I now have a twitter account – for my minuscule mind shards that I was too lazy to put into the blog. Do you think I should aggregate those into daily posts on Deadprogramemr.com?
P.S. I said shards, not sharts.
Blog
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Dreamblog: Dream Caused by Server Support Calling me Over MySQL Crash a Second Before Awakening
I had a couple of fun nights with server support people fixing and troubleshooting database crashes. One positive aspect of being woken up at 4 in the morning is the dreams brought on by sudden awakening. I had two memorable ones: one that directly relates to the server issues, and another probably cause by reading I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
In the first dream I heard by parents bickering with my grandfather. I immediately realized that I was dreaming as my grandfather is very dead. I was glad that I finally achieved lucid dreaming, and also glad to see my grandfather whom I miss terribly. I cried “Gramps!” and ran to him. I was hoping that like that Pooka in Donnie Darko my grandfather had a message for me. I asked him how he was, and he said that he was all right. I woke up then and saw my parents, who apparently heard my scream and shook me awake. Of course I was in another dream layer, as I don’t live with my parents since getting married. My grandfather looked healthy and was cheerful enough as a member of “manipulated dead”. Hopefully we are not in a Tangent Universe, unless that server that keeps crashing is the Artifact…
The second dream is a bit easier to analyze. I was standing at a fishing at a pier right near my job. I was a bit worried that my boss might see me fishing and decide that I was slacking, but my wife told me to go ahead and enjoy myself – it was still 4AM and I did put in a lot of overtime lately. She found a guy who agreed to rent me a fishing rod. It wasn’t as good as mine (the one with the Van Staal Reel), but was usable. Except as soon as I stepped up to the rail, it was swarmed with people who proceeded to cast right in front of me. This was exactly like resource starvation in the database: a few people managed to cast their lines, but so many people casting so close to each other just end up in a lot of tangled line and cursing…
Related: my other dream about my grandfather (it was in ’02, he was still alive then), another similarly recursive dream I had as well as the rest of my dreamblogging (it’s not even boring, I promise). I am glad that I wrote down all of those dreams, rereading them is pretty interesting now.
If you know a good sysadmin with MySQL experience who’s looking for a job, please let me know (my contact information is here).
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Developer Life, Yo
These days there are a lot of documentary shows on TV about various professions. I am somewhat addicted to them – I watched whole seasons of shows about hairdressers, crab fishermen, lobster fishermen, tattoo artists in Florida, tattoo artists in Nevada (but not the one about tattoo artists in LA), restaurateurs, ice road truck drivers, custom motorcycle builders, custom car builders, correctional officers and inmates, and the Philadelphia meter maids.
My own profession is mostly untelevisable. Mostly. Well, maybe some TV network might make a show out of Aardvark’d: 12 Weeks With Geeks. I also think that there could be a tiny market for a heavily edited “looking over the shoulder” video on the code writing habits of colorful alpha geeks like Linus Torvalds, Donald Knuth, Brad Fitzpatrick, Dries Buytaert, and maybe even JWZ. I’d buy that for a dollar.
I found that there are two occupations that are unexpectedly similar to that of a software developer: prison inmate and line cook. Both of these are heavily male dominated, involve a disproportionate amount of minorities and are very stressful.
I recognized offices in which I worked all my life in prison layouts. The common criminals usually live in a common area in the center of the prison. This is exactly like a common area of an office, except with bunk beds instead of desks. Some actually have semi-private cubicles. Inmates organize into gangs, just like departments. Gang leaders are usually placed into single or double cells that line the perimeter of the common area to cut down on the communication between them and their reports. Even there you have to be a manager to score an office.
Restaurants are a lot like developer shops. You have your front of the house: waiters (sales people), hosts and managers, food runners (analysts). And then you have your back of the house: chefs (architects and lead developers), line cooks (developers) and prep cooks (producers). There’s no good equivalent for dishwashers in a typical developer shop.
People often assume that a chef primarily cooks and a lead developer primarily codes. Do you know the title of Julia Child’s awesome show? Well, she was neither French nor a chef. Chefs do surprisingly little cooking, they are more like conductors in orchestras. They create menus, divvy up the tasks, check quality, train and supervise cooks. Best chefs, just like the best lead developers do find time to cook, but still spend more time organizing, tasting and researching.
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Evernote, I’m Loving It
Evernote, my new memex, is a ridiculously sophisticated tool. Text recognition in is is beyond compare. Take a look at this screenshot: I was searching for a cellphone picture that I took of a Poetry in Motion poster that featured a photo of a subway mosaic created by one of my former co-workers:
Eh? Eh!?
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Back from Drupalcon
My last two weeks were very intense. 12 hour days, a 30 hour coding session, a week in Boston with various very cool nerds, a ride in an Aston Martin, a tour of the Infinite Corridor. Will post more when I’ll have more time.
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Der Kunst Der Headline II
For those of you not familiar with the game, here’s the deal. See, where I live we have two things: very arrogant horny politicians and a certain 25 cent newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton that is famous for its obnoxious headlines (“Headless Body in a Topless Bar” being an unsurpassed classic of a genre).
Whenever our politicians get caught – and they get caught with surprising regularity, I always try to guess what the headline in NYP is going to be the next day.
My last try I was way off target: thy went with boring “I Quit”. This time I’m banking on “Dirty Tricks Guv Caught With a Trick”. What do you think the headline is going to be?
In fact, I think Da Post Online should create a widget where you can try your hand in headline creation.
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Memex is Here
I think I finally found a piece of software I was searching for all of these years, the Memex that Dr. Vannevar Bush predicted. Too bad that the good ol’ leader of the Majestic 12 is not around to see it.
Evernote is almost everything that I ever wanted in a Memex. It now even has a web component which will let me use it on Linux. The text recognition actually works and is useful, unlike what the retards at Riya were trying to do.
Evernote seems to be rapidly improving, in leaps and bounds. It was around for a while, but without web storage and access I wasn’t interested enough.
This is best symbolized by what I presume is an old logo, which is pretty lame:
The new logo, with an elephant (they never forget), a dog ear ear – now that’s recursive, and an overall look that would not be out of place on an early 20th century pencil box just simply rocks. There’s more hidden imagery in the elephant’s head. In any case, looks like a real pro made this logo.
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The Anatomy of a NYC Parade
New York City is well known for two types of public celebrations: New Year’s Eve in Time Square and Ticker-Tape parades.
New York City streets are like a 300 pound person in McDonalds: it seems that his or her arteries are so clogged with cholesterol that it’s impossible to clog them any more. Watching NYC streets during a celebration it’s like watching Homer Simpson eat 100 ribwiches. But New York City’s Finest and Strongest have crowd control down to a science, and people and garbage clots get dislodged very fast.
There are three major groups in an NYC public celebration: tourists, local shmoes, pros, and those who work there. Four major groups.
Let’s take a look at the following picture that I took out of my new workplace during the ticker tape parade thrown for the New York Giants.
Arrow with the letter A points to the actual parade: a float with football players going down the Canyon of Heroes. Number 1 denotes the group that came prepared and staked out spots right along the parade path. These are the pros: the showed up long before NYPD blocked the exits and stuck it out for the next several hours. Group number 2 is the clueless parade goers who showed up late, had to walk for a dozen of blocks that were blocked by police looking for a way to get closer to the parade, finally giving up and standing shoulder to shoulder in a humongous mass of people. They can’t see anything interesting.
During New Year’s eve this group is held in place by mounted policemen who, believe it or not pack the crowd in by backing their horses in sideways.
Group number 3 is all the people looking for a path to get into group 2 and those who are late for work and are trying to see a break in the police barricade.
Arrow B points to a more civilized way to enjoy the parade, but it required employment in one of the building next to a celebration.
NYC celebrations remind me of the Soviet times and the May Day parades. The trick was to leave from about 3/4 from the end of the parade, otherwise you reached a fenced in area and could not leave for hours having to listen to communist functionaries giving speech after speech.
I have some advice for those who want to enjoy a ticker tape parade or an NYE celebration in Manhattan:
- Reconsider: you will be crowded by people on all ends and freezing cold for hours. Definitely reconsider if you are claustrophobic, germophobic, have a weak bladder, or don’t like to come into contact with police horse’s ass.
- Show up before the cops block the street. This means at least 3 hours before the start. The best way to do so is to find a restaurant and spend your time there: remember – it will likely be cold.
- If you are a bit late, your best bet is getting out of a subway station right on the parade’s path: these get blocked off pretty late.
- Have a meal somewhere nearby and show up when most of the people left and the cleanup crews have arrived: this is usually more fun than the main event: you can take all the pictures and watch tons of confetti and garbage cleaned up in a matter of minutes.
- Do not reach out with your hand and scratch police horse’s ass. Just believe me on this one.
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What It’s All About?
I recently picked up “It’s Not About the Coffee: Leadership Principles from a Life at Starbucks”.
As you might know, I am a bit of coffee coin-a-sewer, owning a $2000 espresso machine and such. You might also remember the only popular blog post I’ve ever written – the one about the Starbucks logo. I was always very interested in everything Starbucks. The reason? Well, I really could not understand how a company with coffee that is so bad could be so popular. I mean, have you tasted the stuff?
“It’s Not About the Coffee” – wow, I thought, this should clear some things up. Because, I for sure know that it’s not about the coffee. I’ve had good coffee. It just can’t be about the coffee.
The first sentence of the book (int the A Note to Readers) reads: “Although this book is titled It’s Not About the Coffee, of course it is about the coffee–it’s about the people and the coffee.” Leadership lesson number one: start out with a lie, then weasel out.
Cloying, sacchariney corporate doublespeak only got worse on the following several pages, I am not even sure I can get through the book at all. There might be some interesting Starbucks anecdotes further down, so I’ll keep trying. Meanwhile I get a weird feeling about Howard Behar – the same I used to get about Soviet Politburo members: I could not understand if they believed themselves in the ideals that they extolled.
Ok, I read a couple of more pages, and was instantly rewarded by learning this interesting, although disturbing fact: besides the coffee passport, which I knew about, there’s a piece of corporate propaganda known as the “Green Apron Book.” Almost like Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book”. Neat.
All of this reminded me a story that I’ve read somewhere about a North Korean student at a Moscow university that used to carry around with him a little portrait of the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung. He would meditate, looking at the picture for hours, and even used it instead of a mirror while shaving. When asked – how could he shave without a mirror, he said – this is better than a mirror.
I guess, if you can make people shave in front of a portrait, you can make them believe that Starbucks coffee is tasty. There are ways…
