Month: February 2008

If I were Al Swearengen

I did a video of this song last night. I roll my eyes like a cartoon character when I’m performing! Meep! Now I know the horrible secret, my mother didn’t give birth to a little pink wrinkled thing she GAVE BIRTH TO A CARTOON CHARACTER. No wonder I’m terrified of Dip! Alert the Media. Anyway, I’ve tried and tried and tried to post it to my website, and I can’t. I’m gonna wait until Glenn comes over and walks me through FTP again, because I’m OBVIOUSLY doing something wrong, something simple to do with the naming of it, or I’m putting it in the wrong folder. Then I will post it. It’s not good enough for Youtube (a low standard to be sure as Doc Filk would say) but it’s good enough for a giggle among friends, so ping me if you want to see it; the quicktime video is about 4 megs and it’s 3:35.

There is snow. So much f*cking snow. It’s unbelievagable.

Ack. Fast fo;ward to June 23, and I DID so post it to Youboob. Heavy sigh. But I’m commenting it, and that makes it oddly better.

Map of cut cables

mapofcutcables.JPG

There have now been six undersea internet cables cut since December 2007.  I had been having a hard time visualizing where they were, but ScaryClown, as always comes through.

Anybody who thinks these events aren’t sabotage is probably a professional pundit.  There are apparently 25 ships that cruise the globe fixing cable wear 24/7 and there’s a cable break on average every 3 days.  What triggered the hysteria, including mine, was the size of the original break – it took down about 70 percent of Egypt’s traffic, and Egypt is not a small country. 

So I can go back to worrying about something else, like uploading my videos.

 

 

 

Success – we hope

Looks like the place we looked at on Monday night is a go.  I will be forwarding my credit info to the landpeers shortly.  The place is a three bedroom upper floor of a house in East Van bordering on Burnaby.  It’s definitely ‘centrally located’. 

Yes…. we could be looking at lots of places for a lot longer, but frankly we both saw it, we both liked it, and the place is quiet and well kept.  Let’s see if this bears fruit or we have to keep looking.

Cooking cooking cooking

I feel MUCH better for Jeff having been here.  I cooked up a storm and he devoured everything with the judgement of an adult and the appetite of a teenaged boy (a delightful combo) and now he is going to head for the nine o’clock ferry.  Many people were called yesterday, they will hopefully start calling back today.
I had a supremely useful half day off yesterday. I got some really irritating banking done, a flu shot, a physical, a pile of bloodwork and other crap put on the to do list, epsom salts, more almonds and eggs and butter for biscotti, got the block taken off Katie’s phone so Dax can call her again (I willl be glad when she’s working again and can start paying for the damned phone – o did I mention she starts work in a call center on Thursday?) which is not happy making, but I promised.  There was other useful shopping and errand running in there but that’s the general idea.

I am fatter than I’ve ever been in my life.  This is an emergency!  Send out for more cheese dip! (This is a Laugh-In reference, in case you were wondering.)  My next vacation will be to a fat farm; in the meantime, I need to eat more soup.

Looking for a place

Jeff and I looked for a place to live in East Van last night – very nice, v. convenient to buses. It would only be about half an hour on the bus for me. No problem with the cats. I will be hearing back from them shortly. Jeff will look some more again today and hopefully we’ll get out again this afternoon as I have a portion of it off.  The other portion, of course, is to go see a doctor.

Organizational anti-patterns

This is stolen, holus bolus, from a wikipedia article on Anti Patterns.

How many of these classic screwups characterize your organization?

  • Accidental ownership: Employee is given a system that was tangentially related to their system and left to poorly maintain it without proper training, growth or focus (common among phone->network administrators in the late 90’s)
  • Analysis paralysis: Devoting disproportionate effort to the analysis phase of a project
  • Captain in the engine room: The leader spends his time and attention on technical details, and nobody’s running the ship
  • Cash cow: A profitable legacy product that often leads to complacency about new products
  • Continuous obsolescence: Devoting disproportionate effort to porting a system to new environments
  • Cost migration: Transfer of project expenses to a vulnerable department or business partner
  • Crisis mode (a.k.a firefighting mode): Dealing with things only when they become a crisis, with the result that everything becomes a crisis
  • Design by committee: The result of having many contributors to a design, but no unifying vision
  • Escalation of commitment: Failing to revoke a decision when it proves wrong
  • Hero-mode: A policy of continuously relying on the heroic efforts of staff in order to meet impossible deadlines, whilst ignoring the long term cost of failing to build in software quality from the outset.
  • I told you so: When the ignored warning of an expert proves justified, and this becomes the focus of attention
  • Management by hope: Assuming that silence means everything is going well
  • Management by neglect: Too much delegation
  • Management by numbers: Paying excessive attention to quantitative management criteria, when these are non-essential or cost too much to acquire
  • Management by perkele: Authoritarian style of management with no tolerance for dissent
  • Management by wondering: Expecting a team to define their own objectives, and then wondering what they’re doing
  • Moral hazard: Insulating a decision-maker from the consequences of his or her decision.
  • Mushroom management: Keeping employees uninformed and misinformed (kept in the dark and fed manure)
  • Not invented here (a.k.a. N.I.H.): Ignoring an idea or implementation originated outside the organization
  • Polishing the polish: Giving a subordinate or team a finished project to work on, prohibiting them from doing anything else, and then complaining about their productivity
  • Scope creep (along with the closely related terms complexity trap and featuritis): Allowing the scope of a project to grow without proper control
  • Stovepipe: A structure that supports mostly up-down flow of data but inhibits cross organizational communication
  • Vendor lock-in: Making a system excessively dependent on an externally supplied component
  • Violin string organization: A highly tuned and trimmed organization with no flexibility

Who pulled the plug…

… that was blocking my brain?

 

I wrote FOUR SONGS yesterday.  One is a love song to Al Swearengen from Deadwood – one is a blues tune about the Blue Hell, a bar from the Fred Pohl Heechee Chronicles – one is a narsty emo bytchefest between Gelis and Niccolo from Dunnett’s series which references their ongoing telepathic mindgames – and the last is a breakneck, kickass song about the current culture war between faith and reason.

The “If I were Al Swearengen” song nearly fell out of my head right after I wrote it.  When I wrote it, I thought it was all in the same time signature – silly me! Then I go to sing it back and the choruses don’t work.  What happened?  (Or as Paul remarked, “You weren’t recording it?”)  It’s in two time signatures (waltz and mildly syncopated 4/4) which is just bloody bizarre but completely fits the mood of the song.

Anyway, I suspect that somebody went to a shrine somewhere and prayed for me, because that was the most amazing thing that’s happened to me in years.  That sound you hear is a giant mental drain unclogging.

I light a candle for Patricia, who has an owie.  (Further details as authorized).

I light a candle for Katie, who will love Daxus until death or something like it.  I was that stupid at 19, but at least I loved worthier men.