I got a new laptop.. Yeah!
Part of the idea of this new laptop is to run a bunch of vmware sessions to do some multi-server development. Lots of ram, fast CPU… now the challenge is getting the unix enviornment working. I’ve been using gentoo at work for a while — also on my own personall server — it’s nice, but it’s a totally pain to setup.
Love: I can install just about any package and any version. After spending a few years locked in Fedora and finding that I was constantly upgrading a package here and there, but the dependencies and other things constantly drove me up the wall.
Love: It’s linux — unix, etc. It’s home.
Hate: The challenge is that you need to upgrade things about every six months just to make sure you’ve not drifted too far off the reservation (e.g. forcing a full install).
Hate: The installation isn’t quick and easy, you have to read a wiki and make lots of little configurations.
Once again I’m faced with the challenge of how to make good decissions. It’s not Life vs. Death, not anything meaningful in the scope of the world, but something amazingly simple — where to eat! Two easy examples where this has been a problem:
Last Night — I’m “stuck” in a hotel in Washington DC with my timezones totally messed up, so at 8pm at night I want a quick dinner. Chat with the folks at the front desk and they pull out the handy sheet which has a bunch of dining places listed, all for serious $$$ or $$$$ … sigh, I want dinner not a production. Now I’m down to wandering the neighborhood to find food.
This summer — Was picking up the family at the trainstation in Roseville (near Sacramento) around dinner time. Since we don’t live in the area, go to yelp to find food… ha! This is a pure signal vs. noise problem. I’m faced with hundreded of resturant reviews all with good/bad/etc.. All I want is a short list of four places that are worth going to, instead I find myself spending over an hour sifting through listings…
While the Hotel was doing a good job of trying to help — it’s the right concept, limit choices — I failed in not specifing that I wanted “non production” food ($22 entries are production quality). In my day-to-day life I have resources like “The Metro” when I want to find a new dining establishment, or maybe I just read movie reviews to find a worthwhile movie to attend. Where the Internet is failing is that we continue to create site after site which provideds a great outpouring of content and allows the masses to create that outpouring of content, but no filters.
Most of the time I’m not worring about the difference between a 3 star and 5 star rating on a resturant, I just want food. If it’s date night with the wife and we’re up to spending $$$$ I’m probably more interested in some other details (Parcel 104 vs. Wendy’s). But, I’ve now watched most of the 4+ star movies at Netflix, so of course I want to watch interesting 3 star movies (once in a while a 2 star action flick). Presenting long lists of possibilites doesn’t help me decided, it only makes me spend time spinning through lists.
The two services I envision are (I’ve mentioned this a few times to people — if you want to work on it let me know):
Celeberty Food Stops: Just taking all of those food network/travel channel/etc. TV shows and creating a repository of places they’ve eaten. Many visitors to cities and towns would find it “fun” to eat where Rachel Ray or some other celeb ate.
Guideposts: Not really the Alaska magazine, but similar in concept which is if you’re around HERE (Sacramento) here’s 4 places to go eat/visit. But, designed more along a travel route rather than a singular destination. Make it easy, enter a google map and it’ll create a guide book…
Got an interesting email the other day…
David,
I want to take this opportunity to personally introduce myself to you. While going through our database, I came across your information and thought you might have mutual interest in what we are currently working on. Just so you know… this email is not an attempt to try and sell you anything. I am looking to partner with serious minded individuals in the View and surrounding areas to work with us while we expand this amazing opportunity.
My name is (removed); I was previously the director of operations at a successful mortgage company in San Diego California. Long story short — having been involved in residential real estate and reverse mortgage lending throughout the boom years, I have been through the ups and the recent downs of our current market. The unprecedented events of the last several years have forced me to close the doors on a business that I worked countless hours to build! Since changes were inevitable, I decided to do some research to find an alternative to this struggling industry. I discovered an amazing business opportunity that not only allows me to earn as much as I was previously making… but by leveraging my time, I now have more freedom than I have ever experienced!
Anyhow David, if you are interested in learning more… I encourage you to take a peek at our site which has some additional information (including our business model) — (url removed) — or you can always email me with any additional questions. Please understand that we cannot work with everyone, so we do require that you complete a simple application. Myself, or another business coach from the team will contact you within 24 hrs to review the info.
In the signature line it contained adress information, maybe to give it a sense of legitimacy. However, when you pull up the address on the message you discover that it’s the address of a post office in San Diego — with a “60th floor” suite address. While I write this email, I’m listening to the audio track on their website… it’s funny, they’re using just about every technique to say that you’re special! “It’s only available to a select few”, “you’re insignificant if you do this alone”, “chances are you’ll run out of time, you’ll run out of money”, “look how many times you’ve failed already”… “It’s time for a new approach”…
“Are you ready, for an online marketing system that works!”
Yeah, right… I’ve probably got $99.95 to try something, oh, but wait… Maybe I’ll make more money stuffing envelopes.
Tags: scams
Had this thought in the car the other day… Given the copious lending strategies of our society, this might be a way to send your teen to school…
Step 1:
Go to the best school possible, try and finance 100% of their education with no cosigners. This includes credit cards, housing etc. Rack up as much debt as needed, but don’t acquire anything that would be considered an asset (e.g. a car).
Step 2:
Upon graduation and their first job, you should be (23..24) instead of starting payments on the $200,000 you owe, file them file Chapter 7 bankruptcy. You’ve now effective wiped the slate clean on $200,000 of debt. You just graduated from school, you don’t have any assets worth anything…
Step 3:
After 7 years, the bankrupcy is totally gone from your credit report… You’re now 30, buying the house isn’t a big deal. You’re probably married have a good income and you’ve got $200,000 (or more) in the bank since you didn’t have to repay those loans.
I hate silos… A long time ago a very smart engineer who worked for me pointed out that you can never under communicate. I’ve worked in many organizations where under communications was the norm, the classic example is somewhere between micro managment and lack of awareness.
Example #1:
You’re working on a project, there might be three or four groups of people involved… You’ve got Engineers, Product Managers, 3rd parties and Exec Managers. What happens is that the product managers swarm together and iterate through product requirements, then piecemeal inform engineering. While the engineers and product people are working Exec. Management is “determining” capactiy planning information from the 3rd party. Which of course engineering is not aware of, so while they’re doing their capactity planning exercises with the 3rd party, Exec. Managment is doing a similar activity with different numbers. All the while you’ve got a group of product managers who are creating piecemeal requirements without awareness of Exec. management nor engineering needs.
Confusing?
Of course, since at somepoint everybody realizes that not only has the whole process been siloed but because there was no “one true owner” (that owner should be the product and engineering lead) that you’ve got a mismatch between requirements and capabilities. Along with many people feeling disenfranchiced due to communications happening around them.
Example #2:
Take a small organziation, say 10 people… A functioning organziation who have everybody roughly aware of everything that’s going on (Agile/Scrum standups maybe). In a siloed organzation what you end up with is a bunch of people working in their cubes, a few people deamed “managers” who really don’t manage since “the boss” goes around to individuals cubes and changes the task assignments, without communicating them.
…ok… managers? You would expect that the managers would stomp their feet and force tasks back on track, but the challenge is that engineers are typically communications challenged. So, without the support of standups by the time they realize that something has gone amiss, it’s already too late. Of course “the boss” claims that his direct communcations is trying to make things move forward faster without meetings and you have managers who “hate meetings” since they’re not managers, but engineers!
Parting thoughts:
While I’m not a huge agile/scrum fan, what I am is a fan of any system that forces regular communciations. Not only that, but you can never keep too many people aware of any process, if you even remotly think it’s important to them, keep them in the loop. If you keep people out of the loop it’s a quick way to cycle into disfunction and with enough disfunction it’s unrecoverable.
ps. make sure projects have “one” true owner — if it involves the project and the owner doesn’t know, you’re screwed.
Tags: agile · project management · scrum
