|
|
 ✡ Beth wrote this entry on Wednesday, 1st of September 2010 at 11:17:48 AM Dad this weather is unbelievable. There is a heat advisory out and we are not allowed to leave the air-conditioned room except for bathroom and food breaks. Now I hear G-Mom talking about some guy named Earl coming to visit. It is way too hot to entertain. All of the shades and blinds are pulled which is unusual here. You know how G_Mom loves light and hates shades and curtains.
Anyway I am eating up a storm. I am up to three cups a day but it has to have water in it and I think there is also a bit of olive oil in my food. I think that is for my coat, but I do not mind since most of it is all over the yarn and or being mopped up twice a day in the house.
Wow Dad, some days I can hear G_Mom cursing under her breath about my hair! Not much I can do about it. It is so hot here Mrs. “B” has even stopped singing. We asked her about it and she says it takes too much effort!
G-Mom does not know this but I sleep on the bed while she is gone during the day. I heard her asking Slobbie yesterday if I had been on the bed and Slobbie ignored her. Of course I had told Slobbie to keep quiet. However, all of the sheets were washed and the bed is now covered with a removable sheet. She may have figured out what I have been doing because I moved the pillows and forgot to put them back.
So I will let you know about Earl and how it goes. Have a great weekend and stay cool! Opps I forgot to tell you we are also on skunk watch,
This country living is exhausting!
Love, Ellie
 ✡ Ellie wrote this entry on Tuesday, 24th of August 2010 at 10:00:38 AM Well Dad last night I got to lounge in front of the wood stove! Two days ago I was in front of my fan. A cold northeast wind blew in and even I have to admit it was chilly. Of course G_MOM had just plucked out my entire coat, so I was a lot lighter than usual. Slobbie and Cart got baths on Sunday and I got plucked. This personal maintenance routine is really strict. She is talking about brushing my teeth, next.
G_Mom says I can take my fan home, when I leave, because it is much better than air conditioning for me. It does make me happier. Also Dad we are running low on DOG FOOD. I am up to three cups a day, plus my treats. I also get marrow bones three times a week.
I have to tell you about how strange Cart is. She has a real affection for the living room fern tree/plant thing. She loves to have the prickles on the fern rub her back. It really makes Slobbie mad. We take turns grooming each other but Cart just loves the prickly fern. A bit odd but there is nothing we have been able to do about it. G_mom of course yells and then cuts off the dead braches from the bottom of the fern after Cart kills them. I guess I am getting used to just how odd everybody is in Maine. Harlow greets G_Mom at the front door each time she comes home, and has no desire to go outside. Mrs. “B” get mad when we do not sit and stare at her so she starts screeching……and Cart is in love with a fern. Slobbie thinks she is Adam. She does not have to follow any of the rules and always gets what she wants…well maybe she is a bit like you. I am most like Katie because I am always happy and listen so very well.
Well you know just how much fun it is to fool people.
I miss you and love you.
Ellie
 ✡ Nathan wrote this entry on Sunday, 15th of August 2010 at 08:18:49 PM I really need to post more about my fish tank. It is one of my core hobbies and I spend more time thinking about it than I do writing. There is so much to share about how I have managed to make this thing work.
The most recent change is that I gave away my pseudochromis that has grown very large and was terrorizing everything in the tank. This included the shrimp and even my hand.
After this change I decided to continue to grow my anthias harem. So far there are 4 species in the tank and they tend to hang out in 3 clusters. I am not sure why the two different special are always together, but they seem to have made a harem together. My other 2 harems are doing very well.
The only other news worth sharing is that I decided to buy an ORA goniopora, which after a month has been doing very well. I am fearful of these corals, but these ORA are supposedly a good subtype that can do well in the aquarium. We shall see.
Everything else is the same. I am sitting here writing this and watching the cleaner shrimp tend to the anthias one at a time. Always a wonder…nature!
✡ Nathan wrote this entry on Sunday, 15th of August 2010 at 08:09:48 PM I have been thinking a bit about how you structure the start up of today. This also includes older companies looking to bring the best of the startup mentality onboard for rebirth. Maybe we can call this re-starting-up? There are a couple problems that I think are valid in my current position that have made me think hard about this.
The myth of off-shore being less expensive
This postion has been slowly eroding as wages and costs climb in India and other locations. More importantly is the quality of work. If, because of quality issues, you drop on customer at 1000$/month level the costs are rendered moot. This is a very likely position when you have issues in core code quality. To combat this you might decide to have an on-shore resource watching out for your best interest. This by the way is always a good idea no matter how you outsource. Just recall that the outsourcer is in the business of making money off of you. I wont go as far to say that an outsourcer will cut corners to your disadvantage, but they work for someone else besides you. Always keep this in mind. Therefore, if you were to have an in house code reviewer and PM the costs escalate quickly. It starts to look more and more like a model where you have a couple good, high quality, properly motivated individuals in house and outsource tactically in discrete testable units and demand of your internal people continuously reporting on the quality of the deliverable.
The cost of good quality people as leaders
This brings me to the core thought I keep arriving back to. You do not necessarily need the tradition junior, mid, senior, tech lead, etc… model. What you need is a few good high quality senior people to manage consultants in an ad hoc manner. This is true be they in house, near shore, off shore, etc… I saw this hold true at a couple startups that I was involved in and it worked very well. Plus costs are more dynamic and inline with revenues.
This means that the few people you do pick are even more critical in what you are willing to pay, the length of time it might take to recruit them, and retain people who otherwise might bubble off to other more lucrative industries. This may, for example, occur as the need for more stability arises from external forces, eg they have a family or a sick parent to take care of. Remember people leave positions for all kind of reasons, but in tech it seems to be money and stagnation.
I am not sure where I will go with this set of ideas, but I wanted to write them down before the week got away with me.
✡ Ellie wrote this entry on Friday, 6th of August 2010 at 10:31:10 AM Dad,
Hope you are well. It has been so hot and humid here and G_Mom keeps us in the air conditioned bedroom, so I cannot get to the computer! However I figured out how to open the door and last night we got caught. G_Mom came home and we did not hear her….OH BOY…trouble in paradise. We did not do anything bad except, I cannot get Cart to stop barking at noise she hears outside….who cares! G_Mom knew right away that I had figured how to open the door, so I did not get a treat. Some times Dad, this place is just not “the way life should be”. I don’t get it……..we were good. This has become a society of no initiative!
I am actually writing to ask you to tell Josh “goodbye” from me. Sorry I was on vacation when he left. I will miss him. Since I do not fly anymore and am not allowed on the train, please tell him will he have to come visit us! G_Mom says he is always welcome to come to Maine to visit.
Nothing much else new here. Had a big personal maintenance session last Sunday. Please tell G_Mom that Huskies do not need their ears checked. Also she has this habit of spraying us with the hose to make sure we are not too hot when we have to go outside to get our Vitamin D. There are more rules in this house. Anyway could you also tell her to stop with the water?
Have to get going. We all have to watch the electric bill because of how much the air conditioner and fans have run this summer.
Have a good weekend Dad. I miss you and love you.
Ellie
✡ Ellie wrote this entry on Tuesday, 27th of July 2010 at 08:50:16 AM OK Dad, in less than one week I have endured tornadoes and a bat in the house. Is this really “the way life should be”?
This place is nuts! It took two policemen an hour to get the same bat out last night. We came in from being outside around 9 o’clock and Slobbie spotted the bat that apparently has been staying on the back of the bedroom bureau. I don’t think the cop who was here yesterday morning realized that the bat had not left! Well the cops, last night, built a tent from towels that G_Mom gave them and slowly moved the bureau toward the open window so the bat could fly out. I find all of this rather distressing and disruptive to my routine.
I came here for a quiet summer vacation and it has been anything but! That Bitch Slobbie is just so proud of herself because that is twice she has flushed out the bat. Cart and I could care less. I told her that I wouldn’t waste the energy. Harlow, the cat, even said it was not worth getting hot and sweaty to chase the stupid bat. We were all doing just fine together but Slobbie just could not leave it alone, upsetting G_Mom.
I am so glad that I have my fan to drown out all of these crazy people and animals!
Love, Ellie
✡ Nathan wrote this entry on Sunday, 25th of July 2010 at 10:32:12 PM I was reading through this compendium of bad news from Afghanistan on the NYTimes today. It saddens to to be as right has I have been about the outcome of both Iraq and Afghanistan. The bottom line is that I was just young enough to have the memories of Vietnam and The Soviet War in Afghanistan as my first lessons on the foibles of superpowers.
Do your homework and you will see the pattern is very familiar – from our debt load, devaluation in currency, diminution in world stature, to the amputees and well beyond we are reliving Vietnam.
With all that “I told you so,” this is not what I wanted to write about in this post. I wanted to talk about something I read in the Times today. Here is the quote:
This report captured the circular and frustrating effort by an American investigator to stop Afghan police officers at a checkpoint from extorting payments from motorists. After a line of drivers described how they were pressed to pay bribes, the American investigator and the local police detained the accused checkpoint police officers.
I would like to point out something that most of us in NJ have experienced at some point or another. You get a ticket for doing 7 MPH over the speed limit. You think to yourself, this is silly, I was going with the flow, so you show up in court. The ADA or whatever they are called, offers you a deal: you can pay a minimal fine and get 2 points on your license or 500+$ and no points. Think about this. They are offering you to bribe them to not tell your insurance company that you were speeding. I am so surprised this has never been investigated as racketeering. It meets the classic definition:
Traditionally, the word racket is used to describe a business that is based on the example of the “protection racket” and indicates that the speaker believes that the business is making money by selling a solution to a problem that the business itself created (or that it intentionally allows to continue to exist), specifically so that continuous purchases of the solution are always needed.
The redux here: I fail to see how we can tell anyone to not bribe police officers when all we have done it brought a level of professional veneer to the exact same practice.
I, for one, at least respect there openness and honesty in Afghanistan!
✡ Nathan wrote this entry on Saturday, 24th of July 2010 at 08:13:50 PM A friend passed along this link: The Middle Class in America Is Radically Shrinking. Here Are the Stats to Prove it
Here are the stats that should worry all of us:
- 83 percent of all U.S. stocks are in the hands of 1 percent of the people.
- 61 percent of Americans “always or usually” live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
- 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1% of all Americans.
- 36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything to retirement savings.
- A staggering 43 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 saved up for retirement.
- 24 percent of American workers say that they have postponed their planned retirement age in the past year.
- Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
- Only the top 5 percent of U.S. households have earned enough additional income to match the rise in housing costs since 1975.
- For the first time in U.S. history, banks own a greater share of residential housing net worth in the United States than all individual Americans put together.
- In 1950, the ratio of the average executive’s paycheck to the average worker’s paycheck was about 30 to 1. Since the year 2000, that ratio has exploded to between 300 to 500 to one.
- As of 2007, the bottom 80 percent of American households held about 7% of the liquid financial assets.
- The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation’s wealth.
- Average Wall Street bonuses for 2009 were up 17 percent when compared with 2008.
- In the United States, the average federal worker now earns 60% MORE than the average worker in the private sector.
- The top 1 percent of U.S. households own nearly twice as much of America’s corporate wealth as they did just 15 years ago.
- In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
- More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
- or the first time in U.S. history, more than 40 million Americans are on food stamps, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects that number will go up to 43 million Americans in 2011.
- This is what American workers now must compete against: in China a garment worker makes approximately 86 cents an hour and in Cambodia a garment worker makes approximately 22 cents an hour.
- Approximately 21 percent of all children in the United States are living below the poverty line in 2010 – the highest rate in 20 years.
- Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.
- The top 10 percent of Americans now earn around 50 percent of our national income.
If you would like more, please read the full article or there are more than a few books published on this topic. I also suggest reading the blog at: theeconomiccollapseblog.com. Also, watch a movie called Collapse, it is on iTunes of the wider internet.
✡ Nathan wrote this entry on Thursday, 22nd of July 2010 at 02:45:08 PM I get asked a lot about why I have a background in Zoology (particularly, marine and even more particularly, neuroscience) but now work in IT. It is a little hard to describe quickly, especially since this question is often asked by an HR representative over the phone as part of an interview.
To answer this question start to think about the most complicated digram of a process that anyone has ever shown you in an IT/Dev shop: VPNs, data movements, ETL, circuits, SONET rings, DTO movement, ORM, UML, so many many many kinds of flows of information.
Now think about something called the Kreb’s Cycle or TCA Cycle or Citric Acid Cycle. Maybe some of you recall what this is. I will pause a moment to let your high school biology come back to you!
Answer: It is the foundation of energy creation in oxygen utilizing organisms on Earth.
I have attached a PNG of the cycle, for which Kreb won the 1953 Nobel prize. I will pause again for you to run your eyes over the diagram.
If you squint you might see each step as a server or some other equipment, right? HAHAHA
Seriously, as a zoology student, I had to be able to write this out by hand from memory, with all enzymes, chemical structures, notations and details to graduate with my BS.
After surviving that, perhaps you can see that the even the worst IT digram seems manageable!
My own reflection makes me think about how in learning and teaching the lesson maybe more about the role of knowledge acquisition not the knowledge itself. Meaning, I certainly cannot talk at length about ATP generation anymore, nor the 10 steps of synaptic transmission, but from these experiences I learned how to deal with these kinds of flows or similar documents.
I often reflect on this when trying to teach or mentor people on my team or otherwise. I try to be clear about working on the knowledge acquisition and subsequent use in the generation of new ideas or plan rather than the details. Especially since in this day and age the details are a google away!
Another thought that comes to my mind is Hegel’s notion of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. It isn’t exactly what Hegel was after, but you can take an idea (thesis), think of the problems with that idea (antithesis), and then use this tension to arrive at a new idea (synthesis).
Anyway, I can get lost in my liberal arts education at times…sorry about that.
If I had to state a bottom line to this post, it is: when teaching or explaining something, if you can instill the logic and some of the facts, but focus on the logic, then the person will be able to logically solve a like problem again in the future.
Or even more simple? Teach a person to fish, and he or she will eat for a lifetime.
✡ Ellie wrote this entry on Thursday, 22nd of July 2010 at 08:36:18 AM Hi Dad,
Did you ever spend time in a bath tub with three dogs, and a cat? Not fun let me tell you…we were all scared…even me! Below is the headline from the Portland Press Herald.
Explosive thunderstorms that triggered tornados throughout southern Maine knocked down trees and power lines, flooded streets and damaged homes Wednesday evening in Alfred, Limerick, Westbrook , Gorham and other communities.
Dad you should have seen the sky. I have never seen anything that color and it got dark like it was night time! You know what else our ears hurt…..G_Mom was not even home when this all started. She was teaching last night and we were watching the news which is required when you live here.
I actually had fallen asleep but Slobbie woke me up to make sure I was listening. We all decided that we would get under the bed if G_Mom did not show up. What a mess! We had to even put pillows over our heads while we were in the bath tub.
I decided that I had better take care of everyone for the rest of the night. So I stayed right under G_Mom’s feet and we all slept together. Actually Dad I think I prefer snow!
I need to take a nap now. Have a great day.
Love, Ellie
|
|
