a hundred degrees

Almost Heaven

Lexie and I are spending this week in West Virginia while my folks spend the week with my kids (and several hundred others) in vacation bible school.

We got the opportunity to come here when manasclerk told me that I should feel free to stay in his parents cabin in Spring Creek any time that I wanted to. My folks offered to keep the kids for the week, so I took him up on the offer.

It is beautiful up here. My dad could be pretty happy here with all the hiking and bike trails and rivers to boat.

One of the best surprises was an eatery in Fayetteville, WV. Pies and Pints has absolutely delicious food. When you visit the New River gorge bridge you really must plan to eat at this place.

Various Instruments

I worked through an instrument on Monday for our marriage enrichment program. This was one of those Strongly Agree - Agree - Undecided - Disagree - Strongly Disagree tests. It became so tiring with the same questions over and over that I finally started making cute little patterns with the dots. If it says that I hate my wife and am unfulfilled then at least that will provide an interesting starting point for the meetings.

I'm also in the throes of the Human Patterns test. This instrument is similar to the one I took for the temperament pigeonholing. There are sets of four words and you are to choose a Most and a Least in each group. The temperament test had twenty-four groups of words. Human patterns has 250. All these things say to go with your first instinct, but I can't help second guessing. Particularly when I find myself answering as I wish I were rather than as I think I am. And then there are odd groups like this one:
I can be: rational; even-tempered; confident; animated.
When presenting a rational argument I am confident and become animated.
Whatever. There are 249 other groups to pick up the slack. They say that you're supposed to average about fifteen seconds per question. So far I'm averaging closer to sixty. Only three and a half hours to go!

One Year Mark

I planned not to write about the fact that this is my "blogiversary" but I didn't plan what to write about, so here I am. I have missed several stretches while out of town, but generally have written something every day for the last year. Perhaps I have grown somewhat more accustomed to putting words together, which occasionally comes in handy on the job, so I'll claim that as the main benefit and not make any more of it.

Thanks to everybody who has seen fit to leave there comments here. Thanks particularly to you seven or eight regular readers for the gift of your time and attention.

ADDED: And I would be sorely remiss if I failed to thank manasclerk for the use of his server. Gracias, Amigo!

Ego Trips to North Carolina

"[T]he praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards." - Faramir to Sam The Two Towers J.R.R. Tolkien

In the summer of 1982, between my seventh and eighth grade school years, I attended Duke University for three weeks. Duke had created the Talent Identification Program (TIP) only a couple years earlier. This year their brochure requesting alum support said that they were going to be running programs at more universities around the country.

There were some really bright kids at Duke while I was there. The ones taking the math courses were serious geeks. Some of these kids completed two math courses in three weeks. I wasn't as interested in studying as in playing frisbee.

There was a golf course marked out with numbers painted on various buildings and landmarks. I played a lot. I was better than most of the kids. (I spent a lot of time with my friend John during my high school years playing pickup games of frisbee golf at the park: "See that tree over there on the other side of the backstop?"). We also played some frisbee football (now more formally called "Ultimate Frisbee"). One of those invasions of heaven into this earth occured one afternoon when we played a somewhat organized game on the mall in the pouring rain. A peak moment in my life.

These kids were the ones I probably should have been going to school with. I would not have graduated in the top ten percent, but probably somewhere in the middle. Still, I was the RA's favorite on the floor. He was afraid I was too much of a goody-two-shoes until he caught me breaking curfew by trying to read in bed with a flashlight. (Other more successful guys hid in the closets.)

Fast forward twenty-two years...

My dear friend attended a class in Raleigh this last week. He's been raving about it since he got back. He was emotionally fed by being among so many high mode folks.

Early in the class the attendees were introducing themselves. According to my buddy everybody there had been and done some pretty important/impressive things and was working with RO/SST stuff professionally. Except him. When his turn came he said something along the lines of, "Well I've done some work in IT and about a year ago I came across Jaques and connected with what I read. Since then I've been trying to learn and process all I can about his work."

The instructor, apparently feeling he hadn't given the whole picture, added, "He also writes a blog called Manasclerk's Power Struggle."

A guy near him turned and asked with hushed awe, "You're Manasclerk?"

Free Consultation

I spent over an hour on the phone today with manasclerk. I needed to talk about "Weird" Al and books and comics. For most of the time, though, I used him.

There were issues on my mind concerning the Process Improvement Committee that I wanted to discuss in SST terms. He really helped me to get at and ultimately articulate the core problems.

The bank has employed consultants for process improvement type projects several times in the past. Each time they've found that all the improvement ideas come from the bank employees. The consultants only gather and re-present information that is already inside the bank walls. Senior bank staff see this and say, "Surely we can do this ourselves."

When they responded by creating this committee, they admitted two things:

1. We have a management problem that is blocking communication flow.
2. We don't want to change management.

The CEO actually said that he wants to create a culture in which these good ideas come bubbling up to the people who can implement them. What I'm pretty sure he doesn't want to do is change our culture. I think he wants us to shoehorn some goodwill producing program into our existing culture. The bank is a little too deeply self-inculturated.

The process consultants said that we had two choices for our committee's first action. We could either choose a small process with a greater chance of success but low ultimate value or a large process with more challenges for first-time-process-improvers, more risk but likely a greater payoff.

Our real first task should not be a banking process. Our first task is to identify the management mistakes that hamper creativity and communication. Changing the management process is job one. This is hugely complex. Of course we'll need outside help. I'll see if I can get manasclerk the gig.

Bruce and RO

I haven't mentioned it over here, but I've been following and occasionally participating in the Requisite Organization discussions over on Manasclerk's Power Struggle. Now that I've added RO to my schema, I can't help but see it in a variety of workplace situations.

I watched Bruce Almighty this morning and saw a Stratum II guy given a Stratum XII job. He made level two complexity decisions that were implemented at a level seven or eight scope. Everything went badly. Within two weeks he learned to love being a Stratum II.

Validating Beliefs

"... we all have a tendency to see what validates our beliefs. Indeed, my belief system provides the schema through which I create meaning in my world." - manasclerk

"A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest. Lie la Lie..." - Simon & Garfunkel "The Boxer"

Validation using schema. These are terms used in eXtensible Markup Language (XML).

Wrting well-Formed XML is a matter of obeying the simple rules of case-sensitivity, proper tag nesting, et cetera. An XML schema definition (XSD), allows an XML document to be validated. The schema is a stricter set of rules that defines the type of data that can be found in each node of the applicant document.

I had the little-light-going-on-in-a-new-section-of-my-brain experience when I read these sentences in manasclerk's rambling post and applied these concepts to human communication. I can have well-formed english that conveys no meaning (e.g. nonsense:"The stack error plunged through the sycophantic pears like a zit on the poop deck." or the recursive:"Every statement I make is a lie."). But the schema of my belief system rejects the ideas that do not fit.

Interestingly XSD's are written with XML. So, who watches the watchmen? Whose belief system is the final word? With XML you could argue that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the final authority. At least for those that agree to let it be. That's about as well as we can do in the "real world" too: The vatican is the final word for those that allow it to be.

Let's push the similitude with another XML technology: eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT). "XSLT is an XML-based language that performs transformations of XML documents into arbitrary text-based formats, which may or may not be XML." (MOC 2310B Md.12 p.7) In other words, XSLT is XML that can change other XML. This gives us a means not only to change presentation of data, but to change schemas, and even to change the way we change things.

Lexie just finished reading Walter Tevis' Mockingbird. She told me about it over dinner on Sunday night. In the story, books are outlawed. They are seen as an invasion of privacy: Books put other people's ideas in your head.

Information can change the way you validate other information. Information can change the way you present information.

In Three Scientists and Their Gods Robert Wright describes how Edward Fredkin sees information as the most basic building block of the universe. If it exists it can be described. Which came first the description or the object? Oh, heck, don't let me drift off into OOP metaphors now.

I just wanted to say that I like belief system as schema for validating input. It seems more elgant than "world view" or "personal theology." It also fits nicely with "perception is reality."

Calvin Bashing

  As we pulled in to the parking lot at church this morning I made a prediction. "This should be a lively discussion," I prognosticated for Lexie's benefit. I was not wrong.
  I've mentioned before that our Sunday School class (internally known as the Mystics and Cynics) is using a book called Devotional Classics. It features fifty-two selections from various authors almost all of whom are dead guys. This week's reading was taken from the writings of John Calvin. Below are outtakes from the discussion.

N v. N

  The nature versus nurture thing seems to be popping up a lot in the last couple of days. There's this discussion I'm having with ManAsClerk centered around his presentation of the ideas of Elliott Jaques. Paul was just a few days ago regaling me with a story of his surprise at his wife's unfamiliarity with the idea that a four year old could be an alcoholic who just hasn't had that first drink yet. And in the few pages (297-301) of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver I read today, Dr. Leibniz socratically leads Daniel Waterhouse through a unified theory of free will and predestination, mind and body. Also, there's this compelling piece on the Columbine perpetrators that the pastor told me about.
  My own middle path is reductionism obscured by complexity. I've not thought it out too thoroughly (kind of like my idea that you have to be rich to be a Democrat: who else could afford all their damned taxes? -- Starting to understand the name of my blog?). But perhaps that too is part of the view. I have faith that all things can be traced to root physical causes and those causes are so numerous as to be incomprehensible -- unable to be circumscribed but by an infinite being. It is common of the perfectionist personality type that if we can't get something exactly right then we will abandon it. My beliefs remain unexamined because of my faith in complexity. Yeah I know that's pretty lame.

I Heard The Call at H.E.B.

  I worked a half day today, and will probably stay home all day tomorrow. The day care thinks that Madeline has pink eye. I called our pediatrician's nurse and she said that she'd have the doctor send a prescription over to H.E.B. I picked up Madeline at about 11:45 and stayed home with her for the afternoon. After Lexie got home she made me a list of the other stuff she wanted me to get at the grocery store while I was getting the prescription.

Moved

  I'm going to go ahead and move over here to the Movable Type version on processwrite. I like the fact that there are not arbitrary length limits on comments. I also like being able to categorize entries. I promise I'll work on the templates to make the site friendlier and homier in the coming weeks.
  Thanks, manasclerk, for the use and space.

I'm the laughing guy

We were so happy here. How the times have changed. I wonder where all of these people are now.

Oh wait. I'm the guy laughing . . .

Myths and Aspirations

  There's a coffee table book of Alex Ross' DC artwork called Mythology that I like to look at when I visit the book store. As a rule, I read comics for the stories and don't pay much attention to the art (unless it sucks and subsequently detracts from the story). Ross, though, paints these photo-realistic images that are often breathtaking. He had an eye from early childhood. There are a couple pictures in the begining of the book that he did at age 3 that would be about all I could hope to accomplish at age 35.