Archive for September, 2006

But…but…but…she only said that because I rejected her!

Published on September 23, 2006 in Vignettes. 5 Comments

Another story, this one from early in my career, that was brought to mind by a recent incident at work. I worked for a media company that had founded a division to do web stuff at the dawn of the general publics’ use of the web (circa 1995). We had awful internal morale issues - lots if bickering, infighting, histrionics, thrown chairs, the works. I was not above participating in those days and was in fact known for my volatile temper, though I never threw anything or otherwise physically expressed my frustration.

(as an aside, I’m now convinced my volatile temper in those days was actually a reflection of the undiagnosed diabetes, with high blood pressure and high blood sugars - basically my system was always running at 130%)

Anyway the company decided to take steps to address these issues, and arranged with the director of HR to facilitate a set of off-site intervention meetings where we would participate in a variety of team building exercises as well as take the time to sort of expose and discuss the core issues that were causing so much tension.

Shortly before one of the first sessions, a coworker had asked me out, the latest in a series of invitations. She had been pursuing me off and on for a couple of months - mostly, at first, with hints (do you like this new movie that’s coming out? Me too!) and then ultimately with a couple of direct invitations. I had blown her off, politely but firmly, with the ‘I don’t date co-workers’ line. I wasn’t attracted to her.

One of the exercises we had to do on this day was a team building exercise that involved a large sheet of paper hung to the wall for each person, divided in half. Half was the good side, and half was the bad side. Each of us had a post-it notepad, and we had to write one good thing and one bad thing about each person in the room and stick it to the appropriate side of their sheet of paper. Once we had all done this, we had to stand before our piece of paper and pluck off the post-its, read them to the room, then discuss them.

When my turn came around, I plucked a bad post-it off and read it to the room. It said (and I can remember this almost verbatim) “David is poorly socialized, has terrible communications skills, fails to behave appropriately in professional circumstances, and should learn to be more respectful of his coworkers.’

!!!

I had to respond to that in front of ~20 people, back when I was a less confident public speaker. Ye gods! I recognized the handwriting of the culprit (of course it was she of the rejected advances) and my first thought was to simply expose her, as inappropriate as that would be (she thinks I behave inappropriately?! wait till she sees this!). But my common sense won the day. It helped that most of it was absurd. While I was known for my volatility, I’ve also always been known for my verbal communication skills, the ability to condense complex technical issues into summaries that non-technical folk can understand, and my willingness to fold to superior logic. I was also president of my frat in college, for crying out loud, and regularly hung out with a significant portion of the staff in the portland bars.

Anyway, I don’t actually think I did a very good job of responding at that time, I was too flustered, but the incident has stuck with me ever since, and instilled in me a very deep suspicion so-called team building exercises (which, as an aside, were an abject failure in this case. The core of the issues had to do with how sales interacted with the production folks. Sales had no technical acumen and we all knew they were, quite literally, stealing from the company through clever sales incentive scams and we had no respect for them professionally or personally. Most of this, of course, was not exposed in these team building exercises. What was one to do? Write ’steals from the company and gets away with it’ on the post-it and stick it to the bad side?).

Company of Heroes is awesome

Published on September 22, 2006 in Gaming. 4 Comments

Believe it or not the sea of gaming titles that get released for the holiday season starts releasing around now, and there’s a doozy available. Company of Heroes bills itself as a real time strategy game, a genre I don’t typically enjoy, but really it’s more of a pausable real time tactical game. The ability to pause, the slower pace of the combat, the relatively low number of units you have to control, the fact that they’re bundled into squads, and a decent control scheme all conspire to make this a very manageable playing experience compared to the click-frenzy that you find in most RTS. Couple this with a great graphics engine, excellent physics engine (houses you can level to the ground? Brick walls you can storm a tank through? Unfortunate marines flying through the air after you blast them with a flak cannon at close range? It’s got it all), and a well crafted single player campaign based on the WWII invasion of Normandy, and you have a classic on your hands, possibly one of the best RTS ever made. I’m absolutely loving it.

Of course there are some downsides - as with all games in this genre, the artificial intelligence seems a bit dodgy - lay down a line of tank traps across a strategic point and the enemy will drive around them 100% of the time even if you’re funnelling their armor into a trap, instead of deploying engineers to take down the tank traps, for example - but it’s still generally better than that found in most titles and in fact is still creaming me in skirmish games most of the time despite me recognizing ways to exploit it. It requires some pretty significant horsepower to run with the eye candy torqued up, and it’s beautiful so you’ll want to torque it up, but if you’re machine isn’t up to it your framerate will be below single digits. The most damning problem is the inability to pull the camera far enough back from the action, so sometimes you’ll have artillery or tank fire coming in and will flail about trying to figure out where it’s coming from. This is endemic to this class of games and I wish developers would come up with a solution. If it’s true this is about multiplayer balance, then let me do it in solo and campaign games, for gods sakes, and if it’s about performance, let me decide what’s acceptable performance instead of limiting me.

So - pros and cons assessed, to me even if you’re not a fan of RTS usually, this is worth a look because the pause feature lets you play at your own pace and everything else is generally excellent. If you like RTS, you basically have to get this game. While I don’t like the genre, typically, I do tend to try the demos of all of them, and this is the finest game to come down the pike since Kohan II.

It’s also on sale at gogamer.com this week for ~$35 shipped if you’re interested, check their deals section.

Friday fun - free, legal movie for your friday enjoyment

Published on September 22, 2006 in General. 0 Comments

This has made the rounds on the net, but in case you missed it, spend your friday watching the original Dawn of the Dead, the George Romero zombie classic that spawned a genre of films. You’ll need to be capable of playing google videos, which is a short install if you’re not already equipped to do so.

High praise for Jicama

Published on September 19, 2006 in Health. 0 Comments

My Dad introduced me to Jicama the last time I was down to NY, and to my surprise it’s tasty and very edible for me. The consistency is similar to that of a potato but it’s sweet and not nearly as starchy. I’ve been putting it in salads, frying it up to serve as the base for sauce-based dishes like indian food, and snacking on it raw. It’s really better raw than it is cooked but either way works. I found a recipe for mashed potatoes using it as the base that I’m going to try soon. It’s also very cheap, and at least locally is easy to come by. Check it out if you’re a diabetic or if you’re just looking to try something new in your diet.

Like Omnigraffle?

Published on September 19, 2006 in Techno Geek. 0 Comments

Omnigraffle is this wonderful diagramming and charting package from the Omni Group. PC users, think ‘Visio’ and you have the general idea, just imagine a much nicer interface. Anyway if you’re an Omnigraffle user, you’ll love Graffletopia, a regularly updated site where developers publicize the stencil templates they develop. Check it out if you’re looking to flesh out your Omnigraffle stencils.

ars technica confirms how badly US broadband offerings suck

Published on September 18, 2006 in Techno Geek. 6 Comments

Check out this ars technica piece on the sorry state of broadband implementations in the US. 100Mbs symetrical is ~$35 a month in Japan. You cannot come remotely close to touching that in the US, where most of us are lucky to get asymetrical 5Mbps down/768kps up offerings at ~$60/month. Has the free market failed us, the country which invented the internet? Or is it simply a failure of our legislatures? All I know is it’s pathetic. None of this is news to regular readers but I can’t resist another opportunity to bitch about it. This stuff is seriously, seriously holding us back. The explosion of participatory media, also popularized in this country (think ‘youtube’) is but the latest example of possibilities inhibited. Kindly take this stuff into account when you vote, it sounds like hyperbole but this is our economic future we’re trading on here.

Kill stuffit dead

Published on September 18, 2006 in Techno Geek. 0 Comments

If you’re using a mac in a campus lab environment or off some official image built by your employer, chances are fair to good that you’re using stuffit to decompress files, a legacy of stuffit’s heyday when it was actually a decent tool. My impression is mac folk are simply acculturated to using it even though it’s failed to keep up with the times. Consider Unarchiver as an alternative. It’s free and open source, it handles pretty much every file format under the sun, and it’s not evil. What more could one ask of afile decompression utility.

As an aside, I’d love to slowly throttle whoever manages the stuffit website with al dente cooked egg noodles. Ban it from your system. It had its day in the sun and now it’s time for it to go.

Imagine his surprise…

Published on September 18, 2006 in General and Vignettes. 0 Comments

I’ll share an amusing story from my youth to make up for the lack of posting here of late.

I worked in a Ground Round restaurant off and on between the ages of 16 and 19 or so, first as a busboy and ultimately as one of the line cooks. Cooking on a line in a busy restaurant can actually be great adrenaline fueled fun fun, especially if you’re young and irresponsible.

One weekend night I was one of the two closing cooks, meaning I had to work until ~1 AM and was responsible for some of the most onerous of the cleaning responsibilities. The worst cleaning job in the kitchen was having to mop behind the line of cooking equipment. You had to pull the equipment away from the wall and sweep then mop up a stretch of tiled floor about 20 feet long and maybe 4 feet deep that was super saturated with kitchen gunk. Sometimes the oil would be a quarter inch thick on that stretch of floor and extremely difficult to sop up. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that since we all hated doing it, we all found schemes to escape having to do it, meaning if you were unlucky you would end up mopping a stretch of floor that hadn’t been cleaned in several days.

On this particular weekend the regional manager had chosen to visit our restaurant. This was a dreaded event as he was wise to our various schemes to avoid cleaning things and he had a volatile temper, often flying off the handle and screaming at us when he caught us not doing our jobs efficiently.

One of the largest pieces of equipment, the broiler where the steaks, burgers, chicken and so on were cooked, had recently been serviced and we had noted that the emergency valve that would cut off the gas supply in the event of a problem had been installed backwards. We were all aware of this and were used to being careful when moving it because of this valve. The gas line it protected was almost wide enough to swallow a baseball.

As soon as the kitchen closed, the district manager came in the back and proceeded to pull the equipment away from the wall to expose our shoddy cleaning, shouting at us as he did so. When he yanked the broiler away from the wall he pulled hard enough that it caused the gas line to disconnect. Normally the safety valve would block the gas from leaking but since it was installed backwards it did not. The district manager was unaware of this fact, while we were.

You never saw two line cooks run so fast. Steve, my partner that night, had the presence of mind to run towards the back door where the emergency gas cutoff valve was - me, being concerned only with self preservation, ran to the bathroom, thinking the thick wooden door would protect me from the inevitable explosion.

Inevitable it was. I heard a muted ‘whooomph!’ and then shouting. When folks started calling my name I poked my head out and there, his bowtie singed, his face lobster red, and his eyebrows and hair singed and smoking, was the district manager, stunned into silence. I lost it, falling into peals of laughter. Steve, who had meanwhile shut the main gas supply off, came to see what had happened and followed my lead, and after a few seconds the two of us ran out the back door of the restaurant, still laughing our heads off.

Amazingly, neither of us lost our jobs. We had filed a repair ticket on the improperly installed safety valve several weeks prior and this plus the fact that Steve’s quick thinking protected against a worse disaster probably saved our jobs. The district manager was taken to the hospital and ended up being only minorly injured, with some serious but not permanently damaging burns on his face and hands. To my surprise this didn’t really alter his behavior towards us or the line - the next time he came in he went through his same procedure, yanking out the equipment and berating us for our inadequate cleaning skills.

I still chuckle every time I remember this incident.

Shave different

Published on September 18, 2006 in General. 2 Comments

I was in the grocery store recently and could not find blades for my ‘had it since college’ cartridge razor and it irritated me since my interpretation of the lack of cartridges was that they were making shelf room for the latest 5+ blade cartridge systems. This event, plus the absurd ever-increasing blade count and cost of the cartridges led me to investigate alternatives.

I’ve spent the last two weeks shaving with a classic old ’safety blade’ razor, the kind most folks used up through the 1970’s, that I bought at classicshaving.com.

I’m going to stick with it for the time being, despite some shortcomings. While I get a smoother shave from the cartridge systems, the classic shaving stuff is just tons less expensive - a 45 cent blade lasts me a week, compared to a ~$1.25 cartridge that lasts about the same amount of time. Also I think part of the issue is my lack of experience with this - my first shave using it was awful but I’ve been getting gradually better. The key seems to be holding the razor at just the right angle - it’s much less forgiving about this than disposable or cartridge razors are. I’m also suspecting the shaving cream I’m using is part of the problem as it seems to gum up the razor, so I’m going to try a few alternatives in that department.

These are worth checking out if you’re appalled at the spiraling price of shaving supplies and looking for an alternative.