Life lessons from a "dead" language

I think that today's status meeting was a reality check for the alpha Alpha Geek, when he realized how much actually needs to be done and how little isn't. He made the mistake of saying, "Let me know if there's anything we can do." I couldn't resist: "Hire ten more programmers...Well, you said, 'anything.'" He didn't seem to appreciate my lightning wit [eyeroll], so I added, "And I want a pony, too." Which is the point where I stepped into the generation gap between me and one of my co-workers. "So are you going to ride the pony for ten minutes every hour?" he asked, clearly puzzled by the failed humor.

The thing about being raised in the seventies is that what you watched after school (in the days when grade school didn't assign homework) was basically leftovers from the fifties and sixties. You were rather too young to appreciate quite how much frost and freezer burn the TV stations had scraped off before re-heating these relics. Thus, you had no defense against the ethos of decades past as "Petticoat Junction," "The Munsters," "Dusty's Trail," The original (as in Annette Funicello) "Mickey Mouse Club," "Father Knows Best," etc. became your touchstone for reality. And, within that ethos, there was no greater indulgence that parents could bestow on a pre-adolescent girl than her very own pony. Not that I had anything more than a passing interest in horses, mind you. But the pony was the ne plus ultra of parental indulgence. And that's all that mattered.

I drew a breath before trying to explain this to my nine-years-junior co-worker, then decided to just let it go. There are some things you can't explain in the forty-second walk back to your cubicle-pod, and this was one of them. Particularly as I would have slipped up and actually used the term ne plus ultra, which would have only made things worse.

There's another Latin phrase, sine qua non, which popped into my head as I weighed the viability of writing a blog post on ne plus ultra. "Sine qua non" roughly translates as "That without which there is nothing." At least "nothing" within a specific context. It's the life of whatever party is at hand--without it, everyone goes home, the chips grow stale and soggy, and the dip acquires extra colors/textures in the 'fridge.

But I thought that they're really two things that need to be defined when you're looking to branch out into entrepreneurship. Because unless you have a rich relative at your back, starting your own business is a lifestyle choice, among everything else that it is. It's critical to define your ne plus ultra, even when you think you have zero chance of meeting it. Because if you're wrong and you do, you're off the edge of the map--the locale of "Here there be dragons" (a.k.a. hic dracones sunt) In that place, dragons be the least of your worries. At least until you dedicate some introspection toward defining a new ne plus ultra, anyway. I believe that it's just as critical that the sine qua non--i.e. the minimum standards--is clearly and realistically established. Otherwise, what's the point? Seriously.

But what I think would be the most interesting part of an introspective exercise like that is to measure the distance between sine qua non and ne plus ultra. I can't begin to guess whether or not it's germane to the chance of entrepreneurial success, but I think that it might tell you quite a bit about the entrepreneur.

Disclaimer: College Latin kicked my backside but good. Both semesters. Which is embarrassing, considering that I should have learned my lesson during the first semester--the "lesson" being that having had both French and Spanish in middle and high school weren't enough to prepare me for the horror that is noun declension.

Now THAT's what I call "QA"

On the way home from work tonight, I had the radio tuned to the tail-end of NPR's Marketplace. Closing tidbit: Britain's Royal Mint flubbed the stamping of ~100K twenty-pence coins and issued them without a date. Presumably, that's a considerable loss of face. Why? Because the mint hasn't made that mistake since the year 1672.

That's right: About 337 years between making the same mistake twice. Roughly sixteen generations, in purely human terms. Kind of mind-blowing, really. And not a little humbling.

Commuter economies

Yesterday's paintball outing was held west of Chippewa Falls, WI, which is bit north of my old stomping-grounds, a.k.a. Eau Claire, WI. In "my day," the two cities were connected by State Highway 53, which also ran through the town of Hallie. What I mostly remember about Lake Hallie is the Farm and Fleet store, RV dealerships, used car lots, a VFW, and a wonderfully low-key, unpretentious Mexican restaurant (Pancho's Place).

That's the route my husband and I took, because backtracking to the new Highway 53 after a run to the military surplus store would have been counter-productive. The new bypass has made a palpable difference along what's now officially called "Business 53." Pancho's Place stands boarded-up, and there's an inescapable "ghost town" sort of feel to the real estate on either side of the road. In fairness, a couple new office complex buildings have gone up at the southern end of that route (meaning the northernmost part of Eau Claire), and the Farm and Fleet seems to be doing okay. But, all in all, the bypass seems to have been no blessing to that part of town.

I suppose that cities with mature mass-transit systems have their own variation on the malaise when routes are rearranged and stops are closed off. But what intrigues me is the notion of telecommuting, and how it will impact both. That phenomenon, I very strongly and cynically expect, will not grow nearly as quickly or as large as predicted. Yet, assuming it did, the change would likewise have a very real impact on commercial real estate and transportation. When enough people simply nuke leftovers in their own microwaves rather than pop around the corner to the sandwich shop for lunch, the sandwich shop closes its doors. When it's both faster and less frustrating to hop on the highway and grab a ream of printer paper from the office supply superstore in the mall area than it is to fight for a downtown parking spot to buy the same paper at the Mom-and-Pop variety store, Mom and Pop go out of business. I'm sure you can think of other scenarios as well.

One adaptation to telecommuting that would not surprise me, however, would be the re-emergence of the corner store, at least in places that are used to cars for transportation. Heck, if gas prices spike (and stay that spiked), it might even be more expensive to make the trip to Wal-Mart than to pay a few more pennies at the corner store (which would make me, at least, happy on a few different levels).

But it's largely a moot point, I think. It's true that professional firms could save money in the short term by having a percentage of their staff work from home. (And only a fool would underestimate the attraction of short-term savings.) But that scenario involves management not having their direct-reports under their eye forty-plus hours of every week. I thiwaynk we all know how likely they are to relinquish the illusion of control...

That being said, I still predict that telecommuting will have some tangible impact on neighborhood and mega-mall economies. It just won't be catastrophic like a highway bypass or subway stop closing. If it helps reverse the overspecialized wastelands of strip-malls and McMansion suburbias that highways have engendered (at least in this part of the nation), I think I can get behind that with few to no reservations. (Of course, if "telecommuting" translates into my boss requiring me to hook up a surveillance webcam up to my workstation, all bets are off...)

Technology evolution in microcosm

A couple of mutual friends talked my husband and me into trying out paintball circa 2000. After we made a modest investment in equipment and gear, we learned that another friend also plays. The latter crowd (Cory and gang) are a little more hard-core b/c they play in tournaments, although they are all quite good at switching into "friendly game" mode when Cory decides to celebrate his birthday by having his friends shoot at him.

My husband was in the preliminary phases of shopping for new gear today, because my paintball gun (usually called a "marker" nowadays) failed, despite a rebuild last night. Wow, has the technology of those things evolved in the last decade!

When Dennis and I started playing, Terry's young son Alex had just graduated from a hand-me-down single shot (meaning pump action) gun to something semi-automatic. (Unfortunately, by that point he had, of necessity, become preternaturally accurate...and preternaturally stealthy.) Our guns were lower-end, but still quite serviceable: CO2-powered, gravity-fed, semi-automatic, wrench-adjusted to fire at a "friendly" 250 - 275 feet per second. (Tournament speeds, IIRC, are usually in the 300 feet per second range.)

Fast forward a couple of years, when Cory started regularly playing in tournaments and also assuming responsibility for helping his girlfriend (now wife) acquire equipment. We found ourselves up against paintball guns with hoppers that fed the paintballs with little battery-powered motors to feed the paintballs into the firing chamber.

Various commitments on both sides meant that we didn't play with (or against) Cory on the traditional birthday weekend in either 2007 and 2008. Today I wandered into Cory demo-ing the paintball gun he was using to my husband, explaining the modifications he'd made since buying it off eBay. Not only are we talking battery-powered motors, paintball guns now come with electronics and touch-screen programming. In today's play, for instance, Cory dumbed it down a bit, so that it would only go into fully automatic mode--spitting fifteen paintballs per second--after he'd hit the trigger a certain number of times within a given time-span.

I should know better, but I was a little freaked out by how much technology goes into a game. Especially when I reflect on how many centuries elapsed while arquebus gave way to matchlock, matchlock to wheel-lock, wheel-lock to flint-lock, flint-lock to machine gun.

But stepping back and looking at it from a geeky problem-solving standpoint, you can discern how problem led to solution led to problem led to solution and so on. The thought progression can be more or less summed up like:

1. "Hey, my friends and I want to shoot at each other in good clean fun, but BB guns will put your eye out. Why don't we try splatball?"
2. "Uh-oh, I'm the fox in this game of 'Fox and hounds.' Single-shot sucks. I need something that fires a paintball every time I pull the trigger."
3. "Ugh: I can smack the trigger faster than this thing can drop paintballs. I need a motor to keep up with me."
4. "Uh, oh, other people can smack the trigger faster. Going fully auto will even out the playing field."
   
5. "Uh-oh, not everyone wants to play against the Wall O' Paint. I need a way to level the playing field for them."
   

Of course, you can see the downside of those advancements, can't you? For instance, batteries dying in the middle of a tournament is guaranteed to land you in a world of bruise if you don't or can't call yourself out. And let's just say that technology geared toward an obstacle course of bunkers in a clear field doesn't always slog through the woods and the occasional rain-shower as well as the "old-school" gravity-fed kind.

Oh, and one more major technological advancement: Supporting pressurized air rather than pressurized CO2. Because the CO2 of your accelerated respiration will draw quite enough mosquitoes without help from your paintball gun. That, folks, is real progress. ;-)

Frivolous Friday, 06.26.2009: Robert Frost edition

Whose code this is, I think I know:
He left the firm some time ago.
He cannot cringe to see its scope
So exponentially grow.

I skim his lines, think "What the heck?"
I cannot grok this--much less check
For proper place to splice my work:
I'm in spaghetti to the neck!

With second read--and Google's grace--
Each function falls now into place
And though our styles are night and day,
My brain becomes a smarter space.

To learn all night I have the urge,
But at my deadline must I surge
With code to test before I merge.
And code to test before I merge.

When something is better than anything

After scampering around the office, collecting signatures for the card that I bought a couple nights ago, it was my turn to find something to write in it. I think that the easiest thing to say in a situation like this is something like, "please feel more than welcome to consider me as a reference." (Unless, of course, you don't mean it. But we're not going down that road tonight.)

I like that offer partly because it nods acknowledgment to reality, then immediately points the focus at what's next. But mostly I like it because it's something. Too many folks like to say, "Let me know if there's anything I can do." (Which always makes me want to channel Henny Youngman with a comeback like "Pay my mortgage.") In that regard, I'd rather offer a discrete "something" than the "anything" that really means "nothing."

Yet despite the such an offer seeming (to me, at least) the simplest, even most obvious response to someone having the proverbial rug yanked out from under them, it seems to be shamefully neglected--at least from what I've observed over the years.

I don't know if anyone can say that the worst of this recession is over. Even if it were, job (re)creation, historically, lags behind GDP growth. So I would strongly suggest to anyone who reads this to consider doing "something" rather than "anything" for the next person they know who needs a lifeline back into employment. Thanks much.

Leaders vs. managers

Don't conflate the two.

• Leaders stake their credibility on their decisions, and abide by the consequences--expected as well as unintentional.
  
• Leaders understand the full-time balancing act between the man and the mission (to couch it in military terms).
  
• Leaders understand that giving subordinates responsibility without authority is not, by any stretch of fevered imagination, "delegation."
• Leaders get the truly useful information (a.k.a. the bad news) as quickly as (perhaps more quickly than) the good news.
  
• Leaders are not threatened by superior skill or raw brain-power, because they don't mistake either for leadership.
• Leaders keep a part of their brain reserved for what-comes-next while dealing with here-and-now realities.
  

That's not to say that someone who carries the title of "Manager" isn't actually a leader. Sometimes leaders carry no title at all. (To me, they're the truly interesting sub-species.) But I'm becoming cynical enough to think that the safest rule of thumb is to consider anyone with a title as "Manager" until proven otherwise.

I'm sure that the leader vs. manager dichotomy's been dissected to death (and the bones picked clean) over the years. I'm only leaving my own flogger-print on the proverbial horse-carcass because today I found myself staring down into the gulf that separates the two. Fortunately, our contact should be minimal.