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Putting Your Stamp On It

Random Thoughts

I have in the past worked with and from time to time still do work with people who absolutely must put their own stamp or spin on everything.

Let me give you an example. We are designing a database and a process for managing and populating the tables. I sit down with the other developers, we hash out what we need, then we lay out the database. Next, we have a meeting with the project manager to show the design, flesh out the process and begin documentation. Table A, Table B and Table C are source tables for Process 1 that populates Table D. Process 2 takes Table D, Table E, Table F and Table G and produce Table H. Table H is displayed to users. Process 3, initiated by users, takes user input and an entry from Table H and inserts into Table C, which is as indicated prior a source for the first process. Essentially, this design maintains an inventory, matches it with traffic data, then provides the user with a list of available space and equipment usage. The user then picks a unit for making new assignments to and that is stored to be fed into the inventory to keep it up to date.

Simple.

So, the project manager runs off and comes back with a document that states: Table A and Table B are used by Process 1 to Populate Table D; Table C, D, E and F are used by Process 2 to create Table G and Table H; G and H are used with user input to update Table C. The design team gets this document, disagrees, rewrites it to match the original discussion and submits it back to the manager. The manager runs off again and comes back with another document that matches neither the original discussion or the document he first did. This time the user interface is feeding Tables C, F and H, and Process 1 is using every table except G. Totally wrong. So we go around again. And again. And again.

We waste hours and hours, and the manager keeps saying, “Let me see if I understand…” and then always explains it wrong because, clearly, he does not understand.

Eventually we come to a point where someone on design gets mad and says, “Trust us, if it doesn’t work the way WE say it, we can redesign it later.” And of course, we aren’t wrong, it works and we don’t have to come back to it.

I’ve got no solution, nor really much else to say. This is just something that frustrates me as a worker that I’ve added to the list of things I will never do if I’m ever manager. That is all.

1408

Reviews

Last night I went and saw a screening of the new Stephen King movie 1408.

It stars John Cusack as a writer who does books on haunted places, mostly going to them and talking about the history and story, but debunking the actual haunting. He gets a postcard telling him not to check in to room 1408 of the Dolphin Hotel in New York. So, of course, he goes. The rest of the movie deals with him getting the room and what happens inside.

All in all, it was a very well done movie. I don’t jump alot at horror movies, but this one got me about four times. John and Samuel L. Jackson are very believable in their roles. As with many horror movies, there comes a point where the scares stop and the resolution of the film begins, and as with many horror movies this is 1408’s weakest point. The ending doesn’t suck, but it is definitely lower key that the rest of the film.

Still, a good movie, and worth it if you like movies about hauntings.

Urban Dead

Gaming

Thanks to Sanya, I’ve learned about a game I must investigate as I pursue my own endeavor.

Urban Dead is a browser based text adventure. Sure, its not ground breaking, but it is free.

I’ll be checking it out.

Music to the Masses

Random Thoughts, Reviews

Let me just get this out of the way… I like Kelly Clarkson’s music. There, I said it, now let us move on.

CNN has a story up today about Kelly canceling her tour. And on one hand I feel bad for her because she was having poor ticket sales and I feel bad for her fans because the ones who did buy tickets won’t get to see her (No, I didn’t buy tickets), on the other hand I’m kinda glad to see another arena tour fail.

Don’t get me wrong… I love a good arena show. But there is a certain type of arena show I like. For example, in August I’ll be going to see Def Leppard, Styx and Foreigner. And whenever Poison puts on one of their Glam Slam Metal Jams, I’m there. I love a good festival show, like the local radio station 99x’s Big Day Out. But a huge arena show needs bands that demand it, or needs to feature a few bands. U2, prime candidates for a solo arena tour. Same with the Police on their current reunion. Not only do they have a huge library of their own music which will easily fill two hours on stage (plus an encore or two), but they have the current pull to fill the seats. While each band on my 3-band August show ticket could have at one time filled an arena on their own, these days they haven’t had a whole lot of hits.

Kelly Clarkson is a pretty good artist. She sings well, performs well, and all in all I like her. I would definitely go see her live… if it were a smaller show. For her Atlanta date, she was playing the Arena at Gwinnett Center, half house (which is actually more than half), running her about 8,000 seats, give or take. For $50 to $70 (plus handling fees), that’s just too much to wind up being in the nose bleeds for an artist with only her third album coming out and a handful of top 40 songs. Now, put her down at the Roxy or the Tabernacle and drop the price to $15 or $20, I guarantee she’d be a sellout. Heck, in a smaller venue I might actually be willing to pay that $50 or more for an artist who is know to hang around and talk to the fans or put on an awesome show. For $50 I expect to be able to watch the artist perform, not to watch the artist perform on a giant TV because I’m too far away to watch the artist.

I see the draw of the arena show, the same draw it always has had: more money and less time. You play one show, 5,000+ people at $30+ a head, even if you only take home 25% of that, its $37,500+ for one night. Do a tour of 20 or 30 of those and you can probably net near a million dollars. Plan it right and you can do that tour in under 3 months, and take the other 9 off to work on songs and plan your next tour, or maybe do a leg through Europe or Asia. Meanwhile if you do the little shows, you have to do more of them, you have to stay on the road. A year, 18 months at a stretch maybe, at least that’s what those guys on Behind the Music always say. It would be hard work… like, I don’t know… working retail every day, or sitting in a cubicle punching out programming code. Except, you’d be in music, and seeing the world, and making a living entertaining people and putting smiles on faces. Arenas always seemed to me to be a way to facelessly rock as many people as possible.

Maybe I just need to catch more bands on the upswing. I went and saw No More Kings play down at Smith’s Olde Bar, and I and my friends chatted with Pete Mitchell for nearly a half hour. But that doesn’t cover it entirely… I’ve seen Better Than Ezra in concert a half dozen times, once or twice they were part of a festival where I got to see twenty bands, but mostly they’ve been at places like the Roxy, or Underground, or even in the Centennial Park, and even though I’ve never met the band, their shows felt more personal, they were better.

Anyway, enough of my rambling. Ms. Clarkson, if you or your people read this, come to Atlanta, play a small show, I’ll be there and I’ll sing your praises.

wis.dm

Random Thoughts

I have a new addiction and wis.dm is it’s name.

It is really interesting to see questions people ask. It is also fun to think up questions you wonder about.

I’m hooked.

And I’ve already created my own metagame out of the site: creating questions that invent unique entires for the word cloud. If you want to play, you can’t just completely go out in left field, you have to ask a real question. Example: I asked a question that revolves around the movie Tremors, so I created a keyword/keyphrase of underground monsters. I would have gone for the gusto and said “underground God damned monsters”, but I don’t know the site’s policy on dirty words.

If you get there from here, add me as a friend.

They don`t live here anymore

Random Thoughts

Furthering my pursuit to stop junk mail, I have begun attacking the mail that I get that it addressed to previous residents of my home or people who have never lived here.

The first step is the catalogs and coupon mailers that come addressed to someone else “or Current Resident”. One previous tenant was a golfer, I’m not, so the weekly (sometimes twice weekly) fliers from the Golfsmith has to go. The fliers contained no information for opting out of their mailing list, no phone number to call, except the local store who informed me that they were not responsible for the fliers and he wouldn’t give me the main office number. But in the age of the Internet, this didn’t stop me. I went to the Golfsmith website and used their contact page. After a few emails back and forth trying to make the customer service team there understand that I hadn’t ordered anything and just wanted off the mailing list, they finally got it and have claimed that I have been removed.

Thankfully, that was the hardest one to deal with so far. Others have immediately understood what I wanted and responded accordingly, so the catalog of horrifically expensive watches should stop, the fishing catalog, and handful of others should stop within the next few weeks.

Next to deal with are the real mail items for other addressees. Legally, I can’t open their mail to find out if there is a contact number. Nor am I supposed to just throw it out. According to the post office, mail not addressed to me should be marked “Not at this address” and left in the mail box. I’ve been doing this for almost a year now and they still deliver mail for the same wrong people. I suppose I may just have to live with it.

The last thing to deal with is random junk mail, usually for local businesses or those packets of coupons for services I don’t need from companies I’ve never heard of. This level of junk is called Direct Marketing, and there just happens to be a Direct Marketing Association and they publish a method to be removed from their lists. You can find the instructions here. Now, unlike the prescreened credit offers I posted about before, being removed from this list isn’t free. It is going to cost you $1 per name/address combo you want removed. But $1 is worth it to me, not only to stop me from getting this junk, but possibly reducing the amount of this junk that gets printed.

The fight against junk mail continues…

Zoom

Reviews

I am a dork for Tim Allen movies. I am also a dork for superhero movies. So, Zoom, a Tim Allen superhero movie is right up my alley.

The movie stars Allen as Captain Zoom, a superhero once part of a super team. Zoom and his brother, Concussion, along with a few others saved the world a bunch of times, then Concussion, driven mad by being dosed with radiation, killed most of the team. Zoom lived and Concussion was defeated… or so he was told. Turns out that Concussion was just trapped in a dimensional rift of some sort and it looks like he’s coming back. So the military wants to put together a new group of superheroes and they enlist Zoom out of retirement to train them.

Zoom has a very similar feel to another Tim Allen movie, Galaxy Quest, but it is definitely aimed at a younger audience. Still, though, it is fun. The kids learn to be a team, Zoom flirts with the scientist lady, and much comedy ensues.

The only problem I had with the film is the fact that they made Spencer Breslin wear a fat suit, a bad fat suit. It just looked awful, and it wasn’t really needed. But outside that, it was a good movie, fun for the whole family. Its worth the money to buy, or at least a trip through your rental queue.

Meeting Fu

Random Thoughts

When it comes to business, one of the greatest pains are the glut of meetings the average large corporation insists on having. As a programmer, I have come to the point where I estimate any project at least three times the amount of hours I actually need to do it, in part to leave room for mistakes and redesigns, but mostly to cover the seemingly endless meetings the client will wish to have.

The worst offender of wasted time is the Status Meeting with the client. Now, Status Meetings with your manager or with other team members can be quite productive, but with the client its just because they want to see work being done. The first problem is that not all work can be seen by the client. If the code I have worked on has made part of the program function better, or differently behind the scenes, then there is no screen I can show the client to say “Look what I did”. This results in two behaviors:

1) The stack of paper. When a client insists on Status Meetings being face to face, I cannot go to the meeting empty handed. Despite the fact that my job as a programmer is almost entirely paperless, I have a stack of paper in a drawer of my desk that contains print outs of sections of code (from my personal web page), spreadsheets (of comic books and a sample timesheet I made for a friend), manuals (for my universal remote among other things), and a complete guide to Teradata specific query formats. Thrown on top will often be one or two emails printed that concern the project from the client I am meeting with, and two pads of paper, one with a task list (a huge TO DO scrawled at the top) with items crossed out and one with various ramblings and scribblings. I take all this stack of well thumbed paper with me to the meeting, and then periodically I will shuffle through it before pulling out a random piece of paper and then either agreeing or disagreeing with the client.

2) Useless screen modifications. During the project planning stages, I will suggest that certain changes get made to the layout of the screens, more often the initial design of the screens is done UOP (Ugly On Purpose) so that they can be fixed later. Clients absolutely love to see things move around the screen to new places, especially if they believe it is their personal input that is resulting in the changes (one item may clearly belong on the left side of the screen, but I will place it on the right and try to get the client to suggest we move it to the left). All this designing and redesigning pages wastes time both in and out of meetings.

The best bet, however, when dealing with meetings is to take extra care when planning them.

Step one, if your company uses Outlook to schedule meetings make sure than any time you don’t want there to be a meeting, you have something scheduled already. For example, from 11:30 am to 12:30 pm every day, I eat lunch, and to avoid people (especially people in other time zones) from scheduling meetings during my lunch, I have a meeting scheduled every day called “Provision Processing” (Food Eating) and it is attended by a few random people who also wish to eat lunch at the same time I do.

The next step is to never schedule a meeting on a day where everyone is open, specifically the client. Try to find a day where they already have five hours of meetings planned. Your best bet is to look for a day when they look all booked up except for an hour or hour and a half around noon. Since you took my advice on Step One, your lunch is already blocked, but that gap is probably where they plan to have lunch. Schedule it then. If it does happen to fall into their lunch, the meeting is likely to run quick since they want to get out of there. Basically, anything you can do to make the client initiate shortening the meeting is great.

If all else fails, call in sick. Sore throat, take my wife/kid/father/dog to the doctor. Specificity is not your friend, stay generic when possible but if you have to give details, make and keep a list so you can remember what fictitious ailments you have assigned to your family members. Never ever make it serious though. If you ever fib your way into Get Well cards, you’ve gone too far.

Of course, none of this applies if you actually have stuff to show the client. The honest truth is always the best policy when its good news. All this other stuff is just to avoid having to explain to the client that they are honestly clueless. You might also get extremely lucky and have a client who understands and some weeks is willing to simply accept “Work is progressing and is on track, but there is nothing to show you this week.” In which case, ignore everything I said.

Except the thing about scheduling a meeting for your lunch.

Oceans 13

Reviews

Did you like the remake of Oceans 11 with Clooney and Pitt and the rest of the gang? I know I did. It was a smart, snappy film that oozed style, hearkening back to the original with the Rat Pack.

Did you like the sequel, Oceans 12? I was really on the fence about it… it had some decent scenes, but the overall story was just sort of… meh. You know? Lacking.

Oceans 13 gets back what 12 lost from 11. Back is the Vegas backdrop and the neon and music, the style. In fact, almost too much style. There might actually be more 70’s style Vegas in this movie than there actually was during the 70’s. But that’s okay, because it works.

The story: Reuben has been had, his business partner in a new casino venture, Willie Bank, has double crossed him, stolen his share and his money, and Reuben has had a heart attack. Danny and the gang show up and decide the best revenge against Willie is to ensure his new hotel, his fifth, doesn’t earn the Five Diamond review his other hotels have gotten, as well as running a gambit referred to as a “reverse big store” in which they are going to need to rig as many games as possible to make as much money as possible walk out the door on Willie’s big grand opening night. Of course, how do rig all those tables and all those games without getting caught, and how do you get people in Vegas to actually leave with their money instead of staying and gambling it away?

All the guys are back, and evidence that an ensemble can still work, each character has at least one or two scenes that they steal, and no one drops the ball.

This one is almost as good as the original. If you loved Oceans 11, go see Oceans 13.

Hellboy: The Dragon Pool

Reviews

It should come as no surprise by now that if there is another Hellboy book out, I’m buying it. This time around, Christopher Golden returns to helm The Dragon Pool. Of all the authors to come to Hellboy, Christopher is my favorite, with Tim Lebbon coming a close second.

The Dragon Pool is about the legend of King Dragon, who has been depicted as a tyrant and all around bad guy. Eventually his reign was ended and his temple and city faded into history. But archaeologists have come to a mountain plateau and lake to excavate what they think was the King’s long lost city. The leader of the expedition (Anastasia Bransfield), however, believes that the legends obfuscate the truth, and that King Dragon wasn’t just a clever name, but he was, in fact, a dragon. When she turns out to be right, its bad news for everyone because their digging has reawakened the once defeated sleeping dragon and his followers, and she makes the call to bring in the BPRD.

Christopher actually has two tales here. The first is the dig, the dragon and all the mystery that surrounds it all. The second story is that of Hellboy and Anastasia’s history together. Once the closest of friends and lovers, they parted ways because their close association was affecting Anastasia’s credibility in professional circles. Now working together again, they can’t help but be conflicted by their feelings. One of the reasons why Mr. Golden stands out to me in the Hellboy series of books, is that he manages these two stories without them stepping on each other, they flow together well, compliment each other, and each is resolved.

All in all, The Dragon Pool is a fine addition to the Hellboy series, and like all the others I recommend it.