Category: observations

My father has been in town these past few days for his granddaughter’s 5th birthday, so I’ve been out in the Big Room with the blue ceiling more than usual.
Continue reading “real life intrudes”

well, not too long after realizing this job was limited in its upward mobility, I learned today that it’s stability is scarce as well. ah, the joy of working with law school faculty: they’ve consulted the University’s collective bargaining agreement to find out the procedure for removing a tenured (ie, past the probationary period) employee. It’s a very well structured series of “counseling” regimes, from informal to direct, with direct being very closely monitored performance (something akin to time and motion studies, I suppose).

Since this isn’t what I’d call my life’s work and since this has been a uncomfortable fit from the beginning, getting into something else before the completion of the process makes the most sense. I have no illusions about the outcome, and when I consider what the reward would be for completing the process — staying in this position — I’d like to see the second prize.

Everything Burns: Amnestia ahora

At one point in the conversation, the following security problem came up: How do you prevent kids from visiting your house twice on Halloween, and double-dipping from the finite cauldron of precious treats? (“Harry Potter! Weren’t you just here? Scram, you Gryffindor scum!”)

Proposed solutions ranged from marking each kid with a paintball gun to attaching RFIDs to the treats you give out. Each of these solutions, while feasible, has its drawbacks (lawsuits, expense, etc.) I think the only reasonable solution will involve a little bit of infrastructure.

Having just read Bruce Schnier’s latest book, Beyond Fear (Worth reading. Can loan or swap), I’ll apply Bruce’s Five-step process for security measure analysis of a National Trick-or-Treater Registry and ID card. This would require all children and young adults to register with a federal agency (The Department of Homeland Defense is a logical choice, here) so that participating households could assign or withhold treats based on whatever criteria they determined suitable.

Horse, Blender, Car, Crockpot: Pick Your Gadgets

Paul Saffo, a director at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif., who has studied how societies and individuals adopt technology, pointed out that the Amish were just one of many cultures that made selective use of technologies. The religious communities of Hutterites, Mennonites and American Shakers have all had rules for making decisions about which technologies to let in. The Shakers have been the most austere. In fact, Saffo said, “the Shakers made the Amish look like crazed acquisitive yuppies. The Amish get our attention because they’re in our back yard, in the middle of suburbs filled with people driving Volvos and using VCR’s.”

The Amish, Saffo said, are perhaps the most conspicuous example of the process of negotiation between humans and their hardware. If mainstream American consumers have prohibitions, the restrictions tend to be milder, and they make decisions that are more individual. “The Amish stand out because they make their decisions as an entire community,” Saffo said. “The rest of us make similar decisions every day, but we make them as individuals or at most as a single family.”

I disagree with this view. For one thing the Amish are not in the middle of suburbs anywhere I know of. They’re farmers, for one thing, and they keep their distance from the rest of us.

But more importantly, I think the Amish choose technology as individuals more than we “English” (as they call us) do. They make choices based on practicality and utility rather than marketing or sex appeal.

As noted elsewhere, they use telephones and cars, but only as they need to, and they don’t allow these tools to distract them.

No faceplates or ringtones, no multidisc CD changers or fancy wheel covers for them. A car is a faster buggy and a phone is a way to speak to someone at a distance, no more and no less.

Those individual choices are then reviewed and endorsed or rejected by the community. But the initial assessment is based on utility and practical value, not “can I afford it?” or “is this what all the other kids are carrying?”

I still get raised eyebrows when people discover we only have one television set and we only watch movies (on video or DVD) and baseball on it. We don’t have cable TV or a dish, and what are we missing? While a TiVo and its associated power sounds appealing — timeshifting as a way of breaking the shackles of the program grid is a breakthrough — what is the likelihood I would find time to go back and watch the programs I’ve recorded?

Obviously, I’m not against computers (the room in which I sit has 5, 3 of which are running) but I find that more manageable than an equivalent or smaller number of TVs. I still find The Disappearance of Childhood a good examination of TV’s effects on culture and learning.

As the sign at my kids’ school asks, “are you making good choices?”

Amazon.com: Books: Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

Another entry in the small but growing management library that suggests purposely slowing down and smelling the roses could actually boost productivity in today’s 24/7 world, Tom DeMarco’s Slack stands out because it is aimed at “the infernal busyness of the modern workplace.” DeMarco writes, “Organizations sometimes become obsessed with efficiency and make themselves so busy that responsiveness and net effectiveness suffer.” By intentionally creating downtime, or “slack,” management will find a much-needed opportunity to build a “capacity to change” into an otherwise strained enterprise that will help companies respond more successfully to constantly evolving conditions. Focusing specifically on knowledge workers and the environment in which they toil, DeMarco addresses the corporate stress that results from going full-tilt, and offers remedies he thinks will foster growth instead of stagnation. Slack, he contends, is just the thing to nurture the out-of-box thinking required in the 21st century, and within these pages, he makes a strong case for it. –Howard Rothman

DeMarco writes from experience and is someone whose advice you ignore at your peril.

InfoWorld TechWatch: John Cleese’s day in the Sun

“Remember this: It’s practically impossible after a really good idea emerges to recall exactly what the process was that gave birth to it.”

“As far as creativity is concerned, there’s actually no such thing as a mistake.”

“A man who is afraid to make mistakes is unlikely to make anything.”

“Even the attempt to minimize risk can only result in the that greatest risk of all – rigidity.”

Students of medieval history will recall that the jester was the only person permitted to tell the truth without fear of reprisal . . . .

a short meeting with one of my alleged superiors today that illustrated just how profound the miscommunication between us is. One of the goals for 2004 is to get my position as a classified employee (a clerical employee under the university’s collective bargaining agreement) converted to professional staff, usually reserved for people with demonstrable skills. I officially called an end to that charade today, to a surprised reaction. But my reasoning is quite simple, I think.

I asked for a raise a week ago, having successfully cleared the 6 month probationary hurdle. The response was a lengthy epistle about how the university’s bureaucracy was so difficult to work with, that it would be like moving heaven and earth, etc.

I pondered that for awhile, and realized that if it was that difficult to get a small salary increase within the classified staff pay scale, what chance anyone will find the intestinal fortitude to reclassify the position?

So that settles that. Expectation management on full strength from here on out . . . .

zoë

I am trying Zoë one more time: I gave up on it for no compelling reason about a year ago, and found myself this past week or so backed into a corner with email overload. I decided to give it another look and I’m very impressed. I had some initial problems with the fact secure IMAP wasn’t supported, but another user on the Zoë mailing list was able to work out the problem and lo, a patch was released.

The version number now is 0.4.8, and where I left off was 0.2.2 or thereabouts. A lot of features have been added, but more importantly, the component parts that Zoë is based on have almost improved. Java is at 1.4.1 for most platforms (I’ve run it Zoë on OS X and FreeBSD with no problems), the various engines — javamail, lucene, jrendezvous, jdbm, jtidy, xpp, simple, jbyte — are also improved.

This is the kind of innovation we should see from established companies with resources and a broad view of the market. Instead we see it come from some bright spark with a Vision of a Better Way. I’m just glad to see it at all . . . .

The Scobleizer Weblog

Believe me, it ain’t fun to work at Microsoft when we continually have bugs found in our products. It’s the discussion at every lunch and every meeting I’ve been in lately.

Are we working on answers? Yes (with more to come).

50 million lines of code, some of which was written more than a decade ago. I remember using 386’s about a decade ago in Fawcette’s first offices. They were never attached to the Internet. We didn’t have email. No Web. I’m sure that guys who were writing code back then had no idea their code would be permanently connected to everyone else’s computers and that criminals would try to break into their computers.

Interesting that MSFT never expected any box running Windows (or DOS) would be networked, but the Mac shipped with networking built-in. Anyone ever wonder how companies like Novell came into being? By supplying the networking that the grand visionaries in Redmond didn’t understand.

And now we have Scoble (admittedly not a tech guy) saying that some of the 50 million lines of code in the current MSFT offerings dates back to the pre-internet era. Funny, we had dog and pony shows about how XP was all new, all good, and nothing to do with that old Windows95 dreck.

Bah. When I consider that Apple has introduced the PowerPC line with very little, if any, code dating back to the 68K days in 1993 and then switching to OS X with yet another completely different code base, Linux has emerged from the fruitful mind of a university student, the various *BSDs have all evolved in their divergent directions, and the Leading Brand gives us what?

<snicker> spent some time with the tech staff at my workplace today and one of the fired up and XP machine, to which another asked (about the default background), “did you get that from TeleTubbies?”

DenverPost.com – ENTERTAINMENT

People listen to the average CD many more times than they watch a DVD. Yet CDs are languishing in stores and DVDs are flying off the shelves. How to see this other than sheer music industry incompetence?

[ . . . . ]

Record label missteps are legion. But solutions are at hand: Let go of whole-disc sales and create a dollar-per-song online service as good as Apple iTunes. Make it universally available, with all the independents signed up.