Halffull.org

A co-worker of mine just came back from China today. He had been sent there to monitor a supplier of plastic casings for our machines. Apparently there had been some sort of quality issue, and being that my company wisely fired all plastics engineers and outsourced all plastics work, he was the only one found who could possibly help. He described the somewhat dismal though not entirely appalling safety conditions as well as the fact that they seemed like very good workers, despite being paid $100/week. I started thinking of what kind of quality of service I’d expect here for $100/week. If the waiter didn’t have sex with my food I’d be ecstatic. I’ve got some painful messages for American workers here:

1. You are only going to get poorer.
2. Industry is never coming back. No politician can ever bring it back for you.
3. You helped lose it. You succumbed to conditions encouraged by fatcats, but you smiled as you brought about the doom of your lifestyle.
4. You are no better and no worse than a worker in a foreign country. Deal with it.

I’m sick of the type of nationalism that assumes we’re fundamentally different. Somehow an American thrown in a factory as opposed to a Chinese person is going to do better. Yeah right. The American would bitch and moan and get out his newspaper and start asking when lunch is. I do it too. The Chinese person would immediately get to work. Why? Is he better morally? No. He’s hungry! We’ve lost that hunger. We’ve gotten fat and happy and complacent. We got addicted to a much higher standard of living than that of the generations before us.

All of a sudden refrigerators and vacuums and cars and steak for dinner changed from luxuries to necessities. I keep trying to think of a plan to save, and it comes down to: I can’t get rid of internet. I can’t get rid of cable. I can’t get rid of my car. I can’t stop eating decently well. I can’t stop going out at least a few times a week. None of these will change. If my job ever left the country I’d be screwed. I’d have to fundamentally change how I live and find a new career. The only solution is to rise to the top of the company. In order to move up a few levels I’d have to start the habits of lying, fudging, placating, etc. All those things I can’t do because of a damn thing I call integrity. It hurts to see these idiots moving around a few levels above me just preventing the company from doing well. I asked today why the executives who moved our plastics business abroad didn’t demand the same level of safety at the supplier as we have in our plants. The answer is that they don’t care about the people. The people are resources, machines, replaceable and faceless. They only follow safety regulations to avoid legal liabilites. Beancounters. ARGH!

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I’ve been trying to avoid politics lately. I’ve mostly stopped watching cable news, I’ve been sticking to only reading the local section of the newspaper and reading less of the international news. I’ve said to myself, “There’s better things to be doing. I could be bettering myself by reading, or watching more of the Food Network.” But I couldn’t avoid the multiple stories about Cindy Sheehan, or Queen Obnoxious.

Yes let’s all weep for her dead son. No seriously, it sucks. He died killing bastards in Iraq and it sucks. I feel mostly sorry for terrorists. They’re honestly convinced that America is evil, and that it makes a ton of sense to blow themselves up near hordes of children in order to kill so much as a few soldiers. Hordes of young Arabs rushing to die for a reason. They’re not being knowingly lied to, either. The idiot clerics riling them up and the idiot leaders strapping bombs to their chests actually think they’re doing God’s work. It’s deluded and insane and evil, but ultimately you feel sorry for them that their minds have become so twisted. That little bit about feeling sorry for them being said, they should be killed as fast as they can strap bombs to their chest and people over there need some leaders who, rather than use religion and fear to gain power, actually try to do something good for their people and push for democracy and all that good stuff.

If you read that part about religion and fear and snicker, please smack yourself across the face. Because the democrats use fear too. And this brings us back to politics. The massive cry-fest going on outside Bush’s ranch in Crawford being led by the world’s most obnoxious mother. She wants Bush to drop the minor business of running the country and most of the world and A: Issue a full apology to her in particular and other mothers in general, and B: pull our troops out of Iraq. Let’s address these.

Apologizing to mothers for their sons deaths in Iraq. Hm. I can see an expression of sympathies, that should be expected. But an apology? That would imply that Bush was directly responsible for their deaths. Bush ordered the troops into Iraq and they were either killed by accidental friendly fire or terrorists. I should point out here that this is one of the best fought wars ever, despite news coverage that can’t stop referring to it as “Vietnam”. We’re slowly but surely making progress in a hellhole where the willfully ignorant have decided to force their neighbors to buy into their sham vision of a grand Islamic empire. Most people, even in Iraq and the other Arab countries, honestly want to live in peace. But there’s enough ignorant young people who will gladly arm themselves just so they can say they stood for something. We see this problem in the US: young whiny spoiled liberal elitist brats. They know oh-so-much about the evils of corporations and religion and the rest and you just don’t know, man. If you only liberated yourself and enjoyed weed then you’d know, dude, that it’s like, you’re being fooled, by these evil Jesus-freaks, right? I mean open your eyes and vote for Kerry, or else America deserves more bombings. If I said I wanted to hurt hippies I’d be just as bad as them, such as when they riot at G-8 conferences.

I’ve diverted myself. Bush sent the troops abroad, like many other presidents, and some died. Much less than Vietnam, I might add, despite all the dangers over there. So the mothers of the dead should get a letter of sympathy and the thanks of a greatful nation. Different from an apology.

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I’m normally not one for wikis. Point me at a MediaWiki that’s not Wikipedia and I’ll barf.

Initially I hated them because the concept of letting anyone edit your web page is repugnant, to say the least. I came to accept that, in certain cases, they could be useful as knowledge centers. If you don’t like writing documentation, or if you don’t know every intricacy of the subject matter, wikis can be great for letting the community help to spell out a set of articles.

Now I hate them because most wiki systems are awful. MediaWiki, the most popular, has feature-itis to the extreme. “Someone has a fetish for an aberrant magic word that only one site on the entire intarweb will use? Sure, we can add that!” The interface becomes cluttered with strange options that 99% of sites will never use. And God help you if you try to learn all the magic words, templates, variables, and other things so complicated I couldn’t even find a help page for them. Which says a lot in itself. If you need everything and the kitchen sink, it’s your choice. (Wikipedia is only acceptable because it has huge wealths of information, and because MediaWiki was built for it.)

Most other wikis are either fugly, undocumented, unmaintained, or lacking crucial features. However, in my travels, I have found a few very nice and innovative wikis. Here they are, in all their glory:

1. TiddlyWiki: a wiki entirely contained in a single HTML file, using only HTML, CSS, and javascript. It’s quite amazing. You know how to install it? Go to the site, make whatever changes you want, and save the page to your hard drive. It’s your own site. You can email the wiki around, or host if you want - it’s entirely self-contained. Beyond that neatness, it’s also very functional in its own right. It uses just the right amount of javascript to get a seamless, interactive feel. Clicking links doesn’t open a new page, it might just fade in a new block of text over an old one. It’s an effect you really have to see - check out their site. It’s not AJAX (it can’t be, it’s entirely in one local file) but it feels even better.

2. Instiki: the original Ruby wiki, so easy to install and use you’ll wonder if it’s really a wiki. Two steps to install, easy formatting, and it still has all the important stuff for a basic wiki. Plus, it was the inspiration for Rails.

3. Trac: fantastic not for its wiki abilities, but for tying the wiki into the software development process. It has a subversion code browser, wiki, milestones, etc. Take a good look at it if you want your project to have a home.

4. Tomboy: I almost used Gnome for this program alone. It’s an awesome little system tray utility that gives you a personal wiki for notes, to-dos, etc. The quality is in the simplicity. It’s always available.

5. Wikalong: an extension for Firefox that adds a wiki in your sidebar, linked to the current URL. Handy way to keep notes on certain pages, share information, etc. You could also post your Adblock filters.

6. There was a wiki I found at one point that was good for software documentation. I can no longer find it, but it might have been DokuWiki.

I have a suspicion that many people use (other) wikis when they don’t feel like doing design. That is to say, most wikis are butt ugly by default.

Let’s not beat around the bush, shall we? Apartment living sucks. And the only thing that sucks more than apartment living is the people who live above me. Uh, I mean “us.” Yeah. If you haven’t lived in an apartment for a while and don’t really remember what it’s like, allow me to refresh your memory:

It’s been a long week at work. You come home from another tiring day, and all you want is 45 minutes to sit back and relax and enjoy a little peace and quiet. Maybe some TV, maybe not. What you definitely need is a few minutes to settle down. So you do, on the couch or in your favorite chair. All is well when… STOMP STOMP STOMP CRASH! STOMP STOMP STOMP CRASH! The children upstairs start running from one end of the apartment to the other. The next thing you hear is unintelligible screaming. It might be in another language, or maybe it’s just in Childese. Either way, you don’t speak it and it’s really annoying. The people who live above you do not use their air conditioning either, so at all hours of the day, the screaming and stomping of the children upstairs can be heard in your apartment as if they were right next to you. Let’s escalate this and also throw in that they’ve been vacuuming at 7:00am every other morning, including Saturday. Also, if I haven’t mentioned this – the children do not sleep in the second bedroom, they sleep in the master bedroom above you and it’s fun waking up to the sounds of their playing and screaming at 6:30am on a Saturday. At least you’re awake for the vacuuming. And of course when you complain to them, they don’t get it because their children are awesomely wonderful and perfect in every way so how in the world could they be annoying?

This is my day, every day. I know I’m not alone – millions of apartment dwellers have to put up with the crap that goes on with the people upstairs. From the apartment dwelling community to you, I say:

YOUR CHILDREN SUCK, AND SO DO YOU. If only I could get that as a Hallmark card.

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When I was a teenager I went through this phase for a few years during which I was obsessed with Zen and Daoism. I bought all these comic books which weren’t funny but were in fact little cartoons illustrating Zen teachings. In one of them, a master asked a student which mind he wished to refresh, the mind of the past, the mind of the present, or the mind of the future. The cartoon went on to talk about an entirely different matter and left me hanging. I’m sure part of the problem is that the question simply hadn’t translated well (given the huge differences between our language and those of asian cultures). I’ve asked myself this question a lot, which mind do I refresh? I suppose my answer at this point would be that I would refresh the mind of the present. Allow me to explain.

About a month ago I had to attend some courses for Six Sigma. One of the exercises was to make the shots from a small catapault hit a target with less variability. There were seven people in my group (including me), including two who were supposed to be experts in Six Sigma (they were only in the class to “find out what was being taught”). I watched as six engineers fussed over this catapault, ignoring each other and each concentrating on some aspect of the catapault. They argued over whether to tape it down or clamp it down and whether to put a mark here or there and I just kept watching. One of them remarked how I had “shut down,” thinking I couldn’t hear. I continued watching. I felt disappointed in the supposed Six Sigma experts. Surely there was a better way than this random… firing of thoughts? Was that it? Information comes into the brain - make this catapault less variable. The brain spits out whatever is immediately accessed - tape it down, put a mark on the launching arm, hold down the arm, put marks on the rubber band. They then proceed to carry out the commands of their brain. I suppose a clearer definition of thought is needed here. Without one, I will go on to say that all I saw was thoughts competing with each other. But not just competing. Some merged, some submitted to other thoughts, some were discarded, and the entire time I wondered if the participants actually qualified as human during the exercise. It seemed as if they were simply puppets of the information being fired out of their brains. It was fascinating!

I concluded that it should be the job of a Six Sigma expert to controlthese thoughts. They should grab the reigns of this group consciousness and start making productive use of these creative thoughts. The immediate response from the brain here is, “that sounds like a brainstorming session.” Sure, but I’m referring to so much more. Consciously directing competing thoughts by making plans, by detaching people from following the courses dictated by their brains - asking them to think! Re-insert information into the brain. Control the brain rather than follow its directives! Of course it starts with rejecting the assumption that everyone around you is wrong. That seems to be a fairly natural assumption and at work I notice how often people will keep telling each other how very, very wrong they are without attempting to understand the other viewpoint. Pick up what I just did? I set myself up for a trap and leapt right into it. Take the point as this: we must control our thoughts. Our natural inclinations do very well for us - sometimes. If you are confronted with a bear you don’t start thinking about asking the bear how he’s feeling. You run. This is a good response. However, our brain acts the same at work. We run or we attack when confronted. We need to combat our own brains, and that is extremely difficult and we will often fail at it.

My second major thought, while watching this interaction during this Six Sigma exercise, was that in addition to mastering thought we must cultivate a garden within our brains of good thoughts. We need to receive information so that our brain can access better thoughts than those we usually default to. This is usually accomplished by reading. It’s very important, though, that we cultivate this garden and make links between information in our minds consisting of more correct thoughts than those currently in the brain. The more correct thoughts we absorb the more likely it is that new correct thoughts will come from either accessing those thoughts or making links between the thoughts.

My mind, while on this subject, begins to ask those larger questions about whether we exist. For now, my brain has accessed the following information: “I’m able to enjoy cheesecake, therefore I do not care whether or not I technically exist.”

We’re all movie experts in our own right, aren’t we? We know what we like. It may not be what the next person likes, but what we do like, we are experts at. And in the past, there has always been a movie to suit our individual and collective tastes. Not this year. I have always been a big movie-goer. My parents used to take us to the old local theater downtown every Friday for a flick. I saw Indiana Jones forty times and loved it every time. But recently, with ticket and concession prices on the rise and movies that are becoming more miss than hit, I’ve stayed away. Let’s face it – even matinee prices are too high to make recent movies worth it.

There’s been much ado in the news lately about the slump at the box office. According to reports, ticket sales are down more than six percent compared to last year and movie executives fear that this will be the biggest slump in twenty years. High hopes had been pinned on Star Wars: Episode III and Batman Returns, but the two movies have failed to make up for the poor performance experienced so far. And for some reason, it’s a big mystery as to why moviegoers are staying away. Some blame it on higher ticket prices, while others point fingers at pirated movies being downloaded over the internet. Many other reasons have been suggested, but as the theories keep coming, no one seems to agree on any one of them. Well, let me help all of you multi-million dollar entertainment executives figure it out:

Your movies are crap.

Admittedly, I am a book nerd and prefer books over movies. A book can give you so much more depth that a movie can’t. When a movie is released that is based on a classic book (for example, The Count of Monte Cristo) I will avoid that movie like the plague, and for good reason. The book that the movie is based upon is a magnificent story; an elaborate, well written novel that a movie would not possibly do justice to within a two hour sitting. (Read my words carefully here because I didn’t say that they couldn’t do it justice, I said they wouldn’t.) The movie tends to not be even remotely similar to the original story and, nerdy as it sounds, I get angry that people think that what they saw in the movie was what you would read in the book. Because so many great books such as this one have been horribly disfigured on film, there is a general sentiment among movie-goers that the book is almost always better than the movie. Exceptions would be epics like The Lord of the Rings – but these are few and far between. Movies are focusing more and more on long, flashy, expensive scenes, at great sacrifice to the plot and character development.

This week I went to see Kingdom of Heaven. I had high hopes because it was directed by Ridley Scott. On the other hand, it was starring Orlando Bloom, who I really wasn’t sure could pull off a leading role. I stand corrected; Bloom wasn’t bad at all, it was the story that I hated. The fighting scenes were only okay – is it just me or are these epic battles getting old? I enjoyed the tactical fighting of the siege to Jerusalem very much, but the hand-to-hand combat is becoming old hat. Even so, this would have been forgivable except for the storyline. The main character leapfrogs from plot-point to plot-point, giving us very little time to think about why he’s doing anything, and the audience is left with a feeling akin to whiplash. By the end of the movie the audience has no emotional investment in the character, so as Balian rode off into the sunset with the princess, no one cared.

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Howard Dean. This is pure genius. He gets the Democratic party noticed at a time when they are largely being relegated to the sidelines. In my personal view they’re merely the party of whining and then telling you to cough up more tax money for social programming, regardless of whether it’s actually helping or not. That is a very, very biased view and I apologize for it. Unless you’re a democrat yourself. Go jump.

Apparently all Republicans are white male christians who (and these are separate statements he made) never worked a day in their life. He later changed it to Republican leaders. He honestly believes that Democrats still represent the working class. _Since when?_ Issue-grouping has killed that! The Democrats have to be the party of diversity, abortion rights, more social programs, more doormat behavior in foreign policy, and government regulation. The Republicans have to be the party of religion, morality, aggressive foreign policy, lower taxes (though that is rarely delivered), and less social programming and more spending on defense instead.

Issue-grouping is simply bad for America, but it’s really bad for the Democrats right now. They would jump at the chance to abandon abortion and therefore pick up a bunch of religious voters, or so they think. I doubt they’d pick up many votes by abandoning abortion, because I happen to believe it is a media-spun myth (since most people in ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the LA times are liberals) that most of the middle of America only voted for Bush because of abortion and gays. It just fits too well with their typical characterization of red states as full of complete morons. Yes, that college degree completely separates you from them because you know who Voltaire and Jack Kerouac are. (I don’t happen to know who those two are but I don’t really give a crap.) A bunch of over-education and half-hearted pothead analysis of the beauty of the tree symbolism isn’t exactly going to pay the bills. Excuse me, I’m being crass because I’m angry. I apologize. For your information I happened to enjoy the symbolism in Dante because he ruled. Moving on.

So, issue-grouping is bad for both parties, bad for our country, but really, really, really bad for Democrats right now. They simply can’t get their disparate groups together under one big umbrella. Sure they can throw the Pride whatever with the Afro-American Urban Action whatchamacallit, but the Afro-American Urban Action whatchamacallit doesn’t fit with the Abortion league and Local 5380 doesn’t fit with the Pride whatever. (If you’re wondering, I happen to support abortion rights.) I’m just saying they’ve got an uphill battle. Especially when the rhetoric gets nasty. I’m sorry, but “You’re a bunch of baby-killers” is a better line for whipping a crowd into a frenzy than “My body, my choice”. I’m not saying this is good, but you’ve got to face the fact that it will take years to convince people on this one.

It’s also not easy for the gays. I say you go ahead and have hot man-love with whomsoever you want to have hot man-love with. However, “we’re here and we’re queer” is downright obnoxious, especially when they sue some town to fly some pride day flags on a bridge the town maintains is reserved for historical flags. You know, like Veteran’s Day. Or the fourth of July. But then you get some weeping about the holocaust against gays and I’m sorry, but I can’t help but roll my eyes.

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My mentor at work has been jokingly thanking me for training him in how to be political. He said, “See, I’ve learned my mistake. Before, I tried to do what’s right. You’ve shown me that we should just do what’s wrong and get the credit.” This is either a joke, or, as I suspect (though I am prone to paranoia due to social anxiety) it’s a rebuke. Either way, it’s shaming.

My main project at work is receiving more attention than needed, and possibly more than merited, due to the disturbing fact that we have used (deleted out of fear of what happened to that Delta Airlines stewardess) so well that our project will be used as the “model project”, meaning our tools will be shown as examples in training future green and black belts. We only did what was right for the project, ignoring the ephemereal certification guidelines. Now the project is progressing fairly well and we’ve got the sun shining on us.

We have done well on this project. Massive failures remain built into the system we constructed, and I feel inadequate for failing to solve them. At this point I don’t feel that the major problem of production has been solved though we will present data to the contrary. The scary thing is it doesn’t matter what we actually did. No one is watching. We could lie through our teeth and be hailed for it. The ones who will pay will be the tech reps in the field who will, yet again, be presented with a part that meets all design specs yet does not perform the job they need it to do.

I could make the argument that getting noticed is all that matters. I’m a young man and I need to think of my future and getting noticed by the right vice presidents and being obsequious without being obvious is where I should concentrate my efforts. The argument falls apart when I wonder where those vice presidents started out. Probably young people, like me, looking up to those at the top and figuring “hey, they lie to themselves and each other, so why shouldn’t I?”

I don’t mean to be simplistic. I’ve had a problem since starting in the working world, a problem with believing that people are idiots. I can’t believe people are idiots, since I am a person and to believe that everyone else is an idiot but me is… idiotic. People are prone to moments of idiocy. So how do I explain the consistent idiots? Can’t they see what they’re doing? Either they can and they don’t care, or they just don’t notice. That can be fairly easy. I wonder, perhaps too much, what the production workers think of me and the failures on my little production cell. Do they blame me? Do they think that I’m simply an ignorant fool, willingly ignorant or not? Of course I could deviate from this relativistic standpoint and just say that yes, the vice presidents are idiots but they don’t know it because they’re all living a lie, managing by numerical targets that have no basis in reality and without knowing or caring what the actual impact on the company is, as long as they meet their own targets on their perfomance evaluation and manage not to commit actual fraud on the budget in order to do so. If you were an english teacher, I apologize for that last sentence, since I am sure you are now dead.

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Or: At least it wasn’t Fantasia.

Just like Clay outsold and outdid Ruben after season two, Bo shall outdo Carrie. Everyone had recognized his superiority for the full contest length. For reasons unknown, and somewhat fishy, he was a bit nervous Tuesday. Carrie still didn’t deserve to win - cookiecutters don’t make original music. Just like Fantasia was not like Macy Gray at all, cough…

At least Clive Davis knew what he was talking about, and offered Bo a record contract over a month ago.

If I could bring back one person to start beating people over the head, I would bring back Harry Truman. Why? “The buck stops here.” How easy is it to blame external conditions for our lack of satisfaction? It seems perfectly logical to trace events that have had direct influence on our lives and caused us some kind of hardship. However if you really look at many hardships, there is either a pattern or a series of exacerbations. Allow me to explain. I recently had an accident on the highway. I was driving at a high rate of speed in icy conditions because I couldn’t stand being behind slow moving cars. This ended up costing me $600 in repairs to my vehicle and who knows what kind of insurance hike is awaiting me when my next insurance bill comes next month. I am fairly clearly at fault here. Don’t you know someone who might blame the city for not plowing before rush hour? Or perhaps someone who would demand better industry-wide tire quality, or might ask for icy condition training to be incorporated into driver’s license tests? It’s certainly the response the government would take in response to a singular incident. Wow, I just thought of another rant, but I’ll continue with this one for now.

Let me make a more realistic point: I’ve had some trouble at work getting the technicians producing parts for me to adequately inspect the parts. They are all of similar age and background and one of them is able to find defects while the other two cannot. She spends more time with the parts and takes a closer look at them. The other two take a detached attitude to the parts. Should I not come home complaining about lazy techs who are so hard to work with? I would not do this since I know all three are excellent workers. Let’s say I didn’t know them. Wouldn’t I blame any missed defects on their “laziness”? Also take an operator who was, until recently, performing some operations involving cutting on my parts. I found, upon inspecting her work before shipping, that she had cut up several of the parts improperly, rendering them useless. She had lied to me about not finding any defects when I asked. Should I not blame her for my loss of parts?

OR: Should I take responsibility as the engineer for the project? Should I design a better inspection process that is more foolproof and requires less effort from the technicians? Should I define better what a defect is and hold a training session to show them what I am looking for and what I am not worried about? Should I have inspected the operator’s work earlier to make sure she was not improperly cutting parts, or explained to her more carefully which sections of the parts were necessary and which were not? Should I have given her tools that would have made it difficult to accidentally mangle the parts?

Here lies the freedom you can grant yourself with personal responsibility. When external factors are turned into internal factors, you find that there are actions you can take to counteract undesirable conditions. It’s liberating, ironically, to blame oneself for problems because you can immediately see your areas for improvement.

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