What's in the box?

Mama always said life was like a box a chocolates, never know what you're gonna get.
Forrest Gump

There's a box in my office. It's been left on my chair. I can see it from my web cam. It looks like it's from HP. I have no idea what it is.

I wonder what it could be. I won't be in the office until Friday or next week. In my mine I'm accumulating book and movie references with boxes....

• Forrest Gump - as quoted above.
• Se7en - you knew what was in that box.
• Pulp Fiction - Briefcase instead of a box, but close.
• Spook Country (by William Gibson) - just finished that, and it has a box.

There's got to be more....

Update: Turns out the box wasn't addressed to me! I'll never know what's in it!

Meat Locker

It's cold enough to hang meat in here!
David Letterman

I'm in a meeting in a hotel conference room. It is freezing. The room was 58° when we came in. Man my toes are cold. I am warming my fingers over the cooling vent on my laptop. The thermostat has one of those plexi-glass covers locked over it. The best part is the sign on the cover. It reads*:

The Temperature is Permanently set for your comfort and convenience.

Wow, thanks!

* The capitalization is theirs, not mine.

Click click click...

Don't care how
I want it now
Veruca Salt
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory

So, are you a multiple clicker? If you're on a web page, do you start clicking a link over and over if it doesn't come up immediately on the first click? Do you engage in the online equivalent of pressing the elevator call button over and over, even though it's already lit? Just curious....

I encounter users like this now and then, usually when there is a problem in a program I wrote. I'm with the user trying to figure it out, and they just start clicking over and over. It's surprisingly frustrating. Here's my poor little program, struggling to do what's asked of it. Each click just adds to the load. I'm watching what's going on, maybe starting to see clues, tracing the path of the bullet if you will. Then "click click click click click" comes the virtual shotgun blast. Everything collapses and all clues are long gone.

Of course, my program should be able to handle it, and I've certainly done something wrong that needs to be fixed. That's probably why all those clicks infuriate me. They serve to further highlight the inadequacies of my creation. It's not like I don't do it, either. I've clicked away in frustration, fully aware that it does no good.

Anyway, I'm not sure where I'm going with this. I was on a WebEx the other day, and the person driving the mouse kept doing it. I was reminded how much it bugs me, and figured it was something I could post. So there it is.

DST Dumb-asses

I oppose the bill for two reasons. First, it contains a number of highly objectionable provisions. Second, it simply ignores several of our most pressing energy challenges, such as our dependence on foreign oil.
Senator Hillary Clinton
regarding the Energy Policy Act of 2005

Par for course from the do nothing Congress of years past. Highly objectionable? Let me just say that I have found this Daylight Savings Time change extremely questionable. What a bonehead maneuver that was. What, Y2K was too boring? No major glitches? We needed to create a new issue? It's even got its own acronym: Y2K7. What a bunch of knuckleheads.

After spending several hours patching all our servers last night, I'm willing to vote for Hillary solely on the basis of her opposition to this bill.

Death by Conference Call

To mute your line, press star-6...
Automated conference call voice

Lately it feels like that's the most useful think I've heard on a conference call. I am on more conference calls these days. I'm starting to feel like my phone headset has become some psychic vacuum sucking my productivity away. It's like the bridge line is some malevolent entity that feeds on my life force. I hang up from these calls feeling drained. I look at the clock and wonder where the last ninety minutes of my life just went.

"After the tone, please state your name." "*BEEP*" "Please, kill me now." "'Please, kill me now.' has joined the conference."

Clearly it's Friday

Monday I have Friday on my mind

David Bowie

Okay, no posts in a long time. This is because I've been so busy at work, though the following photo of my trash seems evidence to the contrary:

In my defense I will only say that the Marlboros, Cokes, and three of the bottles are not from me.

Paging Mr. Murphy

Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong
Murphy's Law

Let me first point out that I have configured and enabled the Microsoft Routing and Remote Access service multiple times. Each time the configuration worked perfectly, on the first try, with no adverse effects to the system or network. Why was I so successful? It had nothing to do with skill or knowledge, I assure you. There was only one reason: I was standing right in front of the server when I did it.

The most recent time I configured the Microsoft Routing and Remote Access service, the system I was working on was not right in front of me. It was not in a nearby room, not in the same building, not even the same state. It was, in fact, at a hosting provider in St. Louis, Missouri. It was also 8:30 PM on a Sunday night. Oh yeah, did I mention that this was on the database server behind our production web servers.

Three hours later everthing was fixed, but I'm left pondering the often quoted, more often ignored Murphy's Law. I decided to check out its origins at (where else?) the Murphy's Law Wiki Page. It turns out Murphy's Law is named after Maj. Edward A. Murphy, Jr., an aerospace engineer who worked on experimental rocket sleds in the 1950s. He is rumored to have uttered the adage after a subordinate miswired a bunch of sensors resulting in useless test results.

There are actually conflicting accounts around this event. Some stories suggest it was really Murphy's fault for poor planning, and that term was a less-than-subtle dig at Murphy. Others suggest that it was just a quip of Murphy's that became the team's way expressing the pragmatic doctrine of always expecting the worst. That is certainly what the expression became as it was popularized by Murphy's friend and next-door neighbor John Paul Stapp.

Stapp was known as the "fastest man on earth" for his runs on the rocket sled. He was also a collector of expressions and adages, writing them down in a notebook he kept. At a press conference he was asked how such a dangerous program as the rocket sled experiments could have so few injuries. Stapp replied that they always considered Murphy's Law and explained what that meant.

Which is why I can blame Murphy now, instead of my own carelessness.

OUTA SIGHT!

Heavy decibels are playing on my guitar
We got vibrations coming up from the floor
We're just listening to the rock that's giving too much noise
Are you deaf, you wanna hear some more
AC/DC

How can listen to AC/DC's Back in Black and not air guitar? I'm just sayin'....

"Forget about the check. We'll get hell to pay!" How can you beat lines like that?

Banging my head

Why do I keep banging my head against the wall?
Because it feels so good when I stop.

Yesterday I spent the entire day trying to resolve a configuration issue on a new server. The site I've been working on runs beautifully in my office on the computer I develop on. When I tried to deploy to the production system, it would not work, not work.

Would... not... freakin'... work.

I hate problems like this. You know there is some little configuration change you need to make, you just don't know what it is. Some checkbox somewhere will magically resolve the problem turing a cryptic error into a happily running website. You just need to find the damn thing.

My day goes like this: I spend hours googling error codes and re-reading documentation (yes, I actually RTFM). In general, get nowhere. Every so often, I come across a potential solution. For a few minutes, I think I've got it, I feel like this is definitely it. I click refresh on my browser and mutter obscenities when the error fails to go away. I repeat this process. Over and over.

Of course, one of the potential solutions finally resolved the error. With no warning, clicking refresh suddenly yielded the desired (if not expected) result: a happily running web site. I took no joy in the success, though. I don't feel like I've solved a challenging problem or designed an elegant solution. I just feel like I've been banging my head against a wall.

And it didn't even feel that good when I stopped.

Tough choices

"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."
Albus Dumbledore
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
by J. K. Rowling

It's been awhile since I posted. I preoccupied with a pair of decisions that needed to be made.

I had to choose which job I wanted. I had pretty much come to the conclusion that it was time to move on because there was not way to stay here and continue doing what I enjoy - software development. For about a year I've been hunting. There were a few offers, but nothing worth taking. In December I interviewed at a really good place, but no offer came. In February, a new project started up here. It was completely unexpected, and it was exactly the type of stuff I wanted to do (although it's VB.NET, not C#, but I digress). Plus, they need me to get my MS certification, and they'll fund it.

It was nice. I remember telling someone that I was actually enjoying my job again. Wouldn't you know this would be when the place from December called be up with an offer? I know, people should have such problems. I understand that in this economic climate plenty of people are unemployed or under-employed. I'm damn lucky. That said, it was still a touch choice with serious implications on my future. I was back an forth a dozen times, sweating every detail. Finally I decided to stay where I am. This is the last thing I would have expected three months ago, but there it is. What changed was this: I was not longer under pressure to get out of my current job. That raised the bar on any job offer that came. I think I made the right choice. Time will tell.

The other big decision was much easier to make, but much harder to act upon. Odds are good that you've seen seen Sharon's post on the subject. Our 12 year old greyhound Toasty was suffering liver failure, and we decided to end her life quickly. That decision was clear for me. That didn't make it any easier. In reply to our e-mail about this last trip to the vet, my brother replies simply, "Sorry to hear that. Not a fun trip." He'd taken it himself only a week or two earlier. No, it wasn't.

Having weathered those storms, I got to enjoy a weekend of warm sun and gentle breezes. Yet amid the peace of bike rides and campfires, a phone call brought news of darker weather on the horizon. It's Monday now, with overcast skies.

Still here.

It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.
Miracle Max
The Princess Bride

Hey, look at me. I'm posting! How about that. Boy, I wish I had something to say besides, "Hey, look at me, I'm posting!" Well, it's a start. Here's what's new:

• The 2005 Holiday Ale is finally in bottle. It took forever for the yeast to go dormant and sediment out, so we racked it to secondary to get it off the spent yeast (which can impart off flavors). It finally cleared up and we bottled.
• The trains are upstairs under the tree. One day I'll have a big long post about the 4'x8' train layout under out tree. For now, I'll just say that it's over 20 years old, has three tracks running simultaneously, and features some buildings older than me.
• After the Dover, PA electorate smacked down the ID school board, the judge smacked them even more. I'm going to be lazy and not post any links, but follow the Center of NJ Life link on the right to read more about the Discovery Institute's post-trial spin.
• I've been driving 170 miles a day to north Jersey to work in a loud basement computer room. Grumble, grumble, grumble.

That's all I can think of now. I'll try for something more involved later.

I see you!

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone
Johnny Nash

You might notice that the shadowy figure in my office has been replaced by a much clearer picture of yours truly. Thanks to the acquisition of an old wireless PC card, I was able to move my camera to the window sill. Now I'm no longer back-lit. Try to contain your excitement.

Off shore, just

'Marchant service be damned. Talk not that lingo to me. Dost see that leg? -- I'll take that leg away from thy stern, if ever thou talkest of the marchant service to me again. Marchant service indeed!'
Moby Dick

How do you bring lots of cheap foreign labor to America without the pesky immigration issues? Call them sailors and keep them on the boat!

That's exactly what California company SeaCode plans to do. Read about it here. Not all coverage is as negative, of course. The industry publications are lauding this inovation. They say we should hear them out before we call it a "sweat-ship." I have, and I will.

This seems a dangerous trend, because it allows corporations to maintain a workforce outside of any governments jurisdiction.

Common ground

So the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table
Finding faith and common ground the best that they were able
Dar Williams
The Christians and the Pagans

I had been meaning to post this for more than a week now, but I've been a little out of touch with the blog.

I had an interesting lunch with my boss, the owner of the company. The discussion was supposed to be about direction, goals, etc. over the long term. That part of the conversation was suprisingly short, mainly because there was nothing new to discuss there (another story I'll tell sometime).

So, having known each other for 13 years now, we starting talking about co-workers, former employees, etc. "How's so-an-so doing?" and similar stuff. We got onto the subject of marriage, and that was where the surprise was.

He and I are about as different as people can be. He is a die-hard Republican who hunts, plays sports very competively, etc. So it was unexpected when I found so much in common with him. We were both surprised recently by several unexpected divorces of friends and co-workers. We started talking about that, and about what keeps two people together or pushes them apart.

It turns out that we had both gone through several of the same challanges in marriages. The same stressful times triggered by similar events or at similar milestones. The same decisions, rationales, realizations, etc.

Anyway, It was just a reminder that there's always common ground there somewhere.

Communications breakdown

Vogon poetry is, of course, the third worst in the Universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their Poet Master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem "Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in my Armpit One Midsummer Morning", four of his audience died of internal hemorrhaging, and the President of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off.
-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams

Well, yesterday my leg was starting to look like a viable alternative to the meeting I was in. It was the 2005 kick-off event for my group at the office.

Now when the sales team has their annual kick-off (and, BTW, the mid-year update), they go to a big bash in Atlantic City. The engineers get an all-day meeting in the office. The sales team gets a free hotel stays and open bars. We got the sub platter. To be fair, dinner was at a local Italian place that was good, but spouses weren't invited like (you guessed it) the sales team.

Last year they did have Laser Tag, which is cool and fun. But even that was gone. What we got this year was a seminar about how we can be better communicators. I knew it was going to be bad when presenter began by telling us how her material was designed to help address issues she perceived based on our MBTI scores.

I don't know where everyone stands on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. A standardized test that groups people into one of sixteen personality categories is an interesting exercise that makes you think about how you perceive things. It is not a scientific method for determining how someone will act nor what they are capable of. My favorite MBTI site is this one from the Skeptic's Dictionary.

And the information presented was so lame! I mean, I don't need to small group exercises to learn that I shouldn't tell the customer that the system isn't working because they screwed it up. What's that you say? "Ask the customer open ended questions so they'll be encouraged to give more information?" Wow! You've changed my life!

Everyone in that room had at least eight years of experience working with customers, most had more than ten. Our marketing materials are rife with quotes from the happy customers these people have worked with. They're the best people here (all the others have been laid off). Did they really need this seminar?

Just give me the ice pick for my forehead!

In my day....

Grampa: You know, when I was your age, I had to walk twenty miles just to get to school. And back then, we didn't have pacifiers. We had to suck on pieces of wood. And in my day, we didn't have TV sets. We used to sit on our grandpa's lap all evening and listen politely to his entertaining stories.
Bart: Was your grandpa a liar too?
Grampa: No, but his lap was awful slippery!
-The Simpsons

Okay, so I am in training all week. It's for a product that I find incredibly boring and have absolutely no interest in, but I digress.

I observed something today that made me think. When you put several computer professionals together in the same room, there will invariably be a conversation about what computers used to be like. Today was no exception. One of the slides in the course material had, as an example, printer software. This led to a discussion of printers: then and now.

"...depending on what printer you have. Laser, inkjet, dot-matrix... Remember them? How about daisy-wheels? Who here remembers the IBM daisy-wheel printers? They were loud. Not as loud as band printers. Do you remember them? You had to spend thousands of dollars on an acoustic case so you could hear yourself."

And so on. We have these same discussions at work every so often. It's a way of demonstrating the level of seasoned veteran you are. Of course, some guy will always talk about his first programming class where he had to use punch cards. The conversation is pretty much over after that. Either that or programming with paper tape. Punch cards and paper tape trump everything. Every now and then someone goes for setting registers with toggle switches, but they're mostly showing off and end up looking old and pathetic.

This is not to say I do not ante up in these conversations. There is, however, a fine line you try to walk in them. You don't want be so old that you're out of touch, nor so young that everyone has already been there and done that. I think I'm in a bit of a sweet spot. I don't remember punch cards, but I programmed on the first Mac. Assembly code was a footnote for me, but I was in the first object oriented programming class at U.B. Acoustic coupler modems were long gone, but I posted on message boards well before the term "blog" existed. There was already an internet, but I remember a time when there were more .edu addresses than .com addresses.

I also remember when everyone surfed with Mosaic, anyone could add a link to their start page, and you could follow all those links in an hour or two. So, for those of you who share this same character flaw, I'll offer up this link: The Obsolete Computers Museum. I remember many of the items on display.

But not the ones with toggle switches.

Got a monkey off my back!

Got a m-m-m-monkey off my back back back!

My indentured servitude is over, and it feels good!

If you haven't heard the story, it's like this. An early Homicide had Pendleton getting involved in some upper echelon politics. Gee thinks it's a bad idea, and warns Pendleton that "they eat their own." In the end, Pendleton learns the hard way that Gee was right. I was Frank in this particular scenario.

But I'm done now, and good riddence!

It's alive! IT'S ALIVE!

Finally, finally, finally, finally the site is live.

I have alluded to this project in several posts, including the first one. It's been a ugly process. There was serious feature creep. Nothing worked right the first time. No feature was easy to add. Etc., etc., etc. But it's live. Maybe, just maybe, there is light at the end of this tunnel.

Now it's on to documentation. If you use Visual Studio and haven't seen NDoc, you'll want to. It builds MSDN-style compiled help files from the XML comments in your code. Sure all you J2EE people will scoff and tell me JavaDoc had this years ago, and this is just another case of MS playing catch-up, but I've used JavaDoc and this is way better. And just like JavaDoc, it's Free!

Anyway, on with the commenting....

Same code. Different defect.

No luck from Rob lending elequence to medicinal maggots, so they've hatched into bugs. Software bugs, to be precise.

Mistakes, oversights, and undocumented features infest the code like larvae, waiting to burst forth during testing as Level 1 defects that interrupt the testers and postpone the launch.

I'm taking a little refuge in the blog, hiding out from the exasperating issues, the onerous products, and one seriously unrelenting deadline. I have Boston is on the jukebox. Styx is probably next. Sometimes you need the old standards....

But I'll need to sleep sometime, so I guess break's over....

This too shall pass...

It's 11:20 and my plan was to respond to Rob's post about Cheney and fuck. (Yes, I said it, and I'm proud. After all, Dick is)

But I've been sucked in and for reasons unknown feel compelled to type here. No, the reason is I'm hiding from really horrid code. It's what I called "Heart of Darkness" code. You come out of it with sunken eyes muttering "The horror, the horror...." I guess that's apropos right now.

Anyway, I must return to the stone around my neck that is this deadline. Or maybe it's better described as the stone lodged in my urinary tract that slowly working it's way out.

This too shall pass....