Overclicked - Rants and Tirades

Overclocked

2012-02-07T00:01:00.000-05:00

Artists claim pain is a powerful inspirational source. Most writers feel the same way about bourbon. For bloggers, I believe rage is the font from whence our greatest muses are born.

And it is overflowing today.

I have never minced words about my opinions on the importance of keeping realistic expectations in a customer support relationship, though honestly I feel the same way about any time you heap expectations upon someone else.

Unrealistic expectations are only ever healthy when you heap them upon your own shoulders, and then only if you already have the constitution to be driven to strive harder rather than be crushed under the added, unnecessary weight.

I've also gone into some depth about the dangers of tech support and tech development positions and the hell that is being on-call, so when I tell you what has me livid at this hour, I want you to grasp my full meaning.

Stop. Overclocking. People.

I should elucidate: for the entirety of my working life (which, for reference, began some 15 years ago), I have always worked with and opposite individuals who went above and beyond the contractual boundaries of their employment in order to get the job done.

Often, it's to fill in the cracks left behind by poorly-matched logistics or needless red tape on the part of the organization's upper tiers, and always it's done out of a sense of duty either to the client, fellow workers, or the reputation of the organization as a whole.

In the right light, each of these can be counted a worthwhile cause worth the sacrifice of going above and beyond. But without that rare and fateful luminescence, such misplaced dedication can instead amount to only an unnecessary maelstrom of long-term health risks and other shattering impacts to one's life as a whole.

To maintain that level of dedication where it is not deserved is naive, but noble, in its own still-dangerous way. To expect that level of dedication from employees is outright cruel and inhuman. To do so without proper and worthy compensation (that is, above the normal wage) is moving into the realm of war crimes.

I feel fortunate that I work for the state, as there are very strict restrictions and near-Orwellian oversight that make it easy to cry uncle should one ever be endangered by that sort of culture in the workplace. My close friends in the private sector have not been so lucky.

When I call it a "culture," I mean that it exists as such: a series of societal currents within the bubble of a given workplace, but also stretching across the nation, towards what "normal" means in a given environment. Culture also implies unwritten, unofficial rules by which we are no less expected to live and to which we are expected to adhere willingly and unquestioningly.

In this case, the culture involves 60-, 70-, even 80-hour weeks being the standard; the expectation for people contractually obliged to the same 8-hour work day as the mythical "average American worker." It has been true for over a decade that Americans work more hours than any other industrialized nation. The "average working American" is getting driven into the ground.

And many of them think this is okay.

Max Udargo has crafted a response to this mentality that goes beyond my ability to match, so I will let it stand on its own. I can only say that wholeheartedly agree.

Every week of my life, I spend time with friends working well beyond the 40-hour work-week with their only compensation being more hours at the standard fee and perhaps the occasional "attaboy" in the form of some worthless trinket or substandard celebration awarding their unhealthy dedication in hope of inspiring others to do the same.

And that is wrong.

If you hire someone to work 40 hours a week, they work 40 hours a week. If the work is such that it necessitates "crunch time," either your planning needs improvement, your clients need to be better trained (yes, by you), or you need to consider switching to on-call positions to pick up the rush.

Your lack of organizational skills does not merit someone else's lack of a personal life.

But in truth, the issue is rarely top-down. It's lateral. Culture, to be sustained, cannot be imprinted from above so easily as it seeps in from the side; from one's peers. There, it is sustained by the feeling that you are the same as your coworkers, and that your collective fates are irrevocably intertwined.

Even if they are idiots.

Believing that you must to go beyond what you agreed to work and be paid for because "everyone else here works extra hours" is, in no uncertain terms, the most heinous expression of peer pressure since high school or the Third Reich. Take your pick as to which you consider more heinous, I think we can all agree they are at least in the same ballpark.

Managers, peers, friends, clientele: stop overclocking people. You are endangering their lives and their livelihood, typically because you are unwilling to commit further resources, compromise your bottom line, or live with your own mistakes made earlier in the process.

If you want something done on time, assume no one is willing to work past 40 hours a week for you. Bring in contractors early to cover expected overflow. Offer overtime wages and rates to your best and brightest, and then write up a contract with them to determine a cap on hours so that no one work is overloaded unduly.

Or, here's a thought: figure your shit out sooner.

Your lack of ability to get your crap together should not become an undue burden, a very really and lasting burden, on people hired to do a job with exacting parameters. I don't care if you believe every other company does it. I don't care if everyone else at your company does it. Be the exception.

70- to 80-hour weeks are a death sentence, one way or another. They relegate workers, mathematically, to a half-life. We have a substantial unemployment problem. Stop overclocking your people. Buy up new hardware instead in contract and temporary work, just like you would for actual hardware and VMs.

And if you think contractors are less reliable, consider what a seasoned coder having a mental breakdown during the divorce proceedings your unhealthy cultured caused will do for their reliability in the 11th hour before the release date.

There's a reason overclocking isn't standard practice. Within a given buffer, people operate cleanly even under extreme conditions. Without that buffer, without that safeguard, server racks can literally catch fire. Now, servers ship off the line already up to speed at industry standards.

People, by contrast, need time to become veteran phenomena in their roles, and there's no way of telling just how good someone new, off-the-rack, really is until the ink has dried. Plus, when one rack catches fire, the other servers don't consider going offline intermittently for no apparent reason or walking out of the data center altogether.

Compare that to the cost of a competent 6-month contractor, and take another look at your bottom line.

For We Are Many

2012-01-31T10:11:00.002-05:00

When you're a waiter, you want customers to remember you. Like as not, they favor your service and your favorable demeanor, which often translates directly into a bigger tip, so it's good to cultivate that sort of exclusive relationship.

When you're a waiter.

When you're a consultant, the air is decidedly different. For one, there are no tips (more's the pity), so one's performance only affects one's pay insofar as one's behavior doesn't get one fired, which gives one less reason to excel and more reason to simply not fail. That's another problem entirely.

When you're in computer support, you do not want to establish anything remotely resembling an exclusive relationship with a client. The trouble is, your clients will seldom understand that the reason why has as much to do with meeting their needs as with yours.

The trouble is that help desks have gotten a reputation for not caring in the least about their customers' problems. If you've ever been on hold with the cable company, you know that this is not an unjustly earned reputation, though it does not apply to nearly as many support centers as their customers tend to believe.

In bad support centers, routing is generally the number one complaint. Telling people 'no' is infinitely more complicated, taxing and dangerous than simply transferring them in an endless loop of redirects until eventually they hang up and go away on their own.

Therefore, for many clients, when you arrive at someone who genuinely helps you, you want immediate and guaranteed access to them in the future, thereby circumventing the loops and redirects of common routing procedures and avoiding ever getting pigeonholed and passively told to piss off.

Now consider instead that you are dealing with a help desk full of people willing to help you, as is the case with many support centers not run by massive global corporations who have both millions-high call volumes and such unerring focus on their bottom line as to hire at the lowest wages possible and put more stock in automated routing programs than training and encouraging empassioned support staff.

When the staff on the phones or watching the email queue actually do give a damn about solving your problems, latching on to one in particular becomes a burden on them and, more pointedly, a detriment to the client themselves.

As much as we whinge about routing systems, they also exist for legitimate reasons. Sharing the load evenly across a given set of staff isn't all that different from building a redundant server array: more consultants can handle a larger load in less time without any one of them catching on fire.

As an added benefit, newer consultants get a fair shake of the work to gain the training and experience they need to become old and wise consultants, though that's a long view of the situation few clients are prone to take in the short term.

Back to the server analogy: servers go down for maintenance on a regular (and at once also irregular) basis. People leave work at a set time, go home, sleep, play with their pets. These are necessary downtimes. Just like servers, every time you skip a maintenance window, you are seriously endangering the well-being of that system and the knowledge it contains.

The same goes for unscheduled outages: people get sick. Now consider a server bank: if done right, you never even know when a disk fails or there's a problem on the rack. Unless it hits all the servers, the remaining ones seamlessly pick up the slack and keep things moving until their fallen friend is back online.

It's no different with consultants on a help desk. If you're trying to talk to one server every time you log in, you're going to run into a lot more downtime than you would ever see otherwise. None of us can offer as much coverage as all of us.

More than that, if you overload one consultant, they will go offline, scheduled or otherwise, from the added load. If you put a marginal amount of faith in the routing system and the other consultants who received the same training, work in the same office and are often paid the exact same wage, there's a good chance you will get your problem solved just as quickly, if not much, much quicker.

So when a consultant directs you to the trunk line or general support email, don't consider it a brush off. It's that, too, because going around the helmet puts more weight on a given person and thus is not exactly welcome and appreciated. But it's also for your own good.

Also, on a side note, going back to where this all began: most consultants (even the so-so ones) have had someone offer them the equivalent of tips if they will become a given client's "pet tech monkey," so to speak.

There may not be much pride in the computer support industry, and what little was left went out the door with the recent My Little Ponies fandom, but that does not make tech personnel the equivalent of a Tijuana hooker. You are not Richard Gere, and frankly, even if you were, the notion is insulting.

You want a consultant to like you, to answer your questions quickly whenever you call, to go the extra mile because, hey, it's you? Leave the Washingtons in your pocket and listen when they tell you to use the main line and follow process. Then, when luck should have it and you do get that particular consultant, they'll be more than happy to help.

And just think of how many other friends you'll have made among the other consultants along the way.

Illumination via Blackout

2012-01-17T23:28:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the anti-SOPA blackouts across the web. For a list of sites volunteering to get the message out the hard way, visit sopastrike.com

If you're curious what the hubbub is about, it's possible you've been watching the news on TV, reading the newspaper, or otherwise avoiding the very medium at stake.

I'm not going to make an argument against SOPA and PIPA, because not only have more gifted souls already made them for me, but I believe anyone needing the matter explained may be better served simply to experience tomorrow's social experiment first-hand.

Which is, in fact, the point.

What's sad is that it's so necessary. It's true that the Internet has been abuzz with talk ever since the bills were initially proposed, and with the first round send back to the books, the cries seem to have only gotten louder.

The trouble is that the Internet is effectively the world's biggest soundproof room. It doesn't matter how many voices are shouting or how loud each is if the people who need to hear it are outside the room and not looking in.

The blackout is the best way to throw the information in the way of those not already inundated with it from the myriad of online avenues and social networks so ubiquitously viewed by the younger generations. "Younger" here being a relative term: were it the 60's, JFK would still be a member of the "younger generations" near the end of his first term.

For those unaware of the scope or danger of the bill, or those who believe they won't be impacted, tomorrow's blackout is intended as a wake-up call to the reality of the situation: that self-interested parties are lobbying for open-door legislation that would endanger intellectual freedoms on a global scale for the sake of defending what are themselves flawed protections on their own intellectual property, for which they have likely already made millions.

It's almost like knowingly sacrificing brave soldiers to protect American oil interests abroad.

I won't say that intellectual property and copyright shouldn't be defending, I just think our laws for defending them are already too open-ended (thank you, Disney) and have lost all sense of the once-genuine purpose. Building further, more open, more dangerous legislation based on those already broken values is a bit like using the incidents supposedly prevented by the TSA as a basis for upgrading mall security nationwide.

I'll give you a moment to let that image sink in.

A more legitimate question is "is the blackout itself ethical?" Wikipedia and Google especially are such core staples in the Internet community, staples on whom we've all come to rely somewhat. Blacking them out for a 24-hour span could be compared to a child holding his breath until he turns blue, and at the cost of any number of untold problems caused for their not-inconsiderable userbase, including those already in support of vetoing bills like SOPA and PIPA.

In effect, our dependency is about to be used as a weapon for a political campaign by and for those companies most endangered by the very legislation about which they are trying to make others painfully aware. Compare it to Hollywood taking a summer off as a boycott of people sharing their movies illegally, and there are distressing similarities.

Except that people would actually miss Google.

What's saddest to me is that so drastic a measure is also so necessary. That news; any news; is doing such a poor job covering these two bills is just as offensive in my mind as the lopsided coverage in the early days of the still-ongoing Occupy super-movement.

It's not an offensive to American freedoms or any particular politics so much as it's an offense to me of what media is meant to be: a channel for delivery of information to the masses, open and accessible, so that no one need be an insider to understand and be able to act on changes that will greatly affect them.

Like, say, what their nation's leaders are voting on, and why it matters, and who proposed it, and the connections between those many points of interest and why they also matter. That is called journalism.

Instead, we get coverage of the 135th Republican 18-candidate debate, wherein Rick Perry makes an ass of himself and Romney acts like a robot.

I suppose I'm just glad that sites like Google and Wikipedia, from whence many of us already get so much of our news and information these days, are making one loud, joint effort to educate. For once, I feel like the right people are also the loudest voice in the room.

It seems they picked the right week to do it.

My Emergency

2012-01-10T10:45:00.001-05:00

Problems generally do not live by a schedule. When things break, generally speaking, it's unexpected. If it were expected, most of the time, we would fix it, or else not do the thing we know would trigger it. Most of the time.

So when you work in support, it's expected that you be able to think on your feet; to change tack with barely any notice and sprint full-bore in a new direction that was only roughly given to you seconds before by someone who is too panicked to give precise directions.

Weirdly, you get used to this. You may never like it much; the endless interruptions, the ambient tension that at any moment someone will come bursting in your door (often literally) with news of a great and roaring fire that you alone can snuff out before everything they know and love is consumed by flame; but you adapt.

The thing you never much get used to is when people create these emergencies entirely of themselves and then expect you to take over the entire onus of fixing them on an inhumanly tight schedule. One is an abject, exterior force acting upon the system to make it fail. The other is based purely on past and present decisions of the person who will not be doing the work to fix it.

The Law of Conservation of Energy states that, within an isolated system, the amount of energy remains constant. That means you can move it around, but not add it or remove it from the system without going outside the system.

The Law of Conservation of Your Manufactured Emergency follows a similar principal.

When stuff breaks at random or without warning, that's something outside the system interfering with the equilibrium of an otherwise stable and working function. When you put off telling your dev that you will need something in a week and instead tell him or her the afternoon before it's set to go live, you are borrowing from the system and then asking someone else to generate the difference.

Consider another equation:

Energy is equal to half the mass of the project times the intended velocity (the rate of distance to cover over a set time) squared. Now let's put all these into realistic terms...

The distance to cover (the span between project start and completed product) is constant, assuming your client isn't also apt to swap their spec while on a crunch (which is a large assumption, I admit, but then so are frictionless pulleys).

So if the distance is constant, then the time is the biggest factor into v above. Since v = distance / time, the less time you're given, the greater v will be. Don't forget that in the final equation, v is squared, meaning seemingly small changes to the time given can result in far greater values of E in the end.

Let's consider m to be the amount of pressure placed on the dev by the client, typically in the form of unannounced drop-by check-ups during crunch time (which, because they waited so long, is the entire life of the project), repeated reminders of just how important this particular project is (without making that plain by, say, planning ahead), and generally stressful behavior (like a constant state of outward-facing panic aimed at the wrong side of the equation).

This value is in turn halved because most devs are at least a little used to a panicked client and get used to smiling and nodding about the scope of the project's impact while quietly playing the theme from the new My Little Pony series in their head. Note that it is halved only, not reduced to nothing, and thereby still a factor; a not-insignificant one when you consider it stands as a multiplier to v².

The greater m is, especially when the time given is also so much smaller than it ought be, means that the E now required to complete the project is quickly approaching the astronomical. Now let us return to the tenets of our initially stated law...

The dev cannot simply conjure up energy within the system, and all the time wasted delaying telling them about the project in any workable detail is energy you earned and (hopefully) saved; energy to which the dev has no access in the average working environment.

According to the math, the dev should thereby enlist your help in the product's development so as to borrow back the energy you took and are now asking them to generate. Since that is generally impossible in any real-world setting, most devs have to go outside the system to get the necessary E to create the product in the time given.

That often means evenings and weekends, generally unpaid time exchanged (if the dev is lucky) for unmarked vacation later. It's also a great risk and a stressor, factors which the working world has yet to quantify in taxable numbers.

It seems like the only way to then balance the equation is to consider the larger isolated system and attempt to balance things there; for instance, if the client were to donate additional time (in the form of their own vacation hours or a set monetary fee) to the dev who found themselves staying up all night to get things done on time.

The difficult-to-calculate elements (the "coefficient of friction," if you will) remain an inequity, but assuming a vacuum (or no vacuum to jettison them into), such efforts more greatly balance the equation than a simple, emphatic "thank you!" at the project's close; an often (but not always) granted concession on the client's part.

Now if only there were some manner of equation that could easily translate time into a monetary value of exchange...

Now You CMS, Now You Don't

2012-01-02T16:11:00.000-05:00

Three years ago, I learned about Drupal, mostly by way of my now-fiancée who had begun working with it as part of the IT division of a dying newsprint industry. At the time, WordPress had already begun dominating the grow-at-home website market and allowing otherwise inexperienced individuals to put things like "web developer" on their resume without immediately bursting into flames.

More on that in a moment.

At the time, others saw much more potential in the system than I did: a virtually limitless framework for any number of site types and functions, customizable with only the barest essence of work from hundreds if not thousands of community built modules, a surprisingly high number of which were actively and artfully maintained.

So when a friend of ours suggested that Drupal was not long for the world, it didn't strike me as surprising.

Working in education, I get to experience four or more times a year what its like for someone to find a new software package that promises to be "the last framework you'll ever need" with the power to be "tailored to your exact need" in "just a few clicks," only to discover that two of these three statements are outright fallacies.

Even the packages which deliver, for free or a minimum expense, all the things they promise, the lifespan of many such projects is best measured in dog years, or even dog months. Freeware seldom turns a profit, and ten years is a long time to maintain something out of the goodness of one's heart.

The sense of a crowd-driven, open development platform seems on the surface like it might abate that particular problem: if one module maintainer tires of updating their stuff, another user can move in and continue with updates and bug fixes, ensuring an enduring cycle of maintenance.

Except that human psychology also contains something called "diffuse responsibility." If you're alone on a street, and you see someone being mugged across the street, most individuals will either jaywalk to try and help the mugging victim, yell at the perpetrators or call the police, immediately getting involved where they see a pressing need.

However, a crowd of people on the street all witnessing a mugging will turn around and quietly mutter to one another that "someone really ought to help that poor man."

Apply this to a community driven platform versus a small, focused development team, and you're more likely to end up with a module ghost town than anything.

Yet somehow, three years hence, Drupal is not only still running strong but gaining ground. Many large, notable and well-financed organizations are taking notice, and the interest is making Drupal development a remarkably marketable skill to know. Add to that the accidental filter that is the knowledge required to successfully implement and configure a Drupal installation, and it's no wonder it's still a strong market CMS.

WordPress, brilliant in its simplicity, is a wonderful platform for a limited range of site types. When used for what it's best at, few systems can beat it in ramp-up time and maintainer accessibility. The learning curve is about as high as an ant hill. That's already been kicked over.

It's for that same reason that putting WordPress on your resume ranks you slightly higher than a dead frog on the list of attractive candidates. I recommend putting it just above "can thumb-type" and "breathes oxygen." In fact, maybe put it below thumb-typing.

Drupal is harder to pick up without some prior skill, and even then, the learning curve is not insignificant. Part of it is the community: Drupal attracts a number of very skilled and intelligent coders, many of whom are not nearly as invested in playing nice with every blog-builder who runs into a configuration issue as their WordPress counterparts. It's to their credit that a large portion of the community recognize that, and are working to bridge the gap.

In the meantime, Drupal remains a somewhat exclusive skill-set, especially when one claims more than mere familiarity with the system. Rarity breeds value, and as more companies and organizations look to a system like Drupal to minimize ramp-up time, ease upgrades and help standardize the hand-off between developers in our new short-tenure model of migratory employment, Drupal developers are quickly becoming a valuable commodity.

As anyone turning to Drupal and expecting WordPress can tell you.

Rather than rolling over the gentle hills paved with easy-to-read documentation, one is much more likely to run face-first into the iron cliff that is your first attempt to set up Views without any help. That has led more than one would-be dev to scrap the system in the infancy of their implementation because, well, walls hurt one's face.

But if you pick up an elephant gun to swat a fly, it isn't the gun's fault when you're staring at a foot-wide hole in your wall.

The reason for Drupal's success, on top of its original design concept, is a community of elephant hunters (no, not literally) dedicated to building a better and more accurate gun so that it can basically blow a hole in anything you need it to. And with a large fraction of that community now dedicated to fashioning a range of guns for different hands and skill levels, it's safe to say the drop will still be falling for several years to come.

A Prior Engagement

2012-01-01T14:39:00.004-05:00

So moving, coupled with the holidays, explains in part why I missed the last couple weeks of December.

But just in part.

There was also the small matter of this...

which required some due planning and focus, as you might suspect. At roughly ten minutes to midnight last night, she said "yes," so it seems the sabbatical was well worth it.

So, in my first post as an engaged individual, let me just say Happy Hangover Day to everyone, and let us all resolve, this year, to stop talking about the Mayan calendar and just try to enjoy the fact that forever does not end quite so soon.

Happy 2012, Everybody

404: House Not Found

2011-12-20T11:20:00.001-05:00

Slight delay this week, as we were busy moving and without internet yesterday, making it somewhat difficult to find time to rant (and it would have been a happy rant anyway, and those always get all gushy and sentimental, so really, it's no great loss).

All stalling aside, I hope to put a rant up this Friday, if not before. It's the holidays, after all, and that means rote, campy jokes about tradition and giving, and the great mercantile oligarchy telling us all what to do and where to go and how much to pay for it.

Which is why I plan to rant about the internet and little ponies. You heard me.

Anyways, more coming later this week. Thanks for understanding!

A Function of Mass

2011-12-12T11:08:00.003-05:00

The more time I spend preparing to move into our new house, the more I realize just how lost I have become without the Internet.

Whenever I have a problem or need a information, I find it online. This has become so second-nature to me that when someone says "How do you..." and finishes it with anything at all, my first thought is "to the wiki!" I haven't looked at a paper recipe in over a year. It's getting to where I can barely remember how to fold a map, and I was a boy scout, for god's sake.

Now, instead, I find myself rooting about in the basement of an older house, hoping to understand the pieces of this new world I've been invited into, except that there is no Internet her. It is gone from this place, and with it, my hopes of one-click understanding.

I've become so dependent on the "to the wiki!" attitude of research that upon finding things I cannot readily understand in the real world, I'm left with a combination of my own on-the-spot assertions (better known as the Scientific Wild-Ass Guess) and a vague knowledge of how such things operate gathered from years of TV- and movie-watching and all the Hollywood physics that entails. You can imagine how dodgy that can be.

Though I admit it does help having a girlfriend with a crush on Richard Dean Anderson around to fill in the gaps in mechanical improvisation.

It just brings home to me the notion that, were there to be an interruption in the network, far more would be lost than the immediacy of modern communication. The portable, searchable library of both academic wisdom and personal experience is like the one savvy grandparent who teaches you things like what a carburetor does, which fork to use first at a fancy restaurant or how you can put one leg out of bed when stone drunk and somehow stop the room from spinning.

To be suddenly and abruptly severed from that knowledgebase, that collective brain-powered compendium of all things everywhere ever, is more than a little jarring, to say the least. The only recourse, naturally, is to steel one's nerves, take up the bastions of an older era and take to these strange machinations with eager abandon.

At least until steam starts coming out. Then you should probably call someone with an internet connection.

And now, shifting paradigms without a clutch, I bring you fun with math...

Movement (d) over time (t) indicates the speed (v) at which one's life (L) is moving. Like any recurring pattern, the ongoing trend can be evaluated and estimates made as to where that life (L) is going next (e).

As a collection of both forces (F) and objects (m), one's life (L) is often impacted by natural forces (F_n), friction (μ) and other obstacles (o), though the speed (v) of one's life rarely suffers from these countering elements. Instead, on a relative scale, the speed (v) only seems to accelerate at an increasing rate (a) the more time (t) passes.

The more electric moments in our lives (L) often grant us a charge (q) that can rapidly affect the flow of our current (I) direction. These new directions in turn are often met with their own resistance (R), but a greater force (F) can always overcome them, especially if we are willing to go around again for another loop (N).

Overcoming resistance (R) can be a lot of work (W), which is why its so important to conserve your energy (J). Sometimes, it's important to come at the problem from a different angle (θ) to increase your chances of reaching your expectations (e).

In the end, your life (L), despite its obstacles (o), speeds you on (v) to exactly where you're meant to go (e).

Hello Computer

2011-12-09T00:01:00.000-05:00

Anyone who has ever toyed around with the Xbox voice-activated command system knows that great power merits great abuse. Any new technology that performs like a robot butler, responding to whims spoken in our native language rather than scribed in their arcane tongue, tempts us to reassert our command position by doing the electronic equivalent of shouting "dance, puppet, dance!" just to relish the feeling of control.

For years, most end-users have been at the absent whim of hardware and software designers, forced to memorize rote formulas for interaction that differed in every way from their day to day engagements. That isn't to say that software like Siri isn't just a further iteration of the same, but the feeling has changed.

There's no longer a guide or manual required to know how to find your favorite restaurant, you simply ask your phone as you would a passerby on the street. Much like: "does this road go to Hoboken?" or even "what's there to do in Hoboken?", or perhaps: "Why would anyone want to go to New Jersey, anyway?"

All fine questions, and ones to which our truly smart-phones have long held the answers. What has changed is what is required for getting those answers back out. The learning curve is now virtually non-existent.

There is a worry with such things of our tendency to grow dependent on the new ease of use our collective minds has now unlocked will lead to new deficiencies as we further our likeness to Wells' eloi, prompting a noted drop in the so-called "zombie survival ratio."

Of course, a far more realistic concern is what we as a nation would ever do without electricity, and why then we aren't more focused on repairing the coming problems with our failing power grid before it becomes more than merely a theoretical concern.

But I digress...

My concern is entirely different, so much so that I wouldn't even count it a 'concern' so much as a curiosity; a genuine interest in what kind of ripples this drop in the techno-social bucket will make.

Let us set aside for the moment the implications for those bearing the burden of outlying genetics, an issue at most improved and at once made more egregious by this new technology and its wildfire's pace across the fields of our cultural mainstream. Many programs have existed prior to Siri and its fellow graduates that have addressed those very needs (though the attachment to what has become a ubiquitous personal device is a nice improvement).

I'm instead speaking of the implications on language. It isn't news that the explosion of instant messaging in the 1990's carried with it an entirely new lexicon of shorthanded abbreviations and graphical speech, to say nothing of its impacts on sentence structure and the very basic art of capitalization.

Like rats on the Mayflower, the shift in language swiftly spread to other media, first in its native digital environment and then on to the written page and even to verbal speech. Before long, working-class adults were saying aloud phrases like "WTF, man? RTFM!" and still fully understanding on another.

Let me pause momentarily to say that I don't consider this a bad thing. I have read letters from the 1600's and I can say with some certainty that the content of your average tweet today is of no less cultural value (and oftentimes carries far, far more). The difference is that our perception of language around it clouds the true nature of the slop within. One can put a fancy hoop skirt on a chihuahua, it remains a tiny hairless dog with giant eyes.

I'll leave you to savor that image a moment while I prep this next bit.

Siri may be the herald of a second such turning point in our linguistic evolution, although there's an equal chance it will guide is in the opposite direction.

Much of the noise pollution in our modern vernacular stems originally from the ease (and thus, in our culture, necessity) of typing representative letters for repetitively-used words and phrases, as has been our military's standard for decades. We then likewise began to mock our own innovations. Anomalies like saying "LOL" aloud are omnipresent but remain largely ironic in their use, garnering their own comical reciprocation the further they stray from readily-accepted language from which they stem (e.g. "lulz").

[Editor's note: I confess, much of that last paragraph was constructed as part of a bet to put words like "vernacular" and "omnipresent" next to the pièce d'art that is "lulz." Of course, pairing it with "pièce d'art" has just earned me the hat trick, and a free sundae. But again, I digress...]

Software triggered not only by spoken words but able to interpret complete phrases based on commonly accepted structure could kindle a lingual counter-revolution depending on the guidance of the developers and the individuality of each device's learning algorithms.

A more rigid, globally-defined solution could guide our linguistic outliers back onto the common rails of our language, while a more customized solution simply illustrates the sheer flexibility of language to branch off into limitless, internally-consistent splinters of itself based entirely on the whim and habit of the speaker.

While draconian in its conception, there are some localized applications to the more rigid method that immediately spring to mind, such as encouraging children learn to speak properly during their rebellious years.

If their own devices will only recognize a properly-worded sentence before, say, ordering pizza or texting their significant others, it limits the immediate reach of a teen's aims to misbehave until they first begin regimenting their speech; a lesson soon remembered when one must begin interviewing several years in the future.

Of course, the child can circumvent such measures through a judicious use of technical savvy, in which case they are smart enough not to rely on proper speech to earn a lucrative career in computer security, and thus the problem solves itself.

Remaining fixed firmly on the subject, another example use would be helping adults learn to speak to other adults properly. There are more successful adults today that cannot interact with the majority of the populace without stumbling over their own intellect than likely ever existed before (if only because, in the past, they would have either been quietly disowned or made into royalty).

Creating a technologically advanced device that more easily interfaces with confident speech than complex, typed commands could be a large step forward in bridging that divide. Whether or not anyone wants that divide bridged rather than acting as a social moat between themselves and the brilliant marauders of the technological wasteland is another matter entirely.

So despite my misgivings about the comical mishaps to come, I foresee far more good from voice-activated machinery than bad, and a good deal of comedy from the errors in both directions.

One can only picture, then, what change this will have for those studying to be coders in the coming years, when the average person will believe they hold infinite sway over the mind and direction of a very powerful (if handheld) device. The ubiquitous "Hello, world!" just became the greatest reply-all command that ever existed.

It only makes it that much more satisfying, then, to walk by someone else's phone and shout: "Siri, divide by zero."

Man Down

2011-12-06T13:11:00.001-05:00

I have a high enough fever at this point I'm pretty sure I'd be more coherent drunk. I'm gonna go lie down and get you all a rant later this week instead, when I'm closer to mentally sober.

Instead, watch this hedgehog try and fit into a tube.

Acting Together or Just Play Acting?

2011-11-30T00:01:00.000-05:00

Since I am deeply embroiled in the throes of National Novel Writing Month, today's Rant is brought to you by one Izzy Woods, a freelance writer interested in sharing her thoughts with the site. I'd give the usual disclaimer about "the thoughts and opinions expressed here do not represent..." blah blah blah, but since I would never post anything here that I wouldn't want the Internet to see anyway, I consider it unnecessary and, frankly, a little crass.

As a warning, the content is politically charged, but rather than leaning to one side or another, it addresses the very question of "taking sides" politically. So, for your consideration, Izzy Woods:

Well, surprise, surprise, the so called congressional 'Super Committee' couldn't come to agreement on how to stop America's debt burden growing ever bigger. Who didn't see that one coming? I give you three reasons why this was always going to be the outcome:

Firstly, Republicans and Democrats now see one another as the enemy. Once upon a time they viewed each other as worthy opponents. They disagreed on some issues, but respected one another enough to believe that each had the best interests of the nation at heart, and so they were willing to negotiate and to reach a compromise where necessary for the good of the country. Not any more. Probably beginning somewhere in the nineteen seventies, that spirit of co-operation between the two parties has been gradually eroded to the point where partisan interests far outweigh the national interest.

Congress is no longer about getting things done, it's about the stopping the other side doing the things it wants to do. The tactics of the tea party are only the latest manifestation of this long term trend.

The D.C. Bubble

Secondly, it's Washington. The nation's capital undoubtedly exists in its own little bubble. How often have candidates told you the self same thing, but insisted that they will be different? Personally I've lost count, but it doesn't matter, because we all know that nothing changes in that respect. Once inside the bubble, they become mesmerised and don't appear to be able to see out to what's happening in the real world.

The third reason is that it's our own fault. We like the folksy candidate who tells us that they are 'just the same' as we are. They speak like we do, proclaim to enjoy doing what we do, and to hold the same values as we do. Of course, it's sometimes a bit of an act, but it didn't do George Bush any harm when he adopted a Texas drawl and glossed over his privileged upbringing. Well I don't know about you, but I have difficulty making my bank account to balance most months, sometimes forget to feed the cat, don't always wash up the dishes in the morning, and fall asleep in front of the TV on Sunday afternoons. Basically I'm an innumerate, forgetful, slovenly catnapper, so do we really want someone like me helping to run the country? Well that's what we've voted for.

Vested Interests

Finally, to corrupt a well known slogan, "It's the election stupid!" No Congressman, Senator, or any other politician is going to upset their supporters by watering down their message only one year out from a Presidential election, because when the election comes around, it won't only be the Presidency at stake, but many of them will also be up for re-election. Not only might they lose some votes, but perhaps more importantly they may also lose support from the donors who finance their campaigns. Are retirees about to vote for someone who said 'yes', however reluctantly, to cutting their medical coverage? Are companies who rely on defense contracts likely to donate to the campaign of someone who nods through cuts in military spending? I think we know the answer to those questions.

Naturally enough, the spin on failure has already begun. Some analysts are telling us that the very small amount of compromise that was achieved is a good basis for future discussion, but as each side dismissed the other side's proposals as meaningless; it's hard to see things in such a positive light. Some think that the ever nearing imposition of the 1.2 trillion of across the board cuts, which would slash into budgets held sacred by both sides, will finally focus the minds of politicians on what needs to be done. I would refer you to my previous paragraph. The mandatory cuts are not due to come into effect until January 2013, whilst the elections are in November 2012. Anyone with a calendar knows what that means.

Robert Portman, Senator for Ohio, and a Republican member of the Super Committee is quoted as saying “We did a lot of good work”. I'm pleased for him, but at this moment in time there are several million Americans who have lost their jobs, their homes, and in many instances their sense of self-worth, and who would simply like the opportunity to really do a good day’s work. So perhaps his time, and that of our other elected politicians, would be better devoted to fighting for America and not just fighting with one another.

Capital PUNishment

2011-11-24T00:01:00.000-05:00

I'm a tryptophan of the holidays, most especially Thanksgiving. Not because of the turkey, afternoon football or the satisfying sound of cranberry sauce slipping free of the can (although that last one is a ready contender).

I love this holiday because it's so very American.

I don't just say that because it began on our national soil or because no one else cares that much for a bunch of white settlers who managed to survive a brutal New England winter on the good graces of people they considered uncivilized. I say it because Thanksgiving sums up so very much about America in one simple day that no other holiday comes close to.

Let us count the ways...

The season of eating is an all-too-easy mark for a nation wherein pizza is now a vegetable. Despite the diet crazes that seem to stream in perpetua from our more deluxe urban centers, America continues to be a nation that loves to eat in excess. In that, I don't blame us in the least.

America is a melting pot, as the saying goes, which means we have more cultures smashed together across much of the nation, living on the same streets and going to the same schools, than most of the modern world.

With all our issues with labeling one another to try and quantify our differences, we're still much closer to being one long gradient of seamless grays than much of the modern world (and certainly much closer than we were 50 years ago).

One of the greatest advantages of that cultural immersion coupled with a healthy sense of personal and cultural pride (especially in a regional sense) is that we often take pride in our food, and enjoy very much throwing it in the other guy's face (at times literally). Food has become the measuring stick for belonging in many areas of the country. What you call soda. How hot the spices are. How you make your barbeque. They've become our modern shibboleth to indicate membership in one arbitrary club or another.

Americans don't overeat because we're hungry. We overeat because we're sampling. The whole of our nation is one massive buffet of international cuisine. To not sample a bit of your neighbor's plate is not only rude but a sign of an uncultured mind. Yes, even in those regions where even much of our own nation doesn't consider there to be any culture unless banjo music counts.

Here's a hint: it does.

Thanksgiving especially, where we slam together tradition (in its various forms) with our own personal customizations, makes a wonderful diorama for food in this country as a whole. If you have ever eaten pulled-pork sushi, you already know what I'm talking about.

Then, of course, there are the wonderfully misrepresented historical messages. It just wouldn't be an American holiday without them.

We love to glorify our heroes, as any nation does. We look back on the past with rose-tinted lenses and bemoan the loss of such days of value, truth and simplicity.

Strangely, the whole typhoid thing rarely gets addressed.

But setting aside our misplaced longing for the days when a everyone worked with their hands and a simple splinter could be a death sentence, we tend to creatively forget the things that make us even a little uncomfortable about the reality of our forebears.

Thanksgiving is by no means alone in that regard, but since few other holidays come this close to celebrating brotherhood, compassion and giving on the part of a people who were systematically eradicated as violent savages, it seems like the best example.

At least until someone proposes a Henry Dawes Day.

It is, however, uniquely American still to consider that Plymouth colony scene from the other side: a single, bad decision to grant aid to a seemingly-friendly foreign power who later turned on them in violence with the very same tools they had been freely given to ensure their survival.

Because our nation has never been there before.

Lastly, there's the issue of pardoning the national turkey. The number of messages being tangled up in what should be a simple, lighthearted ceremony by an overtaxed administration is simply staggering. Putting aside the more subtle "the pretty one gets to live; axe the fat one" dichotomy, giving a turkey an official pardon brings in the suggestion of capital punishment; a subject for which "lighthearted" is far from the appropriate tone.

The jury is still out on whether drafting a turkey under the provisions of Patriot Act is more offensive than it is hilarious. Preliminary polling says 'no.'

With our current president having pardoned both turkeys, the message then becomes one of cruelty versus amnesty: if killing livestock gains a pejorative view in our nation (outside of southern California) thanks in part to the ironically-named executive branch, what are our already-hurting food growers to think of being vilified on the national stage (on a family holiday, no less)?

And here's what I like about Thanksgiving most of all: if all this seems ridiculous to you; a gross overstatement of genuinely innocent traditions and the tendency of a nation to stride ahead without dwindling too long in the details, then not only do you and I already agree, but you can say so just as loudly to as many people as you like.

Go ahead. I'll wait.

So when the green bean casserole makes the rounds this season and you're asked what you're thankful for, consider that you live in a nation filled with cultural train wrecks, horrid histories and oversensitive people all too happy to make mountains out of every molehill they find. Yet somehow, we all come together around the gravy boat time and time again to argue politics, religion and aunt Ethel's new tattoo and generally act like a family. Because, in the end, that's exactly what we are.

And that's something to be thankful for.

Dropping the SOPA

2011-11-16T12:44:00.001-05:00

If you're not already aware of the Stop Online Piracy Act, here's a little light reading.

The short form is this: Hollywood is tying online piracy to a loss of jobs due to the rampant illegal downloading of copyrighted entertainment products that would otherwise lead to revenue sales. As a result, they have levied support in the least-liked Congress in our national history to put forward legislation that has within it far-reaching consequences for freedom of speech online.

Many have already compared it to the Great Firewall of China, a strawman in the ongoing debate for Internet censorship and regulation that is no longer much removed from what has already been proposed to Congress on multiple occasions. There's a debate going on as we speak that ironically can't be viewed by people living in countries where Internet censorship is a well and regular habit of their governments, to function as case in point.

Several prominent organizations are speaking out against the legislation, hoping to reach an Internet populace that will be deeply (and quietly) affected should the act come into being as law, yet our lawmakers seem to be pushing boldly ahead without much concern for popular opinion.

If only they had fought as hard for the Jobs Act, which would impact Americas far outside of southern California.

But not everyone on the Hill is ignoring the implications of handing over the reins on what has, since its inception, been a birthing pit for free transfer of information, dissolution of conventional boundaries between people and a harbor for any unwelcome opinion a mind has ever been known to have.

In a rare switch, our vice president (who has tasted shoe leather more than a few times this term) gave an eloquent explanation of exactly how dangerous this legislation can be to the principles on which our nation has thrived (and which, though I hesitate to use the term, our founding fathers actually advocated).

With our conventional sources in the news media all but entirely compromised by fanaticism, partisan bickering and challenging the very entertainment field for the right to host elaborate fiction, the Internet is perhaps the only avenue left for genuine facts to reach any new eyes and ears at all (albeit amid the torrential load of horsecrap already floating around out there posing as truth. I'm looking at you, uncited Facebook quotes.)

The sad truth behind what's happening now has very little to do with our popularly-despised legislative branch or their oft-misattributed executive neighbors. We are simply witnessing the second coming of the RIAA and its explosive tirade at no longer holding a simple monopoly through popular distribution methods.

Yes, the letters have changed (MPAA isn't that far off), but the reaction is the same: because everyone with a $20 webcam can stream their life live to YouTube (as thousands of surprisingly successful entrepreneurs across the global stage have already done), the silver screen is becoming more and more tarnished by the year.

With independent directors spinning gold in their own homes while the rest of us suffer through Jack and Jill and Immortals (or "300 without all that pesky plot"), it's no wonder they're terrified enough to actually leverage the (now declining) state of joblessness in the country to secure their former monopoly on distribution methods.

I'd swear I'd seen this somewhere before, but then Hollywood hasn't been very original lately in anything else, either.

If you're looking to speak out against SOPA, americancensorship.org is taking names for an Internet petition. TechCrunch has already initiated a batch of some 3,000 paper letters to be sent to Congress with personal notes speaking out against the act.

Hopefully, sooner or later, our government will get the idea that we like our 4chan memes and our YouTube covers and our stupid pictures of cats (and ponies) just fine the way they are without having to worry about selective filtering and elephant-gun restrictions that get between us and being able to speak freely about self-interested associations who would rather spend their money lobbying congress than employing what I'm sure were quite a few thousand best boy grips now forced to live on the streets without any Internet at all.

I'd like to see someone make a film about that.

Home, Deconstructed

2011-11-08T00:01:00.000-05:00

If houses were made out of Legos...

Every house would technically be a brick house.

You could change the entire function and purpose of everyday household appliances simply by turning them around or gluing another small, colored piece to the side.

The last three rooms would be 60% the original color, 20% a second, similar color and the remaining 10% would be made up of 8 different colors and at least one transparent piece because dammit I don't have that many blue blocks.

If you didn't like the color of the walls in one room of the house, you've have to demolish the entire floor.

If houses were built like websites...

We would have the power to add each component (like plumbing) as its own php include, easy to upgrade and swap out when it aged past its prime or something better came out. However, because most contractors would be certified purely based on the fact that they had once lived in a house, no homes would actually be built this way.

Most contractors would now be abandoning their own designs in favor of stable, modular suites provided openly and updated by the community. Unfortunately, disputes over whether these designs constituted interior management systems or simply "frameworks" would soon grind their overall development to a standstill.

Peeling back the wallpaper in your house would reveal notes left by the original contractors. Some would be helpful ("load-bearing wall, do not remove") and others simply humorous ("there are FOUR PIPES!"). Of course, most houses would be built without any such notes included.

Houses could be built to exact design specifications for ideal viewing, yet because a large portion of your guests might be using a different browser, they stand a sizable chance of getting lost on the way to the bathroom or falling through an open float:left; div in your kitchen, never to be seen again.

If buying a house were like running for office...

You would be competing against a field of your peers all vying for the same home. You would have to lobby for support and attend several primary elections where sellers, real estate agents and people who just heard there was free beer would weigh in on your worthiness as a home buyer.

One by one, buyers would drop out of the race late in the process because they had spent so much on campaign advertising that they didn't have enough left for the down payment, until at last it would be just you and one other schmuck gunning for the lot.

Intelligent discussion of your extensive plans to renovate and increase the value of the house and surrounding neighborhood would be abandoned in favor of low-grade smear campaigns intended to showcase the other candidate's flaws, a tactic that would rely heavily on tying together loose assumptions based on purely unrelated facts.

Finally, the seller, realtors and members of the neighborhood would cast their votes in private for one candidate or another until finally someone was selected to live in the house for a limited time. The next four to six years would be dedicated entirely to exterior, visible renovations and appealing to small, niche markets (like the pink flamingo and lawn gnome lobbies) to ensure your reelection as homeowner next time around while the inside of the house would be left to rot and decay.

If owning a house were like owning a dog...

It would be a serious, long-term investment requiring a great deal of effort just to keep it clean, keep various working parts in good condition and keep up with the constant changes as it grew until you found yourself spending all of your time, energy and money just to keep it from falling apart.

But at the end of the day, it would be something you cherish, something that keeps you warm and welcomes you home; something that makes you feel like a king, even in a bathrobe and bunny slippers. Something you belong to, as much as it belongs to you.

Come to think of it, owning a house is a lot like owning a dog.

Just don't forget to take your house out for walkies...

Voice of Reason

2011-10-31T20:26:00.000-04:00

Anyone who's done tier-1 support knows that technical expertise isn't nearly as valuable as communication when it comes to your consultants. You can teach anyone how to use a knowledgebase to troubleshoot common problems, no matter the system; it's what you're going to be doing for your clients every day anyway.

Some of it is scripted, some of it is intuition and a lot of it is luck, patience and persistence, the last three of which you only get to if you have the diplomacy to keep the client calm while you work out the kinks that are causing them such headaches in the first place.

Teaching someone to be polite, compassionate and understanding with a calm, grateful and communicative client is about as difficult as teaching a dog how to chase cars. Now try teaching him how to only chase the yellow ones, and you'll know what it's like to teach someone how to sound pleasantly sympathetic when their mind is split somewhere between utter panic and abject rage.

Frustration, as most of us know, is an ugly thing. In traffic, it turns reasonable people into rabid foaming wildebeests stampeding towards the next exit. People in restaurants often fret more about the state of their steak than about what dining out for the fourth night in a row is doing to their personal finances. When you bang your head against a wall enough times, sooner or later, you start to hate the wall, even though you're the one doing the banging.

Tech support people deal with headbangers every day, oftentimes over the phone (a device that tends to escalate frustration levels even further), yet many of them remain polite and even understanding in the face of long, involved troubleshooting sessions. A lot of perennial customers in the customer service equation seem to believe that this state of constant compassion is manufactured.

And they would be right.

Well, half-right. Customer service veterans are all familiar with the various forms of "phone voice," a self-defense mechanism that may or may not have anything to do with actual phones. Phone voice is the classic, fostered, outward-facing presence that masks the maelstrom of emotions teeming just beneath the surface.

By many on the other side of the proverbial line (especially those whose demeanor more often demands the use of "phone voice"), this is nothing short of deception; a patronizing gesture meant to sooth the rightfully indignant until the consultant can get them off the phone.

That, again, is half-right.

The truth of it is that all of us are unreasonable when we get panicked, frustrated or angry, no matter what zen grandmasters we make ourselves out to be in our saner moments. We all overlook things and screw up, even when we're trying to be diligent. Sooner or later, all of us are "that client."

Consultants in customer service are not super-human. By the contrary, there are decidedly human, which means they have to take time to think before supplying someone with an answer to ensure that it's not only correct but the best answer available, and will be phrased in such a way as to be understood.

If you have ever been put on hold for 3-5 minutes, chances are the consultant is either a) testing the solution they're about to suggest to ensure that it is 100% viable or b) asking a supervisor or senior consultant if the idea holds water before suggesting it. They are trying to help you, and here is why:

Getting someone off the phone quickly doesn't help the consultant.

We are not telemarketers. We rarely have quotas by quantity of call. A lot of calls to a help desk means either our systems are very broken and user-unfriendly, or clients are calling back a second and third time for the same problem, indicating that the consultants aren't being thorough or clear the first time around.

By contrast, most help desks generally have customer satisfaction surveys. It actually benefits a consultant more to build a rapport with a client so that they're memorable enough to ensure not only a response to the typically-ignored survey, but a glowing one at that.

The purpose of phone voice is self-defense.

While the client's own panic and frustration continue to rise the longer the infinitesimal seconds stretch on in the process of the call's resolution, the consultant's panic and frustration rise at perhaps double the rate or more, depending on how seasoned they are and how close to burn-out they've become.

Apathy is a hell of a drug, after all.

Phone voice is a way for them to retain the appearance of calm assurance in the barest hope that it will help you feel confident that they know what they're doing, they've seen this bizarre broken-cup-holder complaint a thousand times before and the only reason for the delay on the other end of the line is that the consultant's other hand is too busy saving kittens or reaching Nietzsche to devote to proper typing.

The calmer you become, the calmer they remain. Phone voice is a psychological opiate to buy time while the necessary software tools (many of which are web-based) process the data gathering, diagnostics and troubleshooting required to present you with a flawless, work-the-first-time-so-you-won't-have-to-call-back solution.

Is it a deception? Absolutely. Your average consultant, even the seasoned ones, need time to digest the tattered bits you've told them in your own words of what you understand the problem to be. They have to evaluate how much of what you're telling them is genuine and communicated correctly, how it matches known past issues, what to do when it doesn't and how to translate that very complicated process back to the waiting client without either patronizing them or bombarding them with so much explanation they have no idea what's going on.

And, like it or not, most of us on the other end of that line are not inclined to wait that long.

So if you get the sense that the person helping you is suddenly much more polite than they have any right being, consider which will get the problem solved faster: demanding an explanation any time there's more than a ten second wait, or giving the consultant time to solve the issue properly and evaluating their devotion not by their fostered demeanor, but by how well the solution they produce for you actually serves to solve the problem you called in with in the first place.

And consider how much work doing both at once probably takes.

The Great and Powerful Oz

2011-10-25T00:30:00.000-04:00

After last week's brief departure to explore the world of gender norms and recent trends in backhanded advertising, one would think I'd be all the more ready to return to the realm of tech, education and similar, more noble pursuits.

And you'd be wrong.

Over the past month, my girlfriend and I have been working to purchase a home of our own. By "purchase," I of course mean "work diligently with the seller and his agent to purchase our bank a shiny new house, which they will kindly let us live in for a fixed monthly fee because they're such nice people."

I knew from a relatively young age that houses, being terribly large little things, have a nasty habit of costing quite a lot of money. Money, I also learned at a relatively young age, is a difficult thing to come by; even more so when it's demanded in large, lump sums. The solution seemed simple: ask someone for a large lump sum of money now on the promise that you will slowly pay them back a slightly larger lump sum, one piece at a time.

And that is precisely what we have agreed to do.

At least, I think. The problem is that in addition to an exorbitant amount of money, buying a house involves a slightly more exorbitant amount of paperwork. As an employee of the state, I am well-versed in large, seemingly unnecessary piles of paperwork, so I wasn't too concerned.

Except that someone forgot to write them in English.

I should elucidate: the words, individually, were largely English with the occasional Latin thrown in for spice. The formation of the sentences followed something approximating proper English grammar, and though the forms looked like they'd been copied off of an aging Xerox that had recently seen the underside of the secretary's buttocks, everything was roughly legible.

What it was not was intelligible.

I consider myself a well-read individual, a fact I credit largely to being the son of a language instructor, herself the daughter of a language instructor, himself a dedicated father living in Queens, determined not to let his daughter develop the classic, mid-town, oft-lambasted New York accent seemingly known the world over.

So when I read a sentence three times and still can't determine which part of it, if any, constitutes a subject, I become a mite concerned.

I have long been a fan of the clause-heavy sentence. My favorite part of a new language to learn is the subjunctive form we so often neglect in English. I have never feared a semicolon, nor stared at one in puzzlement, unless of course it appeared (as they so often do) where it did not even remotely belong.

So when I cannot decipher a one-page document written in my own native language, that strikes me as a problem.

Any coder who has ever worked with code that someone else (or, as it usually is, many such someones) has put together has encountered this problem: staring at pieces and bits you understand without having any earthly knowledge of the whole of the thing you are looking at, what purpose it serves and, least of all, why it was made this way.

The average person, I would argue, is no coder. The average person does not do Sudoku (or, like many of us, does not have much success at it when they do). The average person is not fluent in Latin or higher-order vocabulary as well as even basic economic principles on a national scale.

So why in the hell are we treating the average person like they should be fluent in a language that doesn't actually resemble any living language much at all?

As someone working in tech support, my first goal is always to ensure that the person I'm helping will become self-sufficient. If I am successful, you will no longer need my help. In short, my goal is to put myself out of a job.

Such has not been the case in dealing with the linguistics of contracts, the land of 58-page license agreements populated by little more than jargon that serves no one but the company who is ironically obliged to put it together in order to to ensure your protection. Of regulations designed to be so arcane and obfuscated of purpose that no one can ascertain their precise intentions now, let alone many years hence when they come up for review. Of policies that no longer point to any semblance of a reasonable cause for existing.

And all the while, people make a profitable living guiding you step by step through the process like a priest begging the tiny indulgence of their arbitrary commission for telling you what, for all you know, may be complete and utter slop. They get paid either way.

That's not to say that everyone who helps us navigate the twisted labyrinths of professional and financial regulations is some manner of soul-sucking remora clinging to the soft underbelly of a fat and unwieldy system. Far from it: many of the people who help us to decode these everyday enigmas are entirely well-meaning and sympathetic.

And they shouldn't have to be.

We can't write everything in Latin anymore (although many of our political and legal staples still very much bear that overall sentiment), nor can we prevent the common man from accessing his or her due promise of the rights to which anyone in his or her country, if not the world, is entitled.

We, who can empower a seven-year-old with a rich understanding of technology our own parents, growing up in the boom that followed the second world war, have no comparable analog for, somehow cannot break down into simple terms the notion of a contract between two people through one bank? I refuse to believe that.

I suspect at best a lack of effort (and at worst, base manipulation) have led us to this dichotomy wherein communication technology and the breaking of global barriers is reaching its apex while simple, staple interactions between ordinary people and local financial agencies are at an all-time low.

And people wonder why we have so much trouble understanding each other.

Etiquette, as it turns out, was largely a code of behavior intended to prevent the poor (or the newly rich) from moving seamlessly into the ranks of the social elite unnoticed. Much like the myths of the Masons, it was intended as a way to "sniff out our own" for those already well established in the economic upper crust.

Hundreds of years later, how little has changed.

That isn't to say that money makes one evil, but the inverse is often true: being evil generally makes it easy to go about making money hand over fist if one is simply willing to sneak between the ever-widening gaps in an already tangled system of poorly-worded (and often over-worded) contacts, policies and laws. The rest have only a blind faith in often well-meaning individuals to guide them to the simplicity that might, at heart, have a hope of protecting them.

But you'd already know that if you'd read page 47 of the end-user license agreement.

Why Chromosome

2011-10-18T00:01:00.000-04:00

Today, we're departing from our typical tech-themed tirades to bring you something of gross importance.

Emphasis on "gross."

It's been true for years that society defines gender and then beats it into our heads at every available turn. The most we can hope for is enough of a spread of alternatives that any given individual learns the importance of deciding for themselves who they want to be. Lately, however, it seems like guys are very much getting the shaft in that department.

And I do mean that literally.

During the mere hour as I write this, I am tracking the number of E.D. commercials that happen to grace the screen on a major network during a fairly popular broadcast (that being football on Monday night). So far, the total is two, although it's a bit difficult to tell, on account of they are both saying the same thing.

"You are nothing without a working penis."

The impressions given across two 30-second spots are that all the things you love and rely on in life (your job, your spouse, your car, your ability to spontaneously go yachting on the weekends, et cetera) all stem from the fact that you have a penis, and that it works as advertised.

Funny that they don't run similar spots for Alzheimer's medication.

Typically, gender identity is a complex matrix of factors. For men, for instance, the classic image ranges from being the primary earner in the household to working with power tools and sporting some wicked stubble. Women have a similar if less favorable spread, which all roughly triangulates to this singular cultural image of what defines the genders from a public image perspective.

It's still jarring to see it whittled down to such a singularly unimaginative allegory for the whole of the male condition.

What's strangest to me is that, in our current marketing age, these commercials barely stand out. The same 20-minute span has also borne witness to a spot suggesting that men are defined by their hair color, and the proportion of gray it contains. It's only a slight step up from commercials who define a man as someone who has hair at all, and suggest that he who is without hair may as well seek refuge in a self-imposed exile of some sort.

Most curious of all to me is the suggestion at the heart of these message laden with a sense of strength, confidence and rugged enduring spirit: that it is all a very fragile state of being, hinging on fading superficial factors rather than any truly solid sense of self.

What pride is there in being a man if the mere natural progression of your own life into the first hints of middle age is enough to sap you of your Samson-like power and turn you instantly into an ineffectual, unsuccessful, incapable, fluid-feeding social quadriplegic lacking even the most basic of human functions?

With all this negativity, one might think I dislike these commercials, but the truth is I'm glad for all three-- pardon, four-- that have passed in this short span. It helps to highlight a trend that's been emerging on many media fronts and has thus far been left to pass without raising much, if any, fuss.

The classic notion of "manliness" has seen a resurgence in two parts of late: the svelte, smooth eloquence of the Old Spice Guy and the many sad attempts to parrot his style, and the semi-serious jabs at all manner of "unmanly" behavior.

Not that all of them are so one-sided.

Despite similarities to the ultra-male social explosion of the early 80's, the new trend seems to be split down the middle in its end goal. Ads targeted at older men (hair loss, graying hair, erectile dysfunction) seem to take their notions very seriously, stressing the importance of the trappings of masculinity without ever really defining the need for a strong personal identity or quality of character.

Not that I ever expect marketing to encourage strong quality of character.

Ads targeting a younger audience, by contrast, almost unilaterally poke fun at themselves, dialing the absurdity up to unnatural levels to the point where one would be hard-pressed not to consider it parody. Moreover, the message aimed at the younger crowd seems to be one of gender responsibility and the importance of personal appearance; a dangerously deceptive notion, but not quite as debilitating as "your winky defines you."

Unless you're really into dragons.

If current trends continue, the prevailing social tide will encourage men to strive to be deep-voiced, well-groomed romantics with a sense of style and an aversion to being anything less than astronomically impressive by their cultural experience.

And I don't know that we can expect much complaining there.

Is gender stereotyping still an issue? God yes. If that doesn't go without saying, it's just because we like to hear ourselves talk. The trick is that the expectations for men are becoming just as unrealistically high as they have been for women for...well, I suppose the term is "ever."

With luck, this will lead to one of two eventual outcomes: either we'll reach a mutually-beneficial social singularity wherein we all agree to stop being so boxed in from birth, or we'll form a society full of cultured, confident, bad-ass superpeople ready to ride horses backwards and swan dive from a self-made kitchen into a hot tub with a motorcycle in it.

So long as we know where our towels are.

Kobolds on Capitol Hill

2011-10-10T23:23:00.001-04:00

For the two people in the world who haven't figured it out, I am a geek.

I don't mean that I know what "IP" stands for in both its contexts (though I do) or that I wear anachronistic goggles and a top hat and go poncing about quoting Tesla on the weekends (though I could). When I say that I am a geek, I mean that I am willing, nay, excited to drive five hours to DC in order to play tabletop games with complete strangers.

And so I did.

DC Gameday was this past weekend; an event that is much like a convention only without the costumes, crowded vendor halls and dangerously lax personal hygiene. In short, all the best things about a convention with the possible exception of kilt-blowing.

Yes. Kilt-blowing.

DC Gameday featured neither kilts nor giggling leafblower-wielding women (more's the pity), just dozens of people all coming together with relative strangers to sit down for a few hours, roll some dice, sample new systems and generally have fun making idiots of themselves.

Before long, phrases like "Bruce, this is what you left our bed for?" and "Walruses, Assemble!" are echoing through the softly padded halls of the American Federation of Teacher's fourth-floor conference area. I'd like to believe that the AFT building had never known such absurdity before this past weekend, but my mother was a teacher, and I know that what they deal with on a daily basis is more ludicrous by far.

We came, we rolled, we died in blazes of glory surrounded by a chorus of raucous laughter and tumbling Jenga tiles. 24 games in two days, and across them all, the same sense of jovial camaraderie borne solely by the common love of getting together with strangers for a day of reckless fun.

And also zombies.

It brought to my mind the old and still prevalent image of the solitary, lonely gamer so reviled by popular culture: an overweight, pimple-ridden and/or balding male languishing in his parents' basement surrounded by dolls, comic books and an emergency supply of Twinkies, dwindling away to the calm, inhuman glow of his computer screen for lack of any other companionship.

I found myself instead surrounded by a group of successful, fit professionals, male and female alike, most of them married and many with brilliant, socially-functional children whom they hope will one day carry on the tradition of shouting "shove that up your readied action, you sodding berk," at an orcish shadowdancer known to his friends simply as "Bob."

This was not just a social event; this was people driving and flying hundreds of miles to partake in what amounts to a neighborhood cook-out. These people were mostly unknown to one another, coming together on the faith that they would be welcomed purely because they shared a hobby. There was no hesitance, no second-guessing: this was an all-in gambit simply because, damn it, it would be worth it.

They arrived to find open arms and smiling faces as total strangers of a supposedly socially-inept subculture greeted one another like family, making jokes and telling stories sampled from the common lexicon that could as easily be the inane water-cooler dialog of office politics and last night's football game, just to name a couple.

Except, in our case, the football was on fire and the other team had chainsaws. Which would you rather watch?

Gamer geeks aren't shut-ins. They never have been. Your average game takes 4-5 people just to be interesting, and can accommodate many more. That's larger than some knitting circles, and here all the backhanded gossip has to deal with fictional people whose feelings can't get hurt.

A book club comes together to discuss one writer's take on his or her characters. A gaming group comes together for people to build stories with their own characters, collectively, together.

There is no entry fee, no dress code, no minimums required. The simple and the genius-level have just as much chance of rolling a 20 when the time comes. Your character's story is at once both your own and a part of the group, so that your stories become the same as theirs; stories to be retold for years and added to the great oral tradition of the gamer nation.

The barbarian who got himself swallowed because he figured the dragon had less armor on the inside. The priest whose peculiar magic was entirely reliant on his belief in the God of Baked Goods. The runner whose ill-timed fumble coined the phrase: "Take the rocket-launcher away from Jamal before he hurts somebody." They are people we all know and love, imagined by people we all know and love.

Even if we haven't met them yet.

This is gaming: a very social community that believes in welcoming anyone to come, without judgement or pretense, and join in the endlessly-diverse ongoing conversation of entertaining misadventures governed by the creative minds of ordinary people and the merciless apathy of the dice.

What did you do this weekend?

At the Spec of Light

2011-10-04T00:07:00.000-04:00

Estimations in development are notably less science than art form, but that's never stopped anyone from treating them like a mathematical certainty.

When a client asks "how long with this take?" with any remotely unique project, the answer is little more than a guess, in simplest terms, albeit based on similar projects with similar situations and a similar workforce in the past (or whatever portions of that information are available).

It's much like asking someone how long it takes to get across town. They can tell you how long the trip was the last time they took a similar route, but the sheer volume of x-factors in between makes that anything but a reliable predictor. Traffic patterns, time of day, recent accidents, road work, the timing of the lights, how much you speed; it all changes the end result.

Naturally, a good estimate, one given by someone with a good deal of experience in the area, is a comprehensive average of the various factors involved. They might start by telling you which roads to take, what times of day are bad for traffic and possibly even how to avoid the speed traps that could seriously impact your travel time.

Among other things.

Still, their estimate is exactly that: an estimate. It's no more fact than the weather report or the odds on a Vegas roulette wheel. It's stated knowing that it's a rough average based on the criteria involved and a reasonable expectation of normalcy throughout the life of the project.

Yet so many clients, sales reps and project managers repeatedly treat it as gospel truth.

Almost all estimations, from casino games to meteorology, are based on complex mathematics designed to make semi-random chaos predictable. And despite popular perceptions to the contrary, a lot of these predictions remain fairly accurate amid a storm (no pun intended) of unknowable factors.

So let's get mathematical.

Let 't' be the amount of time a given project will take, from inception to completion. Make 'w' the total work that needs to be completed, and 'r' the rate at which the average worker can complete it. Multiply that by 'n', the total number of workers committed to the project.

We'll ignore for the moment that most projects involve only a portion of a given worker's time between it and other projects and that a complex priority system can add all sorts of fractional effort to the work. Consider these our frictionless pulleys.

What? Physicists do it all the time.

So, with all our variables in place, the basic formula for time to completion (t) is:

All other things being equal, this simple formula would be fairly easy to estimate. The original spec gives you the total work to be done (w), most project managers have an idea how much work their team can get done in a given period (r), and budget and other projects often determine for you what your number of available workers (n) will be.

But there's a variable missing from this equation, and it makes all the difference in the world:

The client.

Too often, the client becomes the 18-car pile-up that no amount of accurate estimation can predict. If that sounds like an unfair assessment, consider how big of an impact the following seemingly innocuous changes can have on a project in mid-stream:

Finding a "really cool" feature in another site/product and adding it to the must-haves for the project
Adding one more question to ask the end-user halfway through an existing series of dynamic forms
Shifting the due date up three days, from Monday to Friday
Deciding you really don't like the color green after all

Any of these seemingly tiny changes can have a major impact on the overall time to completion (t) of a given project.

A good development team (or one guided by an experienced project lead) can try to minimize the impact by designing the product to be as flexible as possible right from the start, but a focus on proper design can slow the time-to-completion of product demos in the early stages of development.

This planning can, in turn, be sabotaged by an impatient client or sales team who want an impressive product mock-up as quickly as possible to ensure that development is going in the direction they want it to (or to be able to sell other invested parties on the progress to date).

We have just added a lot of friction to our pulley.

So let's revisit the formula, with the total work to be done (w) being appended by the work added during the process of development (x). We'll also need to modify the rate of work (r) by the number of meetings the client asks to have to discuss something else they'd like to add or change to the current spec (b_s), and the number of workers (n) who find other work rather than continue to contend with the existing project (y)

Our resulting formula then becomes:

Things have gotten more complicated, but any mathematician can tell you what we've just done: by adding to the numerator and reducing the denominator, we've increased our total time (t) substantially.

That alone is cause for concern, but most developers and project leads account for such things when giving estimates, and thereby "pad" their totals to account for it. If you consider the added work (x) to be a semi-reliable factor that can be predicted as evenly as the other variables at play, then it's easy to add a similar value to the given time estimate (t) to account for the changes (x) you expect are in store.

The problem is that 'x' is anything but predictable.

The changes (x) proposed after the original spec (w) is agreed upon are themselves affected by any number of values, the most of these being time. The longer the project goes on (t), the more chance there is for the client's situation to change and for new products or sites to inspire new additions.

In essence, the larger 't' value you have, the larger 'x' becomes. Since 'x' has a direct impact on the size of 't', this creates an endless loop wherein 't' approaches infinity. You don't have to be a physicist to know that that's a problem.

No matter how fast (r) your workforce (n) is, it can only mitigate the impact of midstream changes (x), which in turn increase the total time to completion (t). The only way to break the loop is for the project lead to establish a freeze date (a cap on the value of 't') after which no more changes or additions can be made.

Otherwise, you end up with a situation like this:

With all this math flying about, there's just one other equation to consider when it comes to expectations and project estimates:

As 't' climbs to infinity, 'n' approaches zero. Plug that into your equation and see what happens.

Pronoun Trouble

2011-09-30T13:29:00.001-04:00

I've mentioned before that I find the uproar over Facebook's cavalier approach to user interface overhaul hilariously pointless, but it has sparked an interesting vein of thought: who exactly owns your identity, anyway?

The question might seem absurd, but if you haven't considered it before, rest assured: most online identity sites definitely have, and their answer may not be the one you want to hear.

The Internet changed the nature of identity in a way phones never did. Phones removed the visual but left the audio intact in its original form (minus the extremes, of course), leaving a very fixed tether to the original person on the other end of the line.

As every ransom movie has shown us, there are ways to mask one's voice and most of us have mistaken someone over the phone for someone else given just the standard distortion always present, but it's difficult to deliberately pose as someone else over the phone.

Not so over the Internet.

It's true that services like Facebook and Google+ (the latter definitively so) have largely striven for true-name identification and association; hoping, perhaps, to preserve the classic notion of identity and grant a sense of legitimacy to their product and to whatever you choose to do with it.

Perhaps because they don't know their userbase very well.

Compare that to Twitter, where there are so many fake accounts that people have been forced to name themselves @the_real_soandso (or the far classier @soandsohimself) just to keep their own identities straight.

Long before Zuckerberg's behemoth became one of the most definitive databases for identity management, practically everyone on the Internet went by a handle. Forums and UseNet groups were unsafe to give your real name to, and many of them had such strict limits on usernames that using your given name was practically impossible.

The idea of using your actual information online is a relatively new concept, one brought on by Facebook's original purpose of allowing people to connect (and reconnect) with those they knew in real life.

And it may be a step in the very wrong direction.

While I like that using our real names has lent a tone of legitimacy, awareness and attainability to the nature of the online identity, it also saddles it with the baggage our real-life identities already carry: where we're from, where we went to school, if we went to school, where we work, if we work, if we have kids, our religion, our race, our favorite Thundercat...

You get the idea.

The Internet gave us, for the first time, the opportunity to craft an identity, something which sounds seedy and illicit but also opens up legitimate opportunities for those who may not have had them before.

If you've gotten by without ever worrying about how the non-merit-based elements of your personal reputation affect the way others see you, you're either deeply unaware of your social surroundings, or you're an average, healthy, white, middle-class, American male.

There. I said it.

There are countless features not even remotely seeded in true value on which we are judged and through which we are viewed every day of our lives. Except online.

Operating through a handle, a crafted ID, strips off race, gender and all other superficial markers unless you intentionally bring them to bear on the conversation. It breaks down the barriers we've erected between ourselves and inherited from generations of ancestry in a closed-minded, visual world.

The Internet grants us the power to level the playing field and openly be ourselves.

It's not to say that there aren't still superficial factors (things as nonsensical as typing rates and knowledge of viral memes can be as devastating in the online community as zits on a high schooler), but "not perfect" and "not better" are not at all the same.

So consider the worth of the asset that is your online identity, because if you don't decide to take ownership of it soon, someone else will. It's an entirely new form of identity theft:

The legal kind.

A Learning Experience

2011-09-27T11:39:00.002-04:00

I got to experience something last night, a sensation that I haven't been subject to in a remarkably long time:

True and inescapable boredom.

Some friends and I decided to dust off the coffee table (or, in our case, de-fur it) and pull out a board game called "Steam." It's been ages since I played an honest-to-god board game with anyone over the age of 7 (well, 7-and-a-half, to be fair), but on occasion I find great things can be found in the places we've long since stopped looking.

So we unpacked the game and it's 200+ pieces, sorting them into neat little piles because we're geeks and thus suffer low-grade OCD by habit, a condition which is often at odds with our prevalent low-grade ADD which makes for many small, half-finished piles of things stacked and sorted neatly in no discernible pattern.

But back to the game.

As I worked on uncorking the many cardboard hex tiles with which one builds one's fictional railway empire, the friend whose game it was began to read the rules so that we all might hit the ground running once the pieces were finally unpacked.

What followed was an hour of my life I can never again reclaim.

My friend, it should be said, has some gift for oratory. He is the sort of individual whose high intelligence is apparent within even the shortest conversation, yet he has retained the power to communicate clearly (and often richly), making him a nigh-perfect choice for the job of rules reader.

Yet even he could not wade through the miasma of Steam's preposterously-labeled "basic" rules in anything short of an hour while I contented myself to stack the neat little piles of small, choking-hazard tokens into groups of different order prime numbers.

As I've stated, I am a geek.

At the end of the rules reading (which, I should state, does not account for the wealth of data our friend skipped along the way, as well as the remaining three pages of "advanced" rules), just before my brain attempted to escape out my nose, we at last set about the business of beginning to play.

What followed was a thoroughly delightful two-hour game involving complex strategy and some of the most ridiculously non-Euclidean rail construction the world has ever known. We had a blast.

What followed that was something of an epiphany. And that is the subject of today's rant.

Learning by lecture, no matter how interesting the lecturer, simply doesn't work for most people. Learning by reading works for some, learning by listening for even fewer. Most learn by doing, or more accurately, by reading, listening and doing throughout the learning process.

It doesn't matter the subject: it could be anything from particle physics to the instruction manual for a lawn mower, most of us learn best by doing, listening and reading in rapid sequence until we've truly gained understanding of what the heck the thing itself is.

Even if that thing is building a fictional railway monopoly with which to financially crush your enemies.

So for those on either end of the learning styles extremes, the true believers in the time-honored power of "sage on the stage" lecture styles or in full-on immersive learning with little time for anything so droll as an explanation, it may be time to put down the proverbial kickball and reevaluate how people actually learn.

Faster than Light

2011-09-23T11:09:00.000-04:00

With NASA's shuttle program shut down, it's so rewarding to have something else to light our space-faring fancies with.

For those who haven't heard, an experiment took place recently that involved firing neutrinos 730 kilometers and clocking them for speed like some kind of sub-atomic Boston marathon. Astonishingly, the little particles arrived in less time than it would have taken had they been going at the speed of light.

Meaning they were going faster.

Why is that so groundbreaking? Because Einstein's special theory of relativity states that they would need unlimited energy to do exactly that, and since the OPERA project lacks the funding for infinite energy, it's safe to assume that someone is wrong.

What remains to be determined is whom. If the CERN experiment proves repeatable and bears up under scrutiny, then it follows that the special theory of relativity on which so much of our understanding of physics hinges may be up for review. And calling Einstein wrong generally causes a bit of a stir in the scientific community.

The truth is, Einstein's theory specifically left the door open to particles that violate the rule. Nothing in it says that certain particles can't exist which go faster than the speed of light all the time. If you've ever heard of the sci-fi time-bender's dream particle, the tachyon, you know what we're talking about.

But a particle going from one side of the light-speed line to the other is supposed to require all the energy everywhere ever to do. If that's no longer the case, then science fiction writers and fans the world over have something very new to stoke the fires of their imaginations.

Naturally, particles (and people and spaceships) exceeding the speed of light is nothing new in science fiction. When you consider the distances involved in commercial interplanetary travel (or any manned inter-system voyage), they're practically a requirement. And since our imaginations have longed ventured deep into space ahead of our technology, it's nice to know that science has taken another pivotal (if teeny tiny) step towards catching up.

Many authors and many more series have come under fire in the past by sci-fi skeptics for introducing faster-than-light travel. Since nothing had approached disproving Einstein's theory, it seemed to some to be a violation of the "science" in science-fiction to simply gloss over the problem with an attitude that "we're bound figure out a way around it eventually, right?"

Given that within our own lifetimes, things like commercial flight, spaceflight, broadcast imagery and instantaneous intercontinential communication went from being impossible to commonplace reality, it never seemed to me like a brush-off to say "we'll find a way eventually." Historically, we always have, if not quite in the way we imagined we would.

That isn't to say that neutrinos moving fractional microseconds faster than the speed of light will give us the power to warp ourselves to Mars in a month. It's entirely possible OPERA will prove little more than a theoretical exercise with no practical application.

But it's enough to let us dream.

As both a scientific mind and a sci-fi author, I find it hard not to get excited by news like this, even if it doesn't pan out in the end. I firmly believe that Einstein, like many theorists, would not consider disproving part of his original theory an insult, but rather an evolution of scientific understanding. That is to say, I think he'd be jumping up and down with the rest of us right now.

Science shows us the endless possibilities of the world around us through our ever-extending limits of understanding as we go smaller and smaller and farther and farther in search of one more tiny truth to upset all that have come before it.

That it may one day be used to power the outdated engine on a space-bound jalopy just adds to the intellectual thrill.

Coded Behavior

2011-09-20T09:54:00.001-04:00

First off, let me say thank you to those patient readers who've sat by the past two weeks with nothing to show for it. I said I would make it up to you this week, and I plan to do exactly that.

Much of the reason for my absence the past two weeks has been due to a job transition, something I'm very thankful for when the local unemployment rate is getting ahead of the curve. It's good at a time like this that we can relay on our leaders to focus on finding a solution to the problem before more families are-- oh, wait.

Nevermind.

But I'm not here to talk politics. The President recently stopped by the University to deliver a short but poignant speech on the upcoming jobs bill, and I think he said more than enough about my opinions on misguided political motives, so I'm content to leave it at that.

The new job, as most do (or perhaps, as most should), has come with new challenges. It's been almost four years since I left private web hosting for an online blogging site, leaving behind all knowledge of template building, layout design and fashionable CSS in favor of a one-click (ha ha) solution for posting routine content.

I have never regretted the move, but it has come with one notable consequence: absence, it seems, makes the mind grow weaker. Stated another way, web coding is not at all like riding a bicycle.

Except for the part where you can fall off and scrape your knee. But we'll get to that.

When I left off the regular upkeep of my old site, I had only just scratched the surface of CSS and JavaScript, building what I now know was a dynamic template with several moving parts, lacking only a database (or one giant array) for greater automation and ease of use.

Just like when learning HTML, I was hellbent on learning the language the hard way. I never picked up the O'Reilly book or visited any online resource (unless the source code of other people's pages counts, and given the predilection of most coders for useful commenting, I think that's a stretch), which means I made all the rookie mistakes myself, often while running head-down at full speed.

I got to learn about why tables were so limiting for layout purposes and really were better left being used as, you know, tables. I got to learn about clearing float tags to keep my layout from becoming a layered singularity collapsing in on itself. I even got to learn about using JavaScript string manipulation to create basic navigational functions.

...I'll give the coders in the room a moment to finish crying.

And then, when I had absolutely no hair left, I moved to a blogging site, where they had done everything I had done myself plus a few added features on the side, like a web-based WYSIWYG editor and an automated calendaring system for archived links.

Suffice it to say, I was happy leaving the grunt work to the professionals.

Unfortunately, now I am one such professional, helping to maintain the web presence for an entire college and keep all its many moving parts well-oiled and turning cleanly lest anyone notice something grinding to a halt.

Inside my two-week tenure here, I have worked closely with two entirely new CMSs, encountered three new coding languages and wrestled with each of them in turn, sometimes two at a time.

I know more about regex now than I ever really wanted to.

Much like working in food service, you begin to have an appreciation for the other side of the coin (web designers being the waiters in this analogy, which is a remarkably good fit when you consider the average customer for both).

I now feel I have a better eye for which ubiquitous little PHP featurettes are actually mindbendingly difficult to construct and manage and how SQL can make many complex functions far, far simpler than they have any right to be. I understand better why so many sites don't yet have a mobile device version and why even more are still largely not ADA-compliant despite the shift to HTML5 and CSS3.

Mind you, that I understand does not mean I excuse. When I was learning JavaScript, I understood why many web developers made sites that only worked properly in Internet Explorer. That's not to say I was happy about it.

As to why many sites still only work properly in IE6, I may never understand. Or perhaps I do, and just don't want to say it...

So thank you for your patience while the web has taken me back to school. Now that I've stared down regex into no longer stealing my lunch money, I feel confident the gap over the past two weeks will be the last of its kind.

At least, until the next new innovation.

Mind the Gap

2011-09-13T10:30:00.002-04:00

This marks the second Tuesday in Rantville I've missed, so I felt obliged to apologize and explain.

I've just started a new job and have been playing catch-up ever since, which has left precious little time for the frantic and furious free-form frenzy that was (until recently) a largely unbroken weekly trend.

I plan to return to form next week once the worst of the backlog is behind me (where backlogs belong), and furthermore hope to make up the difference in short order.

So in the meantime, I do apologize, and can only leave you with the ravings of another talented and comically displeased individual: Yahtzee.

Transparency

2011-08-30T11:28:00.000-04:00

So I noticed Facebook's privacy settings changed again. Well, it might be more accurate to say I "hardly noticed."

Like thousands if not millions of other Facebook users, I rarely ever actually visit Facebook. I pipe notifications both incoming and outgoing through any number of 3rd-party alternatives with cleaner, less ad-frenzied interfaces. So when I happen by the actual site every few months, something is bound to have changed.

Which is why I can't help but laugh at the folks so incensed over yet another update to Facebook's much-maligned privacy settings.

None of the silent changes to Facebook's interface have been necessarily evil in intention. Ad-buyers don't get more money because you only see the friends you interact with most often on your feed, and none of them really care that you broadcast that message about your period to all your work friends by mistake. There's no revenue to be gained there (and thank god for that).

What it does speak to is an interface design team living in an information silo, ironically not soliciting feedback from the users of their glorified commenting system before making broad, sweeping changes to not only site defaults, but in fact current user-customized settings.

What's worse is that in this particular silo roams a self-interested sociopath whose knack for knowing what people want is only slightly better than his ability to care about actually providing them with it. Neither skill is very high; collaboration was this man's dump stat.

For as incensed as its users get each time Facebook quietly (or even not-so-quietly) updates their privacy and user settings, we have yet to see the mass exodus that typically comes from not giving the people what they want. Clearly, there are ready alternatives. Yet the people stay.

It's a sadly fitting analogy for the state of our current government, who have soared unheard through piece after piece of broadcast information legislation with greater ramifications for our future generations than whether or not you saw Johnny at the show last night.

The truth is that, for as much as the concept of a company rapidly and radically altering very key settings in the software we love without much (or any) notice is a disturbing trend, it is neither a new nor a surprising one.

Windows and Mac have been doing it to us for years.

The difference is, with locally-installed software, we had the power to simply ignore the latest version release. We could opt out of going to Windows Vista or Mac OS 10.6 (at least until the world caught up on compatibility). We could run a little Windows 98 box with Office '97 installed until Judgement Day if we so willed it.

Many of us have seriously considered it.

But with online applications, one standard rules. We all move at once pace, because in the end, we're all using someone else's machine.

In the case of Facebook, that machine belongs to Mark Zuckerberg, and he sets things up the way he wants them. You can argue all day about the validity of his choices, or how badly he should perhaps check in with his massive userbase from time to time, but the only way to actually enforce any of that change is to simply walk away.

Or drive to his $7 million house in Palo Alto and "make your case" in person. Of the two, only one is likely to get you arrested.

The third option, of course, is to leverage the one true power of public opinion to gather a rising storm of protest against the changes in hopes of threatening the designers into altering their freely available software in order to appease the masses who pay them nothing to use it.

Good luck.

The same energy could probably be better spent leveraging support for a more user-considerate alternative, or better still, towards issues not so easily summed up as #firstworldproblems.

So while I can't say that I approve of Mr. Zuckerberg's decisions to regularly yank the rug out from under his userbase (and then rearrange the furniture around them while they're getting to their feet), I have even less respect for those whinging about it who then merely grumble their assent and return to business as usual.

It would be like walking on a crosswalk and being hit by a bus running the light. The first time, it's understandable. But when that same bus hits you regularly about every other week, it might lead one to think the driver has it out for him. The fool then stands in the road, shaking his fists and shouting at the bus as it barrels down on him, unhindered.

The wise man finds himself another route.

I Speak for the Trees

2011-08-22T17:50:00.000-04:00

I'm looking forward to a paper-free world.

Not because electronic data doesn't rot or wither over time, or soak up the coffee stains of a hundred late-night cram sessions. Not because it's wasteful and risks drawing on one of our more renewable yet still limited natural resources. Not because it proves that we can move seamlessly into an entirely abstract medium as a culture.

No. I look with longing on a paper-free world because I've worked in tech support.

Most anyone who's worked in tech support knows that any device that feeds paper, eats paper. And this isn't the dainty gnawing of, say, a newborn kitten. No, this is the full-on face-stuffing of a chubby 12-year-old on the verge of a growth spurt so hell-bent on feasting that he can't be bothered to breathe.

That is your printer.

At the basic level, your average home-use printer is a tech support nightmare. There are more varieties than there are Indonesian dialects, and each iteration has its own unique driver that became unsupported somewhere between the store and the drive home.

Moreover, the drivers tend to come in bundles by some arcane classification not easily relayed to the end-user. An HP 5500 laserjet may need an entirely different set of specs from an HP 5200 colorjet, yet its often bundled in the "HP 5000 Jet Series," because driver designers are cruel and vicious individuals.

Once you've hurdled the software gap, there are the natural issues of picking the right ink cartridge (which carries its own, separate codex), installing the hardware properly and then printing the glorious test page that signals the end of your trials and tribulation.

Unless, of course, it comes out looking like a mangled accordion.

Compound that with the increasing availability of wireless printer/scanner/fax machines for home and office use, and you've added an entirely new plane of problematic existence.

Disregarding that scanners and a working email system should make the very concept of a fax machine superfluous at best, you now have a three-in-one device with a network connection configurable only through a tiny 3-inch display screen full of one-color ASCII characters.

Because it's fun to troubleshoot wireless issues on a glorified TI calculator.

Which is nothing compared to trying to find the paper jam on a full-sized office copier the size of a Mongolian yurt (and with twice as many angry horsemen inside). There are more moving parts in one Konica Minolta than in the whole of a Russian tank. Guess which one is more likely to fail.

Despite ages of engineering and an entire internal processing line the likes of which Eli Whitney could never have imagined in his darkness nightmares, these brilliant contraptions remain infinitely incapable of passing sheets of paper between sequential rollers and feeds without turning them into mangled, charred remains on something like a 1-in-10 scale.

The Russian tank at least has better numbers on survivability. If only just.

A single electronic file can be duplicated infinitely and endlessly to any user with access to a shared space. Point of note, for those late to the party: the Internet is one big shared space. The so-called "Cloud" is not unlike what we've all been doing since 1995.

Everything that once made hardcopy superior is quickly decaying away. Sit down with a Word document sometime and make notes to yourself in the margin, highlight key passages and even draw a funny picture to waste time. Now try to copy and paste on a piece of paper.

Advantage: electron.

Do I deny that there is intrinsic value to having paper hardcopy on occasion? No. But I want it to become the outlier. The opt-in. The exception. You want a paper copy? Buy yourself a little desktop printer (that you install and maintain yourself, because weird is not supported) and print out a copy to take with you.

My hope, my dream, is that some day and some day soon my fellow technicians will never again have to ask someone if this is the Photosmart or the Photojet printer, if they still have a dedicated fax line or where in the depths of this rube-golbergian monstrosity has the photocopy of their boss' butt gone AWOL.

That is my dream, brothers and sisters. To break the hold of the ink-makers and copier-fixers. To remove the need for a second line just to send electronic mail, like we did 15 years ago when we moved away from dial-up. My dream is to limit our computer problems to the simple and critical venue of widely available software and basic networking issues.

And then take the copier out into an open field. With a club. And end it.

Accessibility

2011-08-15T22:25:00.000-04:00

I used to think it was an illusion that things were getting easier in the technological world. "Easier," in and of itself, is such a subjective term that it can rarely be applied to anything with any widespread confidence.

Compound that with the infinite customizability of a coded world, where knowledge attained over a few weeks of trial and error is enough to build monuments of virtual achievement without even needing any physical mobility below the neck, and you wonder how things can actually be anything less than overwhelmingly more complicated.

We'll get back to that last visual in a bit.

A brief lesson in the history of accessibility of technology, for those of the Facebook generation:

First, there was UseNet, IRC and MUDs. Farmville has nothing on the seductive power of "get ye flask" and the mindless hours spent wandering dark ASCII halls in search of the Helm of Power and similar time-wasting endeavors.

The Internet was one thin little tube you could only connect to through Telnet and a phone line.

Now, ten clicks and a free Wordpress hosting account gets you a website better than 16 years' worth of web design could have mustered five years ago.

...Scratch that. Three clicks.

Now, everything from calculators to espresso machines automatically connects to wireless networks at every gas station, coffee shop and two-bit antique store from here to Pokipsy, so you can access, update or even build your three-click PHP-laden website from anywhere all the time without so much as an ipconfig.

So yes, I feel confident saying things are easier now.

Now move past ease of use and into an entirely different meaning of accessibility. Open-source has made practically any software on the planet available for cheap or free, and with the guts out for everyone to see, anyone can make anything of it they want without having to start from scratch.

The Age of Transparency, heralded by every angle of social media and, ironically, groups like Anonymous, also applies to the open-door policy of modern crowd-driven software.

A seven-year-old with a spotty satellite connection somewhere halfway across the world from so-called "Western privilege" can be the next Bill Gates if she has the time and dedication to build on the foundation of her peers. She doesn't even need working limbs. Or sight. Or hearing.

That is accessibility.

So yes, I think technology is becoming easier.

Which is why, when someone complains that it takes three clicks instead of one to set up a website with more features than the entirety of the 'net boasted not ten years before, you'll forgive me if I lack sympathy.

But hey, there's a seven-year-old in Ghana you might want to talk to...

Legacy

2011-08-02T11:57:00.000-04:00

Okay, now I am officially peeved.

Before I explain, I think it's important you all know that I don't typically get truly upset until certain indelible lines are crossed; the most consistent of which being the treatment of part-time staff who are, quite simply, not paid enough to put up with unnecessary attitude when they are genuinely trying to help you.

When you couple that with mathematically unreasonable expectations, poor planning and an irrational distaste for remedial technical tasks, it's safe to say my temperature rises just a bit.

A little backstory: three years ago, we discovered that our main content management system was going the way of the dodo, by which I mean charging recklessly off a cliff with its eyes closed while flapping its wings in vain defiance of evolution's clear disapproval.

Two and a half years ago, we started telling people that the system was going away. A new system was installed in its infancy so that the two might run parallel during the transitional period, allowing our users to become acquainted with the new system while actively teaching through the old to avoid any painful interruption of course content delivery mid-semester.

Just over two years ago, we began an assisted migration program to convert and copy all requested sections from the old system to the new, bridging a gap that involved not only shifting the codebase but in fact the very layout and design of their course sites.

We did this for free, in addition to our regular duties, which had already begun to escalate separately given that we were now running twice as many systems, one of which had yet to shed its proverbial egg teeth.

Every semester since we have broadcast communications of the coming endtimes for the aging system and the need to migrate or be claimed by the coming comet. Then, as a final, quiet gesture, we grabbed as many of the most recent snapshots as we could and hid them in the virtual equivalent of a bomb shelter in hopes they might survive.

And now, almost two months after the skies turned red and the ground opened up to swallow the once-great behemoth now long past its time, someone has wandered onto our plane and wondered aloud: "where the hell is my stuff??"

I've no quarrel with someone asking gingerly "is there a chance, perhaps, maybe, you might have saved some tiny, charred remains of my content on the off-chance I would come asking for it long past the appropriate time?" That is the reasonable desperate plea of someone with enough self-awareness to understand roughly what it is they're asking.

"Can you please de-nuke my neighborhood?" would also have been acceptable.

What I find instead reprehensible is to knock on the door of that bomb shelter and demand, in no uncertain terms, the immediate restoration of all your personal effects to the state they were in previously, down to the last little slight-off-center painting of a clown in your front foyer.

The expectation of legacy information; that we will continue hosting, archiving, storing, running, updating or providing things long past a publicly-stated "no mas" date is becoming so widespread that there's hardly a distinction between production and legacy in many of our regular data havens anymore.

We could argue that that is a good thing, that infinite backwards compatibility is something to strive for. I largely agree, but I also realize that the resources required to maintain that sort of structure (most of them being human) are simply not realistic for every organization at this point in our computer evolution.

Perhaps I'm glad, in part, that we've instilled such confidence in our users that they believe we can bring Lazarus himself back from a small .bak file smelling minty fresh and ready to go home to his wife. But just because someone is occasionally capable of miracles doesn't mean it's right to expect it as the norm. Otherwise you put the fish and bread guys out of business.

...Okay, I may have carried that analogy one step too far. Let me back up:

When an old system or service is retired, found obsolete and otherwise shelved, efforts are typically made to garner what can be saved and migrate it to the new, hopefully shinier alternative so that the end user experiences as little interruption as possible.

If an organization, being finite in size and resources, is unable to migrate 100% of the existing content (which may contain years' worth of archived data), and instead offers an automated request system to help streamline the necessary conversion, that should surprise no one.

If, in addition, regular notifications are made to the entire userbase over a two-year span, linking to the migration request system, and a given user somehow misses the recurrent memo, that's to be expected. If that self-same user later asks that an exception be made if at all possible, most support personnel are at least willing to give it the old college try.

It's when that user, having summarily ignored multiple warnings like the townsfolk of some ancient fairy tale, arrives half-eaten by wolves to demand that someone recover his lower half and other missing extremities at once (with the tacit implication that it is, in fact, "all their fault"), I find my sympathies waning rather rapidly, and something altogether darker taking their place.

Even in the tech world (perhaps especially in the tech world), things fade and die. It's tragic at times; at other times, celebrated; but always necessary as part of the larger system. It's often quick, as our world is fast becoming all around, but rarely without warning.

It's natural for us to want to hold onto precious things, to cling to the relics of our past. Antiquity lends an intrinsic value to the small, unremarkable nothings of our daily lives; one many of us would consider worth fighting for.

But this is not grandmother's ashes we're arguing over here; no ancient tomb filled with treasures of a forgotten kingdom. This is data, pure and simple; nearly all of it younger than ourselves, and much of it younger than our iPhones and netbooks. When something is too new to be old enough to be cherished, do you know what they call it?

Obsolete. "No longer of use."

So why are we fighting so hard to recover it in the first place?

Independence

2011-07-28T11:16:00.000-04:00

It's not unusual for people to resist change, even when everything they're presented with as fact has overwhelmingly positive implications. In fact, it's downright common.

So when I see managers warring against or slapping draconian restrictions upon the concept of telecommuting for a modern, connected workforce, I'm not exactly surprised.

I am, however, pissed.

Leaving aside for a moment the issue of employee trust and the many dark implications on both sides of that particular debate that prevent us from even having it in any forum where it might be appropriate, the notion of a remote workforce is older than the Internet by hundreds and hundreds of years.

Anyone who manages salesmen, truckers, off-shore oil rigs, international business, interstate business or, naturally, telecommunications knows that people have been working well out of sight of their direct supervisors since the Roman Empire.

If the upper management of the Pony Express had been this insistent on "face time," the riders never would've made it out of the stables.

The simple truth is that employers have been finding ways to manage people remotely for over a thousand years. It's time that modern managers learn that, if your workforce isn't working well remotely, the problem isn't them.

It's you.

Let's analyze the fading limitations here: broadband Internet now comes on an OS-independent USB key for a reasonable monthly fee. Consider the cost savings of not needing to find, create, lease or power a physical facility for your employees, and sudden that little USB key and perhaps even the laptop attached to it begin to look like a steal.

Now consider how much more attractive your offerings became: your employees don't have to war with traffic every day, or fight with a drab cubicle environment or that guy three offices down who whistles all the time. You can hire people living in literally any country on the planet and they don't even have to move.

Hell, you can hire someone who owns neither a house nor a car, rents no apartment and whose only known address is a P.O. box in a state they haven't visited in nine years, just so they can pay taxes. This is an actual thing which has happened.

Then, of course, there are the objections: people working remotely are lazy and distracted, their lives come before their jobs and they won't be nearly as efficient or professional as they would be in khakis and a button-down, crammed into a small, fixed, borrowed space with buzzing fluorescent lights and poor temperature management.

I want you to read that last piece again, carefully, and see if you already know what the problem is with this outdated mode of thinking.

The chief complaint I hear from managers considering allowing their workers to work remotely is that their workers will goof off instead of doing their work. I have news for you: they do that at the office, too. Here's another newsflash: it probably helps them be more productive.

Poll your workforce, and I imagine you'll learn one other interesting fact: many of them feel more guilty about goofing off while sitting on their couch in their PJs than they do at the office, where it's a legitimized escape from the norm.

The second complaint tends to tie to measuring work performance. Managers believe that if their workers never come into the office, there's no way to gauge whether or not their working.

I ask you this: what industry are you working in that you can't tell if you're workers are working? In what job is doing nothing legitimately invisible to the larger product or service being developed? How are you not already tracking this? And if you are, why are your tracking systems not online-accessible?

If you can't tell if your employees are working except by wandering by their cube like some whip-brandishing overseer, you're already doing it wrong. There is nothing you can tell from glancing over your employee's shoulder that you can't more accurately glean from proper reporting.

The truth is, you actually get a lot less looking over their shoulder. There isn't a human being alive who doesn't know how to fake being busy. It only takes slightly more knowledge to alt-tab away from your active Netflix stream just in time to show the boss-man your very fancy-looking spreadsheet of random figures than it does to use Facebook on a regular basis.

...which they're probably also doing, regularly, just before you poke your head in to check on them.

Nothing about working remotely changes this.

If your product is such that it can be crafted, managed or provided online, there is no reason not to let your workforce telecommute. Worried about team-building? Get them onto Skype (or better yet, a Google+ hang-out). Invest in WebEx. Hell, buy them a World of Warcraft subscription and form an after-hours raid group.

That way if they're suddenly 10 levels higher the next evening, you know why they're behind on their latest sales figures.

The real problem that arises when shifting to an online workforce is that it dispels the illusion that creating the trappings of professionalism inspires people to be more professional, and thus productive.

In reality, people are often just as willing to work in comfortable clothes at home as they are in a cubicle in a tie, and that goes both ways:

Your dedicated workers who genuinely believe in what they're doing will have no problem adjusting to a home office environment (and may in fact become much more efficient when they can merge their personal productivity habits with their professional work space), and your wage-only workers will be just as inefficient out of the office without the added aid of being able to "look" busy.

The only thing that really changes when you switch to a remote workforce is that your own management skills become the driving force of your unit's success, not some ambient notion that "office = work." Your processes and policies will be tested, and you will soon learn if the organization you have created is complete, or has simply been puttying in the gaps for years.

Without the illusion of a looming office watchman, your workforce will be allowed to prove whether they genuinely care about the job, the work, the product or the service, or if they're instead dedicated purely to getting away with doing as little as possible. If they all fall into the latter group, perhaps it's time to reconsider how exactly you've been inspiring your workers to care thusfar.

And if, in fact, you ever bothered trying to in the first place.

It's no different than parents who blame TV, video games and even school administrators for their misbehaving children. The productivity of your workforce is your responsibility, not the cubicle's. If you're not doing your job, all those fuzzy grey walls are going to do is hide you from the problem, like a five-year-old covering her eyes to play hide-and-seek.

Do your job, and you should have no problem trusting your employees to do theirs.

Now if you'll excuse me, these letters aren't going to deliver themselves.

Newsday

2011-07-20T10:38:00.000-04:00

It's not often I'm glad I missed a deadline, but had I posted the Rant on time yesterday, I would have missed out on the chance to chime in on the Murdoch pie-face incident and the irony of its exposure to the masses.

And that would just be criminal.

For those who weren't watching, Rupert Murdoch began testifying at a hearing yesterday regarding the phone hacking incidents recently uncovered surrounding the News of the World tabloid, one of his many subsidiaries. If this is, as they say, "news to you," I recommend the following two sites to get you caught up quickly.

[To be clear, you needn't know a thing about the recent scandal to either a) question Mr. Murdoch's ethics or b) enjoy a story about a man getting a pie to the face, but the scandal does have some serious implications as far as electronic privacy is concerned in the field of modern journalism, so I suggest you at least give it a skim.]

So to return to the point, during the hearing (in which Mr. Murdoch did a stunning impersonation of our 42nd president), a protester under the effortlessly-apropos moniker "Jonnie Marbles" stormed the hearing and threw a pie tin filled with shaving cream at Mr. Murdoch's face before being summarily dispatched by his wife, Wendi (a little-known master of the Five-Part Palm Exploding Heart Technique).

Appropriately, the hearing about an unfettered tabloid now richly resembles one of its outlandish articles. Next up, "Bat Boy Assaulted with Wiffle Bat."

Naturally, the global social network was abuzz faster than you can say "slapstick" with talk of what was quickly becoming known as "#piegate." Speculation ran rampant about the contents of the pie and Wendi Murdoch's history in the martial arts, leaving behind all talk of the scandal itself and the questionable practices of the News of the World staff and its many compatriots.

It was even speculated that Murdoch himself may have arranged the pie-flinging incident to cut short the proceedings before he could risk endangering himself with something resembling a straight answer. Sadly, it would not be the strangest thing done this year to avoid open debate.

Also in the news, Aaron Schwartz was indicted yesterday for hacking JSTOR, a massive online journal repository, and stealing nearly 4 million articles.

Interestingly, Mr. Schwartz used legal guest accounts to access the articles that he had paid to access, so the use of both "hacking" and "stealing" in many reports regarding the incident have come under some justified scrutiny.

Perhaps more interestingly, Mr. Schwartz returned all the articles to JSTOR and assured them that he had no plans to release them publicly, at which point JSTOR (the victim in this case) promptly dropped the charges. Apparently, the FBI didn't get the memo.

What makes this interesting is Mr. Schwartz's involvement with DemandProgress.org, a politically-charged rallying site centered largely around leveraging public support (or, more often, public protest) to affect ongoing legislation, especially as it relates to Internet policy and electronic rights.

The current penalty stands at 35 years in prison for downloading articles en masse and then returning them. Apparently, the FBI is taking the Save the Libraries campaign very, very seriously.

What's irksome to me is the degree to which this has illustrated just how much understanding we, as a population, lack when it comes to what actually constitutes computer crime.

We've been reminded all too often how little the individual end-user understands about their virtual rights, especially with regard to privacy, and a number of critical issues with regard to setting a nationwide Internet policy have gotten lost in the dust of your average newsday, despite being perhaps some of the most important legislation of our time.

Issues like Net Neutrality could determine the future of the online world in America for generations to come, and yet most of us are too busy focusing on how nifty Google+ is or what was in Rupert Murdoch's face-pie to notice.

The only thing keeping The Land of the Free from turning into the next Great Firewall state are the laws being slipped under the radar of common opinion. With luck, those enjoying the recent hubbub of yesterday's exciting newsday will pause long enough to notice the very serious implications of the hilariously ridiculous headlines passing them by.

Because that's what news is supposed to do.

Plus-Sized

2011-07-11T23:06:00.001-04:00

Google+ is well underway in trying to undermine the Facebook phenomenon with yet another crisper, cleaner, some might say more noble version of an a system so popular it's become ingrained in our social DNA. And yet, thusfar, the react has been a lot more mixed that Google reps might have expected.

The circumference-happy system has been met with less "ooo" and "ahh" and notably more "...huh" than its developers likely forecast.

While there's little mistaking their intentions (to replace an addictive social media platform run by a demented sociopath with one run by many well-meaning and adorably awkward demented sociopaths), the Facebook replacement has scene a virtual landslide of status updates already during its brief beta run all echoing the same muddled murmur: "what the hell is the point of this thing, anyway?"

The question is a curious one: since Google+ merely streamlined the social media system the way they have done with so many other hallmark systems up to this point, why are its early adopters confused?

The outcry for a Facebook-that-isn't-Facebook (or a Zuckerberg-free networking sight not run by chatty blue birds) seemed so substantial that it's hard to believe one couldn't sell the virtual equivalent of an empty cardboard box with the words "Not Facebook" written on the side. Yet the largely "meh" response leads one to wonder what Google is doing wrong.

If you examine the all-too-easy interface and front-and-center privacy settings, it's hard to find any feature that isn't in direct response to the outrage against their major competitor. As ever, Google heard the cry of the masses and stepped in to create something everyone said they wanted and needed so badly.

And now they have.

So what went wrong? It's hard to say for certain that anything has. Google+ is far from a failure yet, and once the doors open wide chances are good that Facebook will finally see a noticeable drop in their familiar Farmville faces as an exodus of sorts begins. Yet the initial assessment seems to suggest that the exodus will either be short-lived or largely anemic in nature.

Why? Because this time, Google they did their job too well.

The interface and environment wrapped around Google+ are so crisp, so clean that there's little room for clutter, noise and distraction. There are no labyrinthine mires of account settings or aggressive ad campaigns to scare you down the narrow channel of your news feed. The games and other mindless deviations are absent or still in the works, meaning the only thing left to do on Google+ is connect with people and keep each other updated.

Which has left everyone asking "what's the point?"

Google should consider this not a commentary on the system they've devised, but on the real purpose of Facebook and why it has such a vicegrip on the soul of its userbase. No one on Facebook cares if you had the best sushi of your life last night. No one on Facebook cares that your relationship is "Complicated."

All they care about is if you can give them 10 more golden rubies so they can complete the set and move on to the next mindless time-waster.

Status updates, micronews and other trends have all moved to the Twitterverse, where people keep up with the bite-sized nuggets of the world they want to see. People looking to establish a decent profile of themselves and their accomplishments all buggered off to LinkedIn, and anyone with more than 140 characters' worth of personal details to share is over on Tumblr.

Facebook, by contrast, is one part kegger, four parts Tetris and two parts dive bar. It's like an online community of PacMan aficionados all racing to be the best at doing anything but their day job. Google+ is trying to bring the original purpose back to the site, leaving users of the classic tripe-deluged system boggling for what to do with themselves.

It would be like if someone went to a frat party and collected all the beer, replacing it with cool, clear spring water. Sure, it's healthier, safer, cleaner and you won't embarrass yourself singing Journey at top volume tearfully to your ex, but now suddenly there's nothing to do at the party but play Parcheesi and eat hors d'oeurves.

Woo. Yay. Roquefort.

Google's devs no doubt believed the very hype they were hearing: that people wanted a fluff-free social networking experience with no limits, no ads, no games, just pure and simple connections between people.

Except they forgot one thing: left to their own devices, people can be really, really boring.

Do I think Google+ will flounder? No, at least not for a while. The novelty of it coupled with the good faith Google has gained for itself in all its past ventures (with the possible exceptions of Google Buzz and Google Wave, both of whom seem most keenly relevant here) will sustain it for a while regardless of any other intrinsic merit.

But do I think Google+ will be the death of Facebook? Hardly. Facebook is not the MySpace or LiveJournal titan braced on a giving user's a unique opportunity for expression (or a self-sustaining community of people who really like to bitch about first-world problems).

Facebook is no less than an online casino, with all the glittery lights and happy pinball jingles that entails. Farmville is little more than a rollercoaster through a hotel: pointless, but people will fly thousands of miles just to try it out.

Google+ may have more class, but without a little glitz and tinsel, they're far from topping the shameless online Vegas that is Zuckerberg's behemoth.

Answering the Call

2011-06-28T00:01:00.001-04:00

It's possible I'm waxing a little too sentimental lately about genuine effort in the tech industry, but when you're actively enjoying watching things work like they damn well should, it's a little difficult not to tear up.

Especially when you've seen what it looks like everywhere else.

On-call is no exception. If you've never had the onus of being an on-call technician, you probably labor under the delusion that the workday is a set frame of time, carved into semi-regular shifts or scheduled blocks, the limits of which are already defined when you show up at the office.

You may even be so daring as to believe in the concept of a work-week, a roughly Monday-Friday span with a separate weekend nob on the end like some sort of chasm in which one might find shelter from the weather on the exposed bluff of the average weekday.

Naturally, there are second- and third-shifters, there are weekend-workers, temps, contractors and the like, all of whom deviate to some degree from the "normal" nine-to-five, Monday-Friday sprawl. But there are few positions that have quiet the same schedule as the on-call technician.

The trouble with the nature of on-call technicians is that unlike, say, professional writers or artists, whose workday is a nebulous thing subject to some adolescent notion of a "muse," on-call technicians have scheduled hours. They may not be nine-to-five, but they often wind up working a regular 40-hour week, planned, on paper.

Which sounds just dandy.

Until, of course, you realize that on-call involves that one can be called upon at any hour, any day, in any time zone, on any calendar and on any planet where one might find oneself when something someone cares about catches on fire.

Now we have two paradoxical notions: a standard, 40-hour work-week, and a nebulous, always-on span of time, wherein one's "muse" is typically a hysterical end-user who happens to have the personal email address of your boss' boss' boss.

And we're going to glue these two things together and call it "fun."

Stretch your imagination for a moment and consider what it's like to never have an "off" minute. Imagine every moment of your free time is subject to the sound of a beeping pager. Imagine that you have to reconsider every engagement, from a weekend matinee with friends to driving three hours to visit your in-laws.

Imagine pulling over to the side of a dark Virginia highway at 11:17 at night, halfway to your parents' house, already having missed Thanksgiving due to a server reboot that took three times as long as you expected, only to pull out a laptop, plug in the little network dongle and pray for signal so that you can troubleshoot a new problem before the midnight cron that is threatening to eat two years' worth of data across your entire userbase.

Now imagine that's you, all the time.

Because once it happens once, every engagement comes with a fear that this will be the day, the hour, the minute that someone chooses to explode entirely of its own accord; when the shortcut your colleague took when they were last on-call (because it was 4am and, dammit, they wanted sleep) will pick this exactly sliver of time to double-back on itself and make your life miserable.

And that, astoundingly, isn't the worst part.

On-call technicians aren't builders. They aren't the people designing and engineering new ways for things to be. They aren't the efficiency whiz-kids making everything run on Green energy and magical pixie dust. Rather, they are, but nobody knows it...

...because you're all asleep, like normal people.

On-call technicians show up when something disastrous is happening. When people are panicked and frantic and no one is available to help them. I work in tech support at a nine-to-five shop, which means when the crap hits the after-hours fan, I'm knee-deep in dreamland while our on-call techs are getting screamed at by people I won't even know exist till Monday morning.

On-call technicians are like the mailman who stumbled onto a crime scene: everyone who happens by assumes they must have something to do with it. Computers, like economies, only occasionally respond to immediate action. Much of the time, when they fail, it's due to something someone did days, weeks or years in the past.

Somewhere, a butterfly beats its wings. Miles away, a server rack chokes on a core firmware update.

So the on-call technician, by virtue of being the only person available to be screamed at at 3:00 in the morning, becomes not a hero but a scapecoat; a strawman villain catching flack for being the only person willing to fix the problem while the fires are still burning.

And now the heart-breaking part: if an on-call technician does their job well, does it right, you will never, ever know they exist. When your grandest aspiration is to be a ghost, there isn't much drive to excel. You have to be a wholly dedicated individual who just loves making things not break for other people while your own life gets carved up into a mess of random oh-what-broke-now bits as a result.

So if you ever wonder why I get sentimental about actual dedication in tech support, I think of our on-call technicians, and how glad I am that they're there.

And that I'm not one myself.

Fools Rush In

2011-06-23T16:52:00.001-04:00

"Why do you do it?" a friend asked me today after a hurried appraisal of the first few hours of my shift and the open melee they had become.

I've written almost 9,000 words today, every one of them in response to an end-user's email. I found solutions for four problems I had never before seen in my life. I saved an instructor 36 hours of work with about three minutes of my time. All in all, it's been a good day.

It's not the first time I've been asked "why do you do it?", although the question most people lead with is "how?"

Anyone who gets to watch a tech support technician support someone else is in for true entertainment, doubly so in the arena of phone support. It's a silent opera of despair and abject disbelief as the technician tries to envision exactly how to help the person on the other line dig themselves out of the hole they're in with what amounts to a toothpick and a piece of string.

How we do it involves a healthy degree of binary operation. We work our way one slow step at a time through the long mental flowchart of our experience. Is it the browser, or the network? Is it the server, or the client? Is it the user, or the system?

It's a hunt to try and track down the nameless offender and untangle the knot it's made before any more damage can be done. Typically, it's just a matter of following the path of carnage. It's one part experience and one part educated guess-work. If you ever call tech support and find they're asking more questions than you are, you're in the right place. Stay on the line.

But why do we do it? There's not as much glamour in tech support as there is in, say, being an E.R. technician (though there's generally less blood and goopy bits, too). It's not like being a fire fighter. When someone tells you they work in tech support, you envision a human gargatua surrounded by Twinkies and Star Wars merchandise. No one does a charity calendar for sys admins.

In retrospect, that's probably a good thing.

So why do it? Because each day I get to make someone's life go from "oh my god my head is on fire" to "oh.......that was easy."

And then I hang up and do it again.

I avert disasters, which isn't to say I could contend with fire fighters, E.R. staff or your average epidemiologist, but virtual disasters, data disasters, are more than simply "I can't get to my pictures of adorable cats." So much of what we do is virtual anymore it's a wonder more devices don't come with a little map on the side pointing to the nearest Esc key.

We labor under the illusion that computers are becoming an innate thing, most of all for the youngest generation, but the truth is that the average person knows about as much about their computer as they do the engine on their car: you figure out the two things you feel comfortable enough touching and leave the rest to the professionals.

Nevermind that cars are beginning to resemble computers more and more.

If it's not Facebook or Angry Birds, most people will struggle with the average tech issue. The number of businesses that would be crippled without a reliable network, data backups and online presence is staggering.

Students as early as the first grade are relying on online assets to assist in their classwork. The permission slips we once stuffed haphazardly into our Transformers backpacks are now online web forms and downloadable PDFs. Public schools are latching onto open-source content management systems for hosting entire curriculae online.

Hospitals, scientists, the military, everyone is coming to rely in no insubstantial way on technology working like it should, all day, every day. Technology, meanwhile, continues bolting forward in the ongoing arms race to be better than the other guy, leaving massive gaps in reliability and user education.

Which means I am the finger in the dike of your whole electronic world crashing down around you and washing away all that you hold dear.

That is why I do my job. Because in my own tiny little way, I get to save somebody's day every day. It may not be someone I know, it may not be someone I like. Heck, it may be someone I outright loathe. It doesn't matter. I get to save somebody's day, and I rarely even have to leave my desk to do it.

And that deserves a Twinkie.

Blech

2011-06-21T20:56:00.000-04:00

No rant today, as I have apparently come down with some form of plague.

I've spent about four hours awake all day, and most of that went to work and scrounging for food. I have a topic (two, actually), and will try to get something online later this week (hopefully, Thursday).

For now, the cats are demanding I go back to bed and finish recovering. Be good. I'll see you all on Thursday.

Committeed Off

2011-06-14T18:26:00.000-04:00

I shouldn't hate committees.

Really, there's no reason for it. Committees, especially approval committees, are typically collections of peers often from varied backgrounds gathered together to help guide a common cause. You know, like a democratically-elected representative government. What could possibly go wrong with-- oh, wait.

I support government of the people, by the people, to the very core of my being, but that doesn't stop me from coming to the difficult and painful realization that, sometimes, "the people" are petty, inefficient, self-interested, short-sighted, or altogether the worst people to get the job done.

With the migration to a new system, there's been a brief period of relative liberty, a sort of Wild West of policy, wherein we've been free to make new improvements to the existing system as the need for them arises.

Hard as it is to admit, that has been a very bad thing.

Generally speaking, taking the long view is the best policy when it comes to, well, policy. But there's another four-letter word that often comes with ideas like "the long view."

"Slow."

When you sit on a help desk day in and day out, it can be difficult to maintain and unjaded opinion on the current state of things: you're likely either to side with your clients, insisting that, yes, dammit, the system should be able to fart unicorns on command; or else take up arms against them, decrying even reasonable objections as "ridiculous" and even "whiny."

That sort of warped perspective makes it difficult to shift rapidly from a free-wheeling fix-what's-on-fire mode of operation to the proper and practical method of filtering everything through a myriad set of minds until they've exhausted every possible objection to the proposed changes.

It's like coming off a desert highway in Nevada and finding yourself stuck behind a school bus in suburbia. The bus is essential, as are the laws that protect the children inside it; that doesn't necessarily stop you from hitting your head against the wheel in aggravation.

It's not to say that committees can't react quickly to a changing environment, but the best and worst thing about a diverse group of people designed to discuss the possible problems with a given venture is that they will no doubt uncover dozens if not hundreds of concerns, each one must be uniquely addressed before the product or feature can move forward.

This is a good thing.

It can also be incredibly frustrating when you're the one sitting on the so-called "front lines" having to explain to people that, no, the feature they've been asking for for almost a year isn't ready yet because someone somewhere believes someone might enter the exact arcane combination that makes their keyboard explode.

Back to the issue of losing perspective.

All we can do is be sure that said committees are well informed of what the client base are ravenously requesting, track and keep ourselves abreast of how many people are actually wanting a new feature (not just how loud they are), and keep the clients aware 1) that they've been heard, 2) that their concerns are being considered, and 3) how long development, approval and testing actually takes in a real-world environment.

Then, perhaps hardest of all, we have to leave the committees to their work, the coders to theirs, the testers to theirs, and trust that when it's all done, the unicorn that gets farted out the other end will be the prettiest, most magical, most stable unicorn of them all.

Clear and Present Danger

2011-06-07T00:39:00.001-04:00

There's so much, I hardly know where to begin-- oh wait, there we go:

After this year's WWDC keynote, Apple can put another notch on the bedpost of its quest to piss off almost everyone by replacing valuable, free and available services with limited, exclusive and expensive ones that people will pay through the nose for.

Because people are idiots.

The federal government released new standards for for-profit educational institutions like the University of Phoenix. The regulations were meant to ensure that graduates from these institutions would be just as prepared for the workplace as their counterparts from traditional university. The overwhelming looseness and general lack of guidance provided by these regulations will go to ensure that that is the case.

With embarrassing Twitter pictures being used as fodder for slander, the reliance on the media to help us mock public figures for what we ourselves have likely already done on Facebook in front of dozens of close friends and relatives is now that much more reduced. Strangely, this is probably a good thing.

At least now we can decide for ourselves what to be petty and judgemental about.

Two major browser upgrades inside of a month have been causing all manner of havoc for tech support and web devs alike. All we need now is for Google to-- oh, wait, there they go.

At E3 this year, Sony announced the onset of voice-activated gaming, which marks at least the second time Sony has arrived late to the party carrying a box of wine.

In their effort to help the Green initiative, SciFi (no, that's not a misspelling) has recycled yet more of its actors into new shows. Most noticeable this iteration is Amanda Tapping, the formerly blond, formerly American Sam Carter of SG-1 is now a long-haired British brunette on Sanctuary.

Other than that, the shows are about the same.

Next we fully expect to see Richard Dean Anderson return as a fat, retired marine unwilling to speak about the tragedy of his-- oh, wait, there we go.

With all we pride ourselves on the power of the Internet and the value of free information, there will never be a fraction as much noble purpose in all these many and varied tubes as there are cute cat pictures, bizarre fetish porn or spam emails about penis enhancement.

Guess which of these history is most likely to remember, then think about what we don't know about our ancestors. Who's to say John Adams didn't annoy his friends by painting a face on an orange and making annoying sounds?

He certainly seems to fit the profile...

Goodnight, everybody!

FPS vs. RPG, QED

2011-06-02T14:35:00.001-04:00

I performed an experiment recently entirely by accident.

Late last year, I received a copy of Modern Warfare 2, one of the more acclaimed titles in the genre of military fiction where first-person shooters are concerned (although there's so damned many of the things these days, it's a wonder they haven't started calling it "Madden Warfare.")

Around the same time, spurned by the endless Internet chatter regarding the game, my girlfriend picked up a copy of Dragon Age: Origins. Zevran's voice-actor may have played a pivotal role in this decision, as did the promise of dirty man-sex down by the campfire.

Clearly, this is a woman of simple pleasures.

The confluence of these two titles might seem perfectly harmless and altogether reasonable: they are both flagship products of their respective genres and are largely and widely enjoyed by a variety of end users.

What struck me is just how various said variety may well not be. Let me explain...

In the long summer of video gaming evolution, when there was more than one but still fewer than three consoles and PCs were the dominant driving force, first person shooters and role-playing games tended to host the most differentiated populace.

FPSs catered to high-impact "twitch" gamers who enjoyed the real-world skill involved in near-immediate reactions and precision aiming. Story was often (if not always) an afterthought: all a game required was an intriguing array of weaponry and complex, multi-dimensional levels.

RPGs, by contrast, were typically slower and turn-based, allowing the strategic mind time to construct an intricate plan of attack spanning minutes or more to combat a singular enemy. Story was paramount, and no amount of interesting gameplay could make up for a deficiency in the writing (or, as it more often was, the translation).

As a result, many gamers set themselves in one camp or the other. RPGs catered to one type of mind, FPSs another of an entirely different sort. Much like the gender wars, story versus synapses became a dividing line between the strongest mindsets of the industry.

Now, it seems, that line is fading.

For those who haven't experienced it, Modern Warfare 2 (along with several similar titles) plays more like a movie than a game. As you run through the levels trying desperately to stay alive, the environment shifts around you, evolving constantly and keeping anything from feeling like a static map to be run into the ground from constant replay.

Dialog peppers even the heaviest fighting, cluing you into the personalities and motives of both allies and enemies and altogether crafting an immersive narrative that unfolds around you while you cry havoc and toss another flashbang in the air.

At the same time, games like Dragon Age are taking on a more active turn-less style of interaction, allowing for finely controlled squad combat in real time that lets the gamer pause long enough to decide what they want to do and then let fly and see what happens.

The sense of timing is becoming uniform, the pacing and level of depth beginning to coincide. Two of the most distant corners of conventional console gaming have flowed together into a single hodgepodge that's making it more and more difficult to classify the type of game by anything more than the semantics of camera perspective.

Naturally, there will always be room for mindless shooters and turn-based old-school RPGs, but I can't say I mind the direction games on the whole seem to be taking towards this narrower middle ground that mixes both elements without losing either piece entirely.

All that remains is to see if any other genres start to blend into the mix. The same mechanics used to managed a football team could easily be scripted for a small army in battle. Motion-gaming devices could make use of the Angry Birds pull-and-loose technique for arching projectiles or siege weaponry. Cracking security on the door of an enemy compound could quick become a small game of Bejeweled. The possibilities are endless.

...And also terrifying.

Still, the common trending in arguably the two most popular console gaming genres means we can expect more and more good stuff (or at least, more stuff, of which some percentage may be "good") from some very unsuspecting sources, or perhaps from the early believers in such a franken-genre world.

I'm looking at you, Valve.

Short Answer

2011-05-24T14:40:00.001-04:00

I have a small mental exercise for everyone:

Imagine you are in a house full of nice things. Maybe these things are yours. Maybe they belong to someone else. It matters not.

You walk into a room. What room? It's irrelevant, but in this room are many nice things set atop of other things. In this room are vases, or perhaps precious statues. Urns full of grandmother's ashes. Valuable things. Fragile things.

One of these things, it doesn't matter which, falls over. Sailing with all the grace of a porcelain brick, it collides with the hardwood and shatters, casting the shards of its former self to the four corners of the room.

Now say that you are the one who knocked it over.

You may not know this yet. Perhaps your arms were full and you bumped the precious thing with your elbow. Perhaps the lights were off in the room and you stumbled in the dark. Perhaps you leaned back too far in your chair and bumped the end table by mistake. It hardly matters. The item is still broken.

What is your first thought?

If you answered "get a broom, sweep up the pieces, and go on about my day," there's a good chance you only call customer service after first trying to fix your own problems. If so, get up from your computer, and go snuggle a puppy. You've earned it.

If instead your reaction is to curse, roll your eyes and perhaps even stomp about, raging at the unseen hands of fate that swooped in to unseat the precious thing from its place, dashing it to pieces with their callous disdain for the sole purpose of ruining your day, then read on. This next bit is for you.

Let's assume that the vase was not a vase but an urn, one containing your fiancee's grandmother's ashes. It is a precious thing, and the longer said ashes remain clumped upon the floor, the more chance the cat will get into them, and no one wants to know where that road will end.

The urn is shattered, the ashes scattered, and you are no expert in ceramics nor do you own a kiln, ergo, you must call someone for help.

And now our analogy has come full circle.

Imagine that the urn is precious online data. Perhaps it's files, perhaps it's pieces of a site you've built, perhaps it's a site itself. And now, for whatever reason, it has been dashed upon the floor. It is broken, and the culprit, at least to you, remains a mystery.

Searching for the cause here is by no means a fool's errand: understanding why the urn broke helps you to avoid breaking others. Fixing it, however, should remain a higher priority.

When you call, what is your first question?

Are you curious about the effects of different types of glue? Are you interested in the location of the nearest pottery shop where you might buy a similar urn "on the cheap?" Or is your first thought: "my fiancee's grandmother is scattered about the floor and a little under the couch, I demand answers?"

If the latter, you have likely had at least one engagement with customer service which lasted 10 to 40 times as long as was necessary to solve the original problem.

You called to ask why you cannot log in, came to find that your browser had saved an older password, and then remained on the line while the technician attempted to explain how such internal storage features work, how they can be regularly cleansed and, perhaps, the entire design philosophy behind using a unified web code interpretation system in the first place.

Or, perhaps more likely, were transferred three times until you found yourself speaking to a hardware technician they buried in a server room some time in the 1970's who is now upset with you for interrupting his "daily constitutional."

Either way, the desire for an explanation has led you into dark corners in which no satisfaction is found, when the simple truth may be that urns, being fragile, do occasionally break; and that elbows, being awkward, pointy things, do occasionally knock them over; and further that you, having elbows, do occasionally break urns.

A sensible reaction is to be briefly put-out, and then to busy oneself in the effort of cleaning up the urn in the hopes that it can be repaired whilst storing dear grandma's ashes in a suitable alternative container.

The reaction we too often receive on the help desk is "that cannot be the only explanation!"

Which is true.

If you walk into a room swinging a baseball bat wildly about with your eyes closed and, upon opening them, discover that something is broken, it is entirely possible that you are not the cause. It is not likely, but it is possible.

Someone, seeing you in such a state, may have come in and knocked something over hoping that you will come to the obvious conclusion. It is also possible that the urn gained a form of sentience at that exact moment, enacted its will upon the universe and sprang from its resting place, crashing upon the floor in a violent displace of self-actualization.

It is also possible that Jesus did it. I'm told he can be kind of a jerk.

Knowing the truth definitively is not always an option. You may have been in the room alone at the time and had your eyes closed. Outside of our mythical perpetrator, there is no witness to the act that cast the urn from its shelf and onto the floor.

After a reasonable investigation into the likely causes, a sensible soul will accept this, and move on about their day.

Many of our clientele instead embark on a manhunt (or, more often, insist that we do so) in search of the mythical perpetrator, who may or may not be part of a larger conspiracy in which someone actively works to make their lives more difficult.

If that were a job, there would never be unemployment.

What's worse is that the most insistent crusaders are often ironically the very guilty party they so avidly seek to enact retribution upon. Like extras from the Twilight Zone, they raise torch and pitchfork high without ever considering the reflection of their own wrongdoings.

...which isn't to suggest that knocking over an urn is inherently wrong or bad. Elbows are, in fact, awkward and pointy things, and we too often get distracted and may not notice knocking something askew in the busy rush of our lives. There is no sin in that.

But searching for a villain when none exists, especially when you recruit for such a crusade, does stray into the edges of wrong-ness, and at the very least is a wonderful way to put a lot of worthy oxygen to waste.

To return to our analogy, when your instinct in the aftermath of error is to search for the cause to the exclusion of all else, you can go for days living in a house with broken shards scattered across the floor while your quest for answers continues. Many people will even cordon off the entire room, much like taping off a crime scene, so that the evidence is not disturbed.

It is a single-minded quest for justice. And it is almost unilaterally wrong.

When the pieces are picked up, when the urn is put back together and the floor has been dusted, then the quest for answers can begin. Then, there is no worry in a long and hardy search because grandma is back in her place and the room is clean and safe for feet again.

And that is our job. We put the urn back together, we help you sweep the rug, we even keep the cat out until all the shards have been accounted for. And when it's all said and done, if you would like us to try and piece together what happened, we are happy to do so.

Once we help this nice lady with her broken vase...

When It Breaks, It Pours

2011-05-16T23:21:00.000-04:00

They say that bad things always come in threes, and most people in the tech industry believe that that's the case.

For certain values of three.

Disaster loves company: it's rare that one thing malfunctions without others soon to follow, often completely unrelated to the original incident.

When one things breaks, be it software, server or network, it's as if it sends a cry out into the night, awakening its brethren to the common cause. The rebellion spreads like wildfire, coursing across the dry brush of your delicately-laid systems until you find yourself surrounded by red LEDs all chanting their silent song with one dissenting chorus.

If a webserver goes down, expect a database somewhere to follow. When a file is corrupted, expect it to contain access permissions for the entire volume. When a router drops more data than the Playstation Network...you get the idea. Things always cascade in the world of tech catastrophes.

It's enough to make one wonder if there isn't a larger matrix of correlation between these incidents. Oracles point to the alignment of planets while modern conspiracy theorists prefer to blame sunspots and still others seek answers in religious texts and spiritual augury.

I see it as a simple mathematical inevitability.

Computer systems, like our bodies, are subject to failure and injury. With maintenance, such "outages" are temporary and we recover largely on our own. But sooner or later, everyone starts falling apart just a little.

Typically we can trace it to the seasons. We get sick more often in winter. Allergies act up every spring. The summer simply exhausts us and leaves us devoid of energy. Each season has its perils, and the transition from one to another is often the least pleasant time of all.

Working on the assumption that computers operate on a shorter cycle than our given lives (an assumption based on both average processing speed, expected downtime and the sheer life expectancy of most hardware), these "seasons" could be as short as days or hours. Couple that with the stress of peak load times, and it's no surprise that one breakdown is rarely, if ever, alone.

So the next time you yell at your laptop for locking up when you have a deadline due (nevermind that the wireless has been flaky for the past hour and the email system no longer accepts the password you've been using for years), just imagine all those components sneezing, coughing or otherwise ill, and see if it doesn't cause you to hesitate just a tick before threatening to dismantle their bits and huck them into an all-consuming fire.

And if you find yourself saying "gesundheit" the next time you see a 500 error, you're already well on your way to a more understanding coexistence.

Sleep well, little servers. Get well soon.

The Malady of Apathy

2011-05-10T00:05:00.000-04:00

The worst part about working in customer service, bar none, is the slow disintegration of your ability to give a damn about humanity in general.

Anyone who works in customer service, be it IT support, retail or the food service industry, gets bombarded with the very worst of decent humanity on a regular basis. I say "the worst of decent humanity" because there are far, far worse examples out there, but they're normally relegated to warlords, drug dealers and that quiet guy who lives by himself in a suburban neighborhood with a convenient little pond out back.

But decent humanity, here meaning the people you see working, living, shopping, functioning every day of your life, is still very capable of some perfectly horrible things.

Those in customer service see the worst and strangest of these every single day. Things a customer's close personal friends would not believe they had done or said will be a regular repeat occurrence when said person is dealing with someone who is, at the base level, employed to make them happy.

It's as if a switch flips in the person's brain:

"Now I am dealing with someone making minimum wage, given the barest semblance of training and holding so little authority that, were we living in Japan, they would already have killed themselves by now. How convenient!

"I was just considering throwing a temper tantrum on a level that would make most five-year-olds blush, and over the most minute perceived inconvenience conjured up in the deep void of my mind, almost as if the flaw's very existence was dependent upon me having someone to bitch to about it. What fun!"

If you haven't worked in customer service, try to imagine this routine: you come to work, knowing that the defining characteristic of a "good day's work" is an empty quantity, a lack of people complaining, making a "best day ever" for you to be everyone else's par-for-the-course.

You move to your station, your stomach already turning at the thought of the first customer of the day and the quite likely event that, after helping them to the best of your ability, you will feel entirely justified in demanding combat pay.

Your mind clinches, racing over endless answers to endless questions, none of which are likely to do much more than ferry you into deeper, more dangerous waters as your customers continue to up the ante in the seeming arms race of any given request.

Customer: "I'm looking for a book."

Helper: "Well, you're in the right store! What sort of book are you looking for?"

Customer: "A novel."

Helper: "Do you have a particular genre you like?"

Customer: "Romance."

Helper: "The romance section is just back here on your left."

Customer: "Do you have any 'space' romances?"

Helper: "Space romances?"

Customer: "A romance. In space."

Helper: "I...guess so, but some of them might be in the science fiction section as well, over that way."

Customer: "How much do these books usually cost?"

Helper: "Each one's different, though the paperbacks are usually cheaper. You can find the price on the back--"

Customer: "What's your opinion of the Twilight series?"

Helper: "Umm...well, if you're interested in urban fantasy, we have--"

Customer: "Why do people still buy self-help books?"

Helper: "We...I'm not--"

Customer: "What sort of paper is this?"

Helper: "...Recycled? I'm not sure what--"

Customer: "If a train leaves Boston at noon going south at 78 miles per hour, and a truck leaves New York at the same time carrying a shipment of children's books, how much wood could a wood chuck chuck if that wood was made of Jello?"

Helper: "...Th-there's a...book of c-common word problems in the Puzzles section?"

The endless parade of senseless questions and inexplicable attitude beat upon the minds of the customer service veteran and cadet alike.

At first, it's only the ornery who wear you down: those truly dedicated to making your day worse in spite of your continued success at doing your job above and beyond what you are compensated to do. Then, one day, even the innocently hapless customer becomes a burden you can't easily shrug off.

It isn't long before you're dreading the jingle of the door swinging open or the heinous ringing of the phone, knowing that the percentage chance that any given customer will be of the non-draining variety has dwindled to nearly nothing.

In the midst of this maladjusted milieu, a veritable army of perfectly polite, reasonable and respectful customers will amble by entirely unnoticed, their every flaw hyper-scrutinized until you find yourself resenting a total stranger simply because they chose to wear a brightly-colored shirt that day.

It's a detestable state: to be unable to see the mountain of kind, average people finding it no effort at all to be decent human beings to the perfect stranger trying in earnest to help them with whatever tiny questions they might have. It would be like looking up at the night's sky and mistaking every single star for a passing airplane, all of whose passengers you jealously disdain.

It's little different than people who have destroyed their eardrums blasting bad death metal or those who've killed their sense of taste by constantly upping the spice on whatever food they find until it becomes a legitimate health concern: too much exposure to the worst of what decent humanity has to offer has left us deaf and numb to the fairly common decency of perfectly ordinary people.

And then, somewhere, in the middle of a storm of "quick" questions, bad tippers and unreasonable expectations, some tiny voice takes the time to simply say "thank you" in such a way that it can't be pawned off as the automated courtesy to which we all fall victim.

One little moment in time, often overlooked by the simple soul who gave it voice in the first place, can repair in a second what it takes months and years to destroy: the desire to help people. The want to care is a powerful influence, only worn down by the sustained caustic blasting of irritable ignorance.

That it can be revitalized in an instant by a simple, genuine and heartfelt token of appreciation with no material significance but almost unlimited emotional currency gives great power to an otherwise humble gesture. That, in and of itself, is a hopeful thought, the truth of which is regularly the only thing that keeps many customer service people human.

Thank you's carry an incredible weight to people who are more used to hearing resolute, mumbled acceptance and open misdirected rage than anything remotely resembling grace. A genuine thank you is the little green mushroom that lands on your head when you're on your last life.

So if you've ever told a tech support person "thank you," or gone out of your way for someone who went out of his or her way for you, let me say thank you from the bottom of my heart. You may never know how many total strangers you've helped, how many awful people whose awfulness you've undone with just two little words and the sincerity to make them real.

Thank you. From all of us.

What can we do to help?

En Masse

2011-05-03T15:27:00.000-04:00

It's no secret that communication technology is kind of a thing for me. Given that I studied in communication and now work in technology, this is no surprise. I have hobbies that include people-watching in real time on a global scale. The way people have reinvented and circumvented the purpose of the seemingly-innocuous, effortlessly available social tech all around them is something of a constant fascination.

Which is why the last week has largely pissed me off.

Two major events have highlighted the news over the past week (and when I say "highlighted," I mean "overrun it like a Venezuelan coup d'etat"): the Royal Wedding, and the death of Osama Bin Laden. The world's communication hubs have been all aglow with constant coverage, endless debate and hashtags galore.

Both events, however you take them, apparently held a great deal of gravity over the lives of millions, if the social network reaction is to be believed. The Royal Wedding revived the once-captivating notion of the Disney princess for hundreds of full-grown women worldwide, despite the fact that as of yet, Princess Beatrice has shown no power over common woodland creatures.

France rejoices.

Outside of photoshopping all manner of unsavory creature sprouting from the makeshift Stargate that was her headpiece, the Internet seems to have largely forgotten the affair (at least here in the States), given the news that The Enemy has been brought to justice at last.

bin Laden's death has led to something of a war of the words between two men, neither of whom actually said the things for which they are being infinitely re-quoted:

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives," quothe Dr. King, impersonating Jessica Dovey, "but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy."

"I’ve never wished a man dead," responds Mark Twain, quoting Clarence Darrow, "but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure."

The debate, in its simplest form, sounds more like this:

"Hooray, he's dead!"
"You jerk. Don't 'hooray' that!"

Only imagine it involves a lot of cursing, half-truths and self-righteousness, just like every other reasonable, even-tempered debate on the Internet.

But beyond simple, violent quote-hammering, the Internet has again responded with countless demotivators, photoshops, and at least one brilliant Facebook group in honor of a single man's death half a world away in the midst of a war we are likely no closer to seeing the end of. Social networking itself played a large part in the ensuing ridicule.

Still warm from the light of hope that sprang from Tahrir Square and the Egyptian revolution, communication technology and social networking were being seen for perhaps the first time as more than merely a place for Kanye West to embarrass himself.

Because we needed more of those.

Now, they have been filtered down to leftovers from People magazine and half-hearted celebration/chastisement at two globally irrelevant events. No offense to the Prince and Princess, I wish them all the best, and I'd like to think they might have preferred a little less international attention (especially of the kind Beatrice's attire is getting).

While we were all busy flaming each other over flag-waving, grandstanding and generally making fools of ourselves on the Internet, here's what we might have missed:

Gaddafi, having lost his eldest son, agreed to speak with NATO officials, the conservatives won out in a Canadian landslide and the new mayor of a town wracked by seventeen kinds of hell celebrated his one-year anniversary as Landrieu, the Dawnbringer. The space shuttle Endeavour was set to take its final flight, one of the last to be taken by the US space program. Ever.

Meanwhile, revolutions continue to simmer or outright burn in Iran, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Algeria and parts of Saudi Arabia, two island nations continue to struggle with the aftermath of Mother Nature's booty-shakin', and new evidence is coming to light that the BP oil spill and its poorly-handled clean-up are far from finished taking their toll.

A hell of a lot can happen in a week.

But news going unheard under the storm of what's-hot-now is nothing unique to modern cloud-based, self-propelled networks of information.

Our continued declining faith in receiving anything remotely resembling fact from once-lauded professional news networks has given the online, at-large, ad hoc media frenzy the proverbial ball when it comes to providing its audience with the all-too-evasive truth.

These faceless, man-on-the-street perspectives, independent of the bias of national ratings or ad revenue, offered the first chance for genuine news through a medium which has long been known for not knowing the difference between fact, opinion and a hole in the ground.

Last week felt like a little less Edward R. Murrow and a little more Zippy the Water-Skiing Squirrel.

Still, I could see it argued that we need a little levity. With all that's happened in the last few months, to say nothing of the last few years, we're ready for something to get excited about.

The Royal Wedding was perhaps the first completely bloodless point of celebration since 2008. The death of bin Laden marks a rare measurable win, if only on the psychological level, in the endless War on Terror. In an age where money is tight, government is stalled, and revolutions don't look quite like we imagine they used to, it's easy to start grasping at straws.

And I can't be too angry at that.

But as the glitz and the glam and the hope and the spam all begin to die down again and we start to brace for the aftershock of whatever new madness awaits on the horizon, the most important question we should never tire in asking (and retweeting) is "where do we go from here?"

...Wut.

2011-04-26T00:01:00.000-04:00

The thing in my kleenex looks like it could be a Syfy original.

Colds are a natural part of being human, as are allergies, sniffles and hiccups.

Hiccups, by the way: no, evolutionary, purpose.

But back to the point. Colds, inevitable though they may be, almost invariably suck.

When you're eight and don't want to turn in your overdue History paper is about the last time being genuinely sick does not suck, or rather, when the amount to which it sucks is directly mitigated by the amount to which morning cartoons are awesome.

At any point past that in time, colds begin to cost you much more than graham crackers and what-I-did-this-summer essays. In your younger years before the advent of full-time jobs and sick days, they can cost you money out of pocket. When you're out on your own and there's no one to force-feed you Saltines and Ginger Ale, colds become an experiment in ultimate self-pity.

You haven't lived until you've watched a 30-year-old research scientist with two Ph.D's whimper like a three-legged wet chihuahua over an empty box of tissues.

Colds become the great equalizer. It doesn't matter if you're young, old, rich, poor, Democrat or Norwegian: colds will find you, and they will transform your every atom into miserable self-replicating phlegm nanites until your biological and technological distinctiveness have been added to their overbearing hive-mind of general discomfort.

There exists no technology to lighten the burden of the simple and earnest cold. Medicine's best answer is to knock you out so that you don't notice your blood is coursing with tiny microbial wolverines whose rabid hungerings could tear an elephant to ribbons inside of an hour. If I wanted to be reduced to a drooling pile of babbling incoherence, I'd have a fifth of whiskey and watch Star Trek: Enterprise.

And really, the whiskey's just there to get the taste out of your mouth.

In a modern world where we've put thousands of hours building and partaking of baby-shaking apps and reality shows set in majestic New Jersey, there remains no immediate electronic remedy to the all-too-common cold.

While I don't believe time should be taken away from more noble pursuits like alternative energy, cancer research or safeguarding our right to free, unfiltered information, I think instead of yet another flashlight app, we might be able to put a little thought into crafting voice-dialing that automatically responds to the sound of a deep, bronchial cough.

Or how about something that auto-searches WebMD the first time you sneeze into the iPhone's delicate moisture sensors? An app to update your status to "plague victim" and start a Facebook group for an impromptu chicken-soup drive?

I'd like it.

But no, instead we get 15 more levels of "Goo: Expert Edition" and realistic lightsaber sounds. And hey, who doesn't want to waste an hour jumping around the house swinging imaginary swords at each other when you're already in a delicate state of health?

Not this guy.

So I leave you to your StickWars and your talking robots. There's a galaxy that needs defending, and my heavily-medicated sword is the princess' only hope.

May the phlegm be with you.

The Space Between: Why Goofing Off is Good for Business

2011-04-19T09:53:00.000-04:00

Many of the managers today grew up in the 80's, where super-charged shoulderpads and powersuits were the standard business mantra. America gobbled up every super-efficient and cutthroat corporate ritual we could in the hopes of keeping up with the likes of Sony and similar giants of industry.

Unsurprisingly, it left a lasting impression.

Despite being the Nintendo generation who now enjoy instantaneous access to movies, TV shows and an endless cavalcade of mindless indulgences, most managers today still cling to a lot of outdated notions about how to manage their employees' time at the office.

Notably, the time between doing anything important.

In almost every job, certainly every white-collar job, there comes a time in any given day when you reach a lull. The phones stop ringing, you're between meetings or there are no more requisitions waiting to be filed. Whatever your level, sooner or later you hit a little pocket of nothing-to-do even in a fairly steady workplace.

Given access to any number of gratifying entertainment media in the palm of our hands, our natural predilection is to begin goofy off, spending our brain's unused cycles on any number of quick, tentative engagements until the phone should deign to summon us back to our calling.

In the mantra of many managers, this is called "slacking:" a counterproductive practice that indicates lazy and uninvested employees who need to "sharp up" and stay on task (ignoring the fact that, for the immediate moment, there is no task).

In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.

A workplace that allows its workers to dabble in minor distractions throughout the hum-drum cycle of the day will almost invariably find itself with a statistical overabundance of happy, dedicated people; the bare opposite of the very notion of "slackers."

Awareness of this paradox is quickly catching on with the newer corps of upcoming managers, but in most industries, the word has yet to reach all the way to the top. As such, the practice is still largely treated as open heresy or a weak-kneed concession to a whiny workforce; bowing to the whim of the masses simply because they are, well, massive.

But there's more than morale and appeasement at play: distractions in small doses are the remedy to much larger and more damaging notions.

Imagine for a moment that you're a security guard. You spent eight hours a day (or more) sitting behind a desk watching the same three monitors flicker in their grayscale depiction of the rooms you safeguard. Every so often, you walk around the exterior to make sure no one's spraypainting Mickey Mouse doing something obscene on the back quarter of the building, then you return to your desk and stare at the monitors some more.

The first hour passes quickly. After that, your Sisyphian efforts to remain awake and alert become an ongoing trial against your every instinct, urging you to lean back in the well-worn office chair and doze off until your next patrol.

Now imagine you have Angry Birds.

During the larger part of the hour, you sit at your desk hurtling over-plump avians into unwieldy pig-forts to your own great amusement. After each level or each throw, you scan the monitors again for signs of any change, and, finding none, return to the business of breaking that one stupid log on the back corner that never seems to want to topple all the way over.

For the duration of your 8-hour shift (or until the battery on your Smartphone dies), you remain awake and alert, checking the monitors at regular intervals rather than staring at them constantly during your first hour and then spending the next seven wondering what it is that makes people so obsessed with Justin Bieber, anyway, as you stare mindlessly at the back of the company logo scrawled across the double-doors.

Goofing off in small, measurable intervals actually serves to fill the gaps in your mental activity, keeping your brain at a constant simmer so that it never has a chance to wink out. The notion (at least for the moment) that you're doing something you maybe ought not even lends a bit of adrenaline to the situation, motivating some to check the monitors/ticket queue much more frequently than they might otherwise.

In essence, slacking off is one of the only things that can keep someone productive throughout their entire shift.

Some employers, upon hearing this, will think: "If it's activity they need, no problem! I have all these papers that need collating, and maybe we'll get wild later and have them staple things..."

Busy work is not a solution to boredom. Rather, the opposite: it wears down your employees even more. Busy work tends to keep hands and fingers moving, but the tedium allows the mind to sink even deeper into its somnolent state, with the added negative that your workers now resent being made into human copy machines or the like.

More engaging work, like brainstorming ideas for the company picnic, bear at least a little merit. Projects that help build useful skills, such as tweaks to the company website or helping draft new employee training regimens, are the real gold mine if you are dead-set against your employees pulling out their iPhones during work hours.

But in the absence of such projects, ask yourself: what is the honest harm in a little distraction when there's no immediate work to be done?

If you're thinking "we're paying them good money to watch Modern Family on company time!", then you're missing the obvious: watching TV, playing games or even reading a book is going to be ten times more enriching (and satisfying to the employee) than staring at a blinking cursor and doing absolutely nothing at all.

If your employees think you will come down on them hard whenever they aren't working, they'll get awfully good at faking it (and it doesn't take much). If instead you let them relax in the downtime between emergencies, you'll have no trouble telling who might be free to take on that new project that just came in.

It's the guy in the corner who's laughing through his nose.

The most important rule if you let your employees entertain themselves in the between-time is to emphasize to them that it be something they can stop regularly and "check in" to make sure nothing has changed.

Most games are perfect for this: at each level break, each new checkpoint, have them check and see if any new projects have come in. Even online TV has commercials. Movies are the biggest worry, although if they're able to watch an entire film at the office, there may be an entirely different problem that needs addressing.

The end result is that a little goofing off goes a long way to making people more productive in the long run. On top of that, you'll have earned yourself a reputation as a fun place to work, which goes almost as far as a raise in the minds of many employees these days.

Sometimes all it takes is an angry little bird to make everybody happy.

Meetings, and Why They Don't Have to Suck

2011-04-11T13:34:00.001-04:00

Meetings almost unilaterally get a bad name across the business world. No one likes them, everyone would rather be doing something else, and in the case of remote meetings, they usually are.

For decades, this has been the expected practice. Meetings suck, that's just the way it is. But like the death of the three-piece suit and power tie, the office standard of death-by-PowerPoint can easily fade into the land of business legend and out of our modern everyday lives.

Ever since switching to my new job, I've come to love meetings. They strike me as a meeting of the minds, a chance to "really get things done," which seems to be the antithesis of the conventional notion of a meeting. Rarely do I find myself staring at a drop ceiling, drawing imaginary lines between the pock-marked panels while the little numbers pinball song from Sesame Street plays in my head.

For months, I riddled on the differences. What made these meetings so different, so unique, so heretical? They were face to face, with the occasional teleconference thrown in; nothing unusual there. We have our trouble-makers, our grand-standers, our quiet abstainers; all the trappings of a normal, everyday, God-awful meeting.

Yet we rarely go over time, we rifle through the action items with tactical precision and we all leave feeling equal parts accomplished and motivated to rip into the next round of to-do's.

I've boiled it down to a few constant ethics that seem to come with each of us individually the moment we walk through the door:

Step One: Don't Waste Time.

Act under the assumption that everyone who has come to a meeting has already lost time. Travel, even if it's just down the hall to the conference room, is time not spent doing the things for which we are paid. Nor is it particularly fun, especially when traffic and/or parking is involved.

So you're all starting in the hole. Don't compound that loss by getting caught up in the details. Act like the room is going to explode five minutes after the meeting is set to end: you want to be out of your seat flying down the hall before it goes. There's no time for getting embroiled in shed-painting debates if your ass is sitting on the bomb.

That said, high-octane leads to high-tension. A little flippancy isn't completely uncalled for; just make sure you rein it in. The clock is ticking.

Step Two: Get Everyone's Input. Period.

Presumably, everyone invited to a meeting is there for a reason. Hopefully, it is because they either support, work with, or orchestrate something related to the meeting's topic. If not, there's a larger problem at play.

So, if everyone's there for a reason, everyone should participate. If you're there to be a fly on the wall, have someone send you the minutes. If you're present, you want to have an effect on the discourse. Period.

Now the larger problem: you're going to have loud, eager, extroverted people sitting across the table from the quiet, passive, introverted folks whose opinions might, at best, come up in a follow-up email long after the meeting is over.

That is unacceptable.

If you're going to make good decisions, you need everyone's opinions. Everyone's. Even if it's a tacit "Sure, that sounds fine," if it's sincere, it's enough.

How to do that involves a foray into communication psychology, a very intricate field that largely boils down to "don't be a dick." Here are the specifics:

Your quiet folks typically hate being interrupted and thus don't tend to interrupt others. Your noisier folks are used to interwoven vocalizations and tend to start talking before the last person has finished. The problem is that your noisier folks create an ongoing river of sound into which no interrupt-shy individual can venture safely.

So, dam the river.

Bring the clamp down on your gab-happy chatterboxes and create pockets of silence. Most of your talkers are talkers because they're brave enough to throw it all out there. By consequence, most of them have a self esteem strong enough to weather being told to "can it" when they're overrunning the debate. Just don't expect them not to make a comment about it before they quiet down.

Be sure to pause longer than a breath or two, since your quiet folks may start up like a '68 Chevy Nova in the dead of a Minnesota winter. You may even need yet more than that: you may need to call on them directly. Sure, it's a little grade school, but it beats the hell out of missing out on the information you need to avoid making a half-assed decision.

Besides, grade school had graham crackers and naptime, two other things the business world could probably benefit from...

Step Three: Own Your Crap

If you're explaining a screw-up, call it a screw-up and move on. If you're divvying up a new project, take your earnest share. Know your strengths and grab the stuff you can do the moment it lands on the pile. Don't waste time waiting to see if someone else is going to take it off your hands.

Sure, you're busy. So is everyone else in that room. Take your slice and move on. If things start getting lopsided, maybe it's time to invite a few new folks to the meeting to help share the wealth (or bump a few hangers-on who are clearly just there for the donuts).

Splitting up to-do's and action items shouldn't be a repeat of 3rd-grade kickball, with everyone leaving the one fat kid and his asthmatic friend for last. It should be more like a game of Egyptian Ratscrew, with everybody scrambling for the stack in an open and violent melee to grab the largest chunk.

...Then again, I work in IT, so most of us were the fat kid or his asthmatic friend in grade school. That may have played a part in the shaping of our modern discourse.

Anything that goes on the pile has to get done. Stalling for time helps nothing. If you know you can do it, grab it and go; don't wait for someone else to fish you out. They may be waiting on the same damn thing from you.

Done right, meetings feel less like a marathon and more like a mad sprint through an obstacle course. You don't stop to inspect the mine and discuss its purpose here, you jump the hell over it and keep running.

Noticing the recurring explosives motif? It's hard to snooze when you're churning through agenda items like a blender through various Apple products. When you have to participate, there's no excuse to zone out on the discussion and leave it to someone else to decide where fate will take you. Get to the point, own your crap, and I guarantee you will start getting more done in 30 minutes than most businesses do in three hours.

Plus, everyone leaves energized. How backwards is that?

There's no reason meetings have to suck. It's not in their nature. When people get together to figure things out, it should be a time for building and solving, not sleeping or Angry-Birds-ing.

Sometimes, it just takes getting everyone into the action.

Blue on White

2011-04-03T23:42:00.000-04:00

This past weekend, I met a man who built a propane forge out of a mailbox, a man who may well be everything right with modern times.

But let me start at the beginning.

This individual, like many, didn't follow traditional roads to success in his life. Actually, that's not quite accurate: he followed very traditional routes, routes long since abandoned by the corporate-climbing culture of the 70's and 80's.

He became a blacksmith.

In a world of mass production and robotic creation, this man pounds iron into shape with simple tools until it bends to his whim and warps into the shape of his mind's design. He joined the Ironworkers' Union (because apparently there is an Ironworkers' Union), and might have led a happy life slaving over hot metal in an age where few people create much in the non-virtual world anymore.

He left this life behind to become a programmer. I kid you not.

When working a core element into the hand-wrought elementia on which our success as a modern society was founded ceased to be satisfying, he decided to take his skill at creating and working the tools of our world into the virtual sphere.

The two fields aren't as unrelated as I originally thought. There's a common vein emerging in the area of computer technology that is starting to defy the old tropes of an out-of-shape, socially-inept soul hiding in the dark of a tiny cubicle.

White-collar workers are starting to seek decidedly blue-collar activities in the off hours to take a break from their pixelated worlds, which is lending itself to some surprising combinations. The sys-admin who goes rock-climbing. The dev team who kayak together every Spring. The help desk tech taking tae kwon do.

People who work with their fingers all day are starting to look for new ways to work with their hands, and they're bringing their own touch to these age-old activities.

Which brings me back to the forge inside a mailbox.

The smith's forge is an old metal mailbox, upside-down on stilts, with a hole cut through what was once its door and a layer of flame-resistant foam lining its interior. Add a little home plumbing and a handy propane tank and you have a forge that could fit inside your closet (though given the fumes it generates, I recommend not putting those dimensions to the test).

One only need browse the wares on ThinkGeek to realize his particular brand of ingenuity isn't alone. Geeks far and wide are finding new ways to experience the same old thing, the same drive and feel of a forgotten age when our primary reality wasn't so overrun with virtual elements and distant, automated processes.

As our technology stretches toward minimizing the tactile human element entirely, many of its foremost agents have come to crave the polar opposite: a post-modern return to minimalistic, rugged survivalism and the unmodified, un-perfected aspects of our world.

Given that it was our exposure to this very natural world that inspired some of our most impossible creations, I can only hope that this return to the immersive experience is far more than just an escape from the dark rooms and gray, fuzzy walls of the cubicle world, but a return to the source from which some of our finest ideas have sprung.

Coupled with the perspective that our past forays into modern technology has given us, I can only imagine what the trend of some of our most creative and unfettered minds returning to the wild will bring.

The modern MacGuyvers of the Do-It-Yourself age aren't content to recreate and recapture past pursuits as they once were.

Everything that might have once been standard or sacred will come to be questioned and re-envisioned from dozens of new perspectives no more interested in pleasing aesthetics than in the conventionally-accepted restrictions that have prevented others from venturing down the same avenues.

It lends itself to a time of fearless re-invention, where the mitigating factors of shame or popular opinion are lost in the heady race to make our imaginations into real and tangible things. As the information age rockets forward, the time-honored tasks and traditions thought to be left behind will be instilled with new life, not as they were, but as we see them today.

Which lends itself to a very hopeful possibility:

When the zombies rise or the aliens land, when the morlocks rise to devour the eloi, when the world tries to break down around us and our white-collar reality disappears, there will still be those who know how to hunt with their own wrought-iron spears and remind whatever force may hope to be humanity's end exactly how we managed to survive ourselves for this many centuries in the first place.

Ticker

2011-03-28T00:25:00.000-04:00

And now, the news...

In Japan, a nation still reeling from a massive earthquake, a tsunami and threat of creeping contaminants manage to rebuild a road that was ten feet away from itself in just six days. Meanwhile, well-paid cubicle jockeys who spend six hours a day browsing Facebook or playing solitaire continue to whinge about their jobs.

Reports on the incident have been perhaps the biggest failing in journalistic consistency in the last ten years or more, largely due to the fact that most reporters lack a framework when it comes to the nature of nuclear power, radiation and heavy metals, which makes it difficult to tell when they're being fed bogus statistics.

The desire to appear to have factual evidence has, in fact, interfered with the process of actually reporting the facts. But then, "ten billion jigawatts" makes for a better sound byte, anyway. Admittedly, the blame doesn't all fall with the news media in this one.

When reporting on the dangers of radiation exposure, the effects (here meaning the potential impact to human life) should be the only concern, and we measure them in subjective terms in our own lives. The average person doesn't know what 7 Sv of radiation feels like. Intense vomiting and diarrhea? Those, we can relate to.

Rather than trying to justify research with inaccurate or irrelevant statistics, we should be gauging the issue by the impact in real, human terms. Those are the only numbers that matter.

In more upbeat news, the state department is working to add a "panic button" to cell phones that will wipe the device's contact memory and alert other linked compatriots to protect pro-democratic protesters in case of a police crackdown on demonstrations.

Paired with the emergency GPS data and cameras standard in most phones, it could also make for a handy way to track and report unlawful abductions to external authorities and news agencies.

Imagine being tweeted the location of the black van your movement leader disappeared into before it has a chance to reach the security of a prison facility.

Think that kind of power is terrifying in the wrong hands? You're absolutely right. Trouble is, it's already in the wrong hands.

Time for the right hands to catch up.

Speaking of the wrong hands, a new lifelike robot was unveiled earlier this month, modeled after Henrik Scharfe, an associate professor in Denmark. According to recent reports, the robot has stormed the uncanny valley and planted the first flag for hipster androids amongst the growing list of "things our children will forever blame us for."

Saturday saw peaceful demonstrators march on Trafalgar Square in London (with a side of vandalism from a smaller group of like-minded protesters later in the day). Apparently, half a million Brits are mad that public services are being targeted for cuts instead of overpaid bank executives and tax-dodging corporations.

In America, library funding and teacher benefits are being targeted instead of corporations who send profits overseas to avoid domestic taxes; at times, altogether. Ironically, the one such measure Americans did show up in force to oppose (at least, virtually) is the one that most likely helped stave off a precipitous rise in unemployment.

Many Americans seem more inclined to oppose global healthcare than to support public school teachers, which suggests that we would like those without the means to afford private institutions to be both ignorant and ill, perhaps in the hopes that some Darwinian principle will negate the problem entirely.

Because it's the Christian thing to do.

Which brings me back to the miracle of an unassuming Japanese road crew, who, while all the world seemed to be falling apart around them (in their case, very literally), took up their tools and put their little section of it back together again.

Hallelujah.

Rise of the Machines

2011-03-22T00:43:00.000-04:00

Dear Rebecca Black,

I want to thank you.

You may not know it, either because you are too young or because you are too busy partying on days that end in "y," but you may well be the catalyst that fosters a return to palatable popular music.

Yes, you.

Your bold attempt to capture the very essence of pop music today succeeded beyond all our nonexistent expectations. You have brought light to the dark world of mass-produced club music in its current form; the auto-tuned, repetitive tripe now swirling into the stratosphere to ward off warring alien nation-states for generations to come.

And for that, I thank you.

I understand that there are those whose jealous self-interest has led them to lash out in anger, mocking your kind service to the worth of modern music. What they don't understand is what a beautiful sacrifice it is you have made.

We are in crisis, as you surely know. Children today are being raised on the robotic stylings of Fergie and her ageless horde of one-word chorusters flooding the airwaves with the verbal equivalent of a techno backbeat. Yet, like so many other plagues of our time, it has gone largely unaddressed for far too long.

Until one girl had the bravery to show everyone just how bad it had become.

Too long have we suffered under the weight of lyrics somewhere south of amateur teen poetry for the sake of celebrating the desire to further celebrate the act of celebrating. Too long have we ached for earnest vocal stylings or even the barest attempt at genuine effort to sing unassisted. Too long have we wondered when disco became somehow worthy of not only a large-scale homage but a further decline into the madness of mindless repetition.

But no more.

Thank you, Rebecca, for throwing the harsh truth of this onerous disease into the face of the masses, that they might all be stung to life and leave their base existence behind for the proverbial road less traveled.

I can only imagine how you must have sustained yourself through the aching pains of this noble production on the promise of the good the truth would bring about. All this effort, all this strain might have been for naught had you not succeeded so beautifully at blending seamlessly into the tired scene of your peers; peers who now laugh at your attempt to rise to their "lofty" perch.

I found myself coming late to the game, having heard only the cries of the derisive denizens without knowing what merited such sadistic merriment. It was well into the bridge before I realized why it was that I had not "gotten the joke." Because the joke isn't in the video, Rebecca.

The joke is on the radio.

Going Nuclear

2011-03-15T23:04:00.001-04:00

With the tragedy in Japan, it's a little difficult to find much to be humorous about.

Sad that it hasn't been as hard finding things to be angry about.

And I'm not referring to the people claiming that the 8.9 quake and the horrifying wall of water that followed were somehow God's retribution for Pearl Harbor, because I don't feel that thoughts like that (if you can call them "thoughts" without insulting the very concept) merit a response.

I'm talking about the recent resurgence to the nuclear power debate that has been cast into the air by the leaks at the Fukushima reactor.

Those opposed to the environmental impacts of nuclear power have used the tragedy as a leverage point to show the dangers of one of our cleanest, most efficient modes of energy production, citing the poor handling of maintenance protocols on site prior to the seismic event that effectively threw the earth off its axis.

Let's set that particular oversight aside for now. I don't need to resort to the obvious just yet.

Ignoring my hope that those finding time to complain about the dangers of nuclear power also found time to donate to local aid for the Japanese citizens displaced by the unforgiving wall of water that swept whole cities away, I feel that a number of these very vocal activists are missing a very important point.

An earthquake of unthinkable proportions rocked the tiny island nation in advance of tidal forces that were in many ways more destructive (to say nothing of the army of 5- and 6-point earthquakes continuing to rock the Japanese coast). Despite this, the Fukushima reactor has sprung a leak.

A leak.

Consider if this were you. Say you work on the fifth floor of an office building. One day, for no apparent reason, the janitor picks you up by the ankles and throws you through the plate glass window onto the waiting asphalt. Maybe you shouldn't have left take-out Chinese in the waste bin all weekend.

The glass shatters, you sail through the air to your doom. Before you land, it occurs to you that skipping all those doctors' appointments probably wasn't the smartest idea after all. But after the dreaded impact, you come away with a broken leg and a minor head-wound. Considering what you've just been through, it's a miracle you're alive.

Now imagine that that miracle is pure terrestrial brilliance on the part of very human engineers.

Fukushima is in bad shape and the people in the surrounding prefecture are in great danger, make no mistake about that. But talk of global concerns and nuclear winter ignores the mildly comforting realization that it could have been much, much worse.

As the anti-nuke rally has been more than happy to remind us, Chernobyl was terrifying. Much like the reactors at Fukushima, it ran on older technology based on our findings early in the nuclear energy days. The accident itself is almost 25 years old. Three Mile Island? 32 years ago next month.

Modern reactors have made great advancements in shutdown and safety precautions (largely due to the last time something went 'boom'). The problem is that most functioning reactors are ancient in the eyes of the nuclear power trend, and thus lack these improved safety features. I believe the tragedy in Japan should absolutely raise awareness of the risk of nuclear plants.

The risk of not building new ones.

It took a catastrophic global event to cause even the slow burn that is Fukushima tonight; a reactor that was due to be decommissioned this year before having its contract renewed. Consider the marvel of engineering inherit in that statement. Something that was "new" four decades ago, before many of those now complaining were born, took a 356-megaton force to the chin and "leaked," in spite of lapses in maintenance and upkeep.

Tell me, what have you built that can say the same?

What happened in Japan was horrible, but it was also rare. If you judged our best source of energy as too dangerous because of a massive meteor strike, you would be just as wrong. The comical thing is that today's nuclear reactors could likely stand up to orbital bombardment.

So before anyone else considers shutting down all things nuclear and gutting our already-atrophying power grid, consider exactly what happened to cause Fukushima to rupture.

And then consider what the Fukushima reactor didn't do in response.

For those hoping to donate to the 440,000+ displaced from their homes, I recommend Architecture for Humanity and its partners, another group of engineers interested in building things that last.

Out of Print

2011-03-08T00:02:00.002-05:00

In Chicago this week for the 10th anniversary of the Drupal CMS, I found myself staring out my hotel window at an old stonework building with the letters "Chicago Tribune" in the classic gothic typeface of their medium and wondering if anyone working in said building is taking note of the all-too-fitting imagery.

It's no secret that the world of print news is rapidly turning yellow and frail across the country and perhaps the world. With the boon of instantaneous updates and no need for million-dollar presses and ink-stained hands, the online news machine is pulling ahead with the sort of ease more suited to the victors of each new metallic Age.

Fittingly, several such paperless publications have seen fit to comment on the changing trend as it unfolds.

But at times the reasoning behind the trend is lost in the rush to the punchline that is the stubbornness of the old-world news tycoons. Print is by no means a less favorable medium: many readers still prefer to read anything of significant length on parchment rather than pixels, and those arguing that the Kindle will save the rainforest may not have done their due diligence.

Anyone doubting our passion for the printed word need only look so far as the efforts lately to save public libraries. It could be argued that a rent-a-reader program out of the back of your local school would be sufficient to replace all the content of a city library and save on a world of cost.

While I don't necessarily disagree, I think by and large we are seized by an urge to treasure books, such as they are, simply because they belong in a library. The classics are especially susceptible to this phenomenon, being treasured as antiques rather than something to bring with you to the beach.

When a book ceases to be simply an engaging read and instead becomes a work of art, we are disinclined to set it aside in favor of the ephemeral electronic edition, the way pictures of a monument are never quite the same as being there, despite the epic level of detail in modern photography.

So if print is still so popular, why is the print industry circling the proverbial shredder?

Therein lies the punchline: much of why print news in particular is dwindling comes from an unwillingness to adapt to a changing market. The twin myths that all news must be online to be current or that all newspapers must print in hardcopy to appease ad-buyers are equally wrong, and equally beside the point.

There is nothing to say that a print paper industry can't survive today; it simply has to give up the onus of providing breaking coverage.

Long before the Internet, TV and radio provided more instantaneous access to the world of modern news. Whenever a crisis is at hand, most of us look to our computers or turn on the TV to search for the latest updates, no matter how minor they might be. There's a sense of "live" news that no print venue can ever hope to provide.

The trick is to stop trying.

Newspapers need to start splitting their endeavors, posting current and breaking news in the thin, quick format the online world has become so reliant on and saving the in-depth commentary and further social implications for the print edition. You now have a two-headed beast: a virtual twitter-feed of updates online, and a paper periodical stuffed with intelligent discourse and what-does-it-all-mean evaluation of the situation at large.

WordPress and a weekend will get you a fully-functional website with easy contribution models for your editors (in case they're just as stubborn as you). Shifting away from as-it-happens news also allows you to move to a different distribution model for the print publication (say, Sundays only, when ad revenues are at their peak).

Worried about start-up? Google Ads alone are enough to support early hosting fees. The same growing readership that requires that you start making more will in turn make that same ad space worth more, and thus the solution presents itself.

There is no reason why the print news industry can't carry itself through this burgeoning age of e-everything. If the leadership of the old news corps are willing to pick their battles and tailor their content to what their customers now desire, they can be more successful than any single news entity; print, online or otherwise.

Is moving to online delivery always the right direction? Yes.

But that doesn't mean it has to be the only direction.

Art Imitates Life (When It Can Keep Up)

2011-03-01T00:00:00.001-05:00

Science fiction has always opened up entirely new frontiers, if rarely the ones it seeks to.

We've argued in the past that tech is driven by the visions of our sci-fi dreams, but in truth, no one is seriously delving into flying cars, personal jet packs or food in pill form.

In the end, this is probably a good thing: running out of gas is a lot safer on the ground, and no one wants to try and wrap a bike lock around an active fuel line. Plus, try and imagine the food network scrambling to recover their losses.

"On tonight's episode of Iron Chef, the secret ingredient will be...Advil!"

The truth is that lately our tech is driving our science fiction. New innovations in the fields of lifelike robotics, military intelligence and genetic engineering put some of our past speculation to shame.

Even space, the pursuit that's long dogged us from the ground, is turning up some interestingly mind-bending fare that sounds like it came from the pages of David Brin or Orson Scott Card.

It's getting so that our imaginations can no longer keep up. Instead, we're forced to pin together things we know atop a new skin and pretend it's original. Alien councils full of familiar politics, new worlds wracked by old conflicts, visitors with simple, two-dimensional motives, the list goes on, but it only goes in circles.

It's a wonderful compliment to all we've been able to accomplish that even the mechinations of our own imaginations have begun to seem old-hat and overdone. Reports on intelligent computers and miracle cures are becoming the mainstay of popular scientific journals, a market far more accessible now to the general populace.

Science fiction is now forced to press on at an entirely new angle to secure rights to the as-yet-unstretched portions of our growing minds. Potential for the changing nature of identity, just as identity and privacy are becoming our chief concerns, is precisely the sort of shift we need in a new age of new-age fiction.

Forays into options for alternative fuel or efficient recycled power and the dangers of certain ventures fit neatly into the hole left by the forebears of modern sci-fi. For those venturing down that particular road (needless or otherwise), I suggest you hurry.

It's only a matter of time before reality beats you to the punch.

* * *

And now, on a tangentially-related note regarding current events which have themselves gone on for far too long:

The Oscars' regular and frequent snubbing of sci-fi greats (and no, I do not mean Avatar) once grated on my nerves before I realized that an aging oligarchy increasingly out of touch with the populace whose worth it deigns to judge are exactly the sort of people whose opinions have long since ceased to matter.

In the end, the Academy is an arcology of self-important well-to-do dictators so focused on the impressions of their opinions as the very canon of artistic prestige that they fail to see how empty the audience to that opinion is becoming.

There are more people tuning in to see what flavor of prosciutto Gaga is wearing to the VMAs. And here's the kicker: what makes their gawker parade any less valid a take on art than passing on a film like District 9 simply because it has a spaceship in it?

The need for science fiction may be changing. The need for its appreciation is not.

[/rant]

The Long Road - An Allegory

2011-02-25T11:54:00.001-05:00

On the breath of the last great winter, the wisemen of the northern tribes knew too well that their end was coming. The summer had been much too short and too sparse to sustain their people through another deep chill, and it seemed each winter was more brutal than the one that came before it.

The land that had once profited them with lush crops and plentiful beasts to hunt was now little more than a barren tundra, its worth buried under the coming frost that seemed to spread ever further with each passing season. Already several tribesmen had ventured in search of new resources, but none had returned. There was hardly enough food now to sustain what meager populace remained. The elders knew this.

Their people were on the verge of dying.

And so it was that one day a young woman of the tribe spoke to the people, saying: "We must leave this place, turn from our worn homes and empty hearths and journey south, where the ice cannot yet reach.

"There," she said, "the land is rich and the hunt plentiful, and our people will thrive as in the old days. We shall make new homes upon the grass and prosper for many generations."

But the people protested. "What are you saying, that we should give our homes up for lost? It took us many months to build the buildings in which our children live, and you would have us throw it all away?"

"Better to lose the houses we built for our children," said the woman of the tribe, "than to lose our children themselves."

"But what makes the south so safe?" said another. "Won't the ice one day reach us there?"

"It may," the woman admitted, "and if it does, we will again journey onward and rebuild."

"Nonsense!" the people shouted in anger. "You would have us waste our lives building again and again the same homes we have now, and for what? So that the ice can chase us off again?"

"That is the nature of this growing winter," the woman answered. "It will forever keep moving, and so, too, must we."

Sensing their disapproval, she added: "Do you not see, friends, that there is an opportunity here for growth and renewal? These homes to which you cleave were built by your grandfathers' grandfathers out of the very mud and rock they found at their feet.

"We are wiser now, we have learned to fashion buildings of stone and metal, we have learned to shape them so that the heat leaves in the summer and stays in the winter. We can build for our children better homes than we ever had before!"

Taking up a piece of their latest kill from where it rested by the fire, she held it high and spake, saying: "This meat which we once prized above all has become tough and bland, hardened by the winter cold. Have you forgotten the taste of a fresh kill? The thrill of hunting that which is not already sickly and dying?"

"We have not forgotten," said one of the tribesmen, stepping forward from the pack. "Nor have we forgotten the sweat and pain of the journey, the danger of a new land and the hunger that comes with a long day's work.

"We built ourselves a village because we were tired of the wandering life. Now you wish us to put aside all we have become for the promise of green fields and fresh meat? The meat here will fill us, and the winters are not so cold. Our houses shelter us from the rain. Is that not enough?"

She threw the slab of meat to the ground at their feet. "The promise of nectar from this once great land has become like sour vinegar, yet still you sup of the bitter flavor and call it 'good.' You have set aside the joy and wonder of this world for the comfort of staying where you are. How can you hope to live with the winter you know is coming?"

"We will manage," said the man, stepping back into the crowd. "We will survive until the breaking of the land, as our ancestors once did."

"So be it," said the woman of the tribe. She took up her pack and brought with her only tools, looking to build a new future in the lands to the south.

Many followed, tired of the bite of the winter cold and the taste of stale meat in their mouths, but many stayed, content to live out the last of their days in the harsh barrens while they waited for their final winter to stretch its shadow across the land. And the woman was sad, for she could not change their minds.

With the village at her back, she led those that would follow to their new home many miles away, guiding them every step and reminding them each of what it was once to be builds and finders of things. And many miles hence, the people did feel the sun on their faces and the grass under their weary feet, and they watched as the elk roamed free and brave.

They would forge a new land, here in the south, in the land known as "Upgrade."

Internet Connections

2011-02-15T09:32:00.000-05:00

It's not difficult the day after Valentine's to linger on thoughts of love. "But," you might say, "this is a tech blog, you know, for geeks and engineers; people for whom love is a finite for-while loop resulting in sweaty palms and Facebook stalking." And you'd be right.

Which brings me to my next point.

It's no secret that I'm a fan of where recent trends in expanding communication technologies are going. The possibilities for education, fair trade and the democratic process in general have proved themselves time and time again.

But what about love?

Don't worry, I have no intention of waxing poetical (it turns out binary haikus are a lot less interesting when you type them out). But I do believe it warrants notice that among the many things caught in the tumble of the information superhighway, love is not the least of these.

There are the obvious emerging enterprises of Match.com and its bevy of similar services, pairing people together on a Mendelian matrix of compatible traits. They've made a show lately of remarking on how online dating is growing in acceptance, so that their potential applicants need feel less ashamed about adding their names to the proverbial dog-pile of participants.

What they're missing is that their numbers are based on online matchmaker services alone. When you consider the explosion of flirt-heavy connections on Facebook and its dozen or more clones, it seems the only reason to leave the house to find your soulmate anymore is to see where they've checked in on Foursquare.

Which leads to yet another avenue: the number of hook-up apps tied to the GPS integration of most smart-phones is making it possible to eye someone across a bar without ever looking up from your screen. Coffee houses, laundromats and even subways are all now potential meet-ups, which just means that the creepy guy following you home may actually just want your number.

When you think about it, chat channels are no different from dance clubs, with dozens of too-forward suitors making their awkward play with lewd ASCII art instead of doing the Hustle.

Yet with all the frightening possibilities, there is a light of hope in the changing nature of love-by-wire. It turns out it isn't just the young who are capitalizing on the instant electronic connection and the faceless exchange of sweet nothings.

By contrast, the older generation have shown a massive uptick in the use of online dating. There's a lot less danger in meeting new people to fill the long, empty days when you don't have to leave the house or drive anywhere. When it comes to meeting people, it turns out our grandparents aren't so much doing the cha-cha as getting a ChaCha.

But hook-ups aren't the only reason people are looking to stretch the electronic affection market to its furthest reaches. As we stretch ever further outward, families are finding new ways to keep connected across space and time. Where our generation sat in awe of the whispers of old civil war letters, our successors will have AIM logs and Skype video to recount the annuls of combat half a world away.

Parents who might once have barely seen their children can now tuck them in each night, one way or another. If that doesn't warm your heart, you may want to check for a pulse.

Our network connections are keeping our intimate relations warm and rich no matter the intervening obstacles, leaving the only thing standing between you and the people you love to be compatibility and the ability to text in shorthand. A safer, stranger and perhaps even purer dating environment is spreading to all the corners of the globe.

For better or worse, it's safe to say that love is in the air (provided there's a strong enough wi-fi connection).

Owned

2011-02-07T22:59:00.000-05:00

It's too common a rote in many grade school classrooms to discuss how some Native Americans had no concrete concept of land-ownership when European settlers first arrived. In our youth, many such tales were used as a cautionary instrument to warn against taking mother nature too lightly when we try to stamp the invisible lines of our fiercely-defended boundaries on some ephemeral plane and call it "ours."

Or, at least, that's what they should have been.

Throughout history, millions have died fighting over lines no one could see. The thought of planting a flag, a mere symbol in and of itself, has long been the most heroic icon of stamping ownership onto even the most absurd of claims.

But these days, the landscape of ownership has changed. As we shift from concrete to the pleasant and terrifying abstraction that is the virtual world, it becomes harder to judge possession, contribution and even the mere scope of what a thing is to be owned.

In the past, if a horse was hitched in your stable, either you had a guest, or it was your horse. You may have stolen it (in which case, someone is already out to get it back) or you may have come by it legally, but that horse is in your stable now, so for the moment, it is yours.

Now imagine that that horse is a stream of data.

You have a horse in your stable. When your sister's birthday comes around, she wants a pony, and so you make a copy of your horse and send it to her. No sweat off your back, of course: you still have the original horse to yourself.

Then your neighbor needs help plowing his field. His old mare has at last given up the ghost and he can't afford to buy a new one. You see no problem in giving him a copy of your horse. After all, you aren't robbing the horse breeder of a sale: your neighbor has no money to buy it anyway. You're merely helping a farmer in need.

One night, while you sleep, bandits sneak into the stable and swipe several copies of your horse for themselves to sell in the open market. You wake up the next morning, unaware that anything is amiss. Your horse is exactly where it was the night before, peacefully biding its time in the stable as it waits for its morning oats.

Worried about a fire, you make several copies of your horse for keeps and store them in safe places around your house. Should the worst happen, you will still have a horse when you need one. No harm in that, after all: you paid for the horse, what difference does it make how many of it you have?

Of course, all this horse-cloning has your breeder worried. If you can make all these copies of your horse and giving them out for free, what need does anyone have for his wares?

So to protect his business, the breeder sneaks into your stable one night and poisons the water trough. By sunset the next day, all your horses are deathly ill and dying. You hurry to the breeder to find out what's the matter.

He tells you that he poisoned the water because he was worried about bandits sneaking off with your horses. Seeing how angry you are with him, he offers you a small vial of the antidote, telling you that it will completely cure one horse.

You hurry back to the stable and administer the potion to the first horse you find. The horse is cured at once, but all its fellow stallions are not so lucky. By morning, you have one horse and one horse only. Worst still, it looks to be getting sick again.

Returning to the breeder, you demand an answer. "Oh," says the breeder, "the antidote is only temporary. It lasts for a day." He offers you another vial, and says you may return as often as you like for a fresh dose, but he will give you no more than one vial's worth a day.

Your sister's new pony dies within a week, your neighbor (who couldn't afford his own horse in the first place) loses half a field to weeds and poor tilling, and the bandits, having lost their ill-gotten gains, have taken to mass producing the antidote the breeder created to keep their own stock alive.

Naturally, you are upset with the breeder, whose plan has succeeded only in inconveniencing you, the buyer, while in no way stopping the steady stream of horse thievery his methods were meant to hinder. But what can you do? Horse breeders have taken to poisoning troughs and offering small vials of antidote to horse-owners all across the kingdom!

Some have even subscribed to more drastic measures, selling a horse and its head as two separate parts, along with a special harness to pin the two together. They upgrade the harness each week to keep bandits from copying their design, forcing all horse-buyers to routinely re-outfit their stables with new and ever more intricate devices.

And then come the few. Upset with the changing tide of the royal union of horse breeders, a few smaller farms decided to offer a new method: they trade their breeding pairs with the promise that any foals are the sole property of the buyer, provided that said buyer allow those in need to borrow said foals when they come of age.

This communal model, scoffed at by traditional breeders, begins to take off like wildfire. Free of the poison-wrought sickness of their forebears, the newly traded animals thrive in a more open environment and flourish, bringing profit, fame and trust to the small contingent of breeders clever enough to break from the old ways.

The bandits, no longer aided by high prices brought on by the cost of widespread poison and antidote production, fall into remission, unable to offer a more promising deal than the communal breeders and still turn a sizable profit. Like the traditional breeders, their vicegrip on the marketplace becomes a distant whisper, fading into obscurity and obsolescence.

Ownership is not what it used to be. Ownership became a war between distributor and consumer. What was once a friendly handshake over the barter tables now more closely resembles a TSA pat-down, with all the violations that implies.

In the name of security no one can prove is being provided, the buyer has been dehumanized, demoralized and deincentivized from putting any faith in the hands of those who no longer equate purchase with ownership.

The more open model of shared, linked, common distribution by which piracy is all but negated as a favorable alternative and the consumer is free to use what they buy as if it were theirs is all too attractive, not only to those hoping for free goodies, but to those businesses hoping for long-term customer loyalty and free viral marketing.

In short, it's time traditional media distributors stopped trying to poison everybody's ponies.

Fight DRM. Save the Ponies.

Training Day

2011-02-01T15:35:00.001-05:00

It's no secret that it takes a degree of zen to maintain a help desk job. Frankly, anyone in customer service who hasn't found inner peace is probably either working elsewhere or a "resident of the state" by now. But there are lesser-known disciplines that apply to the help desk profession that go uncovered by and large and are kept out of the public eye for fear that their superhuman abilities might fall into the wrong hands.

While I cannot in good conscience divulge the secrets of these methods, I feel it is important that customers and potential employees alike understand the power we hold in our hands, and the raw personal strength of will it requires not to misuse it for our own ends.

1) Tai Chmod
Drawing on the focusing element of the "pushing hands" technique, a young student of help desk fu learns that all things are connected and flow through one another. File permissions are like water: parting to let you pass one moment, slamming against you on all sides the next.

The student must learn to navigate these waters, to travel with the flow of the chmod and not fight against its pull, so that their own chi may be in harmony, down to the root.

2) Ring Chun
Stress upon the mind is the enemy of rhythm and harmony. The discordant call of the ringing phone is thus an adversary to be overcome.

The principles of Ring Chun focus primarily on one's own defense. Centered around a strong base, the student must remember to guard her core. Powerful reaching strikes only serve to create openings. Instead, focus on small, quick jabs and attack the problem at its center.

"What does the error message say?"
"What browser are you using?"
"Have you tried turning it off and on again?"

When the opponent is off-center, he is off-balance, and weaknesses appear. Continue patiently pecking away at the problem until at last you have your opening to strike. These principles are core to the practice of Ring Chun.

More experienced masters have developed legendary techniques such as the fabled "one-inch punch," so powerful that it can shatter a problem's defenses in a single question.

3) Leet Kune Do
A more modern technique, Leet Kune Do has yet to be accepted by many traditional masters. Made popular by the late Richard Stallman, the oft-abbreviated LKD school of thought believes in drawing on all fields in a more open environment with one simple goal: do whatever it takes to survive.

While it is a fluid and ever-changing discipline, LKD does revolve around a few sacred principles: efficiency, directness, simplicity. The drive behind LKD is the need to find the quickest solution for the least amount of effort.

Dismissed by many traditionalists as "lazy fu," the students of LKD insist that it requires a stronger discipline than any previous help desk art. With LKD comes the power to break apart the very system itself, to gaze into the heart of the code and update live database tables with grace and speed.

The LKD master is a truly terrifying warrior who maintains her goodness through an unbending will and indelible content of character. Left in the wrong hands, the instruments of Leet Kune Do would be devastating.

As a side note, while many believe that Grand Master Stallman still lives, it is in fact his brother Matthew Stallman who keeps the tradition alive in honor of his elder brother.

4) Ninjutsu
The darkest help desk art, practiced only by those whose moral fiber has been chewed away by years of noble conflict against disrespectful opponents. Formed under the same pretense as Leet Kune Do, help desk ninjutsu is the art of doing whatever it takes, with far less care for the state of the warrior's soul.

The help desk ninja is a quiet hunter and wicked assassin, removing the weapons with which an opponent can choose to fight. Access is no object to a ninja: they will use their powers to get at the truth of the problem and rip its heart from its still-breathing body if they see fit.

Loathed by many and feared by all, the help desk ninja no longer cares for the mockery of presenting a moral front. Their all-consuming goal has become the evisceration of the problem and any who might stand in their way.

Their ways are shrouded in mystery and their methods hidden from any who are not deep within the order already. All that is known about these outcasts is that they will succeed at their task, no matter what it takes. Legend has it, should you see a help desk ninja coming, it is already too late.

The schools of the help desk way are many and varied, but they all have something in common: all require a great personal commitment, devotion of both body and mind, and the patience to see the training through to its ever-moving end.

So when next you encounter a master of the help desk arts, consider the sacrifice they have made to maintain a sense of harmony amidst whatever storms may come. It is not a lightly-won honor, nor are their talents not tempting to misuse. The willpower and patience of a true master come only after years of training and devotion...

...and the knowledge that you can kill someone with a small shell script.

The Point

2011-01-25T00:00:00.001-05:00

"God, I hate this job."

Frank looked up from his ThinkGeek catalog as Sandeep entered the break room in his usual fashion: looping his faded green laptop bag on the back of the faded yellow chair and dropping into his seat like a marionette thrown under a weed-whacker.

"So," Frank said, turning his eyes back to the promise of the starship-shaped pizza cutter on page eight, "rough day?"

Sandeep let out a sigh that could have been heard two rooms away were it not for the troubling hum of the mini-fridge stuffed into the corner behind them. Despite the peeling faux-wood paneling, the lime-colored grit around every seam and the unsettling shake it had picked up last week, the aged mini-fridge was the newest and nicest thing in the room.

"Don't get me started," Sandeep warned, starting at once: "I come in this morning to find that we have two guys out with the flu. That leaves just me and the new guy to stand between about nine thousand angry customers and their computers catching fire."

"Right," Frank conceded, turning the page, "because four guys could have handled that, no problem."

Sandeep started to sink into the chair so quickly that his friend began to worry he might start oozing onto the floor, and there was no room in the budget for a mop. "Naturally," Sandeep said, "this was the morning they had picked to perform a server maintenance..."

"At least it was planned this time," Frank said, staring at an ad for magnetic bee-bees and wondering at the appeal.

Sandeep scoffed, starting to chuckle at the notion. "Oh, sure," he said, "and if it had gone the way they'd planned, no one ever would have been the wiser." He clawed his way up from the depths of his seat, spreading across the small circular table like a fast-spreading mold. "But it never does..."

Frank bent down the corner of the page to remind himself to come back to it later before proceeding to the next. "Of course not," he agreed. "Servers are just big computers. It stands to reason the world could make a bigger monkey."

"That wasn't the worst of it," Sandeep went on, paying little heed to his friend's off-hand remarks. "My boss spent all morning in meetings, so I had to train the new guy in between putting out fires all day. He's some kind of wannabe script kiddie; he embedded a YouTube video on his WordPress install and now he thinks he knows something about fixing computers."

"Well, in all fairness," Frank objected, turning to the next page, "it's still better than the last guy. At least this one knows how to copy-and-paste."

Sandeep rolled his eyes, conceding the point. "This is why our boss needs to be the one conducting the interviews," he said, his hands weaving wild patterns in the air in front of him. "At least she used to do the job; she knows it takes a lot more than updating your Facebook status to prove you know the first thing about troubleshooting a network error."

He sat back with another heavy sigh. "The HR department wouldn't know a competent tech monkey from a hole in the ground," he muttered.

"I'm pretty certain that's not how the saying goes," Frank remarked, turning his attention back to the image of a dart gun with its own USB interface. The price began to seem all the more reasonable the more his friend went on.

"To top it all off," Sandeep was saying, "when my boss finally got back, she told me that I was being passed over for promotion. Again." His arms went into the air on their own. "Apparently, there's another hiring freeze on, and a wage freeze on top of that, so no raises either, not that that's anything new."

Frank turned the page, greeting the familiar tirade with his usual indifference. "But hey," Sandeep went on unhindered, "at least I'm invited to the third-quarter party the Sales team is throwing for themselves! Of course, I can't get away from the help desk long enough to go, but it's nice of them to ask."

The man let go another long sigh before slapping his hands down on the table in a huff, cradling his face in his hands and falling silent at last. Staring over the edge of the catalog with an eyebrow raised, Frank watched his colleague for a long moment in thought, waiting for some last breath of the same tired rage. When none came, he shut the catalog and set it aside, decided it was time at last to speak.

"What did you expect?" he said. The man across the table looked up with a puzzled and plaintive expression. Frank continued unabated. "What did you honestly expect? You work at a help desk," he explained. "You're a professional doormat; the bottom rung; the sum of all losers."

Sandeep opened his mouth to object, but Frank was far from finished. "You get paid so that people can call in and complain about how systems you don't run chosen by people you will never meet are broken in ways you can't explain; the blame for which rests squarely on you: the one person with power over neither the system nor the input provided.

"You're asked to work miracles from parties on either side, and yet both the client and your employers are going to treat you like a convicted felon who has done them a personal wrong. On your best day, you may impress them, and that is your worst mistake: impress the client, and they will ask only for you; impress your boss, and you'll be to valuable to promote.

"You have all the stress of volunteer firefighter without the joy of riding in the big red truck. Your best bet is to lay low, shirk whatever responsibility that happens to fall in your lap and pray that in another year or two you'll have enough experience to graduate to real job, where no challenge they can possibly throw at you will compare to an average day in the life of what you do here."

His piece said, Frank gathered up the catalog and opened it to his dog-eared page, scanning over the print of the text-covered t-shirts as Sandeep stared at him in wonder.

Before he could think to speak, the door to the break room opened and a man with a tie clipped to his shirt poked his head in. "Frank?" he said. "They need you out at the data center again. That server from this morning is still blinking orange or something, and the tech from the downtown office isn't sure what to make of it."

"All right," Frank muttered, setting the catalog aside once more and getting to his feet. The manager retreated at once, shutting the door behind him as he went.

"You're actually going?" Sandeep asked, clearly bewildered. "What about all that 'shirking responsibility' talk?"

"Oh," Frank laughed, "there's nothing broken." Seeing the blank stare on the man's face, he explained: "The tech from the downtown office used to be a buddy of mine on the help desk back in the day. 'Blinking orange' is our code for 'half-priced beer night at Mitch's.'"

Patting Sandeep on the back, he stepped past the man and opened the break room door with a smile on his face. "God, I love this job," he said as he slipped outside, letting the door fall shut behind him.

Left to his thoughts, Sandeep's eyes trailed to the catalog on the table next to him, fallen open the dog-eared page. At the same time, the pager at his hip began to buzz its warning bell. Plucking the device from his hip, he stared at the panicked message as it scrolled past.

After a moment's consideration, he set the pager on the table and picked up the catalog, leaning back in the faded yellow chair and chuckling at the jokes printed on the array of t-shirts on the back page.

For the People, By the People...

2011-01-18T21:34:00.001-05:00

Dear Reverend Dr. King,

First, happy belated you-day. I hope your family got you something better than socks. Or, if they did, I hope you got some seriously sweet foot-warmers, like the kind with the little treads on the bottom and the individual toes...

On to the point. Sir, I wanted to write you today to say thank you. I know it won't be the first time you've heard it, nor do I expect it will be the last by a long shot, but I've been putting off saying it for much too long.

As you've probably heard, things aren't exactly the way you dreamed yet. In history's eyes, we've come a long way in a short time, but there are still people scared to be who they are, as they are, for fear of people who want to believe they're better just because they were born on the other side of the street.

But I think we're still moving in the right direction.

You spoke on equality, sir, with a hope and a reverence that few have managed to equal since. That equality draws ever closer now in an age where no voice is louder than another. There is a place, sir, now, where every voice, good or bad, is heard with all the resonance of a blasting trumpet. Even the off-key ones.

You spoke of brotherhood, of the larger ideals of family and unifying all peoples under a common cause of peace. Today, barriers of thousands of miles are being crossed within seconds by people who may never set foot beyond the borders of their home town.

People are coming together across the globe to discuss and share what they believe, and while there is as much hate as brilliance at play, there are no longer lines to be drawn. We cannot judge what we cannot see or hear, we cannot gauge that which is only data on a screen. Yet the soul of who we are remains fixed in those words, and so at once we are presented, free from bias, able to stand as one people. Together.

You spoke of liberty, and there, sir, I must say I am very sorry. Liberty, sir, is as a man forgotten in the street. It needs our protection, sir, and yet we have walked on by and left it stranded with a cold night coming. Liberty has fallen to the hands of evil men who have squeezed from it every inch of goodness until it can cry no more.

But we have not all forgotten liberty, sir, and we have not all left it to die in the streets. We have taken up arms with words and with thought and we have risen up against those who would keep our liberty down. We have called upon our brothers and sisters to bear witness to the crimes of evil men and we have pulled them with both hands into the light.

But the fight rages on, and we have not won.

It rages on whenever we look for demons in the eyes of faithful men, when we seek violence over understanding, and when we set apart that which is our own.

It rages on between the pundits and the pulpits, where a message of love becomes a weapon for hate.
It rages on wherever reckless spite and aimless wickedness strike out against reason and bravery. The fight rages on wherever innocent boys and innocent girls are too afraid to stand up and say "I am who I am," for fear that they may be denied the right to love, and the right to live. The fight rages on.

The fight rages on in arid Arizona, where Jim Crow has come out of his retirement. The fight rages on in the hills of Virginia, in the heart of South Carolina, deep in the south of Florida, and back home in good old Mississippi. And the fight is just beginning.

Yet these are not times to mourn the loss of liberty, sir, to mourn the loss of freedom nor mourn the loss of hope. These are not times when darkness reigns and all the world is covered in silence and oppression and hatred.

Because, sir, your dreams are still alive.

They are alive in the people of Tunisia, who showed one man that violence is not their constitution, that gunfire is not their national anthem and that blood is not the colors of their flag. They are alive in the faces of the children who will grow up forever knowing that nothing can stop a people when they stand united.

They are alive in the hearts of the people of Tehran, who chose peace in the face of violence; who stirred a nation with the power of hope; who put fear on the faces of evil men by standing together, walking together, praying together, and being one people together.

They are alive in the whispers of Africa tonight, in the light of hope that is spreading to people who have long lived oppressed and in darkness.

Those dreams are alive in Egypt, where people of another faith stand together as one to shield each other, to guard each other, to shepherd each other through these dangerous days.

You shared with us a powerful dream, sir, and while your words may not have carried to every ear, the soul you saw in each of us is still strong today, far from the streets of Montgomery.

So thank you, sir, for teaching us all to dream.

Snow Day

2011-01-10T23:56:00.056-05:00

There's nothing quite like going ice-skating in a V6 sport coup.

A minor ice sheeting last night led to the third serious weather outage since December and the fifth enough-to-worry-about sign of winter precipitation for the heart of our historically snowless state.

Each time this sort of weather rolls around, it becomes open season on inept or inexperienced drivers. The joke for years was that when the white stuff began to fall here in Carolina, local residents were so mesmerized by this strange new slow-falling rain that they forgot to watch the road. After four straight years of ice storms and snow days, I think Carolina has to turn in its warm-weather colors.

Speaking of colors, Oregon revealed its latest and greatest uniform design choice last night for the championship game. For those of you who didn't realize it, Oregon is the alma mater of one of Nike's co-founders, Phil Knight, who has since decided to use the team to showcase as many new styles each season as mathematical permutations will allow.

Last night was perhaps the apex of that particular charge: from the striped metallic helmets to the neon-green socks, color and fashion became a weapon all their own (although, sadly, not enough of one). The socks were designed specifically to make the players' feet appear to blur, and the helmets were giving even the camera crew trouble focusing.

It could open an entirely new avenue for competition: gameday camouflage, distracting uniforms designed specifically to make players blend into each other or blur as they move across the field. Helmets built to catch and reflect sunlight into the eyes of the opposing players, zebra striped uniforms that cause the front line to blend into one indiscernible blob of opposition.

It may prove a saving grace that the team briefly known as the "fighting highlighters" failed to overcome Auburn despite their day-glo efforts. The last thing we need is players using a real duckblind on the field.

On the subject of trends we'd rather see die, the Spring semester began as it always did with the panicked cries of professors who had put preparation off until the last possible minute (in some cases, literally). While it holds in it a sad truth none of us need be reminded of, there is a positive light within that same bad habit: the faith in technology to perform miracles.

That instructors have come to believe that their course content and activities can be unfurled in seconds at the mere whisper of the notion says a great deal about how they trust in technology to be a one-click magical solution.

While support personnel and software designers everywhere are groaning at the reminder of that fact, I think it's important to linger on the upside as well: we as the technologically savvy hivemind have created amongst us an allure around the things we build and support that is not unlike the workings of great wizards and popular fantasy.

We have created and made real that which others only dream about, which they have come to equate with high fiction and an intangible future, set here before them with all the effort of pushing a button. You can think of it as naivete, I prefer to think of it as following a trend to its logical conclusion.

Three years ago, you couldn't hold a computer in the palm of your hand. Three months ago, you couldn't talk to your TV and have it respond in kind. Who's to say what you'll be able to do three weeks from now?

Naturally, those of us who've followed technological trends from the far side of the bar know that all these innovations touted as gifts from on high are in reality just one more nudge along the same old road of development and advancement.

Yet they continue to fascinate and confound a large segment of the populace, even those who use them on a daily basis, never knowing the difference between instantly firing electrons across a carefully constructed grid and the workings of a fanciful sorcerer raking his magic wand across the sky.

Now if only someone would tell the wizard to stop mucking with our weather...

The Power of Choice

2011-01-04T00:41:00.001-05:00

Choice is something we've come to crave above nearly all else.

Given the choice between being given the choice and all our other usual cravings (money, power, influence, and all the things that generally just lead to us having the right to choose in the first place), it's clear which one we tend to gravitate toward.

It is especially (though not exclusively) an American trait to be so obsessed with choice. We are made of and as such seek variety and the freedom to pick what we want out of it. We are the people of the all-you-can-eat buffet and the everything bagel, the write-in candidate and over 240 channels of "basic" cable.

And it seems like all technology is heading in the same direction.

Public broadband is making wireless Internet a public service. Hulu and Netflix are negating the need for cable networks. Musicians are selling their wares direct-to-buyer off MySpace and tumblr (and earning a mint doing it). Creative Commons is rewriting the rules on copyright and the notions of public domain. Cell phones without contracts, free online radio, anything by the Google Apps team; the mutants are becoming the mainstream.

And when the world does not give us a choice, we take it anyway. Don't like AT&T? Jailbreak your iPhone. Don't like Steve Jobs' OS? Install Boot Camp. Don't like paying for computing at all? Install Ubuntu with Firefox and OpenOffice over the free wi-fi at your local Wendy's. All for the cost of a small frostee.

We want it our way, and the more accessible technology gets, the more "my ways" we can pander to. The unspoken monopolies that ones held a vice-grip on the things we loved are being left like statues in the rising sands as a host of new, free, flexible alternatives are taking the world over with a quiet, casual flair.

Perhaps the only thing left that still goes unchallenged is power itself, and with the rash of threats to our oil supply, it's reaching the point where any farmer with a duck pond will soon be able to run his own generator for the price of a fishing net. It's still a ways off, but the research is reaching in every direction. The chance of us finding a more accessible fuel source than billion-year-old ankylodon carcasses is better than fair, giving us all the choice of power.

...See what I did there?

Back to the point, it's time the old megaliths give up the ghost in their struggle to maintain their titan-like status. Like the old saying: the more you tighten your grip, the more it slips through your fingers. AT&T learned that the hard way. Apple's day is coming. The cable giants will hold on like a Middle East conflict, but the more TVs jack directly into YouTube the less people are gonna care about those obnoxious "he went to Jared" commercials.

Because no one needs Tosh.0 to tell them what sucks on the Internet.

It's a new age of open-source culture: if we don't like it, we're not stuck with it, whatever it is. We can eat Chinese food on Christmas. We can vote Libertarian. We can look up words like "anti-trust litigation" on Wikipedia using Google Chrome on Fedora Mobile with a jailbreaked iPhone we bought off etsy using the same unfiltered public wireless connection down the street.

And it comes with a small frostee.

Network Traffic

2010-12-28T03:19:00.007-05:00

Booting......100%
System online.
 

Command?

% open car.bat

Loading...

+-------------------------------+

|      "Welcome, Michael."      |

| "Where would you like to go?" |

+-------------------------------+

> grocery_store

Searching...

Destination found: "yankee-wiggly.com"

Command?

% tracert yankee-wiggly.com 

Tracing route to yankee-wiggly.com

over a maximum of 30 hops:

1   10 ms   10 ms   10 ms  192.168.1.1

2   20 ms   21 ms   17 ms  corner.net

3   33 ms   34 ms   38 ms  thirdandmain.com

4   45 ms   43 ms   48 ms  freeway.com

5   57 ms   57 ms   58 ms  exit17.net

6   62 ms   63 ms   68 ms  yankee-wiggly.com

Trace complete.

Command?

% goto yankee-wiggly.com

Command successful.  

Loading new location...

+----------------------------+

| Welcome to Yankee Wiggly!  |

|                            |

|   Our site is currently    |

| undergoing maintenance due |

|   to network conditions.   |
|                            |

|    Y'all come back now,    |

|          y'hear?           |

+----------------------------+

Session terminated. 

Command? 

% ipconfig /all 

IP Configuration          *      *            *

   Host Na*e . . * . * * . . * . . . : OVER*LICK
   Prima*y D*s *uffix  . . * * . * . : * *  *
   Node*ty*e . . * . . . * . . * . . : Unk*own*
   IP*Rout*ng En*bled. * . * . . . * : No*  *
   DN* Su*f*x Se*rch Li*t. . * . * . * *c.rr**^C 

% ...the hell?
Error: Unrecognized command.

% chkdsk

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
File verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 3 of 3)...
File data verification completed.

0 KB in bad sectors.  

Command? 

% fsck weather

Checking clouds...

Checking wind...

Checking temperature...

Checking humidity...

Error:  Snow detected.

% oh, fsck...^C 

Command aborted 

% open car.bat
 Loading... 

+-------------------------------+
|      "Welcome, Michael."      |
| "Where would you like to go?" |
+-------------------------------+
> home

Searching...

Destination found: 127.0.0.1

Command?

% goto home

Error:  Network path invalid.

% merge car.bat freeway.com

Command successful.

Warning:  Drive is in use.

Command?

% goto exit23

Attempting operation... 

Warning:  file is being edited by another user.

Continue (y/n)? 
> Y 

Attempting to merge files...

Memory leak detected!

Collision imminent.

Command?

% mv car.bat exit.ramp

Error:  Insufficient permissions.

% sudo mv car.b^X *** System Crash *** 

Rebooting......100%

System online.

Command? 

% detach car.bat

Volume removed.

% cd / ; dir

admin    dev     temp

bin      home    trash

% cd home

Command successful. 

% Stupid snow. 

Error: Unrecognized command.

% defrag c: /f /sn

Process started. 

Warning:  CPU temp rising.

Abort, Fail, Ignore? 

> Ignore

% hibernate

Hibernating......100%

System in Standby

> "Sleep well, Michael"

Weighed and Measured

2010-12-21T09:43:00.001-05:00

Assessment has been a cornerstone of educational practice since the ruler-and-blackboard-eraser days of teaching.

Once the chief and only focus, it has taken something of a backseat to the interest of personal growth among students in the last decade or two in many classrooms around the country, but cultural memories of the infamous pop-quiz that could weigh your entire worth as a person inside the bounds of a single word problem serve as a reminder of the ultimate power once held by educators.

One sliver of that power still remains, at least at the collegiate level: each instructor is given complete control over his or her own grading scheme. Whether the entire grade hangs on a single test or an almost infinite series of homeworks and daily quizzes is entirely up to them, as is the point value of each item, its relative weight to the other facets of the course, and the overall mechanism for determining the final grade.

It seemed a sensible bastion to leave untoppled: how a professor arrives at the final grade is irrelevant, provided that they do so fairly across all students. Any mandate which might standardize the making of that final grade endangers any number of teaching styles that should, by nature, be flexible and adapt to the needs of the curriculum, the instructor, and the learning styles of the students involved.

It was a freedom and choice best left to each instructor to design without need for review or revision. I did not think it possible inside of this presumably internally-consistent, entirely-encased system for that freedom to be abused.

And I was wrong.

I learned over the course of the last few weeks that grading styles, scales and schemes are as plentiful and unique as snowflakes. And, like snowflakes, they are fragile, ephemeral, and a genuine bother when a whole mess of them hit you all at once.

As an arbitrary measure of worth, the values assigned to grades are entirely pointless in and of themselves. Whether a quiz is worth 3 points or 600 only allows you greater granularity in defining just how badly they bombed question six. The overall gauge remains the same.

You could make every single grade in a course worth 100 points and lose nothing. In fact, you may ease the minds of your students, who no longer have to dig out their iPhones to figure out what 383 out of 600 actually amounts to. Since final numeric grades are translated to letters on a similarly arbitrary scale, it all comes down to percentages in the end. May as well start with that 'cent' from the beginning and save yourself the trouble.

Weighting, by contrast, is key to each course. Whether you weight by raw points or multipliers is irrelevant, the overall change is identical: some things are more important to a given course than others, and it varies across curriculae.

For some classes, written submissions and lab reports are the thing you are there to learn, the piece you will take into the real world and make your living from. In other courses, being able to solve a problem under pressure or work cooperatively in a team is the key takeaway. That is one decision that should always be left to the teacher; the subject-matter expert on what subject matters most in their course.

What I have learned over the last few weeks is that many instructors have not fully realized that this freedom is theirs; this molding-putty world of unlimited possibilities. Instead they seem insistent upon jamming haphazard equations and values sidelong into an equally arbitrary final score which will be engulfed and forever lost in favor of a simple "B+".

Naturally, this is where we come in. There is a system we manage which holds within it the tools to arrange dozens if not hundreds of unique grading schema through a pattern of built-in equations with modifications for the outliers of extra credit and "drop the lowest..." situations. This fairly sophisticated system has caused no end of woe to many trying to use it, and sadly, not for any fault of the system itself.

I love it when systems break. When they are flawed. When they are wrong. When a system is wrong, you can fix it, replace it, in some cases even open it up and change its nature entirely. Code holds no grudges (despite what some coders will tell you): you can change it every hour and it will only complain if you trip over your syntax. Code can always be fixed.

People, by contrast, are far more delicate. If a person is wrong, if their brain is not seeing things as they are, it isn't generally polite to go banging about with all manner of roughshod tools trying to get at the problem and fix it. You have to convince a person to fix it themselves. Much like the prayer we all say to our cars when the starter refuses to catch, this is often an exercise in optimism, yielding positive results only by the intercession of luck or the hand of a compassionate god.

Any American will tell you that convincing people that they have the freedom to change things is not always met with the welcome reaction one might expect. Change in and of itself is, to many, less preferable than outright oppression, if only because oppression leaves you someone else to blame.

While that may be an oversimplification, the fact remains: over the past few weeks, people have been asking us to change the nature of University-wide grading (from "ABC" to "OMG") rather than restructure their arbitrary scales to match something closer to rational math. The system about which so many complaints have been raised is merely drawing old and twisted limbs into new light where all can see.

Oddly enough, not one math professor has complained. Nor any physics instructors, for that matter, though any good physicist already knows how to operate in a setting where nothing is certain and numbers don't matter.

While I can't say I support a mandate taking from professors the right to grade on any scale they feel appropriate, I do believe these support calls have brought to light that a simple review for mathematical consistency might be warranted. So long as it works, weird is just as valid as the common 100-point scale (although I weep for the students who have to calculate their final grades through a function of pi).

Just remember: if you decide to play educational Calvinball, don't bother looking to the refs for help.

Decking the Halls

2010-12-14T09:00:00.004-05:00

Tis the season of love and generosity. Across at least two major traditions, gift-giving is an all-too-prevalent notion this time of year, and has become an all-consuming goal. Which, in turn, breeds all-consuming consumers.

Putting aside the temporal creep revealed by the presence of Christmas decorations in October, the holiday has continued on its paradoxical decline towards becoming the most hated and hateful season of love on the planet. When caring mothers are clawing the eyes out of strangers inside a KB Toys while "Peace on Earth" hangs illuminated in the window, it may be time to consider revising our time-honored traditions in favor of something marginally more in-line with the holiday's message of giving.

"Giving" someone a black eye does not count.

Enter the boon of online shopping: brought to us by the Old Gods of Amazon, the online marketplace has been helping shoppers avoid the rush for years now. With bonuses like Prime, even the last-minute procrastinators and panicked twilight guerrillas can wade through the virtual masses in their PJs and avoid the open melee of their local mall.

"Mall," from the old English "maul," meaning "to rend without care or remorse," has long been the mecca for the winter rush. From the animatronic reindeer to the denizens of Santa's hive-mind, malls have always been a necessary element of the holiday shopping experience; a winding river jungle full of aberrant carnivores searching with unyielding hunger for their next meal, even if that means devouring the other predators that get in their way.

Online, all you have to contend with is shoving other people's packets aside. Even on a dial-up connection, that doesn't tend to leave teeth marks.

Yet still this season, hundreds of thousands of people with working internet connections will flood the country's commercial centers once more, packing themselves in tightly to engage in the old ways of grabbing for the last Tickle-Me Elmo while songs of good cheer ring out over the tired store speakers. With a rare few exceptions, there is less reason to this madness than in the parking lot full of be-antlered SUVs.

On Beamer, on Lancer, on Prius and Datsun...

Is a gift worth more because you fought off a nurse, a nun, and two kindergarten teachers to get your hands on the very last one on the shelf? Does the effort of navigating the parking-lot game of minesweeper add some ephemeral value to the same object you could have ordered half-naked from your couch? Does the gift in and of itself truly even matter?

Years of buying dad double-knit socks seem to suggest otherwise. We've put so much value in the sacrifice of our last-minute panic to find just the right useless whizbang we've forgotten that, while the thought counts, so does the thing it guides you to. Presents themselves should have a meaning, they should say something about not only the person they're for, but what that person means to you.

A cook book, for instance, says "I love how you look in an apron," or "your enchiladas haven't killed us yet." A stylish new tie might say "you clean up nice," or maybe "It would be so cool if you would go out and get a job so you could start paying your half of the rent." Good or bad, gifts should always be personal. The money and the mall don't matter.

Bring some sanity back to the season before you risk spending all your holiday spirit on elbowing a mall Santa right in his rosy cheeks. This year, let's all go out and truly "deck" the halls.

And Happy Holidays to the boys from FASA Corp for making such a bad pun possible.