A quick look outside…

A quick shot out the hotel window. See that white thing? it’s a bush. See the railing? the white stuff on the tree?

Hey, I didn’t go to Canada to get SNOWED on, you know. I’m an orange county kid. Snow belongs up in the mountains where you can look at it from afar and make fun of people who like to ski…..

Portland.

The border crossing took 18 minutes or so. Not bad, given the color orange. But it helps to cross at 8 in the morning…

We’ve made it to Portland. Given how the weather is turning, we plan (assuming we can) to get out of here and cut things short, crawl down to Eugene and then cross over to the coast and make for Eureka. Depening on weather and how long that takes, we may or may not try to make it home tomorrow.

In all of the off-season travelling we’ve done up here, this is the first time we’ve hit weather that made us change travel plans. And having just looked out the window, Portland is a white mass of frozen water right now. It’s snowing.

Go figure. It’ll be interesting to see what the travel looks like in the AM. Even worse, the place we’re staying in, which we thought had real internet hookups, is still stuck in the dialup ages, so the powerbook is wired to the phone, and transmitting wireless to Laurie’s powerbook as a shared private network… Not fast, but it works painlessly…

snowing. Portland. jesus. who’da thunk?

Crossing the border…

Tomorrow we cross the border back to the states, leaving Vancouver behind. Today we breakfasted at Granville Island, then hopped the false creek ferry over to Hornby and walked downtown for a bit, then back into yaletown. dinner was at Provence at Marinaside, and was much appreciated. My ahi was wonderful, Laurie’s scallops were perfect.

The two shops we were most interested in today were Books to Cooks, a wonderful cookbook store (another of Laurie’s hobbies, she has almost 300 to date) — but we ended up not buying anything, because the books we were interested in are available in the states and it made no sense to buy them here — the one I was most interested in, in fact, turned out to be a Chronicle Books volume published in San Francisco. Go figure. After that, we wandered down to Coastal People’s Art Gallery, a gallery I’ve wanted to visit for a while, and had a nice chat with the people there. Very high quality and reasonably priced (we left with a nice pair of sterling eagle earrings for Laurie, more on that later), it’s definitely going to be on my short list for future gallery visits (stay tuned for that entry later…).

For those that care, I’ve also uploaded the last of my Victoria shots from this trip, and most of my Vancouver shots. Tomorrow morning, on to Portland and the New year. The weather so far has been chilly but cooperative, but it’s unclear that’ll continue as we head south again, so we’re seriously considering cutting our portland stop short by a day, rolling out to the coast, and driving down to Eureka to avoid the passes. If so, it’ll be the first time we’ve had to do this on our trips north during the off-season…

Why do we travel off-season like this? and why do we drive? Oh, um, stay tuned….

Feeling no pain….

You know, I could get used to this…

Back in the hotel room after a late dinner at the Yaletown Brewing Company here in Yaletown (highly recommended, the Red Brick Bitter is wonderful, the food quite tasty). We’ve had a long walk, a nice rest, some good food, some wonderful alcohol, and topped it off with coffee and processed sugars — I think I’m ready to solve world hunger or something….

We’re staying in the Opus Hotel, an upscale mini hotel (97 rooms) that opened a little over a year ago in the Yaletown region of Vancouver. We’d originally explored this part of town (to the south and east of Granville down to false creek) back in 1999 when we came up here for the Grey Cup, and it was just starting to seriously gentrify. We’d heard it’d really taken steps forward, and we wanted to see what they’d done for the area.

Yaletown is an old industrial/warehousing district in Vancouver, with a lot of older buildings. Vancouver’s done a wonderful job of maintaining the flavor fo the area as it rebuilds, with a lot of buildings being turned into lofts or mixed use loft/retail. The emphasis on lofts gives it a real urban edge. Opus reflects that with a modern and contemporary design motif (if I say Designer Guys Urban Loft, you’ll either know what I’m saying or be totally confused….).

Some interesting design issues here in Yaletown stuck in my mind — the key one is that on Mainland, the main drag in the middle of Yaletown, the historic buildings were all warehouses, with attached raised loading docks and one-lane one-way roads. Where most towns would have pulled down those docks and widened the streets, Vancouver chose to protect them, turning them into wide walkways and patio areas, leaving the streets narrow and congested. this really keeps the flavor of the area alive, and is a pretty gutsy move from a planning view (it works because Vancouver has a good transit system that minimizes the need to drive in to these areas). You can see where in better weather the restaurants and pubs are going to expand out onto those areas and really add some liveliness.

Yaletown is definitely a mixed-use neighborhood, with a growing population of shopping (it’ll likely eventually be a major shopping area along with Gastown and Robson), and a really nice mix of pubs, clubs and restaurants, along with a growing number of lofted residential, plus the ubiquitous green-glass high-rise condos and apartments down in the Marinaside area on the water.

(even that works up here, because while Vancouver has regulated the coloring of the buildings, it demands a lot of architectural interest, so while all of the buildings tie in to each other, it’s far from boring — nothing is square. And from an urban planning basis, there’s a major committment here to open spaces and views, so it’s one of the few urban areas I can walk around without feeling closed in or stuck in canyons, because there aren’t any….)

A typical vacation day for us around here — breakfast is coffee and a scone of some sort (which is no problem around here, since it looks like coffee shops are mandated about every 100 feet or so), and then we walk and explore. Today we headed off to Marinaside, caught a false creek ferry for Granville Island and spent a couple of hours there walking and grumbling at why we can’t get something like that were we live…. I’d kill for those kinds of public markets.

then another ferry to the science center, and we walked the end of false creek to BC place, then from there down to gastown where Laurie wanted to grab something from Hill’s. Then we walked to the seabus, crossed to Lonsdale Quay for a quick lunch (more grumbles. No city should have two public markets like this until every city has one!), then back and over to the Pan Pacific, where we grabbed a taxi back to the Opus, where we turned on the finals of the skins game (curling! yeah!), and I fell asleep for a bit, then down to Yaletown brewing for dinner. And now I’m catching up on net stuff while watching a replay of canada/switzerland in the world juniors. All in all, 2, maybe 2 and a half miles today.

Tomorrow? probably Granville for breakfast, then focus more on Yaletown (there’s a great cookbook store here for Laurie, and a couple of galleries I want to snoop at…). Then perhaps dinner at Provence at Marinaside. Or maybe not, these days tend to be ad-libbed pretty heavily…

Weather is quite brisk — under 40F — but while we had rain (and snow) on the travel day, today and tomorrow both are quite pleasant, partly cloudy, little wind. So it’s great out and about weather if you dress properly.

More pictures once I process them, too.

Snow?

So who ordered the white stuff? Got off the tswassen ferry this evening heading back to Vancouver, and what do we see? Remnants of a snow flurry on the sides of the road. Not huge amounts, but really. this is Vancouver.

On the other hand, it’s not slowing anyone down much. foot traffic around the hotel is pretty reasonable.

Weather conditions…

Current weather here in Victoria: 45 F, somewhat windy, and partly cloudy.

current weather conditions at home in San Jose: 46 F and raining.

current weather in orange county, CA, where we’d be if we weren’t where we are: 61 F and raining.

two words most people don’t think of when they think of Victoria: rain shadow

(giggle)

Merry Christmas..

And a happy holidays to one and all.

And to all of you children out there reading this blog, don’t you realize it’s almost christmas and santa won’t come if you’re awake? Go to sleep already, for crying out loud! This blog can wait until after you open presents!

And no, you can’t get that b-b gun! you’ll shoot your eye out!

Unplugged….

As Laurie notes, we are both unplugged and at leisure at the same time for the first time in I don’t know how long. Because of my project’s requirements, and because of some of the stuff she’s been involved in, even when we’ve been on vacation the last couple of years, there’s still been some aspect of work going with us.

This time? almost none. On Friday, my programmer and I put down our stone axes and our bronze chisels about 4:30 and said “enough”. We left the project with two open items, one we think is fixed and will be tested while we’re gone, the other a couple hours short of fixing and we’ll get back on it starting 1/5 (in the past, I’d have been tempted to carry on with this now, but not this year. I’m ready for the break…)

I’ll be spending a very little amount of time making sure systems stay up and stuff that needs to be ready for Macworld is, but it’s other people doing the “ready for Macworld” part this time, thank god.

So we’re going to see what happpens when we have two weeks to ourselves without deadlines, at least deadlines not of our own making…

I think I’ll go take a bath. Back later. Maybe. maybe not. and ain’t that a great feeling….

Drug abuse problems in junior hockey.

A sad, but not surprising story talking about drug abuse problems in the QMHJL.

quote: A series of stories in La Presse suggests that up to 40 per cent of QMJHL players use various stimulants before games and depressants to help them sleep during long bus rides.

Please don’t for a second think that I’m minimizing the issue at hand (I’m not) or that I’m trying to say it’s not true (it is quite clear this is an issue at all levels of competitive sport in many, if not all, sports). But I have some issues with this story.

For instance: substances used by some of the QMJHL’s 380 players include ephedrine, creatine, amphetamines, marijuana and various relaxants — tossing in creatine in this list is like tossing in Vitamin B or Ibuprofen, and complaining about the number of pills the players are taking. It doesn’t belong on this list (whether it belongs on any list is arguable). If the author of the story doesn’t understand the difference between creatine and the other substances they’re worried about, he didn’t do his homework.

And not once does the author, or any of the officials he quotes, mention the world “alcohol”. Hello? HELLO? — what is the number one abused substance in the universe (except in baseball, where it’s probably chewing tobacco). Hint: it’s not marijuana. And either you are serious about solving abuse issues, or you aren’t. And if you aren’t dealing with alcohol as an abusable substance, you aren’t serious. If you aren’t going to deal with the alcohol problems on these teams, don’t worry about marijuana, either.

Leagues very definitely have to get these abuse issues under control. But it should start with alcohol. To mention creatine and ephedrine but not booze indicates to me the officials involved are either naive, playing PR games, or incredibly stupid. And I’m not betting on stupid.

It’s Friday!!!!!!!

End of a long, long week. Exhausted, but in positive ways.

The project that derailed is back on track, performance problems solved; in fact, this week we hit a historic usage level, as well as some nice landmark usage numbers; growth is about 40% year over year right now, which is awesome, but also explains how we got into the little disaster as well; when you are bringing on that much more stuff and new clients and all of that, the risk factors surrounding system issues change — but we never stopped to re-evaluate them. What would have been an okay “damn, we have to fix that!” turned into a “my god, we’re screwed!” along the way, and I didn’t notice.

Different ballgame now. Good change, now that the dust has settled. The follow-on release we rescheduled into January we took yet another look at, and thought that just maybe, we could sneak it in before we do the holiday lock down, if everything broke right. And a week later, we’ve met all of our targets. So far. We’re hopeful, and that’s sort of carried my focus this last week. But we rolled the release out for testing on the revised-revised-revised schedule on time, and so far, testing has shown it to be solid, with no significnat issues so far.

All of which has me in a much better mood now. It also helps that we have no new major project on the horizon; we’re stopping major new development for a bit to sweep up the sawdust and do some landscaping. We have to take a step back and fix up and upgrade the underlying infrastructure to handle these new loads — and get ready for the next round of growth. So we’ve been doing a lot of talking on development processes, project management, and etc. And my xserve with the RAId for the MySQL database is ready, and I get to go play starting Monday or so! (yippee!). Given so many of our processing chokepoints turn out to be an 8Gig SCSI disk on an E-250, I can’t wait.

But it also means that after two years of “need it yesterday mode”, I’m starting to shift back into a more normal world again. I might actually finish some stuff, instead of just get it far enough to look worked on… (grin)

Which sort of leads me to another things that’s I’ve been chewing on the last six months or so. I’ve been feeling more and more like I need to get involved in the community in some way; not the virtual one where I’ve put in time over the years, but the real one, and put something back into the region I get so much from. One problem — not time — seems to be receding. The other problem, what to do, hasn’t. I’ve been trying to find a group where some of my knowledge and skills could add more than just sweat equity to the game (I would happily donate time cleaning kennels at the humane society, for instance, and I might in fact do that also down the road, but I’d like to find something that better leverages me, not just the time I’m donating).

And purely by happenstance, I ran into someone I knew by reputation who runs a non-profit here in Silicon Valley and went and introduced myself, and we spent some time talking to him about some of the work he’s done the last few years. Which led to me realizing that someone else I been introduced to was in fact president of the board of directors of that organization. And it’s an organization that’s doing things I’m interested in, and that I think I can add value to. And so it seems stuff is suddenly clicking into place.

(yes, I’m consciously not naming names here; the discussion will continue in January after the holidays, and if we decide to move forward, then I’ll talk further. I’m just thrilled to finally have a direction to move in…)

It’s got pretty much everything I’m looking for, I think. I have some skills that I can leverage beyond the “average” volunteer for them, it’s established, I can step in at a low level with a low profile and not need to take a leadership position, it’s got a strong people aspect, and there’s a nice political taste to it, an area I was looking to explore. And it’s real world, not virtual.

So we’ll see. gee, my life is so empty I’m looking for new projects.

Hey, I was bored once. It bored me. Life’s too short.

But at least I’m in a good mood again, no?

In the “how things have changed” department…

Back in the 80′s, I published a fanzine called OtherRealms, which reviewed SF and Fantasy books (and did other things along the way).

This week, I got a note from one of the authors I talked about back in 1988 (which was great), noting that his home address was listed in OtherRealms, and would I mind removing it?

I did, the way I’d remove any other information involving a person’s privacy (which is about the only reason I’d alter a public record of something that’s been published). But it’s sort of a kick in the knee just how much the internet has changed in the last 20 years. Back in 1984, I was throwing parties and advertising them on USENET groups (with my then-address and phone number published). can you imagine that today? I know some groups still generate get-together’s that way, but not at a person’s house; at least in public.

ah, the good old days of youthful naivete and trust….

of small things are great weekends made…

It’s been a solid week since I last blogged. I’d apologize, but I needed a break. Not from blogging, but from pretty much everything… When last we spoke, I was surfacing from this. Uncle Stevie, bless him, gave all of us good little Apple Elves a few extra days off at Thanksgiving, so starting friday, I’ve been at leisure for the most part (like anyone with ties to marketing, and the day after Thanksgiving being black friday in the retail trade, thanksgiving week isn’t a quiet time. Fortunately, my part in everything is limited to supporting other people, who didn’t need much support).

And frankly, I was wasted. I spent Friday night and much of Saturday stuffed down in the bowels of Neverwinter Nights, playing couch potato. I’ve been slowly surfacing since.

The last few days have been a bunch of little things — finally some time to catch up on chores — I finally got around to pulling apart and rewiring the video here in the back office, for instance. Lest you think we’re talking about plugging in a VCR, the video setup here has three satellite dishes, two VCRs, a DVD player, a 5.1 AV theater setup, and a channel redistribution system that pushes three channels onto the cable for viewing throughout the rest of the house. Since we’d picked up a new TV (56″ Sony projection) and DVD player, I had to figure out how to make it all work using the new connections and etc. Two days later, I have everything running except the cable distribution, and instead of running everything through the receiver, I’m now using the TV as the center point, since it has seven (count them, seven!) video inputs. the only thing running off of the AV receiver is the VCR, which can that way tape anything the TV is viewing, and I’ll then use it as one of the outputs onto the coax for the front room (the others being the three dishes, one distributing via coax on channel)

And for many operations, it now only needs one remote, and no longer needs an engineering degree to find HGTV. Second remotes for some of the extra dishes, but I’m closer to the holy grail of every TV signal on earth, and a single true universal remote…

I’ve also made it a point to get out every day for a while and get some exercise; Monday was mallwalking Santana Row, Tuesday birding Charleston Slough, Yesterday a short walk in the neighborhood and working on cleaning out the garage, and today spending time cleaning up the front yard. Trying to take advantage of the downtime to try to start reinforcing the exercise habit I want to build. As long as the weather is mostly cooperating, I’d rather be outside if I can… the knees are a bit sore, but not unexpected. The trick at this point is to push hard enough for stuff to complain, but not hard enough that something gets tweaked. It’s a start, now I just have to have the energy and time to carry it forward..

An interview with Greg Jamison

In August 2003, I was able to sit down with Greg Jamison, President and Chief Executive Officer of the NHL’s San Jose Sharks, to talk about the team, the expectations for the season, and some of the issues and challenges from last year’s disappointing season.

Because of an emergency, we had to cut the interview short, and we’ve been trying to find a free time in common since to finish this (we finally have, and we’ll be meeting in about two weeks). Because of that, we’ve agreed to publish this, and use the second session as a new interview examining how things are going now that the season has started.

Interview of Greg Jamison, President and CEO of the San Jose Sharks
Interview conducted August, 2003

Chuq: can you give us a quick opinion on how Doug Wilson has taken on the GM’s role?

Greg Jamison: I feel pretty good about it. I think Doug has done a good job. I like the work he’s done concerning the Group II free agents and the amateur staff. I am very pleased with the way things have gone to this point. We have one player left to sign and everyone else under contract.

Chuq: How’s that going? I figured Hannan would be the hardest one to sign.

Jamison: I think it’s going fine. I talked to Doug this morning, and we’re making good progress. We’d like to get him under contract, so we can really go into the year prepared and bring this team out of camp and ready to go. My sense is that everyone is ready to do that and everyone is looking forward to the season.

Chuq: it seems to me looking around the league that players are more willing to sign this year, and the impending end of the CBA has something to do with it. Is it your impression that this is making it easier or harder to sign players?

Jamison: I can’t get too deep into the CBA, but one thing I can say is we do have a backdrop of the CBA. The word that’s come up so much from Commissioner Bettman is that everyone who runs a business is looking for some form of cost certainty, both on the expense side as well as the revenue side. So whether it’s having that type of impact or not is probably speculation, but there’s no question that as you move a team going forward you must keep in mind that there’s a new Collective Bargaining Agreement that’s going to be done in 2004, and so you have to be prepared to anticipate wherever that may go and that may have an impact on how you build teams, write contracts, etc…

Chuq: and the same is true of the agent’s side, because you can’t afford to have a player out for a year, and then find out they’re not playing for a second year. I think that’s probably affecting some of their view.

Jamison: That’s what I’m saying. Because there’s a potential change coming into the mix, it probably impacts all different ways.

Chuq: Do you think the Sharks will be a playoff team this year?

Jamison: our stated goal is to be in the playoffs. We expect the team to be in the playoffs every year, and we expect to be in the playoffs this year. We are confident that our organization will come out of what was a tough year and will have a very good training camp and have everyone in. Obviously we’re at the mercy of health and what have you, but we expect to be a playoff team.

Chuq: The team that you’ve built can do that given what the western conference teams have done this off season? The west is a tough conference.

Jamison: The West is a tough conference. I think Doug articulates it very well. I think you take care of what you’re supposed to take care of. There was a lot of speculation when teams got players and what have you, but the playoffs bore out a much different story. You had your teams like Detroit and colorado and Philly out in the first or second round, I think it sent a pretty strong message that at the end of the day, it’s still a team game and the team has to play well together, good goaltending, good defense, an opportune goal at a certain time as Anaheim proved, and bang — you’re there. And I think that’s how we look at it from our own perspective of what is it we have to do and build our own team. We let in too many goals last year, and if we clean up that alone it’d make a difference in what our record would be. But Doug feels confident and I agree with him that we’ll have some goals scored, too. It’s a different dynamic now, there are certain players that were in leadership positions that are no longer here, and I think you’ll see some other players emerge into leadership positions in a very positive way.

Chuq: I don’t see that as a bad thing. It’s a different sharks team, that’s for sure.

Jamison: it’s a faster sharks team, The defense has some guys that are veterans now, although in some people’s minds some kids never get older. I think defensively we’ll be strong. I think we’ve drafted well since 1996, we have more players in the pipeline that are coming forward, so into the future, no matter what happens, I think we’re in a good position going forward.

Chuq: going into last season, everyone was really looking forward to it, and it looks like the Sharks tripped going into camp and never really found their center. Looking back at that, with the ability of 20-20 hindsight, do you see any single event that started that cascade that could have been avoided? In retrospect, do you see something you could have done with the knowledge you have now (knowing you didn’t have it then) that could have avoided the problems?

Jamison: I do think there were a number of issues that all came together at the same time. There are some issues I can’t speak to, but there were other issues that seemed to all happen at the same time, caused a reaction, which caused a reaction, so by the time it was all done, by the time we came out of camp, we had a weak beginning. But you also have to remember we came out of December 7-3-2-1 for the month, with 10 home games in January, and I thought we were poised to take off at that point, and we went through one of those issues and [unintelligible].

Chuq: to me the crowning point of the season was the Predator away game at the end of that road trip. That’s where I think the season spun for the rest of the season.

Jamison: I’ve had that game come up before. That road trip was crazy. I think it was like that the entire season. We had a crazy camp. Nick Sundstrom couldn’t get here. We had some injuries, and it seemed like bang from the very beginning. I also see some silver linings. We got it all out in one season, we made some changes that help this franchise move forward, and I think overall our player mix is a good player mix, and if we can get to camp and get some of the basics taken care of, address the system that Wilson and Hunter and Zettler want to address, and I think we’ll come out of camp a good team.

Chuq: Let’s talk about finances a bit. I went back over some of the stuff that came out when the Kings were audited by one of their season ticket holders who’s an analyst, and I found that document to be both fascinating and scary because it made some implications about league-wide finances that really bothered me. Would you say, without going into numbers, that that report is broadly comparable to the state of the Sharks?

Jamison: I’m not at liberty to speak about other team’s finances or league finances, but I can tell you this, that I think this gentleman’s report did follow the strength of his convictions. From the Sharks standpoint specifically, the team lost money last year, and is projected to lose money this year. In talking about the Sharks, our goal has never wavered from winning the Stanley Cup, but I also feel we have to follow a good financial strategy and a good budget process and all those things that go into running a good business, but our business is hockey and running this arena. You have to remember that winning is not a function of throwing money at the team but spending money wisely.

Chuq: the number that really stuck out to me in the Kings document is their concession number, which is about $6 per ticket sold. From what I’ve seen at other venues that’s a very low number, and it indicated to me that the fan feels like the ticket price is too high, so they aren’t spending elsewhere in the arena. would you say that’s a fair assessment?

Jamison: within the scope of it, that’s one portion of it. I think it’s a multiplicity of things to be honest with you. We all very closely chase discretionary entertainment dollar. Depending on who you are right now, the economy has had a huge impact on that; for many people, the money just isn’t there. If you look at your overall financial picture, you have to put all of that out there: ticket price, parking revenue, food, and it all comes into play when you look at revenues. Our goal as a franchise is to chase revenue as much as we can, and in some cases and get outside of the consumer. Our goal isn’t to see how much how much we can take ticket prices up, our goal is to see what revenue we can get outside of that, and our more encompassing goal is to get our expenses in line so we take in more than we spend and still have a very good and competitive product that doesn’t take it’s eyes off of winning the Stanley Cup.

Chuq: do you think you can make the Sharks both competitive and sustainable under the current CBA or will it require changes in the CBA?

Jamison: As I said, the early word on the CBA is cost certainty. You must have cost certainty so you can plan cash flow and all the things that go with that. Do I feel that you can run a good business and break even or make money and win? Absolutely. Absolutely. You must spend money and get to a certain level to bring in talent. But I have three words for you: New York Rangers.

Chuq: one of the things I’ve been worried about over the years is that while the Sharks have done a good job of selling tickets, it seems like the other areas of the audience, especially TV and radio, have not grown the way we had hoped. is there an issue there of whether you’ve appropriately marketed out to the casual fan, and do you think you’ve done a good job of attracting the casual fan, or has your marketing been oriented towards maintaining your current fan base?

Jamison: you always worked hard to maintain the current fan base, because those are the people who are involved with us and have a strong affinity for us, but I do think that at the end of the day, a strong aspect of this, even when we had better renewals than we do this year, it’s important that people be able to buy tickets. What we’re trying to do is both: we try to maintain our audience, but we try to make sure there are tickets available. you never want a 9 year old kid to grow up and not be able to attend a game. I think that serves you well if your season ticket base drops off at is has this year, a strong part of it because of the economy, as well as team performance and not meeting the fans expectations.

Chuq: do you think you’ve done a good job of convincing that 9 year old to attend a game?

Jamison: We’re still in a non-traditional hockey market. We’re in a very fragmented media market. And I think the thing that really drives that is you can have a good regular season and a first round, but I think if you go deep into the playoffs and there’s a real strong concerted interest in the game and what’s going on and you have a deep playoff run and you’re in the third round and into the finals, that’s when I think your television numbers can get a pretty good spike that you might maintain into the future. Hockey on television, for the person who loves hockey and understands the game, they can watch hockey on television and enjoy it. For the more casual fan, even if they’re in the arena may or may not get into hockey on television as much until their sophistication and interest grow. I think thirdly one of the things that will help hockey on television is HDTV. It seems to make it more vivid, puck following is easier for some, so I think there’s a lot of upside potential, but we haven’t fulfilled it. And even when you look at radio and television down the road, eventually you’ll have people in place who’ve grown up on Sharks games and become a sportscaster on a channel, and talking about hockey as well as football and basketball and baseball. Remember, at the end of the day, we’re still only 12 years old. We have not gotten to the point yet where we can take it for granted.

Chuq: this building is about 10 years old. has it met your expectations?

Jamison: I think this building’s been great. People tell me all the time they love our building. It’s intimate. It’s about the right size. Lighting is good. Sight lines are good. it’s safe and secure. It’s been a great building

Chuq: if you were to redesign the building, what changes would you make?

Jamison: I’d do everything I could to maintain the intimacy I have now. I’d probably improve the sound system. I’d have the latest video technology — I think we’re going to wait and see what HDTV does. I like the club. We might revisit the suites. Other than that, I think this building turned out to be very well received and very good. I go into many buildings over the year, and the one thing that jumps out at me is that this building is so intimate.

club: this building is about the last building where the club is down in the 100 level. GM place puts the club half on one side, and then with key arena, they raised the building and put the club into the 200 level. If you had to do it again, would you move the club?

Jamison: I’m not dissatisfied with the model we have. It seems to work well and people seem to like it the way we have. there’s always talk about things, like would you have a restaurant with sight lines into the bowl. Sometimes those are nice, but if you had to pick an overall setup, does this work? My answer is yes it works very well. There’s one guy I see, a president of the building, every time I see him he’s telling me how he has to retrofit his building and how I have a great building.

Chuq: I am fascinated by the lack of retrofitting you have done. About four years ago you put the penthouse in for group sales, but that’s about the only major change you’ve made other than ongoing capital maintenance.

Jamison: we have the terrace and penthouse suites, one other suite. We’d like to re-do the sound system, but the city has to be involved in that.

Chuq: why does the city have to be involved?

Jamison: this is a city-owned building. There are times when the city has to share the costs. We should not be expected to bear the brunt of all improvements to the building. This building has served the city well, and has surpassed every for of speculation of how successful it could be for the city of San Jose.

Chuq: how many light dates do you have a year?

Jamison: about 125, which is pretty good for a one team building.

Chuq: are the metal detectors going to be a permanent part of the entry this season?

Jamison: that’s still being looked at. We are checking with the other arenas, and we don’t want to be lax with our security, and we want to provide a safe environment for our fans. We work very closely with the league. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to do that, but as we all know, we don’t live in a perfect world.

Chuq: I hate to bring this up, but: ice quality. Have we ever really figured out why it fell apart? Because it had gotten better over time, but last year it seemed to fall apart with everything else.

Jamison: It’s interesting how you finished that. There are certain things that always seem to come into play. When a team isn’t playing well, maybe the hot dogs aren’t as good, or the songs you play. We lost the ice for a while in December because of the rain and the humidity. We’ve worked on the ice, we’ve talked to all of the teams, we’ve sent people to ice schools around the league. I’m not negating the problems; you never take the pressure off of how you build the ice. It’s a function of temperature in the building, humidity plays a part, how you make the water, deionized water, and the process is ongoing. My sense is the ice will be ready to go. I believe that, and my people believe that. At the end of the day, we’ll put the best ice we can out there. But once we’re done, the players have to go out and play, because both teams have to play on the same ice.

So, maybe the sharks aren’t going to suck?

It looks like the Sharks are putting the pieces together. They pieces were already there, just not all on the same page. Now, it looks like they’re finally getting things going.

It is the way of the fan — before the season, you rationally tell yourself (and everyone around you) not to make snap judgements, that you really need 10-15 games to get a feel for what the team’s really going to be like. And five games in, you’re screaming and ripping your jersey and throwing stuff at the TV because they suck (or alternatively, writing the check for the playoff tickets).

And then teams settle into to being what they are, not what their first few games say. And with the Sharks, early on, you had a team doing a bunch of things really well (passing, transition game, speed game, possession, high number of shots, hard work), and a few things not so well, and those things done not so well were consistently nailing them.

Typical problem #1: young kids shooting their gamer shot and ready to celebrate, only to watch the goalie stop it. I mean, really — those were goals in the AHL and the Bunde league! (but kid, this isn’t the AHL. that’s Marty Brodeur). Young NHLers always go through some kind of adjustment, a dry spell, until they learn just how much better an NHL goalie is than any other goalie they’ve ever seen, and how much harder they have to work to score. Some players never make the adjustment, and end up going back to Europe or the AHL and score zillions of goals, but never sniff the NHL again.

(the other side of that coin are goalies who stop everything in the lower levels, only to find out that shooters in the NHL can make that shot 8 out of 10 times. If the goalie can’t learn to stop it, he’s headed back to Binghamton or Utah…. The universe is littered with guys like Andre Racicot, who kicked butt until he hit a level where players didn’t shoot at his five-hole, they shot through it, and he couldn’t adapt. He wasn’t called “red light” in Montreal for nothing… It’s the equivalent of the hitter in baseball who can’t figure out how to hit a curve ball. he’ll tear up AAA, but never make the jump to the majors, where everyone has a curve ball)

Problem #2 for the sharks were defensive lapses. play well for 15 minutes in a period, look like the five stooges for five. Enough to kill you. It’s mostly a case of getting comfortable in the system, and learning your teammates well enough to know where they’ll be when — and be there when your teammates need you to support. that and concentration and focus.

problem #3: crease work. It’s natural not to want to get the snot pounded out of you. Normal humans shy away from guys with hunks of lumber. Hockey players can’t. But if you don’t put someone in the slot to create screens and fight for rebounds, you won’t score (period). If a goalie sees it, he’ll stop it. Exceptions are rare enough to that not to matter. The sharks, early on, were doing a good job of getting into that slot area, but had a bad tendency (Scott parker the exception) of sliding back out fairly quickly. so they’d penetrate, but not set up shop — end result being while the sharks were taking 30+ shots a game, few of them were screened, fewer of them were 2nd or third shots off the rebound. So they were generating good offense, but not much in the ways of goals.

All in all, not a bad start — except in the win column. enough to get you screaming and throwing early, well before the game 10 or game 15 deadline…. Some of the folks I know started screaming because they were flashing on last year’s disaster and couldn’t stand seeing it again. me, because they were close, but not close enough. grump.

But in the last five games? Their game is definitely pulling together. After a horrible loss to the Ducks and a worse tie to the Blackhawks (who the Sharks should have spanked), you could see progress against Phoenix in the tie, and then they went on the road. A fairly ugly game in Carolina (sigh), but then tying the Lightning, currently the hottest team in the league, spanking the Panthers, and tonight, tying the Thrashers (another hot team)? four points in three games, three game unbeaten streak, and .500 on the road trip so far, with a tough Devil’s game wednesday due up. that’ll be an interesting test.

I wanted them to be right around .500 after 15 games. right now, 12 games, 9 points. If they play .500 for the road trip, they’ll be a bit below, but not far off. If they string a couple of wins, even better. But they way they’re playing now has me hopeful.

Alyn McCauley is the guy who’s most impressed me. Wayne Primeau’s not far behind; both of them have really hustled their butts. Scott thornton’s worried me,his play has been slow and tentative. I figured he was hurt and hiding it. Maybe he is, but the last few games, he’s looking more like the Scott Thornton that helped drive the division championship team, and the ricci/thornton/cheechoo line is raising some fun havoc.

On defense, Scott Hannan is taking charge at 22:00 a game or more. Rathje’s been struggling, but better. McLaren’s been quiet and somewhat disappointing but not horrible. The kids are, well, kids. Rob Davison impresses with his grit, but I wouldn’t trust him with huge minutes yet, although tonight, he caught Kovalchuk with a hip check that put him two feet in the air in a hit that ought to be a candidate for hit of the year. Great classic whack of a guy with his head down. the thrashers took exception (and a penalty; another positive), but you could tell from the TV shots that Kovalchuk knew he had his head down and it was a clean hit.

That kid impresses me. He’s a gamer. He’s got the attitude and skills that Washiington thought a big contract could buy in Jagr. Watch out for Atlanta, they’re going to be pretty good this year, Heatley/Snyder notwithstanding. It’s not just adrenalin and mission-from-god in Atlanta. There’s some good skill there, too (foundation is Kowachuk’s 24+ minutes a game as a forward! whoof). And I don’t compare him to Jagr lightly…

(which doesn’t explain why, when I had him on my fantasy team, I waived him after 2 games because I didn’t think the Thrashers could deal with the accident and everything else going on. Silly me. Of course, silly me is still looking to be in 2nd in the league tomorrow, but what a bonehead move….)

Wednesday in New Jersey. Might be one of those games that defines where this season’s going to go. Even a competitive loss wouldn’t be too bad, if they hang with the Devils pretty well. But it won’t be easy.

Sharks: after five games

first, an interesting piece out of Philly:

We knew going in that this team was going to be offensively challenged. And so far, it’s shown itself to be, well, offensively challenged. But not offensive. There were a number of "gee, that went in when I was in the {ahl, bundes league, WHL, etc}" shots — we have some kids are going to have to learn to adjust to NHL caliber goaltending. Even then, we’re going to be a 2-1, 3-2 kinda team.

What I like: Someone please tell me why Darryl Sutter couldn’t teach that kind of precious, crisp transition passing in his entire tenure here? And they do it consistently? (actually, I think the answer is fairly simple: under Darryl Sutter’s system, cross-ice passes were failures under all circumstances, so players always went to the near man up the boards, even if he was covered. Very little innovation in the breakout, it was a grinder game. With Wilson, it seems the players have a lot more leeway in passing to the open man, even if, gasp, it crosses the center of the ice. And Wilson seems to take the attitude that if nothing bad happens, it wasn’t a mistake — so instead of never trying things, players hustle back and break up problems before they happen.).

The team is fast (and the ice is pretty decent!). it passes. it controls. It transitions well for the most part (It struggled more against Ottawa, which is the team odds-on with many to win the Stanley cup, and which plays the kind of game the Sharks are now aspiring to — I’m not at all suprised Ottawa adjusted and made life interesting — and I thought the sharks handled themselves okay against a clearly better team). Think how few offsides are called against the sharks. How few icings. How few WHISTLES in the two home games. how few dump and chases, how little "stuff it in the corner and grind for 40 seconds". How the Sharks have given up on the "dump and change" strategy of hockey.

I like the work ethic I’m seeing. I like the team’s willingness to take some chances. I’m really liking Scott Parker: every shift he gets, he puts his head down and hustles his butt like it’s his last shift in his career. he causes havoc, he fights to create screens, and he’s doing what I want a guy like him to do BEYOND fighting. he’ll likely turn himself into a rival of Jeff Odgers for all-time fan favorite at this rate.

So in my mind, even when they lose, this is a much more interesting team to watch. (the opposing point of view, from someone who’s seen more Sharks games than I have, and who’s been at Sharks games going back to the Cow Palace days, is that he hates the new team. Absolutely, positively can’t stand it. Yeah, they work hard, yeah, they pass, but it’s a bunch of kids who can’t score. and he has a point, and he’s seriously missing Owen and Teemu — but look how they helped us last year. At some point, you have to throw it out and start over, and for all we remember the division championship, we need to remember all of those other under .500 years we had getting there. One year where it all fell together and Dallas fell apart doesn’t make a successful dynasty)

This is clearly a young team. It’s going to have good nights, and not so good nights. There’s going to be inconsistency. We’ve already seen a bit of that, but given the last two nights, they took it to heart and really put on a show at home. we’ve lost a lot of scoring — and we have to see who’s going to step up and take charge trying to replace that. (Patrick Marleau, white courtesy phone please). Guys who’ve been in the shadow of Nolan have to step into the light now. I expect some will, just not overnight. I expect this team to season and improve as the season goes along. If it can hang near .500 the first 25 games, we’ll be okay. It should finish better than it started. But right now, I’m shifting my goal down a bit from 80-85 points to 75-80. I just think there will be early struggles to knock pucks in the net. May they make it up in Februrary…

I’m really impressed with Damphousse. He took the offseason "come in and earn your salary" to heart. Against Philly, he was more physical tahn he was most of last season. My big worry here is whether he can hold up to playing that way.

The defense, given it’s missing Stuart, is really holding up well. It doesn’t act like it’s full of untested rookies. It makes mistakes, but it also hustles its butt off to fix them. It’s going to be okay, and it’ll get better.

One serious problem: Scott Thornton. In two games, he’s looked soft, slow and tenative. he’s not right — it looks like he’s already injured to me. I caught him flexing a knee at one point during the Ottawa game, but I’m more worried about a shoulder. he simply doesn’t seem to be the presence we need him to be.

Korolyuk is, well, Korolyuk. someone please get Coach Wilson a large bottle of Tums, and get me one, too. He’ll be a net positive to the team, but always making life interesting. hand me a Tums, please?

Nabokov is looking good, but has to be better. He’s, oh, top 1/3 of the league, we need him top 1/4 or higher.

It’s too early to panic. we’ve played some tough teams (Philly is 2-0-2, Edmonton is 3-2, Ottawa is 3-1) and overall, hung in well. We should have beat Philly, we just didn’t beat Hackett. We have a couple of rather weak teams coming in next, and I hope we’ll go 2-1 in the next three games.

I mean, honestly — if you pick a team to challenge for the 8th playoff spot, and the team we think might win the Cup beats them, isn’t that supposed to happen? Now, if Chicago schools them… But if they play the way they played Philly or Ottawa, Chicago won’t. So let’s see.

Some thoughts on foo camp…

Now that life (ahem) Elsewhere is normalizing again, I have time to throw a few more comments on foo camp. Unlike lots of folks, I’m not a fan of snap judgements, I prefer to think it over and give myself some time to figure out what I’m thinking (which, I guess, makes me a lousy candidate for a high profile blogger, which is fine by me…). Saves me from having to write even more apologies and changed my mind notes than I already do…

That was one of the most interesting and fascinating times I’ve had in a long time. Laurie and I have a term we use, talking to adults, to describe those times when we’re with people who are mentally energizing and interesting, and who stretch our knowledge with their own. We’re lucky to know a good number of adults in our lives — but foo camp was different. It was nothing but talking to adults, and I was honored to be included and contribute a little bit in return in the ways I could. I more or less overloaded after a whle, trying to keep track of who and what and why, and it’s taken me a few days to start seeing the interrelationships of all of this stuff.

Going back over the weekend, a couple of things stood out (other than the session on disassembling the Prius ):

Howtoons: a group out of MIT who are trying to put together projects to get kids interested in hardware and tinkering again. Their worry (and the more I think about it, the more I agree with them) is that the generations we’re bringing up now don’t build things and don’t create things; they use things. So HowToons is an attempt to help kids discover the joy of building and experimenting, and is set up to be easily distributable offline as well as on, using materials generally available, even in non-developed parts of the world. These folks deserve some support and visibility, and if you have ideas for projects they can use in HowToons, you really ought to pass them along. It’s great stuff.

Socialtext: We’ve all been talking about wikis and weblogs and klogs and IM and other technologies, but technologies are only as interesting as how they’re used. One of the things I’ve been looking at the last couple months is how to use these tools in an IS environment to improve communication, document operations and projects, create and manage schedules better, and find solutions for the Fred was the only one who knew how that worked problem. So is socialtext, a group working to integrate these things and de-geek them so that they can be used in the kind of environments I run around in. Looks very interesting. Soon as I get a spare minute…

SecureSoftware: these folks are building tools to help discover and prevent problem code. It has the potential to take us beyond hey, watch out for buffer overflows lectures in building code that can withstand today’s hostile cracking environments…

It was neat to finally meet Stewart Brand, and it’s safe to say without his work, many of the folks who were at Foo Camp wouldn’t have been. One of the people I never had a chance to sit down and talk to was Doc Searles, because it seemed every time I saw him, he was surrounded by a group of people and he was explaining how to overthrow the US political system (note: not the American Government! that’s useful, in the right hands… grin). But it was amazing to see that many people, and so few egos. Or maybe compatible egos.

Which made some of the discussion about foo camp Out Here somewhat disturbing. it’s been pretty much hashed out so I won’t re-open it, but I do want to pass along something Laurie said to me after the Cubs collapsed and lost game 6:

expected, but still disappointing

Exactly.

Thanks to Tim and the entire O’Reilly crew for a great weekend.

Foo Camp.

Back from Foo Camp. It may sound hackneyed, but it was a thrill just to be invited. I think Dori caught my feelings exactly: Most frequently heard comment at Foo Camp: “I have no idea what I’m doing here容veryone here is so much smarter than me.” It’s pretty damn cool to be around 200 people who’re all thinking that.

I went in thinking I’d sit back and watch, pick a few brains, track down some of the people I wanted to meet face to face. It was interesting to see others doing the same, and to find I was one of the folks people were tracking down, as I was tracking down. Overall, very much an ego-free zone, with a wide ranging flavor of sharing and listening — everyone was interested in what others were doing. There was a huge amount of “oh — you need to meet this person!” going on, and I’m sure a fair amount of business was done, and a lot of followups are going to go on as well.

I found myself at a table Saturday night with a bunch of folks, and we all sort of took turns hashing out various things. I floated out my “rethink the mailing list” stuff, last seen here and here, and which has been floating around in the “this doesn’t seem quite right, but I can’t put my finger on why” mode — and much of it was quickly and correctly shot down, making it clear to me not tha the idea was wrong, but it was being poorly presented and superficial, so I ended up crawling in a corner and rethinking my stuff from scratch. I’d scheduled a session to hash over these issues on sunday (later cancelled after Scott McCloud‘s session moved in at the same time, because I was more interested in hearing Scott talk than myself talk… )

And I now realize I’d decided what the answer was early in the process, tried to build a rationale for that decision, and the whole thing bogged down when I hit a dead end in the new design matrix. And then wandered around in the dark wondering where the door was. I spent Saturday night rewriting my first draft of a needs and feature list, and now it seems to all make sense — expect details as soon as I flesh a couple of things out. Very implementable, right from scratch. Hopefully I feel as good about it on draft 2.

Ran into a bunch of folks I really wanted to meet (one highlight — finally got to sit down and talk at lenght with Robert Scoble, and he’s a very charming and interesting person, his being a mortal enemy and all. (seriously — had a chance to play with his tablet PC a bit, and it’s a neat bit of technology, but I think the market’s it’s most useful for are also priced out of it for now, so it’s going to be a niche product for a while — but I really see it as a big winner in Education at some point….).

right now, I’m simultaneously wasted and exhausted and wired — simply trying to filter through, synthesize and file what went on the last 48 hours. I’m going to be useless for a couple of days while I get everything into the right niche in the old subconscious.

Continuing themes that kept popping up: reputation systems, implicit and explicit. security issues, development tools, have you met….., and did you know they’re disassembling a Prius in the parking lot? (it’s okay, it’s a rental)

It was neat to watch everyone just sort of pitch in and make things happen. It was a hugely diverse group of drivers, but without people demanding access to the steering wheel.

More later. time to crash — too much swirling around to write coherently. What a kick in the pants; one I really needed on a number of levels.

as I told Tim at one point: Congrats, you’ve reinvented the Science Fiction convention. At least to some degree. Few cnventions are as well catered, or as low on the ego-conflict scale….

But you know what? I really, really liked Sebastopol. Too bad it’s so far from where I work….

how hockey has changed…

and how rapidly it’s changed.

Nice CBC article on Jose Theodore, which had a comment that struck me funny:

Theodore finished the year with an unimpressive 20-31-6 record, 2.90 goals-against average and .908 save percentage. Not surprisingly, the Canadiens missed the playoffs.

In today’s games, a sub-3 GAA and an above .9 save percentage are unimpressive. Compared to his Vezina-winning season the year before (2.11 GAA, .931 S%) they are.

But tonight, Grant Fuhr is going into the hall of fame, a well-deserved honor. Fuhr is also a Vezina winner. The year he won that trophy, his numbers?

GAA 3.43, save percentage .881.

In other words, a performance that won Fuhr a Vezina 15 years ago would qualify him for an AHL team today.

The difference? goalies are better athletes, goalie technique is much improved, but most important, goalie equipment has improved (and grown in size) to the point where the goaltender now has a massive advantage over the shooter. This year’s moderate reduction in leg pads won’t hurt, but doesn’t solve the problem of Hockey’s fast-march into the realm of soccer scores.

unfortunately, I don’t think there is an easy solution here. what are you going to do, tell teams their goalies can’t be good athletes? Remove enough gear that goalies are injured by Al MacInnis slapshots?

Tough call — but something does have to be done to even out the balance between offense and defense. I’m not asking for 8-6 games; just that the shooter have some chance of scoring, other than dumb luck…..

Reason to Celebrate..

Jordin Tootoo is set to become the first Inuit to play in the NHL.

I’ve seen him play a little, and he’s sure to become a fan favorite.

It’s a significant time for Jordin, and for his people. And I want to congratulate him, and I can’t wait to see him in San Jose when the Predators show up…

Working at Apple…

Got an email from someone Out There about coming to work at Apple. The more I thought about it, the more I realized it made a nice blog entry, so I’ve removed any identifying info, and I hope the original questioner doesn’t mind….

I’m sorry to contact you out of the blue like this. I’ve been reading
your weblog and see that you work at Apple. I’ve been a lifelong Apple
fan and I’ve wanted to work there since before I started high school. I
was wondering if I could ask you a few questions about working there.

- How did you get your job at Apple? Do you recommend applying through
the jobs.apple.com website?

I was working at Sun doing technical support. I’ve been working with Macs on my own and involved with various mac activities, and it was at a time when Sun was squeezing budgets so I was getting unhappy with the workload. I’d been kind of exploring options when my boss at Sun moved to Apple to start the group that was going to support A/UX. At the time (1989) Apple didn’t “do” tech support, so this was going to be the first direct customer support organization. Coming across to help start that up with my boss was a no-brainer, so I became one of the first five members of what became the Direct Response Center.

I definitely recommend applying through the web site. Referrals through people inside Apple can definitely help, but in my case, I only refer people I know because I feel I’m putting my reputation into a refferal, so I tend to be fairly conservative — and it depends on the hiring manager knowing the person over whether they take the referral seriously — so it can definitely help, but it isn’t a guarantee. But if you don’t apply, you can’t get hired — so use both routes. Since I’m in IS&T, not engineering, I don’t have a lot of visibility (or influence) on engineering jobs, so I’m not really a good person to refer over there, although I do at times. Use every avenue available to you… But yes, when we hire, the jobs go on the web site, and we do review and interview based on that site. I believe our last hire came out of the resumes off the site, in fact. But you need to make sure you write a good, powerful resume, since you need to stand out from the crowd.

- What is the interview process like? From reading weblogs I get the
impression it is fairly extensive.

Depends on the group. For technical positions, it can be intense. In our group, it’s not unusual for some of our interviewers to sit you down and have you code something on the fly (as much to see how you react to pressure situations your ability to code). Since others tend to focus on technical issues, I tend to interview more towards personality and compatibility things, which we also take seriously.

Our group’s interviews are generally done in pieces; there’s an initial contact and probably a phone interview, then a decision is made to bring a person in. That interview is with 4-7 people, and 1/2 to 2/3 of a day. Sometimes, depending on realities of a schedule, broken over a couple of days. then there’s a final round of interviews with the management structure, where a candidate gets to meet people going up the food chain — and a non-trivial number of candidates don’t pass that test for one reason or another (my management is very interested in compatibility and personality, in how a person fits into the organization now, how they’ll fit into it in two or three years, and career development issues, so a candidate that might qualify for the job might not qualify for a position because we don’t see a growth path for them, for instance. It’s very “not IS-like”, but we’re also an organization is miniscule turnover rates — people just don’t leave very often….)

So there are a lot of factors. In our part of the world, “plays well with others” is very important at all levels, which means it’s one hell of a lot of fun to work with these folks, and we all generally get along very well. There are regular social groups and after-work get togethers that some folks do.

- What do you like most about your job? What do you like least?

I can make a difference — make things better for people. And I do (IMHO). Being able to change the world, whether in little ways or big ways, is a huge plus for me, and I do it personally in the work I do FOR Apple, and the work Apple allows me to do outside of work (like my time I’ve contributed to the Mailman open source system), and also by being part of making Apple succeed and as a small part of the company changing the world in big ways (and don’t let the media pundits tell you otherwise — they’re so busy looking at things that don’t matter, like market share, that they don’t see what does.

Like least? there’s so much more I wish I could do. Part of me would love Apple to just shut up and fund a bunch of things — but that part of me would hate having to lay people off when those projects were done and I didn’t have new projects for them. So some stuff gets done now, and some stuff gets done later, but we build an operation that’s sustainable and doesn’t do the binge and purge thing. Sometimes we bring in contractors, too — and Apple has funded some projects for me when I’ve written justifiable plans, so I can’t really complain. But there’s so much going on in the internet and the community/communication space right now, I feel like ought to be doing lots of things right now… But we’ll get there.

- What is the corporate culture like at Apple?

Being in IS, I’m not on the Apple campus regularly. I’m probably not a good speaker for engineering land, but from my discussions with people I know over there, it seems pretty good. You work your butt off, but you do things that matter. My area has good morale, and is very “not IS-like”, which I love. I enjoy being in an IS organization that “gets it”.

At the same time, realize it’s been a rotten time in the industry. Lots of companies doing lots of layoffs. Apple took the stance of freezing salaries to limit layoffs, and while Apple hasn’t avoided layoffs 100%, they avoided almost all of them. The freeze is coming off soon, fortunately. But I can accept the tradeoff of everyone giving a little to avoid having some folks give a whole damn bunch — and Apple was able to keep the finances going and the company moving forward and people employed (just in the last couple of weeks, Sun, Gateway and Toshiba announced layoffs. Dell laid off in 2001, and the trail of tears goes on and on…)

In a bad industry, under a salary freeze, there’s going to be some stress and tension. I think overall Apple handled it well, and I think overall, most employees are satisfied and looking to stay, and looking forward past Panther to the future, not over their shoulders. I’m not sure how many companies have employees feeling that way right now. Not sun, that’s for sure.

- Is Apple interested in new graduates without a lot of experience or
are they more likely to hire experienced workers? I do have 16 months of
internship software/firmware development experience but many of the
posted jobs are looking for 3-5 years. Do you have any advice for new
professionals trying to enter the field?

Depends on the group, but in general, the answer is yes. One of the folks working with me is only a couple of years out of college, another was my summer intern a few years back, who we hired in when his startup imploded.

One thing to keep an eye out on is QA/testing — that’s a good way to get into any company and prove your worth so that after some time, you can look at moving into other positions. And you may find you LIKE QA. But for the junior/new person, it cna be tough, because here in silicon valley, I know lots of pretty experienced and unemployed engineers looking for any job, and it’s hard to compete with them when they’re willing to take a job under their expertise to get a salary again. So you have to look for alternatives, and realize competition for jobs is tight right now.

And because of that, I think it’s not enough to just be good. To get what you want, you have to stand out. It’s not enough to be a Java programmer — what do you do that the other Java programmers don’t? or can’t?

Make sure your resume show that. A little bragging doesn’t hurt (a lot does). Another thing I suggest to folks is to do things that people can notice — if you’re technical, get involved in open source projects and make a contribution. It doesn’t have to be huge, and it doesn’t have to be coding — being visible on the support lists, or writing documentation (especially writing documentation!) gets noticed. I know of a number of Apple employees who’ve been hired off of our tech lists on lists.apple.com, because they became known on the lists as people helped out and contributed and proved they knew what they were talking about. I also know of folks who’ve been blacklisted out of Apple because all they’ve proven is they’re noisy whiners, too.

Having useful secondary skills is another way to stand out. Good writer? Comfortable presenting in front of crowds? can you DBA a system? People are looking for people who bring more to the plate than ‘just’ the skills the jobs need. Maybe they’re hiring a Java programmer, but they have a project they want they can’t get funding for. If they see an ability to squeeze that project in as well because you have a missing skill, that’s suddenly a big plus. (I’m tempted to fall into Dungeons and Dragons nomenclature for a minute, and make people think about character types, sub-types and skill sets: you aren’t just a fighter or a thief, but a 5th level fighter with a specialty in two-handed swords, a 3rd level thief with a specialty in daggers and lock-picking. Does your resume say this? Or does it say “thief!”?)

Find ways to stand out in positive ways. It gets noticed, and it helps opportunities to come to you. When you sit at a desk with 100 resumes to review, you’re looking for two things — easy reasons to reject resumes, and resumes that make want to take a second look.

- Do you have any general advice for someone who wants to work at Apple?

Patience, determination. A realization that Apple’s not doing lots of hiring, and generally hires slowly and carefully. Remember you aren’t alone in thinking Apple isn’t Just Another Company, so you have competition. Be aware that if there are certain things working against you (relocation, for instance), the rest might not matter. But think about ways to get involved with Apple, if not working for it — companies that use Apple systems, companies that write software for Apple. There are always alternatives (if you aren’t the only java programmer, Apple’s not the only company….)

Hope this helps!

chuq

The customer is not always right

Been bitching about companies doing stupid things to customers.

Here’s one reason why companies start walling off from their customers.

Back when I was doing customer/tech support for a living, I did in fact tell one customer to please go buy someone else’s product. and my boss backed me up, and called that idiot’s boss to make it clear that the person was no longer welcome to call for support, someone else had to make the call for him.

As a company, you need to make your customers happy, because that encourages them to come back and spend more with you, and tell all their friends how much they like you.

But some customers abuse that, thinking that means they can do anything to you, because they paid some money somewhere, sometime. But the customer relationship has two parts to it. companies sometimes forget they, too, can break that relationship and make a customer an ex-customer. Support crews would be saner if they did once in a while.

it’s my belief, from my years in the trenches with a phone welded to my ear, that if you identified your 1-2% of your worst customers and simply cancelled them from future support and made it stick, you’d cut your support costs by a noticable amount. Note I’m not talking about the folks who call support most frequently, but the folks who are the biggest pains in the asses to your support crew. You will, guaranteed, find that those people tend to be low-volume buyers of your product, or small cogs in larger companies where you can work with their management to get someone who’s not abusive to be the phone contact. You just need to be willing to draw a line and say “beyond this point, my people don’t have to take this from you”.

In my current setup, my people with customer contact have that right, and I’ll back them up, and my boss will back me up when we do it. you can’t use that just because someone’s annoying, but when they turn abusive, you can simply end the discussion.

Either side can file for divorce. If companies drew better lines, they’d have to build fewer walls. Walls exclude everyone indiscriminately, including the customers you covet and want to keep happy.

Mars as we didn’t quite see it…

It’s not exactly as we saw it, but the Hubble took a gorgeous shot of Mars as it reached it’s closest proximity to mother earth.

So last night, a group of us grabbed our scopes and headed off looking for dark, clear skies. we ended up on the top of Mount Hamilton, pretty literally in the shadow of the Lick Observatory. I pulled out the etx-90 and a set of big binocs, my friend hauled out his Meade (my ETX would, basically, be his finder scope), and we spent some time celebrating our neighbor’s close visit.

Seeing was good. Despite the wind (which added a nasty jitter to the scopes), on my scope I was able to get a good disc, and make out some detail of the polar icecaps and some minor detail of the edging around Mons Olympus using a 12.5mm lens and an 80a filter (which gave me the best results). My friend’s sturdier and bigger scope allowed them to resolve out most of Olympus Mons and see some other surface detail.

Seeing survived about an hour, and then we had some moisture stream into the upper atmosphere and things degraded. We still experimented with filters and the like for a while, but the best views were the early ones.

We also had a great view of the brush fire in the easy bay hills, which was going great guns (unfortunately), and seemingly not at all knocked down for the evening. We were upwind of it and some ways away, but in the binocs, it was an amazing sight. And on top of that, the Milky Way was in full force, so we spent some time remembering what the sky looks like when you aren’t blinded by civilization around you…

All in all, an awesome, fun evening. After months of threatening, it was great to finally break out the scope, even if Mars isn’t the most dramatic planet, even when up close and personal. With a scope like the ETX, you don’t exactly get Hubble shots, something that can be a real disappointment to someone who doesn’t understand how this stuff really operates (my view of Mars was, more or less, about the size of the head of a match….).

So, when was the last time you saw the stars, anyway?

Of Faith, God, and religion.

Michaela posted a very moving comment on my piece on he who live in stained glass houses, and I’ve spent the last couple of days wrestling with it.

And I’ve decided to do something I rarely do, which is talk about my personal religious view and philosophy in front of others.

Michaela posted a very moving comment on my piece on he who live in stained glass houses, and I’ve spent the last couple of days wrestling with it.

And I’ve decided to do something I rarely do, which is talk about my personal religious view and philosophy in front of others.

I was born into a family that was nominally Presbyterian. The minister of our church and his family lived down the street. One day, he was found, well, consoling a woman of the church not his wife. My family became mostly lapsed members after that. I was too young to know what was going on or understand the implications, but it meant I grew up in a house that was Christian, but not active in a church.

One half of my family comes from a strongly catholic background. During the depression, one of my grandfathers went to the priest for help for his family. The priest offered him platitiudes (god helps those that help themselves, so pray hard, etc). At which point my grandfather cursed the priest and the church, and never set foot in a church again in his life. I didn’t hear this story until well after my personal views were set in concrete, but evidently it runs in the family….

One of my first crushes was a girl who was, at least in name, Catholic. She had an attitude I’ve found all too often in my life, which was that it was okay as long as you confessed it and were absolved (non-Catholics tend to skip the absolution part, and just go on the assumption that since God loves them, by default, they’re forgiven). I’ve never pretended to be an expert on Catholicism or Christianity, but in my readings, it always seemed obvious that absolution (or forgiveness) was for honest mistakes or lapses of judgement, and earned through pennance and a committment to learning from the mistake by becoming a better person. Yet all around me, I saw people who seemed to see religion as a free ticket to heaven, not as a construct towards being a good person.

That left me conflicted with religion, because my view of religion didn’t match up with the reality of those around me that claimed to be religious.

Puberty hit me like a ton of bricks. I was coming to the realization that at 5’8″ and built like an offensive linesman, I was never going to be a great basketball player (I was never stupid enough to play football, especially in the line). I ran slow, I threw left and batted right (so much for catcher) with no power, I was a below average swimmer and a worse wrestler, and I hated shotput. Toss in some issues with that early crush (we’ll just say that wasn’t a healthy relationship), and, well, by the end of my freshman year I was adrift, unhappy, and intermittently suicidal, and minus any moral or religious anchor to tie on to.

I was a pretty messed up kid. A couple of not serious suicide attempts, one very serious one, with friends intervening. My parents never knew, by design. I’m here today because of a very few key people, who happened to hit right place when I needed a right time. Two were teachers, who didn’t recognize the seriousness of the problem, but made themselves available and gave me a couple of rocks to stand on to keep my nose above water (one of them, bless him, had the sense of humor I’ve adopted in today, and taught me that being humorless wasn’t the same as taking things seriously. As a math teacher, he could make anything interesting).

Another was a girl, a couple of years ahead of me, took me under her wing. She was a daughter of a local evangelical christian minister. she taught me to look at the eastern philosophies, introduced me to occultism. Tarot became the center I started rebuilding around.

I wasn’t a christian. If what I saw around me was christian, I wasn’t going to be that. What I was, nobody really knew, most especially myself. But thanks to a few key people, at least I had something to hang onto while I tried to figure out what I was. You might like or dislike occultism and tarot, but for me, it was what I needed. It got me out of the suicidal cycle and held me together while I tried to figure out what I was. And then she graduated and was out of my life, never to be found again (I’ve tried). I did, many years later, track down the teachers to thank them for what they did, but I’ve never found her.

I spent the next couple of years searching. Buddhism. Taoism. I’ve read in Zoroaster and the Koran. Studied witchcraft (not, ahem, wiccan). I’m not proud of, but don’t deny, that I’ve been involved in black studies and rituals, both in a group, and later as an individual. Of that, all I’ll really say is anyone who’s seen Hell never questions the existance of Heaven.

Oh, and during that time, I lost two very close friends. it’s hard enough having one friend die, but two in successive years? Both were, coincidentally, catholic, and both died in alcohol related accidents.

I also, I should note, spent some time in relationships with a couple of quite positive women. One of my best friends growing up was Mormon, and he introduced me to a girl that I spent some time with. Under other circumstances, I’d be a happily married converted mormon insurance agent somewhere with seven kids — but those circumstances never happened, for various reasons. No regrets, just memories. And another girl, one I still have fond memories of – and catholic. But growing up, the Mormons were the only group that never left me disappointed and who seemed to actually live their religion, not just use it as an excuse. But Mormonism never really spoke to me…

By my senior year, I finally have my act under control, if not fully together. I didn’t (and don’t today) have a religion, per-se, but a faith. That faith is based on a moral and ethical structure that drives my life and my attitudes. It is heavily judeo-christian oriented, since that was my upbringing, but as I like to say, Jesus is a good friend, but not a savior.

My belief structure doesn’t build itself around absolution or forgiveness, but about being worthy of forgiveness, and of trying to avoid the need for it. My god doesn’t demand perfection or forgive flaws, my god encourages being the best person I can be, and understands my failures.

One of the things I’ve learned thanks to my years here is that I made a serious mistake early in life: judging religion by the actions of those who do things in the name of a religion, and mistaking religion for faith.

Faith is the relationship a person has with their god. It’s unique, it’s intensely personal, and it has nothing really to do with religion. It is the underpinning that makes a person what they are and drives what they do.

Religion is a social construct. It is a way for a society to bind together, to teach a common faith and to guide individuals towards a faith compatible with the society they exist within. (It’s my belief, for what it’s worth, that if there is a final judgement of some sort, your god doesn’t judge you. They place you in front of a mirror where you judge yourself, and under the eyes of your god, those of you who’ve been fooling yourself are in for an interesting time…).

Religion, being a human-created simulation of the faith a society is attempting to attain, has all of the joys and failures that comes of being human. it is imperfect (no matter how hard we might try), and it is susceptible to the flaws of those attempting to create and maintain it. As a social structure, also, it is open to being abused by those that see a religion as a structure of power instead of faith.

That a religion can be hijacked by the power hungry does not invalidate the religion, but to me, it serves as a quiet reminder that to find the true power of religion, you have to search close to the individual. You are more likely to find the essence of a religion in the individual and in those that serve close to those individual. The higher you go in the bureaucracy, the more likely you’ll find people attracted to the power of the religion, or who’s true faith has been subjugated by the realities of the political infrastructure they are involved with.

All of this, then, is about an individual relationship between a person and their god — and all of this religious stuff is societies way to help it’s members create that relationship in a positive and healthy way. That goal, however, sometimes suffers from those who see this as a control structure over people, and a way to exert power over those people. Members of the religious hierarchy are also seen as guides and mentors — and, as we’ve seen to our dismay, that sometimes leads to creating opportunities for those that would use that position of power to prey on those they’re charged to protect.

To me, therefore, one of the responsibilities of the individual is to be wary of those who seek to control in the name of religion, and fight to maintain the religion as a pure creation of the ideals we want introduced into our individual faith. Blind belief is no belief at all, and blind obedience merely gives those who would control and abuse power to do so.

Faith is intensely personal. It’s why I rarely discuss it, even with friends. What my faith is is irrelevant to anyone else’s — because it’s not your faith, and therefore, incompatible, no matter how related. As I like to say, the only thing I’m intolerant of is intolerance, and so much of intolerance today is driven by people using religion as a power base.

I must admit I wish I could watch in when certain members of a certain religious organization have to stand before that mirror and try to explain how what they were doing was good and moral. But that’s just a private, and fairly self-serving wish. I’m sure my god will understand (but not forgive me) my weakness.

Having said all that, I happen to be a great fan of classic christian architecture and iconography. In my office at work, I have a reproduction of a 14th century tuscan gargoyle from a church. I love stained glass and cathedral architecture. I enjoy the ceremony and togetherness of a caring congregation. I love many of the symbolic trappings of religion, especially of Catholicism, and I love visiting the classic buildings when they’re open to tourists.

Of course I also have foo dogs protecting my front porch, a small japanese garden on the property, love the ceremony of the shinto priest (and that’s one reason why I’m a fan of sumo, the underlying interactions between sport and religion), and yes, while I destroyed my tarot when I destroyed my black shrine many years ago, I’ve recently picked up a new deck. No, I won’t give you a reading, sorry.

While I disagree with many of the philosophical restrictions he’s made on his flock, I have great respect for the humanitarian activities of Pope John Paul II. That can definitely not be said of many of his predecessors. And I’ll take the Pope over most of the religious leaders in the united states in a nanosecond…

Much of the bureaucracy of religion worldwide has been subjugated to the wishes of the political and the power hungry — and that leaves religion in a pretty sad state today. But if you look beyond the ruling members down to the foundations of the faith at the individual level, you still see a strong and vibrant and positive thing — the very thing those in power are attempting to coerce and subvert.

Religion is, therefore, the human attempt at creating the ideal of the individual faith. It is sometimes flawed, being human. it is sometimes bent to the aims of the power hungry. But for all the flaws of those involved in religion, I can’t judge religion on those terms, because it ignores all that is good about religion and the social structures it creates among us.

And that has to be judged by and with the individual, because a religion is judged by how it helps its individuals define and understand their faith. And for all those that make plain their personal flaws and the flaws of their religion — we tend to not see how outnumbered they are by those who are comfortable in their faith and ethical and moral in their actions.

And it took me a long time to find those trees, thinking only there was forest.

Good people are good people, whatever faith they have and whatever religion they use to define their faith. Bad people are bad people in the same way. Both interact with the religions of their societies — but the religion is not good, or bad, but a tool for an individual to learn about themselves and the society they live within.

And I don’t believe in blaming tools for how they are used, and especially when they are abused. When religion is used as a tool to hurt people, religion is the victim, too.

Instead, I look at the person and wonder how they’ll explain their actions to themselves when the veil of lies and rationalizations is lifted. It is not for me to judge, because they have a judge stricter than I could ever be. themselves.

Even if they think they can fool themselves….

Moving beyond the list mom…

Okay, I think I have it figured out…

Okay, I think I have it figured out. But first, a digression.

On the list-managers list today, we got into a discussion of admin responsibilities, becaues it was (evidently) time for the two-or-three-times-a-year argument that admins ought to stay out of things and let users take care of themselves, followed by the typical rebuttals.

I tried to describe how I viewed it in a different way than I have in the past:

If you are managing a group of some sort, your responsibility is to make decisions in a way that when the needs/interests of the group are in conflict with the needs/interests of an individual in that group, the group's needs/interests take precedence.

There are always individuals that have trouble with that concept, assuming or demanding that they be the center of the universe, or at least be catered to. Unless the group is *about you*, any group of size > 2 is about building a consensus compromise among the members so things work as well as possible for as many as possible. Any individual who can’t/won’t accept that compromise isn’t really part of the group, and is a destructive force on the group.

Some users don’t like not being the center of the universe, and generally blame the admin for having to point out that reality. It’s part of the job. But the primary responsibility of the admin is to make sure the group flourishes, not that it caters to the needs of every individual who wants to be part of the group. Not all individuals are going to fit into the group. that’s pure human nature, and making these groups virtual doesn’t change that reality (although we sure tried, didn’t we?)

To push an analogy into an unrecognizable form to make a point, the group admin is the sheepdog; the wolf has just told the sheepdog had has no right to interfere with his interactions with the sheep, because the wolf didn’t attack the sheepdog directly.

I, as sheepdog, don’t particularly care what the wolf’s attitude towards this is. Which tends to piss off the wolves, but I’m only interested in keeping the sheep happy.

I don’t care, as long as you don’t cause problems for the group. If you follow the rules set out for the group, and I don’t get complaints, then things are fine. And under most circumstances, even if you don’t fully follow the rules and I don’t get cmoplaints, things are still fine. But when I start getting complaints….

On a purely pragmatic level, if my group gets a reputation for being a place where people are harrassed and abused and nobody does anything about it — my group dies. Everyone leaves and goes somewhere safer. Except the trolls and wolves.

Someone has to be the mommy. Groups that don’t have that tend to turn into Lord of the Flies, or an empty lecture hall with the doors open to the weather.

Greg Wood immediately keyed on the problem with this description, the one that almost kept me from using it.

I know what you meant here, and of course this paragraph was pulled out of context. But if you really only allowed sheep on your lists, I'd be gone, because they would be very boring.

My discussion was oriented around the concept of herd (or pack, or pride, or….) and its tender. And Greg immediately caught the subtext of users as sheep and focussed on the docility that using the sheep seemed to imply. And he’s right. That’s a flaw in using this particular analogy, one I knew going in but didn’t see an easy way around to make the point I was trying to make. And it’s one that can potentially sidetrack the entire discussion if you let it.

Don’t let anyone tell you words have no power. Which is why, of course, I’m so focussed on phrases like list mom. Because it sums up in a mental vision what you’re trying to get across, and if you use the wrong term or build into it unintended side-effects, you can really, really screw up what you intend to do. That’s why stuff like this matters….

And I emphasized that in my response to Greg…

and that was the exact reason I argued with myself over using that example, because I knew the sheep image would conflict with the point I was trying to get across... Because you're exactly right, if we were in fact talking about sheep. More generally, I'm talking about animals that share a common interest (herd/pack/pride/etc), and a protector of that herd against someone who is in conflict with the herd. The specific animal doesn't matter, and sheep is a particularly negative image, but I just couldn't think of a better one to use the image I wanted to get across. But I *knew* someone would react exactly this way, too, because I did. And you're right.

Greg: I’d be gone, because they would be very boring. Wolves are frequently more interesting than sheep.

only as long as you’re watching them hunt down someone OTHER than you. that’s a “view from the sidelines” view. If you’re dinner, then it stops being interesting really fast. You, like me, should understand the implications of that rather well….

The point made here is if you look at the flock (ignoring what it’s a flock of), the administrator is the caretaker of the flock. At a macro level, this person creates and maintains the meadow the flock lives in and works to keep the flock together and safe from wolves (and if a wolf pulls an animal out into the forest, the shepard doesn’t say ‘not in the meadow any more, not my problem’). But at the same time, the shepard doesn’t tell the flock where to go or when to eat or what to play. The flock works that out for themselves.

Anyway, that’s the digression. And probably most of this entry…

But what finally clicked in what I’ve been searching for the last ten days or so was a piece in the new (September 2003) Fast Company (links to current pieces not yet available….). It’s the only business magazine I still read regularly, and this issue is full of interesting stuff. In an article on the Les Schwab Tire company, they used the phrase cult of the customer — and it crystalized a lot of the things I’ve been trying to come to terms with internally.

But not directly, but because of how it plays off the phrase I’ve been fighting with: the customer is always right.

See, the customer is not always right. That phrase ignores a basic fact of life. But to create a customer-centric environment, you have to empower the customer to feel free Do Their Thing without constantly staring over their shoulders looking for lightning bolts — but you still need to find some way to protect the interests of the owners as well. And basically, that tradeoff is…

We reserve the right to refuse service…

so very simple a concept, once I realized what I was looking for. Painfully obvious, in retrospect.

So the trick is to create an environment where people understand what’s expected of them as far as limits to their behavior, and then get out of the way unless they violate those limitations.

the user has the right to use a service in the way that makes them happy as long as the owner gives them access to the service.

the owner has the right to refuse to allow a user to use a service if the way they use it is against the owner’s wishes.

the owner has the responsibilty to deineate those rules and restrictions as simply and understandably as they can, and an implied responsibility to not set unneccessary and arbitrary restrictions.

users have the responsibilty to accept and abide by restrictions or not use the service.

And like the person who refuses to turn off the boom box in the restaurant when asked, users that won’t accept the rules will find themselves escorted off the premises, to prevent them from ruining the dining of the rest of the customers.

The group is more important than the individual. And the individual that does not accept that is not welcome in the group….

This may all seem rather simplistic, but it’s a matter of understanding where I want the lines drawn in the sane, and the checks and balances needed to create the environment and attitudes I want to promote.

And now that I know where those checks and balances exist, I can actually get this thing moving forward and finished…

experimenting in groups: the quiet voices.

One thing Laurie and I have been investigating over the years is how to bring forward the quieter voices in a community. In most communities, there’s a group of folks with fairly thick skins and a willingness to enter the mosh pit to get their comments heard — and a second group with lots of interesting things to say, but not as willing to elbow in and make themselves heard over the noise…

We’ve found that second population to be as knowledgable and interesting as the primary population — just quieter. So one of the things we’ve looked for is ways to bring them forward into the community discussions. (it should be noted that when we’ve talked about this issue in our communities, the normal response is some variation of it’s no big deal, just start talking — and that normal response comes from the folks who don’t mind the mosh pit atmosphere in the first place, of course…)

One of our more successful ways we’ve found to draw these people out, at least temporarily, is a concept we’ve called lurker day. It’s fairly simple, at least conceptually. On a specific day, the regulars haul themselves off to the sidelines and sit on their hands for 24 hours, and leave the group to others. Our guideline for lurker is pretty flexible (averages 1 posting a month or less), and is generally self-policed.

it works quite well — you get a whole new set of views of the topics of the day, and the regular posters (for the most part) take the vacation with good spirits. Occassionally this encourages a lurker to join the mosh pit, but for the most part, they enjoy their day on the list, then head back to the sidelines.

For me, that’s a frustration. lurker days work — but you have to schedule and manage them, and in my mind, it doesn’t really solve the problem. It merely makes it clear there’s a problem to solve, which is how you get those people contributing on a regular basis, not on lurker days. And how do you do that without screwing up what you already have? Because it’s not broken, after all, you’re looking for improvements, not changes.

I like to use real-world analogies to help define virtual situations, because it helps me translate what we’re trying to build into known environments. Analogies illuminate both by where they work and by how they fail — and where the analogy doesn’t work is where I try to focus my ideas and experiments.

My favorite analogies for a mailing list (especially since many of mine are sports oriented) is the sports bar and the cocktail party. I especially like the cocktail party concept because it includes the concept of small groups of users
having independent but (sometimes) interrelated discussions. The advantages of a mailing list is that you can listen in to all of these discussions at once, not just the one you’re in (and you can be in multiple conversations at once!). the negative aspect of a mailing list is that, effectively, when one group is having a discussion, all of the other groups have to shut up and more or less pretend they’re not listening — good conversation requires a sense of intimacy, which is at odds with the realities of a mailing list. That’s one reason people lurk — they can never get comfortable with the facade of intimacy, they always see the audience out beyond the lights. Most conversations are between two and six people, from what I’ve seen. While there are always one or two people who seem to revel in being in almost all conversations (I certainly wouldn’t ahem know about that…), you’ll find if you study list traffic that conversations tend to be serial, and different conversations tend to attract different sub-groups, and once a conversation starts, the other chatter usually dies out and waits for it to finish.

So ultimately, instead of a cocktail party of intermingling conversations, a mailing list is more a serialized conversation among intersecting sub-groups. In essence, it’s a cocktail party where conversation can only take place in the talking-place, only one group can be in it at a time, and everyone jostles around to step in when an existing conversation ends.

(this might explain a syndrome I’ve always wondered about: when a group of people on a list get into a topic and really start a lively conversation, someone invariably pops up and tells them all to shut up; it’s as if they think the list is there to be subscribed to, but not really used. But perhaps, what they’re doing is reacting to people staying in the conversation pit too long, and trying to move them along, albeit in a non-polite way…..)

So what we’ve been talking about the last week or so is ways to create more “talking pits”, ways to get rid of that first-in-first-out aspect of a mailing list, without actually screwing up what’s working.

Lurker day has proven there are groups of people who can really contribute to the discussion — if we can find a way to allow them to contribute on their terms; create them a conversation pit away from the mosh pit of the main list.

A concept we came up with over the weekend that I think has promise is this: to create a series of “extra” mailing lists (call them, say, sharks-1 through sharks-6). Members could subscribe to any, or all, or whatever. The use of those lists would be undefined, allowing users to figure out what they want to do with them.

The only binding rules are this: (1) no cross-posting among lists, and no re-posting from list to list. The idea is to create independent places for multiple conversations, as if you’ve taken the cocktail party and spread it among different rooms in the house. Allowing cross posting defeats the purpose, the same way a PA system would defeat it in the real house. (2) you can’t tell others to move to another room. you can only offer to take your own conversation to another room.

My hope/belief is that over time, different groups would migrate into different lists and self-define what those lists are about. I’d expect the main list to continue to be the driving force in the environment, the room with the bar, the band, the dance floor and the mosh pit. less enthusiastic users wouldn’t ahve to wait for the band to take a break to spread out onto the floor and talk any more. Instead, they’d wander off to one of the side rooms. I wouldn’t be suprised to see three or four sub-lists to be more or less permanenty co-opted by sub-groups for various purposes, with the last couple of lists being left for ad-hoc discussions (“hey! let’s take this over to sharks-5 and hash it out”).

and for people who just don’t want all that complexity, the original list is still there. It only changes to the degree people find the sub-lists useful and productive and worth the hassle of populating and using. so it seems like a low-risk experiment on top of everything else. If it works, you end up with a much larger, vibrant community. If it doesn’t, the sub-lists wither and die, and you can prune them without any impact.

I’m curious what people think about this idea. has anyone tried something like this? Has it worked? Anyone know of any research or variants on this kind of setup I can research? does it seem like it might be a useful thing to try?

I’m going to propose this to our sharks list (the official guinea pig list of plaidworks) and see what the reaction is. I’m curious how they, as a potential user base of this idea, will react to it…

(a final note: this is something I’d consider for large, busy lists that “need more space”. It’s not appropriate for smaller, quieter lists. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that a list has to have a consistent level of postings to it to remind people it exists and is there to be used. If your user base is too small, you have trouble sustaining that and people get out of the habit of thinking about (and using) the list — and then it dies. It’s better to have one list with three small and somewhat related groups on it than three lists with three tiny populations, because those three lists will have great trouble building any kind of community due to the infrequent postings inherent in a tiny audience…)

slow progress…..

I continue to make slow progress on the whole post-list-mom-reality. This one is taking a long time, because there are some tough issues I’m trying to understand, and until I understand them, I can’t delineate them.

The key one is the relationship of checks and balances between the various friction points in a community. I want this new setup to be (a) user-centric and (b) self-policing with limits. User-centric implies that all things being equal, what the members want in a community takes precedence over what the administrators and owners want. Self-policing implies that an administrator defaults to staying out of the way unless action is clearly necessary.

Some of the friction points ought to be obvious — a community goes in a direction the owner/admin finds unacceptable, for instance. You don’t want the owner/admin to try to force a community in directions it doesn’t want to go, but at the same time, the owner/admin needs some finer control than “I won’t pay for this, it’s shutting down”. The users need to feel enabled to explore and build a community — and the owner/admin needs to have something they feel is worth paying for, and a way to protect their legal liability issues (since even if they hand off responsibility to users, as the person who manages it and writes the checks, they’re ultimately liable, also)

There’s an interesting case here involving Grinnell College that I find persuasive here. I think it’s unrealistic to assume you can create/own/manage/administer/host/etc a community resource, and build disclaimers that keep you from being liable for what goes on with those resources. (Even if you ultimately win in court, it’s an expensive and pyrrhic victory, and I doubt you’d win). So that implies that anyone in a position of responsibility for a community resource has a liability for content on that resource, so you simply can’t operate something without taking an active administrative role in it, if only to protect your legal interests.

I’ve felt for a long time that the absentee landlord model for running communities leaves you with one type of community: slums. And I think it’s now becoming clear that if you ignore the necessary upkeep and allow it to slum out, eventually, you create a situation where you have a legal liability for your lack of maintenance.

The other friction point are the meta-fights. Fights within the community about whatever the community is about tend to be constructive (although when they turn into hatfield/mccoy type feuds, very annoying to all but the particulars), but when people start fighting about meta-issues, that’s where I’ve found the worst and most destructive fights occur.

Case in point — Friday, on one list we had a user pop up to tell everyone that he didn’t want anyone to send him both a personal reply and a list reply (reply-to-all). This person has a personal view of how things ought to run, and proceeded to try to tell everyone on the list (about 5,000) to do it his way.

This is a failed request on the face of it. Even if all 5,000 people were willing to remember that this specific user wants his mail this specific way (hah!) as new users come on board, they won’t “know the rules”. You create an infinite loop of failures, leaving only frustration on all sides. Worse, his implication is that everyone should do it that way, even though a lot of people (for instance, myself) want both copies. So he’s put his preferences above others, or worse, made the assumption that those 5,000 users will remember he wants it one way, and I want it another, and actually do it.

Not a chance. users will continue to do it the way they’re comfortable with it, and ignore all of this, leaving the users complaining about it unhappy and frustrated. left unchecked, the arguments are going to grow (this one mutated into the normal reply-to meta-fight before being shut down) and the resentments increase: the original person gets more nad more pissed that nobody is doing what he wants, and those around him are pissed that he keeps telling them how to run their lives.

That stuff has to be cut short. non-administrators can’t be allowed to try to set meta-policies; that’s to be left to the owner/admin on a community basis, and to individuals on how their machines operate. (if you don’t like how stuff arrives, teach your own machine to fix it; that part you control completely. The rest, you control not at all — and attempts to control it anyway creates these conflicts).

The issue I’m trying to figure out is where to draw the lines in the sand that enable users to self-police content, but not meta-issues, and how to frame that in a way that a typical user can easily understand. Meaning no more than a couple of paragraphs of non-geek english.

(and no, I don’t expect the list documentation to stop all of these meta-fights; the people who most need guidance to not do this tend not to read the documentation anyway. but it gives the users and the admins/owner easily accessible fodder to shut the discussion down early while it’s small and harmless…)

And unfortunately, this is the critical path right now, and while I work this stuff out, I’m blocked. grump. But it’s getting closer. I know what I want out of all of this now — I just can’t quite get it written out yet. and it serves no useful purpose in my head, other than as a map for myself…

The Sharks in 2003-2004

Over in Frank’s blog (with a broken permalink, sorry), he asks a question i’ve heard a lot — how are the sharks going to make up the loss of the offense with Selanne gone and the other changes?

the Sharks have been saying all along that good defense along with the expected play of their players, especially the younger players, will do it. Fans have been (rightfully) skeptical. But will it?

Basically, the players no longer with the Sharks contributed about .69 goals a game last season. That’s not chopped liver, but much as i appreciate Selanne as a player, when you look at his production in San Jose, it simply isn’t that great, and isn’t that hard to replace.

So our goal (heh) is to find 3/4 of a goal a game.

First step: last year, our special teams sucked. Penalty kill was 30th in the league, we were 23rd in short handed goals allowd, and 23rd in short handed goals scored.

If you assume the Sharks merely get back to a decent penalty kill, that’ll cut .13 goals a game off of the oppositions scoring. If you want to admit they might be decent (10th of 30 in the league), that goes up to .2 goals a game.

Short handed: if the sharks could get back to average, that’d drop 2 goals. If they get back to average in short handed goals, that’d add 3 (a net of +5 for the season). If you want to look at 10th in the league, the numbers are 4 and 4.

So the improvement just by making the penalty kill average is .2 goals a game, or almost 1/3 of the “missing offense”. if you want to assume we can get those three stats to 10th in the league, it’s .3 goals a game, almost halfway there. Just by fixing the penalty kill enough to not be putrid. (for what it’s worth, in 2002, the sharks PK was 11th in the league, short handed allowed was 2nd best, and short handed 7th. Asking to get back to 15th isn’t a stretch, and 10th isn’t, iether. And if you look at the PK after Sutter was fired and Wilson had a chance to retool it a bit, it was in the top ten in the league the last 15-20 games of the season; so I think these numbers are reasonable).

Goaltending: The sharks were 26th in goaltending. If they could get that back to a (mediocre) 15th in the league, that would account for .21 goals a game. That and the penalty kill interrelate, but if the Sharks can get better goaltending and better penalty kill, and a net improvement of .4 or .45 (perhaps even half a goal a game) is easy to find — or 2/3 of the missing offense. San jose was 9th in GAA in 2002, for instance.

While 2002 was the division championship year, we’re not asking for that kind of performance. Even a decent (15th in the league) performance is a major improvement over 2003 — and would almost replace Selanne’s offensive numbers for 2003. That’s a scary thought, both as a reminder how bad the Sharks were defensively, and how weak Selanne was offensively. It’ll be interesting to see how he fares in Colorado. It’s a scary team, but I wouldn’t hand them trophies yet.

In 2003, Selanne scored .34 goals a game. he can be replaced by a penalty kill that doesn’t suck. He just wasn’t the factor his star status would imply.

Then look at some of the guys still with the team: Mike Ricci (goals off 50%), Scott Thornton (goals off about 70%). That’s 15 goals right there, or almost another .2 goals a game. If both of those players come even close to the numbers we expect of them, if the goaltending snaps back to decent, if the penalty kill snaps back to decent, we’ve found .55-.6 goals a game, almost all of the “missing offense”. it wasn’t missing; we were handing it back with bad defense.

Between 2002 and 2003, the sharks scored 34 fewer goals — but gave up 40 more. A net difference of -74. Of that 34 fewer goals, have can be attributed to production losses from Ricci and Thornton.

So how do the sharks succeed?

Penalty kill 10-12th in the league.
goaltending 10-12th in the league.
cut down on short handed goals allowed.
ricci and thornton get back to 70-80% of what they gave us in 2002.

Right there, we’re 80% of the way home.

Alyn McCauley can get us 8-10 goals. cheechoo for 15 goals? That’s an improvement over last year, but not a major one. A healthy and in-shape McLaren is good for 9-10 goals from the point, and an improved power play.

If this team plays to its capabilities, or even close, it’ll be a good team. The problems last year were sub-par goaltending first and foremost, and that was caused as much by bad to non-existant defense and a ludicrous penalty kill as anything. Fix those, and the “missing offense” is at worst a minor issue. Don’t fix them, and it doesn’t matter, does it? Selanne couldn’t save this team last year, could he?

So the house is painted…

So the house is painted, and it looks really good. The crew finished at the early end of estimates, so today was fairly free. I took advantage by getting myself the hell out of the house and down to shoreline and baylands to do a little walking and birding, as much to get away from phones, computers, e-mail, cockatoos, and all of life’s little distractions for a while, and just sit and contemplate.

It was fairly quiet, although the lake had a number of surf scoters, and I was able to watch some pelicans flying and feeding; apart from raptors and loons, the pelican is one of my favorite birds to just sit and watch. Over on baylands, I grabbed a seat near the mudflats and spent some time studying a long-billed curlew, and then spent an hour trying to make sense of the plovers. Which makes sense if you bird, and not at all if you don’t. I enjoy it — and I’m terrible at identification, because I have so little time to practice..

Birding gives me a reason (read: excuse) to get outside and walk, something I need to do more of. And it’s a great excuse to get out near the water.

I don’t know how others resolve design issues, but sometimes I do it by just shutting myself in a quiet place and hacking my way through it, but other times, that doesn’t work, it just adds to the frustration. And when that happens, I need to get away from everything, do something else and let the design resolve itself. I’d hope to make more progress on the damned List Mom thing, but between dealing with the paint crew, work interruptions, tatiana and whatever, it just never quite gelled.

So I ran off today, away from all that. Work still could contact me by cel, of course, but that’s reserved for visible smoke and the like.. So I think I’ve resolved most of the things that have held me up, and hopefully, I’ll make some real progress tomorrow… Because I really want that stuff worked out, so I can finish the re-do of the plaidworks site, and get going on the redo of my blog… Plenty of ideas, but I didn’t want to give myself a chance to avoid the hard pieces…

Another thing I did today was pull out the photos I’d stored on CD-R, so I could grab the “before” images for the house. A full suite will show up in a day or so as I finish getting stuff prepped. That’s where I’m headed shortly, to start tracking down and uploading pictures into the gallery…

Looking back in time…

I got asked a question about the history of usenet tonight, which caused me to do a little research on Google….

And I ran into this post from 1992, which (for reasons I’ll go into more detail later) I found interesting both for how my attitude on stuff has changed in the last 11 years — but how many of the foundations of things I’m thinking of right now are already there, too.

Synchronicity..

for usenet.hist@weber.ucsd.edu
Date: Thu, 10 Dec 92 00:42:27 -0800
From: Eeyore’s Evil Twin

>But it also sounds as if you are willing to take a stand and that is helpful
>too.

I have this really unfortunate ethical streak that manifests itself in two
ways. One is that I believe that any idea worth doing is worth doing
yourself (ideas are a dime a dozen. Ideas that start out with “I think you
should do…” are worth the time and energy put into it by the originator:
nothing. this has put me in conflict on usenet at times, since there’s a
contingent out there that firmly believes it’s a lot better for 37 people to
amke suggestions to the one silly coding-volunteer (and get mad if he
ignores them) than have 38 people coding), and the other is that if I’m
involved in something that’s not working right, I find it very difficult to
simply sit back and let it continue not working right. I have to tinker;
it’s clearly a neurosis. That’s why I’m up to my knees in SFWA-related
volunteerism, and why I’m now running a usenet site again despite my screams
of anguish a few years ago last time I ‘left’ the scene. (it’s also one of
the reasons running a site again scares me. The next step is ‘helping’ out
on the net in general, something I really don’t want to do…).

I don’t suffer fools and incompetents well, which is amusing considering my
chosen career is technical support. I’ve just gotten much better at hiding
my frustration until I hang up the phone….

>> In the Good Old Days (you KNEW I was gonna sneak that in somewhere, no?)

>I was hoping you would

Ah, you young whippersnapers. I remember the Good Old Days when reading
usenet meant walking five miles — in the snow — uphill — both ways, just
to get to a CRT. And not one of these modern CRTs, either. It was really a
teletype, and we had to buy our own ribbons. And steal rolls of toilet paper
from the janitors to feed them. And since teletypes were so noisy, we had to
cushion the blows of the keys with our tongues.

Yes, back then, usenet was a real man’s hobby, not something like today with
all those poofters and ucky girls and stuff. Ugh. Virtual cooties. yuck.

>But aren’t there also thick skinned people who can stand the abuse and
>still stick around to find the good stuff?

I’m sure there are. Thick-skin (or skull, or both) is a primary hereditary
trait needed to be a successful net.twit. Omega Mosely in rec.arts.comics is
a classic example, as was Richard Sexton. They didn’t care what anyone said
about them, so they were free of the restraints of peer pressure or social
feedback that keep most folks in line one way or another.

(I am, to this day, convinced that Sexton was either a clinical psychotic or
someone who pulled the greatest mind-f_ck ever devised on the net. You
ALWAYS get folks who think it’s fun to poke the ant-hill to watch us poor
ants scurry about trying to make things right, but Sexton was poking the
damn ant-hill with a bazooka, and we all twitched together, much to his
amusement. Bastard.)

>Was any way found to prevent topic drift or the smashing of a tread?

Not really, I think topic drift is GOOD. Tangents are where the fun
discussions come from much of the time. But it needs to be controllable,
which implies improving the reader programs to have a better form of
sub-thread pruning, whihc is something that’s really weak these days.

>But when you do happen to have a worthwhile conversation, it is something
>that is valuable.

True. But you have to ask yourself whether it’s worth it. If I want to go
find out the maiden name of the mother of Czar Nicholas, I’ll be happy when
I find out the answer. If it takes me four days of plowing through books in
the library looking for it, was it worth the hassle in the first place?

(answer: if I’m writing a story involving the Czar and I have to get the
detail right, yes. If I’m curious, I won’t do the research. And that is a
classic analogy that explains why you read some groups on the net, and
unsubscribe to others even though they’re both topics of interest. For me,
rec.arts.sf.written and rec.arts.comics.misc. While I like comics, I don’t
like them enough to plow though the volume for the occasional tidbit I find
relevant. Law of diminishing returns).

>Is the frustration that there were Good Old Days and the current net
>doesn’t measure up?

For a while I was bitter that, for all my work in trying to shape the net,
it went off in directions I considered negative. I still think the net went
in the wrong directions in some ways, but it was an inevitable evolution. It
would be easier to stand between an elephant and a box of peanuts and keep
them separate than attempt to make usenet change directions. Once you figure
that one out and start working at nudging it here and there, either to
encourage some behaviour or discourage some other instead of wholesale
sociological reform, life gets a lot less crazy. I probably slowed down the
inevitable decline somewhat. Probably. How much? No way to tell. Maybe zero.
But ultimately it was digging ditches around a sand castle. The tide will
come in.

That was pretty much when I decided to get out of the net.god business. I
couldn’t fix it, attempting to fix it seemed to be making it worse (and me
crazy in the head, not to mention a target for every hot-shot net.twit
looking for a Big Name to virtually shoot down), and I didn’t feel doing
stepwise-refinment procedure type stuff on hurricane would be particularly
satisfying or successful.

When a person (or group) stoppped being able to manipulate the net is when
we stopped having Cabals or net.gods or whatever you want to call them.
Since then, you have individuals who take a little chunk that means
something to them and they do what they can to reduce the chaos. Tale’s
stuff with newgroups is a great example: he’s really doing little more than
what Greg Woods did, or the Cabal, or Elliot for a while. But it works
because he overtly doesn’t set any policy. He’s a filter, not an
adminstrator. (and THAT is b_llsh!t, of course. He does set policy, and
guide the net in various ways, but his public persona is that of an
invisible bureaucrat, which allows him a fair amount of power as long as he
doesn’t get caught using it — in other words, doesn’t screw up. It’s a fun
game. Convince them it was their idea in the first place. Old saying:
diplomacy is the act of saying “nice doggy” while looking for a rock. Do it
badly and you get bit….)

>Do you ever still find something wonderful that happens?

Yeah. track down a thread in misc.fitness on exercise and losing weight/fat.
I made a posting there a few days back, and I’ve gotten at least ten mail
messages from folks who were looking the inspiration that the message gave
them. It helped a few over a mental or physical hump. That sort of thing,
especially the unexpected egoboo letters, leaves you glowing for days.

>So maybe I should ask What were (or are) the delights and the difficulties
>that you have experienced with Usenet?

Jeez. What a question. Delights: I met my wife through usenet (strictly
speaking: my current and final wife). It more or less kept me sane during
the Dark Years surrounding the termination of said first and previous wife.
Or maybe less unsane is better. It was a way of learning socialization
skills, of meeting neat people, of learning. Of wasting immense amounts of
time that otherwise would have been wasted on television or rogue, maybe
maybe being the world’s best rogue player would have been time better spent,
but I probably never would have found my way out of the computer caverns to
where I am. Spaf and the crew. If there was one thing (other than the wife,
and without usenet that simply would never have happened) that made — and
makes — usenet worthwhile, it’s the people.

Difficulties: usenet is an amplified mirror, but with flaws. You tend to get
out of it what you put in, but slightly twisted and at higher volume. So
when you’re nice to folks, you get nice back. When you’re snarky, or
depressed, or angry, or whatever, it returns that as well. So when things
are not going well, usenet tends to make them seem worse. Honestly, though,
a solid 80% of the problems I’ve had with/on usenet are self-generated,
where I tried to immolate myself in the amplified feedback of my own
creation. The other 20% were individuals that conflicted with me — the
Sexton’s, Omega’s and Maroney’s of the world. Which isnt’ to say I’m right
or wrong with them, but simply that wherever we went, we fought. Strong
personalities, differing worldviews. Guaranteed conflicts. Not fun.

Especially when you wake up at 3AM and realize “I’m wrong”. Or worse, “you
know, all I have to do is SHUT UP and it’ll go away”. Flamewars do not long
survive the black hole of silence, except in Omega’s case, and that was
rather amusing. He carried it on something like three years single-handed,
when I wasn’t even reading the group. Talk about pitiful.

>Why were emotions heated during “The Great Renaming”?
>Was it that some of newsgroups would be dropped from general distribution?
>(for example the talk hierarchy?)

Change. Not everyone agreed that it was necessary, and it was a
technological and sociological upheaval. We were obsoleting entire machines
with old software (there are STILL remnants of support for Anews hanging
around, like the 14 character groupnames and lack of uppercase groupnames.
But they’re slowly dying), and we were guaranteeing that everyone would have
to start from scratch and rebuild their virtual reality and the paradigms
they used to view the net. If you got home and found out that the post
office had decided to not only change your zip-code, but your street address
and city name for you, you’d probably be a bit stressed and upset, too.

The talk hierarchy was a good idea poorly implemented, since while we could
fairly easily move the obvious ‘noise’ groups there, anyone after that who
wanted to create a group generally fought like hell to keep it out of talk,
since it had worse distribution. There are oodles of groups that ought to be
in talk but aren’t, like sci.skeptic. Ultimately, creating talk solved the
wrong problem and started a chain of events and precedents that led up to
the creation of sci.acquaria. We would have been much better off merging
them in with the mainstream groups and not setting up a “here are the groups
you can jettison first” mentality. It was set up to make it easy for lazy
sysadmins, so the first thing that started happening was circumvention. It
was the easy answer, not the right one. (mea culpa).

>> I call it benevolent dictatorship, or more closely, the ability (and
>Why do you call it dictatorship if it involved an open discussion?

Because the whole purpose is to convince them to creat a consensus around
what I always intended to do anyway. Rather than force it down their throat,
convince them they always wanted to swallow it.

The initial re-organization of comp.sys.mac is a classic example. It was the
first time someone had tried to spread out a sub-hierarchy, so there were no
precedents. There was strong disagreement with the format, and some folks
felt it ought to be done with a bunch of individual votes. Until then, it
was one group, one vote.

Once we were able to get a consensus that it was silly to create separate
CVF’s for each sub-topic, we finally ended up with what is essentially what
we’re doing now. My original position was that it would be a take it or
leave it single vote on the hierarchy, but that was a negotiating point. I
let the next convince me to compromise with a single CFV, but individually
counted votes for each group name within it (hmm. maybe I shouldn’t say
this. It might piss someone off, or at least mkae it harder next time, but
there won’t be a next time).

I then opened up the re-org discussion for open debate and straw polls and
the like, and did so with my own proposed reorganization setup. That setup
included two groups I firmly expected to get killed and a third I expected
to be renamed (all of which happened). The proposal ended up being abot 90%
what I expected it to be when I started, with the other 10% legitimate
improvements on stuff I proposed but hadn’t completely thought through the
implications (hence the reason why I LIKE open discussion. that 10% may well
have meant the difference between the c.s.m stuff that works quite well
today and total mishmash). Suggestions I wasn’t particularly happy with
generally got sent off onto a tangental discussion, which effectively killed
most of them. The rest were taken under consideration and thrown out.

This is fairly blatant and overt manipulation of the process, but the end
result was that I got it where I always expected it to be when we were done,
plus a few improvements I was glad to have, and the users got what I knew
they needed while feeling that they were actively contributing to the
creation process (which they were. They just weren’t contributing in the way
most of them thought), and we ended up getting there with relatively little
fighting. If I’d just stood up iwth my final proposal and said “This is it
and I say so” we’d STILL be having flamewars and none of the re-orgs in any
of the newsgroups would have ever happened. So while I’m overtly
manipulating and playing mind-games, I don’t apologize for them a bit. It
works.

But it works for two reasons: when something good comes along you adopt it
and make what you had better, because if you don’t, they figure out that
you’re toying with them. You don’t toy — you manage. Also, most users
really want to let someone else do all the work, and you can use that to
advantage — as long as they feel their input is being listened to. There’s
a big difference between disagreeing with input and ignoring it. You can get
people to agree to disagree as long as you’re honest and open. But simply
because someone suggests it doesn’t mean you have to accept it.

It’s a negotiation process. I can’t tell the net what to do, but I can
convince the net to do what I want them to do if I couch it in the proper
terms, so effectively we end up with the same result, but through different
processes. (I’ve probably put far too much time into studying how the net
reacts to things on a psychological and sociological level than is good for
anyone. I’m rarely suprised by the net any more, and I rarely open my mouth
unless I already know the ultimate outcome before diving in to net.politics.
Even if it’s a consciously created loss of the argument. Sometimes you have
to bring up an idea and have it beaten down, just so people cna think about
it and make it more likely to be accepted when you really need it. Like the
Great Renaming).

>Do you say this because participates actively in the process?

Not just that, but are being listened to. Being ignored is a great excuse
for getting angry or frustrated, which causes people to get stubborn and
lash out.

>> But there are! The key is finding them. One problem with USENET in the
>There are what? models? From where?

Before I got involved with usenet, I ran bbs software on other systems.
usnet was a much larger version of what we had there, and went through
almost exactly the same kinds of growing pains at the same relative growth
points. So I’d been there, and I knew what was going to happen –
proliferation of newsgroups, authority revolts, dictatorial leaderships,
signal/noise ratios. One of the things that really depressed me was I’d
already lived through much of the rise and fall of usenet in microcosm and
couldn’t do a thing to stop those same problems happening again.

But more generally, you can take individual aspects of usenet and find
analogous models in real life. Ticket lines for a hot concert: 99% of the
people will be reasonable, and the other 1% will make them all miserable.

I’m a big fan of analogies, which are a form of modelling. They let you
build in a connection to a thing you better understand, and by learning
where the analogy fits (and more especially, where it fails) you learn more
about the thing you’re studying.

And now I realize the alarm goes off in about six hours, so until some other
time…

(yawn)

Alligators and swamps…

This posting on plasticbag nails it right on the head.

When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember you’re there to drain the swamp. And worse, all it takes is one alligator.

Trolls don’t scale. you don’t need lots of problem-makers to screw up or kill a community; one or two is enough. That was a key problem with USENET: one idiot you could ignore, three would make you crazy, ten would make you leave, and USENET had no way to ban out the trolls — kill files help cut the noise, but earplugs aren’t the same as silence.

It used to be that I’d spend a lot of time trying to work with problem-makers, trying to solve problems. I found, though, that most of the time, that work was wasted. Their either couldn’t get it or didn’t want to try. Or lied through their teeth at me just to make me think they’d behave, until my back was turned.

A few of those convinced me to stop wasting my time, at least most of the time. Life is too short to be taken advantage of.

As Bill Cosby once said, Parents don’t want justice. Parents want quiet.

It serves no constructive purpose for the list (or my sanity) to have a long, nasty fight before kicking out a troll, so now, I tend to use a quick hook on obvious cases — pull the plug, and the onus is on them to convince me they’re worth being allowed another chance, not on me to have to prove they ought to be kicked out. Occasionally, one does, too. And while that argument continues, it continues off-list, saving everyone else the hassle.

Use of terms like “freedom of speech” or “my right” or “lawyer” are guarantees that they’ll never get back in, either. The US first amendment means you have the right to start up your own damned list to babble on, not that I have to subsidize your babbling. Use of a mailing list is a privilege, given to you by the owner of the list, not a right. That privilege can be taken away for any reason, or for no reason, and that ought to be made explicit in the list rules and documentation (for the same reason restaurants use the “we reserve the right to refuse service…” boilerplate).

there’s a class of person out there who gets off by destroying what you built. That’s all they want. And the only way to deal with them is quickly. There’s a second case, that of a person not compatible with your community, but who insists that the community reshape itself to his preferences. That’s a lot less clear-cut, but IMHO, ultimately, the best thing for both that person and the community is to invite the person to search for a more compatible community, and usher them out the door. This needs to be done politely — but it needs to be done.

I’ve sometimes considered wherher you could build two parallel, overlapping communities based around dominant but incompatible personalities, but to be honest, the thought scared the crap out of me, even though I have a perfect test case on one of my lists. The chances of it working long term are too risky for my tastes, and I’d hate to try it and then have to patch things back together if it fails… Ultimately, I think the answer for these things is for multiple independent communities on the same subject, with some level of cooperation between them that everyone feels comfortable with. That allows people to migrate to the community they feel most comfortable with, and the information sharing minimizes the issues of people feeling they’re missing something that might be going on the ‘other’ community. as if we have time these days to be everywhere on everything…

And that’s a huge change in the community aspect of the net many old-timers (and others) still haven’t gotten: ten or 12 years ago, when the net was still fairly small and intimate, having a single place for information was a good thing. But as the net’s grown up and the population has gotten large and diverse, there’s more of a need to break up discussions by community as much as by topic.

Think about it: in a small town, you might only have one bar. But when the size of the town doubles, or triples, can you imaging the bikers, the gays, the mill workers and the sports fans all sharing the same bar?

But there’s still a lot of that “small town” attitude on the net, and it’s changing more slowly than it should. We’re all better off with 10 smaller communities on a topic than one huge one, especially if that community is always fighting over which sub-group within it is going to be in charge… Especially so if those smaller groups can build some type of cooperative sharing structure…

The List Mom is Dead! Long Live the, um…..

As I’ve been mullling over rewriting FAQ and Rules for the lists and the site, I’ve had to take a step back and I’ve realized it’s time to rebuild the underlying philosophy of what kind of groups we want and how those groups ought to be managed.

As the net has gone from a small population and geek toy to today’s huge place with a mainstream audience, the expectations and needs of the audience have changed, and so have the expectations that we (as admin/owner) can have about what your users ought to know and be capable of.

The end result of that is that I feel, every 18 months to two years, you need to sit back and re-examine your communities, how you manage them, and how you present that management philosophy to them.

The end result of that is that I feel, every 18 months to two years, you need to sit back and re-examine your communities, how you manage them, and how you present that management philosophy to them. This doesn’t mean I do that every two years, but it never hurts to think it through and tune things up as the world changes around you…

And now, I realize that the whole List Mom concept has hit end of life, and it’s time to go in a different direction. Or more correctly, properly document and represent the direction I think is appropriate and have been aiming at for a while anyway.

Back when Laurie and I started running mailing lists, tings were relatively simple — this was back in what I call the Pre-AOL universe. Your typical audience was fairly small, generally technical, probably worked in the computer industry or was in computer science at college, or was attached to someone who was. You were running the lists because (a) you wanted to, and (b) you had the ability to set up and run the thing on your company’s computer — so lots of the early list admins were also system administrators, and their tasks were primarily technical. You had a user group that, when someone got upset or flew off the handle, could deal with a nice, sysadminly “will you shut up already?”

And then AOL connected to the internet, and unleashed its users on it. This created two types of culture clash. You had the AOLers, who saw the rest of the internet as just an extension of AOL, and assumed it all acted the way AOL did, and exported the AOL culture to the rest of us, and at the same time, you started seeing mroe and more people discovering the internet, and joining in without any context or culture whatsoever, and no real clue what any of this was, or how it worked. Worse, unlike the techies, they didn’t care how it worked.

So there were major changes that happened in online communities (primarily lists and usenet, since those were the dominant systems in the pre-web universe), as the old guard met the chatroomers met the real-lifers. For the most part, there wasn’t a common context or language among them. But in many cases, you ended up with one mailing list about one topic with three (or more!) populations, all wanting things done their way. The admins tended to be technically oriented, not socially oriented, so there tended to be struggles in attempting to manage these situations.

Out of that chaos came a period I now lovingly refer to as my list nazi period. The old guard users were pissed, and wanted things taken back to the Good Old Days (we now realize you can’t, and shouldn’t. funny, but the old guard always has problems with that, and while I sympathize, down the path of rejection of tomorrow lies stagnation and death. And fi that’s okay for you, fine; not okay for me). The chatroomers weren’t there for detailed discussion, they saw lists as funny forms of chatrooms and, well, chatted. And the real-lifers were, well, hard to convince that no, I wasn’t paid tech support, and no, the rest of the list wasn’t there to entertain then, and otherwise shut up and stay in the closet until called.

So all this begat a new, rather hard core administrative style, what I now fondly call my List Nazi period. But it was a response to trying to keep the existing subscriber base together and happy against the influx of a new group of people with a different culture and attitude.

Does this sound familiar? It’s effectively the same problem that USENET had (and had again), the one that the Backbone Cabal had during the first major growth spurt. Ultimately, attempts ot steer USENET in a specific direction failed, because ultimately, a system had been built with a million steering wheels and no rudder.

On mailing lists, it worked better, but over time, created a new set of problems. Eventually, the need for such a tight leash receded, but the leash didn’t loosen. This ended up causing other, different problems — stagnation of the list population, and creating a strong disincentive to post to the list. People get tired of having their every move second-guessed. It kills the community aspect of things.

So in late 1998 and early 1999 (as I remember it…), we threw out all of our list documentation, rules, attitudes, etc, etc etc, and started from scratch. And out of that navel examination came the concept of the List Mom.

Why List Mom? A lot of thought went into coining a new term. We wanted a term that specifically excluded any concept of ownership, but instead of stewardship. You may have created a mailing list. You may own the server it runs on. You may manage the list, and set policy for it. But you don’t own it; the users do.

We wanted a term that looked more to the social aspect than the technical. An admin is a technically oriented person — list administration increasingly is about social issues, not technical ones, and increasingly is done by non-technical people who never deal with the underlying hardware or software.

And finally, we wanted a term that disconnected the administrator from the power of the position. The reason we finally decided to use List Mom was simple: we couldn’t see anyone being taken seriously if they’re yelling things like “you have to do what I tell you! I’m the List Mom!” (think of the underlying image: “you have to eat your lima beans! why? Because I’m the mom, and I said so!”). It’s a term we felt was consciously disarming and non-threatening. In fact, we felt it was anti-threatening, and a way to overtly remind the admin not to take themselves too seriously. (quick digression: in case it’s not obvious, while the terminology is generalized, the primary target of this de-frocking is, of course, me. That others have found it useful enough to adopt is a thrill to me, but I was struggling primarily to find a way to restructure how I ran mailing lists to solve problems I felt I was causing, and to build those changes into the infrastructure such that both the users and myself would understand the changes were happening and the status quo had been thrown out — and to limit the chances of things slipping back into the old habits again…)

I’ve come to see these different administration philosophies as almost a life-stage motif. When we started managing groups on the net (going back to about 1980 for me, even before I was on the Arpanet or USENET), the audience was basically the computer club — build the clubhouse and open the door.

Then later, you start growing because people have discovered the club, but not all of them know (or care) about the history of the club. JKust that you can hang out there and have fun. Nobody — not the old-timers, not the newcomers, and even the admins — really know what the social mores and structures are or ought to be. Some folks are more comfortable in the environment than others, but everyone’s new to this, because it’s no longer a uniform social culture, but a diverse one. So it’s up to the admins to instill structure and try to guide people in the search for figuring out how all this is supposed to work. Which to me sounds a lot like, well, kindergarten. Lots of kids, big kids, small kids, and an authority figure.

And then the kids start growing up, and creating their own personality. That personality isn’t going to completely match the parent’s wishes — it never does. The chiild is now an adolescent and comes home from school one day with purple hair. Some parents are englightened enough to deal with that; the rest of us become List Nazi’s.

And then you find that purple hair isn’t the same as being pregnant, or getting someone pregant, and that the sky doesn’t fall in and the world doesn’t end. Sooner or later, you come to grips with the hair. Your child hasn’t yet moved out, but they are dating. The dance of trusting and earning trust is going on. That’s the List Mom phase.

Which, I find out to my surprise, is a transition phase, not really a philosophy or attitude to itself. It’s a close approximation of what I want, but not close enough. And I believe it’s now time to make that change.

When the net was young and outgrowing it’s clothes faster than you could buy bigger ones, someone had to be the daddy. And then the net was grown, but not really grown up, and and you still needed someone to take on the mantle of authority, but they no longer made all of the decisions (and generally, there was disagreement where to draw the line). And later, as you figured out you could trust them without watching them every minute, as an admin, you learned to back off.

And now, it’s time to take the next step, and throw out the parent/child, the owner/user model, and move to the kind of relationships adults have with each other: that of partner.

The kid has moved out into their own place, and as parent, it’s time to learn to stop being a parent, and become a friend.

List Mom might have been a term with power diminished, but still with power. and while on a practical level someone ultimately has to have the power and responsibility, I think the adult phase of this implies an admin who exercises authority as little as possible. The real world equivalent to this for me is the mediator, or the ombusdman instead of the boss, the arbitrator or the administrator.

So the List Mom is dead. Long live the, well, something.

Exploring where we’ve come from ends. Time to explore where we’re headed. I know where I’m headed here, but to be honest, I haven’t drawn the map. I’ll start that once I publish this piece, because I hope to have everyone help getting the lines in the right places. This is a path I don’t feel I want to blaze alone and then surprise people with. I’d rather we blaze it together, as partners. Which is the basis of why I’m doing this, isn’t it?

(Another reason why I’m doing this in public? Simple: Lots of people have adopted and adapted the concept of List Mom. I’m honored and amazed to see how the term and concept have migrated on their own, and how it’s been adapted and modified along the way. While I’m not encouraging or suggesting they move along the path with me — I want to give them the opportunity to help with this process, and be aware of the process, so they can join in if they want.

And I feel strongly this is our process, not my process. I’m driving, but I need help with the map.

Shall we?

(P.S: where the hell did this come from? Good question — I hadn’t planned on tearing it out to the foundation and starting over, either. But a few weeks ago I was talking about parents and partners over some other issue, and I started to realize it was relevant to this, also.

Eating your own dog food. If you won’t, why should any other dog?

If I could be Steve for a day….

Don’t take this too seriously, okay?

But since Guy and I were talking about stuff, and it turned into a little chat about blueskying future technologies, I finally told him I’d take some time to tie toegether some of the stuff I’ve been thinking about. And somewhere along the way, that turned into a couple of blog entries — this one about things I’d love to see Apple do to take advantage of emerging technologies, and a second (still to be writen) that focusses more on my server-service-running side, sort of as a bluesky of the kind of things I hope to do with Hockeyfanz some day.

Don’t take this too seriously, okay?

But first, the superspecial disclaimer: None of this has anything to do with any project that might or might not be happening over at the Mother Ship. If I know of something, or even heard a rumor about it — I won’t talk about it here. If I talk about it here, adn it actually happens, then I’ll look like a miracle worker, but in reality it’s probably because other people have figured this out, too. none of this, period, is based on information I know, just stuff I’m making up because it’s fun to talk about. Okay? okay… Onward.

If I could be Steve for a day, here are some of the things I’d like to do, or set in motion. There are three technologies I’m watching very closely — and I expect them to converge such that we don’t think of them as separate things, but as aspects of our on-line experience. There shouldn’t be visible seams or arbitrary barriers here — they’re legacies we need to grow beyond.

First, e-mail is my key technology. It is what many of our lives revolve around to a greater or lesser degree. E-mail, web, and to a lesser (but growing) extent Instant Messaging are the primary ways people interact with the Internet.

E-mail, however, is challenged, and to a good degree threatened. E-mail also isn’t always the right protocol to use for communicating — it’s the convenient one. For e-mail to survive and thrive, those challenges need to be dealt with.

First issue is e-mail’s consent model, or more properly, lack of one. Unfortunately, the spammers and other miscreants have taken advantage of the net’s historical openness and screwed it up for everyone. On the other hand, why is anyone surprised this happened? It always happens, so proper controls should be built in from the beginning. We didn’t do that with USENET, and USENET was basically killed by it. We had a chance to learn from that with e-mail, and didn’t. So now, we’re going to have to backfill it.

This means, simply, putting the control of access to a user’s mailbox in the hands of the user. Right now, the model is I can/will email you unless you stop me – if you can. that has to change, to I will ask permission to email you, but unless you grant it, I can’t.

I can already see some of you twitching and mutting challenge/response — and yes, that’s one component of it. But it goes well beyond challenge response. In reality, it’s consent management.

In consent management, I can issue tokens that can be used to access my mailbox. I have the ability to add limitations to those tokens, such as only works from this acccount, or only works for 48 hours. I can create a token that says the first time I see this token, store it’s source and accept mail from it, so that I can hand a token to, say, a vendor, and the vendor can e-mail me — but nobody else the vendor gives the token to can. Imagine having a phone number your bank can use, but can’t sell.

This kind of system includes a whiteist of accepted addresses, a blacklist of known bogus addresses. It needs to have some kind of challenge/response as well, as one tool to help manage the unknown. For this to work, though, there has to be some way to reliably and unambiguously embed these tokens in e-mail, too, so they can be carried around and recognized.

The ability to build a kick-ass consent management system is something Apple could do with some commitment — because Apple controls both the mail application and the address book and they can be tightly coupled, they have the ability to create very easy-to-use versions of these tools — but adding the consent management to a person’s address book, and having mail.app manage the consent.

The second aspect of email is the push aspect. Every time you send someone e-mail, you generate an interrupt. that’s one of the reasons e-mail spam is so annoying, where paper “junk mail” is so much less annoying. You deal with paper e-mail on your schedule. you deal with e-mail on my schedule. OR his schedule. On anyone’s schedule but yours.

Many people think of e-mail as paper mail, only done in electrons instead of ink. Many marketing groups that have moved to e-mail have come out of the print marketing world. To some degree, that makes sense; the creation of collateral is similar to some degree — but there’s a significant difference. If you don’t recognize and manage that difference, you will almost guarantee piss off your users.

And that difference is that, to the receiver, e-mail is like a phone call. it’s interrupting, it’s distracting, and it’s unplanned. So while content can be treated like print collateral, contact should be treated like telemarketing. Miss that distinction, and you’ll regret it.

So the second thing I want to see happen to e-mail is integration of an RSS aggregator. The aggregator is something the user has under control (consider the e-mail/RSS decision to be another aspect of the consent model — it’s up to the receiver to decide WHEN to accept your message, and one way to control that is to let the user decide email or RSS for reception), but once the message is accepted, there is really little difference between an RSS message and an e-mail message, especially given the increasing move to HTML e-mail.

So what I want is a single application that combines my e-mail, an RSS aggregator, and my safari browser, since increasingly, all three technologies are going to deal with HTML and/or XML, and there’s no reason to separate them out because of arbitrary differences in delivery. I’d even argue that safari’s bookmarks ought to be integrated into the address book, because increasingly, all of this contact info is converging, and the differences between a URL to a web page, an e-mail address, and a URL to an RSS feed are increasingly arbitrary.

So Address book is your control panel to the internet, managing your contact info, how you interact with them, and what access you’ve given to them. And the combined RSS/e-mail/browser beast is how you interact with them.

The second technology is blogging. Apple’s done a good job of enabling Apple customers to communicate and share — look at filesharing, web sharing, mac.com. All very useful tools, and combined with quicktime, iMovie, iPhoto and other tools, make it easy to share content for the non-technical user.

So why do none of the tools encourage written communication? Writing tools are, at best, primitive (mac.com’s home page templates…).

What could Apple do here? How about Buy iBlog. It’s a great little tool for writing to mac.com, or to local sharing systems. It imports from iPhoto. It’s a very nice blogging tool like one Apple could write — Apple just didn’t write it. so buy it, and give it away as part of the mac.com account. enable mac.com users to blog overnight.

Apple has the pieces to really take a strong leadership position in the emerging blogging world. But AOL is already beta testing their blogging universe, and it’s clear Microsoft is working on blogging tools for MSN. it bothers me that Apple-the-innovator seems to have missed this one. But I don’t think it’s too late; it’s just that Apple would join the parade, not lead it.

Giving blogging tools to mac.com would give blogging tools to Apple. All that’s needed then is a standard policy on what Apple people can and can’t do. Microsoft seems to have figured it out. Are there risks of leaks? Sure. But are your employees mature and professional, and do you trust them to follow the rules? (hint: if you don’t, you have bigger problems in your organization). lay a set of ground rules on what you can and can’t do. Enforce them fairly and humanely. and watch what happens when your employees become your unpaid evangelists, and your spare time tech support.

(hint: many Apple employees already are. they just do so from under cover. Isn’t it better to have it out in the open where it’s easier to monitor, and people aren’t afraid of losing their jobs for trying to help? — it is in Redmond!)

The third technology I’m watchign closely is Instant Messaging. IM is a weird beast. At one level, it’s e-mail for people in too much of a hurry for e-mail There are very few intrinsic differences between e-mail and IM, except for the way they’re delivered. They’re used differently, but frankly, these technologies should converge, and the difference becomes transparent. We have e-mail in one App, and IM in another, because different groups wrote them. At some point down the road, IM is simply another tool.

All of this needs to merge: IM, e-mail, HTML, XML, RSS. It’s all different flavors of the same thing. We’re not even talking about hammers and nails vs. screw drivers and screws, we’re talking about flat vs. phillips. Or #2 phillips vs. #1 phillips.

So it all belongs in a single App, using a single coherent interface. You control it via your Address Book, which manages who you know, how you contact them, and what your consent tokens are. it also grants consent tokens to those you know, so they can contact you. And whether you use IM or SMTP to send the message, or you read your iMap box or an RSS feed, it dosn’t matter. Most users don’t care about those technical issues and don’t want to. And increasingly, those issues don’t matter. Content is one thing, how that content gets frmo point A to point B is another, and the consent that governs whether it gets through and when is a third. But it all ties together into one single thing.

It’s not e-mail, it’s not IM, it’s not RSS, or XML, or HTML, or IP, or PPP, or any of those things.

it’s communication. And the rest are details that simply don’t matter. So let’s stuff them in the back closet with the other techno-geek things we’ve already realized don’t matter to the average user, and simply give them the environment they want to use the way they want, and quit forcing them to learn different tools for doing things that are different only because we used to think they were — but they really aren’t.

Birds are smart…

Both Boing Boing and Making Light are pointing to a Science article discussing tool using crows.

The article is interesting, but not particularly ground breaking.

Both Boing Boing and Making Light are pointing to a Science article discussing tool using crows.

The article is interesting, but not particularly ground breaking. There’s a huge literature on this, most of which hasn’t really been given much public attention. A good starting point is the book The Human Nature of Birds: A Scientific Discovery With Startling Implications. Hell, if you read Darwin, he had some of this figured out…

The avian brain is wired different than many animals. Everyone’s heard of Koko the gorilla and the language experiments done with gorillas and other great apes. Fascinating stuff.

But few people have her of Irene Pepperberg’s research with Alex the African Grey and other African Grey’s.

Alex has a vocabulary of over 200 words, and can consistently take words and build cognitive groupings out of them. Some of the stuff they’ve done with Alex is here.

Laurie and I have kept birds for what seems forever — about 20 years now, first with Morgan, and after she died, Tatiana, our current Umbrella Cockatoo.

First surprise is that birds (IMHO) have the same attitude as cats. Dogs see you as friends, cats see you as servants. Birds remind me a lot of cats.

Tatiana is an avian equivalent of a four year old. She’s old enough to know that certain actions will get her in trouble, and old enough to decide it’s worth it and do it anyway. This creates a problem, since she firmly believes she’s in charge, and she’s not afraid to let us know if we’ll allow it — and she knows she’s in charge of the cats, because they know it, too. So we have this frigging bird chasing cats — and laughing — because she knows she can get away with it (and we have a smart cat, too. Smart enough to know never to touch the bird when we’re around, and willing to wait for the time when we aren’t — the family is never together unsupervised. never)

Morgan, bless her soul, was an escape artist. we finally had to padlock her cage, because anything less than that, she could open. We caught her one day stuffing splinters up the keyhole of the padlock, becaue she’d figured out that when you put the key in there, it opened. We fully expected her to invent lockpicks at any time, but instead, she chose to disassemble her cage from the inside instead, and kept finding places where she could remove a piece or split a seam instead. She was a big believer in brute force.

Tatiana, on the other hand, is more of an engineer. I’ve caught her watching me do things — for instance, using a D ring to attach toys to her cage (a D ring looks like a link of chain, but one side is threaded so you can open it and then screw it shut again). Not suprisingly, I came home one day, and all of her toys were on the floor of the cage, and she had one of those D rings in one claw, and was very carefully screwing it open, and then closed, and watching what it did as she turned it.

We’re constantly reminded just how sharp she is. She remembers things. She can tell time. She understands the difference between weekend and weekday. She knows if I’m working from home, it’s not “her” time until after 4:30. And she knows when 4:30 is.

It’s never boring here. Just the way we like it, when we aren’t considering killing her.

here’s tonight’s fun and games. I’m home late from work. As I hit the driveway, the door pops open, and laurie yells “I need you in here now!”. That’s never a good sign. Laurie’s blouse is covered with blood spots.

Normally, that means a cracked blood feather, which is either simple to deal with, or potentially fatal — and Tatiana’s in another moult phase, so she’s primed. But tonight, it was a cracked toenail.

So suddenly, Laurie is sitting there with a bleeding bird, who’s alternately showing laurie the toe hey! lookie! and playing with it look! I can write my name on your shirt!. Laurie’s trying to get the clotting stuff out, but the damned bird is too busy enjoying herself to cooperate. All the while, we have two cats wanderin around the chaos going need help? what’s going on?.

So I grab the bird and start treating the wound, Laurie gets the cats into the back half of the house, and then I’m trying to get the vet’s number out of my cel phone so Laurie can call in that we’re coming, because I’m not sure I’m going to get it stopped. Tatiana, at this point, is standing on her cage, holding out her foot for me to work on.

Finally, I get enough goo and pressure on the crack that it slows, then stops. Tatiana just sits there patiently. I keep tossing clotting factor on it to make sure it really stops (I use styptic powder for toes; flour for blood feathers if at all possible, becaus styptic can be caustic and stings).

So we finally get it stopped, and there’s this clump of clotting factor on the toe. it obviously hurts. Tatiana decides she wants to play with it, of course. So we do five minutes of “no, don’t touch”. half a dozen times, and she tries to pretend she’s preening, to see if she can get to the toe that way (dad’s waiting, nope).

So we play about five minutes of “don’t touch that”, and then she looks at me, and stops trying.

And didn’t touch the toe for the next half hour. After that, it was clear it was going to stay stopped, and since it was past bedtime, we put her to bed.

Now you tell me, how many dogs would have figured it out without a victorian collar? Few. I’ll check it tomorrow to see if it needs to be seen by the vet — she probably ought to be looked at, since it’s been about two months since we stopped her hormone treatments (that’s another whole long story…).

But to me, here’s the real reason I feel she’s intelligent: when she’s really, really mad at me for some reason, she’ll do something to get herself in trouble, just because she knows that makes me crazy — and then take and put herself back in her cage and wait for me to catch up. The kid who did something to spite her parents, and the sent herself to her room.

That, folks, is what life with a cockatoo is like. Crows got nothing on my little white friend here (and that shouldn’t surprise you. In australia and the tropics, the cockatoo lives in the same ecological niche that the crow fills here in North America…)

Thoughts on ‘A group is it’s own worst enemy’

If you haven’t yet read Clay Shirky’s A Group is its own Worst Enemy, please do so. It’s a wonderful examination of the social aspects (and technological underpinnings) of the online group.

It’s got some wonderful and very true concepts about the strengths and challenges of running groups. I found myself nodding in agreement with most of it, because he was describing atechnique Laurie and I had settled on to manage our lists (even if we didn’t consciously recognize it before now).

Since I’m trying to figure out what I want to do in the details of building the new Hockeyfanz, this has given me some things to think about, and generated some thoughts I thought I’d throw out there. This is the first (it may be the last, it depends on if I find anything else worth saying…), and it’s based on a discussion on a virtual community discussion on , a place I hang out when I’m not busy writing blog entries…

> Finally, there’s “a way to spare the group from scale.”
> I’m not sure what he means here…

There are two aspects to this. On a macro level, it’s simply the size of the group. Too large, and any attempt to hold a conversation becomes unwieldy, and the dynamics of the group will create their own frictions (something we have seen here at times…). Also, there’s going to be a given percentage of any population that won’t get along, and some small percentage that is simply a problem (aka, trolls). if four out of 100 simply can’t get along, and you have one troll per 100, that’s manageable. But scale taht to 1000, and now you have 40 people yelling at each other, and 10 trolls. Even though the PERCENTAGE is the same, the result isn’t. As groups get larger, the percentage of noise has to be reduced, because the group won’t survive it otherwise. Groups don’t scale to larger sizes well.

One a macro level, think of the cocktail party. You might have 50 people at the party, but they clump off into small groups and each hold separate discussions, but mix around. if you had all 50 trying to be in the same discussion, you again have chaos.

So what Shirky’s getting at is that no matter how big a group gets, the natural inclination is to split off in small groups for a more intimate discussion, and the software has to encourage and allow that. probably encourage it.

So think in terms of that cocktail party, and virtually build ways for people to find a quiet corner of the place to talk. If you analyize most discussions here on eMinds (and most likely all bboards), most discussions actually consist of a very small group of people talking, and the rest of the bboard politely watching from the sides so the conversation and pretend they aren’t listening in — but as you walk through the board, you see different clumps of people getting together in different areas (some people are in all of them, which is the main advantage of the virtual cocktail room over the real one. But everyone has a slightly different set of places where they hang out, and smallers sets of those where they chat)

The other aspect is creating ways to allow people t duck out of the way of the noise, meaning hide from the trolls, and get away from the personality conflicts and fights. In a cocktail party, when Jerry and Fred start rehashing that lost poodle (oh, again? can’t they let it drop? evidnetly not…) for the 30th time, everyone groans and shifts to a different part of the room. How do you do it online?

So (IMHO) the ultimate aspect of scale is creating a system that, no matter how large it gets and how many people are contributing to it, it still seems small and (not private, but) intimiate to encourage discussion.

the more people feel like they’re speaking to a large crowd (or will be yelled at by one), the more inhibited they’ll be, unless you’re someone with titanium skin or no self-awareness of others… so systems need to build in a sense of intimacy and smallness and hide the size…

The reality is, every time we post to a topic here, some X number of people are going to read it. The equivalent of three people talking, 30 listening — that’s not a cocktail party, that’s a conference panel, and makes most people uncomfortable. So systems have to help people stop thinking about the ‘audience’, without ever making them think it’s not there, because otherwise, things get said that are usually regretted…

Okay, I gotta clarify something…

I was considering talking about this anyway, but my programmer came into my office today worried he hadn’t been holding his weight (furthest from the truth, he’s actually kicked some serious butt for me), so I guess I better make sure there are no misconceptions here…

I’ve made a number of references to working long hours on the blog. That’s because I’ve been working a lot of hours, to the point I’ve put a lot of personal things on hold to keep things going at that place that I work…

But lest you think I’m chained to a desk and fed raw meet through the bars, here’s, well, the rest of the story.

About 18 months ago, I was on vacation up north (as usual). I’d been thinking things over for a while, and finally decided I was stagnating, and work just wasn’t all that interesting — I wasn’t challenged. So I wrote a note to my boss saying that I thought it was time to start thinking about transition issues, wrapping up what I was doing, transitioning the email stuff to other people, and looking for new opportunities for me. Now, the timeframe for this transition was a year or so, given what was scheduled, but I just felt I wasn’t growing or being challenged any more, and I was actually thinking maybe it was time to think about even leaving Apple, but my preference was always to find something new and interesting there, not leave. Given I’d been doing what I’m doing since 1996 or so, I don’t think I was being unreasonable…

So I actually did return from up north (sometimes it’s easier, sometimes it’s not…), and we started discussing the situation. Everyone was quite supportive and understanding, for what it’s worth.

Along the way, I wrote a proposal for a new internal system that involved some technologies I wanted to experiment with, and which I thought served some useful purpose. My thought at the time was that a reasonable compromise would be to continue working on my existing stuff, and use this as a possible transition to a new set of technologies, starting part time and growing it into a full-time gig if things worked the way I thought they would. It had some nice potential, a low cost of entry and an interesting ROI, and it’d solve (assuming it worked) a number of long-held requests inside the company. Not bad for a start… It was well-received, and we decided to go ahead with it.

Along the way, though, a funny thing happened. I’d been suggesting another project on and off for a while, something I thought was very interesting and technically challenging, and something that could both save Apple a chunk of money and improve the way Apple did some of their operations at the same time — lower cost, improved customer interaction, more power and flexibility, all in the same package. It’d floated about, but never really found traction or gotten much notice.

Well, for various reasons, the right place turned a corner and rear-ended the right time, and suddenly that first project got noticed, and started being looked at again. And then I’m being asked if it could be ready by This Day (TM), and what it’d take to get there.

So suddenly, I have my new project. I redo my project proposal, work out budget and staffing, estimate everything out, and it all gets approved. Basically, until that point, I’d worked almost exclusively on the “lone wolf” projects — I design, I build, I run. This new one’s big, it’s complex, it’s gotta be done by This Date, and there’s no way in hell I’m doing it alone….

So now I’m architecting a system and managing a team to build and operate it. Talk about wandering out from your comfort zone and stretching your wings. new challenges? technical growth? personal growth? I had it in spades. And in the midst of all of that, I made a simple, but huge, mistake.

That mistake was assuming how much of my time would be available to code — I made the assumption that I’d lose about half my time to managing things and maintaining other systems, and still be able to act as a half-time developer for the project.

Silly me. But I’ve got a strong stubborn streak (my bosses have a term they use with me at times, that of being in “violent agreement” again), and have always believed that whatever needed to be done, I’d find a way to do it.

So I had a problem. We made our first deliverable (barely). Getting there was fun. I think I wrote the “we aren’t gonna make it” memo three or four times. My boss talked me off the roof twice, HIS boss talked me off the roof once, and somehow, at something like 2AM on the morning of the day where the live/die decision would happen, it all fell together and started working, and the damn thing lived.

But the reality was, I wasn’t 50% coding,50% other, I was more like 90% other, 10% coding, and usually, I was the big red line noting the critical path on the schedule.

So I made a decision to try to find as much of that missing 50% coder as I could. I felt there was a significant committment from my company to this project, and there was a rather nasty budget impact to a bunch of people if it didn’t fly, so I felt there was no choice but to make it fly. It was my feeling, given the corporate financial situation at the time, that going for extra headcount wouldn’t work (and frankly, we didn’t have the time in the schedule to wait for the process to bring another body on and get them up to speed), and besides, did I mention that I’m a rather stubborn cuss who believes he can pull off pretty much any miracle?

(digression: in retrospect, I’d say that going back to for more resources would have killed the beast early on, when it was still unproven. But later on, once it was in operation and it was proving itself, I probably should have tried, and I probably would have gotten it — but by then, I felt the worst of the disaster was over, and for the most part, I think I was right. We still could have pulled in our schedules better than we did if I’d thought it out better. But I’m sometimes a bit stubborn, you know?)

So I did what I thought had to be done, crawled in a hole, pulled it in after me, and started hacking. The whole crew (four of us, plus my boss) dug in and fought the good fight. and it worked. We didn’t meet schedules as well as I wish I had, but we did okay. Not good enough, but okay.

So that’s why I’ve been working long hours. I made a proposal to Apple to build a Thing. they paid me to build it. There were groups within Apple that were depending on that thing, and I felt committed to not letting them down, to the best of my ability. so I did whatever I could to meet that committment. I also felt professionally I had a lot on the line; if it failed, I’d never be trusted again (and rightfully so), and that probably was ‘it’ for me at Apple. I decided that wasn’t an option. I didn’t feel like faceplanting with that many people watching.

And, you know what? (I say this around work, and people stare at me like I’m crazy) I haven’t had this much fun in years. I haven’t had this much personal and professional growth in a long time. I’ve had to grow myself technically to make this project fly, I’ve had to grow myself professionally, learning how to manage people, manage projects, coordinate the work of multiple people, deal with outside organizations that are now my clients — lots of things that have been on the “someday” list, and all showed up on the to do list along the way.

It’s been one hell of a hack. Sometimes stressful (well, no; usually stressful, but people tend to forget there’s good stress and bad stress, and it’s been mostly good stress), but always a challenge, and I love a good challenge.

Think of it if this way. You’ve been surfing for a while, you’re not a bad surfer. So you’re out on the board one day, grabbing 10′ waves, having a good time. And then you’re out there, and you see this wave coming — 15′, 20′, 25′. What do you do? Me — I start paddling. If you catch the wave and live, you really know you’ve done something. Now, it’s probably not the smartest to transition from 10′ waves right to 25 footers, but opportunity isn’t always going to cooperate. you can either paddle towards it or away from it, but it may not throw another chance like that at you.

Right around July 1, we checked in the last code that basically brought the key systems to the point where they needed to be. That’s been the transition the last week or so, as I realized it was time to dig myself back out of that hole, and get back to life. The system isn’t done — I could sketch out the next two years development if you asked nicely enough (and were internal to Apple) of stuff we need to (or should) do to this beast, but I don’t expect to ever have to submarine back down to make sure things happen. We’re actually in good shape on future deliverables right now (I always felt if we could Get Over The Hump that the stuff that Came Next would happen faster than expected; it was just getting there that went slower. So far, I seem to be right).

So I’ve spent a week recharging batteries and catching up on ~150 pieces of email, ~200 URLs in my “stuff to talk about” file (many of which I threw out as no longer relevant), and the yards no longer look like nobody lives here. Which has done wonders for my sense of frustration at seeing so much stuff in stasis… heck, I found the floor of the garage!

It was my feeling that an opportunity like this would only come once. I had to either grab it and hope it didn’t kill me, or let it pass and stay what I was, a pretty good email hack and special project gunslinger geek. Which isn’t a bad thing to be, but if you aren’t growing, you’re stagnating and dying, and I’m not interested in that. So I grabbed (and I’m still alive…). And I think I’ve done something pretty damn good, and pretty damn fun, even if I can’t talk about it here…

Sometimes, you just grab, hold on, and see what happens. Would I do it differently next time? Sure — I learned a lot, especially about my limitations and how to be realistic about them. Would I go back in time and do it again?

In a second. If you ever ready Tracy Kidder’s Soul of the New Machine, winning was something you did so they’d allow you to play the game again. Me, I’m looking for another quarter to stick in the machine…

That which does not kill us makes us stronger — Friedrich Nietzsche

Amen! — chuqui

If you go out to the woods today…

damn you, Steve Jackson Games (oh, wait. too late…)

The Teddy Bears Summon Cthulhu!

“If you go out to the woods today
You won’t like what you will find
If you go out to the woods today
You’re certain to lose your mind
For every bear that ever there was
Will gather there for certain because
Today’s the day the teddy bears summon Cthulhu!

Ritual time for teddy bears!
The little teddy bears are waking the Elder Gods today!
Smell the incense in the air!
And see them dancing their eldritch ballet!
See the waving tentacles
While in their pentacles
They summon your worst nightmares!
And soon their Lord, Great Old One Cthulhu
Will rise up from the sea
Because they’re faithful little teddy bears

You could go out to the woods today
With the bears and their evil tome
It’s lovely out in the woods today
But safer to stay at home
Beneath the trees where nobody sees
They’ll chant and pray as long as they please
Today’s the day the teddy bears summon Cthulhu!”

from http://www.warehouse23.com/item.cgi?SJG9401A

Hiring a contractor….

Since we’ve decided who is going to paint the house (finally. yeah!), a few thoughts on how to hire a good contractor…

The key thing to remember, I think, is that any time you are hiring a contractor to do something, whether it’s paint your house or replace a toilet or whatever needs done, is to understand enough of what’s happening to know whether or not the contractor is doing a good job. In this situation, you are your own general contractor hiring a sub-contractor, so you need to understand what you’re hiring out.

Most good contractors will take the time to explain things you don’t understand; take advantage of that, but be aware that if you already know you won’t be accepting a given contractor’s bid, you’re wasting his time. That’s part of the reality of bidding a job and contractors factor that into their pricing, but it’s no excuse to abuse the relationship. you’re better off going back to the contractor you ARE hiring to ask questions you still have. of course, if you honestly aren’t sure who to hire, or whether the job is being bidded properly, you should keep asking questions until you do.

My first thought: “everyone” tells you to get three bids. Well, life’s not that simple. I have accepted the first bid. I’ve accepted the seventh bid. What’s important is that you keep talking to contractors until you find one you’re convinced will do the job properly for a price you feel is fair.

For instance, three weeks after we closed on the house, the furnace went kerplooey. We contacted a number of companies, and ended up working with one that could deal with the problem quickly at a good price. That led to further work — we’ve completely replaced the HVAC system, including reducting the house, and have done a couple of thousand in plumbing to the place since we’ve arrived. We don’t bid any of this out now, we call these folks; they aren’t the cheapest, but they’re wonderfully reliable, their work is first class, their systems are quality, and I can trust them. It makes no sense to go bidding for what we need these days.

Or when we re-roofed. One company has done seven or eight of the roofs on the block — the Eichler is a bit of a specialty, being a flat roof, and residential tar and gravel isn’t exactly common. But to get a sanity check on the price, we brought in a second company to bid; it was 40% higher, without the roof insulation we’d gotten added into the bid. No brainer, we went with the first company, and the R14 under the tar and gravel has made a huge difference to the livability of the house (and our energy bills… we had to spec up the air conditioner significantly when it was replaced because of the heat gain from the roof. Now, the airco is pretty bored, except on really hot days…0

And in one case — our first run at patio and hardscaping, we just gave up and put it off. That was during the high point of the dot com stuff, though, when every subcontractor was booked eight months in advance (or worthless), and people wouldn’t even come out to look at smaller jobs, and if they did, priced them high enough to make sure you wouldn’t accept their bids. ugh. These days, it’s a lot easier to find good subs…

So my point is — get as many bids as you need to get the right guy. To do that, you need to know enough about the job to know what a good one is, right? If you don’t, the sub ought to help you understand what needs to be done, but don’t completely trust them to tell you the entire truth. Try to find an uninvolved third party to help you understand what’s going on and/or evaluate bids with you.

So, here’s how I found our painting contractor. For the last year or so, I’ve been keeping an eye on paint jobs I’ve seen in the area. Residential, commercial, it didn’t matter, I just watched for jobs I liked, and tried to find out who did them. Some contractors put signs up, many have signage on their trucks or vans. it’s usually pretty easy. I tend to think contractors that use trucks with no signage at all are hiding something, because why not advertise (in many cases, they’re either unlicensed, or they’re small groups that are hired out by bigger companies as sub-sub-contractors. more on that later).

I also asked around to find out from folks I knew who were getting paint jobs who they used. In a few cases, I did it to make sure that company got thrown OFF my list (for instance, a house across the street was being repainted so it could be sold. the painters came in and prepped one day, did the main coat the next — and it rained a little that night. Next morning, they came in and did the trim. IMHO, that house needed at least 48 hours to dry before it should have been painted again — and the trim is already peeling, less than a year later. A company I definitely wouldn’t hire…). Also, I throw out companies who’s company vehicles are in bad shape. A contractor’s truck is going to be used (and used hard), and going to show wear, but a there’s a difference between a truck that shows use and one that (in the case of a painter) looks like it’s rented out weekends for paintball contests. A sloppy truck is, to me, sign of a sloppy work ethic, and that is a short walk from a sloppy job. If a sub doesn’t care about how their trucks look — what will my place look like?

I specifically look for small to medium, family or individual owned contractors who use their own crews. With big companies, you can get lost in the noise, and it’s hard to find someone who stands up and will be responsible. Many times, those big companies will hire out smaller companies to actually od the work — they’re effectively brokers, not contractors. This isn’t necessarily bad, since we did the front door that way through Home Depot and I thought the sub did a great job, but you lose some control, and you’re depending on the company hiring subs that will live to the company’s standards. the busier a company, the more likely that won’t happen. Basically, I want to know who the owner is, and how well he’ll back up the work. The closer you get to the owner of the firm, the better.

Remember that most contracting work is subjective (paint, which deals so much with color, is exceptionally so). A technically good job where the colors are off isn’t a success any more than perfect colors put on badly. So don’t minimize the need to be sympatico with your contractor on colors. A good contractor will help you get the colors you need, not necessarily the ones you want.

As I was watching paint jobs, one company kept showing up. I swear half of the jobs I saw that I really liked were done by this one firm. So they got called first. The owner came out two days later, surveyed the house, and wrote up the bid. We spent about 20 minutes discussing the prep work needed (easily 10, maybe 15 years since the last paint job, stucco with some settling cracks, a few other joys), and then another 20 minutes on paint colors, especially on the porch, we’re I’m rebuilding into a (hopeful) focal point.

He brought up certain aspects of the prep that would need special focus, and explained why he felt they ought to be done. he suggested upgrading to an Elastomer paint (basically, it covers and fills micro-cracks in stucco, and then stretches so they don’t come back), and went into some detail of what the house needed. His company is medium sized, about 50 people, but all work is done by employees, and supervised by foremen who are promoted up through the company. Those are very important guarantees to me that what the bidder says will be done, will be done. And then everything he suggested to me verbally was writen into the bid as documentation for the foreman.

The downside: he was about $700 more than I’d hoped, and about $1000 more than I wanted. Oh, and his trades vans are impeccably clean. You don’t have to wash them weekly, but it doesn’t hurt..

The second company was similar to the first — I’d seen a few jobs I liked, they advertised on the jobs. About a 70 person company. I got a full-time bid writer, not the owner. To be fair, I give all bidders the same job; even if something comes up with an earlier bid I want to adopt, I don’t add it to later bids. I want to see if other subs will come up with the same (or similar, or better) ideas. If not, you can always have them adjust the bid later — they won’t mind, and it’s fairest to all.

The second bidder had pretty much the same prep work specced out, which gives me confidence that this is what the house really needs. His bid differs slightly in a few ways, and in one major way. He doesn’t propose the elastomer paint; instead, he bids priming the entire house.

The third company I called out I called cold out of the yellow pages. I enjoy a bit of randomness, to make sure I’m not pre-judging myself into a corner. Small group, four employees, one crew. He was a no-show for his appointment (which happens); he called two days later, and it was a root canal that went bad, and he was in the emergency room. Like I say, stuff happens, so we rescheduled (but don’t expect me to call and ask why you didn’t show up.. but a contractor that calls, I’ll talk to).

We talked over the job, given the same premise as the first two.

final bids:

Bid #1: 3,600

Bid #2: 4,900

Bid #3: 1,900

Same job: $3,000 difference. Makes you wonder, huh?

I really liked the third contractor — but I don’t believe he properly bid the amount of prep work this house needs, and I don’t think his crew is really up to doing it. So while he’s the low bid, I’ve eliminated him — but I’m recommending him to my neighbor, who wants her house painted, and which is in good shape bcause it’s been painted three times in the last five years (thanks to two sales…). She’s so tired of white on white, and that crew is perfect for her house. Just not mine.

The difference between bid 1 and bid 2? Once you sit down and break down the bids, bid #1 and bid #2 are exactly the same price — except bid #2 added a full prime coat to the house.

And both bid #1 and bid #2 have bid a job that’ll do what we need — get the exterior fixed up, and get a quality paint job on it.

But IMHO, I’m convinced #1 will do better prep, and is dealing with the house through prep and with a better paint, while #2 went with a lower quality paint and a more labor intensive solution. It’s not wrong, it’s a different philosophy. Either way, we’ll end up with a well-done house. But the 2nd bid is more profitable for his company than the first bid will be to his company.

Which is why you need to know what kind of job you’re having done, and how it ought to be done. There’s not a thing wrong with that second bid, except that it’s slanted more to the contractor’s benefit than mine. If you don’t know any better, it can cost you a couple of thousand dollars and you’ll be happy with the results…

Of course, before I fully commit to bid #1, I’m going to ask him his opinion of the full prime, and see what he says. I think I know what the answer will be…

But seriously, folks…

Okay, enough maudlin babbling.

Overall, it was a good holiday here. If you celebrated the 4th, hope yours was, also. It was rather quiet here, but fun. Spent much of the 3rd and 4th doing yardwork (one day weeding, one day behind the rototiller), and I’m feeling better because we’re finally seeing progress again. the back yard is still far from done, but at least the parts taht aren’t covered in concrete are starting to show signs of someone living here.

Santa Clara did fireworks in central park again (we missed them last year because we were north), so fireworks was as difficult as walking out the front door and going to visit the neighbors, who were having a small party. Once that was done, we hosed off the cars (we were downwind), and then crawled back inside to catch the 4th of JulIvars on the tube…

Also this weekend we got the quote started for the concrete work, and we should have some idea about the cost this week. Not sure when the money will exist, but we’ll know what to budget for it. Given the size of what we want, I had it broken down into four projects, each quoted separately, and I’m hoping I can afford one or two by winter. And we’ve gotten all of the bids for the paint, and tomorrow, I’ll call and get that scheduled with the contractor we’ve chosen. But more on that later..

On the 5th, I turned 45, so we went out for breakfast, then off shopping for an Asian pear for the back yard (no such luck, but we spent some time considering other plantings once we get the hardscape done… the tree, however, likely waits until bare root season now), and then lazed around until dinner. Today was another quiet day (what good is taking time off to rest if you work yourself to death?), and tomorrow I’ll try to finish the main work on the new porch, and get that done, since it has to be in before the painting. Then, the fence…

It’s beginning to look a teeny bit like…

No, actually, it’s July. But Laurie and I are planning on a Christmas trip this year. Normally, we head to LA for family-time, but after years of negotiation (at one point, Henry Kissinger stepped in to help choose the shape of the table, and which napkins to use), we’ve been given approval to head off on our own.

It’ll come as no suprise to anyone who knows us that means Victoria for christmas. The hotel we use up there has a nice Christmas package that we plan on taking advantage of to spend a few days up there, but we’re trying to figure out what to do with the rest of the holiday. After talking to our concierge in Victoria, we probably won’t spend New Years up there; it’s more of a christmas/shopping location, and for New Years, things are pretty shut down.

So we’re looking at Vancouver. Since neither Laurie nor I are a “ballroom with 2,000 of your closest friends” type, we’re trying to look at what might be fun. We’re hoping the Canucks have a New Year’s Eve game — failing that, there are three or four other teams we might visit instead if they’re playing.

If hockey doesn’t work out, we’re thinking we might head to one of the coasts for some Storm Watching. If we get lucky, it’ll be a cold, rainy night with a nice dinner somewhere and a couple of bottles of wine watching the weather blow in. At worst, it’ll just a pleasant afternoon on a cool beach and a nice quiet night together. Where we might do this is still under discussion, but there are a number of places up the Oregon and Washington coast we might consider. I wouldn’t do Tofino that time of year, but if you don’t mind that kind of drive, it’d be awesome, if you knew the weather was coming. We’re also thinking of maybe finding a place out on one of the islands or up the Sunshine coast, and getting away from it all…

Of course, we could just do the boring thing — stay in vancouver, dinner at Lumiere, and some nice Okanagan wine in the hotel room… but we better make those dinner reservations now… Or maybe the Red Star Roast House in Portland…

Thoughts on groups.

Clay Shirky’s new piece, A Group is its own World Enemy is a wonderful look at on-line interactions. he’s right on. Going back to the days of the Backbone Cabal, I’ve seen (and re-lived) the same kind of issues he’s talking about.

(and, in some great virtual co-dependency, like Skinner’s pigeon, once the wounds scar over, I always wander back into the fray, thinking next time, we’ll find the secret that’ll make it work, this time for real (nothing up my sleeve!). Or maybe it’s Maslow’s monkey — it sure feels that way some days…)

A few random thoughts that his piece brought up, for no particular reason other than I thought they synced up with his piece rather well.

Groups are normally created by a small set of people with very similar ideals and goals — after all, they’re a group. but a successful group is going to attract new members, and over time, you’ll start bringing in members that aren’t fully in sync with the full set of goals for the group, and that’s where conflict starts.

So for a group to be successful, you need to design in UP FRONT one of three things:

1) you design the group to be of fixed membership, so that it never grows and doesn’t have to change. then hope members don’t die, get bored, burn out or have fights with each other.

2) you design the group for change, and hope to god the old pharts are willing to accept it when it comes.

3) you try to put in a framework that inhibits change, and hope to god that the fight that happens when the new pharts and the old pharts collide doesn’t kill it (and if it doesn’t, it makes us stronger. in theory). Then be ready for the fight and try to moderate it as quickly as possible…

—-

When it comes to mailing lists, I’ve always had a hands-on approach. This pisses off people who don’t want someone to tell them what to do, but I generally find those folks are the folks who most generally need to be told to quit being annoying. As they say, if you’re not the lead dog, the view doesn’t change, and my corrolary is that if you are the lead dog, you don’t like being told to get out of the way and let someone else have their turn. But in my experience, mailing lists with “absentee landlord” admins come in two forms: small cohesive groups that have expelled troublemakers already, and dead groups that are badgered by one or two dominant trolls. I generally don’t stay on lists where there’s not SOME hand on the rudder, so to speak, because generally, those lists are quite not-fun to be on, and have a bad signal/noise ratio.

Which doesn’t mean to say my hands-on approach was always good, either. I went through a list-nazi phase I wish I could take back and bury. But it immediately followed the “we’re all mature adults here, so I really shouldn’t need to make up rules and tell you what to do, because you all know what’s right”. yeah, right. 99% of them do. it’s that other 1%….

Happy Canada Day!

to all our canadian friends, a happy Canada Day! Wish we were up there to celebrate in person.

Short night on the blog tonight; dinner with a friend (He showed up in a red Roots track suit, Laurie had her Victoria Commonwealth Games T-shirt, and I grabbed a Calgary Stampede hat), down at Red Sea for Ethiopian. It was an old standard during the days at National Semi, and we’re slowly working it back into the rotation again. Almost 20 years later, still there, same typos on the menu. Then back here for various discussions and some time out back with the binocs (too lazy to pull the Meade) looking at Jupiter. Mars is coming, and I swear, I’m spending time with the scope. I’m still irritated I never had one free night where lack of work and lack of clouds coincided during Saturn’s run….

We’ve finished getting bids on getting the house painted. will likely call the contractor tomorrow to schedule. It’s more than we wanted, but the work the house needs to get prepped is, too, and we’re not willing to cheap out to save dollars, only to need to repaint in five years. If we do it right now, we can have something that’ll handle 10 or more years, and make the repaint much nicer…

And we’re starting to talk about concrete guys about the patio work, although given what we’re spending on the paint, it’s more for planning purposes than getting it done now, unless some miracle happens (say, Apple realizes what a great, useful contributor I am, and… oh, yeah, right… *grin*). We’re figuring up to $5K in hardscaping work front and back by the time we’re done. Be interesting to see how close we come to the real estimate — we were about a third low on the paint (2500 vs. 3500), but in retrospect, with the amount of prep work needed, I’m not suprised.

The nice thing is, once the paint is done and the hardscaping, the only major work left is replacing the electrical service ($2000 for the upgrade to 200 amp circuit breakers, plus, probably, another grand moving a sub panel into the garage and rewiring the garage up to snuff for the workshop. Maybe another grand plus drywall work to fully upgrade the wiring…). And then the bones of the house are finally done for the next decade, or longer. I still have a bunch of internal projects, but it’s mostly cosmetic and cleanup and rethinking usage, at least until we get to the kitchen, and if you don’t start with the bones, doing the cosmetic stuff is silly (part of me thinks the electrical should have been done by now, but we got tired of spending money on stuff hidden behind walls, and our current system is working fine. knock on wood)

picking a contractor is a subject of its own. Was going to write about it tonight, but we sat and talked instead (about penta-quarks, politics and the future of the British royal family, among other things… Until I did my normal and mixed up a couple of shakespeare names and ended up with the play Richard V, which of course doesn’t exist. So we invented it.

We gave up once we hit “Richard V: a tragedy about a man, the crown he gave up, and the sheep he gave it up for”.

I don’t think Ashland’s going to produce this one any time soon…

Watch Steve pull a rabbit out of his hat! (again?)

Okay, like every other mac geek out there, I was off watching the keynote. I didn’t know (exactly) what was going on — any advantage I have over the rest of you comes from two things: years of watching Apple doing this and watching the rumor boards and getting a feel for what leaks to believe and what not to.

not that I talk about that, of course. That would be wrong. But yes, Apple people read the rumor boards, too. Some for comic value… At Apple, the pre-keynote electricity was palpable. People were stoked. The feeling was this wasn’t just another keynote…

Man how much fun was today? I’ve heard rumors of what the FPS is for that high-end box under Quake. i won’t mention it, but the number was scary (and we all know what the REAL system benchmark is, right?).

In previous lives, I had some involvment with hardware. I know enough to be dangerous. I’ve debugged micro-code a bit, and I’ve done some instruction analysis. But I sat and listened to IBM describe the 970, and the jaw dropped. 130 nanometer process? 9 angstrom data channels? 215 step instruction prefect? This is a first generation product?

and then the system wrapped around it? Drool city.

there have been a few products at Apple in my time that generated serious geek lust. the IIsi (a great package at the time). The first time I got my hands on a IIfx. The duo (probably my favorite computer ever until the TiBook). The first generation USB/firewire boxes. The iMac. The TiBook. And now, the G5.

Panther? Haven’t touched it yet (or panther-server). Will soon. But I love Expose, I love the data vault.

With iSight, Apple sticks it’s hands into the Voice over IP market, much to the dismay of folks trying to build their own Voice over IP. Now, IM/video and IM/audio won’t talk to someone on a phone like vonage, but both of you can get AIM accounts instead… So why go to the extra cost? For lots of folks, they don’t need to…

The new mail changes are pretty nice — the safari HTML renderer is awesome. I think there’s a lot of joy left to add to Mail, though. too, but it’s a good tool going great.

Yes, I’m biased, but you know what? it’s days like todays that have made all of the other, not so good days at Apple the last decade or so worth it…

Now, to go track down some CD’s…

Roger Neilson passes away.

Long-time Hockey person Roger Neilson passed away this morning, the day of the NHL draft.

It’s hard to explain how important Neilson was to hockey — not just a successful coach for a number of teams over 25 years, his most memorable probably Vancouver, where he waved a white towel after a series of calls went against his team (that towel is the precursor to the playoff towels used throughout the league today). he revolutionized hockey in many ways: he was one of the first to realize the potential of video for scouting and analysis; he was one of the coaches who revolutionized defensive play in the league (and invented the trap, although the trap on its own isn’t a problem, the way some teams implement it give it a reputation as boring.)

In 2002, he was invited into the hockey hall of fame as a builder. While many of us call the Builders wing the Hall of Self-Congratulation, Neilson was a great builder of hockey and well-deserved to be there. Earlier this year, Ottawa allowed him to coach a game which gave him his 1,000th career win as a coach.

He ran youth and development camps in Ontario every year, but he also has run a camp in Israel as well. As much as he loved hockey and winning, his real love was teaching and working with kids.

I don’t say this lightly, but I think Neilson deserves to have an award named after him. I hereby suggest that the NHL and the Hockey Hall of Fame create the Roger Neilson award, to be given annually to the person most active in the development of hockey. The league already has the Patrick award for development of US hockey, and the Clancy for leadership. Nothing would serve Neilson’s memory better than an award that represents what Neilson was all about: making hockey better, and bringing hockey to people of all levels, in all places. As a way to bring recognition to grass-root efforts across the continent and overseas, it would serve to continue the work that Neilson started, and do so with honor.

it’s somehow fitting that Neilson passed away on draft day, the day a new generation of kids graduate into the ranks of pro hockey.

to you from failing hands we pass the torch be yours to hold it high

With less than a week to the NHL draft, I predict…

I predict absolutely nothing.

And I will continue to do so. I find there’s nothing sillier than a bunch of fans getting together and arguing over who should be drafted by what teams.

Most of us have little access to the undrafted players — how many of us have actually seen any of them play? (Laurie and I, since we watch some Div I college hockey, have seen a few a couple of times; not exactly stunning scouting work).

So a lot of the pre-draft predictions boils down to people looking at the Hockey News draft section, and either disagreeing with the team needs, or disagreeing with the draft rankings. (“The sharks don’t need a center! they need defense!” “He’s a scoring left wing, no way he’s 30th in the rankings!”), based on stuff they’ve heard other people say, they think.

And if that’s what you enjoy doing, be my guest. I just don’t find any enjoyment out of it. So I’ll just sit back and wait until after the draft to figure out what it all means…

No, there’s no truth to the rumor the New York Jets are getting an honorary pick so the fans can boo it…

Ancient History, and what it’s all about.

John Porcaro and I are talking more now than we ever did when we both worked at sun… heh.

But he talks about how he wants to do more talking to customers, and not talking about them. Which got me thinking….

Have you ever stopped to think about how you got to where you are? For some reason, I’ve been doing a lot of that lately.

I spent most of my career at Sun talking to customers. When I came to Apple, I was already a Macintosh user (I bought my first Mac when the 512Ke was state of the art, before the MacPlus came out with a SCSI port….) from my days at National Semiconductor. One of the reasons I went to Apple was I was going to be able to start up a support environment, and I saw that as an opportunity to change Apple’s “we have no bugs, call your dealer for support” culture. Remember (if you can), we’re talking about the days when a IIsi was fast (at one point, my primary testing box for supporting A/UX was a II/SI running 8 megs of RAM. these days, my keyboard is faster than that…)

After a while, Apple started changing, not for the better. A couple of days before a vacation, we had a re-org, and we all got called into a conference room to meet the new bosses. We were told not to worry, our group was staying in Campbell, not going to Austin with some of the other support crew. I went on vacation, came back to find my job was moving to Austin. I made it clear my chair was, I wasn’t, and that I didn’t appreciate being lied to. I was told nobody had ever said we weren’t moving (by the person who’d said we weren’t), and that bad attitudes weren’t appreciated at Apple.

I took the hint, and found a new job — in the group that got to support the people in austin doing the support I used to do. That ended up in (name your favorite re-orged name enterprise solution, server solutions, server marketing, or apple business systems; it’s charter, basically, to sell into enterprise.

Out of that organization came another product, the Macintosh Application Environent (MAE). Laurie had started a mailing list for the Sharks on an internal Apple box in her part of the world, and I’d started one on the Giants (I was still a baseball fan in those days), as well as minor league baseball, since I’d really fallen for the San Jose Giants. Every so often I’d suggest we do mailing lists for products, but since we didn’t do support of end users (Austin did), it wasn’t considered part of our charter. MAE was different, however, and we felt it was one of those products that’d really be tough for Austin to support successfully.

We came up with the idea of creating mailng lists — not to support Apple Customers, but to allow Apple customers to talk to each other and talk to each other, and we felt they’d be able to help support each other, and keep them off the (very expensive) telephone call to Austin. Since we didn’t do support, we couldn’t call it a support list, and we made it clear Apple was an observer, not a participant. Today, it’d be considered a virtual community of some sort, but back then, that term wasn’t coined).

And Apple’s official mailing list system was born, sitting on my desktop machine (Medraut.apple.com. bonus points for figuring out the name). Later it moved to its own box as abs.apple.com (apple business systems), then solutions.apple.com (still couldn’t use the word support!). We moved from 68xxx to PowerPC, Sun kept growing the Sparc sun-4′s and eventually shut down the sun-3 line, and MAE came to a logical end, while A/UX died with the 68000 chip and was replaced with, well, nothing for a while, and then A/IX, since by that time, Sculley was gone, Spindler was in, and Spindler was partnering with IBM.

Apple’s struggles continued. In 1996, Guy Kawasaki started Evangelist, a way to rally the faithful around Apple, a followon to his earlier semper-fi (1995, I think), an attempt to reconnect with apple developers. he wrote, I ran the plumbing. There’s at least one book just writing about Apple at that time and what went on behind the scenes, and how Guy worked his butt off to save Apple from itself, and IMHO, I think there’s a 50-50 chance it wouldn’t have lived long enough to get to Gil Amelio without Guy’s energy and charisma and salesmanship. But I’m not writing that book as long as I work there… I like my job. (grin)

In 1995, both Laurie and I saw Apple as being in some trouble, so we took the plunge, and spent a couple of thousand dollars and had the internet installed in the house (a 56K leased line — remember, this was way before DSL). Plaidworks was born, mostly to be home for our personal internet stuff that currently lived on Apple hardware, back when that was fairly typical and low-key. We’ve had IP in the den ever since.

By then, my little on-the-side list server was running lists for people all over the company, and my primary job (webmastering and content geeking the server group’s web site) was increasingly difficult. it was decided the lists really needed to be a corporate resource, so my job got split in half, I went with the mail list part over to the IS world, soon thereafter Gil Amelio buys NeXT, Steve purges Amelio, and in March of 1997 my old group (and the Apple Network Server) is blown up and fades to dust. I was pretty much the only survivor from that group (although much to my amusement, in the last year, a bunch of them have returned to Apple in new roles, including people who now are part of the client group I do most of my work for these days…)

Always, I was looking for ways to help encourage Apple and Apple’s customers to talk — especially back in the days when Apple was falling apart.

And even today, I still have that goal — that and making sure Apple has a corporate infrastructure capable of letting me move to Oregon and continue working for apple via telecommuting without significant limitation (and then convincing my bosses to let me do it….). And turning back to John’s blog a sec, and looking around the net in general, it seems that some form of “connecting with the customer” is starting to turn into a key deliverable. Most companies will screw it up badly, too. Me, I’ve been trying to build it into the system for years, where I could — most of my life’s been aimed at connecting the tech side of a company with its customers and acting as translator, with a foot in both camps. Hopefully, i’ve given mine a bit of a head start…

it’s funny, but about two months after I wrote my first web site, I realized we’d need e-mail systems to really communicate with people, because the web is just too passive. But e-mail has its own flaws, and with spam strangling it, there’s a need to grow beyond e-mail as well as fix it. And that’s something I’ve been working on for a while.

Of course, I can’t talk about that yet….

Fixing hockey…

I’m working on my own “how to fix hockey” notes, but Frank Albin, head honcho of the Sharks broadcasts, posted his today, and except for his view on hand passes, I could have written this….

http://www.sj-sharks.com/sharks2002/interactive/in_the_crease/20030613-1055519741.htm to see his ideas.

(why not hand passes? While I’ll agree with kicking the puck, if only to get away from the “did he kick it?” video reviews, hockey is a game played with the puck on the ice, and hands don’t belong down there. Feet do. That change is as fundamental as the day someone playing rugby first ran with the ball and started turning it into today’s American football, and I don’t want to go down that path….)

more notes on the town hall

Meant to cover some of the building news from the town hall meeting. The quality of the ice is still a key concern, and quality (or lack of it) are not for lack of trying. There seemed to be implicit (but not explicit) comment that the building would be colder next year. At one point jokes were made about “wilson brother’s sweatshirt night”, that sort of thing. The group was humourously polled how cold the building had to get before people would complain. They basically stopped about 40 degrees when they realized nobody was saying “too cold” yet (I found that interesting as far as the audience went, and I think it was noted by the panel)

One area that also was affected by the netting was the Jumbotron, and Jamison said they were investigating (but didn’t guarantee) upgrading it with new video boards with roughly double the density, which would make for a much improved picture.

Near and dear to my heart (and ears) was hearing (finally) that work on the arena audio system is happening. They acknowledged strong and dead areas, and some work is evidently going to happen to reposition some speakers and try to improve this. It was also noted after a couple of “TOO LOUD” comments from the crowd that they did tune it down about 20% last season, but I got the feeling this was an area that was going to be watched. it was noted that Jason Minsky is no longer with the team, and Steve Maroni is now in charge as Director of Event Presentation (and the sharks have even updated their web site! wow! yippee! Oh, sorry…)

Using de-ionized water was one thing being investigated for the ice. So were installing dehumidifiers, since they seem to think it’s the humidity that’s the worst problem. it was also noted that the Sharks don’t skate much at the arena other than games, and I got the implication that Ron Wilson was interested in changing that, but it was never really said. Building availability will be an issue there, as well as the practice facility, but one way you harden ice is to skate on it and compress it….

(FWIW, it’s a very quiet summer at the Tanq, not a lot of light dates this summer right now… that might cause them to try for more falls/winter dates, to try to keep revenue up. they were also hoping for one more arena football game….)

Parking: season ticket holders will pay the same as last year if you bought the package. day of game parking they couldn’t guarantee would stay the same, but it’s undecided. It’s been noted prices have only gone up twice in ten years for parking (but that was 7 to 10, 10 to 13, so each jump was pretty steep), but at the same time, I’ll note their parking is competitive with other venues.

Radio: discussions about the coverage of radio went on. The Sharks noted that they had a good station lined up for the east bay last season, and at the very last minute, it got sold, changed formats, and didn’t want their broadcasts any more, leaving them hung out to dry with no real alternative (Note to greg jamison: if nothing else, you got all of the bad things out of the way in one season, no?). East bay coverage is a focus this year (again), and one they’re very aware of and working to solve.

Finally, I find this on the sharks web site interesting. Anyone want to guess what it might mean?

down at the bottom, under Miscellaneous:

Television Play-By-Play Broadcaster Randy Hahn
Television Color Analyst Drew Remenda
Radio Play-By-Play Broadcaster Dan Rusanowsky
Radio Color Analyst Pete Stemkowski
Radio Hockey Analyst TBD

Looks to me like there’s a roster spot waiting to be filled. Hmm. If Pete’s still around as the color guy, one can only assume the hockey analyst is the position being held for — some ex–player? That was was Zettler and Granato were doing, so it looks like adding in that third voice is going to continue. One can only wonder who it might be…. I have some thoughts, obviously, but I’m not going to curse them or make you think I want them to retire… It may stay open until after camp, even… (hey, laurie, send them a resume! If you don’t get that, they have a job open for Alternate Governor and CFO!)

(also, Danny Miller is listed as the only game host, no sign of the blond woman who was working with him late last season. I consider that a hopeful sign — she was rough early, pretty much had the role figured out by the end, but I find her voice wrong for that job in the arena. Maybe if they retuned her mike or something, but she’s too screechy for my tastes)

A couple of other people were called out for introduction in the crowd during the Town Hall:

Ken Sweezey was introduced as Director of Guest Services. If you’re unhappy at a game, he’s your guy. Laurie and I know him just enough to know he’s pretty cool and interested in getting things fixed. I expect by the end of the season he’ll see us and run…. (grin)

Michael Lehr was introduced quickly. He’s president of the Cleveland Barons, and as Greg Jamison noted, Lehr was very good at keeping them informed about what was going on in Cleveland, especially as the injuries went insane and the team turned into an ECHL team (side note: Roy Sommers was given a strong vote of confidence for his work there last year in the face of amazing adversity — at one point 11 people on the injured list and only one AHL-rostered defenseman. They were very happy with how that place held together as well as it did, and with how the players reacted adn fought through the problems….)

David Pollack was introduced from the mercury, so he could agree with everyone else that hockey coverage in the bay area sucked (well, he was more polite than that). The suggestion (from Greg Jamison) was if you want that improved, you need to write the editors at the Merc, and keep letting them know you don’t like what they’re doing.

Finally, Greg Jamison introduced Matt Levine, who was formerly Vice President of Development for the Sharks. Matt is one of the key people involved in making sure the Sharks actually got to San Jose, and spent many years working for them building the relationships into the region. A couple of years ago he went off to help found a startup for educational software, but he still hangs around the Tanq. Matt was one of the first people (along with Ken Arnold) to take the internet seriously with the Sharks and see some of the opportunities, and the person who really first took this list seriously as a group of people interested and involved with the team, and was willing to work with us and listen to us over the years. If I had a dissapointment with the meeting, it was that ALL OF YOU PEOPLE WOULDN’T SHUT UP so Laurie and I had to leave before the meeting ended, and that kept us from tracking Matt down and saying hello. (so, matt, if you’re out there, “Hello! let’s do dinner at George’s some time, my treat!”)

(big grin on the wouldn’t shut up part, in case it wasn’t obvious…..)

And with that, a good time was had by all…

Notes on the San Jose Sharks season ticket holder Town Hall.

By my estimate, 900 people were there, +-100. Greg Jamison, Doug Wilson, Ron wilson, Mike Ricci and occasional others sat up on a podium. Drew moderated, or tried to, or whatever it is Drew does. the Sharks supplied soft drinks and munchies, which probably meant the thing was going to run on until they ran out… (grin).

Seriously, Jamison opened it by saying they’d stay until every question was answered, and they were clearly going to do that. Most questions were very reasonable, many were tough, all but a few fair. More on that later, and I’m sure others will have their notes. The Sharks sat there and took it, answered things as completely as they could, ducked as little as necessary (mostly things like tampering rules or tipping their hands at the draft, or dealing with the CBA, where the league rules got in the way).

I was impressed — by the sharks, for doing this and being open and honest about it; by the fans for not pulling punches, and very often proving how astute they were about what was going on; by the chemistry I saw between wilson and wilson and jamison; by wilson’s ability to match Drew smart-ass remark for smart-ass remark;

It took 2 hours for someone to smack rathje, and he seemed pretty well smacked back; 2 and a half hours for the nets to come up, which I think surprised everyone — but once they did, it got covered thoroughly and without any pulling of punches on either side (Jamison’s comments basicaly boiled down to “we had a vendor who made us look like complete idiots by not doing what they said they’d do”). The expectation he set was that things would be better; he didn’t pretend that miracles would occur, and he also said he felt there’d be a third generation of nets that would be more of an improvement down the road, also.

It sounds like this year’s marketing theme will be “this is a hockey game: bring a sweater”. But at the same time, don’t expect miracles, either. they’re still working on ways to improve the ice consistently, including deionized water and installing dehumidifiers. But a colder building seems to have strong support among the fans there, and that message seemed to be noted.

A couple of other thoughts on the hockey side of things.

They were very tactful and complimentary about both Darryl Sutter and Dean Lombardi. Their view is you learn from autopsies, not dwell on them (i.e., figure out what happened and move on). There was no knocking the past, and some work reminding folks how far forward the team was brought by these guys.

If you were a fan of classic Blackhawks hockey, you’ll love the Sharks. I kept waiting for Wilson to announce he was bringing Probert and Dirk Graham out of retirement, with McLaren playing the part of Chris Chelios. In all honesty, this attitude doesn’t bother me one bit, either (yippee). If this is the case, then I guess Alex Korolyuk is going to be Stan Mikita…

For those that aren’t aware of what I’m suggesting, it’s a team that plays very aggressively early, both to pressure the other team and to get the home crowd into the game, to use the crowd’s energy later. The first ten minutes of a hawk’s game used to be key to their performance, especially in the old building. it’s a physical game but not a stupid game, aggressive, heavy forecheck.

Wilson and Wilson emphasized becoming a faster team, both by having faster skaters and by skaters who anticipate better and reacting faster.

Doug Wilson emphasized more than once that what happened to Brad Stuart (his concussion) disgusted him, the Sharks lack of “dealing with it” really bothered him, and he was going to make sure that the Sharks roster had what it took to make sure that never happened again. he refused to go into details on what that meant (both because of tampering with naming players and fines for outright saying he was going to buy a goon), but you can read between the lines. There will be a place who can play policeman on the Sharks this year, and it seems as long as Doug is GM, there’ll be a place for one.

Wilson talked about Owen Nolan, and admitted he felt that the ultimate failure was making him Captain. he noted that there hadn’t been a Cup winning team with a power forward as captain in 25 years, and that the physical demands of that type of game on top of the demands put on someone being captain are just too much. he also came out and said that in retrospect, he should have done something about this within the organization before LAST season and didn’t, to his regret.

Doug was asked about the lack of a power forward with Nolan gone, and what the Sharks would do about it. Wilson responded by pointing at Scott Thornton, and made it clear he felt thornton’s game was still evolving. He made it sound to me like he expected thornton to be a top-six-forward caliber power forward (which makes him an amazing steal; hell, he’s an amazing steal NOW) — and from what I’ve seen of Thornton’s growth here, I can’t say he’s wrong. Wilson then pointed to Jonathon Cheechoo as a player with a distinct edge, which I took to mean he saw Cheechoo as the next generation behind Thornton.

They were asked what they were going to do with “too many” (7) centers, and Ron wilson laughed, noting that forwards can be moved to wing without a lot of problem and improve the team there, since it adds creativity and defensive awareness into those positions, not to mention more faceoff capability. It was noted from the playoffs just how important faceoffs are, and while the Sharks are okay, he wants them better.

There were some that made the assumption that Mike Ricci being invited on the panel implied that he was going to be the next Captain. When that was put to the panel, they all walked carefully around the issue and said it wasn’t decided, but to me, fully left the impression that once it is decided, it’ll be decided that Ricci is captain.

There was some talk about the kids — they say a bunch of kids are coming into camp with the attitude that nobody’s going to send them down, which they like. they also went out of their way to point out that nobody has jobs (shades of, I think, Jeff Jillson), and not all of them will get jobs no matter how good they play.

When asked about the lack of shorthanded threat, Ron wilson noted he had to teach them to keep the puck out of the net first.

The team, as was sketched out by the sharks last night boils down to:

Fast, puck control oriented. Defensively solid, heavy emphasis on fundamentals. Ron Wilson noted that he felt five of the D expected to be on the roster this year were guys he felt comfortable releasing to join the offense, and he saw that as a huge advantage. A physical team, but I got the feeling it won’t be a grinder team.

There were strong indications they’re planning on adding a top-six forward on top of Korolyuk, plus the enforcer. They made it clear they aren’t interested in three years out, and would have no problem trading up or down in the draft, or trading picks and/or players to get the right guy for now. they felt there were really good players that were going to be available into the 2nd round, and the top 12-15 are top talents.

Major support of Rathje, both on the panel and in the audience — and yet they still noted that they felt he needed to take his game up another level still. As good as he is, he still needs to be better.

When asked why the team didn’t seem to shoot enough on the power play, Wilson offered to let the person come down and talk to the players, noting he’d brought that up once or twice and it didn’t seem to have sunk in. Both Ron and Doug wilson have a philosophy of “if there’s no hole to shoot through, make one”, but he also noted one problem here is the power play tends to practice against the penalty kill, and the guys have some mental problems over injuring one of their own teammates (that’s not a bad thing, actually). I considered suggesting hiring the SJSU team for practice but I kept my mouth shut… (the SJSU team thanks me for that). Both wilsons say that if the other team wants to get leg injuries stopping point shots, that’s fine with them…

wilson noted his philosophy was that the negotiation was a three-way, with the player actively involved. As an ex-player, he also noted that the agents were more willing to let him do this, and in fact he was demanding that players heard it directly from Wilson, not filtered through the agent. It needs to be remembered that Lombardi wasn’t always allowed this access to the player, or didn’t push that agenda strongly enough at times. Wilson’s also made it clear he feels it’s both his AND the player’s responsibility to make sure they’re in camp when it opens, not just Wilson’s, and that a player who misses camp is hurting his team and the teammates. Interesting spin on things. The team can’t take advantage of that, though; he really called it out as a partnership.

I was mostly trying to get a feeling for what their philosophy was on the type of team they want and how they want that team to play. I’m not surprised to hear Wilson reaching back to his Hawks roots for some of it, and frankly, I’m really, really encouraged here. It was fascinating to listen to Doug Wilson as GM talk about the job and mentally compare it to Dean Lomabardi. I don’t know how to describe that without sounding exceptionally negative about Lombardi, when in fact that’s not what I intend, so I’ll keep mulling that one over.

The other thing I was trying to get a feel on was chemistry — towards the end, relations were strained between Jamison and Lombardi and Sutter, and all three seemed to have different ideas of how to move forward that conflicted with the other two. it seemed to me all three got along well and there was a lot of humorous bantering (to the point where Drew had trouble getting his snide comments in — it’s hard to keep drew out of a discussion!); my feel was they all were comfortable with each other and work well together. A good sign. They’re also all very personable, and Ron Wilson will never been known as bitter beer face around here (in fact, I think one of the reasons he gets knocked by some is he doesn’t take himself all that seriously, and isn’t afraid to make fun of himself or other things, or throw out a zinger at someone — but don’t mistake taking something seriously iwth being serious…)

I came back feeling, in all honesty, really jazzed about next year. It’s a new, fresh direction, they seem to have the roster under control and working to get everyone in shape, in camp, and moving in the same direction. Talking to some of the folks I knew off the podium, there’s a large contingent of players staying in the area and working their butts off to get ready, adn in the words of these folks, these guys want camp open NOW.

I’ll have more later, I’m sure, but that’s what I took from the talk. They didn’t tell me things were going to get better, they made me believe they would be. I’m ready.

when’s camp open?

Sharks season ticket holder town hall

Last night, the San jose sharks held a town hall with season ticket holders.

For the folks on the sharks list that couldn’t make it, I did a few pictures and (in the next posting) had a few thoughts on what was said…

www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/albums/town_hall_june_2003.

It’s a small world after all!

No, this isn’t an advance leak of Disney’s movie based on the It’s a Small World right (check boing boing for that!), but a quiet reminder that it really is a small world here in High Tech…

Turns out that Microsoft Blogger John Porcaro is a fellow ex-Sun dude. I was there in 85-89, he was there until 1990. I still have, here in my office, the little lucite block I got the day Sun went public… As far as we can tell, we never interacted with each other, but it’s c00l running into a little piece of your history by suprise, especially here in the blogger world. Brings up fun memories…

The time I spent at Sun was a fascinating time, not just a small company growing and going public, but it was a time where the industry was really starting to change the larger world around it. I started working with a group that was supporting third party developers who were porting NFS, YP/NIS and XDR/RPC to non-Sun platforms. (for those of you who think SOAP and XML/RPC are new adn unique, go take a look at XDR/RPC — things are a lot more sophisticated today, but the basic concepts and challenges are amazingly similar). NFS was one of the first serious attempts to open up a protocol and let others use it, rather than lock it down and hide it away — Sun understood that it needed to be endemic to succeed, took the chance, and it worked. In many ways, a precursor of some of the open source movement today.

The first vendors to sign up for NFS were Gould and their Firebreather box, and the Mt. Xinu folks. That meant I got to work with Ed Gould a bit, which was, for a fairly young and earnest unix geek, a real thrill.

Later on, I moved over to Sun’s support world, where I spent time on the phones. Really gives you a perspective on the customer view vs. the engineering view, and it really made me aware of and an evangelist of the customer wherever I’ve worked — IMHO, every engineer and coder should be required to spend a couple of weeks answering support calls, except most of them couldn’t handle it. But it’d make for better products.

As support, I became somewhat of an admin specialist, and did most of the support of sendmail, uucp and similar stuff. This was back when ethernet was new and most networking was by modem, and SunOS fit on an 80 meg hard drive (yes! megs. not gigs! with room for your home directory!). By the end of my life at Sun, I got involved in a stealth project to get a neat new product shipped, a box that became known as the Sun/4-260 — sun’s first generation Sparc chip, and the first time (to my knowledge) that an OS shifted processors, since prior to that, Sun’s were 68xxx boxes.

I ended up leaving Sun because, like many support organizations, it let the support budget get squeezed, and there were too many calls, too many hours, and too few engineers, and I got tired of the grind. Besides, this company called Apple was starting up its first real support organization, for a product called A/UX, and were looking for someone to come in to help create the organization. They ended up hiring my boss at sun to manage the beast, and I came across as the senior geek and 2nd lieutenant, of the group that ended up being the core of what eventually moved to Austin and became Apple’s support universe down there….

Ever wonder how life would be different if you’d made different decisions in your life? What if I’d stayed at Sun? There have been days when life at Apple looked dark that I considered looking to go back (my boss who moved to Apple eventually did, and is now in Colorado way up the food chain), but to be honest, the one time I came *this* close to leaving Apple, during the darkest years of the Spindler era, was to go to SGI. But the position just didn’t feel right for me and I just wasn’t quite ready to give up on Apple (even though it seemed everyone else had, even inside Apple), so I stayed.

Not a bad decision, in retrospect, but at the time, most folks who knew what was going on thought I was an idiot…

And now you look at Sun, and it’s in some pretty rough times. I’m rooting for it to turn it around, but will it? I’m not convinced.

Advantage — nobody?

The Devils won game 5, as I expected, but honestly, somewhat more decisively than I expected. Neither goalie looked good, the Devils fed off the crowd and took advantage of having last change, and the Ducks just didn’t look sharp.

Not surprisingly, the first goal went to the Ducks, on a clean faceoff win by Oates. We’ve seen THAT before. New Jersey is just in deep trouble in the left face-off circle of the offensive zone without Niewyndyk.

Now we go back to Anaheim. New jersey is going to be desperate, and knows how to win in pressure situations. Anaheim has the home crowd and last change advantage. I expect another tough fight, with Anaheim winning.

Then off to game 7 in New Jersey, and who knows? The Devils have shown Anaheim they’ll have trouble there, but Anaheim still can beat them on the road.

New Jersey is the more tired team, but Anaheim lacks the experience.

Paul Kariya is still missing in action. Hello, Paul? Now’s a good time to break out and not depend on Steve Thomas to win games.

too close to call the series at this point. And both teams have earned respect in it. great hockey, for the four of us watching it.

Taking people for granted….

Does this sound familiar to you?

I was talking to a friend of mine who works for some other company, and they’re in a bit of a dither. See, one of his co-workers came back from vacation and gave notice. She’s leaving in a month to go back to school.

It was a fairly open secret she wasn’t happy. As happens in times like these, one person left the company, wasn’t replaced. The workload got divvied out, and those that are left behind go from busy to overloaded to freaked to exhausted.

Now toss in a divorce a few months ago, a company deferring and limiting raises and doing mandated shutdowns that eat vacation time, and next thing you know, the house is for sale, and a valued co-worker is off to get that degree she always wanted.

The company is now scrambling: 8 years of corporate experience and history are about to walk out the door. Their job the next month is to suck her dry of everything she knows, and we all know that this never really works; the most important data she has is the stuff even she doesn’t know will be needed until it’s too late.

And everyone in the office is upset she’s leaving, worried about losing her knowledge and her contributions, worried about how they’re going to replace her. And the normal questions of “what can we do?” and even occasionally “what could we have done?”

And the latter question is really the key one, and the one companies never ask, because they don’t like hearing the answer. The reality is, before the decision is announced, it’s made. And once it’s made, it’s too late. sometimes you can buy someone’s loyalty back, but that really doesn’t work as well in practice as it does in theory, because it isn’t all about money.

What could we have done? — if you ask any staffing professional, they’ll tell you how much more expensive it is to replace an employee than it is to keep one. So why don’t companies do more than lip-service about employee retention?

Because deep down inside, companies don’t expect you to leave. and in a down market like we’ve been in, actually take advantage of the tough job market. And then when the economy picks up and people start leaving — they wonder why… You have to treat people right all of the time, not just when you think they might leave. It’s almost as if companies think their employees are stupid, won’t notice, and won’t remember. You hired them because they aren’t stupid, they do notice, and they will remember.

We all have budgets to keep, headcount requirements to manage, staffing issues to worry about. It’s easy to forget the other side of that — until staff turnover skyrockets and you see that drain of important people walking out the door. By then, it’s too late.

It’s important to remember that the time to do something is before you find out they’re leaving — which means now, and tomorrow, and every day, or week or month. It means manageable workloads, even in tough times, or at the very least, being honest and open about how long and why. It means money where you can, and when you can’t, recognition and notice and accolade and positive feedback.

It’s important to remember you can’t buy happiness — but failing to try can sure lead to unhappiness. Most of us aren’t purely motivated by money, and throwing money at an untenable employment situation doesn’t make it acceptable — but lack fo money becomes a de-motivator after a while, and if you throw in too much work and low morale and a lack of feedback, you’re basically telling people to leave.

So don’t be surprised when they do. And don’t ask “what can we do?”

that question should have been asked months ago, and repeated on regular occasions. By waiting until they leave, you’re telling them you only care about them when they cause problems for you.

Is that the message you want to send?

Ducks tie the series!

I was a little worried there, but the Ducks have tied the series 2-2, so the Stanley cup final is going at least six games. Two straight overtime games, tonight’s win 1-0, and now the ducks have the momentum going back to New Jersey.

Those folks who’ve turned off (ABC ratings are lower for hockey’s final round than Arena Football) are missing some intense hockey. Low scoring doesn’t imply bad, but some folks think so. I’m impressed with both teams.

Watching post game interviews tells us where this series is going: the Ducks are talking about chemistry, about special things happening in the locker room. the Devils look broken, look beaten. Talk about regrouping.

Right now, New Jersey’s advantage is two games at home. But they have to be thinking they can’t win in Anaheim, so they have to think about sweeping games 5 and 7. Anaheim hasn’t won in New Jersey, but goes into game 5 thinking all it needs is one game in the swamp, and they’ve won two straight.

I think this one probably goes 7 — New Jersey wins game 5, and anaheim at home in six. And after that? crapshoot. But emotion and momentum are goin the Ducks way, so they have to be considered a slight favorite right now. But until they break serve, it’s far from over.

So how was your weekend?

So — who turned the calendar to June while I wasn’t looking?

It sure seems like it ought to be mid-April or something like that, but what the heck. I’ve had two weekends in a row that didn’t turn into extended work days, which means I’m finally feeling like I’m making progress on stuff here at home again. The back yard is beginning to look like someone lives here (and cares). Another weekend, and the worst of it will be done.

One of the things we’ve been talking through is the redesign of the backyard. it’s gonig to require removing a lot of concrete (ditto the front: when they turned this into a rental, they took the expedient way out adn simply laid concrete everywhere. Great, if you want to park four cars in your front yard. not great, if you want to plant things). While the concrete’s not going anywhere soon, we can landscape the areas where we have dirt, at least to some degree.

The main areas we can landscape are the back corner, where we’ve already put the veggie beds in, and the center of the yard (which, when we moved in, contained a mostly-broken hot tub, a huge, ugly, invasive Mulberry tree that needed massive maintenance but was too low to comfortably walk under, and all other areas had been covere dwith plastic and river rock. That area is going to be landscaped as a mini-orchard, with five trees, a water feature (to be designed), and a pathway from the main patio to the hot tub (new and currently with a minor annoying leak) which sits on the concrete pad the old, rusting garden shed used.

Two of the trees (an Improved Meyer Lemon and a Washington navel) that I gave Laurie for Valentine’s day are now in and doing fine — one was a ten, the other a fifteen gallon. We decided to trip up to the tree nursery to get some ideas on what we wanted to do for the other three, and perhaps get them in, since they’re a feature that’ll take the longest to mature, and the sooner the better.

Imagine our dismay when we say the “going out of business” signs on the place. The stock had been picked over to a good degree, but worse, it was clear they’d cut back on irrigation — everything was stressed and I just wasn’t happy, so we left without buying anything. Time to find other alternatives. sigh. but we did pick up some ideas on what we wanted to do. One of the trees is going to be an asian pear (probably a Shisieki or similar strain), and we both want a good apricot, but it needs to be self-fertile. We looked at a pluot (a genetic mix of an apricot and plum that’s starting to be grown here in california), but they require a plum to fertilize, and the plums they use aren’t self-fertile. Down that road lies madness. We’re undecided about the third, but either a self-fertile (and maybe heritage) Apple, although we also like the idea of a white nectarine…

Got one of the veggie beds in, with the squash, pumpkins and tomatoes. Laurie’s got about six varieties this year, including a couple of antiques. Of couse, I don’t eat raw tomato, which makes growing that many even more amusing, but she makes sure they don’t go to waste… The other bed is almost ready, needs tilling, and then everything else can go in. Maybe thursday.

Sunday was work in the garage day, attempting to get enough space in the workshop to use it as a workshop. Progress was made, but…. today was finally doing something about the bikes — always in the way, but never really easy to get at. Tehy’re now in a rack, which is on wheels so I can just haul the whole thing out and stick it somewhere while I’m working. Of course, I built the rack 3′ wide, and the access to the back yard only gives me 32″, so the obvious answer of stuffing them in the back while I’m using the workshop has a minor flaw in it. next time, I’ll figure that out BEFORE I build the frame. but I’ve already come up with ideas to improve the rack, and it’s good enough for now…

At least now I can start getting the bikes ready for the summer, too…

Bridges of Toko Ri…

Memorial Day morning, there was pretty literally nothing on TV and baseball hadn’t started. So I’m wandering around the channels on the dish (500 channels and there’s still nothing on!), and AMC is showing military films.

At that moment, the Bridges of Toko Ri. So I left it there and watched it for a while. I found out, much to my surprise, it held up pretty well for its age.

William Holden as Lt. harry brubaker, a denver lawyer now finding himself in a jet on a carrier off Korea. Frederic March as The Admiral, of course. A good supporting cast, and ~~Andy~~ Mickey Rooney as, well, ~~Andy~~ Mickey Rooney, playing the cutup who happens to be one hell of a helicopter rescue pilot (in lime green top hat)

Bridges of Toko Ri was one of the movies early in the shift in attitude between the John Wayne School of “let’s go get ‘em, pilgrim, for mom and apple pie” WW II movies towards the more ambiguous “yeah, I know we gotta do it, but I don’t have to like it” films came later.

Personally, this movie was one of the ones that early on sparked my interest in military history, causing me to find the book, by some guy named Michener, and from there into realizing that history is really not icky, no matter how much the history teachers made you think it was…

So we’re sitting there watching it, and making snide remarks about how Korea looks an awful lot like the badlands of southern california, just like M*A*S*H did. And we were talking about how this was a movie that really set the kind of ambiguous military tone that M*A*S*H (the TV show; the movie was basically a black farce) later tuned into a find critical commentary on Vietnam, set in Korea.

And then late in the film, after Holden is shot down, Andy Rooney flies in in the eggbeater for the rescue, and I swear there’s a scene of the chopper coming in that’s a duplicate of the “wounded incoming” scene seen so often in the TV series, except Bridges predated it by many years.

Which makes me wonder whether that was a quiet way of Larry Gelbart honoring one of the movies that made doing M*A*S*H possible. One can only wonder… But it was fascinating to get that flash of recognition from two pieces that so clearly share a common attitude.

And, well, unlike the John Wayne movies, they don’t live happily ever after…. Or die heroically. But you could probably guess that (worse, by causing Holden to take flak over the seconary target, the director makes sure his death is meaningless, too — they got away from the key target scott free. I mean, you don’t need to be Fellini to figure out what he’s saying here….)

Just a little opportunity made out of a otherwise-wasted hour, snuggling up to an old friend and finding out the friendship still simmers…

And the stanley cup winner will be…

this is a tough series to choose. I think the teams are very evenly matched. People who see Anaheim as a 7th seed and a cinderella haven’t noticed their first 40 games really reeked, and their last 40 games they played as well as Detroit did.

It’s going to come down to Brodeur and Giguiere, which goalie plays better and handle the pressure. Normally, I’d pick Brodeur for his experience in playoffs and stress situations, but I really like how the Ducks and Guigiere are playing. They’re still in “mission from god” mode, with “nothing to lose”, and seem to have sidestepped much of the stress that way.

going out on a bit of a limb, I’ll pick anaheim to win this cup. And I’ll pick them to win in 6 games. My gut tells me 5, but my head doesn’t believe it’ll be that easy.

back to the grind…

Hope everyone had a great memorial day holiday, those of you who live in the states.

For us, it was a nice, quiet, productive long weekend. After last weekend’s upgrade, the beast at work has worked pretty smoothly, with the exception of one rare, but exceptionally annoying buy. I spent much of the week chasing it without ever completely killing it (god, I hate those…). By friday, I was ready to scream, so I finally decided to let it stew for a couple of days and just dropped everything for a bit.

With the weather finally shaping up, it was time for the second round of maintenance out front, so I spent about four hours weeding, pruning roses, and generally making the place looking lived in. the results are here.

Saturday the weed-eater moved into the back yard, where the two citrus trees I bought Laurie for valentines day are finally planted (an improved meyers 25 gallon, and a washington navel 15 gallow). We spent some time discussing design issues back there, and are ready to go buy three more trees for the landscaping (with, we think, two more once we get the hardscaping done). the back yard is still rough, but another week or so will have it under control as well as we can until we get it redone… Sunday I tuned up the tiller, so this week we can turn the veggie beds and get those planted next weekend. the BBQ is now cleaned up and we used it for the first time tonight, also. I guess it really IS spring.

Around all that, I started reading a book I’ve had in queue, Ronald Spectors At War At Sea, a study of how technology and tactics changed through the wars starting with the steam era. I’ve just finished up WW I, the first major war to be fought by steam instead of sail, and which was the time of the emergence of the submarine and the beginning of the end of the capital ship. The transition to airpower is just beginning as I type…

I’ve been meaning to blog more, but that bug’s been making me crazy, and I just haven’t had the energy at the end of the day. the good news is that tonight, after a couple of days off, I took a fresh stab at it, and I think, a couple of hours later, that I’ve finally nailed it. I’ve run some tests and it seems fine, so maybe I’m finally past it…

then again, I thought that at least three times last week, too.

On Memorial Day…

Before we all run out to enjoy the day off, perhaps we should take a moment and reflect on why we have this day off.

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place, and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Many people have died to give us the life we have; a life that allows us the freedom to take for granted just how wonderful life is in the United States. Some seem to spend all of their time complaining about it — and not that there’s nothing to complain about, it’s just that some complain without any perspective or sense of context.

I grew up post Vietnam. My youth was filled with Walter Cronkite and the nightly body counts, and later, demonstrations and the whole outgrowth of the 60′s, my sisters generation. I’ve watched many of that generation try to come to grips with a flawed war with flawed motives and flawed tactics, where politicians ran the military, not military men, and made political decisions, not tactical ones. Not to say the politicians have no place; they decide whether or not we go to war. After that, get out of the way and let the military win it, or not.

I have friends who were vets who were shunned by the VFW and American Legion, and in some cases their own community, when they returned back from doing their duty, and some still carry the bitterness and will to their grave. I have friends who already have, and friends who left friends behind.

I see many in my generation, and in my sisters, so affected by Vietnam that they are unable to see any conflict except through Vietnam-colored glasses. Was should never be the first option, but to exclude it completely is to ignore reality. Can’t we all just get along? — a quick perusal of any history book would quickly show that the answer is no, has always been no, and while I hope some day that will change, we’re nowhere close to that goal.

To those that are and have served our country, thanks. To those who’s friends and loved ones served and didn’t return, my sympathy and grief. This is a great country with much to be proud of, for all it’s lack of perfection, and that greatness was built on the foundation of those of us in uniform — for without the safety they give us to be free to be ourselves, there is no freedom.

So before we head off to the ballpark, or the beach, or wherever you’re heading on this bank holiday, stop and say a quiet thank you to those that protect us and our freedoms and our lifestyle, and a quiet prayer to those that came before, and didn’t come home to celebrate any holiday, ever again.

Upon the backs of many poppies was this country built; to those that see only the problems of the US, I suggest opening your eyes and learnign to see beyond your anger to better understand how life elsewhere on this globe struggles for things we take for granted.

Maybe we should all sit back and reflect on what this country is, could be, was, and might have been.

But we won’t, of course. After all, Memorial Day in the US is just another bank holiday now, and the United States always has been and always will be, so we can take it for granted and complain about what we perceive it’s not.

Happy Memorial Day.

It’s done! I’ve survived!

Welcome to hell week. Or the end of hell week, or something. I’ve just sent off the e-mail declaring the upgrade successful. One of the systems I’m responsible for has been given a major facelift.

For me, it’s been a couple of weeks of testing scripts, rehearsing, doing dry-runs on pieces where we can, code reviews, check lists, backout plans, stress, adrenalin, and endless evenings of sitting and staring at walls going “what have we missed?”

End result: we missed very litte. The database conversion took 15 hours, and has (mostly) fixed one of the biggest issues with the system, a table so large that rebuilding it took 14 hours (official process: whatever you do, don’t crash the database!). Now, it’s better: only about 8 hours. Which at least means we can do things to it overnight. Still work to do there.

For me, this beast is a project well beyond anything I’ve done before in size and complexity. Mail lists servers are, well, Mail list servers. If they break, nobody jumps off a cliff. This beast is different. if it breaks, I’ll have a choice: jumping or being tossed. So as we move forward towards this upgrade, I’m slowly building the adrenalin, worrying about whatever it is we missed, worrying that, basically, I don’t have a clue what I’m doing.

And then mid-week, as we finally got into the final prep, the theater training kicks in, and the stress leaves. You know you’re done rehearsing, and it’s either going to work, or it won’t.

Unfortunately, I was running on that adrenalin by then. fortunately, this wonderful thing called coffee exists. But we started the upgrade thursday, let the database conversion run all night, spent friday morning doing validity checks and tests on the database and starting the 2nd phase of conversion, and started rolling in the code base.

Overall, the upgrade was painless — I’ve fixed a few minor things, left two peripheral glitches for my programmer for monday, since he knows that part of the code better, but overall, it all seems to have worked “out of the box”. I’m thrilled.

We’ll be doing some more testing tomorrow, but I don’t expect to find anything significant. So it’s off to the next major code upgrade on one of the other beasts, due in about three weeks (but it’s in pretty good shape, not nearly this monstrous, and without the huge data set to worry about — yet). There are still details to sweat about the conversion, but I’m comfortable there, now that this beast is over.

It’s funny, but it was almost exactly two years ago that I went to my management and said I felt I was stagnating and had gone about as far as I could in doing e-mail stuff, and I basically gave myself and them a year to figure out what’s next. And then a project I’d been suggesting for a while was at the right place at the right time, and suddenly was funded, and we’re off to the races. I’m sure not stagnating any more, that’s for sure. I’ve been very lucky to have a strong, supportive, competent management (all the way up — I’m about four hops and a skip from Steve, and every one is a winner) and good, clueful and innovative people in the client groups. There’s been a fascinating synergy here, a strong cross-functional cooperation that makes stuff better than it could be individually. Thank god for good management, people who knew when to throw raw meat over the wall of the cube, when to be supportive and positive, and when to kick me in the face and tell me to get past it and get back to work. Sometimes I need to get talked off the roof, sometimes I need to get told to go ahead and jump. sometimes I need to get thrown off. And I’m lucky my management knows which one to do…

I’ve always programmed one-person projects, most of the time, things that were designed/built/run by one person (me). So to move to a group environment, with people reporting to and responsible by me, with client groups around the company dependent on me — it’s a big shift. it’s a shift I’ve sometimes struggled with, but it looks like everything came through and survived, including myself. I found it exceptionally difficult to step back from the code and trust others to do it right, and almost as hard to admit to myself there were more ways to “do it right’ than the way I’d choose to do it.

The first release was okay, but like most big projects, what we set out to build and what we finally built changed based on what we found out once we started using it, so now, I feel like we’ve finally got the base layers of the vision I had when I started proposing this. Better, since we cleaned up most of the first generation warts (14 hour rebuild times on tables, anyone? whatever you do, don’t crash the database!), we have a wonderful foundation to build other stuff on, and the list of stuff that needs to be built — I think the dance card is going to be full for another year or more adding features and functionality.

What a hack. And for those wondering why the updates to www.lists have been so slow in coming, well, this is why. I swear, though, that now that we’re past this deadline, I’ll find time to get that puppy updated. it’s driving me crazy, too.

Hey, I know! let’s do it again!

What’s that thing up in the sky?

Oh, I almost forgot — it’s the sun!

Amazingly enough, it’s not raining, and actually hasn’t been raining long enough to get some work done outside. Laurie spent the day fighting the weeds in the backyard, I spent time out front weeding the iris and roses and finally getting my pansies planted into the annual bed. The front is heading towards it’s peak color, with the roses finishing up their first major blast of blooms, the irises and day lillies starting up (late, thanks to the weather) and the gladiolus bulbs randomized into the bed coming in (on time). By the time the irises fade, the dahlias ought to be up.

I still have more weeding to do, and parts of it desperately need a refresh of the mulch, but it’s gorgeous, just what I wanted when I planted it a couple of years ago after pulling out the lawn.

I’l try to take pictures — just to piss off those of you still dealing with snow and hail. Sorry, but ther’es a reason the silicon valley’s cost of living is what it is… there are always tradeoffs.

Going out tomorrow to buy the wood for the new gate and the new porch structure. This week, using the gift certificate laurie gave me for valentines day, I went and bought a pair of temple dogs for the new porch (i’ve had my eyes out for a pair for about a year, I stumbled on these at our favorite nursery), and a couple of gorgeous pots to frame the front door on the new porch with a great glaze on them. They’ll hold annuals as well.

Once I get that done, if it’ll ever stop raining, I can start prepping to paint the house. but I’m betting we’re not done with all the water-coming-from-sky. the weather’s just too weird. and besides, the two trees I got Laurie for valentines need to be planted, too….

Conference Finals

So Minnesota pulled it off. Amazing.

vancouver looked good early, built a 2 goal lead, and couldn’t hold it. They just looked tired. Once the first goal got scored, they got careful, once the second goal scored to tie it, the game was over.

Ohwell.

Western Conference Finals: Anaheim/Minnesota: I’ll pick anaheim in 7.
Eastern Conference Finals: New Jersey/Ottawa: Ottawa in 5.

I was 4-4 in the first round.

I was 3-1 (missing Minnesota in the 2nd, so I’m 7-5 for the playoffs.

I’m going to have to really tank it to finish under .500 in my picks this year. but that’s not unprecedented.

Tonight’s game 7….

Having watched Vancouver implode two games in a row, it really looks like a team that’s run out of gas getting this far. Willing, but banged up and tired. Minnesota, on the other hand, seems to be getting a second wind and looks stronger and is really starting to use its speed, especially Wes Walz.

so while my heart is iwth vancouver, I expect by the end of tonight it’ll be the Wild meeting Anaheim for the marbles here in the Western Conference. And the one thing those two teams have in common is they’re both teams that got little respect during the regular season, but are better than anyone wanted to believe. Neither team is a fluke, and both won by buying into the concept of team and winning as a team.

game starts in about half an hour. It might be a long, close (overtime?) game, or it might be a blowout early, depending on how tightly wound Vancouver is, and whether that team can find some energy to keep up with the Wild’s speed. In all honesty? I don’t think so — their game was game 5, and they didn’t get it done, and it’s been all Minnesota since.

Soon, there will be four…

Congrats to the Senators and Ducks!

Gotta send props to the Ottawa Senators and Anaheim Mighty Ducks for putting away Philly and Dallas tonight. I was hoping Vancouver would put Minnesota away tonight, but the Wild aren’t going quietly and Vancouver just had a braincramp night. good news is, those are easier to put behind you than tough losses, unless you let them into your head.

way to go, guys. It’s nice to see some new teams heading deep into the playoffs, especially ones with moderate salary structures. This game hasn’t been handed to the deepest pockets quite yet.

halfway through the vacation….

Halfway through vacation, a weird thing happened.

But first, a digression. Normally, I don’t advertise vacations on-line. I prefer not to put up signs, real or virtual, saying “house empty! nobody will notice!” (even if it’s not true because we have housesitters in, which we do some trips. the housesitters really don’t want surprise visitors, either). Back in the dark ages of the net when I was still active on USENET, there were a couple of incidents (including one where someone did track down the house, although ultimately nothing bad happened…) that make me feel a bit of paranoia is a good thing; it’s one reason why our public address is a rented box and we try to make it difficult to find us without our permission. I’d rather keep the stuff inside the house inside the house, not inside someone else’s house.

but this trip, I wanted to experiment with blogging the trip, and to play with the digital camera, iPhoto and taking stuff online. Had a lot of fun up in Victoria, trying to get back into sync wtih a lens and start trying to put what I see into an image. Lots of work there to do, although I find the digital format really liberating here, since it throws out the film/developing cost out of the equation, so I feel comfortable taking a lot of shots just to evaluate how they come out.

So maybe I’ll become less paranoid… But I think it’s important that everyone who blogs remember some of the implications of it — including things like telling strangers that your house is going to be empty. Not everyone who reads your blog is your friend…

But anyway, end of digression. I stopped blogging midway through the trip for a couple of reasons — we hit Portland, and a bunch of things changed. Victoria was an exploration of the familiar, allowing me to focus on how to frame and display what I was seeing. This was the first time we’d really spent significant time in downtown Portland, so I found myself more interested in exploring. I carried the camera, but used it very little, because it would have slowed me down by about half, and I wanted to see as much as possible to get a feel for the downtown.

There is an amazing amount of really fascinating and kick-butt archictecture in Portland, needless, I’ll be going back and using the camera a lot. But with only one full day in Portland, I wanted to spend it walking and looking.

One thing that hit us walking around Portland is that the Portland downtown is what San Jose has been struggling to build (unsuccesfully) for as long as we’ve lived up here: very active, with lots of shopping, lots of eating, and lots of people. we made it down to the saturday craft fair, all the way down to chinatown (depressing), and a good chunk of the waterfront (enviable). That put me into pondering mode, about what Portland did right that San Jose didn’t; Laurie and I have been talking and doing some research on that topic since, and more on that once it crystalizes.

Unlike some people, when I’m gnawing on a topic or trying to understand something, I tend to get introspective. Some folks can make quick judgements and make immediate comments — I work best taking my time and understanding something before talking about it; I’d be a horrid failure as a sunday morning talking head, but I believe I say fewer things I regret this way, too (the talking heads probably don’t regret what they say much; but they should. Uh, oh, only one digression per post allowed…)

That, the fact that the Westin charges for internet access (not a suprise, FWIW) and I got myself involved with Steve Brust’s Paths of the Dead and then Mike Resnick’s new book return of Santiago (reviews of both coming), I just didn’t go online.

I’m sure you’re all suprised and shocked to find out sometimes I turn off the computer….

I have more photos to upload of the totems at thunderbird park, and more to say about Portland, but when I came back to work, I had a bunch of things needing my attention — no problems, just, well, there’s this shindig coming monday morning, so I had other priorities than blogging, and by evening, I was feeling pretty braindead. It wasn’t until thursday I started feeling like I was back from vacation…

Portland was — wonderful. Being downtown and soaking it in was just great. We both wish we’d had a couple more days there, but we also know we’ll be back…

okay, who had anaheim in four?

who had anaheim in four in the hockey pool, anyway?

I figured Giguiere was playing well enough to give Dallas a run for it, but this is rather crazy… and you know what? I’m luving it!

playoff 2nd round predictions

I went 4-4 in the first round. Okay, I guess.

2nd round picks:

Ottawa in 6
New Jersey in 5

Vancouver in 5
Anaheim in 6

Victoria, day 3

Didn’t blog yesterday, instead we went up to Duncan and had dinner with friends, and got back late enough that I just bagged it — too mellow to blog….

Day 1 was the heavy walking day, out around the city and seeing how the legs hold up. Whatever I’m doing to get in better shape (and right now, it ain’t much), it’s working, because I felt really pretty good for day 2, so we started the day doing more walking — this time, out into the antiques district, where Laurie scored a few hockey books and I picked up a book I’d had reserved — the 1950 edition of Effects of Atomic Weapons, the first monograph to try to define atomic bombs as more than just really big booms. Wandered back through the city a bit, then hit the car to head out for some birding. We drove out to Ogden point, where the breakwater that protects Victoria’s Harbor is (and a place where, if you’re lucky and at the right time of year, you can see puffins), and then drove out Dallas past Mile zero (where the trans-canada highway ends on the western side) to clover point, a great birding place.

It juts out a bit into the sound, plus it has some nice rock structures and has nearby kelp beds, so you can see lots of interesting things (although there are days when all you’ll see are gulls and pigeons). When we got there, we saw: fins? sticking out of the water?

Sea lions, laying in the shallows sunning. Also oystercatchers, mandarin ducks, some grebes, cormorants and a loon.

Continued out dallas on the scenic drive, out to Oak Bay and the marina, then to cattle point, then to Arbutus cove. A gorgeous drive, some great vistas, anda chance to look at some of the most expensive and beautiful real estate on the island…

After which we hit up Bolan’s books, and wandered out to Duncan for time with our friends and a pretty good dinner at a local restaurant (Jakes, downtown).

This morning, Laurie wanted to do a bit of shopping, so we wandered down to Mayfair mall. Wandering the mall made me realize the legs were a bit sore, so we drove for a while exploring the Gorge area, just neighborhood surfing, and then hit Earls for lunch, and back to the hotel room to relax, catch up on mail and stuff, and work on the photos.

Day 2 and day 3 photos are here.

At five, off to dinner at Bravo on Wharf, which I think is close to, if not, the best restaurant in Victoria. Innovative but subdued, Laurie had the Sirloin of Lamb, I had a nice steak, and we both agreed the desserts were exceptional. So now we’re sitting here watching hockey and digesting….

Tomorrow’s the last full day in Victoria, and we’ll likely spend the time around the museum and thunderbird park, and doing the last of the shopping, such as wine (tonight was a 1999 Cedar Creek Estate Pinot Noir, with a hint of apple and a wonderful garnet color…) and chocolates…

One thing we find fascinating is how the city changes from visit to visit, without ever really being different. But that’s another essay….

Embedded in Victoria, day 1

Normally, after two days of driving, we want to stretch our legs, so day 1 in Victoria is usually a walk through town. The weather is cooperating nicely, the rain having waited until we arrived and then headed off to annoy others, so it was a perfect day for a tromp.

We started it early by walking over to Smittie’s, a perfect place for breakfast, and then started wandering around looking for historic buildings and ghost ads, so I could play with my digital camera and iPhoto 2. We ended up wandering some areas of town we haven’t spent much time in, ending up down at the old Bay storefront, then heading back towards the water and the areas north of Chinatown, the old warehouse district, where there’s a lot of older buildings that are in various stages of repair. After that, we walked back into Chinatown (the official chinatown is one street, about two blocks, but it heavily influences the area around it — small, but wonderfully vibrant and colorful, with interesting architecture), and then back into the downtown core around Government street.

Lunch was at the Elephant and Castle in the Eatons Centre, which, since Eatons died and Sears blew it trying to maintain the name, is becoming the Bay Centre, since Bay is moving into the better downtown digs in the next month. The centre clearly needs a solid store anchoring it, so this is a good thing for everyone, I think. I wonder what’ll happen to the old building (guillotine windows and all).

As part of the downtown walk, we did our normal “just in town” dealer crawl, to see who’s got what, and try to decide what, if anything, we’re really interested in. One dealer (Sa-Nuu-Kwa on Johnson) that I really liked for their jewelry had a faded “closed for inventory” sign on it; never a good sign.

I saw a few other pieces I liked, none that really reached out and grabbed me. Since I told Laurie this was a “no shopping” trip, that didn’t disappoint me. Of course, then we stopped in at Alcheringa Gallery on Fort. For the last few years, I’ve been trying to get a feel for Nisga’a styled art, and Alcheringa is one of the few dealers that handles Nisga’a up here.

We started talking about Nisga’a work, and then he showed me some pieces, and then he showed me this other piece, by Wayne Young, a Nisga’a/Haida artist from Prince Rupert, and it’s a Raven in th haida style, and, well, so much for it being a no-shopping trip. Laurie just smiled, but it’s a stunning piece and was at a great price, and, well, you know. I’ll find a spot on the wall for it.

It really is an impressive gallery — they always have a number of better known artists like Robert Davidson and Tony Hunt Jr. They showed me some pieces they have ready for a new showing to debut in May that I really loved, too. Keep an eye on the web site if you care about this stuff.

We also spent some time talking to the folks at Eagle Feather Gallery. This is a relatively new gallery in Victoria, but one I’m increasingly impressed with. They’re strongly tied to the first nations, and while most galleries up here buy at least some work directly from artists, they’re 100% directly bought, and as I understand it, partially owned as well. This means that when you buy from them, you more directly support the artists and their tribes, which I prefer.

I had a chance to talk to one of their resident artists, Art Charlie, about some of their pieces. Their featured artist is Doug Lafortune, who’s a great carver. One thing Eagle Feather does that the other galleries in Victoria don’t is bring in artists to work in the gallery — you can see them carving or working in other media, depending on who’s there.

I’ve told Laurie not to let me back in Eagle Feather with my wallet, there were at least four pieces I wanted, and I have a living room to finish.

After all that, it was back to the room for the hockey (remember? hockey? playoffs?). Dinner at Old Spaghetti Factory, since we wanted something good, but not fancy, and not too leisurely, to get back and see as much of the Ducks game as we could.

One of the things I wanted to do this trip was focus more on photography and exploration, and to give the tools a good workout. I ended up taking about 80 shots today using the digital. When we got back to the room, I dumped them into iPhoto, cropped and cleaned them up, captioned them, edited them down to the best 60, and then exported them into HTML and uploaded them to the web site. All in about 90 minutes: god bless digital photography…

And if you’re interested, the result is here.

Embedded in Victoria…

We’ve made it, embedded into Victoria. Two days of driving, San Jose to Eugene, Eugene to Victoria. About 10 hours travel time both days.

Day 1 we lost an hour, maybe 90 minutes, to weather. Rain caught us heading out the 80, kept it up most of the way up the 5, except at Weed, where it decided to turn into snow. Fortunately, it was short-lived. More fortunately, Laurie was driving. I was, as usual, asleep, but woke up to the lack of rain sounds on the van…

Today we chased the occasional shower, but it was mostly a decent, grey day. Hit the 4PM out of Tswassen, made it to the hotel a bit after 6, and to the Keg for dinner during the third period of the Oilers game.

The picture shows the Empress hotel and the downtown skyline across the harbor, as seen from our hotel room. In the foreground is the wax museum, and the roof in the lower left corner is the ferry building for the Coho to Port Angeles. To the right, out of the picture, is the Parliament building.

As we were walking to dinner, the sun broke out of the clouds and bathed the inner harbour with a golden light, and we stood there and watched the light play off the water as an Air Beaver seaplane took off on one of its runs.

And I turned to Laurie and said “and people wonder why we come up here….”

The daffodils are fading up here, and the tulips are just starting, the cherry trees are in bloom, and the place looks awesome. So far, so good.

Victoria: Butchart Gardens

A few miles out of Victoria is Butchart Gardens. Carved out of a former cement quarry, the gardens has turned into a tourist spot that draws a million people a year. Is it for you?

If you’re at all interested in things that grow, the answer is yes. It’s a fun place to while away half a day, walking through the gardens and thinking to yourself how nice it’d be to have a professional staff of planters and weeders…

but seriously — I think everyone ought to try it once, if you’re going to be in victoria more than a single day. If you have a car, you can drive to it, or the tour groups have busses that will shuttle you out and back.

During the summers, on Saturdays, Butchart does a victorian fireworks show that is very popular. On our trip last July, our concierge convinced us to give it a try, so we were signed up onto the Gray Line, which picked us up in the early afternoon, giving us about half a day in the gardens, a nice, long twilight, and the fireworks — remember, in BC, summer days are long, so the fireworks start fairly late, and traffic is busy, so expect not to get back to the hotel until very late. Also, since it is so popular, and it’s grass seating, plan to go protect space in a prime viewing area earlier than you’ll thnk you need to.

But frankly, I can’t think of a better way to visit Butchart than to be driven there, spend a few hours in the gardens, and then take in a fireworks show (and it’s quite a good one). The gardens has a good restaurant, and is also one of the places you might consider taking tea, if you feel you must (a much better tea than the Empress, which I find expensive and not terribly interesting)

if you’re only in Victoria one day, the gardens would take up too much time. But for a multi-day trip, it’s a great time to get out of the city and wander through gardens you can only dream of….

The playoffs are here!

It’s time for that second season, the hockey playoffs. The time hockey switches from marathon to sprints. Four sprints and you take home the stanley cup. Nothing to it. (yeah, right).

As usual, I’m handicapping the playoffs. And as usual, anyone who bets on my handicapping is an idiot, since I’m consistently under .500…

Eastern Conference:

Ottawa/New York Islanders (Ottawa in 5): I don’t trust the Isle’s goaltending, and I really like Ottawa’s overall play.

New Jersey/Boston (New Jersey in six): Might be the most interesting to watch, but I’ll bet on Brodeur, thanks.

Tampa/Washington (Tampa in 6): who cares? one loses in the first round, the other in the 2nd. I’m not interested in watching either team play.

Philadelphia/Toronto (Toronto in 6): I’ll take Eddie Belfour here, and Nolan, and the Leafs crew. If they can stay out of penalty trouble. Which they have trouble doing. But I’ve made a solemn pledge to never pick a Philly team as long as Bobby Clarke is GM, and in recent years, he’s proven me right. His teams find a way to mess up at crunch time.

My pick to go to the cup finals: Ottawa. My preference to go to the finals: Toronto.

Western Conference:

Dallas/Edmonton (Edmonton in 6): these two meet again. what, did it get written into the labor contract? Aren’t they tired of beating each other up yet? Dallas ought to win, but I’m rooting for Edmonton anyway. Just because sooner or later, Edmonton ought to find a way to beat Dallas in a series.

Detroit/Anaheim (Detroit in 4): welcome back to the playoffs, Anaheim. Well done. But don’t expect miracles.

Colorado/Minnesota (Colorado in 4): and welcome to the playoffs for the first time, Minnesota, even if you’re a Jacques LeMair team and horribly boring to watch. enjoy it while it lasts…

Vancouver/St. Louis (Vancouver in 5): St. Louis never gets out of the first round. nobody can figure out why. But my best guess this year is their goaltending will let them down. Whatever else, though, the Blues will find some way to exit early again. it’s become a tradition, sort of like the Blackhawks finding ways to miss the playoffs.

My pick to come out of the west: Colorado (Roy, Forsberg, Sakic, Blake. any questions?)

My preference to come out of the west: Vancouver: (Bertuzzi, Naslund, Jovanoski, Sedin, Sedin, Linden, Klatt, Cloutier…)

My probable cup final: Ottawa/Colorado (colorado wins in 6)

My preferred cup final: Toronto/Vancouver (Vancouver wins in 7. Sorry, Owen)

The cup final guaranteed to make ABC/ESPN hate hockey: Edmonton/Ottawa.

Dark horses: none.

The politics of participation

Tim O’Reilly has an interesting perspective on the Architecture of Participation, looking at the differences between styles of participation in various open source communities.

One of his comments struck home…

> In the case of Perl, it was CPAN, as much as anything. By contrast, the Free
> Software Foundation was always fixated on control not just of the core but of
> the whole enchilada (cf. RMS’s constant efforts to get Linux renamed GNU/
> Linux), and their community never took off in the same grassroots way.

I think the difference here is that CPAN is promoting use of the software, and the bottomline purpose of FSF is to promote the policies under which FSF develops software, not really the software itself. so to some degree, with Perl and CPAN, the software is the end, and with FSF, the software is a means to promote an end, adn that end is the vision of how software ought to be that RMS has promoted.

And so while the community at large has bought into the idea of licensing as a way to promote a political agenda, the proliferation of licenses shows that it hasn’t bought into RMS’s agenda, but instead we have dozens of licenses promoting different things, most of them much more liberal than RMS likes.

to me, it just shows that (1) free software is a good idea, and (2) RMS, ultimately, had a vision that wasn’t widely (much less universally) shared, and so the community has taken the parts it felt were useful and left behind the rest.

I think it shows that in the open source community, nobody (not even RMS) can dictate. I think one reason Perl/CPAN is so large and vibrant is because Larry Wall actively unties agendas from his software, almost the antithesis of RMS. RMS is trying to change how everyone does software, through conversion or coercion (using his viral licensing); Wall is trying to build software people find useful.

I don’t agree with RMS or some of his policies, but I abide by licenses and support his right to do what he’s doing (and let the market decide). my preference, however, is to depoliticize software and software licensing, much as Larry did. I think that really serves the greater good….

Sun, I think, made a mistake with java — they tried the same basic strategy that worked for NFS/RPC/XDR — open the interface, control the details. But when I was with Sun and working on the third party aspects of this, it was with a server-based technology that was basically vendor-based. Java’s a much different beast, but they seem to have tried to control it in much the same way — and it’s created conflicts within the java community. You can’t have chaos, so someone has to be in charge, but Sun would have been much better served by handing off control to a consortium for Java, not attempting to be both “open” and “what we say goes”.

A few submarine books

Sort of a three dot lounge from my collection of submarine military history books….

I’m not sure where my interest in submarine operations came from. In high school, one of my post-graduation options I considered (and quickly rejected) was submarine ops. A combination of claustrophobia in tight spaces and childhood asthma made that (practically speaking) impossible, so it got crossed off the list early (Ringling’s Clown College survived a lot longer, but that’s another tale, another time).

But a fascination with the submarine stuck around in the back of my head, and when I started reading history and military history seriously, I naturally migrated towards the submarine corps.

If you’re curious about how a submarine operates, a good introduction is Tom Clancy’s Submarine. It (like all of the non-fiction book written under his name) have a distinctly pro-military bias to them (like this is a suprise?) but he also has good access to sources and does good, solid research. I also thought his books on Carrier, Armored Cav, and Fighter wing were good introductions to how these military forces operate.

Submarines are different beasts. The survive and kill by stealth. Lose that stealth, and they’re sitting ducks. They can’t outrun the enemy, they can’t outmuscle the enemy, they can’t hold off the enemy. They’re an assassin, appearing out of nowhere, disappearing into the shadows.

Submarines were also key components of both WW II and the Cold War, and it’s no suprise that a key strategic component of submarine warfare was finding ways to make them quieter and more powerful, and finding ways to improve your ability to hear them, find them, and kill them.

The story of the submarine in the cold war has been for the most part kept rather quiet, but an interesting look at the games superpowers play is Blind Man’s Bluff. Blind Man’s bluff is a series of stories of modern submarine operations, each of which tells the story of the submarine in a different way. Most interesting to me is the chapter that re-visits the loss of the submarine Scorpion using new information originally suppressed from the original investigation, and the tale of the Halibut as it repeatedly sneaks into soviet waters to tap, and then monitor, an undersea phone cable from a remote military base.

One of the people at ground zero of the cold war battle under the surface was John P. Craven, Chief Scientist for the US Navy’s submarine office. His memoir, discussing things now declassified, is The Silent War, and it dovetails and illuminates (and somtimes contradicts) what Blind Man’s bluff says. the two books cover the same timeframe for the most part, and Blind Man’s Bluff does so from thew view of the investigative reporter, while Silent War does so from the insider/personal view. Both are interesting snapshots into a mostly unseen aspect of the cold war, and interesting reads.

Moving back in time to WW II, I can recommend two other memoirs: Salt and Steel by Edward Latimer Beach, and Silent Running by James Calvert. Beach was a long-time skipper of submarines, including the Triton, the first sub to circumnavigate the globe without surfacing. From the battle of Midway to his retirement in 1966, Beach was part of the navy’s submarine establishment, and discusses it’s strengths, weaknesses and flaws (Beach is a very good writer, and also the author of the fictional work Run Silent, Run Deep). Latimer started in the service with the Jack in 1943, skippered the Skate to the North pole, the first naval vessel to reach it, and in this book, tells the stories of his service in World War II in the Pacific. It might be the best description (absolutely pants-wetting) of what it’s like to sit in a small metal tube and be depth-charged that you’ll find. Both are interesting books by interesting people in similar times, but both are different enough to be more than worth reading…

To try to get an understanding of submarines from the German side, there’s Memoirs, by Karl Donitz, commander of the wolf packs for Hitler. Personally, I found it very dry and not very engaging, and somewhat self-serving. Better for trying to understand the german submarine strategy would be Operation Drumbeat by historian Michael gannon, which attempts to show the impact of the German attacks on American shipping off of the east coast during 1942.

A differing view of Operation Drumbeat comes from Clay Blair, however. For those with a strong interest (and some background in submarine ops — I certainly would’t start with these books) in this field should check out his two books:

Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunters, 1939-1942 and Hitler’s U-Boat War: The Hunted, 1942-1945. A combnied 1700 pages, Blair analyzes the German Submarine operations from the start of war in 1939 to the end of German involvement. Using both US and German records, Blair pieces together the history and strategy of the German U-boats, discussing where the wolf-pack strategy came from, the impact of Operation Drumbeat and other operations, and goes into great detail (sometimes almost excruciatingly so), chronologically discussion every submarine, every mission, every battle, and where available, even down to every torpedo used. He evaluates military records to assign kills, both by and of submarines, and what each boat and captain accomplished.

The data presented can be very overwhelming — I spent over six months intermittently working through the books. The overall picture, however, is a scary one of one country (Germany), clearly unable to keep up with the production of it’s larger enemies (Britain, Russia and the US, and it’s clear that even before the US was officially in the war, that Germany understood the inevitable). While struggling to meet it’s own production goals, Germany saw the submarine corps as a key resource to starving Britain and Russia of needed supplies, and as a terror vehicle to attempt to keep the US population convinced it needs to stay out of the war.

Ultimately, it was a losing proposition. Allied losses were horrible early on, but as the allies figured out how to defense against the submarines, the wolf packs were forced to innovate, move further away from support lines and into more difficult waters. Fascinating stuff, but to be honest — you have to really be interested to make it through both books. I found myself drawn into it, however, in an almost horrified way.

One of the most interesting aspects of the Blair books was the insight just how important the Commander of the submarine was. There isn’t likely a boat in the service where the caliber of the Commander and how he interfaces with his crew is crucial: literally, life and death. A Commander has to be tactically sharp and fearless, but at the same time, cautious and not foolhardy. To be successful, a submarine has to take risks. Take the wrong risk, or guess wrong, and you have a dead submarine, and a dead crew. Succeess in that narrow band between too careful (and off to a day job) and dead requires a bit of a cowboy mentality (because once you head off on patrol, you’re on your own), but at the same time, a knowledge and gut feeling for when to draw the line and not cross it.

Living conditions in any submarine are, in a word, cramped. But living conditions in a German U-boat were horrendous. There’s no better way to bring this home than to grab a copy of Das Boot. I strongly recommend watching it in german with subtitles, it adds a different and scary aura to the film. It catches the gritty reality of the wolf pack wonderfully, and will likely leave you horribly depressed.

It might well be the best single introduction to submarine warfare there is. and it’ll guarantee you’ll never, ever understand what makes people crawl into one of those machines and go sailing off to war (or die).

On the other hand, don’t waste your time with the excrable U-571 factually bogus, dramatically biased and simply not very well done, it’s more a testiment of what happens to a good film (Das Boot) when the Hollywood Marketing machine gets done with it. You’re better off spending your time watching re-runs of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

On island time….

I’m sure most of us have talked at one time or another about getting away from it all and living on some remote island.

Laurie and I have….

I’m sure most of us have talked at one time or another about getting away from it all and living on some remote island.

Laurie and I have. Victoria has been high on our lists of potential retirement towns for years, but even though it’s on Vancouver Island, because of the size and the ferry system, I’m not sure it counts. But around Vancouver Island, and up the Sunshine Coast, are many smaller islands that people also live on. you also have the San Juan islands in the area as well.

Getting away from it all is the fantasy — but what if you need to get back? What’s it really like living on the wrong end of a part time ferry line?

Canadian author Hilary Stewart did that. When she retired she moved to Cortes Island, and then wrote a book about what it meant to live out there. That book On Island Time” is a fascinating read in and of itself, but anyone who’s thought about doing this really ought to track it down.

I first discovered Stewart when I started researching Pacific Northwest native culture. She’s the author of many books on my shelves about those people and their art (one of these days, I plan on getting to talking about that stuff, too. honest). Cortes island is a small island accessible by ferry from Campbell River, about a four hour drive north of Victoria. To get to it, you take a ferry to Quadra Island, drive across the island, and then take a second ferry out to Cortes. The Quadra island ferry runs from 6AM to midnight, about once an hour. The quadra to cortes run goes about every two hours, from 9AM to 6PM.

That’s the first reality of island time: if you’re late, it leaves. If it’s full, you wait for the next one. If it’s the last one, they’ll see you in the morning. Unlike bridges and freeways, you work your schedule around the ferry. At busy times, you show up early to get a place, and wait (some ferries have some reservations).

Not everyone can handle island time. I love it. To me, a ferry is a way to unplug from my day to day reality — it’s a realization that I can’t just point the car south if my work calls with an emergency. The ferry is, psychologically, a way to force myself to give up control of my schedule to someone else. that’s one reason I so love to vacation in Victoria (moreso than Vancouver, or Seattle or Portland, much as I love all of the northwest) — once I get on that ferry, I can leave the rest behind (even though my hotel room has cat 5 hookups in it!).

Laurie can sometimes get frustrated by the waits, especially peak times where we might run into having to wait for a second sailing at Tswassen or Horseshoe Bay (in practice, I don’t think we ever have). Me, I just pull out a book or the paper and relax; most of the time she does, too — but once in a while, the process bothers her. My parents are driven crazy by ferries, because it’s out of their control.

And it gets worse. Sometimes there are accidents. Sometimes there are delays. Sometimes the ferry simply is shut down, by strikes once in a while, or by extreme tides, and more commonly, by weather. I admit to being a bit of a ferry geek (and it’s all Jack Chalker’s fault. long story, some other time). If I have the opportunity to take a ferry I haven’t taken before, I’ll try it.

Most of the time. A while back we took a November trip north, flying into Seattle and then renting a car. We decided to do some exploring, so we scheduled some time in Campbell River. Our original plan was to head north up the sunshine coast (the coastal side of the vancouver mainland) via the Earl’s Cove to Saltery Bay ferry, up to Port rupert, and take that ferry across to Comox. At the last minute, because we were running late and the weather wasn’t great (it was November, after all, and frankly, the weather wasn’t bad, just not good enough to warrant sightseeing new territory) we bailed and took twassen to nanaimo and drove up the island.

And it wasn’t until we got to Campbell River we found that the Port Rupert ferry was shut down by a strike. see, the plumbing on the ferry had failed, and, well, the crew had been trying to get it repaired, and finally got tired of the smell.

Just as well. I like ferries. Just not without limits. We still plan on doing that trip, just not in November. Better to explore new territory some other time of the year.

Another aspect of island time is access to amenities. When you’re two hours from the mainland, and you might find your connection shut down for a few days at a time by weather, don’t run out of toilet paper. Planning ahead isn’t just a good idea, it’s absolutely crucial.

My family has a cabin in Washington, in an area known as Paradise Bay. To get their, you cross the Hood Canal Bridge, drive a bit, then hang a right, and keep driving. Officially, it’s considered Port Ludlow, but that’s the post office, not the reality. The nearest supermarket is about 10 miles in Poulsbo. the nearest serious shopping is down in Silverdale, about a 25 mile drive. The nearest gas station is 6 miles.

In other words, you can’t just pop down to McDonalds when you don’t feel like cooking (the nearest McDonalds is near the supermarket). Except for those rare times the Hood Canal bridge is closed (really, really bad weather can do it), at least we have access. On an island? once that ferry turns off the engine, it’s over. Don’t need a prescription filled until morning.

And that’s where I join Laurie in realizing island time isn’t for me. The isolation that comes with being on that island just isn’t something we feel we can do long-term. We both like some amenities — god help me if I can’t get to a bookstore easily, for instance. Being 10 miles from Poulsbo is okay. Being on Vancouver island is okay. But neither of us feels a great attraction to heading that much farther into the wilderness. Except to visit for a while…

Which is one of the things that keeps drawing us back to Victoria. It’s easily accessible, but still, because of the ferries, somewhat isolated. It’s small, but has enough of interest to keep things fun. And it’s a great base camp for all sorts of adventures, but still developed enough that the hotel has internet installed… heck, we want to get away from it all, but we still appreciate civilization, too…

RFC 3514

Steve Bellovin has released RFC 3514, a change to TCP/IP to make it easier for network applications to tell whether or not the packet is safe or has evil intent. Once fully implimented, this will make the job of the firewall a lot easier.

ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc3514.txt

This has been a weird ass season

This has been such a weird ass season. I hope the weirdness is ending, but who knows?

Have you figured out why Darryl Sutter got fired? Neither have I. I thought I did, but I was wrong. it was clear (from the one year contract) that not everyone within the Sharks wanted Darryl back — and I assumed it was Lombardi, partly because I simply couldn’t see the franchise firing the coach that just won the division (“marketing will kill you, if the fans don’t get you first”) and partly because of what he said at the time of the firing.

Silly me. After Lombardi was fired, jamison came out and said that bringing Sutter back was a hockey decision (i.e. lombardi). The strong (strong) implication being that the business side of the team didn’t want him back, and all Lombardi could get him was the one year deal. And if that’s true, then the pressure to fire Sutter came from the business side, and Lombardi played good soldier to the press in saying it was his idea.

Why does that make sense? Think about it. When Lombardi was fired, who was the first person to call him? Darryl Sutter, according to various reports. If Lombardi was the guy trying to fire your butt, as well as the guy who got you fired — are you going to call him when he gets fired? I just can’t see Darryl calling him up and saying “neener neener!”. It just doesn’t fly.

Firing Darryl Sutter sure didn’t solve the problem. Ron Wilson seems to be, but it took bloody forever.

Have you figured out why they fired Dean Lombardi? Neither have I. but I have some guesses.

First: we won the division last year. But in the history of Dean Lombardi, only once have we finished above .500. Whatever else you might think, however screwed up it was when he as given full control, ultimately, this is a franchise that hasn’t won a winning tradition. Building one? I’d like to hope so. Has one? Not really. So since the bottom line is winning, you have to feel that Lombardi was always one crisis of faith by his bosses away from being unemployed. Even if it’s not his fault.

Second: Dean Lombardi eats, sleeps, and dreams hockey. Some folks wonder if he’s really a hockey guy, they don’t know Dean Lombardi. The guy ate his stomach over the team. If it ever won a cup, his first thought would be how hard it is to defend the damn thing. He’s like that. Dean Lombardi is also honest, sometimes too honest, about what he says.
For instance. talking about the “cancer in the locker room”, a statement Jamison later came out publicly and said he wished Dean hadn’t said. Dean probably regretted it, too. Later, Lombardi came out and said he was looking at a three year plan, which I’m sure went over with marketing and the owners like a lead balloon (“yeah, let’s sell season tickets next year by having a team that we’re saying will be good in three! that’ll sell tickets!”). Jamison was upset enough at the first to comment on it, and has since come out himself and said he feels the team will be competitive next year (aside: “who’s right? depends on how you define the term. Look at the wing’s game. Next year’s team should be fun, win a bunch of games, and could well be a playoff team. Dean Lombardi’s idea of competitive is “deep into the playoffs”. so at some level, both, depending on how you set expectations).

Third: off more into speculation-land here. it’s no secret Lombardi was told to cut salary. Numbers differ. the number I heard was $15 million. He didn’t. Nolan went off to toronto, a deal that I think everyone wins: Nolan needed a change of scenery, even if he hated leaving San Jose. Toronto and Quinn can make the most out of him, Nolan is clearly revitalized and playing better with the “C” off his shoulder, and San jose is away from his contract. But beyond that, Lombardi didn’t do much. The Damphousse deal failed because of a million dollars Lombardi wouldn’t subsidize, even though it would save money. Ultimately, he couldn’t pull the trigger, I think, because the deal didn’t make sense as a hockey deal. Ditto, I think, Selanne. They wanted a player and prospects for him, not just salary dump. they didn’t get that kind of offer, they sat on him. I think Lombardi wouldn’t make bad deals for the team just to cut salary, and went back to the ownership and told them they’d cut the salaries at the draft when better deals would be available.

And I think ownership sacked him for it — for being given marching orders to get the salary down, and refusing to do so in a way that screwed over the team. He tried to make it a situation that worked from a hockey view, and ownership just wanted that number smaller, now. that — and his tendency to say things he believed, even if they weren’t politic, and his support of a coach out of favor with his bosses, and the new ownership wanting to put a new face on the organization, as new ownership is wont to do. but Lombardi made it easy, at the end. He tried to do what was best for the team, and that might have worked under Uncle George, but with the new owners, budgets are budgets. he busted his, and got busted. that’s business in silicon valley.

You see signs of that all through the organization right now. I’ve heard multiple rumors of employees having their salaries frozen, and even paycuts. Last year, they had a big fight with the usher union, squeezing every nickel they could (the ushers, selfish fools, were trying to get a pay scale based on the Living Wage. they failed). This year, the nickel squeezing was ARA on foodservice and the food unions. That fight was pretty brutal, and I’m not convinced it’s completely finished (note of possible conflict: my sister currently works for a union in southern california in various capacities, and prior to her current gig, worked for the union that handled the food service employees at Disneyland, the hotels, anaheim stadium and the Pond. So she was directly involved in dealing with Disney and the Ducks.).

I know lots of folks, going back to the North Star days, wanted to bitch about the Gunds as cheapskates. I never saw it that way. Instead, I always felt that “Uncle George” was the relative who showed up at christmas and handed $10 bills to all of the kids. And some of the kids griped, because their friends in (ahem) New York and Detroit got $20′s. Well, I think we’ll all miss George before too long, when it becomes clear what the new ownership has set as an agenda. Because I feel, at least right now, that the current ownership setup is seriously undercapitalized for running a hockey franchise.

At least in the short term. This valley is in a nasty recession. Stock prices are dead. It’s affected lots of us (working for apple, I haven’t had a raise in over two years; my bills weren’t frozen, though, and I have a job, so I’m not bitching). The owners may have a higher net worth, but they aren’t isolated from all of that. In some ways, it’s nastier, because more of their income is non-salary and results based: stock options, for instance, or under-market grants. Or bonuses. If you stock is down 70%, like Brocade’s was last time I looked your options are under water, your bonuses are zero, and you’re riding it out with the rest of us (just with a larger mortgage). These guys got into the ownership group just BEFORE the bubble really burst. I hope they expect things to cool off — I doubt anyone expected it to fall off a cliff. So I think they’re pushing to get the budget in line, because while George wasn’t super-super rich, merely pretty damn rich, this new ownership group is well off, but right now, their deep pockets are under water along with all of our options and investments, too. So I think this ownership group is digging a foxhole to survive until the valley turns around and the new CBA is in place — and at some level, I can’t blame them. Still, it’s frustrating. It’s also worrisome if this is the best ownership group Jamison could round up, because down that road lies — the Seals. the death spiral of losing your original owner who lost money because he believed, and then never having enough money to be competitive to drive attendance to make money, until you hear the little flush at the end….

Laurie somewhat thinks the death spiral is there. I’m not so convinced, but I’m not sure there’s much margin of error. and to be more positive — the rumored budget next year is $33-35 million, down from $48. Still a quite respectable number, and you can put a pretty good team together for it. just not a team with Nolan and (ahem) Selanne on it.

So what I’m seeing right now is very much the Canuck’s model: good, young competitive team, expectation to make the playoffs and raise havoc. Don’t expect really expensive stars, but we’re not Buffalo, either. Or the Cubs. At least, not yet. Cut losses until we see the new CBA, and hope it makes us financially competitive. If not, don’t be too surprised to see the team sold again and everyone cut their losses. Paul Allen, white courtesy phone?

FWIW, the number I’ve heard is $10 million, cash operating loss. that’s money that went out of the organization above adn beyond what came in, ignoring how accountants define and manipulate things. It could end up at $15. That’s about a million dollars out of pocket for each owner in the ownershp group, ABOVE what was originally planned. not total, extra. Words you might keep an ear out for in the press: “cash call”.

Perhaps the cleaning house was inevitable. Sutter was Lombardi’s guy, Lombardi was, I guess, Gund’s guy more than jamison’s guy (and if rumors are right, at least one, and possibly two, of Lombardi’s staff of hockey guys and advisors actually worked for Jamison, and were there to watch Lombardi as much as advise him; I knew that, I guess I never really thought about what it meant in terms of the sometimes machiavellian politics of the sharks as a business.

Because when you get down to brass tacks, the fight that tanked this season wasn’t between players, or between players and sutter, or between players and lombardi. it was between the hockey organization, and team management. The final line in the sand was between Lombardi and Jamison, and it really looks like Lombardi was trying to maintain what’d been built, and Jamison (and the owners) were trying to get costs under control. Lombardi hardballed Stuart, and hardballed Nabokov, and he did it because he was told to. That (and other comments and rumors) pissed off the players, and they went sour, and nobody could fix it. Ultimately push came to shove, the players soured on the situation, and then Sutter was shot behind the shed, because they want more fan-friendly hockey and someone who doesn’t scowl at reporters, and then Lombardi was shot, because he was told to do something and couldn’t. So now Jamison gets to build his new organization, with people who see things Jamison’s way.

Which may not be all that bad, really. I’ll go out on a limb and say our new GM is likely Steve Tambellini from Vancouver, which is a great choice. the big risk is we can’t afford him, or he won’t touch the problem. So Wayne Thomas is on the great altar of “you’re our second candidate” — if he was going to be GM, they’d have hired him already. He’ll get hired only if the candidates they really want turn them down. Until then, he’ll put on a happy face and pretend he doesn’t know he’s the bridesmaid, because that’s what good soldiers do. And when they hire a new GM, he’ll turn in his resignation, tell the press it was voluntary, and hopefully nobody with a brain will believe him. But he won’t stay unhired long. Wilson? I don’t have a read on doug, other than “he’s not the next GM, either”.

And changes are already starting. People are leaving the organization in the wake of Dean’s firing. And those that haven’t quit: more than a few expect to be let go. The restructuring has just begun. Ron wilson is coach next year, because Jamison said so. Expect lots of other things to be different, on the ice and inside the bunker…

Which, in some ways, may not be bad. It’s definitely not the end of the world, it’s definitely not ALL bad. I can’t even argue with firing Lombardi much. And I do respect and trust Jamison, “hockey man” or not, he’s smart enough to make sure he has people he can trust to advise him who are.

But it’ll be different. Some might like it better, some will hate it. Maybe it was time (I keep thinking back to “only one season > .500″). I just hope I’m wrong about the owners pockets. $35 million is a good salary structure, but if they struggle a bit and still lose money, what’s next? 28? 23?

whatever it turns into, we won’t know what it is for a while. I just hope the journey is more fun than this year’s trip….

“And in the end the love you take is equal to the love you make.”

Paul McCartney

The Six Phases of a hockey season

Denial: What’s going on? This can’t be happening. These guys don’t suck!

Anger: What the F–k is going on? why can’t they f–king sign nabokov already!

Bargaining: Look. Sign Nabokov. Stuart’s ankle isn’t ready anyway. If you can sign nabokov, we’ll be okay.

Depression: jesus, this sucks. we suck. we’re f–ked. It’s over.

Acceptance: Look at how well these kids are playing! Just consider this extended pre-season!

(with apologies to Dr. elizabeth kubler-ross)

Paul Stewart’s 1000th

I want to send out a hearty “congratulations, you idiot!” to Paul Stewart, in honor of his 1000th game as a referee in the NHL. He reffed today’s game in Boston, his home town, against the Panthers. The other referee was Wes McCauley, son of John, who was the man who hired Stewart and gave him his shot in the NHL. It was McCauley’s third NHL game.

For a number of years, Stewart was the referee I most wanted to see handling Sharks games. Best referee? No, not really — but he wasn’t afraid to show a personality, he has a strong rapport with the players, and as an ex-player himself, he understands the game from that point of view of the players and knows how the flow of the game is affected by his actions. He was very much a “let the boys play” referee, but also knew when to crack down to keep games under control. There are advantages and disadvantages to that kind of game, but it’s one the players generally prefer, and one that leads to a good energy that keeps the fans entertained.

My nickname for him was “no blood, no foul”. not quite true, but close enough.

This is his last season in stripes, and while I think it’s the right time for him to retire, the NHL is going to lose a distinctive personality and a good referee. Here’s hoping he stays in the game somewhere.

Stewart is the kind of referee the NHL ought to be recruiting: ex-players who understand the game and know how to manage it, with a distintive personality for fans to get to know and, of course, to hate. In a loving way, of course.

I’m unhappy with the way the leagues are trying to program the personality of the ref out of the game, because the style of the referee affects the style of game played; some people feel referees ought to be automatons who all act exactly alike and have no real presence in the game itself — I feel strongly that’s a stupid thing to try for, because a referee’s style adds one more variable for coaches and players to deal with, and that adds to the interest of a game. Let them be human — just competent ones.

So here’s to you, Paulie: you suck! and we love you for it. Dinner’s on us, anytime you’re in San Jose. And enjoy the rest of your life. you’ve earned it.

In the Beginning, there was the computer…

(thanks to Dan Rusanowsky…)

THE CREATION

In the beginning there was the computer. And God said
c:\>Let there be light!
Enter user id.
c:\>God
Enter password.
c:\>Omniscient
Password incorrect. Try again.
c:\>Omnipotent
Password incorrect. Try again.
c:\>Technocrat
And God logged on at 12:01:00 AM, Sunday, March 1.
c:\>Let there be light!
Unrecognizable command. Try again.
c:\>Create light
Done
c:\>Run heaven and earth
And God created Day and Night. And God saw there were 0 errors.
And God logged off at 12:02:00 AM, Sunday, March 1.
And God logged on at 12:01:00 AM, Monday, March 2.
c:\>Let there be firmament in the midst of water and light.
Unrecognizable command. Try again.
c:\>Create firmament
Done.
c:\>Run firmament
And God divided the waters. And God saw there were 0 errors.
And God logged off at 12:02:00 AM, Monday, March 2.
And God logged on at 12:01:00 AM, Tuesday, March 3.
c:\>Let the waters under heaven be gathered together unto one
place and let the dry land appear and
Too many characters in specification string. Try again.
c:\>Create dry_land
Done.
c:\>Run firmament
And God divided the waters. And God saw there were 0 errors.
And God logged off at 12:02:00 AM, Tuesday, March 3.
And God logged on at 12:01:00 AM, Wednesday, March 4.
c:\>Create lights in the firmament to divide the day from the night
Unspecified type. Try again.
c:\>Create sun_moon_stars
Done
c:\>Run sun_moon_stars
And God separated the light from the darkness. The sun ruled
over the day and the moon and stars ruled over the night.
And God saw there were 0 errors.
And God logged off at 12:02:00 AM, Wednesday, March 4.
And God logged on at 12:01:00 AM, Thursday, March 5.
c:\>Create fish
Done
c:\>Create fowl
Done
c:\>Run fish, fowl
And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature
that creepeth wherewith the waters swarmed after its
kind and every winged fowl after its kind.
And God saw there were 0 errors.
And God logged off at 12:02:00 AM, Thursday, March 5.
And God logged on at 12:01:00 AM, Friday, March 6.
c:\>Create cattle
Done
c:\>Create creepy_things
Done
c:\>Now let us make man in our image
Unspecified type. Try again.
c:\>Create man
Done
c:\>Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and
subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea
and over the fowl of the air and over every living
thing that creepeth upon the earth
Too many command operands. Try again.
c:\>Run multiplication
Execution terminated. 6 errors.
c:\>Insert breath
Done
c:\>Run multiplication
Execution terminated. 5 errors.
c:\>Move man to Garden of Eden
File Garden of Eden does not exist.
c:\>Create Garden.edn
Done
c:\>Move man to Garden.edn
Done
c:\>Run multiplication
Execution terminated. 4 errors.
c:\>Copy woman from man
Done
c:\>Run multiplication
Execution terminated. 2 errors.
c:\>Create desire
Done
c:\>Run multiplication
And God saw man and woman being fruitful and multiplying in Garden.edn
Warning: No time limit on this run. 1 errors.
c:\>Create freewill
Done
c:\>Run freewill
And God saw man and woman being fruitful and multiplying in Garden.edn
Warning: No time limit on this run. 1 errors.
c:\>Undo desire
Desire cannot be undone once freewill is created.
c:\>Destroy freewill
Freewill is an inaccessible file and cannot be destroyed.
Enter replacement, cancel, or ask for help.
c:\>Help
Desire cannot be undone once freewill is created.
Freewill is an inaccessible file and cannot be destroyed.
Enter replacement, cancel, or ask for help.
c:\>Create tree_of_knowledge
And God saw man and woman being fruitful and multiplying in Garden.edn
Warning: No time limit on this run. 1 errors.
c:\>Create good, evil
Done
c:\>Activate evil
And God saw he had created shame.
Warning system error in sector E95.
Man and woman not in Garden.edn. 1 errors.
c:\>Scan Garden.edn for man, woman
Search failed.
c:\>Delete shame
Shame cannot be deleted once evil has been activated.
c:\>Destroy freewill
Freewill is an inaccessible file and cannot be destroyed.
Enter replacement, cancel, or ask for help.
c:\>Stop
Unrecognizable command. Try again
c:\>Break
c:\>Break
c:\>Break
ATTENTION ALL USERS *** ATTENTION ALL USERS: COMPUTER GOING
DOWN FOR REGULAR DAY OF MAINTENANCE AND REST IN FIVE
MINUTES. PLEASE LOG OFF.
c:\>Create new world
You have exceeded your allocated file space. You must destroy
old files before new ones can be created.
c:\>Destroy earth
Destroy earth: Please confirm.
c:\>Destroy earth confirmed
COMPUTER DOWN *** COMPUTER DOWN. SERVICES WILL RESUME
SUNDAY, MARCH 8 AT 6:00 AM. YOU MUST SIGN OFF NOW.
And God logged off at 11:59:59 PM, Friday, March 6.

On March 8, God created the Macintosh.

Virtual Communities are Not new, and not really Virtual

This requires some explanation. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, it used to be possible to use the net to get to know people. to have conversations on USENET without wading through the spam and trolls. To actually post things to usenet about parties and not have every lamer in the world show up crashing it for the chance at free beer.

Below this is some correspondence about what became known as the first End of the World party, which was held in my place to celebrate Gene Spafford visiting the left coast. A party was held, and contrary to some of the notes, a good time was had by all and the swat team wasn’t called out.

why is this notable? Take a look at the dates, and the newsgroup. “net.singles”, which hasn’t existed since the usenet Grand Renaming moved it to soc — and this electronic shindig happened in 1984. I believe the FIRST on-line get together I was involved with was in 1979, perhaps 1980, and in fact I just got a note from some dear old friends who are celebrating their 20th wedding anniversary this year. They met through an online community that we were all involved in (not internet or arpanet, but one involving colleges in the CSU California system).

So when you hear pundits talk about how virtual communities are hot new things on the net, that’s crap. Virtual communities aren’t new — just trendy. And the best ones aren’t virtual — they’re real communities that have a virtual component. Which doesn’t mean you necessarily get together in person (but it doesn’t hurt), but the community has to be rooted in something real — and the virtual aspects enable you to participate in that community.

The History of Usenet: sources

As I put chuqui.com together, I went through any number of notes I kept about things I wanted on the site, and also did research on the net looking things up.

As I did, I realized there didn’t seem to be a place bringing the various resources together, so I’m starting that as well. this is a list of various URLs I’ve run into with stuff I think others might be interested in, especially as glimpses into USENET in its earlier days.

Bruce Jones did a lot of research into USENET in the early 90′s, including setting up a mail list where many of the early USENET hackers got together and talked. Various parts of the archives are still available:

http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Usenet.Hist/

The raw archives of the usenet history list, in a mhonarc threaded format:

http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Usenet.Hist/Nethist/index.html

Here are a couple of postings within the usenet history lists that I call out primarily because they are good exposures of what *I* was thinking and doing at the time.

http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Usenet.Hist/Nethist/0172.html
http://communication.ucsd.edu/bjones/Usenet.Hist/Nethist/0154.html

Another Note on Referees

(originally published in 2002, updated a little as I move it to my blog…)

> I know my buddies that work basketball think hockey has too many strange
> rules to understand. So I guess it’s just what sport you work. Most of my
> friends that do basketball, just work varsity bb and no other sports. I
> don’t work basketball.

I reffed to JV highschool in basketball, JV in football and varsity
baseball, plus I judged diving for the swim team. I also did a little
exhibition wrestling, all back when I was in high school and considering
reffing as a career.

Football is pretty easy. You have a limited sphere of control, and the big
issue is staying out of the way (you do NOT want to get run down) and
keeping angles on the action. The interpretation was, for me, pretty
straightforward.

Baseball is concentration and consistency. A consistent strike zone is
harder than it looks. Otherwise, it’s angles and timing. I always found
baseball moderately easy.

Basketball requires you to be in good shape, keep up with the action, be
consistent, and keep your angles so you see what’s going on.

Diving is *all* consistency. I found it really tough, actually. Worse than
plate on baseball. Perhaps that’s because I didn’t do it as much, but it’s
one of those classic situations where an athlete lives or dies on the
quality of the judging (like gymnastics or ice skating — and both are great
examples of how sports are ruined by the politics of judging), and that
stress is tough. Even in baseball, a blown strike call rarely destroys a
game, a blown diving call can kill the entire tourney. Ugh.

I sit and watch hockey refs, whether it’s down in the rec leagues, wandering
off into the BCJHL on one of my road trips, or in the NHL, with awe. I don’t
know how you folks do it, folks. The action is so fast, there are so many
bodies, things change and are so fluid, and the angles you need to keep open
change so rapidly I’m amazed how well it generally gets done.

To me, the big difference between basketball and hockey is the
behind-the-play action. In basketball, if you take a good angle and keep
your eye on the ball, you’ll catch most of the action you need to catch. In
hockey, if you can SEE the puck through four guys screening you, you stll
miss the two guys behind you scrumming against the boards (the “Claude
Lemieux technique — wait for the ref to turn his back, and then slash
him…). You literally need eyes in the back of your head, and THEY’LL be
screened. Also, basketball’s goal is hanging in air, the hockey goal is on
ice and players can skate around and behind it. That really adds to the
issues of screening and vision. And hockey players are on skates, which are
much faster than basketball players, so stuff happens so quickly. Like
trying to referee a demolition derby in a pinto….

Fixing the NHL: visors

Much as I enjoy hockey and like watching NHL games — there are places where the NHL is plain old broken or braindamaged.

For instance, in the last couple of days, Mattias Ohlund gets hit in the face again with a puck and suffers an injury just below the eye he almost lost, and Pavol Demitra suffers a bruised retina and is out AT LEAST a month.

But if you listen to the league, and more stridently the union, wearing visors isn’t a safety issue, it’s an issue of personal choice. Players complain it hinders their eyesight (true, but if everyone wears visors, they’re equally hindered) — and if you take a look at the list of top scorers in the league, you’ll see guys like Theo Fleury, Jaro Jagr, Luc Robataille, Ziggy Palffy — it sure seems the GOOD players aren’t hindered by wearing visors.

The league and the union needs to get real here. The union, especially, is, as Laurie likes to put it, thinking with the wrong part of their body, and dealing with this in terms of the macho image issues, not the safety issues. And while the players are posturing and the league is turtling on this issue, the fans get to watch elite players like Demitra and Ohlund not play due to eye injuries, and players like Brian Berard are permanently maimed, lose their career and will have their lives changed — all for our entertainment.

Eyes are irreplaceable — they affect a player’s career, and more importantly, their life. The attitude that it’s a personal choice is a false one, or else the NHL ought to remove their rules requiring helmets, pads and cups (although, speaking of thinking with the wrong part of their body, if you think any hockey player is stupid enough to play without a cup… — but these same players are more than willing to risk their eyes?). As fans, eye injuries cost us the ability to watch these players — is the league really better because Demitra’s out for a few weeks?

Visors aren’t a complete solution, and we can’t prevent injuries just by wearing visors, but they are an easy way to reduce these injuries, and the only thing standing between a player and the loss of an eye is the macho attitude of canadian hockey players (thank you, Don Cherry) — European players seem to have no problem wearing visors and succeeding in the NHL using them. It’s time for the NHL to stop thinking with its testosterone and make visors mandatory for players in the league. Either that, or OUTLAW cups unless you also wear a visor. It’s a lot easier to go through life minus a testicle or two than it is going through life without an eye or two — but you wouldn’t know it the way the league acts.

(update)

Darren Eliot chimes in:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/inside_game/darren_eliot/news/2001/02/12/eliot_insider/

Fixing Hockey: protecting the head

Here’s a piece I’ve been meaning to write for a while…

While he was in San Jose, we got to know Jay More a little bit. A very nice, quiet, somewhat shy person who happens to work in front of a crowd of 20,000 people every night. Nice wife, nice kids.

Or more correctly, USED to work in front of a crowd of 20,000 people. Jay took a hit to the head, went down, and never got back up. Concussion. Long-term post-concussion syndrome — the same problem that’s cost the league Brett Lindros, Pat LaFontaine, Nick Kypreos, and has now made Eric Lindros basically unhireable in the NHL, because one more hit to the head and he’s a 50 year old boxer leaking lime jello out his ears.

The NHL has to get serious about hits to the head. Period. Exclamation point. How many more guys need to be sitting in a dark room three years after a forced retirement to keep the migraines at bay, before the NHL fixes the damn problem?

Here’s the problem, as well documented by writer Jeff Shultz:

(document no longer available)

We have a coach (Ron Wilson) yelling at his players (Brendan Witt) to “get” someone, quote-unquote. That someone was Andrew Brunette. End result? A fist to the head, a concussion, multiple games missed (so far) by Brunette, and a $1000 fine to Witt, which his teammates likely passed the hat around to help pay off. No fine or suspension to wilson for overtly ordering the hit. No suspension to Witt. Witt wasn’t even issued a minor penalty, tahnks to the NHL’s “what’s a penalty in the first period isn’t a penalty in the 3rd, because we have dinner reservations to keep” mentality of referees (but — that’s another rant, later)

Earlier this year, Louie Debrusk skated up behind Todd Harvey, and put him down with a brutal elbow to the head, which left him with a concussion, pinched nerves, and whiplash. Game misconduct — no suspension. harvey is STILL not playing. Harvey never saw him coming, because Harvey made the mistake of trying to play hockey, not realizing he was about to be attacked from behind for no reason.

To be fair, the NHL has gotten better at dealing with blows to the head. They’ve gone from completely oblivious to merely horrible. Players and the union make small talk about taking responsibility — but nobody does it. Even though the players are doing it to themselves, there’s no leadership in the union to stand up and say “dammit! enough!” and take the issue to the league and to its membership to do something.

It’s time for the NHL to do something about this, before we lose more players, before we end up with a breathing vegetable on the ice that makes yet another PR travesty for the NHL to try to live down its (not completely undeserved, but overblown) reputation as a goon sport.

And the answer is simple — you have to give players, and teams, motivation to change their behavior. All the talk in the universe means nothing without some teeth to make them think about it.

Here’s how you make them change.

Any blow to the head, for any reason, by intent or by accident, is an immediate major penalty and game misconduct — unless the two players are in a fight and both players have their gloves off. If they’re fighting, let them fight. If ONE guy is beating the crap out of another guy, you stop it. A player gives his approval to fight by dropping his gloves. Until he does — you don’t touch his head.

I don’t care why a guy gets hit in the head. I don’t care who hits who. I don’t care what body part gets hit. You don’t touch a player’s head. I don’t care if you knee him while he’s n the ice. I don’t care if you elbow him in the ear. I don’t care if you highstick him. YOU DON’T DO IT. PERIOD.

You’ll be amazed how fast players will learn to keep their damn sticks down when they realize the league is serious about this. right now, they don’t have to. what’s a two minute penalty? Nothing. So make it a major anda game. Make it hurt. Make it stick.

How do you make it stick? simple:

The league adopts a rule allowing video replay for hits to the head. Every NHL game is reviewed by the league office. Any blow to the head that is caught on tape but not penalized during the game is called for a one-game suspension of the player — and a two game suspension of the referees that missed the call.

Does a player have to die or turn into a vegetable to do something about it? If we do, how many more do we need before they’ll get serious about this?

the league office is horribly irresponsible in their dealings with blows to the head, but so are the teams, the board of governors, and the union. it’s union members attacking each other here — where is the union? Other than making excuses?

There’s no reason — NONE — for this behavior. And in any sport but hockey, that kind of behavior isn’t tolerated. In real life, it has it’s own term: criminal.

but in hockey — it’s just gritty physical play. Unless you’re the grittee, and not the gritter. And you can be gritty and physical and not attempt to scramble someone’s brains and ruin their life — at least, if you have a modicum of talent. And if you don’t, the NHL doesn’t need you.

time for the league to get serious about head hits, before someone dies. We’ve already lost too many good players for them to be sitting around whining about players needing to be responsible — force responsibility on them. Now.

more chuqui grumpies: telling me to do it your way.

as long as I’m being grumpy, let me grump about another thing that drives me crazy…

Today, a member of a list I’m on posted this, aimed at me:

> Excuse the shouting, but I have made this request repeatedly, first
> in message footers, then at the beginning, and yet it seems to be roundly
> ignored. I do not need to get two copies of every message sent to this
> list in response to mine: the one delivered to the list will suffice.

Yes, he was being roundly ignored. The thread developed into a bit of a discussion over it, and while I’d originally planned on letting it drop, I finally chirped… As long as I’m chirping, I might as well throw it out to annoy everyone….

You know, I was going to let this drop, since I didn’t want to turn it into an argument, but since it is anyway, I’ll chime in:

He can ask. he can’t demand. Since philosophically I’m strongly against the request he made, I ignore it. Just because he asks for it doesn’t mean he gets it, and since I’m in control of my email client (not him), all he can do is ask. And asking in ever louder and more frustrated voices doesn’t help him get what he wants, something he should realize by now (at least with me… grin)

That is why I suggested the PROPER way to do this is to fix it on his own local system, since he does have control of it. If you want your email some specific way, set up your system to present it that way. Don’t whine at everyone else to change their lives to your convenience — fix your computer.

Not only is that more effective, because your computer HAS to listen to you and I don’t, it’s a lot lower on the frustration level, because as rich has to remember from the early days of USENET, educating users DOESN’T FRICKING WORK because every time you educate one, two more pop up who are new and even less capable of understanding why they need to be educated, much less care about what you think. So this “do it my way” strategy is guaranteed to fail anyway, and by trying, you’re wasting your own time and energy, and raising your blood pressure at the same time. That’s a stupid way to handle something.

Find a way to solve it, not complain about it. And that means doing it using things you CAN control, and that doesn’t include the users around you.

here’s why, by the way. I filter all of my list mail to folders, which I can read in my free time, so it doesn’t get in the way of my “real” e-mail. If I’m in a conversation (like this one), I WANT a private copy, because it flags to me that a conversation I’m in needs to be looked at. That keeps the threads I’m involved in directly moving forward on a timely basis, without requiring me to plow through all of my list mail wondering if a discussion I’m involved in needs my attention. That’s good for the list (IMHO) because it keeps discussions from going stale for six hours and then picking up again.

But if someone doesn’t send me a private copy, I don’t yell at them. Things might slow down a bit, but the world won’t end, either.

(why do people, in a large, complex environment like the internet, seem to think the answer to their problems it to tell everyone else to do it the way they want? if you want something done a specific way, teach your own system to do it for you…..)

Be nice to those who do the heavy lifting…

Russell Beattie writes a short lament on the realities of releasing code as open source.

The executive summary: it can turn into a real hassle. People ask you to fix things, you don’t have time, or don’t want to, or don’t think it ought to be done, or…

Name it. Honestly, it’s not limited to open source. Anyone who gets involved in a project or runs something that other people use runs into this. We dealt with it back when the Backbone Cabal was trying to figure out how to run USENET. Laurie and I deal with it with the mailing list systems and other sites we manage. It’s one of the reasons I mothballed hockeyfanz.com, and why it hasn’t come back to life yet.

Russell Beattie writes a short lament on the realities of releasing code as open source.

The executive summary: it can turn into a real hassle. People ask you to fix things, you don’t have time, or don’t want to, or don’t think it ought to be done, or…

People tend to forget that the people doing all of this have lives, and those lives aren’t dedicated to waiting around for people to come up and say “hey! I wish your thingie did this and that!” — and most folks are actually pretty reasonable about it, to be honest. but there’s a small subset that seems to have taken “the customer is always right” completely to heart, and now honestly believe that really means “you shall give the customer anything they ask for, now, without questions”.

Those people get upset when I say “maybe that’s how your site will run when you build it, but not here…” as if their asking for something means I have no say in the matter. A few folks go so far as to think we’re somehow slaves to them, and get upset when we refuse to accept that.

And that gets really frustrating. Sometimes it gets frustrating when people ahve good ideas, but not ones you want to implement. Or wish you could, but know you’ll never have time — and yet they won’t implement it, either. (It’s fun, at times, to watch the reaction to people on the various open source lists making enhancement request when the reply is “great idea. start typing, submit a patch”. Some do. Some — don’t. Some — don’t, very loudly.

What we’re really talking about is — tech support. Which in real companies is generally a separate group of people, dedicated to that task. and those folks (I did it for about a decade, because I love the customer focus) are generally overworked, underpaid, not given the resources or access they need, and somehow find a way to mostly make it work anyway, all the while being one of the more visible faces of the company to the customer. Bad tech support can kill you in oh so many ways, so fast — but it’s usually one of the first to see budget cuts (or never get the budget in the first place). I’ve never understood that attitude, but I think it comes down to companies not really understanding what tech support is for a company, and instead seeing it as a way to use cheaper talent to keep the engineers focused on project work. (personally, I think ALL engineers ought to have tos pend time talking to customers who actually are trying to use what they built, but many engineers can’t handle real people, and can’t deal with finding out that what they wrote is crap, or merely incomprehensible to anyone but the author. That’s why engineers tend to hate tech support folks — because it’s tech support’s job to make sure everyone knows who isn’t wearing any clothes, and that creates conflict. So support ends up, politically, somewhere just above tech writers in the political scheme of things in companies. Which explains why manuals generally suck, too…)

hackers (and admins) need to understand that anything thy put out there for people to use — will get used. If you don’t want to manage or maintain it, you probably don’t want to put it out there. (with software, put it out public domain instead of open source, and make it clear they’re welcome to it, but don’t expect you to do anything with it. On a couple of projects I did a while back, that’s exactly what I did, and — others took up where I left off and made it even better…)

and users? Please: the relatively few percent of the net building stuff that the majority of you use don’t like being treated like your slaves. Most of us, in fact, want little more than an occasional “thank you”, or at least understanding when we don’t respond to email within 30 minutes (when I’m putting in 50-60 hour weeks, a guaranteed way to PISS ME OFF is send me email asking about your list subscriptions here at home, and then start complaining that I haven’t answered you yet. I get frustrated enough when I’m 200 pieces of email behind that I don’t need hourly reminders I’m not caught up yet…….). We’re all in this together, at least in theory, but if you piss off the builders and they stop building, there won’t be any fun toys to play with any more…

King of Hearts

King of Hearts, 1967, Alan Bates.

A movie out of my past, back in my “what is reality, anyway and why should I care?” phase (other movies from that phase include Harold and Maude and Phantom of the Paradise), the DVD is in French with English subtitles, and forces you to take a close look at what reality is.

During WW I, the Germans are evacuating a French village, and decide to leave a trap that will blow up the town after the British enter. The citizenry leave the town in fear, and the inmates of the local asylum escape and enter the town to take over their fantasy roles in the emptied city. Into this the British send Alan Bates to meet up with the resistance contact, not knowing everyone in the city is insane.

or are they? The movie makes some interesting comparisons about the subjectivity of sanity, especially when it comes to war.

Going back and revisiting fondly remembered things from the past can be risky. Not all of these items age well, or turn out to be as good as you remembered them to be. Sometimes, honestly, it’s better to leave them in the past without any of the tarnish of today.

King of Hearts in the modern context ages well, with an interesting, powerful message, although it now has a minor feeling of, well, Quaintness.

I’ll give it a B+ for a message that’s an interesting counterpoint to the current fun and games over Iraq, being an enjoyable romp back into an earlier time in my life, and by maintaining enough grace over the years to be worth viewing again.

Men With Brooms

At February 10, 2003
By Chuq Von Rospach
In FYC - Books, Movies, and Music, Sports
0

Yes, I’m a fan of curling. deal with it.

So it was with some interest last year while watching the Brier that they were advertising a curling movie, Men With Brooms, starring Leslie Nielsen, Paul Gross, and Molly Parker.

Not surprisingly, it only played in theaters in Canada. To my surprise, I found it was available this year at amazon on video and DVD, so I grabbed a copy.

The story is right out of the Sports Movie Cliche Handbook: a team of curlers with great promise breaks up for reasons never really explained; the coach of the team dies of a heart attack, and leaves a video demanding the team get back together and fulfill his dream. Each team member has his own demons and challenges, but they rise to the occasion, suffer setbacks, break up, face their demons and get back together for the final run.

Leslie Nielsen plays the father of one of the team members and coach for the rebuilt team — and as the old guy in the movie who survives on pschelic mushrooms has some of the best lines in the movie, enhanced by his sense of timing.

But it’s not enough to save this movie. it can’t decide it it wants to be Bull Durham, Caddyshack, or some teenage raunch movie, so it tries to be all three at once, and succeeds at none of them.

The Bull Durham parts come from characters trying to face up to mistakes in their past to see if they live them down to succeed this time, and wondering if they still have it in them to do so.

The Caddyshack aspects come from the reality that you can’t have a Leslie Nielsen movie without comedy and slapstick. Unfortunately, none of it is sustained, and most of it just isn’t that funny, and all of it seems to be placed in the storyline to keep you from really getting to know or care about the characters trying to do the Bull Durham thing.

And then when they couldn’t figure out what else to do to move things along, they generally seemed to have decided to take a couple of the characters and send them more or less off-stage to get more or less naked, to do some more or less humping, most of which has little to do with the main plot. One of the taemmates, however, is strugglling against abysmally low sperm counts in his attempts to get his wife pregnant, which leads to the ability to randomly insert scenes of his wife running in yelling “honey! I’m ovulating” and them running off to go screw.

The movie is rife with anti-american sniping, which in all honesty, I don’t mind, except most of it isn’t all that well done.

Overall, I give the movie a C-. There are worse ways to waste an evening, but at the same time, it could have been a much better movie with some focus and better scriptwriting. As an intorduction to curling for non-curling fans, it’s pretty useless. I’d recommend this movie mostly to those looking to spend an evening where you don’t have to think too hard, and you don’t mind improving the movie with a couple of Molson’s or Moosehead’s.

(do they win the ultimate battle? Let’s just say the final battle comes down to winning at all costs vs. winning with honor, and honor wins out, but in a way I found ambiguous and unsatisfying…)

Mild Concussions are still a problem

here’s an interesting piece about new research showing that even mild concussions can still cause real problems. All the more reason to take head injuries and shots to the head even more seriously.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/866906.asp

My dad steals “the axe”

This URL might seem strange, but — Cecil Rospaw is actually my father. My family’s traditional name is Von Rospach, which traces back a few generations to the Alsace region of France (or Germany, depending on who took it over last). In WW II, having a German surname became politically difficult, so the name was americanized. when I graduated from high school, I decided to return to the family’s true name, and became a Von Rospach again…

http://www.stanford.edu/group/axecomm/history/daily_46theft.html.

Chuqui: an autobiography

Fortunately, not yet posthumous. More stuff than you probably remotely want to know about me….

(Originally written in January, 2001 as part of my annual review to myself. For an example of my latest self-review, see .

Updated January, 2003 where I felt if needed to be)

To figure out where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve were. If you don’t, you run the risk of circling back and revisiting places you’d rather not be. But to explain where I’ve been, I also have to revisit some of those areas, and to be honest, I don’t want to — I’m shaped by my past, but my past isn’t something I really enjoy wandering in, so you’ll have to excuse me if I skip stuff and give short shrift to other.

For instance, high school. I was two people in high school —

There was a public me, who was involved in, well, pretty damn much everything; athletics (I played what I could, I managed what I couldn’t, and I more or less lived in the gyms, and graduated with three varsity basketball, two varsity football and one or two varsity baseball letters, all as manager. I also swam, did some water polo (including goalie), wrestled a little, racquetball, and bike racing. Of these, the only ones I was remotely good at were racquetball and my cycling, which ended when I wracked my knees in a crash. After that, I slowed down significantly, becoming, well, a bit of a slug, something I’m today trying to fix, slowly by surely), drama (some acting, more tech), speech and debate (almost going to state finals once), school journalism (sports editor, duh), photography — even in high school I dabbled in lots of stuff, because I was interested in lots of stuff, a habit that continues today (but which is a double-edged banana, since if you play with too many toys, you never get good enough with any toy to master it.

But there was a private me as well, which few saw (including my parent, who were amazed when I leveled with them a few years ago, and I’m not sure they really believe me) — high school was a brutally unhappy time that led to three suicide attempts, two of them serious; it was a time when I learned to manipulate the jock culture to skate through school, leaving me completely unready for a college environment I couldn’t manipulate, and, of course, girls, a subject I flunked horribly and which it took me a long time to finally get my act together on. Compound that with having very close friends killed in auto accidents both my sophomore and junior year (both alcohol related, of course). Given that I was intermittently suicidal for two and a half years and depressed when I wasn’t — you get the idea that high school really sucked (and mom was surprised when I tried to bail on graduation…. I lost that fight). I can honestly say that it’s because of three teachers who figured it out and cared, and a couple of dear friends who also figured it out and intervened — that I’m here at all. About a decade ago, I went back and tracked them all down to say thank you, and was able to find all but one — the girl who was (platonically) key to keeping me sane enough to stay alive until I found myself again. To her, I’m eternally grateful, wherever she is. (if I were a christian who believed that my god intervenes in mundane affairs and all life is controlled by that being, I’d declare her to be an angel. But I’m not, and I believe in being responsible for my own actions, even the stupid ones, and not relying on letting someone else take the responsibility or blame, she’s instead a very caring person who’s debt I’ll never repay, no matter how much I pay forward against the balance….)

So you’ll excuse me if I leave my high school days where they belong, dead and buried — other than to say it left me with a strong interest in exploring everything, a strong belief the special people can make a big difference, a huge debt (my life!) I’ve tried to pay forward in reward to people who did the same to me, an ability to study organizations and figure out how to take advantage of the politics of them, a love of sports and the whole jock environment and bad knees…

I entered college in 1977, completely unprepared. I wandered looking for a reason to be there, finally ended up in theater, joined the debate team. Did badly at everything. Then in 1978, looking for an easy way to avoid math — I found a class in something called “introduction to basic programming”. Love at first sight, to put it mildly. It also led to me being kicked out of school for bad grades, so I ended up at a 2 year to get things back under control, but I finally knew what I wanted to be when I grew up, and life finally had a purpose.

Around then I discovered there was a group of people who were using the school systems to (gasp) communicate, not just use them for homework. The main computer was a CDC Cyber, and it connected all of the campuses of the CSU system. Someone had written an e-mail program in APL, there was actually a real-time chat system called (amazingly) $talk, and someone else had written (in fortran!) a program where you could leave messages for others to read and reply to called the Latrine Wall (what do you want to do? #1(read) or #2(write)?) I had no clue at the time, and neither did any of the people doing this, but they’d independently invented the BBS system. Over time, I took over running the Latrine wall, and added new versions for other topics (my primary interest being SF), then rewrote the code so a single program could (gasp) handle different topics from a single program (um, it was 1978. I was writing in fortran. CDC fortran, on a Cyber with 6 bit bytes and 60 bit words, and lower case too 12 bits… and I’m doing text hacking…)

The CSU group topped out about 200-250 people. Over time, it developed a strong, if distributed culture. There were parties, there were romances. There were fights. We wasted an enormous amount of time in chat and e-mail and on the boards. The admins wanted us dead, but had trouble keeping up with us (after a while, they gave up). And then I got introduced to the Arpanet, and SF-Lovers.

My first e-mail address was chuqui@mit-ai.arpa. You weren’t just talking around the state — my god, there were even thousands of folks out there. Absolute heaven.

By this point, I’d figured out enough about my head to actually be able to date without self-destructing (or wishing I would). The first woman I ever got truly serious about I met over $talk, taking her out after she’d flunked a final and needed to be distracted — I was at CSU Fullerton (aka the Fullerton University Center of Knowledge, as we called it until our debate coaches noticed…), she was at CSU Long Beach, and she got dragged to Disneyland (where I was working at the time…). I mention that only because I just got a card from her and her husband, and they’re about to celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary — he was a close friend of mine, and I stepped out of the picture to let them figure all of this out. I’m thrilled to know it was the right decision, too — and the synchronicity of it is that he, unless he’s changed jobs without me knowing it, designs rides for Disney… (Jon and Karyn, congrats!)

My first professional programming job was in 1979, programming fortran on a data general Nova. By late 1980, I was working full time with computers, had quit Disney (1976-1980), left school (with 60 units left for a BSCS, 45 of them general ed), and had firmly entrenched computers in my life…

In early 1980, although through the computers, I met the woman who’d become my first wife, a marriage which lasted four years and proved mostly that (a) we’d married the wrong person, (b) I wasn’t nearly emotionally ready to be married, and (c) slow engagements are a damn good thing. We moved from the LA area to the San Francisco bay area in 1982, and divorced in 1984. And that’s all I plan on saying about my first wife, since she was a good person, simply the wrong one, and despite that, she was the person who finally helped me grow up and be able to deal with life for real. We parted, if not friends, friendly, and I believe in letting her enjoy her life without being reminded of my continued existance… (we have, actually, talked a few times, but don’t try to keep in touch. Why should we?)

During this time I’d switched to the Arpanet (later known as this beast called the Internet), discovered Usenet (I’m honestly not sure when, but by January 1983, I’d already attached my then-company’s minicomputer to it via uucp), and on usenet in the comics groups, I met the person who would become my second (and final) wife — Laurie, who happened to be at Purdue at the time. When she graduated, she took the bold step of moving west, waited patiently for me to get my head together enough to try it again, and we were married in 1987, so we’re a few years behind Jon and Karyn, but chasing them…

Even then, computer (and long distance) romances were unusual — our life once made the Washington post in a feature, and again somewhere else I no longer remember. Now, of course, this stuff is almost routine, but back then, people thought we were crazy, but Laurie and I had something most relationships didn’t to build on — we talked, no, communicated. A lot. About everything. Enough to piss off more than one uucp admin around the country for running up their phone bills (people who know today’s internet only won’t understand that. I’ll explain some day) — and it built a strong enough relationship to make it all work (it didn’t help that on our first meeting, we were rather taken with each other as well, when I roadtripped through Purdue on a weekend during a business trip..)

And since then, life’s been pretty damn good. Laurie helped me finish the job of getting my life together, and it’s sometimes been interesting, sometimes stressful, but it’s never once been something I’ve had second thoughts about.

And hopefully, this gives a little glimpse into why I’m me — the sports interest that led to hockeyfanz.com (although how an LA bike and beach bum ended up a hockey fan is another story…), the interest in computers and more specifically the net, my committment to paying forward into the net and making it a better place, of trying to be there for people when they need me, of finding causes that deserve a piece of me and finding a way of giving it.

I’m now at the point in my life where almost half of it has been attached to the Internet in its various forms, and I’ll make no bones of the fact that the net has always been a significant part of my life (sometimes, the primary focus). And while more than once I’ve been told to get a life, those folks don’t have a clue. I have one, a pretty damn good one (and a better one than I had back when I was desperately trying to be normal…) — virtual communities really aren’t virtual. They’re just enabled differently. And getting a life has nothing to do with computers. computers don’t have lives — people do. Or don’t. And whether a person has a life has nothing to do with whether they’re on a computer or not…

And I wouldn’t have it any other way…

Some (hopefully short) notes on things I’m interested in, or involved with, so if you seem we walking down the street, you can walk up and say “compadre! I’m involved in that, too!” (or run off and look for a hiding place, if you prefer…)

With computers and the net (can they even be separated any more?), my main interest is in working with and building communities (on-line communities aren’t virtual, they’re just enabled differently…)– which is something I’ve been doing going back to about 1979, although it wasn’t until three or four years ago I put a name on it. Although I’ve been involved in USENET and mailing lists for most of that time, USENET is dead (although the body is so big and decentralized there’s no brain to recognize the body is rotting), and I’ve come to the realization that mailing lists suck as a community tool — it’s just that until the last couple of years, there weren’t any alternatives, or they sucked even worse. Those tools are just now maturing, and I’m now starting to investigate them seriously. The biggest problem (and it’s NOT a problem, really) is that people are conditioned to and comfortable with lists, and they tend to think they work at this stuff. If they’re happy, I don’t plan on screwing it up but I think over time, most of the community aspects of mailing lists will move to other formats, primarily on the web.

Laurie and I have no kids (by choice), but instead, have our birds and cats. Currently we’re blessed with three canaries, two cockatiels and Tatiana, an umbrella cockatoo (practically speaking, a four year old with an air horn and a claw hammer…). We’re currently working on adopting in a pair of rescued cockatiels, and that should happen in the next week or so.

One of our cats is a feral rescue, the other adopted out of the local humane society. One is an extremely reserved, intelligent cat, the other is a brainless, golden-retriever-esque bundle of happy energy. I’ve never been a cat person — never — and I’ve always, always wanted a dog in the house (but free time and logistics have always gotten in the way). I now have one, too, but it’s stuck inside the body of a tiny calico cat…

The cockatoo is our kid — as I like to joke, we name our vet as “pediatrician” on our tax forms. Cockatoos are highly social, intelligent animals with a definite personality, a strong intellect and a stubborn personality. Developmentally, they ARE about the same as a three or four year old. Old enough to get in amazing trouble, almost old enough to know they shouldn’t, but more than willing to do it anyway. And unlike many birds that are kept as pets, cockatoos (who’s nickname is “love sponge”) are very demanding of your time. Just like, oh, a 3-4 year old…

The cats live in the back of the house, the birds in the front, and they mix only under supervision, cages notwithstanding. One of our cats has learned that the birds are offlimits, but the retriever-cat hasn’t figured it out yet.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve gotten involved in astronomy, since a friend has access to the telescope on Fremont Peak. A year ago we bought our first telescope, which we’ve only had time to use about four times, but now that some of the worst of the tech development is winding down, I hope that’ll change for the better.

When I hit 40 and decided middle age wasn’t all that bad (I had my midlife crisis at 25, in all honesty, and it’s been gravy since…), I’ve started rediscovering things I did earlier in life that had fallen by the wayside. I bought a bike, and have used it sparingly. I’ve been slowly building a woodshop in the garage 9at least the parts there’s room for tools in). I’ve been getting involved in gardening again fairly seriously, and dabbling with my needlepoint again. And Laurie’s been trying to teach me to identify birds when we birdwatch, but I’m pretty rotten at it still.

Even though I no longer write SF, I still read some, but I’m pretty disgusted with the field and the quality of writing. Much of my reading has shifted to other areas, including mysteries, but in all honesty I read very little fiction any more. Instead, I’ve started reading a lot more history and non-fiction, and have gotten rather interested in Roman Britain and World War II military history, especially naval warfare, double-especially submarine warfare. Why? Hell if I know… but it’s fascinating stuff.

And I’m a science and tech nut — part of my training to be a science fiction writer, I browse what’s happening in the sciences with the enthusiasm of an omnivore in a spring meadow… I’m not trying to be an expert in anything, but I enjoy learning and studying pretty much everything…

The life cycle of a coach…

The life cycle of a coach.

If you are a disciplinarian coach, (what I call a “bad cop” coach), you get hired by a team who has players who are consistently underperforming, don’t show a strong committment to the game, float, phone things in, or generally just don’t look like they care much about playing the game. As a “tough” coach, you put in tough practices, yell a lot, skate them until they puke, and generally drill marshall them to their potential. Initially, players tend to respond to this, because they know they were slacking off.

Eventually, though, players get tired of being yelled at, and being treated like children who can’t run their own lives (even though under their previous coach, they proved they couldn’t). the coach starts making them crazy. they start tuning him out. Play gets erratic, team ethics fade, and players start looking uncaring, distracted, and generally grumpy and pissed. nobody smiles any more, or laughs. players arrive at the last second for practice and leave as quickly as possible after, because being there is No Fun At All.

Eventually, the team stops winning. The coach tries to fix it, and can’t. Eventually, the GM fixes it by firing the coach, which is generally a player’s coach, since right now, the players hate everyone, starting with themselves, the coach, the gm, and the ice guys. they also hate the game and play like it.

The player’s coach (aka “the good cop”) laughs a lot, tells stupid jokes, puts shaving cream in guy’s skates just before practice (and punishes them for being late), and generally acts like a clown. his job it to get players to stop hating the game again, while still teaching them how to play it to win.

For a while, it works. Players appreciate “a friend” as opposed to that last SOB they were playing for. They respond, play well, smile a lot, show up early, practice late, hang around the locker room, and turn into a team. Eventually, however, they start getting comfortable and complacent. A guy will miss a practice. He’ll cut 10 minutes off his bike time. He’ll stay out a little late. He and his linemates will sneak out after curfew to a strip club and get into a fight.

Eventually, everyone gets too happy, too soft, complacent. they start underperforming, discipline goes down. Everyone looks like they’re spending too much time partying and too little time practicing. The team stops winning, because it’s game has lost all discipline.

And the GM looks around and realizes it’s time to make a change, so he pulls out the rolodex, and starts looking up names filed under “bad cop”……

my cut on the McLaren trade…

I like the McLaren trade. I think it works for everyone.

San Jose drops most of Sundstrom’s salary and uses him to turn Jillson into a finished player overnight.

Montreal gets depth at forward (and I think Sundstrom gets a fresh start, which he seems to need. How he’ll do will have to wait for 15 games…), and gets rid of about $2million US in salary they can use for something else, instead of paying way too much for an increasingly unhappy backup goalie.

Boston gets the goalie they wanted (who is thrilled to be able to play again), and a top prospect for a guy who told them to go to hell.

Hard to find a loser in this deal, IMHO, player or team. Montreal’s success here depends on what they do with the money they won’t pay hackett, but even cutting costs in today’s NHL isn’t a bad idea…

This is the kind of trade I like. Everyone feels they benefitted in some way. It may be more fun for fans to feel like they ripped off some other team, but it just doesn’t happen all that often.

The last days of Darryl Sutter

How does a coach go from being coach of a division winning team to unemployed? Since most fans have no connection inside of a team, firings many times seem sudden and arbitrary. Sometimes they are. But most times, if you know how to find it, there’s a history that builds up over time that — in retrospect — that clearly points to the inevitable…

I’ve been arguing with myself whether to post this or not. I’m still of mixed minds, but I think it’s got value.

I just didn’t think Sutter was the problem. So his firing came as a major surprise to me. But I was at the point where I felt something had to happen, and said so. I just didn’t think it’d be the coach.

But after talking to a lot of people (see footnote1) and trying to get to the reality of the situation, I’ve come to realize that it was time for Darryl Sutter to move on, and I think the only person who realized that was GM Dean Lombardi.

Coaches have a shelf life. With few exceptions (Scotty Bowman being the primary one in hockey, and HE was fired more than once) coaches only last a few years before they lose their effectiveness with a team. When you hit that point as a coach, you’ve hit the expiration date on the “use by” tag. That was, ultimately, why Sutter was fired. The team was hearing, but not listening. Playing hard as individuals, but not together as a team. And Sutter couldn’t fix it.

That, essentially, was Sutter’s problem. Sutter has a distinct personality and coaching style. He’s a strict disciplinarian, sometimes abrupt, sometimes crude, sometimes bordering on abusive. This is not a criticism — it’s a fact of life in coaching and the NHL. you don’t get there without a few choice cuss words.

Sutter had a specific style in the game he coached and the way he coached. It’s an effective style, but it has limited flexibility, both strategically and personally. Sutter is — Sutter. The problem with this — and the reason most coaches have a limited shelf life — is that if you have someone saying the same things to you day after day, over time, you tend to tune it out. For some coaches, the only way to break through this is by getting louder, which works for a while, but ultimately, they hit a point where you can’t turn up the volume knob any further.

The seeds of this firing go back a number of seasons. In my discussions, it became clear that there were warning signs going back a number of years. Sutter brings many strengths to the game as coach: he’s a pretty strong tactical coach, good at line matching, and brings the legendary Sutter work ethic and discipline. He doesn’t expect anything more out of his players than he expects out of himself — but being a Sutter, he expects a lot of himself.

Not all players can handle the demands of playing for a Sutter, but those who do come out of it better men. But one spot where I think Sutter’s weaknesses are a potential problem is his dealing with young players. Sutter doesn’t seem to see teaching as a big part of his job, and in today’s NHL, that simply isn’t true. He also isn’t at his best interacting with the younger players.

If you look through the Sharks years with Sutter, you see a string of struggles by their younger players. Patrick Marleau, Brad Stuart, Scott Hannan, Shawn Heins, Alex Korolyuk. Youngsters with various levels of potential, who tended to show intriguing results as a rookie, and then ran into a sophomore slump. But kids have sophomore slumps — so you don’t think about it much.

But maybe we should have. As part of my looking around the firing, I ran into an interesting set of rumors that all dovetailed together. Multiple stories of youngsters expected to be adult veterans, yelled at in practices, thrown into situations they couldn’t handle with little support system from the sharks staff. Two different sources told me that the mysterious replacement of Sutter’s assistant coaches Paul Baxter and Bob Berry was forced on Sutter by Lombardi in an attempt to bring in people more able to relate with the younger players. They were replaced by Cap Raeder and Lorne Molleken, and then later, Raeder went back to the east coach where he works the college scouting circuit, and was replaced Rich Preston.

One source told me quite explicitly that the reason Patrick Marleau developed into the player he’s shown himself to be this year is because of Lorne Molleken, not Sutter. I’ve heard from friends of two players who’s attitude towards Sutter can only be described as “angry and bitter” over how they were treated as a 1st and 2nd year player. Sutter, from everything I’ve heard, wasn’t trying to destroy the kids, but the kids might not agree. What he saw as tough love and acting like a professional, the kids saw more as thrown into the pool with a cement lifesaver.

And at the same time — these same players recognize how much they learned from Sutter, and as far as I can tell, to a man, would play for him again. When Al Sims was fired in San Jose, I heard rumors of players wandering the halls under the arena singing “Ding, Dong! the Witch is Dead”. Not here. Most players were stunned and hurt that Sutter was fired, even those who also felt he didn’t handle their development well.

That’s why this firing defies easy explanation. This team hadn’t quit on Sutter (as Calgary did to Gilbert) — but it wasn’t really listening to him or playing the game he asked them to play. They didn’t always like playing for him — but they respected him and wanted to win for him. It seems weird, but more correctly, the relationship between Sutter, his coaches, and the players was a very complex one, in a business where fans love to try to simplify things.

While hints of impending doom rattle back through the years as far back as 1999, Sutter’s firing really seems to have taken tangible form last season. It became clear last summer that some kind of fight was going on inside the Sharks. I never quite figured out what was going on, but things were leaking out that some people wanted Sutter fired, other people wanted Lombardi fired, there seemed to be people who wanted everyone fired, and for a while, it wasn’t sure who might get contracts and who didn’t. Lombardi sold his house, officially to simplify life (and I still can’t decide whether to believe him or not — but I tend to think it’s true; at the same time, it also made it easier for him to walk away if he didn’t get what he wanted to stay). Lombardi eventually got a multi-year deal, Sutter a one year. The one year deal raised eyebrows, too.

I now think I have a feel for what went down. It has to be remembered the Sharks faded towards the end of last season, playing just over .500 for the last 20 games. At the time, some folks on the Sharks list felt the team was tuning Sutter out and called for his replacement. Most of us, of course, pointed out that Sutter won the division, and that any thought of firing him was lunacy.

It turns out that same fight went on inside the Sharks. In one corner, advocating replacing Sutter during the summer, is Dean Lombardi. He saw the team tuning sutter out. he saw the team coasting and sputtering. He saw a growing conflict with his coach over certain players and how they were used (or not): two that seem to be points of contention are Alexander Korolyuk and Shawn Heins, but they’re mere shadows of the fight to come.

(Shawn Heins played 17 games in 2001-2. Korolyuk played 32. Heins never saw enough playing time for me to ever decide how good a player he is, but it seemed clear Sutter didn’t think much of him; Korolyuk showed flashes of brilliance, and flashes that made you want to strangle him. In both cases, however, Dean Lombardi seemed convinced about the quality of the player to keep them — even as his coach insisted on not playing them. I could never figure out the logic of this. In reality, it seems to be a fundamental disconnect between coach and GM — Lombardi clearly felt they ought to be played. In Heins’ case, Sutter just didn’t. In Korky’s — he did, and Korolyuk couldn’t find consistency to suit Sutter or the fans. Did Korolyuk fail? Or did Sutter not create an environment he could succeed in? I know the answer I had last season and the one I have now are very different…..)

In the other corner seems to be Greg Jamison as president and speaking for the ownership group. His response seems to be the quite logical “are you crazy? he just won the division! Our fans will kill us! worse, the marketing department will!” — and if you think about it, it’s really hard to argue with that. While some fans were seeing the sputter and fade, most were seeing that division banner and playoff run. Not bringing back Sutter would have been suicide.

I get indications this fight between Lombardi and upper management got pretty, well, intense. And when it was over, Sutter got a one year deal. Effectively, double-secret probation.

Which seems to have pissed Sutter off in a major way. Among other things, he is a man with great self-confidence and pride. I think he seriously considered telling the Sharks to stuff it and keep their contract, but his ties to San Jose (his family has really settled in san Jose) and a feeling that things weren’t finished, and the reasoning that winning would be the best proof/revenge, he accepted the one year deal.

And that sets us up to this final season. The Sharks are division winners, pundits are picking them for the cup final, everything thinks life is great and a parade is just a matter of time. But in the meantime, Gary Suter retires, Stephanne Matteau moves on, Korolyuk heads off to Russia, Nabokov holds out, Stuart holds out, Nick Sundstrom screws up his visa stuff and misses camp…

And let’s not forget that along the way last season, a number of players picked up injuries, and not all of them were 100% coming into this season: Stuart (who’s still not 100%), thornton, and as far as I can tell, Nolan’s NEVER 100% any more, between his back, his groin, and his wrist. So the team that started last season on a roll and carried it through the playoffs came into this season missing some guys, with some guys hobbled, and with a feeling of “we’re division champs, and we’re off to win the cup”. No matter how hard they tried, a little bit of complacency snuck into the off season, and this team simply wasn’t ready for the start of the season.

The one player who’s loss can’t be minimized in all of this is Gary Suter. Not just for the 20 minutes a night he played, and his power play and quarterbacking. his loss forced Sutter into a position he’s not comfortable with: depending on younger players on the blueline — his senior guys were Rags and Rat now, which meant Stuart and Hannan had to pick up a lot of the slack, and Jeff Jillson was expected to be ready to contribute to the team.

That seems to be the final conflict: Jeff Jillson. Darryl Sutter believed he wasn’t ready for the NHL. Dean Lombardi was convinced he was. When Lombardi refused to listen to Sutter about Jillson, Sutter seems to have basically thrown Jillson into the deep end and let him struggle to prove a point. I’ve heard from multiple sources that Sutter was brutal to Jillson in practices. Part of this seems to have been an attempt to force Lombardi to send Jillson down to Cleveland, but I also think Jillson ended up taking some of the frustration that seemed to be going on between Sutter and Lombardi. It wasn’t long before Jillson’s confidence was shattered and his play erratic. Still, Lombardi wouldn’t send the poor kid down — to a good degree, there was a battle of the stubborns with Jillson as the pawn.

So the season opens with two sets of conflicts: the team is flat, it’s missing key guys, other guys are hurt, and it starts badly. Parallel to this, there’s the fight going on over Jillson, and that leaked out all over the players — they couldn’t miss it; hell, they couldn’t hide from it. Jillson was falling apart, and the players weren’t happy, with themselves, with their play, or what was happening.

Finally, sundstrom gets his visa, Stuart signs (but isn’t healthy), nabokov signs (but isn’t godlike). Sutter gets all his guys back, gets a few games to get everything together — and the Sharks still suck. You could see it in their play, it wasn’t coming together. they’d have a good game, then two bad ones, then a so-so one, then…. God knew what team would show up every night, but nobody else did.

I’ve heard rumors that “something” happened on that last road trip before the firing, probably in Pittsburgh, perhaps in Philly. What it is, I don’t know, but I have indications it involved Jillson. If it did happen, I don’t know what, I don’t know who was involved, but it doesn’t seem to have been the team in general (it clearly wasn’t a mutiny or any other kind of team thing) — if it happened at all. But that seems to have been the final catalyst. The Sharks finished out that road trip with a great game against the Blues, a rotten game against the Predators, and came home and stank up the joint against the coyotes. I wrote my “something has to happen” piece, and at the time I was writing that, Lombardi was calling up Jamison and saying “NOW can I fire him?” — and Jamison looked at the first 1/4 of the season and called the ownership group.

Did Lombardi set Sutter up to fire him? In all honesty, I can’t find any indication of it. Lombardi’s off-season was a typical off-season. he treated the unsigned free agents the way he always did. The injuries were out of his control, and it’s not Lombardi’s responsibility to keep the players from getting complacent (it’s partly the coach, it’s mostly the players).

If Lombardi did anything to set this up, it’s that he was convinced that Jillson was ready, and wouldn’t listen to Sutter when Sutter said he wasn’t. (note for the record: within two weeks of Ron Wilson coming on board, Jillson was quietly sent to Cleveland to recuperate and get his confidence back. To me, this is an indication of just how bad the relationship between Sutter and Lombardi had gotten: Sutter was right here, but Lombardi wasn’t listening. But if, as I think likely, Sutter had similar refrains about other kids in his preference for a veteran team, you can’t blame Lombardi for eventually tuning that refrain out, the way the players ended up tuning out Sutter, too).

To me, though, this indication that GM and Coach had hit a point where the relationship wasn’t functioning is the key indication it was time for Sutter to be replaced. If the coach and GM can’t communicate about players, you have a real problem. In this case, Jillson got stuck in the middle, and I can only hope it doesn’t screw up his development.

So my bottom line is that it was time for Sutter to be replaced — but this is about as close to a classic “no fault divorce” as you’ll ever find. I can’t find a villain anywhere in the story. Sutter did great things for the organization, and deserves every accolade he can get for that. it just — stopped working.

And if you look at other NHL teams who’s gone from doormats to champions, perhaps that’s inevitable. Bob Gainey built the Stars, but needed Ken Hitchcock to make them Cup Champions. We forget, but Scotty Bowman didn’t build the Red Wings, Jacques Demers and then Bryan Murray did, and Bowman came in to finish. In Quebec/Colorado, Dave Chambers and Pierre Page built it — and Marc Crawford finished it.

Do teams hit a point where you have to change voices to read a new level? It sure seems so to me. It’s really hard to blame Sutter for having a “use by” label on his forehead — but every coach does. His just came up a bit earlier than we expected.

—-

(footnote 1: In the years we’ve been season ticket holders with the Sharks and running our mail lists, we’ve gotten to know any number of people, players, staffers, relatives, fans. This year, the list has both people close to the Sutters and close to a number of players. They don’t talk about it on the list, generally, but some of them were willing to discuss some of what they were hearing and seeing. I try to not abuse these relationships (“Hey, jake! long time no talk! What’s the poop on the sutter firing?”), but sometimes you talk, and sometimes you listen, and I can’t help but try to put things together, because I want to understand. Some guys grew up wanting to be a pro athlete? Me, I figured out early on I wa at best a mediocre one, so I grew up wanting to be the GM…)

I survived MacWorld Expo…

well, we survived macworld. My mysterious project that I still can’t talk about (hopefully, soon, and then I’ll even be able to explain why I can’t explain) performed pretty well, although things were quite chaotic.

I’m starting to get comfortable with the Xserves and with sendmail 8.12. The Xserves are starting to kick some butt — I’m seeing 4X-5X performance pretty easily, and at times, as much as 8X my old E-250. Solid, stable, fast as blazes, and inexpensive.

8.12′s sub-queues are interesting, but they take some getting used to. I found out (the hard way) that you really can’t take 8.11 configurations and use them, you have to re-architect. Maybe small or average sites will do okay, but mine don’t qualify. So it’s been a re-thinking for me. I’m starting to settle in and get a feel for how to tune the beasts, and it seems nice and stable.

As to the Expo itself — I found it quite impressive. I think some folks haven’t figured out that Apple isn’t trying to take out Microsoft any more (the “great satan” thing was a Mike Spindler fantasy, folks, and one of the most incompetent business strategies I’ve ever seen) — but instead, a realization that Apple is better off not dependent on Microsoft, like it really was with IE. Not being the Great Satan doesn’t imply they’re our close ally. I found it significant, for instance, that microsoft was very missing from the keynote, unlike previous years. I also find it interesting that Microsoft is heavily pushing it’s “open” office format, while Steve just kinda tossed off XML, open file formats as a minor aside.

I love Safari. Already my primary browser. Perfect? no. But pretty darn good, and will improve. I love the bookmarking. So clean. And while I got used to tabs when I switched to Mozilla a couple of months ago — and I hope safari gets tabs at some point — I think most folks screaming for them should try out snapbacks. Snapbacks do 95% of what I used tabs for in pratice: I can get along without tabs quite nicely. (another standard chuqui rant: try not to think about a particular function, but what task you’re trying to accomplish. In some ways, snapbacks are BETTER and more efficient with screen real estate than tabs…)

I’ve seen a couple of mac rumor sites “take credit” for the ‘reversal’ of the rumors of the iLife stuff being kept free (except for iDVD). All I can say is, some folks take themselves way too seriously, and ought to get a life.

It was the kind of expo that makes me glad I’ve hung around Apple all these years. it’s still a company that believes in making a difference, not just a profit.

wrapping presents with a cat

kasia’s recent cat post reminded me I had this squirreled away waiting for time to get it posted…. Sent to me from a friend…

Wrapping Presents With A Cat

1. Clear large space on table for wrapping present. Go to wardrobe and collect bag in which present is contained, and close door.

2. Open door and remove cat from wardrobe.

3. Go to cupboard and retrieve rolls of wrapping paper.

4. Go back and remove cat from cupboard.

5. Go to drawer and collect transparent sticky tape, ribbons, scissors, labels, etc. Lay out present and wrapping materials on table, to enable wrapping strategy to be formed.

6. Go back to drawer to get string, remove cat that has been in the drawer since last visit, and collect string.

7. Remove present from bag.

8. Remove cat from bag.

9. Open box to check present, remove cat from box, replace present.

10. Lay out paper and cut to size, trying to keep the cutting line straight.

11. Throw away first sheet because cat tried to chase the scissors and tore paper.

12. Cut second sheet of paper to size by putting cat in the bag the present came out of.

13. Place present on cut-to-size paper. Lift up edges of paper to seal in present, wonder why edges now don’t reach.

14. Find cat between present and paper. Remove cat and retry.

15. Place object on paper, to hold in place, while cutting transparent sticky tape.

16. Spend next 20 minutes carefully trying to remove transparent sticky tape from cat with pair of nail scissors.

17. Seal paper down with transparent sticky tape, making corners as neat as possible.

18. Look for roll of ribbon; chase cat down hall and retrieve ribbon.

19. Re-roll up ribbon and remove paper that is now torn, due to cat’s enthusiasm in chasing ribbon end.

20. Repeat steps 10-19 until down to last sheet of paper.

21. Put present in box, and tie down with string.

22. Remove string, open box and remove cat.

23. Put all packing materials in bag with present and head for lockable room. Once inside room, lock door and start to re-lay out packing materials.

24. Remove cat from box, unlock door, put cat outside door, close door and re-lock.

25. Lay out last sheet of paper. (Admittedly this is difficult in the small area of the toilet, but try your best!)

26. Seal box, wrap with paper and start repairs by very carefully sealing down tears with transparent sticky tape. Now tie up with ribbon and decorate with bows to hide worst affected areas.

27. Label, then sit back and admire your handiwork, congratulating yourself on making good of a bad job. Unlock door, and go to kitchen to make drink and to feed cat.

28. Spend next 15 minutes looking for cat, before coming to obvious conclusion.

29. Unwrap present, untie box and remove cat.

30. Retrieve all discarded sheets of wrapping paper, feed cat and retire to lockable room for last attempt, making certain you are alone and the door is locked.

31. At time of handing over present, smile sweetly at receiver’s face, as they try and hide their contempt at being handed such a badly wrapped present.

32. Swear to yourself that next year, you will get the shop to wrap the thing for you.

Happy New Years….

I know, I know. a few days late. That’s my life these days.

Had a nice, quiet new years, dinner at a new italian place with an old friend, and then back to our place, where we talked long into the night to a bottle of Amarula cream licquer he brought back from one of his eclipse trips.

A big discussion of the evening turned into politics, especially the issues involving tech and the net — and why tech voices are disenfranchised. Which led to the beginning of a discussion about how to change that, which I think has promise. I’m still sorting out my own ideas on this, so stay tuned.

The answer is not ignoring politics, or writing witty and snide pieces on slashdot about how rotten politicians are. It’s getting involved down in the grass roots. He’s someone who has gotten involved, both in elected office and in becoming someone who’s helped explain tech policy to politicians at all levels of government, and he’s got an interesting perspective on what we’re doing wrong. I’m thinking about using that knowledge to try to generate some ideas on how we can do it better.

As Napster showed, you can ignore laws and politics only until someone decides you’re worthy of their time. We aren’t exempt from laws, we’re merely ignored until we become inconvient enough to throw lawyers at.

You don’t fix things by standing outside the building and complaining about what’s going on inside. You don’t fix things by fighting your way into the building and disrupting. Doing that stuff gets you marginalized out of the process. So the answer is to get invited inside.

And as the RIAA is showing quite clearly, you may not like how this stuff is run, but if you’re up against someone who does play the game and you don’t, you’re dead. So I think it behooves us to learn to play the game.

Exactly what that means, I’m still trying to decide.

But I seem to have taken on as my new year’s project to figure that out and try to communicate it, and hopefully help us all get better represented and part of the process. Standing on the outside and whining about it hasn’t done us any favors, has it?

Categories

Archives

Recent Comments

Search Chuqui.COM

Copyrights

Site Design

Subscribe

Where to Find Me

My Communities

Recent Blog Posts