Guess the Army was right!

Had a fairly intense conversation with my group's manager, the other day, the nut of which was, you're doing what we asked you to do, and you're doing it well, but we don't like paying full time for you to do it, because obviously, it doesn't take all of your time to do it. Which, as it happens, is true, but the proof of it was that I have time to a) dial into a recurring teleconference held by his boss's boss (capo di tutti capi? Not quite...), and they wondered how a grunt level person would have time to do this, and b) when he would hold his own team meetings, and at the end invite people who were remote (like me) to hang on and listen to the local stuff, I would -- thus proving that I didn't have enough to do. I thought that volunteering to sit in on these things demonstrated a certain amount of interest in how the organization works, above and beyond what is normally shown, but that wasn't how it was perceived. And since the organization runs on what they call 'claim codes', which is to say, billable hours, the people paying the bill objected to paying for me full time when part of the time -- obviously ! -- I had nothing to do.

Now this is a decent guy, trying to do his job with a minumum of bureaucracy.... and even I know that when a group manager gets that way, you'd better just nod and smile abjectly ....so that's what I did. Offered up some defense, but it didn't matter, he'd already come to a conclusion. Whether it was his or his boss's, I don't know. I'm disappointed in him and for him, though. He's better than that. So am I.

But the old Army aphorism was right. Don't volunteer.

PIR

About a week ago, we took delivery of a new dining room table. It's quite nice -- here's a picture, though that isn't where we got it -- but we now have a small problem.

We occasionally have pizza for dinner, and sometimes we'd have it in the dining room. How unconventional! When it would come, we'd grab plates and drinks, drop the box on the table, and have at it -- which is how that table got a nice glossy spot where the heat of the box, um, damaged it. But not a lot. And sometimes the plates would sit there for a while before getting cleaned up.

But this is a nice table. It seems a bit -- I don't know, awkward? tacky? -- to put down something to protect the table from the pizza box -- along the lines of putting heavy plastic on furniture to protect the fabric (and yes, my family has been known to do that, too; your thighs never quite forget that feeling of plastic sticking to them). But neither do we want to damage the table. The first spill - gasp! We could, I suppose, just leave the pizza in the kitchen, which is all of ten steps away -- but that does ruin a bit of the spontaneity of the event. What's next, napkin rings? Though we do have these napkin rings that we almost never use....


File this one under Problems of the Idle Rich.

Is this Panama?

Driving home, feeling the humid, sultry heat, watching the steam rising from the hot pavement, all courtesy of a day of +80 degree heat and our recurring late afternoon rainstorm. A whiff of damp warmth came in through the van window when I rolled it down at the mailbox... instant change from frigid air to soggy dampness.

But no new complaints today, and a couple of nice things happened. My distant acquaintance is speaking to me again -- I'm delighted by that, more than might be obvious. My daughter's unhappiness with some arrangements at summer camp were addressed to her satisfaction, so that's good. And her final grades came back from school, better than expected. All goodness.

Got involved with a discussion about a technical problem that one of our customers had yesterday. Four people, each representing a different technical discipline, and two non-techs trying to get us to speak English. We didn't come to an answer, but it was a fun discussion. Well, I had fun, anyway. It was an interesting question -- see, the deal is that our customer runs a financial application that lots of people need to talk to, either directly or via an application somewhere else that needs info from it. To do this, they either run a job on our system (a big iron mainframe) that talks to the financial database directly, or they dial in, using a session manager that connects them to an application on the mainframe, and run queries against the database, or they use some unknown (to us, anyway) kind of remote application to connect to one of a series of servers that in turn establish a session with network software on the mainframe that then talks to the database. At about mid-day, the session manager started kicking out error messages, saying that it couldn't hear anything from the application -- it was talking to it, but the application wasn't responding. People who were trying to sign on were reporting very long response time -- hanging, is what its called. About thirty minutes into this, the customer shut down one of the servers, and about twenty minutes later, the problem went away -- error messages stopped, response time went back to normal. Question is, what caused it? Well, the roomful of technical experts said, looking slit-eyed at each other, thats a tough question, you know, could be lots of things... so one of the non-techies asked what I thought was a very good question: next time this happens, what information do we want, and where will we get it? Cause you know, you just know its going to happen again. Reprise the slit-eyed scene.
I love that kind of stuff. Course, I love even better figuring it out, and we're not there, yet.

One month from today, plastic surgery. Not looking forward to walking around with stitches in my chin. Hope it doesn't look hideous; hope even more than the surgeon doesn't say Hey, what's THIS?, halfway through the process. I kid about having a nightlight put into my chin so I can read at night, but truth is, I just want this to be over.

But overall, things are good here in Saunaland.

Dueling Headlines

From Google News....

US court-martial to hold pretrial hearings for three soldiers next week
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) A US Army court will hold pretrial hearings next week for three soldiers charged with abusing Iraqi inmates in Abu Ghraib prison, a coalition legal officer said Monday.


Somali Charged with Plotting to Blow Up Ohio Mall
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Somali man living in Ohio was charged with plotting with al Qaeda supporters to blow up a shopping mall in Columbus, Ohio, Attorney General John Ashcroft said on Monday.

Hmmm......

Working from Home

I'm working from home today, and will be, on Mondays and Fridays, for the summer. The reason is to let me retrieve my daughter from the summer program at a relatively early hour, like 4:30, without having to cut out from work way early to do so. This way, I start my work day about half an hour earlier, and end it about ten minutes later. That is the rational brain reason. Underlying it is the emotional brain reason, which says that I want to work from home because it saves me an hour of commute time,plus the associated gas. It also isolates me from the noise at my office. Truthfully, the noise isn't that bad, but sometimes, it is. I don't care for people goofing around a lot. A little, sure. A lot, no.

I feel guilty about working from home, though. Feels like I'm cheating. When I'm at the office, that same background noise that can be irritating is also a hum that says yes, you're doing the grown-up thing, you're At The Office. When I work from home, it's not there. I do about 90% of the same stuff no matter where I am. Most of that remaining ten percent is paper-oriented stuff that can only be done there, and the rest is walk-up stuff where the person decides to wait until they see me again. Delaying the first a day or so is not a problem, but I don't like the idea of delaying the second. Part of that is that I don't think it's professional of me to make people wait (okay, they could IM me, and some do, but some don't), and part is that people tend to draw quick assumptions that you're somewhere slacking off -- and as I've said, I tend to feel that way, too. It leads me to question my own professionalism.

I think I need more to do.

So That's What Homilies Do

I take my daughter to church on Sunday mornings, the 7:30 Mass, which is the one that doesn't have singing. I don't care for the singing, and neither does she. Truth to tell, though, neither of us particularly cares for the mass anyway. We don't get anything out of it. I go because I think she should; she goes because I make her go. I'm not sure this is a terrific arrangement, but it's probably not all that unusual.

This morning, the pastor gave the homily. He's been the pastor for a long time. His homilies are not very dynamic, but he tries, and I think that he means what he says. I've had the full course of Catholic school, though, which tends to bend you pretty sharply one way or the other. You either become a true believer, or you shuck it all off. I don't usually get much from the homily.

This morning was different.

He told a joke, which he likes to do. The jokes are usually pretty corny, but he usually gets a polite laugh (though he got a bigger one when he remarked abruptly, having walked away from the lectern at the end of his sermon, 'Hey, I didn't have the mike on! Could you hear me? Hate to think I did all that work and all you saw was my lips moving!). But what he said today caught my attention.

He said that a lot of people don't like things the way they are. They don't like their job, their marriage, their kids. As a result, they hide from the things they don't like -- lingering in thoughts of how great things used to be, or mulling over how nice life would be if something great happened. But they don't take even a small step toward fixing the things that they don't like, and so, usually, those things don't change. They won't tell themselves the things they don't want to know -- your marriage stinks, your kids are out of control, you're not very good at your job -- and they won't even think about the possibility of trying to fix any of it. They cringe away from the idea.

I know about this.

Purely aside from my reaction to doctors, about which I've spoken, I know about cringing from things I don't want to face. About three years ago, I wanted to create a spreadsheet to give me a general idea about how much money we'd have when we retired. I was flabbergasted to discover how little that would be. As it turns out, I had forgotten a couple of income sources, and I had overstated one expense, and I had forgotten that one expense would not last past another ten years or so -- but I was so stung by the experience, that it literally took me six months to get back to making the spreadsheet work. I would see it in the list of files, and think 'I should work at that', and I would shiver at the thought. And this was just a spreadsheet, not a person, not a family, not a job. Scared the bejesus out of me.

So while he was saying all of this, I was thinking, well, yeah, that's true, but you don't understand -- I'm fat, and I can't seem to lose weight; I don't take care of myself or my chronic medical condition, which never gets better and stays that way; I don't get stuff done that ought to be done .... and then I thought - well, just what the hell do you think he's talking about? And who?

Oh.

Now, I don't think my life is going to now be a series of illuminated steps in the darkness, just because a homily gave me something to think about. I am just as capable now of ignoring and defering as ever before.

But I at least know that someone thinks that change is possible, that improvement is possible. It can be and probably will be a bitch, and its not a guarantee, but if you try, truly try, then yes -- its possible.

Giving that sort of hope -- I guess that's what homilies do.

Chin Music

I'm pretty sure that that's a way of slyly saying 'A lot of talking, not a lot of saying.' That's kind of what I'm in the mood for, though, at the moment, and it's even one of the things I've been thinking about.

Found out about three weeks ago that a really large lump on my chin is a basal cell carcinoma. As cancers go, it's pretty small potatoes, but anything like that on your own personal body is unsettling, and this one was big enough to cause the plastic surgeon to express surprise. Came to figure out, too, that I've likely had it for Quite Some Time, because of a combination of things -- my beard covered it, doctors that I see for other stuff didn't notice it (or when they did, thought it was something minor), and, mostly, because I didn't push the question with them, because I don't like going to doctors, because they tell you things you don't want to hear. I realize that's stupid -- I have known that for some time. Now I really know it. In about four weeks, I'll have some plastic surgery, and it should be corrected. The carcinoma scares me, the surgery kind-of scares me, and the 'should be' scares me. So much so that last week I asked my local medical people for some kind of tranquilizer, because, frankly, I was freaking out. Not running, ranting, and shouting, but fixating on it and not sleeping. They gave me some. So far, I haven't had to use it. Hope not to, but it's nice to have.

I also found this week that a friend of mine -- I guess 'acquaintance' would be a better term -- whom I know only via email may be getting ready to end our electronic acquaintance. She tells me that she's just becoming more guarded about who she talks with, and since she doesn't really know me.... well. I guess I understand that. It's what I'd advise my daughter to do. Can't say I like it much, though. But its a funny thing -- protesting Hey, I'm Normal! sends exactly the opposite message.

And we learned on Wednesday that a) the woman who comes one day a week to spend time with my mother, whom we like very much (both of them!) may be quitting that business. She spends a lot of time with infirm people, and it's getting to her, and b) the cleaning crew that does our house once every couple of weeks told their boss that they're quitting, en masse. They did want to tell us that they liked my mother, though.

Good news is in short supply this week -- which may be partially why I am so taken by the Varley book. No, on second thought, that's not it. It really is a good book.

I could use some lazy, hazy days in the hammock, though, right about now.

John Varley is a Good Writer

...which I realize is like saying 'And that Isaac Asimov, and that Robert Heinlein, man, they're pretty good, you know?' People know this already. Nevertheless, I wanted to say it, because I like sharing information, and heck, who knows, someone might stop by who's looking for a good read.

The novel is Red Thunder. Its the kind of book that I can lose myself in, looking up after twenty minutes have passed that I didn't even notice go by. The plot is fun, the characters are believable (okay, there is one... but I want to believe in him, so I will.)

I'm starting to care about these people, and I'm only on the fourth chapter.

Red Thunder. Good read.

Man, This Makes Me Feel Old....

I was just wandering through the list of Favorites on my browser, and came across this page, which is dedicated to a squadron that I was part of when I was in South East Asia -- Korat RTAFB, Thailand, to be exact. I clicked on a couple of the pictures, and smiled. And then I thought: that picture is more than forty years old, dude....

I don't care. It reminds me of my youth, and I like it.

Late night munchies

Living life asynchronously, at the moment -- went to bed early, while the others were awake; then I woke up just as the daughter went to bed and the wife was signing on to work to look at a job she had run, which meant that I couldn't check email. So I did what most people would do -- went out to the kitchen and found something to eat.

I was reading a magazine, the other day, that's oriented to people who really like to fix up their homes with lavish technologies. (Actually, the phrase that came to mind was 'people who like to tart up their homes') I know, the magazines are intended to sell the concept, but even so: small microwaves and refrigerators for the master suite so that you don't have to trudge all the way to the kitchen for a midnight snack? A central command post controller in the kitchen so that you can see if the garage door is open? Speakers in the halls so that you can listen to the soundtrack of the movie playing down in the media room? Good golly.......

I read the magazine to get some ideas, and I did. Obviously, I'm not doing enough to support the economy. Think I'll buy some books.

Iraq. Prisons. Torture. Us.

I hate being on this side of the torture question. I hate thinking that maybe its okay.

Is any action, any attitude all right as long as it destroys a despised and hated foulness? What if it just weakens the foulness? Do we back off? Or do we then say that we need to kick it up a notch, because the level of intensity we were at was not good enough, not meeting its desired purpose?

Who gets to decide? The instruments of the action? Or someone else?

And if we truly got material from what we did that could not have been gotten any other way, and if that material was truly worth it -- was the action ok?

Why isn't this obvious to me?

Beheading.

They're animals. Pure and simple. Rabid, frothing at the mouth, animals. They dishonor their heritage, their religion, and their nation. This foul act begs for revenge.

I hope we don't do it. Justice, absolutely. Revenge -- I don't think so. My gut says yes, smash them, smash them all, they, in fact, the whole region, responds to strength, not mercy. My brain says 'The cycle has to stop somewhere.'

Want to bet they didn't have this discussion?

Gas prices and the stock market

Let me see if I've got this straight.

Gas prices are going up because demand is up, reserves are down, and the base cost is up.

Because gas prices are going up (among other things), the feeling is that 'inflation is back'.

Because inflation is a bad thing, the cost of loans is expected to go up as an anti-inflationary measure.

Because the cost of loans is expected to go up, corporate profits are expected to go down.

Because corporate profits are expected to go down, people sell stocks now.

Because people sell stocks now, the value of the stock market goes down.

Because the value of the stock market goes down, the value of stocks, overall, goes down, and the net wealth of the country is less (barring direct and cost free transfers into other financial instruments).

Ok, I think I've got it.

I've heard that the reason grown-ups like to ask kids what they want to be when they grow up is that the grown-ups are still trying to figure that one out, and are looking for ideas.

I think that's true.

I had a bit of a pleasant surprise in the reading department this week.

I have a running list of books that I want to read. I've been keeping the list for years, ever since I realized that I would buy a book and then not get around to reading it for months, by which time it would frequently be out in paperback. Adding insult to injury, I was finding that a lot of the books that I bought weren't as good as I had thought they would be. I seemed to have developed the gift of hitting the best part when I was skimming it in the bookstore, and finding out only at home that the rest was not up to that standard. So I started my list. When I took a year off, I promised myself that I would get the list down. At its peak, it was up around 75 books, and I did get it down -- to about 68; hardly as many as I wanted to have read during that hiatus.

About two weeks ago, I realized that the list was pretty big again, and since I was looking for something to read that wasn't technical (or at least not intensely so), I thought to order some books through my local library's interlibrary loan system. My library has a somewhat cumbersome process for doing that. It's manual, and it uses a different ILL order card depending on whether the book is being reserved within the library, ordered from the library system of which they're a part, or ordered from another system entirely. That might make sense to a librarian, but it makes no sense to me. On a couple of occasions, I was halfway through a card before realizing it was the wrong one. What joy! What made all of this particularly irritating is that I had the info on the book -- title, author, ISBN - already keyed into spreadsheet that I had made while searching the library system through the Internet. To then take the digital information and hand write it so that someone else could key it into another computer system was offensive to my sense of How Things Should Be (which, admittedly, is sometimes much sterner than it ought to be). Plus, I notice that the more I have to write, the less legible my writing becomes. I'm sure the librarians really enjoy that.

So this week, I thought to ask the librarians if I could do it digitally -- fill out a form on line, or send them an email with my requests. To my surprise, they said yes. Its clearly something that, if lots of people asked for it, they'd not do, but I gather that this is an unusual request for them, and they were willing to honor it. I even told them that I'd be willing to pay a premium for this additional service. I think a buck a book would be reasonable. I suggested that they consider adding this feature to their web site. Doubt that will happen, though -- I get the impression they are part of The Official Library Computer System, and changes are not made to that lightly.

Still, I'm pleased. Now I just want to see if the books ordered this way actually do come. I hope so -- I just added two books (The BeeKeeper’s Apprentice, and The Working Poor) to the list. Gotta read, gotta read.

Two words I like.

Refectory.

Clerestory.

Solid, substantial words. I like 'em.

Sitting in the car at a light, I did the math.

I use twenty gallons of gas every two weeks, mostly going to work and back. That works out to 520 gallons a year. That ignores long trips, of course.

Gas is now about 50 cents a gallon more than it was three months ago. Assuming it stays that way -- and Dick Cheney's pals will make sure of that, and then some, I bet -- that works out to $260 more a year out of my pocket.

That $260, at the current gas price, would pay for about 138 gallons of gas, or 69 round trips to work. That's about 6 round trips a month. So, if I worked from home 6 days a month, I'd break even. More if -- and when -- the price goes up, of course.

Seems like a no-brainer to me.

I just went outside and took about fifteen pictures.

It's been a long time since I've done any photography, and I had forgotten how much fun it can be to look for the right angle, look for something to frame, something to make the picture come alive. I'm not a stylistic photographer, but I like to think that what I take is worth keeping -- which I suppose makes it odd that I routinely throw away seventy percent of the pictures that I take. That'll likely happen this time, too. The motivation for the shoot was that someday -- not soon -- we'll be selling this house, and we wanted a photograph showing the house with the landscaping in bloom. Got some nice ones. I wandered around in the street with a ladder, stepping up on occasion for a better angle (the house is on a very slight rise), and occasionally kneeling to get some up-close photographs of some of the more striking flowers. I thought to invite the family out to the landing, and took some shots of them, too, at the conclusion of which, the daughter borrowed the camera and took some shots, herself. She said she really loves doing it, and me, I love that she loves it.

Hope they come out.

This morning, I was teasing my wife about not knowing how to make 'peanut bobbles', and how every other family has a wife who knows how to make it, and that the knowledge is passed down from generation to generation, but I seem to have been left in the lurch, and didn't this call into question the whole likelihood of the marriage surviving? In the middle of which, our daughter came into the kitchen, and I looked at her and said 'Can you beleive it -- this will shock you -- your mother doesn't know how to make peanut bobbles!" She stared at her mother with a stunned expression, and her mother said 'Do YOU know how to make peanut bobbles?' Whereupon the daughter smiled and said "Kids don't have to know. Only moms are supposed to know how to make peanut bobbles.'

Is she cool, or what?

I currently work for the largest software company in the world.

I used to work for the second largest, although as things go, its probably about the fifth, now.

Both companies say and said repeatedly how important people were in the delivery of their service.

Both have cut back dramatically in training for their technical people, the sources of their technically oriented products, and one of the sources of their success, to the point where it is rare to get any training at all, and reservations are voiced even about taking electronic courses which cost nothing.

What should one conclude from this?

To characterize each company's management as, say, 'lying sacks of shit' does comes to mind....but that would be childish, immature, and wrong.

Besides, the excrement would be offended.