a. fish

Should-be-obvious stuff I learned this week

After two or three days, being in a hospital really sucks!
Even in a good hospital - like John Muir in Walnut Creek - it's a drag to be confined to a bed. Or, I should say, it sure looks like a drag, from this visitor's vantage point.

The worse didn't happen this week. But it will happen someday, and it's going to suck!
What a self-produced farce we swallow, that we're prepared for the worst - as if! Uh-uh, oh I'm suuuurre you're ready for anything. Accept this now: "preparation" is a worthy objective, but "total preparation"? A figment.

Cards, flowers, phone calls and visits really make a difference!
Face-to-face visits, even short 20-minute ones, make the most of all.  Phone calls are good too, but...pain medication makes for lousy short-term memory. This renders telephone small talk, reading of any length, worthy unattainable goals. A card, however, with your name signed in clear script - is great for the patient to see. Again and again. (See short term memory, above.) But the interaction that comes with a visit may be the most helpful. The data's still collecting.

Friends and loved ones are really important!
Friendships of any kind need to be nourished. And yeah, yeah, times like this make you realize who matters (in a way, everybody.) But all that jazz. It's so obvious it becomes mundane - which...must be...precisely the problem. Surely there's a technique to head this off - the mundanity. Comments welcome.

It's Friday, right?

An amazing fact!! Your Daddy and I have been married 47 years today!

Got this email from my mom. We are a zany family with plenty of blowups followed by months of not speaking to each other. But moments like this make me think we're an exhuberant version of Ward and June Cleaver's clan:

Hi my darling babies,  
What an incredible thing life is.  Can you believe Dad and I have been married 47 years.  You guys must be old.  

You are all incredible happenings to us from your first  baby yell to your current selves.  We couldn't love you more.  

Had to toot our horn.
Love,
Mom

Happy anniversary, mom and dad. (Was officially September 6th.) You're both pieces of work. For that I love you both enormously :)

Can you download your parents' memories onto disk? James Doohan, cont.

Last week I posted a link to the cheeky news story of the James "Star Trek Scotty" Doohan tribute from Edinburgh Castle pub San Francisco. I emailed the James Doohan story to my parents and brothers with the subject line "Grandpa MacLeod would be proud of Star Trek Scotty".

I open my email tonight and see my mother's response to my email about James "Star Trek Scotty" Doohan tribute:

Grandpa MacLeod was easily proud.  Edinburgh Castle was started by a man who bartended for my dad, Douglas (I think) Matheson.  Grandpa's place was the Scottish Tavern or Scotty's 555 Club.  It was a for real place just like Edinburgh Castle - dart boards, pipers, the jukebox with only Scottish tunes on it.

My Grandpa MacLeod, my mother's father, was the proudest of proud Scotsman. Born around 1898, "Mac" was the middle son of eleven children who always believed he was his parents' favorite. He immigrated to the US through Canada, picked up an icelandic wife en route, had my mom in Chicago, then raised her in Berkeley, CA.

After a few cocktails my grandfather spoke a hybrid language of Gaelic, in which he was fluent, and English. Apparently UC Berkeley's linguistics department taped my grandfather speaking Gaelic.

Since he died when I was just 4, I only know about him through the colorful stories told and retold at family gatherings. "He truly was a force of nature" my mother tells me. My older brothers have fuzzy memories, but they're lucky enough to know what his brogue sounded like. I ask my older family members about "Mac" from time to time, but before I can get much detail from them, they start to smile, roll their eyes and shake their heads at the memories of Evenader "John" or "Mac" MacLeod, and I can't get a clear picture of this larger than life dude. Oh, what I would do to hear him speak.

How would I have ever known that a) my grandfather owned a Scottish pub in San Francisco called "Scotty's 555 Club" and b) the man who opened the Edinburgh Castle pub was a bartender for my granddad? Had no idea. Edinburgh Castle pub also happens to be the place Roger, my boyfriend, took me on our first date. Classy place, I know!

I wonder how many other family history factoids are floating around in the tenuous day-to-day thoughts of my seventy-something parents? If only blogs existed back in granddad's time. I know enough to be sure his prose would have had plenty of sass and Scottish 'tude; he may have blogged about his favorite American leaders - FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt, JFK and his least favorites - like McCarthy. I know his posts would have be spare of apologies.

New Anti-Terrorism Policy: No geek will live past 7th grade, date women, or procreate

Talk about your bad idea jeans. Schneier on Security: Shoot-to-Kill Revisited.

I've already written about the police 'shoot-to-kill' policy in the UK in response to the terrorist bombings last month, explaining why it's a bad security trade-off. Now the International Association of Chiefs of Police have issued new guidelines that also recommend a shoot-to-kill policy.

What might cause a police officer to think you're a suicide bomber, and then shoot you in the head?

The police organization's behavioral profile says such a person might exhibit "multiple anomalies," including wearing a heavy coat or jacket in warm weather or carrying a briefcase, duffel bag or backpack with protrusions or visible wires. The person might display nervousness, an unwillingness to make eye contact or excessive sweating. There might be chemical burns on the clothing or stains on the hands. The person might mumble prayers or be "pacing back and forth in front of a venue."

I feel so safe, being one of the hip cool popular people [nnnNNNOOOTTT!]

Happy SysAdmin Day

Thanks to Paul Boutin, who reminds us to hug our sysadmin today:

6th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day.  Because if one word describes how most sysadmins feel, it's "unappreciated."

Ain't that the truth? I sent an email to Mike Papio, the SysAdmin from a job I left a year ago. He wrote back write away to say "thanks for the greetings."

The tech job dance

Yesterday I talked with a recruiter about a job opportunity here in the city. For the first time in quite a while I got excited about a tech job. If a company is too large, the programming department is too separate for my tastes - you are told to stay in your seat and code. Yuck. I've come to the conclusion you can code for three days straight MAX. Other days you need maintenance: testing, planning, stepping back a few paces & evaluating progress. Evangelizing. I think a big part of software development is persuasion. There's also listening.

I think you have to maintain a sense of excitement and celebrate milestone achievements when you are in tech. Otherwise things slow down, you slow down and become a seat warmer. I left my last job because that seat warmer phase was setting in, and while they were paying me a good hourly rate to keep that seat warm, I didn't like the bad habits it reinforced: idleness, automaton-ness. I had to shake things up. There were a few panicky moments, but it was the right move.

In The Secrets of Consulting, Gerald Weinberg walks you through the hilarious back-and-forth world that is consulting. People hire consultants to get advice about a problem. But those people will not admit there is a problem, even though they hired the consultant to solve it. So the consultant has to suggest a solution to a problem that does not exist. To avoid hurting the manager's ego, the consultant must convince the manager that the consultant's idea was the manager's all along, which leads the manager to wonder why he's paying the consultant such a high hourly rate. And so on.

Zipcar coming to SF

This is great news: Zipcar carsharing service will soon open PODs (Points Of Departure) in San Francisco, Seattle and Portland.  I've been a member of CityCarShare for about three years now, and I highly recommend car sharing for city dwellers who only use a car for out-of-town errands.

Besides parking, the biggest annoyances of owning a car in the city are the irregular maintenance tasks:

oil changing tire rotating wheel realigning fuel injector unclogging gasket replacing rust proofing honest mechanic finding

insurance renewal insurance policy deciphering registration renewal fee title transfer fee state title fee nonusage fee blah, blah, blah

CityCarShare sends technicians to check up on cars at each POD every Wednesday. Insurance and maintenance fees are all included with membership. All I have to do is pay my $10 monthly membership fee, plus monthly usage fees, keep my driver's license, and return the car with at least a half a tank of gas.  There's even a gas card in the glove compartment.

For absent-minded folks, all parking tickets are promptly paid by CityCarShare, then charged to you as part of your monthly usage fees. No separate envelopes for the GoldenGate Bridge ticket, city of Mill Valley ticket, Berkeley ticket and San Francisco Parking and Traffic ticket. Just one consolidated payment to CityCarShare.

Zipcar is for-profit. It will be interesting to see how it competes with nonprofit CityCarShare.

Elsewhere: Dan Gillmor weighs in on carsharing at Bayoshphere: "Today, car sharing in the Bay Area is just about invisible to the general public. Bring on the competition."

The mind of a pit bull owner

Back around 1978 or so, the bay area must have experienced a rash of dog attacks. Police officers made guest visits to our elementary school classrooms. They taught us that acting scared in the presense of a scary looking dog merely invited aggression from the otherwise innocent pup, thereby justifying our original fears. We watched filmstrip scenarios illustrating the right and wrong ways to get away from these snarling slobbering barking domesticated best friends. "Nice dog, that's a nice doggy," the little girl in the filmstrip said, taking slow, controlled backwards steps away from Millie-turned-Cujo. The little boy made the mistake of turning his back on the gum-saliva-and-tooth baring canine, and (ha!) attempting to run away. The boy's fate happened off camera and was never quite spelled out, but we heard enough to know his was scenario "wrong."

There are reports of death by family pit bull gracing the local papers about every other week lately. I do  notice more and more of these beasts casually strolling downtown. It's really hard not to tense up. Especially with master holding the leather strap leash thrice wrapped around his arm, wrist and hand, all secured with a white-knuckled grip. I don't get it - how much do people make in dog fight tournaments? Where do they take place? Is there some sort of rush that comes from nuzzling these animals? If you want spunk, why not opt for a jack russel?

UPDATE: The Contra Costa Times' editor Chris Lopez tells us that their pet columnist is writing a lot about pit bulls. The CCTimes has an online discussion on the topic here.

Up against your neighbor. Happy fourth!

There's a quirky house on the tree-lined block of my Pacific Heights/Marina neighborhood in San Francisco. A shredded Vietnam-era flag stays mounted on the front stairs handrail. The California gubernatorial recall campaign was in full force at the time I first noticed it; I was moving into my current place. The house had a banner above the garage urging nobody in particular to take our country back, but not on ideological lines. The garage banner's instructions read: "RECALL DAVIS. IMPEACH BUSH!!"

Soon after, Arnold Schwartzeneggar was sworn in to replace recalled Governor Gray Davis. The banner's wish was half accomplished and obsolete, and promptly taken down. The shredded flag remained, and six clear plastic pockets were symmetrically attached to either side of the the garage door. In the pockets were offered anti-Bush articles printed out from Internet news sites.

In peculiar timing, around six months before the November general election, I noticed the literature pockets were gone. No banner was mounted above the garage. The shredded flag flew solo. I asked Sam, the owner/proprieter of the corner grocery on our block, what had happened to our local free speech practitioner.

"Why don't you ask him yourself," Sam said, pointing outside the store, "he's sitting right there." I knew the man was older, in his late sixties at least, as someone had pointed him out at the grocery the summer before. In my mind this vociferous neighbor was a tough SOB; a salty dog anarchist. Not so, I learned that day.

Outside sat a tall, distinguished elderly man in kahkis and a windbreaker, eating his deli sandwich and reading his newspaper at the grocery's outdoor table.

All jobs suck, at least a little

The latest organ grinding is a contracting gig at a San Francisco advertising agency in my old role, programming. The commute is short. I get paid by the hour. The instructions are clear. The people are cool. I am not micromanaged. So of course, as I left the office today, I was mentally listing the parts of the job that suck.

The inefficient way they do things. They have a designer use photoshop to mockup an entire webpage, only to hand it off to a programmer to slice up the .jpg mockup into banners and sidebars, and replicate it all in html. I am paid by the hour, but when I leave after six or seven hour day because there is nothing left to do, why do they hint that I should warm my swiveling chair for another 1.5? I mean, sheesh, it's the company's money that I'm saving by leaving early!!!

Then I remembered a discussion on a radio show I heard once. Gene Burns, a local talk show host, said he does exactly what he always dreamt of doing. And after years in the position, he still wouldn't dream of doing anything else. But, it's still work. And the nature of work stipulates that even a job doing what you love involves some unpleasantries, Burns said. Movie stars, even, dread showing up at the set sometimes. Sinatra, perhaps, thought he might puke if he had to sing My Way AGAIN before the night was over.

Recalling this made me realize: I have the perfect job. It has that tension of freedom balanced with wondering...if I'm doing enough. I can work fewer than eight hours because I've done what needs doing, and I only get paid for doing something. But I get to go to an office and work with other programmers. And that facetime talking about programming speeds up the program problem solving (to a point, there is a diminishing ROI, of course.) And I don't have the illusion that this will be a great job - of course it's not the answer to all my dreams. Dreams are outside the office.