Tour de France

Image via Wikipedia

Well people have been bugging me about blogging, and I confess that I really dropped the ball. I could say things have been crazy, I could say that I don't have any time, but that's always the case. I'm not sure what exactly caused my long hiatus nor do I make any promises that I will start blogging regularly again, but how could I let the Tour pass without my normal commentary? (Thanks Dismas!)

I should mention that I leave tomorrow for a four-day three-night trip to a place without electricity, to say nothing of internet. So even if I wanted to there's no way I will be posting any updates on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday. Anyway, with that caveat I'll dive in.

Today was stage one of the Tour de France, this would normally be called the prologue, but I guess that organizers felt that it was too long to be a prologue. Fabian Cancellara won the stage, which shouldn't really surprise anyone. Alberto Contador came in 2nd. I don't think many people are surprised by this result, but they should be. As you may recall Contador started as just a really promising climber. Initially his time trialing was not that great. For him to get into a form where he comes in second, on a short time trial is pretty impressive. I mean look at the time trial specialists he beat: Levi Leipheimer, Cadel Evans, Kloden, Zabriski, Millar, and of course Armstrong.

So what about Armstrong? Well from what I saw at the Giro, he was coming into form near the end. I expect him to do well, but he's 37, and even if he comes into this tour better prepared than ever he just doesn't have the same engine. So other than Contador who do I think will do well? Okay here's my list:

1- Alberto Contador
2- Cadel Evans
3- Andy Schleck
4- Levi Leipheimer
5- Lance Armstrong

I should probably include Carlos Sastre, but for some reason I've never liked him. Anyway there you go. I'll try and post about the team time trial (even though I'll miss it live) on Wednesday.

Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death!

Cold Fusion on 60 Minutes

Image via Wikipedia

Long time readers may know that I have a soft spot for "Cold Fusion" (though I think they prefer the term "Low Energy Nuclear Reactions") these days. In fact if you look on the right hand side you'll see a link to one of the main Cold Fusion websites (along with some other links that are probably woefully out of date). In any case I've long felt that there was something to the whole idea. And that while it may have been horribly wounded by mistakes that were made early on, that it would end up being a great example of truth eventually prevailing over doubt by dint of massive amounts of experimental evidence.

Anyway it's the 20th anniversary of the (disastrous) initial press conference and people are taking another look (of course some people haven't stopped looking). Including 60 minutes which did a piece on it. I would urge you to watch it, it's about 12 minutes long and they do a really good job of examining the issue, going so far as to ask the American Physical Society, the top physics organization in America, to recommend an independent scientist. They recommended Rob Duncan, vice chancellor of research at the University of Missouri and an expert in measuring energy. Who went from a skeptic to a believer after spending two days at a Cold Fusion laboratory.

There is still the problem that it only works about 70% of the time, and it's not quite ready to give the world unlimited clean energy yet, but the whole thing is tremendously fascinating and exciting.

Coldfusion doesn't work I should know I have had to migrate a lot of sites from it to php.

Parkinson's Law for Hiring

Cover of Parkinson's Law

I read a fair number of business books, particularly as a percentage of pages. One thing you'll notice when you do read a lot of them is that they don't age well. Which is not to say that they're worthless more that business just changes too fast for anything to be true for very long. The notable exception to this rule is "Parkinson's Law" by C. Northcote Parkinson. My dad recommended it to me many years ago. He had noticed the "not aging gracefully" problem as well and so he decided to start with the business book with the oldest copyright, which was "Parkinson's Law".

"Parkinson's Law" is actually grouped with humor books, but like a lot of jokes there's more truth in the jest than in a thousand serious statements. Parkinson makes a lot of points, the best know of which is that "Work expands to fill the time available for it's completion." But there are many others, and it's fascinating to see how true they still are. One of my favorites is that when an organization builds a nice new headquarters the end is nigh. We have a great example of that right here in Salt Lake. American Stores built the tallest skyscraper in downtown (the church office building aside) and six weeks after the opening ceremony they were bought by Albertson's...

Anyway I digress. We were looking to hire an new software developer recently and in the past the methodology which had been used involved giving them a little test project first, getting to know them over the subsequent six months as we gave them increasingly larger project before eventually offering them a full time position. It worked well enough except for the fact that it took SIX MONTHS FROM START TO FINISH!!

Well we didn't have six months, so when it was apparent that we needed to hire someone I suggested using the hiring methodology from Parkinson's Law. What he basically says is that the advertisement should balance the risks and the rewards of the job to such a precise degree that only one person will answer the ad, and they will be the perfect candidate. Here are a couple of examples from the book:

Wanted – Acrobat capable of crossing a slack wire 200 feet above raging furnace. Twice nightly, three times on Saturday. Salary offered $70 per week. No pension and no compensation in the event of injury. Apply in person at Wildcat Circus between the hours of 9 AM and 10 AM.

Wanted – An archaeologist with high academic qualifications willing to spend fifteen years in excavating the Inca tombs at Helsdump on the Alligator River. Knighthood or equivalent honor guaranteed. Pension payable but never yet claimed. Salary of $6000 per year. Apply in triplicate to the Director of the Grubbenburrow Institute, Sickdale, Ill., USA.

He points out that there is no need (in the case of the first article) to insist that the candidates be skilled at wire walking, or that they be sober or free from dizzyness, because the ad has automatically excluded anyone how isn't. And in the case of the second you need not say that the person needs to be mad for archeology, because no one would apply who isn't. The point being that the salary and other benefits should be exactly balanced against the bad parts of the job (of which every job has legion) so that you attract only someone who really fits the position. So here was our posting on Craigslist:

Wanted -- full-time web programmer eager to prove himself as a software hero with mad programming skills. Intelligence, teamwork, and sacrifice will be required. Ideal applicant has read enough programming books to have a publisher preference, has had more computers than girlfriends, and can confidently use closures. Work hours are long but flexible. Starting salary is $40k per year.

About US:

• This is a full-time position with an proven company.


• We're extremely technical. Even our sales people are programmers.


• We are NOT a temp-agency. This position includes health benefits.


• Our current platform is built with Perl and MySQL. We use Ajax and HTML extensively.


• We don't have old-fashioned time-cards, cubicles or strict dress codes


• Employees may listen to music, play games, and surf the web as long as they get their shit done


• If the word "shit" offends you, you probably won't work out. You don't have to be vulgar, but you have to have a thick skin and good people skills.

About the Job:

When you get here you will be the new guy. You will have to prove your programming kung-fu to everyone on the team. You will have to answer your phone after hours. It will be tough. It will require you to be extremely bright, optimistic, and a rapid learner.

After working for us for 12 months you'll be qualified to be a senior software developer at just about any company. You'll know more than most people do after a four year CS degree. You will discover tremendous new confidence in yourself and your programming abilities. In short, you'll be a bona fide software badass. Salary increase after you have proven yourself to be an equal on the team (realistically this will take you 9 to 12 months, at a minimum.)

You know all those movies that glorify honor, sacrifice and humility, and show people taking a bullet for their buddy? That's us. Only you probably won't die and we'll give you all the Rockstar you can drink.

If you feel you have what it takes, email a brief resume with references to Ross. If you're young and you don't have a lot of references yet, be prepared to impress us with all the software you have written in your spare time.

In the end we got 10 applications, about half obviously hadn't read the posting so they were immediately disqualified. We ended up interviewing three, one of the three was obviously out of his depth, the remaining two got the PERL Camel book and were told to come back in 3 days and show how much they'd picked up. We hired one of those two and we couldn't be happier with how it's worked out. And what's even more interesting is that the one guy we did hire is the one who really responded to the ad. In other words in his initial e-mail he mentioned that his favorite publisher was Addison-Wesley and that he HAD had more computers than girlfriends etc. In other words the idea that if you craft the ad carefully enough you'll get one perfect applicant has basically been born out in this (admittedly) tiny sample.

Another point to make. We had more than one person e-mail and say, I'm not at the stage where I can work for 40k anymore, but if I was young and out to prove myself I would totally have applied for that job, as one of them said it was "absolutely the best job listing/description I have ever seen".

Parkinson for the WIN

Trip to St. George

Image via Wikipedia

On of my wife's cousins (the last in that branch of the family) was getting married on Friday down in St. George (about a four and a half hour drive for us), so we decided to arrange babysitter's for the kids and head down. One of the first questions was whether to take one of our cars or to rent a car. I ruled out the van pretty quickly. It's old and tired, get's pretty crappy gas mileage and is kind of overkill for just two people. My car, the 91 Nissa Sentra gets great gas mileage, but always feels kind of fragile on the freeway. So we decided to rent a car, particularly since there's an Enterprise location right near our house and they have a great weekend rate.

So we ended up with a Nissan Altima. Before the trip I'd tweaked my back pretty bad while playing Squash, so I decided to take a muscle relaxant the night before and make my wife drive down, while it wore off. I took the muscle relaxant but it didn't seem to work very well. I didn't fall asleep very fast and I had no problem waking up the next morning and I didn't feel very groggy, but just to be on the safe side I had the wife drive anyway. I did fall asleep without too much trouble about an hour into the drive, but that's just me being normal, I don't need drugs for that.

I woke up and conditions were a lot different than when I had fallen asleep, the rain had changed to snow and the visibility was pretty poor. I believe I said "whoah" (possibly startling my wife...) less than two seconds later the back end started to slip a little. My wife tried putting on the brakes and suddenly we were in a full on spin. At that point there was nothing left to do but hang on and ride it out. I think we did a full 360, maybe more. We missed a nearby car by only a few feet ended, plowed off the road into the shoulder. Down the side, through a barbed wire fence and almost on to the frontage road.

Two cars stopped to see if we were okay, including the one we almost hit, which is how I knew since we couldn't see anything during the spin. He was understandably pretty upset, since if we had hit him the whole thing would have been orders of magnitude worse. Some people drove by on the frontage road and said there was a highway patrol car a little farther down (next to another car that had also gone off the road). The UHP car showed up in a little bit, and the officer was entirely humorless, though I can't really blame him. He wrote my wife a ticket for improper lane travel or something like that and called a tow truck.

The tow truck showed up pretty fast, we were fortunately within site of the town of Scipio. The barbed wire had scratched the hood, punctured one tire, ripped off some plastic under the bumper and taken one of the two mufflers and bent it 90 degrees so that it was within a few inches of the other muffler. Fortunately my wife had gotten the full damage waiver so we called Enterprise and basically said "We broke that one give us another one." Someone had to drive all the way from Salt Lake, so that ended up being a pretty long wait, but within a few hours we were back on the road.

Some additional points:

-We were going somewhere between 75 and 80 when the crash started.
-We discovered, once the car was up on the lift, that one of the rear tires was almost completely bald.
-The barbed wire fence belonged to UDOT, if it had belonged to a farmer I would have tried to replace it, but as it is I'm already paying for it.
-Enterprise was very cool about everything they definitely are getting more business from me.
-We missed the wedding, but made the dinner afterwards.
-I already didn't like Scipio, and this just solidified that, though the mechanic/tow truck driver was definitely a good guy.

Still a little bit shaken up

You Can Always Blog About the Bad stuff

Image via Wikipedia

Someone commented a while back that the robbers had apparently also stolen my will to blog. That may be true. What I can say is that the final robbery combined with my travel and then my wife leaving town, plus more than the usual level of chaos combined to make March really, really busy, and I feel like I'm only just now starting to see daylight. Busy is good. Business is going really well there are some deals on the table which could be potentially worth millions, the key is that word "potentially". It's in that journey from the potential to the actual that so many good things get beset by cannibals, devoured and made into drums.

In part I had nothing to blog about because, on the whole, things were going well. Fortunately for my loyal readers that couldn't last forever and just this morning I encountered a bunch of annoyances both small and large which served to give me ample reason to vent. A month or so ago I bought this booklet of deals for Midas, a local auto-repair chain. For $40 I got safety and emissions, an oil change and then like 10 more oil changes half of which were free and half of which were 50% off. I figured if all I did was use the inspections and the first oil change I'd be money ahead, so I bought two (one for each car).

Today I finally got around to using one. The big catch to them is that you have to have an appointment. So I showed up for my 9:00 appointment figuring that in the 30 or so minutes it would take I could read my book. Well they said that it was actually going to take an hour and a half. Well I didn't have that much left to read and it seemed like that was a lot of time to sit around. So I decided to walk back to work (where my other car was). It was about 12 blocks (mapquest says it's 1.89 miles) and it took me about 32 minutes to make the walk. Overall not too bad, I like walking, except for the part where this was the one morning I had forgotten my jacket, the temperature was in the 30's and it was pretty windy. My ears did not fall off, but it was a close run thing.

So that got me into a bad mood, then they called and told me that the rear cylinder's were leaking, and one of the bearings was bad and *blah* *blah* in order to pass safety it would be ~$700 in repairs. At this point I told them, hold off on that, I don't have time to do that today, and what I was really thinking is this is what I get for not going to the family mechanic. Well I guess I'll rectify that now and let him make the repairs, even if he can't do them for less at least I'll be giving money to someone I like.

So I hopped into my car, and went to pick up my wife so we could pick up the car. That's when I saw that some (pardon my french...) ASS-DOUCHE had plowed into my parking strip and had completely taken out one of my trees. There's a 3 inch stub sticking out of the ground and no evidence where the other 6 feet went and a gigantic rut through the landscaping rocks... Walking I can handle and should probably do more anyway; Money I can handle and should probably make more anyway; But having some careless assclown blow through the one piece of my yard that I actually liked... In the words of Homer Simpson... "URGE TO KILL RISING!"

Anyway I have some other blogs I'd like to do, so I thought I'd list them here in the vain hope that it will serve as an external commitment to write those blogs.

-Parkinson's Law for Hiring
-Our Vacation Procedure
-Persistent Web Games and Motivation

At the rate I'm going that should keep me busy until Summer.

Tell you what: we come back and everyone's slaughtered, I owe you a Coke.

Robbery

Image via Wikipedia

Okay... so here it goes. A few weeks back one of my business partners moved back to Salt Lake from Washington. In the process he forgot to bring back his key to the office. So the other partner lent him his key. So that evening he called me to tell me that he was locked out of the office. So I decided to just drive over and let him in. While there I decided that this had gone on long enough and I was going to drive to Wal-mart and get a copy right then. As I was leaving I went to lock the door, but my partner had already mentioned that he might end up having to leave, and that if so he would just leave the door open, plus some other people were coming for a meeting that night and they didn't have keys. So I didn't...

On my way out of the building I passed a tall skinny guy with a closely shaved head of blond hair and a backpack. Something felt wrong about the guy, but what can you do? Tackle everyone that doesn't seem cool? Of course I should have followed him, particularly when he went up the stairs towards our office. But the front door is open till 8:00 because we have a youth counseling center downstairs... Anyway I didn't stop him, or follow him and our best guess is that he was the thief. He (or some other person) walked into the office through the open door, walked over to a desk with a laptop, grabbed the laptop, the laptop case, a checkbook and walked back out. People were in our office at the time, just around the corner.

So I guess that was Wednesday, the next Tuesday when I came into work first thing that morning, things seemed weird. When I got back to my office, some files from my filing cabinet were on the floor and my monitor was gone (I have a laptop and I just plug it into an external monitor when I'm in the office). So then I walked back into the main area of the office and that's when I realized a brand new iMac we'd just bought was gone and another, older, imac was gone. That said a lot of stuff was still there, some of it was cable-tied, but it was apparent that they had gotten spooked. In the final accounting the things mentioned were gone, plus a credit card, a camcorder, an old mac desktop, and the checkbook of the guy who'd lost his check book the last time around...

We had an outside door that led directly into our office. For awhile it had not shut properly, you had to lift up on the door when closing it for it to latch (we're pretty sure we told the landlord about it he claimed we didn't, in any case we didn't tell him strongly enough). In general we told people not to use it, but we didn't really stop them from using it. One guy in particular used it just about every day to go to lunch. So when it was obvious that's how they had gotten in, it seemed equally obvious that this guy had not closed it tightly. (For the curious he was one of the people who's computer had gotten stolen.)

So we sat down and had a big meeting with the landlord and he agreed to implement bunch of new security features, fixing the door being pretty high on the list, but just as important putting a lock on the door between the outside door and the main work area. We also wanted him to have a horn right next to that outside door that went off the second it was opened, and a couple of other minor things as well. To his credit, with the exception of the horn, everything went in pretty fast, and I was personally feeling pretty good about security.

We were leaving for LA on Sunday and I really had to scramble to be ready. In the course of the scramble I missed getting my long-awaited watch. I finally decided on a model (MTG-1500-9AJF) assembled the necessary funds and ordered it from Japan. USPS claimed that they tried to deliver it on Saturday and left a notice (which is a lie) and by the time I discovered this it was too late to just go to the post office and get it. I was pretty disappointed that I was going to have to wait until I got back to get it.

On Monday I considered trying to arrange for a redelivery by calling the post office and calling my guys back at the office, but I didn't get around to it. On Tuesday I checked and the site said that it had been successfully delivered the day before. So I called on of my guys and he said, oh yeah that came yesterday. And a thrill of joy coursed through me, and even though I was eyeball deep in a bunch of work for the client I was in LA for, everything seemed like it was going to be okay. Well he wasn't in the office at the time I talked to him, but I told him to give me a call when he was just because I had some things I needed him to do.

Well when he got into the office he couldn't find the box with the watch. I figured it had just been misplaced, but after several minutes I started wondering how hard it could be to find a box in the midst of our fairly tiny office. That's when he told me that he was sure that it wasn't misplaced, that it was gone. And of course I couldn't understand how it could just be gone, and then he mentioned that the cops had been called. Initially I honestly thought he was joking, but no. There had been yet a third break in (and I'm not even counting the incident between break-ins one and two where someone shut off our power from the outside). And basically the new security measures had worked, except that when the watch had arrived rather than going to the guy who had the key and putting it in my office the same guy who might have left the door open on break-in two had just left it outside my door, in the hallway that the outside door opened on.

This time it was obvious that they had a crowbar and with that info it's unclear if the door had been left open the 2nd time or if they had just jimmied it in the same way they did the third time. It was also apparent that they had tried to bust open the door between the hallway and the main area. So basically things worked, but unfortunately there was a really nice watch there for their effort. Plus as I found out later our payroll packet was also placed in the hall next to the box. So that included my paycheck and the payroll report, which had everyone's social security number.

Anyway... so that's basically it. Most of our employees are feeling pretty freaked out and for the near term we've decided to just work from home. We'll see what happens from there. I sort of feel like if I had blogged about the first two robberies that the third one wouldn't have happened. That by leaving the subject open from the blog, it was left unfinished in reality. But I probably am ascribing too much power to myself...

Sign of the times?

Nostalgia

Image via Wikipedia

So last week was my birthday and this year is my 20th reunion. As a result of the two I ended up getting into this loop or rut or something where I spent a lot of time last week thinking about high school. So Saturday night I'm out at a play (Romeo and Juliet, not bad, I think the actress playing Juliet really nailed the 14 year old girl vibe) and when it's over I leave out a door I don't normally take. And there standing next to the water fountain is the first girl I ever dated. Because of all the time I'd spent thinking about high school I wasn't sure if I'd summoned her by force of will, or (more likely) seeing someone who resembled her and because of my state of mind I'd mistaken that person for this girl from high school.

Just on the off chance it was the first I walked up to her and sure enough that's who it was. You have to understand that I don't believe I've bumped into a single person from my high school (that I'm not still in contact with) in 10 years (since the last reunion) even though my high school is only an hour away from here. So after spending the week thinking about it to bump into someone in that fashion seemed like an amazing coincidence.

We talked which was a little awkward as you might imagine. Partially because it took a lot of brain power to even remember the threads of a relationship which had ended nearly 20 years ago (I had seen her at my 5 year reunion, but that hardly counts), but overall pleasant. One bonus to the whole event is that (all modesty aside) I looked good. I had on my nice Nordstrom sport's coat (which hides my gut...) with a turtle neck. My beard had just been trimmed earlier in the day, and overall I think if I was going to bump into someone you once dated I couldn't have dressed nicer if I had known in advance.

Next... The Robberies!!!

I'll be good...