Frenzied Daddy

Yet again I’ve changed the site layout. Nothing too major.

This “theme” is all my own work; my own photos too.

I really liked the “borderline chaos” one, but it got pretty crufty because I kept throwing new things into it, and then I learned that I had b0rked the adsense all to heck (for some reason it was hiding behind some other page things and was unclickable. Kinda pointless at that level, innit?

I’m sure I’ll keep tweaking this around, but it’s looking pretty clean and nice.

Palladium needs your help.

Palladium has been producing RPGs for over 25 years. They make quality products- if I weren’t such a sucker for computer games and for Dungeons and Dragons, I’d play in their ‘megaverse.’ Apparently, they’ve suffered some of the same fates that Cowboyz did when I worked for that crew. Backstabbing, embezzling … you know the type.

So they’re asking for help. Not just a “donation,” but the purchase of a specially-produced poster, for $50+ shipping and handling.

Miss K and I were sharing the chair at my desk. My desk has a window, and the monitor is below the surface. Both huddled over the window we ate our dinner. Hers was a cheese quesadilla. She eats it like an oreo- opens it up and scrapes out the cheese, and leaves the tortilla for the dogs.
Mmm, cheesy goodness.
But she wasn’t using her hands; she laid it out on the glass pane and smooshed her face up into the cheese, and ate it without touching it, cept for her lips.
I cuddled up to her ear and spoke gently but firmly “use your fingers.” She looked up and smiled and went back to her messiness. I chuckled and started doing spooky low “uuuuuse your fiiiingerzzzz” sounds like a ghost.
She looked up, grinned, looked down at her hand and curled her fingers into a little fist. Then she looked back at the remains of the quesadilla. Slowly she brought out her pointer finger and looked at the tip. I said “yyyyeess, your fiiiiingerzzz.”
She grinned at me and then poked her pointer finger into my eye and went back to grazing on the quesadilla.

Who says 2 year olds don’t have a sense of humor?

Which reminds me- Miss B’s sense of humor is changing. I was out looking for the Daily Grind to get a handle on some “free” wifi (for the cost of coffee). She asked where were going, and I told her what we were looking for. Then, from the back seat I hear “You mean the ‘Daily Groin’?” and a cute little giggle.

Ok, I admit I laughed. It was the first time I had heard humor like that from her. Since I laughed, I had to listen to it ten more times before she believed me that it wasn’t funny anymore.

Sheesh, “the daily groin.” (giggle)

It’s the new hotness. Podcasting. I keep thinking that I am so gifted with a kid (Miss B) who loves to sing and chat and tell stories that I should harness a mic on her and make her pay for her college education via podcasting.

But I wrote an article on what podcasting really means to me- an inexpensive diversion, an alternative to audiobooks for long drives. I also paid a compliment (totally deserved) to Nick Bradbury, who has been creating quality software for … well, for longer than I’ve been creating quality children.

… for my daughters?

Actually, while that’s a great idea, by the time my girls are ready for them, they will know how to get around them. That’s the problem with trying to parent with technology. The only real use for these would be to keep my kids from being the subject of an Amber alert. There is always going to be some way for the kid to outwit a device or tool for parents. Even satellite tracking. And even if there weren’t, it would probably send the wrong message to the kid. One of distrust.

What I need to be able to do is give the girls enough good tools to make good decisions that my tracking them would be a non-issue.

I stumbled upon WaiterRant in the pre-dawn hours of my internet combing. His writing leaves me sad that I don’t have such great tales to tell of my waiting days at the fat red bird. And that my days are spent chatting to such a small group of people that I don’t think they’d be so interestingly carved out as his pages.

But I do have a little advice- I’ve probably said as much in the past, but tip well. Ten percent’s not that hard to figure out, just slide the decimal point over once. Then double it for 20 percent. And you know something? If you’ve eaten out, and it’s a 35 dollar tab, and you add seven dollars for great service (as opposed to five for ok service and don’t ever add just three and a half), if you add a couple more dollars, what is that to you? Two dollars to you is “pfft,” but a nine dollar tip on a 35 dollar tab is 25%. And if everyone tipped 25% there’d be a lot more happy waiters :).

Trust me, you want happy waiters.

Not to be too much of a googleite, but google calendar has gone live.

When I was in the fifth grade, I was on the elementary intramural volleyball team. Surprising? I suppose. We did pretty well, and at the end of the season, we went on to the city-wide competition. Since I was the smartest kid in fifth grade (just ask me then!), obviously I was also the best volleyball player. As the best player, I spent a lot of my game time backing up the other players, getting behind them to make sure that when they missed the shot, I’d be there to score for us.

Imagine my shock when we were soundly defeated by the other teams all drilling the volleyball into my ‘zone.’ Obviously if these other players on my team had been better, I wouldn’t have had to spend my time in their zones and not protecting my own.

Joel On Software makes a similar point. He likens the company to a yacht, with the developers as the engine, and basically, all the developers need is a place to sit and do their pretty-code-making work. Everything else is a distraction. One minute that the developer spends thinking about, for instance, where he’s going to get his dry cleaning done, is one minute the engines aren’t running to move your company.

Google also makes this case; although a little less starkly. They provide all they can to help their workers focus on … work. And I can certainly see the advantages; in fact, most jobs should, IMHO, be like this; designer should tell the developer “I need a login form here” and the developer should be able to say “I need a header graphic here” and be able to treat each other’s job function as a black box; push the button and out comes a design.

When I was a busboy, I was the best-damn-busboy I could be. Because I focussed on doing everything for the waitstaff that distracted them from making money. Food delivery, water refills, seating, and, yes, the occassional table bussing. I worked my fanny off to ‘abstract’ the work of waiting tables. But when it came my turn to wait on customers, I wasn’t so good- I expected that same level of service from the clerks and cashiers, and I had a hard time anticipating the customers’ needs. But I was a good hardware technician; my strength lay in figuring out what the sales folk needed to help them sell hardware (and incidentally hardware installation).

I imagine that in a lot of the roles of life, this abstraction would be useful; for instance a big company where the developers just develop, the managers arrange everything for the developers, the design folk design, the design managers arrange everything for the designers, the sales guys do what ever it is sales folk do, and so on and so forth. Then the managers could get together and arrange amongst themselves how best to take care of their charges. In a bigger company, there could be a manager-manager to facilitate the care and feeding of the various yacht-parts, and to help them work together to power the yacht and direct it to parts unknown.

I have three problems with this point of view, though. First, when I’m working for myself, it’s hard to abstract the Russ-as-programmer and have the Russ-as-manager provide for all his needs. So in a very small company, this abstraction is just a Platonic ideal that we can visualize but never quite achieve.

Second, I’ve found that I work best knowing the context for my work. I tend to do strange things like listen in to other departments’ meetings, so I have an understanding of how work flows through the company. As a programmer, I need some time set aside to give me the “whys” of a project, not just the “whats.” Most often, I have to get this myself; managers don’t usually see the use of not treating me like a mushroom. With the context, I have an easier time programming for what the customer needs, as opposed to what they say they want. I don’t see an allowance for this in Joel’s model (or Google’s model).

Last, I’ve found that most manager-types don’t like to treat me like a black box. They want to know what I’m doing when I’m doing it and why I chose to do it that way. If they don’t see hard numbers (I spent 4 hours rewriting this to use a different programming technique and saved us 2 seconds off the loading time and reducing system load by 1%), they don’t see the value in you. When someone is a “black box” you have to trust them to do their job. Most managers I have worked for have a hard time trusting that I have been doing my job; I can think of two roles where my superior had that level of trust in me; the University of Oregon and Interlink.

When I was a kid, my fingers were my favorite tool for washing the dishes. Sometimes if I was using a sponge or a dishcloth with the hot soapy water, I’d miss some stuck on bit of food. But my fingers could always find a rough spot that was in the wrong place. So even when we had gloves and cloths, I’d tend to just use my fingers. I was closer to cleanliness than I could get with the materials.

This weekend, I was assigned to rip out all of the old grody caulk from the shower and replace it. It’s been done a few times; first, we ripped out the ugly walls and replaced it, then later we patched it with some rubbery clear caulk. I did an abysmal job of it– the caulk was rough and somehow a bunch of mildew and mold had snuck behind it, which we could see through the clear caulk. So to redo it, I bought the caulk and a little thingamajig that I was supposed to trowel through the freshly laid caulk and smudge it into position. It was a miserable experience. I couldn’t get the little thingy pointed right, all of the caulk that it scraped up just stuck to the little tool, and it was gloopy and messy. So I used my fingers.

I’ve used my fingers for a lot of this sort of thing. I get impatient with the putty knife smearing the wall compound on the wall, and it’s silly anyway because we have these horrid old lathe-and-plaster walls that are so rough that using the putty knife just winds totally weird looking. So I wind up using my fingers, getting it mostly patched and then trying to get it sort of textured like the rest of the wall.

This time, I ran my finger down all the crevasses and slid it into the holes that had to be fixed. And then I wiped up some of the excess with, I hate to admit it, some baby wipes (what? they were wet, disposable and handy to my gloopy fingers!), thus completing one of the best caulking jobs I’ve done.