tales from the rock

so the baby has been in school for almost a year, and it’s amazing how quickly she learns by playing with all these other bright kids.  some of it is no so goo, but some things are diabolically cute.

part of the daily ritual of school, is the daily progress report.  mostly just a 1 sentence recap of the day’s activities, but also a breakdown of mealtime - how much was eaten of each food category (entree, veg, starch, fruit, milk, juice, etc.)  the baby usually does a bad job at vegetables, but she makes up for it at home, so we don’t really pay too much attention to it.

at some point, she would occasionally get a star drawn near the food section, and she started reporting that she was a ’star eater’.  I guess coincidentally,  we probably noticed on days when most or all of the vegetables were eaten.  Because she was a star eater, we’d treat her to something - maybe some jumba juice, or french fries - whatever.  (maybe not such a great idea to reward good eating habits with junk food!)

anyway, since I usually do the pickup, I also noticed there wasn’t much of a consistency to the star eater award, although the baby ALWAYS knew she had a star on her report.  Sometimes only ‘few’ vegetables were eaten and a star was rewarded, sometimes EVERYTHING was eaten, but no start.  I thought maybe there was a behavioral component, or maybe the effort exuded in conquering a tough food item was given extra credit.  her actual teacher isn’t always there when I pick up, and since it wasn’t such a big deal, when she was, I would forget to ask.

so I was picking up the other day and happened to pull out her report next to a mom whose son is in the same class, and while they had the exact same eating boxes checked, my report had a star, and hers didn’t.   I asked if she knew the criteria, and she claims to have NEVER received a star.  this now concerns the mom, because when you are using this kind of pre-school to inject your kid into a private school, the last thing you want to be is short on stars!

the teacher happened to be there, so we went in to resolve the mystery of the ’star eater’ once and for all!  so I basically ask, what’s the criteria for being a ’star eater?’

and teacher responds, “the kids ask me to draw stars on their papers, so I do…”

these diabolical 2 and 3 year olds MADE THE WHOLE THING UP!  there is no ’star eater’ award.   seems like it’s mostly the girls (which is why the other mom had never seen a star), and when a teacher is sitting near them at lunch (they will sit in different spots every day), they ask them to draw the stars, and they call themselves star eaters!

the teachers thought it was hilarious of course, since we have been basically using this as a reason for praise for the entire year - kind of typical of the private school parent neurosis, over analyzing everything the kids do.  they had just thought it was innocent fun the whole time.

we haven’t really broken it to the baby that the gig is up, but she is having a tougher time now when she is a ’smiley face eater’, or a ‘christmas tree eater’, and not just a star eater.

although part of me thinks she deserves just as much reward for manufacturing this scam all on her own….

french fries for everyone!

btw - this was front page news on MSNBC.com.

2 questions

1. where the fuck are Revs. Jackson and Sharpton? this situation is cantankerously unacceptable!
2. I’d like to know what role those devious kids at the P had in this!

I was going to write about my day yesterday, and how I had 1 great experience, and 1 awful one, but it turns out the awful one was actually not so awful, so instead, I will just give you the rundown.

the good part happened early (thankfully), and in case you haven’t seen it yet, here it is.  I love a great story about sports, and sportsmanship stories are unfortunately few and far between.  I can’t help to wonder though if it would have still happened on a mens team.  there still might have been a great story, but it would have probably been about the runner gutting it out somehow, taking 20 minutes to drag himself around the bases, permanently disfiguring himself in the process.  certainly no giggling involved.

and not to be a debbie downer, but let’s not gloss over the fact that a)  if you pay attention, you wouldn’t have missed a base, and b) if the ball was out of the park, how fast do you really need to run?  certainly not so fast that a hard stop would fuck up your knee.

the awful part was going to be about my afternoon at a Microsoft launch event.  I like to attend these things for the free schwag (nice insulated lunch bag - thank you Mr. Gates), and also because the evangelist demos are usually pretty good.  while they tend to be oversimplified, and cover areas I don’t work in, it’s good to see a scripted demo that purposely takes advantage of the key features of a product.

unfortunately, all the demo yesterday did was hurt my brain.

there is a new Visual Studio coming out, and while the new features aren’t really language extensions to make say, C# any better, they are great productivity enhancers, and if you are using visual studio, you’re doing it because of things like Intellisense, code formatting, etc.  maybe this guy (or his script writer) was overthinking it when they put this demo together and assumed all us ‘hard core techies’ didn’t want to see a demo of such fluffy features, but it would have been much better than what they did put on.

first of all, they went into this whole thing about ‘what is AJAX’ - certainly something that shouldn’t take longer than 3 seconds for us ‘133t h@x0r5′.  they managed to take 30 minutes to do that, while also including such incorrect gems as ‘AJAX reduces number of requests the server has to handle.’

then they went into a demo with VS08 that basically used products and features available in VS05 - totally glossing over javascript intellisense, code formatting, etc.  Even the split screen editor windows and CSS management (which is really great) was given just a word mention.  now, I understand you can only talk so much about intellisense, but the culmination of the demo (2 hrs later) was the dude trying to fit 75 minutes of real useful development (windows workflow construction) into 10 minutes of time - what a fucking waste.  they should have focused on the big construction, and maybe added some bits to showcase new features that wouldn’t have otherwise been covered.

on top of all of that, everytime the guy would declare a variable, he would say, “OK, I’ll ‘dimension’ this integer.”  I kept thinking he was moron, since DIM means “Declare In Memory.”  personally, once someone makes a gaffe like this, it destroys their credibility (especially since he kept saying it out loud!)  it’s like the convention I was at last week, where one person was talking about the next version of the product - version 4, but kept saying version EYE VEE, since the version was denoted with roman numerals (IV), or the people that insist on a strict grammatical use of the word data (plural of datum), and create sentences that are correct, but not commonly heard, fucking up most of the room - “your data are corrupted.”  once you have identified a speaker as one of these jokers, everything else they say is static, and subject to mocking.   it didn’t help that I was there with PG, and that guy loves to make fun of every speaker that isn’t him.

anyway, I did make sure to check myself on this, and it turns out, maybe the dude was wrong at all.  in VB (all BASICs really), DIM does stand for Dimension - has to do with array declaration.  Declare In Memory is an assembler term (which proves SOME of what I learned in that class has been retained).  I’m quite sure this dude doesn’t know assembler though (like me), and was probably saying ‘dimension’, just to bait someone (like me) to challenge his use so he could show everyone how smart he was.  ultimately,  he’s not a moron, just a pretentious ass.

so the moral of the story is, always check your facts and assumptions.

and be a good sport.

and if you gave away an XBox during the morning session, but don’t plan on giving away one in the afternoon session, please say something, so the people just waiting for the xbox giveaway to happen don’t leave even ANGRIER than they already were, free insulated tote or not.

wah wah wee wah!  he is finally broken.

most of the people I associate with are successful due to effort.  everyone is bright, but I think we all carry a certain old school work ethic, have pride in our work, and work that is associated with us, and also have good perspective on our impact as part of the grander scheme.

coincidentally, no one is particulary driven, so while our efforts fuel comfortable lives, it doesn’t appear that anyone is going to be in an significant positions of power or control.

one of the reasons I certainly don’t/can’t/won’t light that fire, is that realistically, my talents are pretty limited.  I cover this by painting with a broad brush, but in any one discipline, I’m really a hack.  now, at this point, my broad experience allows my voice to carry a certain sophistication, but it doesn’t make me any better at what I actually do.  the effort I would have to invest to masquerade as someone better than myself is just too great.

I’ve also worked with a handful of people who are truly skilled.  it’s not that they could see solutions to complex problems, or even execute them - not a functional skill;  it’s that the solutions they see have a certain elegance - they reduce the overall complexity of system when executed.  this can manifest in many different ways, but to boil it down, it’s the difference between doing a job as a craft (which is what I think I am), or as an art.

a craftsman is no less skilled, or important in whatever trade you want to use as your example.  a carpenter for example is a classic craftsman.  as you learn your trade, it becomes more and more natural.  as you see and solve problems, they are no longer hinderances in accomplishing your objective.

and that may be where the line is drawn.  as an artist, you work less towards defined objectives as part of a task, and more toward some idea you want to achieve or express.  it’s not carpenter vs architect though, it’s really more like that master stairbuilder, who can build a solid path from floor to floor, and the builder of the Loretto Staircase, whose stairs seem to be a byproduct of some other vision.

so what’s the point?  those of us on the outside looking in often will think that “if I had that kind of talent, I would ….”, with the “…” usually refering to solving some profound issue that has plagued us for some time.  unfortunately, a lot of these potential ‘artists’ seem content to expend just enough energy to be no better than anyone else they work with!  classic underachiever (relative to personal potential), without the Bart Simpson like antics.  sometimes flying just under the radar, popping up every now and then to remind everyone what they ‘could have been.’

it drives me mad to have to work with someone who cannot get excited about what they are doing when they are clearly very skilled at doing in.  some even go so far as to treat their talent like a curse that traps them in the position they hold.  usually though, it’s enough that they just take the easy way out, milking drops of their greatness and cashing in for gallons of praise.  jealousy?  maybe.  in fact, yes. 

I’m jealous because “if I had that kind of talent…”, the effort I already expend would have that much more impact.  my comfort and satisfaction comes from knowing that I work hard, and have positive impact.  holding anything back gives me nothing, and usually just sabotages the work you do - it’s like lying, where the problems only get worse, except in this case, you are lying to yourself.

some people can’t be motivated.  if it’s not worth it to themselves, then I just can’t waste time and money trying to make it so.  ultimately, they will just fuck you when you need them the most.

so folks, find something to do where you can drink the kool-aid - it will be worth it to be where you should be, and definitely worth it to not be where you shouldn’t.

got back from the trip, and the camcorder refuses to release the fricken tape!  I sense a mastercard commercial coming up - definitely priceless footage.

Canon says they will fix it for a flat rate of about $150 (assuming nothing else is wrong with the camera), and they claim to return everything that gets sent in, but the question now is should we risk sending it the mail and having someone else lose the tape anyway.

the new camera I would buy to replace it is about $800, so it’s not really that close.  I’m not really into spending the money right now, but this is the excuse I’ve been waiting for I suppose.  funny how when I’m shopping, I wish I had an excuse, and now that I do, I can’t stand that I’m being forced into making a move, so I’m still gunshy.

the other problem, is that I’ll have to destroy the first camera to retrieve the tape.  I tried removing about 50 little screws, but the damn thing is still solidly together.  why I feel the need to take care of this little machine that doesn’t even work that well anymore is beyond me.  must be my hereditary collector psychosis coming out.  for some reason, if I could guarantee the tape return, I’d probably pay to repair the camera AND buy the new one.

now I have to start my OCD style electronics shopping regimen - shopping around, watching for coupons, never being happy with any discount because I feel someone else got a better deal…  it’s horribly sickening.  I’ll also never compromise  on any feature set.  I can get last years almost identical camera for about $100 less, but it doesn’t have some connector I won’t even use on the new one.

if I was rich like the G, or fearless like the Tom, I’d have the new camera in my hand already.

this end to this vacation has only just begun….

well, I’m on the annual business trip, this time in Anaheim, CA.  been a while since I’ve spent real time in soCal.  interesting to see what has become of this place.  around Disney, things are really nice - the area has been totally redeveloped to support the park and convention center.  as you move away into areas like Brea, you can see where the money is spilling over in spots with luxury condos going up, or little housing tracts, but it’s still in the middle of what was probably upper lower class neighborhoods - interesting mix.  pretty clean overall, and I’m sure Disney has the cops in check, cracking down on hoodlums.

booking this trip was a complicated mess, as I wanted to fly into one airport, then leave from another.  wife and baby joining me midway, so they are on a seperate itinerary.  add a commuter flight in between for the 3 of us, and 2 airlines going out of business, and you can understand the amount of coordination required to book a trip for under a couple thousand dollars!

in the past, something like this would make a travel agents fee worthwhile.  before the internets, working with the airlines was not something the ordinary person would do - if you did, you weren’t getting a great price.  finding the best fares, routes, and schedules was something left to a ‘pro.’  these days, there are so many travel tools available, an ordinary person online can build these complicated travel plans with no assistance.  because of this, no one can staff agents, and so the entire service sector of the industry slowly dies off.

so while you can book travel quickly and easily, when something goes wrong, you have no one on your side to work shit out for you.  for example, once I was going through Denver, and as expected, weather started fucking with the flights.  as soon as I saw the buzz behind the desk, I was on the phone to the corporate travel desk, and rather than wait in the mile long line to find out they desk agent couldn’t do a thing, our travel agent had alread rerouted my around the problems.

I certainly could have used their help with this trip.  while I booked everything with no problem, when I showed up to the MOTHER FUCKING MARRIOTT ANAHEIM at 1:00am, I was told there were no rooms at the inn.  now, this happens, and I’ve experienced it before, and usually the 3 star and above hotels will accomodate you appropriately -walking you to another comparable hotel (even a competitor), and transfering the booking.  in this case, they decided, that comparable to their FUCKED UP HOTEL on the grounds of the convention center I needed to be in and out of all day, they sent me in a taxi to a motor lodge 2 miles down the road.

there is only so much I can do with the 20 year old prick stuck working the graveyard shift in an oversold hotel, so I had no choice but the check in at the other dump, just so I can get some rest for the next day.  had I a competitant travel desk to call, I could have had someone working on the issue while I slept, and hopefully giving me good news the next morning.  since we book all our own travel at the P, all I could do was lay restlessly all night, working on the fit I was going to throw the next day.

long story short, the MARRIOTT ANAHEIM SUCKS DICK, and it certainly wasn’t mine they were sucking.  at least I didn’t have to pay for it - the entire booking has been comped, in large part only to arguments I know to make with my inside info.

unlike the SHITTY MARRIOTT ANAHEIM, Orion Limo Service in the greater LA metropolitan area is awesome - (888) 431-5466.

http://improveverywhere.com/2008/04/07/best-game-ever/

these guys may have jumped the shark with the amount of corporate involvement on this project, but hey, it was for the kids.

reading through the description of this stunt reads exactly like the kind of projects I want to be involved with (and ultimately fail in.)  clearly, there were no limits in the setup here.  started with a simple, yet great idea (turn a little league game into a major event), and then with each layer of the illusion, then turned it up to 11.

getting the fans was the easy part actually - my friends and I have stopped to watch littel kids play sports and just started cheering them on.  the vendors and programs were a nice touch, but within reach of any ordinary stunt.  the superfans were a nice touch, but if that was the extent of it, may have come off a little creepy.

jumbotron is where the real spectacle began - where the real rick-diculous thinking started to turn this into 16 ounces of pure awesome.  I wish I was at that planning meeting - I can see it now - yellow post-it’s arranged on the whiteboard, MS Project Plan projected on the front screen, and jimmy drifts into that stage of semi-lucidness from his lunchtime dimebag.

Sally - “we should find some way of getting one of those light board things that have at real games to hold the numbers and stuff”

Jon - “it’s called a SCOREBOARD Sally, for fucks sake, have you ever BEEN to a baseball game”

JIMMY - “fucking A - scoreboard.  no FUCK THAT - JUMBOTRON”

Sally - “how are we supposed to pay for a jumbotron?  that sounds expensive.  is that the thing throws the balls at the bat guy”

Jon - “PITCHES at the BATTER!  why the fuck are you even here?”

JIMMY - “we’ll just call the TV dudes - like Jim Gray or some shit - what the fuck does he have going on now anyway?  just tell him to bring his”

Sally - “who’s Jim Gray?  does he talk about baseball games? why would he want to do this”

Jon - “he CALLS every significant sport on NBC!  do you even know what we are trying to do here?!?”

Jimmy - “what the fuck Sally - why you gotta be a debbie downer.  my supplier friend knows a guy that works a dude whos cousin like, sweeps up and shit in the office he walks through to get his mail or some shit.  let me hit that bitch up”

…

Jim Gray - “Hells Yes - I’m fucking in.  Let me call my boy with the blimp.”

the fucking GOODYEAR BLIMP!  can’t you just sense the avalanche of delicious passion this was turning into?  granted, not much at stake again really, but if you are putting together an ambitious plan you want to be a potential glorious failure and it includes a mother fucking DIRIGIBLE - you are on the right path.

in the end, they pulled it off brilliantly, kids and parents had a blast, and improveverywhere took another step towards annoying.  if only they dared to test waters of failure…  like roiding up a kid or something….  glorious….

this is my new professional goal.  kind of abstract, but this is really where I want to be.

the sunday paper’s Parade insert had an article on Randy Paush’s last lecture, which has turned into a second career for the guy.  google him if you need the backstory, but I reccomend watching the original last lecture from the CMU website, not the short Oprah version.

anyway, “glorius failure” was a term he used to describe groups in his classes that took big gambles that didn’t pay off, but still deserved recognition.  the idea of course being that you have to encourage big thinking, and the current establishment only punishes those with unrealized goals.

anyway, in an academic setting, that’s all well and good, but in a professional setting, you typically have more at stake to celebrate failure, which is why I think it’s a perfect goal. if you think about it, to achieve glorius failure, you have to have everything else working so great that a spectacular flameout is still an acceptable outcome for something.

working backwords, you have:

• project fails, but it was a fucking awesome ride
• EVERYONE is on board, working as a team, putting in tons of effort to pull off this miracle
• momentum is great, support is there, no end in sight, but the first steps are boldly taken 
• the sky is the limit when envisioning the product - it’s not worth doing unless current paradigms are destroyed
• simple, yet BRILLIANT idea pitched; sounds crazy, but could have significant impact on current model
• partnerships are working, communication is good and happens often.  we learn about each others jobs, objectives, and barriers to success
• daily grind is replaced with progress towards stability.  lacking pettyness, we can move the day to day ‘work’ to the back of our minds, to be rewarded with time to explore as the daily chores are complete
• all bullshit is eliminated

ah, and there is the rub.  as an army of one, I can only fight with myself (which does happen often, but I feel a victory is within reach.)  put 2 people in a room, and  sooner or later, one will think the other doesn’t deserve the good chair, even if they took the crappy desk.  a lot of times, we think we can eliminate the bullshit by skipping ahead to the awesome project everyone will love, but that never works.  eventually, you have 15 minutes of real work to do (even on the fun projects), and while you trudge through it, you notice that the bitch across the hall someone got the admin to order $15 ball point fucking pens, and you can’t even get the RIGHT KIND OF FUCKING KEYBOARD THAT YOU WILL USE ALL FUCKING DAY - WHO THE FUCK IS WRITING WITH A PEN ANYMORE ANYWAY….

so why not just focus on eliminating all the bullshit?  because if science can’t cure retardation, neither can I.  some people just like to be miserable, so they keep jobs they don’t like, for less money they think they deserve, working with people they hate, knowing that the boss 3 levels up only does the job 1/4 as well as they could do it.

step 1:  rally the no bullshit team.  it’s here somewhere - I just have to find it.

I can’t believe I made it through.  while I started the week strong, it quickly faded into a blur due to a disaster at work (of which I was partially responsible), last minute organization for a big fund raising event this weekend, and a questionable punking by Tom.

work is usually busy, but not terribly difficult.  this bites me every once in a while because I end up under-engineering something that should have gotten more attention.  it’s a challenge to give everything the appropriate amount of time due to lack of sufficient staff, but I gotta pay better attention.  anyway, this problem was the result of something bad that happened months ago (and fixed right away), but since it was not discovered, lots of new work was done based on bad data gathered in the mean time - this is the worst kind of problem to have here, since there is really no simple fix.  no one is out to get me for this (yet), but it’s always embarrassing to have to sit in front of administrators and explain a problem like this.  while the technical details are very straightforward and reasonable, the layman’s explanation pretty much sounds like, ‘I didn’t do something right, so now it’s fucked up.’

the baby’s preschool fund raiser is this weekend - annual gala/auction.  goal is to raise $50k.  I’m on one of the main committees, so it’s a mad scramble to finish the prep on everything.  the thing that makes this more difficult than it should be, is that there is 1 lady who wants to have final say on everything, and as much as you want to change things for the better, you realize that unless you are signing up to run a committee for life, you have to let the 1 person who runs it every year have her way.  side note - debby deb helped me out getting her famous golfer cousin to autograph some stuff, but her grandma ended up making me look like a fool!  another blow to the ego.

finally, the ultimate bash in the head - Tom gets me with an April fools joke.  I feel this is a questionable punking due to the following:

1. the entry in his blog with the misinformation was read by me (a daily reader) on April 3rd, because he didn’t post it until later April 2nd, and then backdated to April 1st - does that even fucking count?!?
2. usually, his blog is so full of misinformation and confusing detail, that reading an entry and asking for clarification is a very common occurrence.  and finally,
3. the entry in question would certainly have been amazing if true, but not necessarily that unique (very young child walking/running), especially compared to the entry I read TODAY (dated 4/2):

“Well recently ive been compulsively saving my heel shavings in a gerber dish about yay big.. I was making some progress this year it was 1% filled.. almost.. of dead heel skin.. im using the new cheese grater tools for my heel..”

…

“Well my goal was to fill the container up .. i think it would take me almost ten years to do so.. but it would be totally awesome..”

…

“But.. in the end i failed.. that damn dog .. got a hold of my shavings one day.. while i was out.. and somehow ate it all up..”

while this entry contains the usual grammatical/spelling/diacritical errors, and the weird visual reference in writing (yay big), due to so much time spent with him, I don’t even think twice about the actual scenario!  Asking about a young walking child does not seem so outlandish anymore, does it?

ultimately, another week spent not living life enough.  I must work harder next week to improve my standing in this world!