Recessionary inflation

The car-doctors down at Ballweg's again pronounced my bordering-on-retro Tercel in admirable shape, mileage and salted roads notwithstanding. One outstanding concern is the oil pan gasket "sweating" a bit of oil. One of the few truly practical life lessons I can claim is this: You know you've found a good auto shop when they try to talk you out of, rather into repairs. And it seems that the change in ownership (i.e. Steve Low's to Ballweg's) hasn't changed in that respect.

But I have to admit to wiping a smile off my face when the service desk dude who rang up the bill skimmed through the summary of work done, referring to the person who handled the work order as, "A.--who was your advisor today..."

"Advisor"? Really?!

Now. I'm probably bordering on hypocritical here, simply because my second job in college (not counting work-study) was at an ever-so-slightly upscale women's clothing store. At minimum wage (plus the discount on the clothing I was supposed to buy from the store for the privilege of coming into work), I held the title of "Fashion Consultant." Anyone who knows me--and my jeans-and-baggy-cargigan dress sense--should quite rightly be howling with laughter at the irony.

I'll grant you, the "title inflation" phenomenon is not exclusive to recessionary economies. Witness, for instance, how any fool capable of picking the correct Dreamweaver menu options in the late 1990s qualified for a business card reading "Web Programmer." But--based on my perceptions from the double-whammy unemployment/inflation deathtrap of the early '80s onward--it seems to me that title inflation is a form of compensation for jobs that would normally be considered beneath the average sitcom character. You know, that alternate universe in which baristas can afford Manhattan apartments. That sort of thing.

But the problem is that inflation--in titles as in money--has diminishing returns. And the only saving grace of a bubble is that its popping restores--however temporarily--an equilibrium. At least until some skanky wanker decides to cut in line and starts gaming the system and other fools follow suit. Sigh.

Yet, to me, it all begs the question of why "Sanitary Engineers" are more societally correct than "Garbage Collectors." ('Course, as a Java partisan, I can totally get behind the value-add of garbage collection, but that's a whole 'nuther story...) Imagine how quickly life would become noxious if garbage collection stopped or the sewers were allowed to back up--how quickly we'd open our wallets to clear the stench from the apartment or house. Imagine the office (and parental) strife when day-care providers shut their doors...or home care providers stopped knocking on ours.

In the time capsule that is Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, she has (Miss) Kate Vaughn stand in for the British classism that is foil to (morally superior) American democratic sensibilities:

Miss Kate strolled away, adding to herself, with a shrug, "I didn't come here to chaperone a governess, though she is young and pretty. What odd people these Yankees are; I'm afraid Laurie will be quite spoilt among them."

"I forgot that English people turn up their noses at governesses, and don't treat them as we do," said Meg, looking after the retreating figure with an annoyed expression.

"Tutors, also, have a rather hard time of it there, as I know to my sorrow. There's no place like America for us workers, Miss Margaret;" And Mr. Brooke looked so contented and cheerful, that Meg was ashamed to lament her hard lot.

"I'm glad I live in it, then. I don't like my work, but I get a good deal of satisfaction out of it after all, so I won't complain; I only wish I liked teaching as you do."

So the question is: Have we become the enemy--i.e. the Victorian elite whose servitors were expected to be velvet-footed, when not completely invisible?

Because, no matter how (cough!) "menial" (cough!) the job may be considered, the fact remains that we all--rich or poor, potentate or peon--have exactly 168 hours in a week---112 if you get your 8 hours of shut-eye. Even the increasingly Disney-esque fiction of the 40 hour workweek eats nearly a quarter of the grand total, and over a third of a human being's waking hours.

You can't claim to respect the sanctity of life on principle and auto-magically suspend that valuation in the face of The Suits' solemn invocations of "hard choices" in the name of "shareholder value." Nuh-uh. Not while I'm within earshot, anyway.

All of which makes me sorry that I didn't actually follow up yesterday's reference to "your advisor" with a dewy-eyed, "Oh, you mean the technician?" Because, frankly, "advisor," in my mind, implies self-interest, manipulation, puppeteering: Rasputin. Nostradamus. Karl Rove. Catherine dei Medici. Cardinal Richelieu...or even Wolsey, for pity's sake. Umm, thanks, but I just want someone to tell me which car-part is borked...and to put a not-borked one in. Trust me, I'll respect technical chops that a lot more than the eminence grise pretensions...most especially from someone almost young enough to be my child.

No post tonight

A house-type project has sprung up, one that I can pretty much guarantee will chew up the evening. (Hopefully, it'll only be this evening.) Torturing the shade of W.S. Gilbert--and possibly my gentle reader's poetic sensibilities besides--will have to take a rain-check.

Belated epiphany

Apparently, keyboards are like wine...at least so far as the correlation between price tag and one's tastes go. Meaning that there is really no correlation.

That being said, the cushy (though not back-lit), kinda-cheap Dell doesn't work with the USB-to-PS2 adapter that my keyboard of the past several years used to interface with the KVM switch. Which leaves me in a quandry of sorts, particularly in the coming months when I'll have to make some effort to make sure that software works a broad smattering of web browsers on various operating systems

(Side note: If you don't know what a KVM switch is--and to tell the truth, I've never even cared about it enough to bother looking up what the letters K, V, and M stand for, m'self--all you really need to know is that its a heinously overpriced brick that lets you connect multiple computers to the same monitor, keyboard and mice.)

My very own heinously overpriced brick is a tad...shall we say..."retro" in that it supports PS2 (rather than USB) mice and computers and VGA (rather than DVI) monitors. But the essential problem--other than the classic pull of sunk costs--has three truly viable solutions:

1. The hardware-based solution is to close my eyes, key in a credit-card number, and upgrade the heinously overpriced brick to anothe heinously overpriced brick that will natively support my USB keyboard/mouse and (hopefully) better monitor resolutions.
2. The (mostly) software-based solution is to spend a couple hundred bucks and then a weekend installing Ubuntu Linux (on a beef-up hard drive) alongside multiple versions of Windows so that I can boot into any one--but only one--of them at a time.
   
3. The hybrid solution is to install more memory, a buffer CPU and a bigger, badder hard drive and then at least a weekend figuring out how to intall Ubuntu Linux alongside multiple versions of Windows on a single workstation so that I can boot all of them and toggle between them at will.
   

Once upon a time, my business card read "I/T Manager," and several years on, I'm wondering whether that wasn't a joke (on the entire company as well as myself), because I suddenly--yea, even viscerally--grok the attraction of Option #1, otherwise known as "throwing more hardware at the problem."

That attraction, I should point out, is predicated on the assumption that hardware--at least in the short-term--is a better value for money on each iteration. (See also: Moore's Law) Of course, "value" is a slippery term if you can't blind yourself to the socializing-the-costs-and-privitizing-the-profits multi-national business model. I can't say I'm eyes-wide-shut there...maybe squinting?...I'll make a virtue out of being a late-adopting cheapskate yet...

Anyhoo. The term "peak oil" is certainly in cant use. "Peak food" and "peak water" aren't far behind, as our species kaleidescopes--yes, it's a verb tonight--its DNA toward 7 billion planetary neighbors. Which (in light of the push & pull of fact and rumor surrounding rare earth metals and their processing) makes the concept of "peak hardware" that much more conceivable.

What then, gentle reader? Please understand that I'm not asking that as a fatuous rhetorical exercise (e.g., No oil => no plastic; no rare earth => no chips; no plastics + no chips => no gadgets => you're screwed, jack: Discuss.) Would pinching off the option of "throwing more hardware at the problem" mean that human-based solutions would become more valuable...or even more commoditized than they already are?

Me, I'm still working through the implications. Either way, repercussions are unavoidable--and they're not particularly pretty. But that doesn't mean they're not worth serious consideration. (After all, that's the kind of thing showers and bus/subway rides were made for.)

Frivolous Friday, 03.04.2011: A pin for the corporate ego-balloon

Trust me, I have less than no pity for the company that wilfully ignores the technical and organizational debt incurred by outsourcing to the lowest-bidding "body shop." That being said, the other end of spectrum--meaning, when any window-office satrap announces "We hire only the best," it doesn't exactly burnish their credibility in my eyes. (Eyes, I might add, that I'm trying hard not to roll. While anyone's watching.)

Why do I call B.S.? Because if you hired only the best, you would definitely not proclaim it with serene smugness. Not because you're afraid of spending your days preventing your "best" from being poached with shiny offers. Not because, statistically, it's about as vacuous a claim as can be made. Not even because a house packed with rock-star egos will make old Bedlam seem like a genteel Edwardian tea party in the garden gazebo.

No, rather because it's a curious habit of management to sack "the best" when they're at the top of their game. (FWIW, I've been laid off, but never sacked--which means I know better than to number myself among "the best.")

I'm currently mopping up Moorish Spain (a considerable improvement on A Vanished World, which is more sermon than history), and the reader can't make it past the year 711 before history makes a mockery of the boast of "hiring the best."

Today's Goths, of course, evoke a much different reaction than they did during the sunset and twilight of the Roman Empire. In the former imperial province of Hispania, they were--at best--a mixed blessing once spliced onto the top of its political, social, and religious hierarchy. Let's jump into their world and its environs.

In the Hispania of the year 711 CE, we're specifically talking about the Visigoth branch of the family. It beggars the imagination to wonder why anyone would want to be their king, what with well-armed relatives always eyeing one's crown. Plus, in the "Some things never change" department, there are always the Basques to make politics interesting. And so it is that Roderic--or Rodrigo, take your pick--finds himself and his army tied down on the northern border by fighting scarcely a year after yet another dynastic free-for-all has put the crown of Spain up for grabs.

For the most part, the drama is lost on the rest of the Mediterranean neighborhood. Muhammad has been dead just shy of 80 years, and in that time, the newest religion in town has recently arrived in the Maghrib (a.k.a. modern Morocco in northwest Africa), where it's caught on in a big way with the local (Berber) tribes.

People being people, I highly doubt that there was much correlation between the change in faith and an uptick in Berber raids into southern Spain. It had been going on for awhile, in fact, when Tariq ibn Zayid was sent north across the water to...ahem!...seek "alternative sources of revenue" for the state. That foray ended the next year in a decisive battle against what army Roderic (and his shaky allies) could throw together.

ibn Zayid won decisively, and Roderic was killed in the fray, leaving the door open for the conquest of the Visigoths' capital city of Toledo--and thence the entire pennisula. The North African governor and ibn Zayid's boss, Musa ibn Nusayr, quickly followed up with a round of devastation that basically ended any real resistance (except from the Basques, naturally).

But not before the governor, so the story goes, berated his subordinate for overstepping his authority, thrashed him with his riding crop, and demoted him. In one of history's delicious ironies, ibn Nusayr met much the same fate upon reporting--Spain's captive aristocrats and bling ostentatiously in tow--to his own bosses in Islam's capital city of Damascus.

But there is a semi-happy ending here. By tradition, Tariq ibn Zayid's invasion force landed on the isthmus of Gibraltar. The Rock of Gibraltar derives its name from the words "Jabal Tariq," meaning "Tariq's mountain." Thus, very nearly thirteen centuries later, his name lives on. Something that can't be said for his boss.

Which--for this history nerd, anyway--brings to mind another similar anecdote. For that, let's fast-forward over a millenium and change.

It is late February, 1793. A month ago, King Louis XVI felt the embrace of Madame Guillotine. The over-extended Revolutionary Army of France is, quite improbably, giving the Prussians and Austrians reason to lose sleep. Far removed from the center of action, Corsica is headed by the leader (Pasquale Paoli) responsible for prying the island away from three centuries of Genoan rule (only to be sold to France, but that's another story.)

Orders come from Paris to take the neighboring island of Sardinia. Strategically, this might have made sense to the Parisian mindset. From a local, tactical standpoint, it just comes off as stupidity--historically, the islands have been on amicable, even cozy terms. But given the Revolution's growing propensity to eat its own, insubordination is not an option. Under the circumstances, Paoli does the only sensible--if rather passive aggressive--thing: He orders his subordinate-also his nephew--to take a flop. And thus a comically under-equipped (cough!) "invasion fleet" (cough!) weighs anchor for a short tour of political theatre.

Four days later, the same woefully under-supplied rag-tag battalion is in position to take the entire island within a few more hours.

Welcome to Napoleon Bonaparte's first campaign in the service of the Revolutionary Army.

Whoops.

Fortunately for Sardinia, Paoli's nephew fabricated the threat of a mutiny, pulled rank on his future Emperor, and pointed his sails back home.

Thus I hope that the next time my gentle reader's ears and credulity are abused by the "we only hire the best" platitude, s/he will remember the flip-side of "the best" entails. Particularly if s/he is being considered for a managerial position.

- - - - -

Bibliography:

Fletcher, Richard, Moorish Spain; Los Angeles, University of California Press: 2006; pp 1, 15-20

Lowney, Chris, A Vanished World: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Medieval Spain; New York: Oxford University Press: 2005; pp 29-31, 38-39

Norwich, John Julius, The Middle Sea, a History of the Mediterranean; New York: Doubleday Publishing, 2006; pp 389-390, 412

Defeating the purpose

Being a complete naif, I used to think that the worst part of contracts was their lawyerly patois of weaselese. Not so much, it turns out.

There's a backstory and it's a long-ish one. The tl;dr folks are welcome to head for the exits now--trust me, I understand completely.

The backstory is that two departments at "my" client are having a tug-of-war (of sorts).

• Party A comprises the "owners" of "my" application for many years, and whose delight with "my" application has been the source of my employment and job satisfaction for over half a decade.
• Party B insists that certain features of the application itself, as well as its infrastructure be changed to meet certain minimum standards. And, while it riles certain non-conformist sensibilities, I can see the point of setting a baseline for software developed by outside contractors.

(And, of course, there's me and certain co-workers. Alpha-geek. Walks-Above-The-Water SysAdmin. QA. OfficeMom. Certain innocent bystanders to boot.)

But Party B has standards, friends and bretheren. It's all about standards, don'cha'know... Which--afore-mentioned non-conformity aside--admittedly does have a certain pull with your faithful blogger. Haven't I, after all, twisted my whitey-tighteys into a bunch when Microsoft or the Mozilla Foundation or whomever thinks it knows better than the W3C? So, basically, that makes a contract with this brand-name company sorta-kinda like an API for its vendors, yes? Yeah, I can grok that.

And--let's be fair--the process of modifying and deleting extraneous and egregiously slanted terms in the voluminous "Application Service Provider" contract was actually pretty amicable. So no complaints there.

Then came the ugly question, "Who's paying for these changes?". From where I stand, Party B said to Party A, "Well, it's your application." Party A retorted to Party B: "Hey, we didn't order this!" And so the rollout--originally slated, appropriately enough, for Halloween weekend--was put on hold indefinitely while that was sorted out.

Fast forward to early 2011, when we were informed--sans fanfare--that arms had been twisted and some budget somewhere would be shaken down for the not-inconsiderable fee. Oddly enough, the rollout was then set for Valentine's Day weekend. So I'm wrapping up walking "my" power-users through the tip-of-the-iceberg changes that would actually affect them, when I'm sucker-punched by the news that a completely different set of folks need to know this, because "my" users don't have the resources to deal with the downstream users.

And so the upgrade is unceremoniously stuffed back into its cryogenic tube.

A week or so elapses between the above (ahem!) epiphany and an email informing me that Parties A and B have scheduled a meeting to hammer out the support issue. Donning my very best Chibi-eyed Look of Innocence, I offered my support "in case there are technical questions." Then I booked the tickets to crash the meeting in person, rather than via web conference.

Maybe it's just that everyone was on their best behavior b/c "company" was visiting, but the actual meeting was pretty laid-back--seriously, singing "Kumbaya" or passing a joint would not have been entirely out of place--at least from my vantage-point, anyway. The changes that were largely "mine" were pretty much accounted-for. But what blew me away was that, when it came to the question of all the auditing history that Walks-Above-The-Water SysAdmin has to do, nobody--and I mean nobody--in that room had a clue who was supposed to receive that.

I'm pretty sure I managed to keep the "Y'all are kiddin' me...riiiiiight???" I mean, after all, don't you do this contract for everybody 'n all?" look off my face and saved the actual freak-out for the safe confines of my home-pod, nestled in the nurturing bosom of my workaday "family."

That's when WATW SysAdmin enlightened me to the fact that the bulk of "his" part of the contract was written as a potential "escape hatch." In other words, the intent of Party B is to rely on entropy, to assume that the service provider would--given their druthers--cut corners, kick the can down the road, bank on no news being good news, etc.

In other other words, unwritten weaselese. The brown M&Ms clause and that sort of thing.

Problem is, that smacks of what psychologists call "projection." Were I a gambler, I'd label that a "tell." And I'm emphatically not a gambler. (If you don't believe me, ask Dennis about the infamous game of 500 with his Mom and Grandma where I was dealt what can only be described as a statistically-improbable hand--and couldn't stop giggling the whole round.)

Now. Even someone who still nurtures enough foolishness to be annoyed at a criminally illogical world, I do know that people are a special case of the Universe-at-large. For the most part, the Universe-at-large does not conform to your expectations. At least not without a lot of money or pharmaceuticals to make a gated community from your own special lower-case reality. People, on the other hand, quite often do live up--and, more aptly, down--to your expectations.

Expect to be screwed by anybody, anytime, and...well...I have a tough time scrounging up much sympathy when it happens. Because, in my naifish world, a contract essentially says, "Okay, we're spelling out the quid pro quo to cover both our butts. Because we both know that people come and go, and in the meantime we all have better things to do."

But beyond that, expecting contracts to passively do the relationship-policing for you is a management #FAIL. Most especially when the definition of "management" embodies our worst-case top-down military-industrial hangovers. Even in that extreme case, it begs the question: "Why are we wasting all these windows on hard-walled offices when we can manage by contract?" I understand that there need to be minimum standards to head off cronyism, kickbacks and the like. But at some point, an organization needs to understand that it's doling out executive salaries and absorbing the cost of the corporate caste system's perks to some tangible end.

Please understand, above everything, that I desperately hope I'm wrong here, and that the representatives of Party B--and they've been quite easy to work with thus far--just don't have that much experience with outside parties. That would be awesome, actually. Not only because it leaves me more time to worry about making sure that The Bytes successfully hook up with The Real World--but also because it basically equals a productivity #WIN.

Deferring Tuesday post until Thursday

I'm just about as packed up as I can be for returning to West-Central Cheddarstan (and a fiercely-missed Dennis) tomorrow. It's been a productive--if not always comfortable--trip so far. Will share some of the insights later. In the meantime, a six a.m. wake-up call has been inexorably set, so good night.

Frivolous Friday, 02.26.2011: Bot Bingo (NSFW)

Yesterday @CouleeRegion tweeted "Jeez, mention 'job' and the spammers come running." Which is a sad--no, make that downright pathetic--comment on the state of our allegedly post-recession economy. (Or, to satirize a certain--ahem!--political celebrity: "How's that record-y Wall-Street-y profit-y thing workin' out for ya?)

But let's give credit where it's due. One thing I'll say for Twitter is that their bot-blocking armor has improved--largely, I believe, because of the "Block and report as spam" feature: Human judgement trumping mere algorithms, nat'cherly...

And, while it's been quite awhile since I've wanted to dunk my eyeballs in hot bleach after looking at one of my "follower"'s avatars, Twitter has obviously hunkered down for the never-ending cat-and-mouse game that is the fight against people too lazy/slimy/uncreative/lame to actually add value to the economy (a.k.a. spammers).

Yet, rather than bemoan this state of affairs, why not actually have fun with it? By which I mean a Twitter game/meme called "Bot Bingo." (Note: For the purposes of the game, it's probably best to create a separate account.) To avoid the necessity of a centralized scorekeeper, here's how I imagine the rules would work out:

1.) The "grid" is based on a 25-day month--in other words, spam-bots collected on the 26th through the 31st day of the month don't count. The "grid" is considered to be 5 x 5 (see Rule #3, below)

2.) "Bait"-tweets must be issued on the appropriate day of the month, or they don't count.

3.) The (5 x 5) BINGO "grid" looks something like this:

• Row 1: The 1st, 6th, 11th, 16th and 21st day of the month
• Row 2: The 2nd, 7th, 12th, 17th, and 22nd day of the month
• Row 3: The 3rd, 8th, 13th, 18th and 23rd day of the month
• Row 4: The 4th, 9th, 14th, 19th and 24th day of the month
• Row 5: The 5th, 10th, 15th, 20th and 25th day of the month
  

4.) The "bait" subject for tweets are as follows:

• Day 1: Jobs
• Day 2: Stocks and/or investing
  
• Day 3: Real Estate
  
• Day 4: Work from Home
  
• Day 5: Marketing (pref. w/the word "Consulting" included)
  
• Day 6: SEO and/or Internet Marketing
  
• Day 7: Social Media
  
• Day 8: Blogging
• Day 9: Twitter
• Day 10: Facebook
• Day 11: Lindsay Lohan
• Day 12: The Jonas Brothers
• Day 13: Justin Beiber
• Day 14: Taylor Swift and/or any dude who's ever brassed her off
  
• Day 15: Any member of the High School Musical brat-pack
• Day 16: Bacon
  
• Day 17: Wine
• Day 18: Any secret "discovered" by "A Mom"
  
• Day 19: Health
  
• Day 20: Any self-proclaimed "ninja" or--worse--"sensei"
  
• Day 21: Sex (specifically, nothing that would be endorsed by the Puritans)
• Day 22: Sex (specifically, anything the Victorians would consider "trashy." And, by the bye, don't overestimate their standards. These, after all, were the folks who considered 12 or 13 the "age of consent" for a chick...until the more "enlightened" year of 1885 raised that minimum to 16--unless she was to inherit property, thus giving the protection of her "virtue" the force of law until the age of 21.)
  
• Day 23: Sex (specifically, anything that would have been criminialized before the 1960s/1970s in the industrialized West)
  
• Day 24: Sex (specifically, anything that would raise Hugh Hefner's eyebrows and make him say, "Seriously?! I gotta see this..." right before hollering for a photographer)
  
• Day 25: Sex (specifically, anything that would skeeve out Larry Flynt)
  

5.) Just like regular BINGO, the "winner" is the first in her/his Twitter group with five contiguous "matches" (vertically, horizontally or diagonally) wins.

6.) The "winner" in each Twitter group, presumably, gets bragging rights until the next month.