellence. Only the CEO of fools expects consistency in people.

So if you're in the position of writing a job ad for your company, pretty-please-with-organic-fair-trade-dark-chocolate-sauce-on-top, do not write yet another cookie-cutter job description. Meaning, do not write it for everyone. Picture the best person for the job, and make the ad your love-letter to them...preferably scaring off all their rivals in the process. True, I can't offer any hard data to prove that this will cut down on the time-wasters. But if tonight's research is any indication, I can guarantee that you will stand out in the wasteland of boilerplate blahblahblah.

Communication >= Code

Tonight's promotion of code to a production system illustrated why staffing your I/T dept. with good programmers who are likewise good communicators is wiser than staffing it with coding rock-stars.

Without going into too many details, we had a mis-fire in the normal promotions process, so the coder responsible for the database and code changes was never notified that he needed to commit his code changes to the source control repository. And I'm sorry to say that I missed that fact as well...until the database changes had been promoted, and there was nothing in the queue from the repository to promote. And sure enough, the application raised a JavaScript error when I checked it. And of course I'm the only one around, because we're intentionally promoting after business hours.

Fortunately, the programmer in question had left a comment in the source control package's revision logs that left no doubt whatsoever what needed to be merged, commited and promoted to the prime-time server. So I did, and buh-bye, JavaScript error! Thus, what should have been a thirty-second maintenance window was extended to perhaps three minutes. Granted, that's 500% longer than it should have been, but it could have been much, much worse. But it wasn't, simply because someone took a few seconds to plink out a mere sentence's worth of context.

No blog post tonight due to illness

Normally, spending the evening baking under blankets in the company of a history book and my husband has immense therapeutic value. So I'd hate to know how under the weather I'd be feeling otherwise. But for all that, any writing worthy of its readers is still not in me tonight. G'night all, and better luck tomorrow.

A thought on the importance of knowing which business you're in

I'm supposed to be working on a bit of volunteer programming at the moment, which involves migrating a client to the next version of an open source software package, and shaving some of the corners off the proverbial square pegs.

Except I'm not coding tonight. I'm mainly waiting for the second iteration of a massive folder/file upload to finish and hoping that the permissions are right this time. Not the most edifying or entertaining aspect of a coder's life, to be sure. But the recipient of this work wants to see the customizations in context of the existing version before we take a single step toward the actual "upgrade."

I'd be lying if I denied that I'd really rather be coding, but it plays up the fact that I'm not, technically, in the same business as I've been for 40+ hours/week. When there's a layer (or more) of team leads, account managers, etc. between you and the clients who use your code, you're basically in the Functioning Code Business. However, when those layers disappear, you're officially in the Warm Fuzzy Business. Big difference. So that fantasy about spending more time coding by going freelance? Weeeeeelllllll...I suppose that's the kind of thing fantasies are good for...at least until you can afford to outsource most of the warm fuzzy production.

For now, I think I'll stick to fantasies of a quiet, white sand beach with a big umbrella and a stack of books and someone to bring me cold fruity drinks with paper umbrellas. At least that fantasy might one day become reality.