Category Archives: Work

The Debris of Mind

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I have reinforced certain habits using the gadgets that I am so fond of using. Specifically the Reminders app that is linked to my Apple ID and my iCloud account. Enter items one place and they are present on all the other devices I use – ta dah! So I have a structure of repeating reminders that I use to structure my workdays – actually my entire life – but lets just go with workdays to make it seem less sad and dependent. I schedule snacks, lunches, even the end of work because when I’m concentrating deeply on something time just flows right on past me. Without alarms and reminders I would be late for everything and I might even forget to attend something important. So my reminder went off today, for my mid-morning snack, which is a cup of fruit-on-the-bottom greek yogurt and so I went into the mailroom here at work where the community fridge is located and as I was walking to get my snack I noticed the mail. Oh! The mail! So I got sidetracked. I got my mail and brought it back to my office. Mostly it was junk, just more meaningless wastes of paper as most mail is these days and I sat back down and got back to work. Then I had this nagging feeling like I had forgotten something and I looked at my reminder list and my snack wasn’t checked off.

I would love to attribute this to anything but what it is. Technology has softened my wits. I’m easily distracted and waylaid and that in itself is just another problem. It’s not age, although I would love to blame it on something like that, but what it comes down to is that technology is a double-edged sword. Sure it enhances life and makes it easier on us, but by doing so, it eliminates the rigor we once had to not forget when we move from room to room. The only real saving grace is that doorways represent really fundamentally important context changes in the human brain that can demonstrably damage items in short-term memory. You can get up, walk out of the office with a fully fleshed out plan and each time you pass a doorway that plan gets hit by a mental tempest. Coworkers stopping you to talk, mail in your mailbox, something going on with the machines in that room that need attention, anything at all can swiftly kill even strongly made plans.

This got me thinking about an imaginary environment, a building made up of doorways, in a long linear arrangement, say 15 rooms. Each room loaded with things designed to distract and confuse. Bright lights, blaring sounds, overstuffed mailboxes, a copier machine spraying paper, a ball-pit filled with brightly colored balls being gently agitated with mystery sounds coming from underneath it, perhaps even animals and clowns, like a circus. People walk in the entrance and as they slowly make their way through the doorways and the distractions erode even the most intensely established mental frameworks. When people reach the exit, they walk away refreshed and emptied. The worries, the concerns, the issues they carried in with them at the entrance are utterly blown away by the simple act of slowly walking through this environment. At the end you could have a nice big lounge filled with soothing music and overstuffed chairs with a really long wall of excellent books that you can pick out and read for as long as you like. Perhaps another room where you can nap. You could bill such a building as a “Mind Wash” and I bet people would pay to be able to enjoy it. All your worries, all your troubles, at least temporarily blown away by all the doorways and all the distractions and then the mood music and lighting and books and napping pads on the floor. 🙂

Empty Nests

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I’ve given up on Twitter. I won’t be removing my account as Twitter still has some use to for browsing the stream but there really isn’t any compelling interactions on that service for me any longer. The only things that will end up on Twitter really are links to blog posts and maybe the one-off comment.

Ever since Twitter enabled the data download feature on my account, I took advantage of it. I downloaded the entire archive and discovered to my pleasure that Twitter stored all my tweets as plain text in a CSV file. I spent the last months migrating my old Tweets into my Day One application. I will hand one thing to Twitter, it did keep me “logging” along for a long time. I’m switching that impulse over to Day One. It’s impressive just how much of my past I have recorded. It turns out to be about 2600 days, or about 7 years of my past – recorded and in some ways with a lot of resolution. For that I will always be thankful for Twitter. However…

The reason why I am leaving Twitter is because it is too exposed. I didn’t feel it was useful to have a private Twitter account, so I left it public and this decision was made with a devil-may-care attitude, that anything I tweeted wouldn’t matter. As it turns out, it does. Mostly this is because of my workplace, in that I do not trust them or anyone who works there. It’s not really anything meant to be hurtful or anything, but I can’t risk my job and I certainly feel that sharing on Twitter threatens my employment. For as far as I trust Western Michigan University, it starts and ends with the partitioned, compartmentalized version of me that works there professionally. Not the true honest authentic me. Being honest and sharing freely would just upset everyone and lead to needless drama at work, so I unfollowed a bunch of coworkers and people whose tweets would have gone to waste on an ignored account.

Another problem with Twitter is the loss of engagement and dimensionality. Everyone on Twitter is a three-dimensional person with all the complexities that come with being alive. Twitter’s relationships seem stuck in a one-sided mode of conversation. This very thing struck me most powerfully as I was migrating Tweets into my Day One app. I caught out of the corner of my eye tweets that I had made to people who were popular or famous. They were wasted messages. At first this concerned me, but then I realized that what was really going on was that the people who had thousands and thousands of followers were so far beyond their social horizon (that 150 limit I’ve written about before) that they simply cannot socially relate to anyone beyond their subset coterie of social contacts. It’s not that they are mean or being ignorant, but they just cannot process that level of interaction – it’s more about how our biology is colliding with our technology. So for the really famous, the really popular, that’s where the dimensionality comes in. A regular person is three-dimensional. The others are one-dimensional. They are human billboards. They stand there and output information and you stop thinking of them as individuals and start relating to them as “sources” instead. Robbing them of their inherent humanity. They don’t have feelings, as billboards don’t have feelings.

So, we’re all done with that. Twitter will still be a link-dump for my blog. Most of my actual sharing will start in Byword, then be copied to Day One, then from there shared to Facebook under my “Sharing” security model. If you don’t see lots of things on my Facebook wall, that’s because you aren’t in “Sharing”, and mostly that’s because I can’t allow my honest self to interfere with my work. — Gosh, writing that out felt wrong, but at least I’m honest.

If you follow me on Twitter and want to keep your lists tidy and unfollow me, I won’t even notice you leaving. So go in peace.

 

 

PAD 2/18/2013 – Far From Normal

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“Many of us think of our lives as boringly normal, while others live the high life. Take a step back, and take a look at your life as an outsider might. Now, tell us at least six unique, exciting, or just plain odd things about yourself.”

Odd things? Odd things that won’t lead to me being fired, hunted, or driven from the village by an angry mob wielding torches and pitchforks?

Nope. I keep my oddities to myself. The last thing I want to do is give my enemies any more ammunition than they need to make my life difficult. Perhaps it’s one point that I have enemies. They may not think of themselves in that capacity but I certainly do. So I won’t be itemizing my strange.

The people who know me, and know me well, which is to say, none of my coworkers at least to start with, already have a good understanding of all my strange specialness. I’ve given up on my work peers, it’s been too long, there has been too much unpleasantness, and frankly the level of honesty required for me to share with them anything that would normally be in this particular PAD post just isn’t proper for a professional relationship. I value my coworkers not knowing about me about as much as me pretending that once work is done they cease existing.

So, you can imagine just how mindbendingly awkward it is for me when I spy one of my coworkers out there, in the real world, like at the supermarket or the movies, or any place that isn’t Walwood Hall, Westerns campus, or the Roadhouse. The last time I ran into a coworker was at Chocolatea and I stuffed my head behind my MacBook and concentrated on that as hard as I could, and the possibility of the awkwardness passed me by. Not quite unlike the Angel of Death moving through biblical Egypt. 🙂

I’m glad that *my* supermarket is on *my* side of town. Everyone I work with lives elsewhere. And yes, I would rather drive out of my way to avoid an adjacent supermarket if it means I can totally avoid running into coworkers. It’s a very special form of awkwardness. It’s goofy and unpleasant and squicky. The last time, for example, I was in the West Main Meijers  was last week and I was more concerned with getting out quickly and not running into coworkers than I was finding what I was looking for or even checking out. Another reason why I never go there… beyond the fact that it’s laid out backwards. 🙂

So, there we are. 🙂 No.

Explaining Things Simply — The Lone Sysadmin

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Explaining Things Simply — The Lone Sysadmin.

I read this article and started to really think about why it is that I find myself saying over and over again that Hell is Other People. I’ve faced this pressure in my professional life, the clamor to “write simpler” ends up being a 22 caliber bullet that ends up ricocheting around inside my head. The requirements for communication are straightforward, you need a common language with a common syntax, grammar and vocabulary. In my experience with IT the biggest tripping point is that vocabulary trap at the end.

When you are in IT, sometimes you have no choice but to write in a complicated fashion because the core issue is a complicated one. Usually there is fiscal risk, sometimes legal risk, sometimes even personal risk. The messages are often times important and the combined issue of complicated subject matter and limited shared vocabulary really makes communication impossible. This is where I think a lot of my particular cassandras tears originate from. I can’t hope to communicate with others about technology as the spiraling reduction of complexity required to reach a successful instance of real communication ends up making the entire statement devolve into “That is bad. We should not do it. It is not safe.” which ends up being thrown in the bin because your reasons aren’t good enough – those reasons you left on the chopping room floor because they were too complicated and there was no shared vocabulary.

After reading this article, which I can appreciate, I can’t help but get the image of Morlocks and Eloi out of my head. I’ve frequently made reference to these characters in HG Wells’ ‘The Time Machine’ story, but I think the comparison is apt and getting more so as time goes on. There are people who understand, there are people who do not, and it could lead to a fundamental separation between people – maybe even enough to be something that could cause speciation. There is another aspect of this that rankles me deeply, and that is that there is a deficit in vocabulary to start with! What ever happened to self-improvement, learning, or being curious with your average person? Years ago we all could have said that understanding technology wasn’t a necessity, but in the 21st century? Can we really say that still? Everyone needs to understand technology. Even a dog-catcher needs to understand some technology to do his work! So, if there is nothing to do that doesn’t involve some sort of technology then why do people avoid it so? Why do they remain so ignorant and incurious and so unwilling to learn?

I’ve said it many times and it’s likely going to be either a part of my memoirs or my epitaph even, that when someone ceases to learn, they begin to die. If you don’t want to know, perhaps living isn’t for you. Let a machine do it, what’s the difference?

Apple Hardware Pro/Con List

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This off-the-hip list I wrote out for a coworker to use when selecting which Apple product to buy. I thought maybe other people might find it useful.

Mac Mini

************

Pros – Inexpensive, quite lightweight, easy to move from place to place.

Cons – No iSight Camera, no video screen with device, must bring your own.

 

iMac

*******

Pros – Very nice screen, luggable from place to place depending on the size, even the largest isn’t too heavy. Has iSight camera. The 27″ model could also pinch hit as a TV or movie screen. The 27″ model can easily have it’s RAM upgraded, while the 21″ cannot.

Cons – Expensive. Luggable is a double-edged sword, some people don’t mind, some do.

 

MacBook

*************

Pros – Very mobile. Has iSight Camera. A good mix that allows you to attach to bigger screens if you want with an adapter.

Cons – Expensive. Upgrading RAM is a real pain and really can’t be done. Small screen size, 13″ can be an issue.

 

iPad

******

Pros – Exceptionally mobile. Has iSight Cameras in front and back. You can send the video output to an Apple TV to play out on a bigger video device. The software is totally vetted by Apple and the device is extremely safe. Cannot suffer from viruses or even any malware.

Cons – It’s a tablet, so you don’t have a physical keyboard and no mouse at all. You could attach a keyboard over Bluetooth but it can become unwieldy quickly. The limits form the App Store could eventually be stifling for some uses as you can’t download apps from any place but Apple. There is also no upgrading of the device hardware. What you buy you’ll always have.

What A Mess We Have In Zimbra

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Webmail Plus and Apple, two tastes that make for awkward WTF’ery. At work I get meeting invitations so I open up Calendar and I open the invitation up. I change which calendar it’s on over to my iCloud calendar because I do not like using Webmail Plus and if I can avoid it, I will. But when I do that single action it apparently sends meeting cancellation notices to everyone else who is invited to the meeting! So the hilarity ensues. Then I get emails from everyone confused as to whether or not the meeting is on, or not.

So, it’s an incompatibility between Webmail Plus and Apple’s Calendar application. What a shocker. The workaround? Just ignore the invitations from Webmail Plus and bang in the details manually using my keyboard. It’s low-brow, but alas, it’s what must be done.

I find it hilarious that doing this sends out a cancellation to everyone else, even though the meeting wasn’t organized by me. Seems to be a bug, but since I just laugh at Webmail Plus and it’s issues, I just shrug and move on. Zimbra. Hah. Whatever.

The One (Really Easy) Persuasion Technique Everyone Should Know — PsyBlog

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The One (Really Easy) Persuasion Technique Everyone Should Know — PsyBlog.

I love methods of persuasion. It was a huge part of a lot of the courses I took when I was getting my bachelors. Most of what makes persuasion like this possible is just how absolutely loose and floppy human willpower really is. There are so many ways to bend people to your will it’s amazing any of us even have a will to call our own. There is a part of this that is similar, in that people in certain situations feel obligated to continue a social interaction even if it’s unpleasant because people don’t usually want to be seen as rude. This is ingrained in us for many years. This is the exact thing that telemarketers and fast-talking salespeople depend on to get what they want. They expect that people will continue an interaction if you deny them a closure and they’ll endure your sales pitch or your fast-talk until you are finished. Years ago I felt this very force keeping me from simply hanging up the phone on a telemarketer. I will say that when I pulled the phone off from my ear and looked at the handset I could hear the tinny little voice still trying to deliver the fast-talk. I just shrugged and hung up the phone. It felt oddly wonderful and liberating all at once. Ever since then I’ve had no problem in terminating unwanted communications. It was if a seal was broken, now I no longer feel beholden to continue even face-to-face communications if I do not want to, I just turn and walk away. Once you make that first liberating break, it’s far easier.

So, with this little article, you might be better armed to understand when someone is trying to bend you to their will. You can either go with it or you can do the unexpected and refuse, or you can just walk away. It’s been my experience that people need you more than you need them, so it’s not like you are going to endanger future exchanges. Plus if you terminate communications with someone and they know you are able to do so, they’ll likely tread more carefully next time.

SQL Tattletale

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While at work I had an irritation with my SQL Server database. My coworkers give me data to load and without fail I have to create new tables to accept the data that they give me. The data is all headed somewhere and that somewhere always has many tables and in each of those tables many columns. The need I have is for the names of those columns, their data types, how long they are, and what their collations are. I don’t really have any of that information written down and for the longest time I’ve been schlepping to sp_help ‘table name’ to find the answers and it’s been a right mess. The data is there, but it’s annoying as sp_help gives me way too much information and there is no way to trim it back. So, I created a new stored procedure and I named it “tattle”, here it is in T-SQL:

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[tattle]
@MYARG char(255)
AS
SELECT COLUMN_NAME,DATA_TYPE,CHARACTER_MAXIMUM_LENGTH,COLLATION_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE TABLE_NAME=@MYARG
GO

I’m quite proud of what I accomplished and the output is EXACTLY what I need when I need it. To run it I just type in tattle ‘table’ and it spits out just what I am after.

It’s the little victories you have to savor. 🙂

PAD 1/30/13 – Burning Down The House

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“Your home is on fire. Grab five items (assume all people and animals are safe). What did you grab?”

I would rescue these items from my house:

  • Important Documents Folder
  • Backpack of Data
  • Messenger Bag
  • Antiques
  • Family Photos

These are things that I cannot easily replace. Everything else would be a matter of homeowners insurance. While much of the things I would rescue, such as the Important Documents Folder may not be exactly irreplaceable it does hold some things that I have an emotional connection to, the real physical things that I have earned – like my High School Diploma and my Bachelors Diploma. I am sure I could get reproductions of both, but these are originals and they are important to me. Antiques may surprise people, that I have some which I do, and that they are on my list. Some things, even if they aren’t worth very much have an irrational value because they are physical threads leading backwards through time to people I never knew but revere because without them I would not exist. I list them as “antiques” because I do not want to cover what they are. They are important to me, and that’s good enough for me. I’ve taken the concepts of readiness that I did for my professional life at work and extended them to my home. There are some habits that I have like placing certain things in bags, like a backpack where all the hard drives are kept and my trusty Messenger Bag which stores the lightweight but vitally important objects in my life, like my Nook HD, my iPad, my Laptop, that sort of thing. Photos of family would be rescued as well. Again, almost everything can be reproduced but I am guilty of ascribing extended properties to physical objects in an irrational capacity. Photos are just chemical marks on paper, but these are of my loved ones, my family, and so they are more than the sum of their chemical marks, in many ways they carry a piece of that family member with the photograph. Looking at my family in photos brings their memories back and help me return a part of their existence to my life through the blessings of memory. Very much like how the Prophets discussed the flow of time to Benjamin Sisko on Deep Space Nine – “You exist here. Why?” and I like the idea of memory in this way, that the past, present, and future all exist at the same time. Our consciousness and bodies move forward in time, but parts of us exist in other times and we can access those by the act of remembering. That the sheer act of remembering in a way helps us to return to when our loved ones existed with us and so, they can again, in a fashion.

If people are safe, and my pets are safe, and these objects are safe then the rest can burn. I think that over time this list will get smaller as some of these objects are stored in places where disaster cannot strike like safety deposit boxes and the like. More and more of life, I think, will end up being digital and stored on the cloud – so much of the material that is digital becomes proofed against loss, against burning, against flooding, against everything.

Saving your bacon with Dropbox

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Several days ago at work I had someone approach me with a terrible tale of woe. They were helping a graduate student with a technical problem and wanted some guidance from me. The graduate student had a USB memory stick that had their entire academic production stored on it and they didn’t have backups anywhere else. This student went to Wal-Mart to print out pictures that were stored on this memory stick and when they had returned to Walwood they found that the memory stick no longer worked.

Then I got involved when the staff member helping this graduate student came to me with proxied panic about the data that this graduate student had lost. I plugged the device into my iMac thinking that at least the Mac would be able to display some sort of basic block device even if the filesystem was corrupted or damaged somehow. The USB memory stick was very old and my Mac noticed the device but refused to even display the block device details – so while the controller was apparently working, the channels further along towards the flash memory chips was not working as expected. There was nothing I could do to help the graduate student or the staff member and I felt just terrible. That there are no backups just made the panic more present and awful.

What could the graduate student do to mitigate this? The answer is in the clouds. I told the staff member that it wasn’t enough to simply tell graduate students that they should get some sort of cloud infrastructure to put their information on, but that they had to be stronger about it. That they had to insist that all students get some sort of cloud infrastructure to store their data. The cloud infrastructure that I prefer hands down is Dropbox. I use Dropbox and I love it, but when I tried to extend Dropbox services for the University I ran into some legal issues which pretty much precluded me using it – but none of that would preclude graduate students from using the system.

What is it about the cloud that drives me to it so strongly? It takes away a huge issue in one firm slash. The question of backing up your data. Using the cloud effectively abstracts away storage from the user, takes it elsewhere to be handled by people who spend their entire time only considering the proper storage and backup of data. Dropbox relies on Amazon S3 for primary storage and it’s Amazon that does the backups and the media shifting and everything that if you were to read an older “protect yourself” blog post would encourage you to do yourself. Instead of relying on you to do all the heavy lifting, which lets face it, we all want the benefits of that protection but sometimes getting to that point can be daunting, having it abstracted away makes a lot of sense. If there is a problem with Amazon S3, then the Internet has a bigger problem and if that’s the case, I would argue that Earth has a problem and that singular condition trumps the conditions of your backups because there are other more important things to consider. Now, please note that I am not directly advocating loading your data into Dropbox and then ignoring secondary backup completely, but for the majority of people out there, I do believe that Dropbox and Amazon S3 is enough to ensure your data security and persistence enough to stop here. Nothing stops anyone from duplicating their Dropbox contents on another storage medium but only those who are really invested in technology really need to move beyond what Dropbox provides.

I think every student should get a Dropbox account. The basic one is free and you can store up to 2GB and Dropbox has several ways you can win more space, such as referrals and such. For the panicked graduate student there is little that can be done beyond perhaps using a data recovery service such as the one I had previous experience with, Secure Data Recovery but the price tag on recovery with them is very expensive. You only use their services because you have to, and it’s a blessing that they are there, for when shit hits the fan.

I also think as a sidelight to this, that people invest in a diversified storage layout, especially when using public systems like those at Wal-Mart. Flash drives are very cheap now and it’s easier to kill a cheap throwaway “sacrificial lamb” than it is to watch your entire life disappear in a puff of logic from an overused terminal and it’s possibly damaged or shorted-out USB port. It is also my strong professional recommendation that people put lifespans on the devices they depend on. USB Hard Drives should be replaced after five years, no matter how long they have been running or not. USB sticks should be replaced every six months. Flash technology is not bulletproof, these devices degrade over time and it’s best to be safe and not sorry and if it costs a little extra or seems wasteful, then my argument is, so be it. Better to waste money on devices you don’t need then have to spend a thousand times more to recover data from a device that you errantly depended upon for far too long.

If I were in the academic sector at my University I would take this threat very seriously and as a value-added service to the student population I would find some way to set up a “University Cloud” storage system, and open-source variant that provides the same functions that Dropbox provides, alas, I am on the wrong side of the aisle on this, so all I can do is load my good ideas into my professional trebuchet and lob it over the walls of the ivory tower. Maybe someone will read this and it’ll spark something. Just some cursory searching on the network has led me to some possibilities:

Thanks to Quora for this list

Above and beyond everything else, when your life is becoming more and more digitally based it becomes a new vital thing to protect yourself from loss. The maxim “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is more relevant and important than you may have originally considered. Don’t end up being pushed up against a wall, protect yourself, backup your digital life!