skeptomai

Vancouver Day 1, Seattle wrap-up

Goals

Great trip, but far too short. I learned a lot about what's going on at the company and where my project might fit in. My boss gave a quick presentation to a room full of company employees who were hearing about us for the first time. It was well received, and the best part was some random dude who blurted out "whoa, this is cool..." to the guy next to him. We are all about delighting customers so hopefully that comment means we are off to a good start.

Friends

I apologize to everyone I didn't get a chance to see. I made promises to a number of you that I couldn't keep simply because of time constraints. My friends are very important to me and it pains me to know I let a number of you down. I certainly hope to make that up next trip.

Personal

I also learned about professionalism, honesty and revisionist history. I won't weave a web of intrigue or play "he said - she said". Suffice it to say, I have a very different opinion of things that went on during my last year in Seattle. I'm reminded of the former Soviet Union, the purges and persecutions (no, I'm not getting a complex..). I was convicted in absentia and burned in effigy. Of course, I'm exaggerating. Everything I know about this process, I learned second hand through others that I respect and who respect me. This process was carried out, in secret, by those who had already formed their conclusion. Why wasn't I given a chance to review the fact and refute them, or at least mount some defense? I can only assume it's because they are only interested in what they want to believe. I have direct data that flies in the face of what they are saying and I believe they are missing the motivation for a number of the decisions I made. Apparently there was an analysis written and sent to senior management. I've never seen it and was not asked to comment.

Worse yet, most of them are civil to my face and have never mentioned a word about this. I believe this all to be cowardly and unprofessional. Accuse me in the open, to my face. I'm a big boy and I can handle it.

Getting Typo (and Rails) Working on Ubuntu

I'm trying some experiments with virtual hosting and getting Typo running under Ubuntu.

Getting any complex Ruby app running in Ubuntu is frakin' hard. If you are travelling the same road, you'll need this.

I appreciate the Debian packaging philosophy and the granularity it achieves, but I can't help looking at the Typo dependency list and thinking it would take me hours to work this out by hand and dozens of attempts to run Typo, each time getting a new and puzzling error. Who needs to fix this? Should there be a more dynamic and user-friendly dependency system in Ruby or should there be a Debian package for Typo? Hmm... I think I just answered my own question. Crap, more work to do. BTW, Movable Type still powers this blog. It's powerful and extensible. I recently installed MT-Textile, fiddled with MT-Blacklist in the past, etc. There's even a book on hacking MT.

I thought this was about books... It's really about life

First, thanks to anyone kind enough to have read my recent posts. You'll remember I missed Seattle's huge bookstores and the variety of material available. What was I doing last night from 9 to 11 pm? Yes, that's right, late at night I was cruising the aisles of Barnes & Noble I've been jones'in for a book fix for months and I'm sorry but Exclusive Books doesn't cut it. I've been meaning to read Paul Graham's Hackers & Painters for a long time, so I bought myself a copy on the spur of the moment (just because I can) along with about 100$ worth of other titles. Oh, and I have stacks of packages from Amazon piling up where I'm staying. Perhaps these will sustain me for the next few months in Cape Town. I just hope I can get them all home through customs.

But, my self-indulgent buying spree isn't really the point of this post. While I triaged my purchases and matched them up against the books I brought to read on the plane, I realized something - I'm judgmental and I have an unconscious system of categorization. I bet you do too.

Here's mine:

• In the bag
• On the nightstand
• On the shelf at home
• On the shelf at work
• On the list

I dynamically promote and demote between these categories. If there's a hot idea of the moment, I'll buy the book, put it in my bag (in which there's a finite amount of space) and bump something currently there. Here's the dilemma: sometimes that means I don't finish the book that got bumped. Wasn't it the "hot idea" just a week before? Yeah, I'm fickle. I have a room full of half-finished books. I need to solve that problem, but my dynamic system is a subconsious way of addressing the really big, important problem of LIFE: You have a finite amount of time to absorb new ideas. You only get one shot. A friend of mine once had me do the back-of-the-napkin arithmetic using the number of free hours in the day, and the number of hours it takes me to read a book and I calculated the rough number of books I'd read over the rest of my lifetime. DEPRESSING. Seriously depressing. I love to read and I read and learn pretty quickly. Still, the wave has long ago crested over me and kept going. I'm only capable of slowly paddling along, trying to keep up with the constant flow of information. Somewhere inside, I feel a strange pity for those who aren't even doing that.

Seattle, Day 1

I made it, after over 30 hours of travel. Of course, I was a complete mess yesterday and couldn't sleep until after 11 pm last night (which night? where am I?) I always forget how profounding disorienting this long travel can be. I missed my connection in Atlanta, like anti-clockwork, like everyone said I would. We spent nearly 1 extra hour in Cape Verde refueling, God knows why. That put us behind and then customs clearance in Atlanta... Yeah, anyway I got on a flight which left 2 hours later and ended up in Seattle just before 3 pm local time on Saturday. What's the first thing I did? I went to Tully's. Then, I drove by our house. The garage doors were open and a woman was inside unpacking kids' toys. Life is unfolding as it should. I didn't stop to chat because after 30 hours of travel, I'm sure I looked a bit rough and didn't want to scare her.

My flights were uneventful in terms of travel, but quite interesting personally. From CPT to Joburg, I sat next to a member of SA Parliament. We discussed the current political situation and he was impressed that an American high-tech company (like the one I work for..) would locate an office in ZA and employ local nationals. I didn't want to burst his bubble by saying that we are employing only *very* educated and experienced software developers and we aren't really adding much to the local economy in terms of expansion, growth, or aiding in building infrastructure. Still, it's salaries and tax base. He described Joburg's inner city and work to make it less dangerous. He grew up there and has been mugged twice at gunpoint. He also gave me a list of places to visit in the spring. I'm excited to get out of Cape Town and check things out.
On the flight from ATL to SEA, I sat next to a student from Seattle Pacific U. who was returning from a 6 week stay at an AIDS orphanage in Kwazulu-Natal. Man, what a humbling and humanizing experience. I felt a lot of guilt as we compared and contrasted my lifestyle in the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town with her stay in a cold little building with a corrugated tin roof. Obviously, everyone there was extremely poor and had little hope of escaping. Mothers would bring their children to her to feed, hoping the white girl from America would have money. Men in the village were drinking away their lives with the meager pension they received. Not a pretty site. Still, it's gratifying to know that people are being sent to help and perhaps the cycle can be broken. I need to get out and learn more about this stuff.

Quagga, true or false?

Ok, I learned a bit of local lore today... We live not far (5 min drive) from a big open game area containing zebra, wildebeest, springbok, etc. Until last weekend, we'd never seen the zebra but I'd heard stories about the subspecies and how the ones around here looked a bit different. It turns out there was quite a bit of debate about the Cape Quagga and whether it was indeed different from the Burchell's Zebra. Biologists have come down with a verdict - same taxon, whatever that means. I did find this interesting link though: http://home.hetnet.nl/~harrie.maas/speciesinfo/quagga.htm

Back to Seattle...

I'll be in Seattle from Sat Aug 13 to Sun Aug 22. Mostly this is for business, but it will be great to see all my friends. I've gotten in touch with most folks, but there are a few that I'll drop in on and surprise. I'll get a pay-as-you-go SIM card for my phone there and probably post the number here, in case someone needs to contact me. We'll be doing project reviews for the management team back home and checkpointing on some technical details of our project. Things are still pretty much under wraps, but I can say we are making good progress. I'm having lots of fun coding again (finally :)).

The weekend of Aug 20-22 just prior to departure, I'll be in Vancouver, B.C. Catch me in Seattle before that, or in Vancouver with the usual cast of characters.