Frivolous Friday, 08.07.2009: Give me the desk, and I shall give you the person

There's actually a semi-serious point to this navel-gazing, so kindly humor me.

Three addresses and fifteen years ago, I picked up a bottle of artist gilding paint at the local Ben Franklin ("local" if you lived in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, anyway). I noticed tonight that it had tipped over on my desk. Being alarmed that its solvents had leaked onto my desk, I removed the lid and inspected the contents. They were--quelle surprise--quite safely and solidly lodged in the bottom. And so that jar just served for basketball practice into the wastebasket, closely followed by the travel-tube of hand lotion whose contents may well have met the same evaporative doom.

Old-fashioned pencils that require sharpening, markers that may or may not have dried, masking tape (important at birthdays and Christmas), a stapler and other sundries reside--as they have for years--in a vase that looks suspiciously like a product of a college Art Dept. But it can't be tossed, because it's a 2nd-place trophy from a speech competition. That the "victory" it represents (in a largely snowed-out tournament) didn't mean much isn't at issue. Why? Because its slightly larger 1st place "sibling" (which *does* mean something, darnitalready) holds disintegrating roses once sent by my husband (and, of course, simply can't be thrown out until they're powder). One cut-glass fob from a chandelier--a token of my mother's faith that I would some day be successful enough to own a house grand enough for a whole chandelier--weighs down random scribbles which possibly hold intelligibility and/or value. The pen-holder assembled from various "gum nuts found in the Australian bush" holds calligraphy pens...and a particularly stubborn pistachio.

Small items--paper clips, binder rings, extra staples, push-pins, brittle rubber bands--and odder things--a tarnished ankle-bracelet, Canadian/British/Irish coins, mis-matched earrings--are distributed between containers as various as an old cold-cream jar, a pretentiously overpriced Neimann-Marcus potpourri jar, and a bit of "Chinese"-looking pottery that probably appealed by my husband's Grandmother because she married a Norwegian farmer, and thus didn't have a choice about taking the white-and-blue ethos to heart. The painted English teacup saucer that belonged to my father's mother holds the oddest assortment of sundries. I need to find a safer home for the origami frog from Geometry class and the origami tulip my husband made before he outgrew that hobby.

There's a dainty sterling pendant--another gift from my mother--in sore need of polishing, which keeps company with a glass trinket-necklace brought home by her father from his "Grand Tour" of France as a WWI "Doughboy." (Mind you, if the house catches fire, it's Grandpa's pendant--i.e. my talisman against whining--that will be saved if it's in my power to do so; Mom already abides with me, probably in more ways than either of us appreciates.)

The afore-mentioned "semi-serious point" of this, though, is to take a good hard look at the "clutter" of your desk. Not the one at work, the one in your "cave." Unless you're a complete neat-nik, it's the Archeology of You. The marginally-useful, and (most especially) the non-functional items are probably the most illustrative of where you came from...and maybe even who you've come to be. Because it's not premeditated, it's a good exercise in introspection, rather than narcissism. Trust me on this: It's worth your time.

The "flattening" of information (belated*)

The neighbor to the east is again (cough) "sharing" the classic rock from his radio with us tonight. It's the genre that gets me through most of my workdays, b/c I've listened to it so often that it's tantamount to "white noise." Some of it we own on CD; other stuff never made the leap from cassette. So I'm thinking that one benefit of owning music via download is that you'll probably be spared the experience of finding revenants of your music library in a decades-old box and being mortally embarrassed by your younger self's taste.

But for the most part, data--meaning digital music, video, as well as other kind of information--has become "shallower" than before. Lowell Thomas, Walter Cronkite, Barbara Walters, et. al., no longer need to be present with a posse of camera and sound technicians for something to be newsworthy. Photos and video captured by a cellphone can be around the globe in, quite literally, a matter of seconds. YouTube fads garner audience sizes that any ambitious content provider would sell a child for. Yet the breadth of content distribution has a flip-side, namely the 24/7/365 news and entertainment cycles. Increased competition for our attention spans means that the stories rise and fall in prominence more like a juggler's pins than the bulbs in a Galileo thermometer. In other words, wide distribution + short impact = shallow information.

This is hardly "news" to anyone who's been paying attention for the last decade or so. The impacts on marketing are, IMO, among the most symptomatic. At the knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing end of the gene pool, high bandwidth is used to scrape information about you off the web and blast it back in the form of spam or telemarketing. At the more developed end, companies attempt--with varying degrees of smarminess and success--to conscript their customers into "communities."

Yet it's a huge mistake to confuse the distribution of information with the creation of information--or, more to the point, to confuse their costs. For all the "race to the bottom" mentality driven by cellphones and portable media devices and wireless internet hotspots, collecting data, contextualizing it via cross-checking and verification, and formatting it into something digestible, well, that takes human-hours. "Boots on the ground," as they say in the military. I don't want to think of how many sales my day-job firm loses immediately after the would-be client understands that merely tipping their messed up data into our platform is not going to sort it out. I very much doubt that my firm's an anomoly among hosted software. Because the reality is that data points by themselves are useless. It's like that episode of The X-Files where the little boy filled sheet after sheet of paper with random sequences of ones and zeros--random, that is, until Mulder climbed the staircase to view the sheets tiled on the floor below and the ones and zeroes coalesced into a drawing of the boy's vanished sister.

This has at least two ramifications. The first has been covered by others, namely the prediction that information consumers will increasingly rely on others to filter and prioritize it for them. The second, however, is that the next revolution in information technology will be a "race to the bottom" for the collecting of data and/or its near-instantaneous transformation into usable information, even by those who don't know the first thing about relational databases or pivot tables or what-have-you. Personally, I have no interest in being a tastemaker. But I've had to sort out enough screwed-up data (my own and other people's) that the second possibility is far more exciting.

---
* Apologies for the delay due to last night's internet connection speeds that ranged from nil to, shall we say, "vintage" at best

If you give a gnome a cookie...

The original plan was to spend the annual vacation budget to replace the much-abused carpeting and kitchen flooring. But since my husband suggested an extended weekend in Canada's Maritime Provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island), the idea won't let me alone. I inched a little further down the primrose path of temptation yesterday when I dorked around on Travelocity to price-shop equivalent jaunts to NYC and Halifax.

I haven't closed Firefox since, and now I'm being stalked by the Travelocity garden gnome. It's not coincidence, either: The ads are pitching fares between La Crosse and Halifax. Clearly, the travelocity.com servers are accessing browser cookies that would have been automatically flushed if I'd closed Firefox in the interrim.

For all that I know exactly what's going on here, I will confess that it's still kind of creepy being stalked across various websites (Yahoo, GMail). Pity that tonight's already spoken for; otherwise I'd plan to watch Amelie in the spirit of "hair of the dog." I can only wonder what would-be Travelocity users less familiar with the inner workings of their browers feel like...

Oi, Travelocity: Probably not the brightest marketing tactic, that. Just sayin'.

Learning and meta-learning

To my way of thinking, one of the first casualties of our politically polarized culture is the ability to learn from those we don't particularly like. Liking someone and respecting someone's talents don't necessarily go hand-in-hand. One of the things that appeals to me about working in technology is that it's easier to spot someone who's attempting to get by on buzzwords and glad-handing. It's not that those folks are necessarily unnecessary: In fact, they can be extremely useful as "buffer states" between the people who actually add value and the martinets/gatekeepers/empire-builders/sychophants/flunkies/loose-cannons and other organzational parasites. As long as they're functioning in that capacity, no self-respecting, self-aware geek should object to their place on the team--all other things being equal, of course.

I've been fortunate to work among more people that I've liked than I've disliked, and the number I've actively despised would probably fill two hands' worth of fingers, if that. But if you're stuck working for or with someone you have come to thoroughly despise, you can work on takin away something that might come in handy after you've figured out how to extricate yourself from that situation. Otherwise, it's just wasted time. And who, really, has time to waste? Learning how to work through the resentment/frustration/anger/outrage enough to learn that "something" is the meta-lesson. That which you actually take away from the experience is the lesson itself. Even when the lesson involves very detailed instruction in how not to be that person, it's still a lesson. That means you (ultimately) win. It may be the only victory, and it may be a tad on the Pyhrric side, but it still parks in the "W" column.

(In case it matters, I'm talking from past, rather than present experience just now. In other words, this isn't venting in disguise.)

Technology "generation gaps" can run both ways

For the second year running, the La Crosse area's Relay for Life was held at Logan High School, on the practice field. I can't speak for the mens' room of course, but the ladies' room in the concession building is in amazing shape, considering some of the vintage features that give away it age. In particular is the large semi-circular "fountain" sink, whose water is turned on and off by means of a likewise semi-circular foot-rail.

I had just turned up my jacket sleeves to wash my hands when I noticed a lady of roughly high-school age waving her hands in the air next to the fountain holes. For a second, I wondered why she wasn't washing her hands instead. Then the light-bulb went on: "You step on the bar below," I said, and pressed it down with my foot. Her laugh was embarrassed, so I tried to be reassuring: "If I hadn't gone to a high school that was built in the Fifties, I probably wouldn't know that either."

At such times, it's rewarding to be a bridge. But given the boundless creativity my nieces and nephews show in informing me how old and unfashionable I am, I won't say that I didn't enjoy that for other reasons.

Book report

My geography skills are so appalling that it's almost laughable. Which is ironic, being married to a truck driver's kid (who inherited a better-than-average sense of direction and an almost preternatural sense of knowing when he's been some place before). So when my best friend gave me Brian Sommers' The Geography of Wine as a gift, I started reading it while covetously eying her copy of The Billionaire's Vinegar, which (being historical) is more my style.

If we--meaning my husband and I--have enough of the appropriate real estate to grow some of our own wine grapes, the first part of the book will definitely merit a second reading--one admittedly more intensive than the first. But they otherwise didn't make as great an impression on me as they should have.

The really meaty parts of the book--meaning the reasons why it (IMO) merits banging on about--revolve around the economic dimension of the wine industry.We'd like to believe that consumers and producers act in rational ways, yet the history of winemaking solidly demonstrates the fallacy of this assumption. Moreover, the economic "dimension" is itself incredibly multi-faceted. Colonial imperialism, communism, war, nationalism, disease, fashion, and mere accidents of geography have left deep marks on why so many assumptions are bottled with that liquid.

It's those niches of economic history that I think make the book valuable, even if you personally consider wine complicated, ovenuesver-romanticized, and possibly even snooty. Because fads, counterfeiting, trademark squabbles, incomprehensible regulatory fiat (think Prohibition), globalization, marketing gimmicks, commoditization, distribution channels, etc. affect far more industries than the one that peddles fermented grape juice. For that reason alone, its 272 pages are an edifying read, and I can recommend them to folks who aren't even half so nerdy about the stuff as I am.

Something I wonder about every year

Why do non-profits seem to have a pecking order? Moreover, what determines it from year to year? I'm prompted to to speculate on that during the opening ceremonies of the American Cancer Society's "Relay for Life" that wound down this morning. What brings out the mayors of both La Crosse and Onalaska to give their spiels? More importantly, from a practical standpoint, what prompts local businesses (who probably field dozens, if not hundreds of such requests each year) to donate cash, goods or services to one cause and not another?

The non-profits (that I've encountered, anyway) seem to be driven by a small nucleus, with the difference in tactical success seeming to hinge on how well it can assimilate a sudden influx of support labor (and, perhaps, the mixed blessing of political attention). But on the larger, strategic level, I'm still as mystified by the dynamics of the "popularity contest" as I was back on the recess playground.

Please understand that I'm not knocking the ACS. To say that the faces of cancer are legion is not purple-inked hyperbole. In personal terms, I've lost grandparents, uncles and an aunt--on both sides of the family. It made my husband an orphan at the age 32. Effectively battling an enemy so prevalent and so hydra-headed can only be done from a national level. Ditto other multi-faceted problem-solvers such as the Red Cross.

Normally, though, the Who's Who list of top-grossing non-profits strikes me as inefficient at best. Why can't the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts and Girls Inc. and the Boys and Girls Clubs merge and capitalize on economies of scale? Why the purdah of separating the YMCA and the YWCA in this age of unisex rest-rooms? And why do social aid organizations have to come in different religious flavors? I'm not being facetious, either. Well, not too much, anyway.

Ultimately, however, all the world's misery is local, and requires local brains and creativity and face-to-face interaction to ameliorate. And I would hate to think that local efforts hinge so much on which charities host the best mixers in Georgetown, or which have the most ex-congresscritters (or their spouses) on payroll.