Coding Slave: The Blog

Q: What happens when you die?

2009-09-27T17:44:00.000-07:00

A: Your Facebook page lives on

I did it. I created a Facebook site for myself. I uploaded my email contact list which Facebook used to automagically send out 'friend' invites. Then I started to look at my 'friends' lists, my 'friends' of a friend's list and so forth and so on through the network. Now some of my acquaintances are 'friends', some of my current friends are 'friends', some people from my past are 'friends' and I am sure a few Facebook impostors are my new 'friends' too. Who knows, maybe Donald Fagen will be a 'friend'. Maybe a 'friend' will offer to drive me to the airport or invite me over to dinner. Maybe a 'friend' will volunteer to look after my dog while I am on vacation.

I can only hope.

Don’t get me wrong; I am really hot on Facebook. I find the notion and technology compelling. Facebook is important. These guys got it right, for the most part. I mean jeepers, the increase in the sales of BlackBerry and iPhone units that result from 'friends' just having to see what's on their walls is going to be of significant consequence. Facebook is a great step forward in the ongoing transformation of human attention into real currency.

I am a little embarrassed to admit it, but I find my introduction to using Facebook to be very meaningful. I am sorta loathe to go with the crowd. But, a I said earlier, it's an important technology.

A photographer-person that I knew from college days took a lot of photos during that time and posted them on his Facebook site. I was in a few of the photos. These photos, coupled with the ones I discovered as I put my life together to present on Facebook, have allowed me to take an objective look at my life. Words really don’t describe that which the eyes in those photos reveal. So here is a sampling.

Oh yeah, my daughters have yet to accept my invitation to be a 'friend'.

Q: What is the cure for our woes?

2009-08-15T22:32:00.000-07:00

A: Three days of fun and music, and nothing but fun and music.

Forty years ago today I woke up in the back of a Pepsi truck. I had left Port Authority Terminal the previous night on a bus to Bethel, New York to go to Woodstock. I was with my friend, Henry.

The bus got caught in traffic way outside of the festival area, so we got out and walked, all night long. Sunrise came. It was pouring rain. The only dry place that I could find was in the back of an empty Pepsi truck on the periphery of the festival field. Henry was across from me. It was Saturday morning. We fell asleep in a sitting position.

When we woke up we were cold, damp and hungry. So, we did what the times demanded. We ate the orange acid.

And thus began my participation in the Woodstock Festival.

We trudged down into the mud, found a place to the center-right of the stage, about 150 yards up and sat down. The sun came out. Things began to warm up and look a whole lot better. I was no longer cold, damp and hungry. I was someplace else, someplace really, really else.

The first band up that Saturday was named Quill or Keef Hartley. I had never heard of them at that time and I have not heard of them since. No matter.

From then on it was pretty much as depicted in the movie, except for two things: Sly and chicken tacos.

After traveling around the cosmos for most of Saturday, I needed a rest. At some point in the late night, after Janis, I fell asleep again. Somewhere in my sleep I remember feeling the ground shake. I woke up. The ground was shaking still. I got up to look around. Down on the stage was Sly and the Family Stone. The ground was not really shaking. It was moving sympathetically to Larry Graham’s bass lines. The music literally took over my body. I had no say in the matter. The next thing that I knew I was singing “Higher” while dancing around on the little piece of muddy heaven on Earth that the cosmos had given me for the weekend. Had you told then that I would carry those sounds and memories around with me for the rest of my life, I would say that you were probably right. At that point the whole notion of what it meant to be alive shifted a few degrees off the beaten path. And, at last I knew what it meant to really play the bass.

After Sly finished his act and the stage was clearing I realized that I had not eaten in two days. So, I figured that getting some food might be a good idea. I left my muddy piece of paradise and made it to the periphery at the back of the field. I found a taco stand and stood in line for a while. I bought some chicken tacos and took them back on plate to share with my friend Henry. All of the fairy dust had worn off, so I was pretty hungry.

So there I was trudging through the mud back to my spot when out of nowhere a hand came up and overturned my plate of chicken tacos. I was really hungry and really looking forward to those tacos. The guy that had tipped over my meal looked up at me from the ground where he was sitting and said, “I am sorry man.”

I said, “It’s alright.”

And, it really was. At that point I had not a stitch of anger in me. The tacos were on the ground. That was it. There was nothing to get mad about. Why? Because for the first time in a long, long while I felt safe; really, really safe. At that moment everything was all right in the world. It was as if the horror that the TV had been bringing me since Nov 22, 1963 did not exist. Walter Cronkite was not there on the 6 O'Clock News to tell me how many of us and them had been killed that day in Viet Nam; there was no “we interrupt this program to tell you that somebody has been shot … again.” There was no more fear of getting arrested and being tossed into jail for ten years for being an adolescent pot smoker. I did not have to think about what I was going to do if I was drafted when I turned nineteen, to be brought into a war that had been with me all of my life. At that moment in time and space, I was safe. Nobody was going to do anything bad to me. Nobody was going to threaten to take me in the boy’s room, cut my hair and then beat the living daylights out of me. All that I had to worry about was to not eat the purple acid that the guy on the stage was telling me to watch out for.

And, for one tiny, itsy, bitsy, teeny-weenie, morsel of time I was not alone. There were a lot of me out there. It’s a feeling that’s been hard to replicate since, despite the relief of the last election and close to thirty years of drug-free, alcohol-free living.

Then the sun came up and the rain started again. Henry and I looked at each other. It was time to go. The rain was winning.

So we worked our way out, jumped on the hood of some car going to a bus station and headed for home. I was barefoot. My shoes were out there someplace in the mud.

And so it went, forty years ago today. I was fifteen years old.

Q: What is the warranty of Open Source?

2009-07-19T14:37:00.000-07:00

A: Here, you figure it out.

This posting is rated

PG

[Pretty Geeky]
Knowing about code is helpful,
but not required.

After seven years of enterprise programming in .NET/C#, over the past year I've been relearning the hardcore aspects of enterprise level Java. Maven, Spring, Jetty, Jersey and Eclipse have become my new and free-for-download best friends.

It was hard breaking away from the Redmondians. But after the bait and switch tactic of ASP.NET MVC, I decided to take a rest from the lemming like culture of Visual Studio's "Productivity Out of the Box". I mean, couldn't those guys on Lake Washington figure out that ViewState was a bad idea from the get go?

Anyway, all aspirations come with a price and a story. This is mine:

A few weeks ago I got this bright idea to exercise my Java coding prowess by making a Java library that provides a randomization service against often used data, in this case the city, state, longitude, latitude information associated with a given United States Postal Service zip code.

It was a simple idea. The library publishes a method, getAddress(). Behind the call to getAddress() is code that gets a random Address object from a list of Address objects. The list of Address objects is composed of data that resides in an XML file that contains all the address information for zipcodes in the United States.

The XML file is embedded as a resource in the Java project to allow the library to be transportable. I got the zipcode XML file from the Internet. The effort seemed like a no brainer.

So I make the library code as a Maven project under Eclipse and write my unit tests every step of the way using TestNG. (I am obnoxiously loyal to Test Drive Development.)

I run the unit tests under Eclipse and also from the command line, just to be extra special sure. No problem. All works as planned. At the end of it all I have a nice JAR file which I can share with my coding brethren and qualified family members.

Then I get another bright idea, "Say, wouldn't it be great to expose my Random Address library as a REST service". After all, I am just as susceptible to coding trends as the next guy. So getting a handle on writing a Java based REST service using that new fangled OpenSource project, Jersey, seems a nice way to kill two birds with one stone.

(This is the part in story where the skies beginning to blacken. Evil things are about to happen.)

That night I go home from the day job and begin to read up on Jersey. It seems that all the code examples on the Internet are referencing beta versions of the Jersey artifact, which is weird because I know for a fact that there is a 1.0 version in play. All the coders at work doing REST under Jersey are using the 1.0. Anyway, I figure to myself, what the hell, just get the Jersey code examples to work and take care of upgrading to 1.0 later.

So I do. I use Jersey to get a simple REST site up and running under a Jetty web server.

Then I fiddle with the code to my Jersey REST site to make calls to the API in my Address Randomizer JAR/Library.

You know what? THE ADDRESSS RANDOMIZER LIBRARY DOES NOT WORK!

I figure, OK, I'll work around the Jersey enabled web code; after all maybe the beta version really is a dog. I write a unit test within the REST Web project that accesses the Address Randomizer directly, straight call to the JAR file.

THE UNIT TEST FAILS TOO!

I ask a colleague for guidance. He says to debug the unit test in the Web Project as a remote server. So, I fire up the Surefire debugger from the command line and bind in the unit test under Eclipse.

(Now for those of you common folks that are looking for breathing apparatus by which to survive this descent into the perilous depths of Java coding, please know this: if all this geekiness is causing you to lose interest, take heart! Read on knowing that in 5 years all of this technology will be replaced with a whole new set of gizmos that will be just as hard to learn and equally exasperating to use.)

Back to the coding.

So I look at the code under the remote debugger. It turns out that the XML file is not loading under the REST Web Project. I don't know why. All I know is that there is a null value where the file based InputStream transformed by getResourceAsStream() is supposed to be.

The wheels begin to spin and the self-doubt sets in. What am I doing wrong? What don't I understand? Am I loading the resource properly? Is there something about the Jetty web server that I do not understand? Is the Jersey beta code that wacky? Is there something more about the XML file format that I need to learn?

I go to lunch with a coding friend. We talk about the problem. He says that I might want to check the XML to make sure that the prolog is correct. And, he goes on to say, that it's a real craps shoot coding to XML in Java because all the XML parsers seem to work differently.

So, I fiddle with the encoding. Still, the XML file won't load.

I do some new coding in the original Address Randomizer library using the Xerces parser directly. I get a new error: Content is not allowed in prolog. I track down the error message on the Internet.

At one point I am taken to a Java bug report, UTF-8 encoding does not recognize initial BOM.

I think, can it be this deep that I have to start looking at bytes in the XML file? But, I figure, what the hell? At this point I'll do anything. I am that frazzled.

So I download the workaround code. The code is literally doing byte inspection, not my favorite topic in the world of computer programming. Turns out that the code had portions commented out. Can I trust this code? I go through it line by line trying to follow the logic. It seems that some of the comments were left in by error. I start uncommenting code. Then recommenting code.

Three hours later I am still at a standstill. I go to sleep quivering in my bed completely obsessed about the error of my ways. I just can't get it. The code is working running the unit tests under Eclipse. But, when I try to use the code in the REST Web Project, running against Maven from the command line, it fails.

It's a new day. It's the weekend. I can hit the code really hard.

So I start fresh, getting ready to completely rewrite the whole Random Address library. Then I notice something.

I try to follow good coding practice. Thus, I put the name of the XML file in the resource as a constant value like so:

/** The Constant ZIPCODES_FILESPEC. */
private static final String ZIPCODES_FILESPEC = "zipCodes.xml";

Just for giggles, I look at the name of the resource file in the file system.

The name of the XML, zipcodes.xml.

Again, the name of the XML file in the file system is, zipcodes.xml. The value assigned to the constant in my code is, zipCodes.xml. One little 'c'!

So I go back and change the constant value to:

private static final String ZIPCODES_FILESPEC = "zipcodes.xml";

The code works everywhere!

So what do we have? I spent at least three evenings trying to find the bug and fix it. I took the time of at least two of my friends trying to leverage their expertise to solve my problem. All for what?

Here's for what: Learning that the libraries under Eclipse will load a resource file, case insensitive against a filename:

/**
* This is a helper method that fetches an Xml file that is embedded as a
* resources as an InputStream and converts that input stream into a string
* that represents an in memory representation of that Xml file
*
* @param resourceFilename
* the name of the xml file. You do NOT need to prepend a '/'
* symbol to the file name. This method make the prepend for you.
* @return the xml file as a string
*
@throws IOException Signals that an I/O exception has occurred.
*/
String getXmlFileString(String resourceFilename) throws IOException {
InputStream is = this.getClass().getResourceAsStream(
String.format("/%s", resourceFilename));
return convertStreamToString(is);
}

While the libraries in my Web Project will not!

Had Eclipse failed from the get go, I might have noticed that one little 'c' a whole lot earlier and avoided many a night of fitful sleep.

I love to code, always have, and always will. Coding is an enormously demanding, yet intensely satisfying creative experience that's hard to describe to anybody but another programmer. Still, when I signed up to work with code as a way of life, I don't remember reading the paragraph that said to be suspicious of all that you see and never to expect anything to really work, particularly if you follow the Way of the OpenSource.

It's like this: most painter's don't have to know about the in's and out's of each type of paint in order to make a portrait. Paint making is mostly a third party affair. An artist gets some paint and executes the intention.

I really wish that the same could be said of OpenSource programming. I do. I really, really do.

Muse Alert!

I need to thank my wife for her patience on this one. I spent the whole weekend getting the code to run and then writing up on it.

She didn't give me any trouble at all; no "You are spending too much time in your geekiness."

Most guys would have been sleeping on the couch for lesser offenses.

Q: What happens when work goes away?

2009-07-05T15:21:00.000-07:00

A: Society goes insane

No doubt about it, the bubble's blown and payment is due. Without a moment's thought I can come up with three friends that are out of work.

It seems as if every Saturday the number of people trying to resell old clothes, VHS players and tattered furniture along that stretch of block on Venice Blvd, just west of Sawtelle is getting bigger. The sellers are people that used to work in kitchens, haul lumber at job sites, trim trees and do light assembly in local plants. The work that they did was provided by an economy that was based on funny money. And that money is long gone and it ain't never coming back; neither are those jobs.

So this where we ended up. It's like some scene out of Metropolis where the cream of society dress in white and live far up high in the clouds. The laborers dress in black and everyday march into the bowels of the earth in a eerie lockstep to man the gears of industry. Sort of like working on the line in what used to be GM. Only now they march in lockstep to the unemployment line, food stamp office or, if INS status is wanting, the nearest border.

The sad fact is that, for a variety of reasons, more and more people will be unable to participate as wage earners in the modern economy. We've moved way beyond the value of labor being the brawn of one's body. And, that taking advantage of entrepreneurial opportunities in most situations comes with a need for significant amounts of capital means that you can kiss goodbye the notion of starting an empire by selling oranges on the side of the road and reinvesting the profits. Fact is, the only viable side of the road to be had has 4 lanes in each direction with a name that starts with the letter "I", as in I95 and I80. Mickey D, Pizza Hut and Burger King tied those locations up a while ago.

Besides the important aspect of providing money to put food on the table, work organizes one's self and one's society. Ever since being ejected into the world, we've had agents that have organized our sense of self. When we were infants our parents held us and talked to us, even before we could figure out what they were saying. The subliminal message was,"You exist, you exist". We needed the ongoing message for our identity to emerge.

Then as we got older, regularity set in. Most of us had a specific meal time and bedtime. Then it was time to go to school. Our week became organized. School was soooo boring. But, as much as we hated it, the structuring of time further enhanced our sense of self and brought predictability to our world.

After school, we went to work. For some of us who were lucky enough, our life had meaning. But no matter what, just about all of us had structure. The notion of being without ego was kept far away. If we had no internal sense of existence, then that was easily provided by the alarm clock going off each morning.

But what about those of us that didn't have the parent telling us that we existed, the predictable meal and bed time and all the external structures that take a blob of undefined identity and evolve it into a mature human being? What's happens to these people?

Well, if the world won't on its own provide the structure required to differentiate, then these type of people force the world's hand. They injure themselves in public view. They'll get caught for a grand or petty crime that ends up having time structured for them: jail. In some cases they'll just join the military.

The human psyche needs structure.

Which brings us to work. Here's the deal. All the talking heads are saying that we are going to have significant unemployment for a long time, maybe forever. It takes a lot of smarts to participate in the modern economy. After a while the UPS packages will figure out how to deliver themselves and all the movie theaters will be in your house, even the 3D ones. We won't need drivers or ushers.

The birth rate might go down. But, without birth control in the water supply that's debatable. So there is a good possibility that we'll have a lot of people sitting around with no place to go, without need of an alarm clock. The external structures that reinforce ones sense of self will diminish. An ego without identity is an ego in panic.

Then as far fetched as it might sound, if the unemployment rate is high enough, for long enough, society just might go insane.

Q: What’s more dangerous than global warming?

2009-05-04T07:37:00.000-07:00

A: Riding a bicycle

OK, I’ll admit it; the global warming stuff is scaring the bejeesus out of me. You’d have to be half brain dead to think that melting glaciers, weird weather and rampant drought are not very, very serious problems.

There's no twisting my arm; I’ve drunk the kool-aid. Global warming is serious and I am not going to be an innocent bystander on the road to geothermal destruction.

So, I am paying attention and doing all that makes sense. I’ve taken a job four miles from my domicile. I drive a four-cylinder car, as does my wife. I have two trash bins in my kitchen, one for bio-degradable waste, the other is for recyclables. And, I avoid using my car whenever possible.

Which brings me to the bicycle.

I bought a bicycle a few months ago in order to kill two birds with one stone: to get some ‘free exercise’ and also to do my part bucking the trend toward environmental Armageddon. I mean, I going to go to work anyway, so I might as well burn some calories on the way there. And, there is both a moral and financial exhilaration that comes with filling the tank every two weeks. Win/win as they say.

Well that’s the dream. Let me tell you the facts. Riding a bike from West LA to Santa Monica is like going all in with the chips that represent the remainder of your lifespan. First, most streets do not have bike lanes. This means that I am forced to share the roads with four thousand pound monsters traveling at forty miles an hour, any one of which can just flick me off planet Earth with nothing more than a nudge from its right fender. And, if the fender does not get me, an open driver's side door on a parked vehicle will. The best case is that I can see it coming and hopefully avoid throwing myself over the handlebars as I careen to a stop. The worst case is that I go flying over the door into traffic, in which case I’ll get a one-way ambulance trip to a local hospital.

And then there are the alleys and driveways. I have to watch each alley and driveway that I pass to make sure that there is no vehicle emerging. In most cases the driver will not see me coming. And, if he or she does, it has been my experience that most times it just won’t matter. The vehicle keeps going on just the same. It’s as if I have a sign on my back that says ‘Hit me’.

There is no place for bicyclists on the thoroughfares of the American city. Don’t let the Save the Planet mumbo jumbo fool you. When it comes to LA, New York, Boston or Chicago, Mother Earth has been bought off by the Big Three, or what’s left of them.

But, there is a little, millimeter size sliver of hope. Some cities get it. If you live in Barcelona, you can walk up to a ‘share a bike’ stand and take a bike through a myriad of bike lanes to your destination. Pickup, ride, drop off…simple.

The same is true in Paris and Rome. We’re not talking about a few bikes for the Birkenstock crowd. According to a friend of mine from Paris, the City of Lights is going to put 400,000 bikes on the street. This is a lot of drivers to take out from behind the wheel.

Sour grapes aside, I’ll still keep at it. I need the exercise. When worse comes to worse, I'll ride on the sidewalk despite the fact that my municipal guide to bike riding in Los Angeles advises me not to. Who knows, maybe the bike thing will catch on.

Keep hope alive.

Q: What’s a good way for a Big Corporation to save money?

2009-03-07T11:41:00.000-08:00

A: Use the Corporate Jet [listen]

OK, I’ll admit it. I don’t think that I am going to make any new friends on this one. But, what the hell?

It seems that recently there has been a lot of hubbub running through the airwaves expressing indignation about the audacity of Big Ass Bank CEO’s taking the corporate jet to Washington in order to get some bailout dough in order to allow the big wheels of finance to keep on rolling.

Whether or not bailing out cash strapped banks is a good idea is a question that is better answered by someone who actually knows something about intricacies of financial prestidigitation. As far I can tell, turning a ten dollar deposit into a hundred dollars in loans is a fantastic, yet fundamental magic trick that seems to be the bedrock of the global economy.

So I am not going to comment about the wisdom of bank bailouts. But, I do know something about the economy of corporate jets.

The Big Ass Computer Manufacturer that I worked for in the nineties had a jet. It was a Gulfstream, I think. I was never on it. That was a privilege reserved for senior executives and board members.

One day I was ranting on about the injustice of it all—thousands of assembly line workers supporting the excess privilege of corporate executives. After I finished my rant my boss sat me down to explain the facts of life. If I had to put a title on the lecture, I would call it, The Value of Time.

At the time I was working for the Big Ass Computer Manufacturer, it had 19,000 employees and was pumping billions of dollars in revenue. Also the company’s stock was headed to its $80 a share high mark. There were billions of dollar in play every day. At the top of this prosperity was a group of ten people running it all. If these guys made a good decision at 9 AM, a few million dollars showed up on the bottom line at 5 PM; make a bad decision and a few million bucks went to the red. Given these numbers, it is not that far fetched to think that the value of the senior executive’s time was worth well in excess of $5,000 an hour.

So let’s say I am Joe the CEO in New York and I have a meeting in Washington with the powers that be. Let’s use the scenario that my group of four—me and three senior VPs—are traveling on a standard commercial flight, at a ticket cost of $658 round trip from NY to Washington.

We leave my office at 10 AM, just after a 9 AM conference call with the President of France. We want to get to LGA by 10:30 AM for an 11 AM flight to DC. We hit severe traffic at the Triborough and get to LaGuardia at 10:50 AM. Due to the heavy traffic we have missed the flight. The next one is in an hour. So, we get to wait. That hour will cost my company at the least $20,000. And because we are to meet with the House Committee on Really Important Things, I am going to cost the taxpayers some money because all the Congressmen and Congresswomen will have to wait for us too.

Or we can go to Plan B. We leave my office at 10 AM, hit severe traffic, arrive at La Guardia at 10:50 AM. We go to the Corporate Hangar, get on the Gulfstream and off we go. The cost? About four thousand bucks a head back and forth. (You can lease 50 hours of a corporate jet for about $425,000 or 8,515 an hour.) While this may seem expensive at first glance, when you take a look at numbers in terms of risk mitigation and opportunity cost, four thousand bucks for a NY to Washington roundtrip flight for a Fortune 500 executive is not that bad. In fact, it's pretty good.

I know, I know, four grand is a lot for the average traveling salesman. But, these people are not average. They may be running multi-billion dollar corporations into the ground, but they *are* running multi-billion dollar corporations. The Gulfstream is nothing more than a piece of the equipment that you need to play the game. Think about it. A pair of leg pads for a NHL goalie still costs around $1200, even if the goalie plays for a last place team. It costs a lot of money to play in the Big Leagues.

So it seems to me that the real issue is not the corporate jet. It’s the people traveling in the corporate jet. I mean, all this righteous indignation would be but a murmur if the passenger were Brad Pitt, or if our 401Ks were worth the money that we put into them.

Q: What is the price of a drink?

2009-02-15T14:12:00.000-08:00

A: $36,000

The other day I had a Dim Sum breakfast with some friends in LA’s Chinatown. Afterward we decided to take a walk around the area to get a sense of the local color.

So off we went.

We came upon this big store. It was like a cross between an Asian grocery store and an Asian department store. We went inside.

We strolled past a large varieties of ginseng root and royal jelly elixir, took a turn upstairs into cookware, bowls, plates, cups and finally went back downstairs to exit. We were about to leave when I noticed a large counter displaying an assortment of liquor. I went over.

Usually I don’t go near areas where liquor is being sold. I don’t go into liquor stores. In fact, I don’t even go down the beer and wine aisle in grocery stores. Alcohol and I parted ways a long time ago in early adulthood. It was a perilous relationship that was best to terminate and one that I have little desire to rekindle. But, in this instance there was something about that counter that drew me near.

I strolled over, past the Stoli and Jack Daniels. I looked into the glass case in front of me. There it was, the $36,000 bottle of cognac:

(click to zoom in)

We’re not taking thirty six hundred dollars; we’re talking thirty six thousand dollars—a year’s salary for somebody making $18 an hour.

I had to know more.

Turns out the liquor is Remy Martin Louis XIII Black Pearl cognac:

The new release will be limited to 786 bottles, the number of decanters that can be taken from one tiercon, the type of oak barrel used by Rémy Martin to age Louis XIII. The spirit is created from 1,200 eaux-de-vie aged 40 – 100 years. The Louis XIII Black Pearl decanter is made of crystal that has a silvery gleam like polished hematite and the decanter is finished with platinum fleur-de-lis designs. Each decanter is numbered and purchasing is done by invitation only.

I was hooked. I went to the web site. There was a cute, high end, animation. In order to get anywhere beyond the introductory Flash I had to register. So I did.

And then I got this message:

(click to zoom in)

There was no more Louis XIII to be had. All 100 bottles allocated to the US market had been bought. And, it seems that one of them made it to Chinatown, Los Angeles, CA where it will be bought by somebody to whom money is no object when it comes to taking a swig of fine spirits.

So think about this the next time that you hear about GM on the verge of bankruptcy and millions of Americans being out of work—the rich really are different than you and me, always were, always will be. Just ask Louis XIII.

Q: For what did Stalin lust?

2009-02-06T22:48:00.000-08:00

A: Twitter

One of the things that made Winston Smith special was that he could hide from the camera. Everybody else in 1984 was watched all the time, but not Winston Smith. His apartment had a unique floor plan. There was one little corner in his flat where the camera could not see him. He had privacy.

1984 was a fantasy, albeit a grim fantasy. The old Soviet Union was the real deal. Stalin went to a great deal of trouble to make sure that the government knew as much about the governed as was possible. Children ratted on their parents, students on teachers, employers on employees, neighbors on each other. Complete knowledge about, and control of the comings, goings and thinking of the population was Stalin's idea of paradise.

But that was then and this is now.

Whereas in the past people jumped barbed wire fences for the right to mind one’s own business, now we can’t wait to give it way.

We used to make it hard for the State to keep tabs on us. Now it’s just a question of buying one of the many GPS enabled devices that are available for purchase. We don’t have to worry about some neighborhood commissar reporting our whereabouts. Our cell phones will do it just fine.

The sad fact is that we really don’t mind. We’re more than happy to report what we’ve eaten for breakfast, who we’re dating, the books we’re reading, even when we’re taking a bath. It seems as if we can’t wait to tell the whole world the most trivial facts about ourselves. Yet when someone on the elevator asks us how we’re doing, we say, "fine" regardless of the true state of our condition.

It seems as if we’ve created social networks with a slew of supporting technologies without having any idea about who our next door neighbors are.

But the saddest thing of all is that our billions of bite size messages don’t mean squat. Yeah, the State wants to keep an eye on us to make sure we’re not going to blow stuff up or infect Los Angeles with The Plague. So, in a sense, those messages count. But all the other messages—where we’re going, who we’re seeing, what we’re thinking—those messages don’t count. It’s noise to the powers that be. The only messages that count are the messages that The Man overlays on our messages, and those messages are called advertisements. Because you see, in the currency of human attention, advertising is what makes the world go 'round. Just ask Google.

So think about that the next time you just gotta Twitter.

Q: What’s more painful than putting your head in a bucket of ice water?

2009-01-23T19:09:00.000-08:00

A: Paying attention to the news.

OK, I’ll admit it. The transnational, worldwide message queue is more messed up than usual. Normally you’d turn on the television and get your standard assortment of rapes, murders, fires, lost dogs and celebrity DUIs. No big deal. Our cultural metabolism has developed over the years to accommodate the day to day anxiety and fear produced by bad news, sort of like accommodating the fact that most of us are going to have skin damage due to too much sunshine. Melanoma has become more an annoyance than a terminal possibility.

But that was then and this is now.

Now you turn on the tube and you get a fire hose dousing of tragedy: Microsoft lays off 5000, 1 in 10 mortgages are in trouble, Iceland’s gone bust, Bernie Madoff has stuck it to Kevin Bacon and Steve Jobs is just a bit too skinny for a hormone imbalance. It’s been like this for months now, over and over, on and on, with no end in sight.

I’ll let you in on a secret. It was getting to me. I’d wake up at 7 and have a wrenching stomach by 9.

So I took at look at my morning routine: get up, make the coffee, slice up the banana, mix it with yoghurt, pour in the walnuts, sit down, read Google News, The NY Times, Huffington Post and then do a fast check on iGoogle to check out Market activity.

I got to thinking, “jeepers, is my information queue messing with my head?” I abandoned network news and CNN years ago. I knew that stuff was poison in a flat screen panel. I thought that I was safe. Maybe I wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I pride myself on being well informed. But the information was killing me.

So I stopped reading the news until noon. It helped a bit. Yet I still had that gnawing feeling of impending doom.

I decided to be proactive. I thought, “ya know, instead of polluting my head with bad news, maybe I should take in good news only.”

I found a web site, Good News Network.org. Things were looking up. Turns out the site cost $24 to $97 dollars a year, based on income. I can live with this. I mean, some people need to pay a lot more than a hundred bucks a year to keep the smiley face going. So, in the scheme of things, it’s a good deal and the site’s good too.

You might want to check it out.

But, if you don’t have the bucks to subscribe, send me a note. I’ll help you out. I've made it a practice to find some good news around me on an hour by hour basis. I’ll be happy to share my finding with you.

Operators are standing by.

Q: What’s the easiest way to be a good employer in bad times?

2009-01-11T21:24:00.000-08:00

A: Work with your employees

Somebody I know was laid off on Friday. After two half years of giving it all to a gig as a Web Master for an online publication, he was shown the door. Putting the sadness and stress of the situation aside, it was probably a short sighted move on the part of the employer. Maybe the former employer has a plan in place to mitigate the risk incurred. But, a web site without a web master is like a truck without a truck driver. You really can’t let the machine run uncontrolled.

Way back in 1998 when I worked for the Big Ass Computer Manufacturer, it was layoff time. The company had its first losing quarter ever. So, they did the usual: setup HR counseling, setup a re-employment office with desktops and fax machines, and start the layoffs.

I was friendly with a Big Ass VP. He told me that he had just gotten an email from an employee of 10 years that had been laid off. The laid off worker asked one question: “How could you do this to me?” The VP was shaken. The laid off worker was a friend of his.

When business goes south, changes need to be made, no doubt. Businesses cannot run at a loss forever. But there are typical ways to address bad times, and there are extraordinary ways to address bad times.

I wonder what would have happened at my web master friend’s employer or at the Big Ass Computer Company if the supervisor gathered all the troops together and said, “Business is such that we don’t have enough resources to support our current payroll. Our business is based on treating our customers and our employees as partners. We want to work with you. So I’ve been instructed to ask you, what can we do to solve this problem?”

Maybe somebody will say, “Gee, I can work part time for a few months.”

Maybe somebody else will come up with an idea to increase sales or trim expenses.

Maybe somebody will say, “Hey, Jane doesn’t do jack shit around here. Get rid of her!”

Who knows what other ideas will transpire? Maybe none. But at least all parties will have made the effort to look out for one another.

There is a big difference between having something done to you and having something done with you. It's the difference between a shove and a dance. Shoving creates resentment and retaliation. Dancing makes friends, even after the dance is over.

Q: What’s worse than being unemployed?

2008-12-28T12:52:00.000-08:00

A: Depending on a job.

There has been a lot of screaming coming across the sky, “the layoffs are coming, the layoffs coming”. In fact, they’re here.

The economy is contracting. Thus, no dough means no going to the mall to work out with the plastic and no going to the bank to refi the house in order to pay down the plastic to be able to go back to the mall.

It seems that the only things going these days are the Big Ass Corporations going to the Government to refi the whole stinking mess. This has happened before and it will happen again. It’s sort of the way the economy works. That this recent run of profitability from 2002-2008½ was based on more than the usual amount of funny money is making it feel as if tragedy is coming out of nowhere.

One day you’re employed; the next day you’re out of a job. And for most people, not having a job is a devastating experience. Jobs are the compass we use by which to navigate life......for most people.

The story that has been fed to us since the time that we filled out our first form is that a responsible person can get and hold a job....forever. The responsible citizen gets up and goes to the office, plant or delivery truck to do a day’s work for a day’s wage. Only miscreants, con men, artists and actors drift from gig to gig, working as the work suits them, unless of course you happen to be ‘well-off’, which probably means that you made some money doing the work that suits you, not laboring away in a corporate position waiting to see if you get your annual 3-6% raise depending on the strength of your performance review and the company’s financial condition.

And as I said, this is supposed to go on forever, or at least until you retire or die, whichever comes first.

Well those days are over. There is no more ‘forever’ in the corporate landscape. I don’t know if there ever was really . There is little question in my mind that the perceived, maybe mythical, covenant between worker and corporation, which seems to me to be an offshoot of the 1950's emergence of the Corporate SuperState is gone, never to come back. Except for a few shining years when unions sorta looked out for the basic well-being of the membership, employees are and have been an expense to be minimized whenever possible. I mean, I can’t think of any Captain of Industry that started a business saying, “Gee, wouldn’t it be great if we started a company that provides really interesting work and employs a lot of people for life, paying them an extraordinary salary and exceptional benefit package? And, the way we’ll do this is to make great stuff that people need and want!”

We’re just not that generous.

So where does this leave us? I like the notion of working as the work suits me. Also, I like the notion of an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.

To paraphrase Freud, it's all about love and work. So taking a transitive approach, this is what we get:

meaningful_love + meaningful_work = honest_days_work = honest_days_pay

(But, this is easy for me to say. My kids are grown.)

Q: What is the second rule of software development?

2008-12-06T18:16:00.000-08:00

A: Even the easy stuff is hard

A few years back I found myself sitting in a team meeting about a software project that was running way behind schedule. The company had an old Windows 3.0 product that it was trying to catapult to a Web 2.0 version in order to capture back lost market share.

The meeting was called by a Really Big VP. This last missed date was indeed, The Last Missed Date. There were no more excuses to be had.

So we were sitting in the meeting getting the expected reaming..... as if a blast of justified fury could undo a year of misguided coding. Finally the Really Big VP said, “look, we’re going to finish this product by the end of the month, even if it means that I have to learn how to program over the weekend.”

At that point I knew that this product would never see the light of day. And it didn’t. But more importantly I found myself having to confront this very serious question: How the hell could a profession present itself in such a way as to give feasibility to the notion that competence could be garnered with nothing more than a weekend’s worth of cramming?

I mean, can you imagine a hospital administrator saying, “We are going to save this patient even if it means that I have to learn brain surgery over the weekend”?

Everybody knows that practicing medicine is hard. Yet, for some reason, there’s a bunch of people out there that think that coding is easy.

I don’t know, maybe it’s because of all those advertisements that promote “productivity right out of the box”.

Or maybe it’s because some dentist‘s kid with a knack for Dreamweaver took a few photos and made a web site that got an A on the science fair project. Thus, the syllogism becomes: "hey, if my kid can do it, how hard can it be?"

Whatever the reason, the premise is a dangerous myth.

Believe me, coding is hard. The learning curve takes five years minimum, and the devilish details are picayune and astronomical.

Still we seem to want to believe it’s easy, even yours truly.

For example, only three days ago I thought that I could do an installation of Subversion on a Linux box in four hours. (So what if my installation experience was Windows based?) The reality was that I forgot that I had forgotten all my Unix admin skills as well as my aversion to working at the command line.

So, what I thought would take a half a billing day of labor, took a day and a half and a ton of documentation review.

I guess that the only thing that’s easy when it comes to making software is falling prey to our own delusions.

Q: What is the first rule of software development?

2008-12-02T17:49:00.000-08:00

A: Making software is expensive.

I learned this lesson from one of my former employers, Cap Gemini. Cap Gemini is a very, very big IT consulting company—worldwide, if not intergalactic. The rule at Cap was, “software is expensive; if the client cannot understand this, pass on the work”.

Very few places can pull off making software on the cheap. I’ve seen a few. Usually these places are staffed by about 4 developers that are very, very, very good. They’ve been there, done that and know that even the easy stuff is hard. These types of developers know what to build and what to buy. They don’t have to ask a lot of questions because they have most of the answers. And usually, they’ve learned by burning through a bunch of money on other projects that never saw the light of day.

But, as I’ve said, such situations are rare.

Everybody else just has to bite the bullet and accept that fact that making code is a high risk game that costs lots of bucks

In fact, a good case can be made that the less the product sells for, the more expensive it is to make.

Take Windows for example. You can buy a copy of Vista Home Basic for around $200, or get it for “free” when you buy a new machine. Do you have any idea how much it took to make Vista? $10 billion dollars is one estimate. In other words:

$1 of product price = $50,000,000 development cost

Or to put it more concretely:

A single iTunes download (purchase price) = three and a half F-16 Fighting Falcon aircraft (development cost)

And this is a product that you pay for. Think of the cost for the stuff that’s given away for nothing…. like Internet Explorer, or Google’s Chrome.

In the case of Microsoft, the company has been making software for twenty years. Although their products may be of questionable quality, you have to think that they learned something along the way about cost control and development efficiency. Believe me, these guys know that you can’t make software on the cheap.

And still the streets are strewn with the carcasses of development projects and web sites that started with an attractive lowest bid or a sales pitch that sounded soooooo good. And then, once the really expensive talent is brought in to resuscitate the mess of dead code that the dream left behind, the truth sets in. Making software is expensive, always has been, always will be.

So the next time you hear of a project that has an operating budget that is not at least 50% more than the estimates, print off this page, and cut along the dotted line below.

Experience has shown time and time again:

     MAKING SOFTWARE IS EXPENSIVE

Don't be fooled otherwise!

Q: How many vehicles does it take to make a point?

2008-11-24T19:32:00.001-08:00

A: Thirty

There’s been a lot of hubbub in the works lately about the plight of the Big 3 Automakers. Will they survive? Should we bail them out? What will it mean to the American economy? The questions seem endless.

So the other day I got this idea to practice some empiricism and get some data on the situation. I decided to take it to the streets, literally.

I enlisted the aid of my dog, Itchy. Itchy is shown below.

While we were out walking, using my trusty Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS, I photographed every car that we passed on the way to the corner of my street.

I live in a neighborhood that is, according to Experian and ZipWho, somewhat white, somewhat Hispanic, somewhat African-American, somewhat Asian and somewhat professional, with a median income of around $37K. In the scheme of Los Angeles, California we’re not Beverly Hills and we’re not South Central. We seem to be sorta in the middle.

I photographed thirty cars. The results of my investigation are consolidated into a single graphic shown below. (You can click on the image to see an enlargement.)

Here are my findings: Of the thirty vehicles photographed, eight were made by a Big 3 Manufacturer. Of the eight Big 3 vehicles, six were either an SUV or a van.

So what can be said? Try this out for size. An overwhelming number of people parked on my side of the street (75%) do NOT drive a Big 3 vehicle. And of those that do drive a Big 3, most drive a gas guzzler (75%).

And people wonder why the Big 3 can’t make any money? From my unscientific inference, it’s not a profit margin problem. It’s a sales problem. Most people are just not buying Big 3 cars. No sales, no business. It’s that simple; it really is.

Being American means buying Toyota.

So here is an idea that is somewhat painful to express. Let the Big 3 go the way of Pan Am, Commodore Computer, Orion Pictures and the IBM Selectric. Hopefully the vital auto manufacturers will buy up the factories, dealerships and customer lists. All will be as it was. The people on the line will keep on working, if not on making cars and trucks that people want to buy, then on a transcontinental light rail system that runs on solar/magnetic power and carries folks and freight from coast to coast at a cost that is a fraction of fossil fuel based transportation. Profits will flow and 401Ks will rise.

All will be well.

It’s that simple; it really is.

Q: What is the shelf life of my head?

2008-11-23T12:28:00.000-08:00

A: Two years

I jumped ship back in July and went from coding in a hardcore .NET enterprise to tech writing in a hardcore J2EE shop. For those of you that are unfamiliar with the technical implications of this move, it’s sort of like a baseball player moving from the American League to the National League—the rules are fundamentally the same, but because there is no designated hitter, pitchers have to hit. Thus, the dynamic of the game is different. You’ve got to make adjustments and learn a new way to play the game.

(For those of you that are tech savvy, the reason for the switch is that the Redmondians embracing MVC in ASP.NET five years too late was the last straw!)

Needless to say I’ve been in heavy duty learning mode about all things OpenSource: Maven, Spring, FreeMarker, SiteMesh, Jetty, Derby, the whole unified theory of programming under POM.XML. The list goes on.

At the end of every week I have to press both hands to my ears to stop my head from spinning. This stuff is hard! You’ve really got to like leaning new things, which I do.

And then I get to thinking to myself, “I wonder, will this be another set of technologies that I’ll employ for a few years and then never have call or need to use again?”

The first time I ever wrote a line of code and gave it to a machine to execute was back in 1975. It was a line of PL/1 code written on a remote terminal and was transmitted directly by telephone wire to a mainframe located at a place unknown. There was no monitor of any sort. All display was handled by a typewriting printer hooked up to the terminal. The paper wasn’t ever perforated to separate neatly. You simply tore it off of the printer.

The purpose of the program was to have the computer solicit the operator to do lewd and lascivious acts. I guess that I was acting out my anger about Watergate.

Since that time I’ve learned a lot of applications and done a lot of programming. Most of what I have learned is useless today. The more I think about it, of all the technologies that I have mastered, the only one that I have used consistently throughout my lifetime has been English. All the others are a crapshoot.

Here is a partial list of all the applications and programming languages that I spent days, some times years of my life learning and which I have not used in the last two years.

Visual Basic/VBA 1.0-6.0
VisualAge for Java
Visual Cafe for Java
Visual C++
Delphi 1.0-4.0
MFC/ATL
COM
MTS/COM+
Together
Windows 3.1/95/98/NT 4.0/
MAC System 5-9
Novell NetWare
LAN Manager
O’Reilly’s WebSite
FrameMaker SDK
Adobe InCopy/InDesign SDK
Lotus 1-2-3 (with macros)
Lotus Symphony
Freelance Graphics
Quattro Pro
Paradox
Ashton Tate DB3
PageMaker
Quark Xpress
Q&A
Harvard Graphics
Storyboard Live!
Demo-It
WordPerfect
AppleWorks
MacWrite
MacPaint
DOS 3-6 (with memory configuration)

My father told me a joke once. It goes like this:

An automobile mechanic sends a bill to a customer for $500. The customer complains, “you had my car for 1 hour and you charge me this? I pay my doctor less for an office visit.”

The mechanic responds, “Well your doctor only needs to know how to work on two models, and they don’t change from year to year.”

I can relate. When it comes to coding, there are some days when Medical School looks really, really good.

Q: How do you know when you are old?

2008-11-17T08:17:00.000-08:00

A: When all the of baseball players, most of the police officers and The President of the United States are younger than you.

I’ve been thinking about my age for a while. I am counting down my remaining years in the workforce from a number somewhere between fifteen and twenty-- fifteen if things look good, most likely twenty if the economy continues going the way of the dodo.

I lay in bed at night pondering a time when I won’t exist as I presently know existence. I, all the memories, anxieties and technologies gathered over a lifetime, will be gone. From what I can gather, there will be no "there" there, no more "me" as me.

Earlier on life was a Never Ending Story. Now I experience it as a collection of chapters with beginnings, middles and ends.

I saw the World Trade Center go up. I saw it come down. I’ve been to Woodstock. I remember the Cub Scout uniform that I was wearing the Friday that Kennedy was shot. I’ve lived through a lot of people being shot. Each is a story in itself.

I remember gas shooting up to 73 cents a gallon in 1973. Today it is a bargain at $2.45.

I can still imagine the sound of a room full of typewriters.

I remember Black Monday in 1987. It didn’t really matter then. I didn’t own any stock and didn’t have a 401K. I just put money in a savings account. That was then, this is now. I’ve grown up. I do own stock and I do have a 401K. If things keep going as is, both will provide me with a comfortable “retirement” for about two weeks.

I’ll probably keep coding into my seventies, if I can keep up and the carpal tunnel doesn’t incapacitate me. Otherwise I’ll become a greeter at Ralph’s, a fate worse than death according to a financial planner that wanted my money back in the nineties.

I've made it to the top of the hill. From here I can see the dock from which the ship departs for the Great Beyond. And yet I still worry about what is to become of me.

But, as we learned out in the terrain: We come in alone. We go out alone. We pack in a bunch of people, pets and things in the middle. The people and pets matter more. The Past is but a memory, the Future is but a dream. All that we really have is Today, with or without a bailout.

Q: What might the recent election signify?

2008-11-06T08:03:00.000-08:00

A: The start of the Great Do Over

Electing Barack Obama President of the United States might indeed be the start of the Great Do Over.

The board, although not wiped clean, has had a number of houses and hotels removed. Maybe the deeds for Boardwalk and Park Place will go back into the box too, for later acquisition by the Public Trust for the betterment of us all. Maybe we'll be able to stash a few hundred dollars more under Free Parking for future generations. Maybe making our way back to GO won't be so risky.

However, the rules of the game are still the rules of the game. Some of the old players at the table still own a lot of properties of like color. And, there are a few Get Out of Jail Free cards outstanding.

Yet today I am as happy to wake up in America as I am to wake up in Los Angeles.

Now, once we get this marriage thing straightened out in terms of one's right to equal access, waking up in California won't be so bad either.

Q: What happens when you can no longer report what you think about an idea?

2008-10-08T17:57:00.000-07:00

A: All that’s left is to report how you feel about it.

In his book, Culture of Complaint, Robert Hughes asserts that, as a culture, we’ve lost the ability to think. I agree. Newspapers have become reduced to running two column stories with lots of graphs and pictures. Movies are more visual action than dialog. And, public political discourse has ended up as nothing more than two minute answers with "one minute follow up" to questions that do nothing more than mirror the obvious.

It’s seems as if we have neither the concern nor the attention span to grasp complex ideas.

From where I sit, the important issues of the day are complex, very complex. Addressing problems with the economy and foreign policy with solutions that can be described in a sentence with less than ten words is an insult.

Sorry, “We’ll get Bin Laden where he lives.”, “The surge worked!”, “A nuclear Iran is dangerous.”, “Those making less than $250,000 will pay less tax.”, “We’ll buy toxic mortgages.” does not cut it. Pretending to be less smart than you really are for fear of voter backlash doesn’t cut it.

I am frustrated and I am angry. I am tired of the dumb stuff.

I want to tune into the next Presidential Debate (if you can really call it that) and I want to hear this:

My fellow Americans, the issues that confront us today are complex. In order to ensure the prosperity and well being of our nation, now and into the future, we must value thoughtful action.

Understanding complex issues takes time, skill and discipline. We cannot address problems that take days to understand with solutions that take minutes to explain. Therefore, I say to you tonight that I plan to take the time necessary to answer fully your questions to the best of my ability, no matter how long it takes! I will not bore you, I promise. Rather, I will engage you and invite you to join me in the labor that is required to act with wisdom.

We must move beyond the politics of sound bites to a politics based on comprehensive thinking about the issues at hand.

We must move beyond how we feel about issues to how we think about issues.

In the defense of liberty and freedom, being thoughtful and learned is no vice. Acting on unsubstantiated belief is no virtue.

And yet sadly I think the probability of this desire being satisfied is about the same as getting world peace in the next 90 days.

There’s a joke. It goes like this:

What’s the difference between a chimp and a human being?

A human being can reason and rotate his or her thumb. But some people only get the thumb.

Yet, no matter what, we still get to vote. So I will.

Q: What is the result of fighting?

2008-09-10T19:38:00.000-07:00

A: Somebody getting hurt.

I’ll share a secret with you. I fight with code. There are times when I will sit down and try to program something that I want. But, the compiler doesn’t like the way that I do things. It kicks out some error messages trying to tell me the error of my ways and then leaves me to my own devices to figure it out. I try to force my will again and the machine just won’t give an inch. Unless I figure out how to accommodate the situation at hand, I am left in the throes of my own frustration. It hurts.

That’s what fighting is really all about, one will trying to gain dominance over another, either by physical force, or in the case of computer programming, intellectual assault.

Fighting with a computer is a waste of time. The computer just doesn’t give a shit and it's impervious to pain . When the fight is between humans, somebody ends up hurting.

It seems that we like to fight, particularly in politics. Candidates want to fight for us. Some candidates want us to fight for them. There are a few that want us to fight, period!

Debates aren’t a rational exchange of ideas. They’re fights. We want to see our guy trounce their guy. That’s the way it is.

There is a theory that the language that we use describes the way that we think.

You don’t hear talk about “struggling”. You don’t hear talk about “persevering”. You don’t hear talk about “thinking”. All you hear is talk about fighting…fight, fight, fight.

We seem to be a nation of fighters, at least that how it seems by the way we talk. I guess that we're not adverse to inflicting pain.

We’ll I don’t like to fight. I like to do things with people that at the end of it all everyone comes out of it feeling just all right. I think that it's called cooperation.

If I am going to hurt somebody there needs to be a really good, concrete, in my face, life and death, immediate family and close friends reason to inflict injury.

Fighting with my neighbors over politics just doesn’t cut it. I’d rather struggle, persevere, think and learn to accommodate the situation at hand in order to get what I want. And, if that doesn't work, move on.

Then when it’s time go to bed at night I will sleep better knowing that nobody got hurt due to my need to have my way.

As they saying goes, all you need is love.

Q: What’s more addictive than heroin?

2008-08-31T14:05:00.000-07:00

A: Tragedy

We all know about addiction: You know something’s bad for you, the more you do it, the worse things will be. And yet when the object of obsession presents itself, you follow with undivided attention. The feeling is just too good to pass up.

So I was watching the Democratic Convention last week and I could not help but notice that sooooo much attention was being given to the episodes of tragedy that exist among the population: the mother with autistic children being denied insurance, the soldier on his third tour in Iraq, the couple that was told to declare bankruptcy or get a divorce for some reason or another. It seems as if we are a nation full of tragedy, that there are so many people down and out and so little time to save them.

I think that the reality is much different. Sure, 47 million people are not covered by health insurance and that sucks. But, most of the people in this country are getting over. There’s food on an awful lot of plates and two cars in too many garages. On the whole, between the job and easy credit, in the scheme of our time on the planet, most people in the good old USA are doing all right.

So, what gives?

Joshua Meyrowitz wrote a book back in 1986 titled, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior. One of the points that he makes it that media is a megaphone by which perceptions are amplified. Take a 100 people, put them in a frame of video and have them shout some slogans. It seems as if hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets. The numbers might be small, but the perception of volume is huge. The whole world really is watching.

Probably the most telling example is the conflict in the West Bank and Gaza. The entire population of Israel is ~7.3 million people. In terms of rocks, guns, suicide bombings and armored personnel carriers, I suspect that the number of belligerents might be less than 20,000, if that. Yet is seems as if the entire population, Palestinian and Israeli, is in a state of siege, that millions and millions of people are going at it, every hour of every day.

As any ad exec will tell you, media works!

Which brings us to the Democratic Convention. Now don’t get me wrong, I am an ardent Obama supporter. I plan to vote for the man as many times as they’ll let me. He’s right; the stakes are much too high this time around. Looking back I can only imagine how different the world would be were Gore to have taken office in 2000.

But, I need to admit that political discourse that embraces the Queen for a Day, "no tragedy is too small for empathy" brand of attention getting is disheartening. The political prime directive seems to be: Get the feeling and the votes will follow. On the HD-TVs of America, looking tough is more valuable than being thoughtful.

Yet can we expect more? As Robert Hughes points out in his book, The Culture of Complaint, to paraphrase, when we can no longer report our thinking about a topic, all that is left to report is our feeling.

Q: How many words is a picture worth?

2008-08-09T08:40:00.000-07:00

A: How many do you have?

A while ago I took the Coding Slave site offline and redirected it to here. I did this for a variety of reasons, mostly because the MySQL database that ran the site broke and I ran out of time keeping the site up in terms of content updates. Also, I was not very successful at talking some Big Ass Venture Capital Firm into giving me a few million dollars in order to hire a small staff and buy a time share in a GulfStream, things which are necessary to take the concept to the next level.

So the world gets the blog, which for now is probably the best to be had, and not a bad thing at that.

But, one of the items that went away was a bunch of postcard photos that I created. I think them to be humorous and thought provoking. It was a mistake to take them offline.

So, I am going to post them here. Take a look. Feel free to download them. Send them to family and friends. Hell, send a few to your boss.

If you make any money selling them off as your own, well..... karma is karma.

Coding Hell

ERD

How to determine a dysfunctional organization

How Jefferson justified slavery (in questionable UML)

Why people get dogs (in questionable UML, with reasonable VB)

The nature of things

Q: Where do the competent go?

2008-07-26T21:44:00.000-07:00

A: Away

The other day we had the random good fortune of meeting a young couple and having them share some refreshments with us at our big ass dining room table. (Click here to see the big ass dining room table.)

Turns out that the husband is a former aeronautics engineer turned filmmaker.

We got to talking about the aeronautics engineering business.

He told me a story. It goes like this:

It was his review time at his employer, a very, very big company that put satellites into orbit. His boss sat him down and gave him a marginal raise.

My new guest was taken aback.

He said to his boss, “Look, I do just as much work as anybody here and I am paid less than most of them. I could easily go to your competitor and get 20% more than what I make here. And, then in a year or two you’ll try to hire me back and have to pay me another 20% more. So why don’t you just save yourself 40% and give me a decent raise now?”

His boss replied, “Look, if I bump you up to what you are really worth, I’ll have to bump everybody up. And, that’s not something that I am willing to do. Anyway, when you come back you’ll be more valuable.”

At that point my guest decided to quit aeronautic engineering and go to film school. He just didn't want to be in a business where, if you are at all competent, the only way you can realize your worth is to keep moving around to the highest bidder.

Makes sense to me.

So the next time that some recruiter calls me up and puts me in touch with an HR person that wants so know why I move around so much, I’ll have a ready answer: “… because I am competent.”

Q: Where does logic run insane?

2008-07-15T21:30:00.000-07:00

A: On Wall St.

This is a story about a stock, James River Coal Company.

James River Coal Company mines coal. It is a pretty big, not the biggest, but big enough. (It takes a lot of bulldozers to mine coal.)

The company employs about 1600 people and at the end of 2007 had a negative net income of $63 million dollars. JRCC lost money. Its nearest competitors made money.

There’s nothing too dramatic about this story: small size mining company loses money. Happens every day.

But, let’s pause for a moment and look at its stock price.

On March 24th, 2008 JRCC stock sold for $14.60 a share.
On April 24th, 2008 JRCC stock sold for $24.00 a share.
On May 23rd, 2008 JRCC stock sold for $35.87 a share.
On June 24th, 2008 JRCC stock sold for $62.48 a share.

That’s a 427% increase in the price of the stock in 90 days.

You’d think that the company was pumping out 4 times as much coal, or had done some reorganization magic and increased its profit margin from the 7.76% to the industry average of 27.92%.

Nope, not at all.

Why has the stock price of JRCC increased fourfold?

Well, let’s look at the price of oil during the same period or thereabouts.

Mar-2008: $96.87 a barrel
Apr-2008: $104.31 a barrel
May-2008: $117.40 a barrel
June 2008: $122 a barrel
July 3 2008: $145 a barrel

OK, oil is going up in price, about 66%.

So let’s see, the price of oil goes up 66% and the stock price of a mediocre mining company goes up 427%. Sounds sort of whacky doesn’t it? We’ll it is whacky.

So what happened? Here is what I think happened. Some whacky analysts somewhere said something like, "Oh shit, the price of oil is going up. In no time at all the \whole world is going to favor coal. There will be a huge demand for coal. The price of coal will go up. All the coal companies will make a fortune. Let’s buy all the in coal company stock that we can, balance sheets be damned."

Never mind that the sun has not yet come up on a day in the last fifty years that anybody has favored coal over oil. Jeepers, even nuclear's gotten a better rap.

And Wall Street does what it always has: take a morsel of logic and go insane.

Sort of makes the current banking situation looks well thought out doesn’t it?

Oh yeah, Apple sold a million iPhones over the weekend. The price of its stock dropped 2.44% today.

If this is not insanity, then tell me what is?

Q: What’s the difference between a real friend and a virtual friend?

2008-07-05T10:49:00.000-07:00

A: A real friend gives you a ride to the airport.

I’ll be honest. I’ve been having a lot of trouble ‘getting’ FaceBook, MySpace and all those other social networking sites. Yeah, I belong to LinkedIn and it has been sort of neat getting back in touch with all those people that I went to college with thirty years ago.

I get a list of people who were former classmates. I contact them. They contact me. I find out they have a kid in college. They find out I have a kid in college. Some have come over to the dark side as software developers. A few own a small business. Few have gone on to the Big Time.

Great information! Then I never hear from them again.

I have a hundred people on my ‘direct network’. About half of them would be able to pick me out of a crowd in an elevator or recognize my voice on the phone. The others have not shared a meal with me in a long, long time.

Of the 2,965,200+ people in my extended network, I think that few would know enough about me or my whereabouts to turn me into the FBI if there was a million dollar reward on my head.

But still, this bunch of virtual friends and contacts have a lot of value to people who buy, sell and operate social networking sites. In fact Linked In has been valued at $1 billion USD. (That’s a thousand million dollars folks!)

So where does that leave us? We have ‘communities’ of people who know each other as web sites, emails and interactive avatars. Jeepers, for all we know, Bill Joy might be right! Maybe there is nobody there. Maybe our virtual friends are nothing more than a collection of very smart computer programs that know how to behave as that which we assume to be a person.

So how do you tell your real friends?

It’s simple. The next time that you have to take a plane trip and you want to avoid paying for a cab or airport parking, put an alert out on your social network seeking a ride to the airport. Any one who responds is a real friend. Because as we all know, a real friend is someone who will take you to the airport when you need a ride.

Q: What’s a bad idea?

2008-06-12T21:08:00.000-07:00

A: The notion that there’s no such thing as a bad idea.

Don’t be fooled by the oft heard saying that there’s no such thing as a bad idea. Believe me, there are plenty of bad ideas to be had. I know. I've had more than my share of them.

I think that the worst idea that I ever had was to dress up as a giant frog in a Santa suit at the annual Christmas party thrown for the residents of a secure detention facility that I worked at in my late twenties. I still cringe when I think about it.

But, if this was my worst idea ever, it pales compared to other bad ideas running around, current and past. So in the spirit of sharing the wealth, here is my list of what I think are the best bad ideas of the recent ten years.

No down payment mortgages requiring stated income only.
Let's pretend that we are in the WayBack Machine and it's 2003. I just found out that I can buy a house...ah, I mean a home. All I gotta do is say that I made $200,000 last year. Don't have to prove nothin'. This guy says that I can afford a $500,000 house, no problem. Pay the mortgage? Hey, the guy says that all I have to do is pay the interest which is about $2000 a month. And NO MONEY DOWN! Jeepers! Where else but in America can you move into a brand new 3500 sq. ft. house for $2000 a month? Just signed the papers. I move in next week. Now all I gotta do is figure out how to make $2000 a month.

The Hummer and its noble competitors the Cadillac Escalade and the Lincoln Navigator.
So let me get this straight. An average person weighs around 170 lbs. A Hummer weights 6400 lbs. So, for every $4 spent on a gallon of gas 10 cents goes to moving the person and $3.90 goes to moving the vehicle. If this is not a bad idea, then tell me what is?

Rap music.
Being an obnoxious poet is really nothing new. Ezra Pound was spewing garbage along with the Cantos well before any young rapper was uttering endless rounds of “motherfucking bitches” and passing it off as musical innovation. Music can exist for only so long without melody. But then again, what can you expect from a culture that sells Dr. Scholls footpads by reciting “Gellin’ associations as poetry in action?

Blowing up the Twin Towers
Do I need to say more?

Trying to rebuild the Twin Towers
There are some memorials that should remain memories.

6 string basses
If I want to play something with 6 strings, I’ll buy a guitar. Basses have 4 strings. Cellos have 4 strings. Violins have 4 strings. Violas have 4 strings. There's a pattern here. OK, I like to go down to that low B as much as the next guy. If I am hot to go low, I’ll just restring the ax with heavier gauge strings and tune lower. And as far as going beyond the G string....hey it's called a BASS not An Instrument that Can Go Real Low and Sorta High. Anyway, when it comes to bass playing, I have a simple motto: what would Jaco do?

Sentencing guidelines
When I look at the evidence presented, I can easily believe that there is some guideline somewhere that instructs the judge to throw away the key if the guy is black.

ASP.NET MVC
If you want to use Microsoft technologies to do internet based development, first you learned ASP, which reduced you to procedural programming after years of leaning how to be a good object oriented programmer. Then MS tried to make it better, so you leaned ASP.NET which reduced you to writing bloated client side code after years of writing lean, stateless code like all the other guys. And now, after 5 years of finally learning how to optimize ASP.NET bloat, MS says, "hey wait a minute we have a better idea. We’ll just have you use MVC", which they really should have implemented under ASP years back. So, you can kiss your tools and experience from the last 5 years goodbye. Usually a better idea from MS is a bad idea for the rest of us.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
Baseball players go to the Hall of Fame. Football players go to DisneyWorld. Rockers come in the night and make good girls bad. Hall of Fame? Give me a break. Anyway, I wonder if John Cippolina is resting any better knowing that his rig is on display in Cleveland.

And the worst idea of the last 10 years:

Invading Iraq
I wish I could say something really funny about this, but it’s well beyond humor. The guys that thought this one up make Nixon look like a favored dinner guest. The transgressions are no longer political. They’re criminal. Our executive branch has become that which they say they are fighting: Extremists with no sense of humanity and no respect for the rule of law.