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Obstacles Welcome by Ralph de la Vega

ckincincy — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:49:32 -0500

The third installment in the book review program with Thomas Nelson publishing, covered here, was a leadership book written by the top executive of AT&T wireless, Ralph de la Vega.

This book is an extremely easy read, almost story like. This book was a review of de la Vega’s life, from a poor Cuban immigrant to who he is today. Where the title comes from, is without the obstacles he has faced he wouldn’t be where he is today. So obstacles should be welcomed, not avoided.

This book was obviously de la Vega’s way to try and cement his legacy, filled with several great quotes and pointers about how to plan for success, in spite of obstacles. Great words of wisdom on how to build a team that is destined for success.

I’ll be passing this book onto the local VP of my employer. There is nothing, if implemented correctly, in this book that would cause issues for the employee. Then I’ll be re-reading parts of this book in the future to get a good handle on some of it’s concepts.

The only negative I have about this book is that, at times, it was a little too simple of a book. Almost minimizing the real struggles and failures that happen, even when all the right steps were taken along the way.

A Few Thoughts on Twitter

ckincincy — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:17:27 -0500

I am on Twitter. I don’t use it much, but I’m on that service. My interaction with Twitter has been a work in progress. My first three or four attempts just didn’t pan out. I found no value in using the service, but I would give it a fresh look every four months or so. During my last attempt, it stuck a little. So I’m going to share a few of my thoughts on Twitter.

Being OCD causes issues.

I’ve got a bit of an OCD personality to me. The domain name on this site is not by accident. I have to have a near empty inbox and Twitter works the same way. I need it to be up to date on all the things I read. This causes me to keep my friend list very well defined and pruned. I use TweetDeck to sort out my friends. A list of people I want to read all of their stuff, a few custom searches, a group for people who Tweet too much (hello @DanielJohnsonJr), and people who Tweet WAY to much (hello @Shanselman). I’ll continually refine this list and I can’t wait for Twitter to release their new list functionality officially.

Twitter Stars

I’m sure there is a term for this, but the idolizing that some people get on Twitter is pretty disturbing. I see this with some high end technical people, but its worse when it comes to some well known ministers. When it comes to the technical people, it odd to see but when it comes to ministers… I just get a creepy feeling inside. I’ve been in church settings that were defined by a personality of a given minister or staff member, and I just get that vibe when it comes to this dynamic on Twitter.

Can they stop the porn bots?

I get on average a spam friend a day. Generally a link to some dating or porn site. Can they stop that? I will occasionally go a few days without incident and then get three or four in a row. I can just see this taking over Twitter.

Stalkers

One of my friends is Daniel Johnson Jr. He helped start up a local group called New Media Cincinnati. He spent a lot of time building this organization, but lately a stalker came into the fold and created New(er) Media Cincinnati. Dan covers it well on his blog, but the fact that Twitter has let this continue after many complaints disturbs me. The newer person has no intention to use the site other than to cause Dan problems.

Get with the program!

OK, I’ll admit this is my OCD firing up. However, there is a way to do things on Twitter and it annoys me when people don’t follow the given protocol. Learn the tricks as you go, and as you do… change!

It won’t last

I can’t imagine Twitter will last. 140 characters just isn’t enough to keep the interest of the average person. Plus the people that do use Twitter hard core have a history to move on. These people were the first on MySpace, then Facebook, now Twitter. And if you really want to go back, these were your bulletin board people, your people paying by the minute on AOL, people that used a website that I think was sixdegrees.com. It is the nature of the internet to move on to the next cool thing. Few things stick around for more than a few years, and I’m not at all convinced that Twitter is one such site.

Book Review – The Well-Behaved Child

ckincincy — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 22:10:35 -0500

This is the second installment in my book review program with Thomas Nelson publishing.

I had originally chosen a different book, but it had printing issues and they sent me this one instead. I am very grateful for this change of plans.

I had never heard of John Rosemond before this book, so I had no idea what to expect. It turns out that John Rosemond is the anti-psychologist psychologist. Much of his book is based round his fundamental belief that psychologist have screwed up America’s children and over medicated them.

Now out of full disclosure, one of my children go to a therapist almost weekly. She is not my biological child and she has a heavy and damaging history.

I found myself in 80 to 90 percent agreement with much of this book. However I am a firm believer that drugs have their place in some treatment. I do think we over medicate our children in a grand fashion, but that doesn’t mean they should be avoided 100%.

Back to the book. The author goes into pretty good detail what bad behavior is and how to treat them. With sections devoted to some of the most common problems.

If you have good children, buy this book. If you have bad children, buy this book. It is crammed full of practical wisdom. Again, for full disclosure, this is a Christian book at its core. But even the non-Christian would find this book very good. It builds on Christian principals and is not a selling pitch for the Christian faith.

Great children don’t happen by accident, and I’ll even say bad children don’t happen by accident as well. There is an important role that parents need to play and for far to long parents have vacated those roles.

Finding Talent is Hard

ckincincy — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:31:07 -0500

At my current employer, I am the round One interview. I don’t negotiate or care about salary. I just talk about .NET. I have 20 standard questions I ask each and every person, then I throw in a few question specific to their resume.

Now keep in mind these aren’t hard questions to answer.

What is the difference between session state and viewstate?

What is the life cycle of an ASP.NET page?

I don’t go into these interviews looking for a person to know every one of the answers, but there are a few that I consider critical. I just want to measure their depth and breadth of knowledge of the .NET framework. What I’ve come to realize is finding talent is hard. So when I browsed to FoxNews.com and saw this article, I know exactly what they are talking about. You’d think with unemployment hovering around 10% that talented people would be available.

Then when you do find somebody worth hiring, its not a done deal. Due to the extremely tight market when you find a developer you want, you are battling with other companies. Even meeting salary expectations isn’t enough, because of the market the employee can pick and choose which company they want to work for, with little risk of letting a good opportunity pass them by.

Now just so this post isn’t one big rant I want to throw my thoughts out on a few aspects of this topic.

What does this mean for companies?

1. It means you need to be willing to pay top dollar. This isn’t a market where you can negotiate down a persons salary. If they say it is going to take 80K to get them on board, then you need to be prepared to pay 80K.

2. It means you better pay the employees you have. I’m new to my job, and while money was far from the primary or only factor, it was a factor. Companies need to pay the employees they don’t want to lose top dollar. This, surprisingly, isn’t a market where a 5% raise guarantees an employee sticking around.

3. The cost of development has gone up. The out-sourcing movement has had its affect on the market and there is no India to turn to to drive cost down. Talented workers are expensive workers.

What can be done about it?

1. Training must be encouraged. As the previous article stated in another way, you aren’t going to take the factory worker and plug them into these jobs. People like me have been constantly learning for years to get to where we are. They need to understand that just because they were a lead worker on their factory line, they will have to be the follower in their new line of work.

2. Government incentives. I think this is a place where a focused tax benefit could come in handy. Give companies a significant tax break for hiring entry level workers for these positions. It cost money to train them and their newbie mistakes cost money. Give companies a reason to hire relatively new people.

3. College for all. Yep, the small government Republican just said that. We need to find a way to get more people into college. We can’t compete if we don’t have the skills to compete.

What does this mean for the worker?

1. Don’t be afraid to look around. One of the big causes of the tight job market is that people are afraid to switch jobs. I’ve never been one to play into this fear much. I know that with some risk comes reward.

2. Don’t be afraid to ask for more money. Lets be real here when I say, they don’t have much of a choice in the matter.

3. Stay up to date on your skills. This is why there is an allusion of age discrimination in the IT field. People get comfortable in what they are doing and when technology moves on, they can’t find a job when they need one.

With all of that being said, my employer is still looking to hire several .NET developers. If you are interested contact me and let me know. Going through me, does offer some incentive as I do get a referral bonus. Not that I’d take it any easier on you in the phone interview, but it sure does make me like you more :-).

[Referenced article in PDF form]

How I Help

ckincincy — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:52:07 -0500

I forget where I found this:

Maker vs. Manager

ckincincy — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 21:49:44 -0500

Being new to my current company, one of the big differences I’ve had to adjust to is meetings. For a while we had a daily 10AM meeting and then occasionally we’d have another meeting at some point in the day. Paul Graham wrote a great article on the topic that hits the problem well.

The basic concept is that makers work in 3 to 4 hour chunks. When a maker gets into work, they really don’t like distractions for three to four hours. From a programmer’s stand point, this is very true. There isn’t much you can accomplish in 40 to 60 minute chunks. Its about that time frame when you’ve fully identified the problem and are ready to start writing some final code to fix the issue at hand. Then managers work in hour chunks. Each hour starts fresh with what is on tap. So a meeting doesn’t really hurt their day because it is just what they need to do that hour.

You can read the source article here. If for some reason that is no longer available, here is a PDF of the same article.

Fearless by Max Lucado

ckincincy — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:05:10 -0500

As mentioned in my prior post, I will be doing the occasional book review on this site. I am a member of the Thomas Nelson Blogger Book review program.

For many of my blog readers the name Max Lucado means nothing to you. He is a well written Christian author who has a very identifiable style to his writing. This book did not disappoint. It focuses on Max Lucado’s specialty and that is talking about the grace of God. This book goes over a new kind of fear in each chapter from the fear of screwing up your children, to the fear of God being mad at you.

What it doesn’t aim to offer is a lot of practical pointers. Its focus is more on encouraging one to rely more on God and not be fearful of the given topic.

I will say that if you need some encouragement due to the recent economic downturn or job uncertainties, this isn’t a bad read.

Book Review Program

ckincincy — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 13:06:44 -0500

As I mentioned in my prior post, I have recently closed a personal blog and will post personal content on this blog on occasion.

Today as I was going through my saved book marks I found this link which talks about free books if you agree to review them on your blog. So I registered with their program, and I hope to get my first book soon and then I will review it here.

This is a Christian publisher so that will be the topic of those post. One of the goals will be to show where my faith comes into play in my profession.

What I think is great about this is that the book industry is struggling and they know it. Just like the music industry. Many executives and companies are trying to find ways to prevent technology from changing the way they do business, but this publisher is trying to find ways to utilize the wave of technology to expand their business in new ways. You have to celebrate that as a geek.

Canon Pixma MP620B Blue Edition

ckincincy — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 14:34:35 -0500

A few weeks ago my sturdy Dell desktop computer from 2001 decided to finally die. The unfortunate part of this is that it was my only real PC with XP on it, to host my Lexmark X6170 printer on my network. The Lexmark X6170 has been a faithful member of my house for around six years. With no issues until we started upgrading our computers with Vista. The X6170 was only partially upgraded to work on Vista and even then was fairly unusable. Even though I was a key member of developing the drivers that ran the X6170, and many of the first few generations of Lexmark’s All-In-One printers, while at Jetsoft Development… it was time to replace it.

While my family was out one night, we were fairly close to Best Buy and I figured I would stop in and price a few printers. One of the first ones I saw was the Canon Pixma MP620B Blue Edition. It supported ‘wireless printing.’ Which was intriguing to me, as my house is networked by wireless. After reading over the box I saw that it also supported USB and wired printing. It was on sale for just $99.99, a savings of $50. Setting it up was not trivial but the directions that came with it made it pretty clear.

Once I had the printer configured on my wireless network and on my personal computer it was time to install it on my wife’s. Any installs after the first one are pretty trivial and went pretty smooth. Now all the computers in my house are able to talk to this printer without issue.

When I bought this I assumed that only printing was able to be done over the network because scanning is not a simple thing to program for on a local connection, much less a network connection. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that this machine actually does support scanning and printing without having to be directly connected to a computer. I was also surprised to find out that the machine also supports ‘pushing’ documents to computers. So if my wife wants to scan a document to her file system she can do it from the printer and does not have to be around her computer. The printer will scan and save the file on her hard drive.

The next added benefit is the numerous memory card slots on the box. Not only can you access those from the printers 2.5 inch LCD screen but you can access them as a shared drive on any connected computer. This saves battery life on the camera as it doesn’t have to put the power out to copy the files from the memory card to the computer.

My initial ratings on this computer is certainly a 4.75/5.00. The software is a bit clunky, but most software bundled with these devices are. Which leads me to my final point on this machine. When I figured out that it was also a scan over the network printer, I made another assumption that my third party scanning applications would work with it. That they didn’t have valid TWAIN drivers to allow for that. I was wrong again. I opened up my favorite application, again one that I had the pleasure of developing for several years at Jetsoft Development, Art-Copy. Sure enough I get the simplistic interface and advanced features of Art-Copy and the convenience of a network scanner

I certainly recommend this product if you are in the market for an affordable, and flexible all in one device.

Domain Name Changes

ckincincy — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 13:59:15 -0500

Well for readers of OCDProgrammer.com some things happened last week that may change the direction of this blog. Last week I orphaned my old domain, CKURL.com and just had it resolve to this site. So if you are looking for CKURL.com and my personal post… well those days are gone.

However there are times when I want to comment on politics, life, or my Christian faith. Those post will not happen often, but they will be here on occasion. For readers of CKURL.com, you will likely want to unsubscribe from my RSS feed or email list. This blog is fairly technical and I don’t plan on changing that.

Thanks for reading either of my blogs.