LinkedIn is a pretty good business tool. I use it quite a lot to communicate with old colleagues and investigate opportunities. As the kids approach college graduation, I have encouraged them to build their LinkedIn profile. Kelly changed her profile picture and the page is really starting to take shape. You can click here to see it.
Month: October 2013
Day 776 of 1000
There is an interesting article over at The Numbers Guy blog at the Wall Street Journal titled Government Shutdown’s Price Tag. It basically says whatever number the government calculates as the cost of the shutdown is just wrong. He talks about how badly the calculation was done during the last two shutdowns and what it is impossible and worthless to even try (Hint: The U.S. economy is about the same complexity as the weather). There are a couple of other things that make Obama’s shutdown even more expensive that are of the Obama’s own making. Beside the greater amount of money Obama spends to keep people out of parks than it would cost just operate as usual, there is a good chance the Democrats will pay the furloughed government workers for services NOT rendered. From the article:
There is one other big variable to economic impact: What happens if Congress chooses not to award back pay to furloughed workers? After every prior shutdown, Congress has made up the withheld salary. “If the current situation lingers for several weeks, I suspect this Congress will be less willing to offer that pay,” Mr. LeBas said. “The multibillion price tag for doing so is more meaningful today in a deficit-conscious world, than it was almost 18 years ago.”
Whatever number is selected as the cost of Obama’s shutdown will almost certainly be used to blame the people who were actually trying to remedy the situation.
Day 775 of 1000
This a picture Kelly snapped while at work at the fabulous new NCSU Hunt Library today. As I am stuck out in Prescott without the family working through the weekend, I got a little melancholy. Lorena, the kids and I started going down to the NCSU Hill Library (the old one) when the kids started community college three and a half years. At first it was fun because we got to watch the posturing and histrionics of the college kids while Lorena, Kelly, and Christian studied and I worked on volunteer research for NCSU.
When the kids moved on from community college to NCSU, we continued to go about every other Saturday, but now it was even more fun because the kids were part of the drama. Then, at the beginning of 2013 the best college library in the world opened over on the Centenniel campus. Now, we only have a few short months to go to the library together. I want to enjoy every chance I get to be with the kids before they go off to graduate school in the west. Fortunately, the plan is for me to be home for a couple of weeks after this trip and I plan to make the most of it. I am very thankful that they still do not mind if I tag along.
Day 774 of 1000
I was scheduled to make a two day trip to Denver next week, but it got cancelled so I can stay here and program something that is essentially similar to a video game with a robot attached. If I am going to be stuck in a hotel away from my family, I would rather do that than travel around the country. I found a very cool new college library to visit, but it is at a school full of fundamentalist liberals, so I think the general public is not welcome there. Kind of like the federal government. Obama shuts down the government and then does not allow people use stuff that is normally free and is not paid with money taken by force from the American people by the government. Amazing how that works.
Day 773 of 1000
We have some challenges at my work that require me to make an unscheduled trip to Denver for a couple of days next week. It needs to be done and I am the best one to do it. One of our vendors has really not met their commitment, so we have to pick up the slack. One of the people who works for the vendor has caused lots of delays. Because he is not willing to try to make adjustments for his lack of performance, we will have to put a man in his mid-eighties on an airplane to deal with the problem. An unwillingness to at least make an attempt to do the right thing when it will cause grief for the people you have let down is pretty egregious.
Kelly was in a situation at her summer internship where she thought she had fallen behind in her work. She was tasked to learn some pretty complicated materials and she just did not understand it as well as she should. Her future tasks depended on the new knowledge. I asked her how long it would take to learn the material. She told me she could do it in three or four hours. I told her she should consider going into work the coming Saturday. Because it was a place that needed a security clearance, she had to ask permission. When she called her supervisor to make the request, her administrator told her it was not permitted for interns. The administrator laughed a little after Kelly asked the question.
Kelly was a little embarrassed when the administrator laughed. She did not find out until later that the laughter was because her direct supervisor who needed her to learn the new material was sitting beside the administrator when Kelly made the call. They had gotten a kick out of her desire to go the extra mile. Kelly’s boss mentioned it to her the following Monday and thanked her for the attempt. He assured her she was doing just fine. Both the administator and the director of the division brought it up with Kelly during her exit interview. A willingness to go the extra mile is worth it. It does get noticed. Unwillingness gets noticed, too.
Day 772 of 1000
I logged for one summer in North Idaho while I was in college. Though I had worked in sawmills a lot, I found the logging culture both different and interesting. There seemed to be a constant flame war going on about which cork boots were best (White is the brand I remember). There were also continuous arguments about chainsaws (Stihl, Husqvarna, etc.), the “right” way to file you saw chain (whether to do it yourself or have someone else do it), and a million other work and tool related subjects. It is really not much different in the world of of programming. There is always a struggle to get everyone on the same page with respect to programming languages, development environments, debuggers, hardware, etc., etc.
I got a kick out of the seventh item on this list in an article at Simply Statistics. It points to an article about using something called Hadoop to deal with “big data” problems. I am just starting to learn more about different statistical tools, so it was great to be able to glean information about tools that are new to me from this article like pandas and scalding. The pop-culture element of the article is the reason I thought to right about it here. The disdain with which the author writes about Hadoop is more than matched in the comments section below the post. I especially like an aside written by one of the commenters in response to a commenter before him who extolled the virtues of language named Erlang while hammering everything else:
[Edit: I have had a poke around, and you appear to have a bit of a history of trolling and flaming-anything-that-isn’t Erlang, so if you don’t mind, I will take your criticism with a grain of salt.]
Christian and I discuss this kind of thing pretty regularly. It is hard not to get caught up in the religious wars. It is something I have to fight on a regular basis. In industry it is critical to do what is best for the company. Sometimes that means reuse of a really, really bad code base to get something to market quickly. Sometimes it means using almost dead cult languages like Delphi and Haskell (see, I still have some religion) that have little penetration in the real world. As I get older I realize there is nothing new under the sun. Before there were chain-saw arguments, I am sure there were axe arguments.
We love Monterrey. Lorena’s brother, Jorge, sent a link to this great video about that beautiful city. It is really even better than this video shows. Except the cheesy Yoga thing.
My buddy John at work told me to go look at donotcall.gov. The image below is what was there. Make sure you do not call donotcall. They are shut down. On the one hand, it gives great joy that the government is shut down so they do not waste as much of my money nor spend it on evil and objectionable things. Shutting down the government is about the only thing Barack Obama, Harry Reid and the Democrats have ever done for which I have been thankful. I wish the Republicans would have thought of doing this. On the other hand, this is one of the few government services that was actually worth it.
Day 771 of 1000
Kelly went to her first job fair at NCSU last year. She was not wildly excited about the idea as she said none of the other students took it too seriously. Actually, she pretty seriously drug her feet, but in the end she dressed up very professionally, we updated and beautified her resume, and she went. When she went, she was wiped out–it really is hard work to work a big job fair. She said she was a little skeptical, but that changed to outright enthusiasm after she got four interviews and three job offers. This year, she does not need the job fair as badly as last, because she has a standing offer for internship work at the JHU-APL. Still she plans to spend some quality time there.
Kelly’s experience helped Christian a lot. He is pretty fired up. Last summer, he did research, so he was not looking for an internship. This year, he wore his suit to school today, has an armful of updated resumes, and plans to spend several hours working the floor. I am looking forward to hearing how it goes.