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I've begun reading Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, which I've been meaning to read but haven't gotten to. My dad had a copy down at their river house (L and I are on a working vacation, right now in Greenbrier County, WV) so I picked it up. The beginning is certainly riveting. And although you can tell that he liked Clinton best, he's not uniformly critical of Bush, Jr. and his actions immediately after the attacks. I think that Bush's decision to return to Washington was gutsy and good: it will be hard for other leaders of the free world to act without personal bravery. His decision to attack Iraq (or, perhaps, his staff's decision for him) was stupid, as is becoming quite clear, unless you buy that we had to invade a mid-east country and the obvious choice (Saudi Arabia) was off-limits. Invading Iraq to brush the Saudi back from the plate seems like an expensive pitch to me.
Anyway, it reads well and should prove to be interesting.
Beneviste, Guy. "Survival inside bureaucracy". In Markets, Hierarchies & Networks, ed. by G. Thompson, J. Frances, R. Levačić & J. Mitchell. London: SAGE Publications, 1991 [1977], pp. 141-
[ Continue reading "Open vs. Closed Sector Careers and What That Means for Consulting" ]Closed sector careers take place either in a single organization or in other organizations that are similar. Knowledge and experience with the organization or the sector are of first importance. Transfers from organizations in other fields of endeavor in different sectors occurs only in rare instances. Once an individual initiates a career in such sectors as cinema, education, the military, banking and so on, the experience is most valued in the same area. A person may go from sales to production to assistant director for R&D to general manager. Moreover, in many such closed sector careers, career paths are strongly determined by the status of the initial appointment location. If one is first appointed as an assistant professor in an unknown junior college, the probability of ever being appointed in a large university is low; but if one is first appointed at Columbia, there is a higher probability that one may end as a full professor at Harvard.
Russell Mann pointed out a recent article in the times about a successful mid-30s, single woman who aborts two of her triplets because "I'd have to give up my life". (That's not the real Times, but the New York one.)
What about having a baby does she not understand? It's time to call in Click & Clack on this: "Honey, you gave up being cool when you had the first one." If she really wanted to keep her life, she would have killed all of them. I'm not even sure where I stand on the abortion issue. I certainly can see how triplets could put the mom's life in danger. And how the rise of fertility drugs has made having them a nightmare, because they're so common the community doesn't chip in any longer. But because you think that you're going to keep your "life"? Why do people who don't want kids have kids? I mean, she even decided with her boyfriend that they would have the baby when she went off birth control pills. Did she not understand that this little crying, shitting, puking bundle of stink was going to turn her life upside down? What does she do now, travel all over God's green earth with Junior in tow? Leave him with her boyfriend?
I mean, with the Art History advanced degree and age, she's basically a peer of L. Maybe that's why this is bothering me. Here's somebody getting more than her fair share of them and she wants to send them back.
Look, you don't get to have it all. You don't get to have a wonderful family and dominate your world, travelling yonder and fro. You have kids and if you want to be a part of their lives, it takes time. Lots of it. Time. Not quality time, but time time. It takes time away from all the other things that you would rather be doing. You can't always get to watch the game or go to the opera or hear the Blacks at the Hideout. In fact, hearing anyone at the Hideout is probably clear out. It's not that you lose your life: you get another one. Kind of like when you decide that you're going to be married.
Then again, maybe this all seems so maddening because my pal wants to divorce his wife. Actually, she wants the divorce but he's going to give it to her. He always gives her what she wants and he'll do this thing, too. If it would help, I'd go over there and whack him in the head with a 2x4. (It may interest you to know that my old friend, Lumpy, told me that if I ever abandoned L, he would come up to Chicago and break both my legs, before starting to hurt me. Since he was clearly capable of doing these violent things, one had to believe he meant it. I'm pretty sure he did.)
I haven't cooked over charcoal since I served as deacon in that church in Chicago. Back then, Vilas roped me into "helping" out one weekend we had a big church cookout. We bought the food in bulk and everything was in grill-frozen state. ("Make it as easy as possible on yourself," he told me. "You have no idea how hard it already will be.") Of course, the next time Vilas took a much-deserved vacation and I ended up running the show. We never cooked for more than a couple of hundred but that's a pretty big number when you don't know what you're doing.
Anyway, I used to fire up the 55-gallon drum cooker (handmade by Vilas, a true saint who went horribly underappreciated because he was a blue-collar guy in a white-collar church) with the briquettes and grill those burgers and Vienna Sausage red hots for a few hours. It was fun: it gave me something to do which prevented me from boring the socks out of the church-people (common complaint) and at the same time gave me something to talk to folks about. I always tried to cajole my friends and even people I just met into helping out. Surprisingly, most people liked doing that: I worked hard to make a pleasant environment for what is, let's face it — a dirty job.
"Learning by Doing Something Else: Variation, Relatedness and the Learning Curve" by Melissa A. Schilling, Patricia Vidal, Robert E. Ployhard & Alexandre Marangoni. Management Science, Jan 2003 49(1): 39-56.
Note: Learning curves go down and to the right. You want the learning curve to be as steep as possible, since you get back up to high performance quicker. Just in case you haven't seen this before.
Implicit in discussions of learning curves in organizations (and explicit in most) is the idea that focused, uninterrupted learning is best. Learning curves are descended because of doing the same thing over and over. Schilling et al. believe that learning to learn is important. If you learn on related materials, you will have steeper learning curve (read: quicker down the learning curve to performance parity) on other things. In other words, you can learn to learn.
They posit that variation related to the subject helpds the learning rate. Variation that is unrelated doesn't help.
They say that
At the individual level, some psychologists have noted that an individual is unlikely to make a significant contribution to an area until they have at least a decade of intense study in a particular domain of knowledge (Hayes 1989). Simon and Chase (1973) quantified this expertise by studying chess grand masters and other experts, concluding that individuals need approximately 50,000 "chunks" of information related to a narrowly defined problem domain prior to making a fruitful discovery. pp. 44; citations are for J. R. Hayes's The Complete Problem Solver (1989) and H. Simon and W.G. Chase, "Skill in chess", American Scientist, 61:394-403.
Argh! I'm doomed!
I have been reading a "greatest hits" collection of Wisława Szymborska's poetry, Poems New and Collected. Szymborska won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996 and still lives in Poland, unless she's passed on recently. She writes in Polish, of course, but the translations compelling. I usually pass on translated poetry; something about it seems dead. Hers, though, seems to rely more on imagery than wordplay and I found her work a savory delight in the midst of my usual dead-as-doornails business and academic texts.
Plus, most business and academic writers can't write.
I recommend the collection. Since I picked it up one day at a local bookstore, you may be able to find it wherever you shop for books. The link above is for Barnes & Noble, with whom I have affiliated so that I can legally use their images.
Below is a poem from her 1986 collection, The People On the Bridge. Since I have spent my entire worklife jobhunting, I found it appropriate to include here.
Bob Bemer passed on. One of the great forces for standardization in computing. Click the accompanying image file (above) about Bob's contribution from the old Interface magazine. He definitely shepherded ASCII into being and created the Escape key concept, which created a way to manuever in computer screens. He even has been credited for talking about the Y2K hazard in the 1970s.
Read more.
Sad week for computing.
Some not entirely random thoughts about the grace of hospitality:
I've been spending some time turning my world upside down (again) in the last year. May 2003 I left INFOSEC because they were going to be firing me anyway. It turns out that they were waiting for me to step up to some type of plate, although when I just stepped up and started working, they really got ticked off. I'll never fully understand what they wanted me to do. But that may just show how poorly suited I am for development work.
Anyway, over these last twelve months of unemployment, I've been able to send my life onto the "Escalator of Excitement!", which is probably only funny if you live in Houston. They once had a church with the name (real, I think) "Fellowship of Excitement" who advertised on giant signs on IH-10. The Escalator of Excitement is probably a bit different, because I think that they always made a ton of money and I can honestly say that I haven't. If I could just get a handle on how one does that.... A friend of mine points out that had I wanted money, I would probably have it right now. I'm not so sure that this is true: I remember being totally stunned when I came to Chicago and had to find a job. Saying that I was unemployable pretty much sums up the situ.
But the goal of turning my life upside down worked. I started all of this by reading one of the Software Engineering Institute's pieces on Risk Management for software projects. In a footnote, they described how they created their method partly through the wisdom of Peter Block's Flawless Consulting. I went out looking for this fabled book, since I really liked the risk management process that they had put together. Bloomington's Borders did not have a copy but they did have another book of his, intriguingly called The Answer To How Is Yes. I went ahead and picked it up and proceeded to turn my life upside down.
I got to spend some time recently with a pal of mine who really isn't interested in his daughter. She lives most of the time with her mother an hour or so away, where he used to live before he had to move for work, and only comes up on the weekends, mostly. Poor girl is starved for attention and hitting the 'tweens where it matters. At least having attention paid at certain times and then having her get all upset and ignoring you and running off to her room, slamming the door and screaming "I hate you! I wish I'd never been born!", or so I gather will be happening. Or maybe that was just V. Anyway, I get stuck next to this kid, who wanted to sit next to her dad but it was inconvenient to do at the table (we were eating out at a local chain). She proceeds to rope me in on her conversations while angling them to get her dad's attention. Yeah, it would have been great to have been able to spend the lunch chatting with my other pal and his crew of boys, one of whom mows my lawn and I wanted to see if he would be interested in some other work I had that needed doing. But I'm a grown-up and I will have other times to do that. I can make time when I need to, and put off a kid when I have to get something done. But it really didn't take that much to hear her stories occassionally and play a table game with her.
Maybe when you have kids it's different. Maybe the adulation and adoration grates on you after awhile. I doubt I'll ever know (the Lord giveth and then again, sometimes he doesn't) so I suppose I'll only wonder about it. It just doesn't seem like much of a loss for a grown-up to listen every now and then during a meal. I'm not one who wants the kid to be the star of the dinner table all the time — that three-year old shouldn't be made to run the family, as my brother always says — but giving out a minute of my time isn't a big deal.
Recently, I got another email newsletter from Texans for Texas, some conservative group who probably got me from my involvement with my brother, who was a republican activist down there. One of the links was to an article entitled "Connecting the Dots" by Maria Martinez of Americans for Prosperity. It started off interestingly, which got me to read the rest.
Since the 9-11 terrorist attacks on America, perhaps the strongest consensus to emerge seems to be that our government needs to learn how to better ?connect the dots? when threats to our security are concerned.
Congress and the Administration should apply that lesson by focusing national attention on a looming threat facing the Internet. The Internet infrastructure, built almost entirely by Americans, combines some of America's most envied achievements: cutting-edge technology, the free flow of information, and promotion of open systems of commerce over which trillions of dollars a year in transactions now travel.
But as integral as the Internet has become to our economy and our daily lives, Americans by and large don't have a very good understanding what the Internet is. And if we don't understand who runs it or how it works, it's hard for us to imagine how to protect it from threats.
Indeed. Americans are woefully ignorant about how the Internet works, more so than even their cars. We who have any type of understanding about the network need to work tirelessly to educate the ignorant, including the willfully ignorant who talk about the Internet anyway.
And let's start with her.
First, most policymakers probably do not know who governs the Internet. The job of Internet traffic cop is in the hands of one of the strangest, least-accountable organizations ever devised in Washington . It's called the Internet Corporation on Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN. ICANN was the creation of Ira Magaziner ? the famed mastermind of the Byzantine Clinton health care plan. ICANN is a government-chartered, non-profit corporation in California that is funded by compulsory industry dues. It is not accountable to Congress, is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act or the Administrative Procedure Act, and is not even accountable to the industry it is meant to serve.
Now, we all hate ICANN. At least, most of us hate ICANN. I mean, why not hate ICANN? But to say that ICANN "governs the Internet" isn't even missing the point: it's just ludicrous.
ICANN's actual job is to handle the Domain Name System, or DNS. DNS lets you get away with, for example, addressing an email to "ELVIS@LOVEMETENDER.COM", rather than the correct "ELVIS@134.24.111.22". It's a big job and most everyone I know has been burned by DNS issues. And the DNS isn't particularly robust or secure, which is gravely troubling. But ICANN doesn't even settle disputes. They don't even register domain names much any more, although they used to have a lock on it through InterNIC. Except for all those pesky .uk, .be, .fr, ....
ICANN are definitely powerful but they don't "govern the Internet". I mean, if they do, let's sue them for all that blasted "perform biological acts with animals" spam that has been hitting my site.
As part of its effort to distance itself from America, ICANN is seriously considering awarding control of the most technologically sophisticated and financially important domain name ? the dot.net domain, which is currently managed by California-based VeriSign ? to a foreign firm which has no experience handling anything as large and complex as the dot.net systems.
Oh, yes: "the most technologically sophisticated ... domain name", the blessed .net domain! All hail the .net! Yes, changing from Verisign is fraught with peril, as the phrase goes. But so is staying with them.
Look, I'm not here to praise ICANN ("Mighty ICANN! Save us!") nor am I trying to say that we don't need to be concerned about ICANN's non-accountability to anyone. But no one polices the IETF, either.
Just don't say that ICANN governs the Internet. God knows, if enough people say it, ICANN will act like they do. And nobody wants that.
So, the wife and I went to Pittsburgh to see the godsons (and their parents, of course) over the 4th of July weekend. We drove, and since our car is still in the body shop getting repaired from my having been rearended on US30 by a woman 33 weeks pregnant with no insurance (lapsed), we had to drive a rental. Enterprise up here in the north end had given me a Kia Amanti, their top-of-the-line luxury car, for the week prior for work and told me to just go ahead and keep it for the duration. They love me. I got a really good rate, perhaps because no one wanted to drive a Kia. I've put 2600 miles on the thing and it isn't that bad. It certainly is plush, for a guy who has driven a Saturn within the last few years. An old Saturn. That always ran 3/4 hot.
Anyway, L and I tooled around in the Kia sedan (23 mpg highway, according to ship's computer). I had to drive the whole way since I didn't have time to add her to the contract ere leaving our wonderful town. I had already gotten used to it, and it drives a bit like a boat. By "boat", I mean a 1976 Mercury Marquis but with a smaller engine than that 426 that was under ours. And with a tape/CD player instead of an 8-track. I suppose that this is what Cadillacs used to feel like before they got to be the size of Saabs. Incidentally, I've been wondering whether the new Saab and that micro-Caddy are built on the same design.
After about four years of heavy use, the Dell Brick (Inspiron 5000; weighs about 8lbs) has just about seen its last days here upon the earth. The screen doesn't close properly any more, or at all without some manual intervention. As a result, the screen cover has cracked on the hinges. It may have something to do with getting books piled up on it in the living room. Wireless networking can be dangerous.
I took a look for the cheapest replacment that I could find. Right now, Circuit City weighs in with the Averatec AMD 2000+ laptop. It's a consumer type of device where replacing the hard drive (the second thing I'd do) voids the warranty. But it was on sale with the rebate for US$899. I don't think I'll do any better than that, even with the Circuit City "extended coverage". On these cheap-o computers, that's not a bad idea because you can just take it in and exchange it. Averatec isn't rated all that great but it's like buying the new Kia or a seven-year old Honda: either buy problems you know or buy someone else's problems. At less than a grand, the Averatec comes in as an hard to beat buy.