Brandon's Blog

3/17/2010 #

This One May Be Weird

It’s bedtime, so I’m not sure how kooky this might be.

Do you ever look at somebody and think, “Where did they get that sweater?”  Not like in an Us magazine what-were-they-thinking fashion kind of way, but actually wondering about the story of the item?

Sometimes in strange moments I picture people sitting around with their families opening Christmas gifts (or Bayram gifts, or whatever), and pulling that sweater out of a gift box.  Or did they just pick it up on some ordinary Saturday by themselves?  Did their girlfriend pick it out?

Especially for guys, who don’t generally need to have the turnover rate seen in the standard woman’s wardrobe (and not as much of a will to shop, either), I think a lot of things have the potential to carry interesting stories.

Which makes it strangely personal, in a way, to encounter people wearing these goofy variations on standard things.  I suppose like the arrangements of leopard spots or freckles, the mortal spirit needs to wrap itself up in these little pieces of uniqueness to reinforce its own vision of self.

Maybe this is why I generally dislike wearing overly distinctive or heavily branded items.  To me, that’s a lot like trying to tell a story you’re not part of.

3/16/2010 #

A Whimper

I suppose the crowning moment for a dysfunctional, parasitic organism is when it is finally able to detach from its host and operate independently.  It’s starting to feel like our Congress has reached that point.

In school, pretty much everybody learns the principle that cheaters never win (at least in the end).  I did a little thought experiment, if you will, to explore my natural concept of cheating.

I conceptualize a government, and then I imagine someone is cheating inside that government.  What does that look like?  My mind arrived at the concept of a coup.  You break the power of the current rule of law, typically with some kind of popular or powerful support, and impose new rules.

The key concept here is that you broke rules to get your way.  This violates the Booker T. Washington-esque principle of working within the system to effect change.

Maybe you just break a law.  You slip a judge some money to get a certain decision, or perhaps you lobby excessively for a legislative change, or buy a presidential pardon.  It doesn’t matter.  You either crack the system or crumble it, but no matter what you broke a rule.

I then note that the situation in Congress doesn’t seem to match this concept.

I see a second-order cheating at work here; very post-modern, I guess.  Here, you don’t break the system by violating its rules, you break the system using the rules.  This is cheating with the brain rather than the fist.

We are in the midst of a dismantlement of our manufacturing capacity.  Farming continues to consolidate.  We are paying companies to plant trees to offset the charcoal we burn in our barbeques.  We employ people domestically to draw software flowcharts that are zapped to India for development.  We somehow manage to compete with the rest of the widget-producing world and be a/the preferred immigration location despite the growingly extreme lack of widgeteries.  I assume this competitive advantage is not completely driven by Quik-E-Mart and Starbucks operations.  So it’s working, somehow, at least for now.

In this way, I guess it makes sense that cheating would also become more cerebral.

But, in a coup you have people or guns (probably both).  You have something behind you.  Maybe a few Deists sitting around a table drafting up a pretty hard-worded document that later gets enclosed in UV-proof vacuum glass.

In the new model, all you pretty much need is a sketchy grin and a firmly extended middle finger.  How did you get into this powerful role?  It’s clearly a question for the ages for those in a mysterious position of power.

Does it matter how you got there?  How do you stop someone who is playing by the letter of the law?

Americans are level-headed enough to pretty much rule out the idea of throwing everything off and starting again.  Our system works quite well on the whole.  But what are we going to do about Congress?  At this point, they are operating in open disregard of the public’s support.

We think we have choice, but with the party in many ways dictating who makes it past the primaries, we get a bunch of yes-men with a few renegades who slip through the lines only to get pelted once faced with the machine of the system.

Matt Taibbi’s The Great Derangement had a pretty stunning recount of how Congress is effectively a petting zoo front propped up against the mechanisms of committees and party inner-workings.

Right now, we can’t do anything.  I remember trying to read the language used in the bailout bills.  It’s impossible.  How can citizens get involved when things work like this?  And isn’t that the most important rule of all?

3/9/2010 #

Walking to Work Thought

I just realized how similar the historical flow of (post-Ottoman) Turkish political power is to the ideas behind Battlestar Gallactica.

I am sometimes ashamed of these types of thoughts, but they’re mine, and I’m at least going to share them with my blog.

Conceptualizing the members of the Religious Right here as Cylons is kind of a funny thought, anyway.

3/9/2010 #

Resources

I think a lot of companies have a fundamental misunderstanding of the knowledge workers they employ.  New employee orientations often warn against “personal use” of the company internet connection during working hours.  This “while you’re at work, you should be working” philosophy works fine if you’re welding truck frames, but if you’re truly getting paid to think it’s an absurd slice of utopia.

I’m not busy all the time.  Sometimes I kick back and read some news to unwind from a task, and a lot of times this is when I come up with an improved plan for the next job.  People who are working nonstop often seem scattered, unfocused, and inefficient.

I remember “wasting” some time at work back in the States researching graphviz, probably thinking it might help some hobby project I was mulling over at the time.  I ended up using it in one of the best projects I did in that job.  I learned Python during one of my summer internships, and I have used it to produce a few automation projects that would be otherwise unworkable in our lockdown environment here.

If knowledge workers are actually in the business of acquiring and applying knowledge, then half the time we should probably be viewing them as academics or researchers rather than worker bees.  Absently consuming an entire day with e-mail reading (and over- or under-sorting), droning telecons, and spreadsheet monkeying mutes the value of a college education and decent intelligence, which garnered the big professional salary and desk job in the first place.

But the truth is, most supervisors (all of mine) understand this and generally support self-guided personal growth, even if it’s not even pointed at a current company objective.  There’s a stigma, but it’s only enforced at the extreme in practice.

It’s also important to equip these workers with the proper tools.  At a prior job, we needed VP approval to get a Blackberry, and I’m still on a “User” profile computer that doesn’t allow a program besides Internet Explorer to access the internet, and installing something like Python is out of the question.  Policy is one thing, but I have lost countless hours designing workarounds to these limitations.

Most notably, I wrote a VBScript application that launched an instance of Internet Explorer to download a file, scraped the data out of the browser control, and wrote it to standard output, which the calling Python script collected and performed analysis afterwards.  This would have been accomplished in a single function call if I had been able to use the basic functionality of Python (the proxy made this impossible).

Postscript: It’s interesting to me that I long ago grouped work and academics together for the relevant tag in my blogging.

3/9/2010 #

Macadamia Nuts

You want an illustration of the benefits of portfolio diversification?  Construct a building with only one men’s bathroom stall on the whole floor, take off its door handle, and lock it.  Right in between coffee time and lunch time.

3/6/2010 #

Is That Meat-Related?

The homophones department called, and it’s time for a different website name.

3/4/2010 #

IE6: Bye Bye, Die Die

IE6 support is officially pulled from Google Docs, meaning I can no longer access these files from work.  I can also not use it as a dropbox for files I want to pass back and forth.  That’s what a USB stick is for, so no biggie there.  I just can’t update my cost basis file or other documents from work anymore.

I had just been thinking about how good Google Docs is for what I’m using it for.

Grammar moment: … how good Google Docs is for that for which I am using it.  (?)  Some authorities are saying it’s perfectly fine to end with a preposition as long as it makes sense (to?).  I feel like verb-helping prepositions are part of the verb in many cases (learning Turkish will do that to you, actually).  Since I doggedly begin sentences with “but” on free-thinking principle, I am not one to talk about such things.

Also: did anyone else hear that style guides are saying it’s no longer so smart to put two spaces between sentences?  Heresy!  Although the web’s write-plenty-show-once policy with whitespace has not helped my cause.

Anyway, Docs is a OS- and (more importantly) computer-portable way to keep up with basic stuff without resorting to more complex measures.

I’m in love with Dropbox for similar reasons, but it’s heavier-weighted to allow for a more rich experience with the documents.  All of my Windows-enhancing portable apps (Notepad2, grep, md5sum, git, svn, 7zip, WinSCP, etc.) are stored in my Dropbox account.  I then add this tool folder’s location to my PATH environment variable via System Properties, and I have command line access to all my tools without downloading anything to each computer separately.  This has reduced my system reinstall overhead significantly.

By the way, I am now using that virtual directory linking tool I mentioned before as a means of creating a more sane “profile” folder in Windows.  I have a C:\User directory that houses symlinks to several key directories, but the directories have been linked as one-word names.  So I have C:\User\Music (My Music), C:\User\Documents (My Documents, breaking up nesting like this is no biggie, so subfolders can become peer folders in my virtual structure), C:\User\Dropbox (My Dropbox inside My Documents), etc.  If you get tired of fishing out the Application Data hidden folder in your profile directory, you can link that in as well, maybe as Settings.

You could also do a C:\User\Brandon* structure easily if you’re self-hatingly trying to do a multi-user Windows experience.  This is pretty much how Mac organizes user files.  It’s nice, because the existing Windows structure (Documents and Settings, etc.) is completely unmodified.  You’re just accessing them in different ways.

Since I sometimes access music via the command line (working on an even better way to do this, actually, besides calling on VLC directly), it’s nice to avoid file names with spaces as long as possible.  Windows does a nice job sloppily escaping spaces, but it takes a lot of time and tabbing when typing directly.  Did you know Windows 2000’s command shell doesn’t have tab completion?

3/4/2010 #

Hodja

I did some reading, and the Hodja is a famous story character in Turkish and general Islamic culture.

Once I thought about it, I realized (and later confirmed) that hodja is a transliteration of the Turkish hoca, which means a wise man or religious teacher.

This actually came up in a really cool book Kristin and I both read called The Yogurt Man Cometh, which is an American teacher’s account of a time spent teaching in Turkey.  The students called him hocam (my hoca), although they weren’t supposed to do that because the word is very formal and archaic.

There is a lot of hold-over ultra-respect in Turkish daily usage.  My blog platform is called efendi, which is like a lord or nobleman.  If you can’t understand a taxi driver, it’s perfectly normal to say “my lord?”  Of course, the general Turkish norm is to be pretty rough with the guy otherwise, but you still call him a nobleman when you can’t hear him.

It’s a lot like the Spanish señor, I think.

3/4/2010 #

Feuding with Vueling

We used a Spanish airline, Vueling, to get from Barcelona to Venice.  They actually got us as far as Milan, and we took a delayed bus from there.  Something like this?

Needless to say, the flight was 98% full of perhaps two of the most passionate breeds of European, the Spaniard and the Italian.  The other 2% was pretty much the two of us, and we were basically freaked until a friendly Spanish guy with a very Three Musketeers type of beard translated all the news and directions for us.

Well, a nice lady who did speak English (and apparently Spanish and Italian) took down everyone’s e-mail addresses and promised a fight when she got back home.  The fight has commenced, with national newspapers being informed and the like.

Anyway, I already applied for my reimbursement of that flight, so if we get a refund I’m not sure how to handle it with integrity but without waking the great beast of HR administrivia.  I don’t know how they would compensate such a transgression, but they’re not Star Alliance, meaning we’re pretty much going to Madrid or the Canary Islands if there is a voucher involved.

This is the kind of airline that charges you to choose your economy seats in advance, so I hope they don’t offer a free eggroll and checked bag.

We do deserve some consideration, though.  Being stuck in a completely different city overnight without two wings and a prayer - I suppose - missing out on a whole lot of sleep and the vast majority of a night’s rest in a very charming Venice hotel kind of jacked up the rhythm of the vacation.  We stayed in the hotel for about two hours, which was one of the best ideas of the trip but was definitely the most expensive nap and shower I hope to ever take.

3/3/2010 #

Turkish Humor

From work today, to illustrate a point about invoicing:

One day, the Hodja borrowed a pan from his neighbor. After he had finished using it, he took it back to the neighbor with a small pan tucked inside.

When the man saw it, he was most surprised.

“What is that?” he asked.

“Well, said the Hodja, when I borrowed your pan it was pregnant and it brought a child into the world.”  The man smiled and accepted them.

A few days later the Hodja borrowed the pan again but this time he did not return it. The man was rather cross. He went to the Hodja and asked “What about my pan?”

“I am very sorry,” said the Hodja, “but it died.”

“Don’t make jokes with me,” replied the man, “How can a pan die?”

“If you believe that it brought a child into the world,” said the Hodja, “why can’t you believe that it died?”