Alfred Thompson the Cyberspace People Watcher: Life

Blame The Parents

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 21:36:23 GMT

I’m a Preacher’s Kid. That means different things to different people but for many of us who are actually in the role one of the things it means is that if we do something wrong it is likely that our parents, particularly the preacher in the family, who will pay the most serious price. Yes I know people who have lost their jobs because of things their children did. And still more who found life very difficult for the same reason. To some extent the same is true of people in other public positions. Teachers, political officials being the most common. I would argue that they don’t usually have it as bad as preachers do though.

This week of course a lot of people are out to get Sarah Palin because of actions her daughter has done. The Palin’s 17-year old daughter is pregnant. Gasp horror! Lots of people are suggesting, if not outright saying, that this shows that Palin should not be Vice President. As a PK I’ve heard all this before. And it upsets me quite a bit. The girl is 17. Kids of 17 make mistakes like that all the time. Kids from all walks of life make it. Blaming the mother or some how suggesting that having a daughter who makes a common mistake is somehow not fit for public office is outrageous. It is unreasonable to hold parents personally responsible for their children's mistakes.

Being a parent and being the son of someone whose profession brought extra-ordinary attention to things I did the unfairness of this is blatant to me. It is completely unfair to both mother and daughter. They are both under enough stress as it is. This helps no one. I really feel for the girl by the way. At 17 no one should be under national scrutiny for something like this. Oh but it is because of who her mother is some say. So what? It is still unfair to the girl. This is and should be a private family matter. Her parents are being supportive of her. Good for them. Praise them and hold them as a positive example that should be emulated. She’s keeping the baby, again with support from family, which is yet another positive thing. If you are going to bring it up then the morally right thing to do is to accentuate the positive. Caring family following through on stated pro-life belief by supporting mother and child to be. Isn’t that what we want? As it is the media we are seeing and the critics we are reading seem to be aimed at stigmatizing unwed mothers more than they already are and extending the “shame” and “failure” on to parents. I fail to see the good in that!

There is yet another lever that this all offends me. Most of the people who are bringing this up and pointing fingers and suggesting it reflects poorly on the parents are the same people who think that cheating on one’s wife should not be an issue. They are the ones who say that single parent families should not be thought of as a bad thing but as an example of female empowerment. They are the same people who will forgive all sorts of failings in their own candidates but nothing at all in the candidates they oppose. I’d be happy to discuss the issues with people who honestly believe that this issue should rule Palin out. All the have to do is first show they are non-partisan in their objections by stating out that there is more than enough similar reasons to rule Hilary Clinton and Bill out for any future high political office. After all using ones position of power to get a young White House intern to have sex is at least as bad as a hormonal teen getting pregnant with someone she plans to marry. And a wife trying to cover it up is at least as bad as a mother being willing to support a pregnant unwed mother.

Oh I’m not one who believes that Bill’s sexual dalliances rule him out for public office. Alec Baldwin (noted left wing extremist) convinced me of that in a letter to the editor years ago. Anything I’d forgive someone I like I should and would be willing to forgive in people I don’t like.

Working Outside

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 19:53:29 GMT

This is where I have been working today.

It's a warm sunny day following a number of very rainy days. I needed the sun and the fresh air. With good wi-fi and portable phones (and one extention cord) why not? Isn't technology wonderful.

On Disconnecting

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 01:12:58 GMT

I suppose that if I were really committed to disconnecting from the Internet I would leave my laptop at home. But of course I seldom do and this vacation is not the exception. The first few years I cam to this camp in the middle of the Adirondack mountains they didn’t have any real Internet connection. There was dial up but it was a toll call and complicated to set up. To say nothing of slow. Still I tended to use it several times during the week. Several years ago they got a broadband connection but one had to do to a specific room that was a walk in a direction I didn’t often go. Still it was near the bookstore where my wife went so I would tag along. But still most years I didn’t use it much.

This year there is wi-fi very close to the cabin where I am staying. I have to walk but not far. It’s very tempting. But mostly I have avoided it. Sunday I used it because I thought I had forgotten to submit an end of fiscal year report. Tuesday I used it, well, I guess because I could and I was bored. But in doing so I learned some things. One is that most of the email that comes to me is easily ignored. I use filters and large amounts of my email come from a number of distribution lists that are automatically sent to specific folders. I can, and in fact did, delete those messages without reading them. In two easy moves I went from 250 unread messages to 27.

Secondly I learned that most of the messages I do have to read don’t actually require me to do anything. I should know the information in them and reading them is a good idea. But in the short term nothing is added to my task list. Thirdly those things that require action can often wait. I drag them to my task bar and set them to remind me to handle them on Monday.

Another major lesson I have learned this week is that email is only a small part of the distraction the Internet causes me. There is Twitter – which apparently goes on as well without me as it did before I started using it. And there are blogs. As I write this, with four days before I expect the pay blogs any attention and 4 days since I paid them any attention, there are some 450 unread blog posts in RSS Bandit. I think it will get worse before it gets better. I will probably only read a small fraction of them too!

And in spite of missing all those blog posts, deleting unread all that email, ignoring all those Twits to say nothing of not paying attention to Facebook, or MSNBC, or any of the several online forums I normally read on a regular basis life is going on. I’m spending time with family, I’m getting a daily paddle around the lake in my kayak, I’ve finished one book (one of those old fashioned paper ones) and well through a second. I’ll almost surely finish all three that I brought with me. And there is fresh air, sunlight, fires in the fire pit, and lots of conversation. I could live a life without the Internet I think. In fact I am starting to wonder if it might be a better life. Though to be honest I am not ready to give up computers completely. There is no way I am going back to writing by hand or even using a typewriter.

I started writing this several days ago but didn’t finish it or post it at that time. I was writing while offline. Since then I confess to a couple of short Internet connections but nothing like my usual activity. I have close to a thousand unread blog posts. I have deleted many more email messages but have several more queued up on my todo list. I made a couple of work related phone calls on the drive home from the mountains – cell phones keep us too connected sometimes.

I did finish a second book and started a third while I was away. I got in some extra reading as well. I realized that I missed other reading – novels, longer magazine pieces, stuff like that. The Internet seems all too often to break things into bite sized (byte sized?) pieces. Sure you can find long pieces but they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. I think that writing longer pieces, something that is on my todo list as well, may require me to stay off the Internet for a time. The Internet is an almost irresistible magnet to what ever ADD I may have. It sucks me away from longer projects with its “hey this will just take a minute to read/write/do.” My mind wanders or I just decide I “need” some piece of information right now and the next thing I know I’ve lost hours of time. I should probably accept the blame for it but I am human.

I think this once a year trip where the Internet is hard to reach is a good thing. How to make it happen more and to take more advantage of it will be a chore though as the Internet seems to follow me to more and more places all the time. So do you feel the need or even see a value in unplugging? Do you do it? How’s that working for you?

Out Of Office Messages

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 22:25:08 GMT

Out of office (or in Microsoft speak OOF – for Out Of Facility) messages for email are the new answering machine messages. But different people use them differently. For example, I sent out an email to four co-workers today. Three of those accounts replied with an OOF message. The interesting thing is that all four people are at the same off-site event with the same access to email. And yet one person didn’t set up an OOF message. It’s not because he doesn’t do so – he does – but (I think) that he has a different view of what being away means.

That’s pretty common. I have received messages from people who are in their office and working on the computer but have decided to focus hard on a specific task and ignore email for the day. And yet I know other people who always ignore email except for one specific period of the day without feeling the need to set up an automatic message. Some people will set up a message if they will be off email for a single day. Others will not unless they will be away for several days or longer. I’ve had messages from people who typically take days or weeks to reply to most email that say that “today they are not in the Internet” as if somehow it will make a real difference.

I have heard of people who set up an OOF message during lunch breaks. What? No really. Once I set up an OOF message saying that I was taking the weekend off and that I would reply to email on Monday. Several people found that amusing. Others expressed concern about people who bring work into the weekend. Ironic as they had seen the message because they sent me work related email on the weekend.

Most of the time I keep my OOF messages short and serious. And I tend not to use them unless I am on vacation or really not going to be able to keep up with email. Being on a cruise ship for example. I have a vacation coming up – we’re going to Disney World. I am tempted to have a message that says something like “leave me alone unless you have something more fun than Disney World in mind.” That should keep most follow ups away. But of course I will not do that. I’ll have the usual “out of the office and away from email” with a connection to my manager in case of an emergency.

But you know the sad thing? I’ll probably be reading much of my email while I am away. Just not as often.

On Work, Vacation and the Mix of the Two

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:56:19 GMT

I spent about a week and a half away from home recently. One of the things that means is that I have a huge backlog of work and I should be doing that instead of writing this post. But it's lunch time and I need a break from it and this is how I choose to use it.

My travels were a mix of work and pleasure. The interesting part of this is that while I was away on work I had no cell phone or Internet access. At least none that I was willing to ask the company to pay for. While I was on vacation and taking a day or so of comp time I did have both cell phone and Internet access. I guess in theory at least I should have ignored the email and the phone calls that were work related. But somehow I could not. I am after all addicted to the Internet. There I said it.

So while I was on vacation I had a brief work related phone call with my boss. To be fair to him I should say I told him it was ok to call me after the briefest of instant message chats. What we talked about was important to me personally and professionally. Like wise the telephone conference call I joined after receiving a last minute invitation was also important to me personally and professionally. Would that conference gone on just fine without me? Probably. Would all the things I brought up have been brought up? Well, honestly, probably not. Some of them for sure. Perhaps some other things would have come up. But I felt just fine giving up an hour of my vacation to get my opinions and information into the conversation.

So in those cases having real access while on vacation was ok by me. Your mileage as they say may vary.

Now while I was away on a cruise ship (working VERY hard - honestly - take a look at someone else's description of the conference here) I had no access. Now I didn't miss a while lot of email because a) a good part of it was over a weekend and b) a large part of my team was on the same ship but I still returned to a lot of work related todo items. I would really not have had time at the conference to deal with most of it either. Working a conference is an 18 hour a day job if you are not sharing a room with someone who is also attending the conference. I was sharing a room with a conference attendee (a very nice faculty member not a co-worker) so I felt like I was "on" pretty much 24 hours a day. So it would have had to have been a pretty high priority event to distract me and I didn't miss any of those.

There is a stress trade off in this constant connection though. If I didn't have it then it would be a little stressful worrying about things going wrong without me to take care of them. My son has been sick and missed several days of work. He was going back to work yesterday not because he felt 100% but because he was worried about what was going wrong without him to take care of things. So I think many of us worry about what goes on at work without us there. But when one knows that one could keep up if we wanted to there is a certain amount of extra stress over it. While I was on the cruise and knew that I couldn't keep up there was a certain amount of release knowing that "it wasn't my fault."

Sometimes when I go on vacation my wife threatens to take and hide my cell phone (which also gets my email) if I check it too often. That helps because then of course it is not my fault that I am not connected. But that doesn't always work.

So I wonder, will the idea of vacation as we know it today disappear? Can you see a world where people go on skiing (or in my case snowboarding) trips and yet still spend enough time on the phone or on the Internet that it doesn't have to be charged to vacation time? Does an Internet connected time mean that parts of a day are work and parts non-work and that is good enough for everyone?

I suspect that some people need extended time (days, perhaps weeks) where they completely disconnect from work. Does that mean two to four weeks of real vacation or does it mean one full week a year and lots of hybrid days that are a little work and a little vacation? Or does it just mean that no one size fits all vacation scheme really fits all? Will we re-define vacation in the future and will it be driven by the needs of the individual or the corporation. I think I need to noodle on this one a little. Thoughts from others are cordially invited.

Alfred On Channel 8

Mon, 11 Feb 2008 21:15:12 GMT

Just in case you wondered what I looked and sounded like, I am in a brief video at Channel 8 right now. This was shot at a wrap up party for members of Microsoft's worldwide academic team so the background noise is a little different from the normal interview venue. There are several other members of the team from the US and elsewhere on the short (less than two minutes) video.

I'm still in Seattle all this week by the way. I am having a wonderful time meeting Microsoft employees from all over the world at an event called TechReady 6. This is a twice a year training event and there are 6,000 Microsoft employees from the field here for the week. What an exciting event. I am making new friends and putting faces to names I know from email and blogs. I love making the real life connections.

Plus of course I am learning a lot about recently (and soon to be) announced products. I hope to be blogging some of those things soon.

Technorati tags: microsoft, techready, techready6, channel8, channel 8

Wisdom of Graffiti

Thu, 24 Jan 2008 17:54:06 GMT

Many years ago when I was in high school is was in a classroom for the first time. I don't remember if I was every in this room again and I clearly did not sit at the same desk again. I don't even remember why I was there. What I have never forgotten (and it is over 35 years later) is the graffiti written on the top of the desk.

I wish I was what I was when I wanted to be what I am now.

Confusing at first but profound as one thinks about it. Or so I think anyway. I have no idea what prompted a high school student to write it. How many things can one wish for and reach at that young an age and regret already. But none the less it is a sentiment I have pondered over the years.

When I look at possible changes in who I am or at least what I do for a career or for other life changes I think long and hard about what it means to change. Will I later regret making a move? That is a question that has the potential to create paralyzing uncertainty and a certain stagnation if taken to extreme of course. One does have to take risks at times and often those risks are based on less than complete information.

So far I have never had to express the wish to be what I once was. I have moved forward to better things and a happier life. Even these days when I think about becoming a teacher again (what I was when I wanted to be what I am now) it is not because I don't want to be what I am now. Rather it is because I see different roles for different parts of my life. I want to be what I am now more than I want to be what I was then. At least for right now. Are there other things I might like to be? Yes I think so but they are new things, things I need to work towards, and not a retreat to something I once was.

I think a little "want" to drive one forward is a good thing. I think it is also ok to want to move back to something, or to be someone, one was before. Not everything works out the way we expect or the way we hope. Second chances are good things and not to be feared.

Too Pretty For Pictures

Wed, 02 Jan 2008 19:11:35 GMT

As I looked out my kitchen window this morning I marveled at the sunlight sparkling on the fresh clean snow. We've had a lot of snow this winter - the most snow on record for a December. Ever! But while I get tired of (and from) moving it off my driveway and walk way and even get concerned about the weight of it on my roof I never get tired of looking at it.

My first thought this morning was that I should take a picture and post it on the Internet. But I decided against it. There are a couple of snow covered back yard pictures in my album here already. They're very pretty but they really do not capture the real beauty that I see. Some of that is the quality of my photography skills, some the quality of my camera, and some I think the fact that cameras just can't capture things the way the human eye does. So I decided against taking pictures.

I did move my laptop to the family room (my home office has no windows) and open the blinds over the rear sliding doors. As I sit and work in my recliner I have a very nice view of my back yard. It is bright and white and clean. There are sharp crisp shadows from the brown trees with a few patches of groan from the evergreens. The play of light and shadow, the world in black and white I call it, is as dramatic as any burst of summer color. It's just different.

It's not the completely idyllic scene that a real photographer would capture. There are remnants of my garden plants including the poles that held up the tomatoes that never got cleaned up in the fall. They'll have to wait until the spring now as between the snow and the frozen ground it is more likely they would break then come out of the ground cleanly now. But it is my little piece of the world and it is just a peaceful as it comes. If I get really lucky a Cardinal or perhaps some other song bird will fly by to visit the bird feeder. I can hope so. That would make it perfect I think.

And to think that it is the technology of phones, high speed Internet, and laptop computers that lets me enjoy it and still get my work done. Now isn't that something to appreciate as the new year starts?

Company Cultures

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 04:23:27 GMT

I have been thinking a lot about corporate cultures lately. A lot of the thinking has been in terms of why do products come out the way they do, why do companies operate they way they do, and why does the blogosphere not make as much of a difference as some people think it should. The big thing that people miss I think is that companies do not have a mono-culture. Even if they did have a mono-culture it would still be hard to change. Having multiple cultures makes it a real mess though.

I used to work for Digital Equipment Corporation when it was the second largest computer company in the world. It was in many ways a wonderful company. It was first and foremost and engineer's company. Being an engineer by nature I was quite at home there. From time to time we, use engineering geeks, would see some practice or other that we disapproved of. IT was usually done by people in marketing or sales. A common comment was "If Ken [Olsen - DEC's founder and long time President] knew about that he would put a stop to it."

After all Ken was "one of us" - and engineer - and he was (and is) scrupulously honest. It was a heck of a theory but it was seriously flawed. I put this to the test once and learned several important life lessons[1]. I sent Ken a message via interoffice mail about a practice that I thought was deceptive. It was actually read and Ken asked a senior VP to respond to me. I got a lot of high level attention, an official (but BS in my opinion) response and nothing changed. Why did nothing change? Probably because Ken Olsen trusted the VP who was in charge of the decision. He probably assumed that there was more to the issue then I was aware of and that things were not the way I saw them. And of course the people arguing that what was going on was right had his ear day in and day out. I had my one shot in one memo. Everything was stacked against me. It was the first time but not the last time I was to see this sort of thing happen.

I lost a little respect for Ken Olsen because of that incident but I lost a lot more respect for the senior management who worked for him. It was a big wake up call for me. One of the things it did was cause me to take a closer look at the types of people who make up large companies. I started to realize that marketing and sales were different from engineering. And legal is different again. So is accounting. And manufacturing. And any other group you could think of. A company culture is really a sort of mix of all those cultures with the end result being a factor of proportions and to some extent the relative power of people in different cultures.

I am convinced that the culture of a sales organization in any company has much more in common with the sales organization of other companies than it does with the culture of the engineers. And the culture of engineers (even in companies as different as Microsoft and IBM) has more in common with other engineers than with sales people. I've worked with the sales organizations at four different companies now and met sales people from many more. They are all a lot more like each other than they are like the software engineers I also work with. The software engineers at all the companies I've worked with have all been a lot alike. Though to be honest they are smarter at Microsoft (and were at Digital) than at some of the other places I have worked at. A lot of the smart ones from Digital wound up at Microsoft where they talk about the two companies being a lot alike.

So why do smart companies with smart people come up with poor products? Why the Kindle? Or the Zune? I blame culture clashes. Engineers pushing for some things, marketing people for other things, accounting people for still more things. Let me give you an other example from my Digital days.

IBM came out with this new thing called the IBM PC. Some of you may have heard of it. Digital then decided, rather late in the game, to compete. The engineers decided they could do better than IBM. To many people they did come up with something better. It was faster, more flexible, and had more features than the IBM PC. The only problem was that it was not 100% software compatible with the IBM PC. Marketing complained. I heard one engineer say "those crazy marketing people would be happy if we took an IBM box and just slapped a Digital logo on it." I heard marketing/sales people say "Absolutely!" Engineering wanted to create the best machine possible. Marketing wanted the easiest thing to sell possible. Friction resulted.

The Digital Rainbow was a failure in the market. There was a mismatch between what engineering wanted to create and what marketing wanted to sell. And honestly it was a mismatch with what customers wanted. Had they included 100% software compatibility with the IBM PC it might have worked. But the engineering culture of "we can do it better" worked against the market. Once the company turned around (which took a bit too long I think) they created compatible PCs that were wonderful and became part of the reason Compaq bought Digital.

But things work the other way as well. At some large computer companies the marketing/sales people make a big push towards corporate sales over consumer sales. Now when a company has made its name and fortune in consumer sales (even if though third parties) it will find that things get different when you set your focus on corporate sales. You wind up with once easy to use, beginner friendly products that now are more corporate/professional friendly but which turn off consumers. And you change your ways of doing business as much as you do your product development. It is a culture change. Change increases friction and that takes a while to work out. Sometimes it doesn't work out.

People outside large companies think that the person at the top can change anything they want. They think that the CEO can wake up one morning, hear a great idea (like perhaps Hugh MacLeod writing about how Microsoft should be listening to their customers or Robert Scoble telling Google - and everyone else - how to run their public relations) and make it happen across the company. But it doesn't work that way. Change takes time. It takes time because a lot of times things require culture to change.

Inertia sets in. Passive aggression is a powerful force. People resist change. The only way a CEO could make instant change would be to directly manage everyone. And that is just not going to happen. Small or flat organizations have an edge here. But even in schools which are very flat organizations (almost everyone reports to the principal) and tend to be small are hard to change though. I've seen great principals fail to turn schools around even with the best of ideas. There are no quick fixes in any organization.

Individuals can and do make a difference though. Even in large companies one person changing they way they work and influencing the way other people work can over time make big changes. But "over time" is key here. Few people want to wait for change to take place slowly and evolutionarily. We are a "do it; get it; make it now" society. We want to believe that we know the answer and that the reason others do things differently is because they are idiots. Or perhaps dishonest. But clearly they are "bad" by some definition of bad. The truth though is more complicated. So too is fixing the situation.

[1] Life lessons from my memo to Ken Olsen

Never go over your manager's head without giving them warning.
Senior managers get that way because they are convincing male bovine excrement creators. Plus they have the ear of the boss a lot more than you do.
Marketing people see "truth" different than engineers. Or generally - different cultures see "truth" differently. Not always widely different but differently enough to cause friction.
People often have too much invested in poor decisions to just say "duh, why didn't I think of that" and change direction.
Not everyone sets the same priorities. You can't understand someone's decisions without understanding their priorities.

Blogging Burn-out

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 05:35:00 GMT

I've been blogging for about four years now. There has been some ebb and flow in both the amount I post and the amount of other blogs I read over that time. Lately though its all become less fun and somehow harder to do. In my other blog (its for high school computer science teachers) I actually missed posting on several business days in a row for the first time in months. Usually I have so many posts in my head that I post several days worth at a time and am a week or more ahead. Not lately.

I don't post as often here as I would like but there was a time when I posted daily at another blog that has been effectively abandoned. So total posting is really down about half or more from my peek. I still think about blog posts. I even write them in my head. What's different is that I don't actually get them written and posted. Why? Complicated.

Of course some of it is time. I have been traveling a lot lately. A week in Texas and couple of days in New York with lots of local New England day trips in the mix. And there is all this stuff to do because of the Christmas holidays. But that's not all.

I used to take the computer into the family room and read and write blogs while watching TV. Lately I find I just want to get away from the computer. A bit of information overload I think. I just want to rest my brain.

Recently my brother and I talked about visiting a family owned home that is not much used in the winter. My brother said "but the cable TV and Internet connections are shut down for the season. Why would you go?" I answered "because the cable TV and Internet connections are shut down." Time with my thoughts. Time to pray. Time to just disconnect from the hustle and bustle of a world trying to live on Internet time.

I realized today that I have been programming computers for longer than more than half of Microsoft's employees have even been alive. It's been 35 years since my first computer program was written (in FORTRAN) and I have been running as fast as I can to keep up with the technology ever since. I'm not as young as I used to be. I think now and again I need to get off the treadmill and take a breather.

I'm planning on taking some time off from work for the week that joins Christmas and New Years. My wife is threatening to confiscate my Treo so I can't check email while away from the computer. I think she's planning on getting me out of the house and well away from the computers as well. I think it will be good for me.

The only question is will I come back revived and roaring to go again or will I perhaps find that I like being "off the net" better than on it? And if the latter then what do I do?

Seven Things I am Thankful For

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:34:12 GMT

Luke Gedeon tagged me for this meme. I thought about it for a while and decided that with Thanksgiving coming this week it was time I put some thought into the question and perhaps even time I was thankful publicly about it. I sure do have a lot to be thankful for.

1) Jesus - as a symbol for my faith in God and Salvation for sure. I have to say that especially in bad times my faith is what gets me through. I doubt I'd have made it through the hard times in my life without my faith in God.

2) My wife - What an amazing women. I'm not always sure what she sees in me but I hope she never wakes up one morning and decides I'm not worth it after all. We're closing in on 31 years of marriage and it gets better all the time.

3) My son - Oh sure everyone thinks there kids are the best but I'm right. I am particularly thankful that he shares his time and interests with me. This weekend we'll be snowboarding together for example.

4) My dad - As inspiring a man as I have ever known. At this point I think we have by far the best relationship we have ever had in our lives.

5) the rest of my family - Some great people who I enjoy immensely.

6) My job - It's a great job working with great people. It lets me travel and meet interesting people all over the country. And it pays well enough that I have been able to take good care of my wife and take some trips with her.

7) People who read, comment on and link to my blog. Putting my thoughts out there is a great release for me on its own but any sign that people are reading them and thinking about them (no matter if they agree or not) is something that I really enjoy.

Who to tag? I'm not sure about tagging others. I don't mind getting tagged myself, in fact I enjoy it, but I hesitate to try to place some obligation on others. If you feel the spirit move you to post a list of your own please link back here or leave a comment so I can read it though.

At this time of thanksgiving I hope you all have much to be thankful for.

The Internet as Re-Connector of Lost Items and Owners

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 18:17:16 GMT

I lost my high school ring many years ago. Decades. Maybe over 30 years ago. I long ago forget when and where I might have lost it. Every couple of years I would think about it and search the house thinking it must be somewhere around here. Of course I never found it.

Then a couple of days ago the phone rang and a woman I have never met asked me if I'd gone to Brooklyn Tech. Yes, I went to Tech. She then asked me if I'd lost something a long time ago. I replied that I hadn't been able to find my class ring in years. She said she might have it. What year did I graduate? Sure enough she had a Tech ring from my year of graduation with my initials engraved inside.

Apparently someone in her family had found it years ago while combing the beach in Rockaway New York. That's a beach I'd spent many a warm summer day on and it was a likely place for me to have lost my ring. This wonderful woman was making it her task to track down the owners of a number of class rings that had been found over the years. She found me via a web site - classmates.com I'd filled out things there a number of years ago but had all but forgotten about the site. But all of a sudden I was glad I'd used it.

So today the mail brought my long missing high school ring. It's on my finger as I type this. Would this even have been possible without the Internet? Not easily and probably not for someone who live so far away both from the place the ring was found and from the person who lost it. It would have cost large amounts of time and money. As few as the people who try to do things like that today it would be fewer still.

Oh for the simple early days of programming

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 11:28:41 GMT

The other day at a conference (ReMIX07 - what a great event) a couple of us had a brief chat about the old days. I think it was started by one of the speakers talking about managed code and garbage collection as if they were both new and part of object oriented programming. Of course both have been around for decades and pre-date object oriented programming by many years. BASIC-PLUS ran on a virtual machine and had garbage collection back in the 1970s when I first started using it.

This all started me thinking about the old days. I guess that is a sign that I am old. I hear people talking about being in the field for 20 years as if it were a long time and think "wow it's been a long time since I was only 20 years in the field." I read yesterday that 66% of Microsoft employees are under 40 years old; 18% under 30. Since I started programming in 1973 I suspect that something like half the employees at Microsoft are younger than my first computer program. Somehow I find that scary. But I digress - perhaps another sign of age.

At ReMIX I was hearing about a lot of exciting new technologies for software development. Silverlight for managing media. The Expression Suite of tools for design for user interfaces in all sorts of applications. WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) for enhancing the user experience of client applications. Popfly for mashups. The list goes on and on. Don't even get me started on new dynamic languages like Ruby and Python. On one hand it is a very exciting time to be in the computer industry and in software development in particular.

On the other hand part of me longs for a simpler time. The introduction of the CRT as a viable tool started this mess off BTW. Before that most input was done in strictly formatted punch cards. It was all about getting the data in a form the program could digest easily. Oh sure we still had to validate data but getting it is was easier. And output was also simple. Your choices were basically to print a report on a line printer, punch things to still more cards or write things to a tape of disk in a format that was arranged a whole lot like that on a punch card. Input and output was simple.

Giving everyone their own terminal with a screen complicated everything. I don't miss having to specify the X and Y coordinate for every object (and I use the term object loosely for what we did in the early CRT days) on the screen. Windows Forms (which I first discovered in Visual Basic) were a huge advance and remain quite simple to use. Still once a program had to care about the user the door was opened for the need for real designers.

I guess my hope at this point is that people will use tools like Expression and WPF to allow designers to design and set up the user interface. That should let programmers deal with the easy stuff. The stuff that for me is more fun - working with the data.

In the mean time I sometimes feel a little overwhelmed by all the new stuff. It's great and it will make things better for the users of course. But I can't help but think that in some ways all this growth in tools, in options, in the whole field means that computing is becoming more and more a young person's job. I'm running as fast as I can to keep up. At some point one has to specialize I think. A little simplicity in the way of a narrower focus may be the best path to continued sanity.

Eight Random Things

Sat, 22 Sep 2007 02:23:33 GMT

So I have been tagged. Now I have to think of eight random things to tell you.

I ride a unicycle. I still have one and while I haven't taken it out on the road for a while I can still ride it. Most people go from tricycle to bicycle and for some reason many people stop there. I went on to unicycle and why not? I'd like to get more serious about it again and get a good off-road unicycle.
I once road a bicycle from coast to coast. The trip started in Long Beach California and ended in Rehobith Beach Delaware. 3100 miles in 31 days. Before that trip started I had never ridden a 10 speed and had never ridden more than about 30 miles in a day. We rode well over 110 miles each of the first couple of days. I was 16 at the time - turned 17 later that summer. We brought the unicycle along but only rode it around camp at night to relax.
I studied aeronautical engineering in high school. Problems with slide rules kept me from continuing in college. Who knows how my life might have been different if we'd had calculators back then.
Related to #3, I took my first computer course in an attempt to avoid taking math in college. I fell in love with programming and everything changed.
I once washed dishes at a summer camp for a summer job. I figure I washed more dishes in that one summer than the average person does in a life time.
I had my first real date as a college freshman. The next year I had another one. I was a little slow with that whole dating thing.
I sang Christmas songs on Christmas Eve in Bethlehem's Manger Square one year. Since I have a very bad singing voice you will be happy to know I sang very quietly and the other people in the group were much better singers. Still it was quite the thrill.
The house I grew up in had a brass pole from a fire house in it. My Dad had connections. We used to slide down the pole to get from the second floor to the first floor. We wanted to cut a hole through from the third floor where our bedroom was but since we didn't own the house our Dad said no.

Who to tag? Didith, Bernard, Diane, Leigh Ann, and Brian.

Change The World or Go Home

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 04:42:20 GMT

About 15 years ago I was working a job I hated for a manager who was making my life miserable. I was reading the newspaper and reading the obituaries. What can I say I was avoiding thinking about things and was running out of things to read. As I looked at the headings over the various people I started to notice what they said about people. Worked at <insert company name here> seemed to be one of the most common headings.

It occurred to me that if I died that night the header would say "Worked at Digital." Frankly that depressed me a lot. I was hard pressed to think of anything I had done in the previous 10 years or so that made the slightest different in the world. I had served on a couple of boards (school board, budget committee and a committee for my town) but that seemed pretty small. Quite frankly while they were good things to do I didn't see my role as all that impressive.

Fate stepped in and within a year of that night I had lost my job and found myself teaching school. Well that was a bit more like it. I could feel pretty comfortable with "taught at <insert the name of the schools I taught at> as an obituary. I like to think that I made something of a difference in the nine years I taught. I loved teaching and I had some wonderful students. And some very smart students. Some were both wonderful and smart. I am very proud that some of them still keep in touch. Hopefully some of them feel like I was a positive part of there education.

Four years ago (4.25 actually) I took a new job working for a company. A great company with really smart people, great benefits and one that I feel has given me a chance to make something of a difference. I've had the chance to support a lot of teachers across the country and some outside the country. I've talked to a lot of students and shared ideas and knowledge with a lot of teachers. I feel pretty good about what I have done and what my plans are for this coming year.

But somehow I just feel like I am not making enough of a difference. I'm not helping enough. Perhaps I am not doing the right things. I'm frustrated. And it is my own fault.

One of the things I talk about when I talk to students is that technology careers offer people a chance to change the world. To make a real difference. I really believe that. I really do. I could not say it if I didn't. And then I look at my own career and think "where is the difference I have made?" And I don't see it. I had small pieces of work in the making of tools that others used.

My wife is a REAL teacher. I see what she does and she is making a difference. When middle school boys greet a teacher (as some did my wife last week) and ask her if she read any good books over the summer and then tell her about the ones they read you know someone has made a difference. When someone who dropped out of school for a series of dead end jobs gets their GED after taking your courses (as my wife has seen time and again) you know someone has made a difference. She is just awesome!

Our son is a special education teacher in an elementary school. If you want to see someone making a difference in people's lives look at a teacher of special education. I am so proud of him it brings tears to my eyes.

And don't get me started on my Dad's career. None of us have time to read about all he has done. I have the same name as him - I should be doing more to live up to it.

So I am up late when I should be sleeping because I just can't stop thinking about needing to do more. Or better. Or just different. But somehow I want to change the world for the better. Maybe I should stop writing and start doing something. But what?

Taste and Memory

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 22:20:20 GMT

They say that smells connect us with memories faster and stronger than any of our other senses. That's probably true. There is probably something about self defense and getting early warning on things in there somewhere if you analyse it. But I have to say the connection between taste and memory can be pretty strong as well.

When I was a boy we used to put salt on watermellon. Why? I don't know. It was just something we did and it did taste pretty good. Bcak then people put salt on all sorts of things. No one talked about a connection between salt and high blood pressure or other health ills. We just used it without thinking twice. Over the years my house went pretty much low salt. My mother in law who lived with us for many years until she passed away about a year and a half ago was on a no salt diet. So we stopped adding salt to food as a general rule. We didn't even put a salt shaker on the table at meal time.

Oh we ate salted potato chips and pretzels now and again. And I confess I never could eat mashed potatoes without salt. But the days of putting salt on watermelon were gone and long forgotten. Until this summer. My cousin's daughters were visiting. There house is a house that uses salt. My cousin, we went on a two week trip together, seems to salt pretty much everything. So we had watermellon one day and his daughters salted it.

Well I hadn't done that for a long time and didn't even remember what it tasted like. So I tried it. The memories flooded back. Hot summer days with my cousins and siblings all running around eating salted watermellon. We used to eat it outside as it was messy and we could spit out the seeds without a care in the world. Our hands would get wet and sticky so that we had to wash them off with a garden hose when we were done. Those were good days. But I hadn't thought about those days in years and years. Yet one taste of salted watermelon brought it all back in a flood of memories. Amazing.

Iceland

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 20:54:27 GMT

It's about time I posted more on my vacation in July. Some pictures and some of the story. Here is a start.

In July my cousin and I took a trip to Norway. On the way we stopped in Iceland for a couple of days. We took a lot of pictures and I thought I'd share some of them with you. Hopefully it will not be too painful. The first two pictures are typical landscapes in Iceland. basically what you are looking at is hardened lava flow. The whole country is output from volcanos.

This next shot is a statue on the harbor in Reykjavik - the capital of Iceland. I thought it was pretty cool. This sort of abstract image seems to have worked its way into modern jewelry from Iceland.

As you may know the tectonic plate that Europe sits on and the plate that North America sits on meet at Iceland. The two are pulling apart and that is why there is so much activity (volcanos, earthquakes, etc) there. I knew this is theory but it didn't feel real until I was there and saw what that meant in person.

In the picture below I am standing on a cliff at the end of North America. Below is a plane where the Icelandic legislature used to meet. On the far side is Europe. So not only can you see Europe from North America you can drive between the two. I found this to be pretty cool.

Speaking of volcanos - this one hasn't gone off for a while. There is quite some pool of water in the bowl though. That's my cousin on the left.

Oh yes and there are water falls there. This one (next two pictures) is called Gullfoss or Golden Falls.

The term geyser was invented in Iceland. It is the only word from the Icelandic language that has worked its way into English directly. The geyser in the pool in the back of this picture is called Geysir and is the one all the rest have been named after.

One last picture - The steam you see in the distance is all natural.

These steam vents are used to heat the whole city of Reykjavik. Geothermal power is pretty much the whole source of power for the country. Such a deal.

Ramblings On Vacation

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 04:42:47 GMT

I just got back from vacation. Yes, another vacation. It's not my fault. A bunch of my family goes to a camp in the Adirondack mountains (Camp of the Woods) every summer. It's about 10 years in a row for my wife and I to attend but my father and my bother and his family have been going longer. Sometimes my middle brother also shows up with his family. Usually my sister and at least one of her children come up from the Bahamas as well. My Dad sets the whole thing up. It's one of the few times other than a wedding or a funeral when so many of us (there were 10 this year) get to see each other at one time.

Frankly this week is a lot less stressful than a holiday (Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc) type of gathering. It's more time together than a wedding and really a lot more fun than a funeral. Since meals are covered in the package no one has to cook or clean up all week either. Some years the food is pretty good. Some years not so good. This was not one of the better years for food. Oh well.

For the last couple of years I have been bringing my kayaks. The cabins we stay at are literally a matter of steps away from the beach and the lake. My kayaks spend the week on the sand waiting for me to ride them. And they do get use. If I bring one kayak I can go out on the lake by myself but that tends to get boring. By bringing both of them I can go out with others. Two of my nephews, my niece and my youngest brother all went kayaking with me at least once this year. Kayaking with others is really the way to go.

My nephews and niece don't have kayaks so just about all the experience they have with them they got from me at camp. It has been something to watch them grow and learn over the summers. But perhaps the best part of the kayak rides this year is that they are all far enough along that we can have a conversation while on the lake. I feel like this gives me a chance to get to know them better than group conversations or even trying to talk on land. These conversations are among the highlights of the week.

I stayed away from the Internet for the most part this week. On not completely but more than in some recent years. This was actually harder to do as they have expanded the number of areas where wi-fi is available. But it was easier in other ways as I did not have a textbook project to take up my time. I went to use the wi-fi a couple of times - mostly to blog for work. While I like to write blog posts in advance before going on vacation this week I wasn't able to so I tried to fill in a little. I found that I actually resented the time I spent doing this.

But it was worse than that because I found myself doing all the other things - reading blogs, checking email, looking at websites, etc, that I do in a normal day. It just seemed too much. So I tried harder to stay away. I did manage to completely avoid firing up RSS Bandit while I was away. I did start it up when I got home and there are 966 unread posts. Most of them are not going to get read. It's too much and I think I need to get a real life.

One funny thing happened. I was sitting outside with my computer on - I think I was showing people pictures from my other recent vacation - and someone walking by and asked "is there wi-fi here?" I replied "not here here but there is wi-fi in" and I gave the locations. I also asked the man to no tell his wife who told him where the wi-fi was.

There are always people at camp using the wi-fi and their cell phones to conduct business while they are supposed to be I confess that I checked my Trio a lot to look at email. Not all my email and I didn't really answer a lot of it. But I couldn't keep from checking it. Addiction? Perhaps. Evaluating my use of the Internet is something I think I'm going to have to do.

Leadership and the Classroom - The Teacher As Manager

Sun, 22 Jul 2007 19:26:22 GMT

Thanks to a link from Hugh Mcleod I found this post subtitled "Or why spending a month working in a kindergarten should be obligatory for MBAs." It really got me thinking about leadership, about what people learn in schools, and what people don't really appreciate about teachers. The key point is first that students both need and want leaders. Even students who are leaders (think team captains for example) want adult leaders to bring them along. Paying attention in school will teach you a lot about leadership and followership. (I'm not sure followership is a real word but it should be. There is a nack to finding good leaders to follow and to following the without losing ones one identity.)

While I was thinking about this subject I remembered a guest talk I did last school year. A number of people from industry and academia had been invited to a school to talk to various classes. The class I was to talk to come in to the library and gradually settled in (though perhaps not settled down) while I talked to some of the student's regular teachers. When it came time to start I said I was ready and the teacher asked me if I wanted her to settle them down so I could start. I replied I could do it and proceeded to start as if it were a class of my own. I was amused to overhear one of the teachers in the room say something to the effect that it was obvious I had been a teacher.

You see settling a class down so that work can begin is an act of leadership. Frankly it took me a while to learn and my first year of teaching was pretty painful because I hadn't developed that particular skill. Different age groups are harder to settle down. Well perhaps not harder but different anyway. In business among adults I have watched people settle groups down so that meetings could start. There are similarities and differences from the same activity in a school.

For example if the people in a room respect the person or the job title they will quiet down very quickly. Be it a principal or a corporate VP there is a certain amount of power, of intimidation, inherent in the office. One can lose (or really throw away) that respect if you really mess things up but people will assume that someone with that title deserves the respect. Even if there is no respect there is often fear which serves as a substitution for some activities that require control. The higher up in the chain one has by right of position the less "testing" individuals will put them to.

Ordinary level managers or teachers get less of the benefit of the doubt. Employees and students alike will put people to the test. People who fail those tests lose control. Once lost control (and respect) is difficult to regain. I learned that the hard way by the way.

Leadership among peers or by a stranger with no clear power or position is the trickiest thing of all. Every organization has a bit of a pecking order. The order may change from time to time or for different tasks but there is seldom complete equality. At some level and for every task someone has to be something of a leader. Someone who wants to lead must decide to lead. By that I mean they have to project a certain competence, a certain confidence and a certain will to take control. Substitute teachers learn how to "take over" and to command respect quickly or they don't last long as substitute teachers.

A person coming in to take over a class, be it a substitute teacher or a guest presenter, must set the tone right away. Some people are better at it than others. Some never get good at it while others rapidly become great at it. Siguard Rinde suggests that MBA students take over a kindergarten class for a month. I think kindergarten is too easy. Let's not dumb down the curriculum. :-)

I'd suggest taking over the oldest grade in a school. A sixth grade in a K-6 school, an 8th grade in a middle school or a group of seniors in a high school. The oldest group thinks they are amazing and they know that, among students, they are the leaders. Those kids will eat the average industry professional alive! If you can earn their respect you are a leader worth following. Just trying will teach you a lot about yourself.

I don't think many people understand just how much being a teacher is a leadership position. Most people think of teachers as individual contributors reporting to a manager. In fact they manage people. A high school or middle school teacher may have 125-150 students to manage. Think about it as four to seven large meetings a day with action items being given out, status to review and lots and lots of information to disperse. The teacher has to know where everyone is in every project they are assigned. They have to prepare and present information to a tough audience and make sure the audience understands it all. And they have very little beyond their personal credibility, personality and strength of character to get everyone to follow instructions.

Detention? Grades? Ha! Those are a lot weaker than you might think. Students are just as likely to see detention as a victory as a failure. And as for grades, it is part of a teacher's job as a leader to give value to those grades. And there is no firing going on either. Teachers who rely on those things fail themselves, their students, and society.

You know I look at some of the teachers I know and think if they went into industry a lot of current managers would lose their jobs in a hurry. Some of you out there might want to think about increasing teacher pay just to prevent that from happening.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 01:54:29 GMT

And buses, boats (big and small) and of course walking. Oh and horseback! I think I have used more forms of transportation in a shorter period of time in the last two weeks than at any time in my life. I am home after two weeks of travel to Iceland, Norway and some brief visits to Sweden.

I've flown to Iceland, from there to Norway and then back again. I have taken trains multiple times. In fact I don't know that I have ever spent so much time on a train since the days when we traveled by train from New England to Florida many years ago. I've taken bus rides between towns including a two hour trip to the airport this morning. And trolley rides around Bergen. A trolley is sort of a cross between a bus and a train I think. I have spent considerable time in cars as well. And I've even taken a number of boat rides. A kayak ride along a fjord, a ferry ride between two Norwegian towns and another to and from Sweden from Norway. Have I left anything out? There isn't much left that I could have ridden.

One of the things I took away from this trip was the variety of ways to travel and the variety of ways each contributes to the experience of getting from one place to another. I've got a lot to talk (blog) about from my recent trip. It was quite an experience. Lots of pictures to upload as well.

But for now I just wanted to let people know that I was alive and to say that while I intended to blog a lot more this vacation turned into a bit of a vacation from blogging as well as from many other things. It was good for me I think. More thoughts after I get some sleep in my own bed.

Gamle Fredrikstad

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 22:42:10 GMT

Today my cousin and I visited Fredrikstad and surrounding area hosted by one of our relatives who lives here in Norway. We visited the site of some ancient (bronze age) carvings in stone. I was amazed at how accessible they were. One could actually touch them. There was no guard or attendant anywhere. There were however signs in several languages explaining what we saw.

We also visited an old church dating from the 12th century. It was in remarkable condition. I only wish it had been open so we could have seen inside. WE visited a manor house from the age where Norway still had aristocrats (parts built in the 1600s and some in the 1700s) on a farm that dates back to the middle ages. Old Fredrikstad, the walled city built by Fredrik II in the 1600s was probably the most complete walled city I have visited. It was a little interesting, I think that is the right word, to have pizza at a restaurant built into what was probably once a dudgeon and was certainly at least the storage area for a fortress in a walled city.

We finished the day by driving down to a local harbor and looking at the fishing boats. I have never seen so many good sized wooden hulled boats in my life. And these are working fishing boats in daily use. But the are works of art in some ways as well. Wooden dowels are used in the construction to hold the planks in place. Hand work I am sure.

One of the things today is that many of the places we visited had signage only in Norwegian. On one hand that made things more difficult even though my cousin and our relatives read the language. But on the other it felt good to know that I was visiting sites intended for Norwegians rather than for international tourists. Somehow that makes things feel more authentic.

BTW Gamle means "old" in Norwegian. The walled part of town is locally called Gamlebyen which means "old town" or "old place." Towns and cities in Great Britain and elsewhere in Europe whose names end in "by" were generally founded by Vikings.

What Kind of A Horse Are You Riding

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 22:21:57 GMT

I went horseback riding today. It's been well over 35 years since I'd been on a horse but a lot came back to me quickly. One of the things about this kind of chaperoned ride is that there are really two kinds of horses. The difference is in training by the way. One kind of horse is a lead horse and it ridden by the leader of the ride. The other kind of horse, ridden by the guests, is a follower.

The lead horse is a bit more independent but at the same time more responsive to the rider's commands. The followers pretty much just follow the other horses. The rider can tweak things a little - slowing up or speeding up a little or turning directions. If however there is no lead horse controlling a follower is more difficult. When in doubt they will head for home. Any time there are no horses in front they are in doubt. The best way to stop them from wandering off is to turn them around to face the other horses because they decide to run off. Lead horses tend not to wander away on their own.

Once upon a time, in my youth when I rode more, I much preferred to ride a lead horse. Today I was just as happy to ride a follower. If nothing else it made it easier to look at the scenery.

There are lessons in this for understanding people though. I try not to think too deeply on this, I am on vacation after all, but I think that some people prefer to follow others. If there is no leader they will follow a path of least resistance. Leaders are not immune to direction but with their independence comes some responsibility.

BTW I posted a few pictures from today's trip. We also saw geysers, a couple of waterfalls - one truly impressive, an old inactive volcano, and a lot more. We get up early tomorrow to fly to Oslo.

Alf, we're in Iceland!

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 16:42:24 GMT

I'm on day one of my long awaited vacation. My cousin Richard and I have been talking about visiting Norway together since we were very young. And we're not so young anymore. I was able to visit in 2000 (seven years ago more or less to the day) with my Father and the rest of my family but Richard has never been before. This year we decided to go - just the two of us. During the planning stage we decided with help from recommendations from others that we should take some advantage of the stop in Iceland and see that country a bit as well.

We left Boston last night and arrived in Reykjavik, Iceland this morning - early local time and very early Boston time. No sleep for us on the plane. Well I may have grabbed a few minutes but no more than that. There was free wi-fi at the airport in Iceland. The hotel we are at has it as well. I like that about Iceland.

Our hotel was not ready when we got here so we started a walking tour on our own. My cousin kept saying "Alf, we're in Iceland." Other than several trips to Mexico where his wife has family he hasn't traveled outside the country much since college. Neither have I really though some visits to Canada, the Bahamas and that 2000 trip to Norway count for sometimes. It was just so mind boggling to be in Iceland though.

The view from the bus windows on the drive in from the airport was amazing - quite other world like. No trees but lots of low grasses, lichen and flowers covering a volcanic rock surface. The ground was pitted with sink holes, cracked rocky ground and just about the roughest most uneven surface I have ever seen. It was as if the world were young and not yet domesticated. Given how much volcanic activity Iceland sees that is probably what explains things anyway.

Downtown Reykjavik is really quite nice. A little "foreign" in that the signs are mostly in Icelandic which is not much like English. I little like other Scandinavian languages but the alphabet is different with letters that are not in the other Scandinavian languages - to say nothing of not being in English.

The amount of English writing we see has been quite a surprise by the way. In several supermarket and convenience stores we have been in there were items when all the writing was English. They could have been plucked off the shelves in a store in New Hampshire. WE went into a bookstore and a lot of the books and a number of the magazines were in English. There wasn't a separate "English Section" either. The English and Icelandic books (and some German, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish language books as well) were intermixed on the shelves. That was a surprise. Of course everyone we've met speaks English - usually quite well. There are parts of Canada with fewer English speakers I'll bet.

We visited a couple of churches including the Cathedral Church that is just across the way from the Althingi (parliament) which is the world's oldest functioning legislative assembly dating back to the year 930 AD. The parliament building is being renovated but clearly isn't as old as the parliament itself. The church was very beautiful. It reminded me of some American churches I have seen that also date back to the late 1700s. We also visited Hallgrimskirkja church which was much larger. It was dominating the view on top of a large hill. In front of the church is a large statue of Leifur Eriksson (Leif Eriksson) given by the United States in memory of his discovery of North America.

We also found several small parks, wandered into several stores and looked for food. Things are very expensive here. Books in the bookstores run two to three times what we'd pay for them in the States. And food? Oh we'll lose weight on this trip because we are not going to be snacking much. Gas is over $2 a liter which puts a gallon at close to $8 compared to less than $3 in New Hampshire. How do people travel and how often do they eat out? Is income really that high?

Once we were able to check into the hotel we took a nap. When I woke up I started this blog post. Now we're going to find some supper soon and also try to book a tour of some kind for tomorrow. We leave Iceland very early on Tuesday for Norway and the main part of our trip. Updates when we find more free wi-fi.

Technorati tags: Iceland, alfred thompson, vacation

Shy Bloggers?

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 02:18:01 GMT

Last week at EduBloggerCon we did an icebreaker exercise that had each person interview someone else. One of the questions was "what is something that people who think they know you don't know?" And interesting question and one that quite frankly deserves more thought than can be accommodated in an icebreaker exercise. And it is one that I have thought a bit more about since then.

My answer today? "I am by nature a real introvert and very, one might say painfully, shy with strangers and in strange environments." Now people who think they know me will be surprised (I assume) at that statement because I blog and am otherwise quite vocal in Internet forums and I regularly speak in public, occasionally in front of fairly large groups. There is a general assumption that shy and introverted people don't do those things. This is, I believe, quite often an incorrect assumption.

What I believe it that public speaking and much Internet communication uses very different "emotional muscles" then one to one or small group interactions. I see this as similar to stutterers who do not stutter when they sing. I have heard of performers of many types (singers, dancers, actors) who are uneasy in small groups of strangers and yet can perform in front of large groups. And most public speaking, and I think also blogging, is a form of performance. Shy people who are willing to work at it can develop some level of comfort even without overcoming a more general shyness or tendency to introversion in other contexts.

Now I have a job that also requires me to interact in person in small social groups. That part of my job is often very difficult for me. I'm not always good at it. One thing about being very active online though is that groups that are real life instances of the online community often include people I have an online relationship with. This is a huge step towards making face to face interactions more easily. In many cases I feel like I know people and that they know me even though we have not previously met in person before. This may be a good reason for introverts to blog - to establish a virtual presence in a community to make face to face interactions more comfortable.

Well it works for me. It may not work for everyone.

Technorati tags: edubloggercon07, blogging, alfred thompson

Annoying things about Air Travel

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 01:28:35 GMT

No sooner did I settle in to my seat on a flight yesterday when I realized that I had forgotten my Bose Quiet Comfort II headphones home. Now you really have to try a pair on a flight to make you realize just how much more relaxing and comfortable a flight is with those headphones on. Airplanes are noisy.

I did have my little MP3 player with the ear buds that came with them though so at least I could listen to music and it would drown out some of the airplane noise and the sounds of the baby in the next row who was not happy about something. The problem is that ear buds do not fit in my ears very well.

I see those silly MP3 player ads with the people dancing around and I wonder if the ear buds are glued in or something. If I do anything but sit completely still those buds fall out of my ears. Things like yawning, talking, chewing or taking a drink of water. Plus they hurt.

The sound from them is pitiful as well. I really missed my headphones. I am determined not to forget them for my long flight to Norway via Iceland in a weeks time.

Thinking about this annoying thing got me to thinking about something else that has been bothering me. I miss my knife. For most of my life I carried a small folding knife. Sometimes a pocket knife and for many years a small folding knife that I wore on my belt. You have no idea how often such a thing is useful. But largely because of air travel I no longer do so.

There is no easy way to bring a knife with you when traveling by air. Now if you do that very seldom its not that big a deal but I travel a lot. It got so that it just became easier not to make a habit of carrying a knife. I lost one small knife to airport security when I took my toiletries kit in carry on luggage once. I don't want to lose more, nicer ones. So now I am out of the habit but I still occasionally find myself reaching for a knife that isn't there.

I'm sure there are people who think that this ban on small knifes on airplanes make us safer. There are also people who believe Elvis is still alive. I think that both groups are seriously wrong but at least the Elvis believers are not doing anything to make my life harder.

Speaking of making my life harder and annoying airline travel things, some of the airlines are still giving out peanuts to all passengers. One of these days I'm going to have a worse allergic reaction than normal and someone's peanuts are going to kill me. I hope it happens on an airplane so that my wife and a good lawyer can get really really rich on my death. As it is I get uncomfortable with people who are eating peanuts touching all sorts of things that I'm likely to touch. At least they tend not to touch me.

And you probably thought I was going to complain about uncomfortable seats and bad airline food. Well most of the seats except for first class are uncomfortable but airline food has gotten better. Of course you don't get fed more than a snack that often anymore. But when you do it's ok.

Step Away From the Computer

Tue, 29 May 2007 15:55:02 GMT

This past weekend was Memorial Day weekend - a three day weekend during which in theory we honor America's armed services personnel killed in wartime. In New England where I live it is also several other things. It is the unofficial start of the summer season and it is finally, for sure, safe to plant gardens.

While some daring people chance the weather earlier and get a jump on things my wife is the cautious sort and we generally do wait until the last weekend in May to plant our garden. We had a great weekend weather wise for the task and so I spent very little time on the computer. Most of the time I did spend on the computer was mindless casual games and deleting email. I was pretty much too tired to do "real work."

Our gardens were in pretty bad shape so there was a lot to be done. Two years ago I had planted some vegetables but never made the time to keep up with things and we had no real harvest. Last summer my wife was suffering from allergies and some residual illnesses from the winter and we did absolutely nothing in our gardens. Needless to say the weeds took over. I started early on the vegetable garden this year. A couple of weeks ago I rented a rototiller and bought some fertilizer. The rototiller tilled all the weeds under and mixed in the fertilizer. That put me way a head of the previous couple of years. On Saturday I put down plastic garden cover and planted the first of the vegetables.

The flower garden took a lot of hand weeding though are there were some bulbs and perennials we wanted to save. That was the hard job and I was glad that Sunday was cooler than Saturday had been. Once weeded and with mulch down we were able to plant a bunch of new flowers, mostly all perennials. I am hoping that we can keep them going. In the mean time my wife filled an array of planters that line our back deck and stairs. Window boxes in the front of the house as well as planters for the front steps are all freshly planted as well. The house is surrounded in natural color. With care they should brighten things up all summer long.

There is still work to be done weeding the herb garden. It's a real mess. The meditation garden is in fairly good shape but still needs new mulch to keep the weeds down. And I need to get more river pebbles for the walkway. But it is looking up. As my wife put it yesterday, we have the yard back.

I'm sitting in our family room and looking out the back sliding door. I can see the flowers on the deck and some of the vegetables. In a few weeks I'll be able to see more of the plants, especially the tomatoes, as they grow tall in the sun. Walking around the room and on the deck, as I tend to do while on the phone, the flowers and the rest of the yard make a relaxing and pleasing sight. It reminds me that there is a "real life" and that what is on the computer is remote and somehow artificial. I could have spent the weekend in the house trying to build things in Second Life. Somehow that seems like it would have been a complete waste of time though. Sometimes I like, make that need, my reality non-virtual.

But maybe that is just me.

Working for Mental Health

Wed, 16 May 2007 03:18:30 GMT

I recently broke down and paid a company to clear out my basement. It's a long story about why it needed that level of attention but the end result is that I have a clear basement for the first time in years. I've been moving my power tools down there and setting up a bit of a wood working shop. I haven't really had a place large enough to set them all up at once but have been acquiring them as I needed them for various projects anyway.

Without a regular place to set up my power tools it was difficult to do much with them. For a large project it was worth getting them out and setting them up outdoors. Of course that meant that weather was always a factor. Simple spontaneous projects were pretty much out of the question. But those days are, I hope, over.

I have had a small work bench for years. Unfortunately I managed to saw through one of the top boards that make up, or should make up, the work surface. Replacing that top has been on my "to do list" for a long long time. For a years I didn't really have the right tools for the job. Once I did have the tools the project never surfaced to the priority that would make setting up and breaking down everything I needed. In other words set up and break down turned what should be a small job into a big job.

Tonight I was bored with what was on TV and decided to fix the bench. I was able to just walk downstairs and start working. In a fairly short time I had made a bunch of wood cuts, drilled some holes for work pegs and glued two long pieces of wood together and fixed them in a vice to dry. No set up other than adjusting cutting blades and connecting the right drill bit in the drill press. No break down other than putting the drill bits away and tossing out the scraps.

The big surprise though was just how good it felt to take care of this little project. I don't know if it was the smell of the wood as it was cut and drilled. Or perhaps it was the feeling of knowing that with a few more minutes work tomorrow I'll have a working workbench again. Or perhaps it was just the complete change of pace from working with computers and words and other somewhat abstract objects to working with actual physical objects. Or all of the above.

One thing is sure - I'm going to be trying to take more breaks from the computer and the TV and spend some time trying to make things from wood. I think it may just be the therapy I need to keep my attitude going in the right direction.

Conferences in Party Places

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 02:58:57 GMT

So I have been thinking about conferences in places that one normally thinks about as a vacation spot. I've been to a couple of these in recent years. I was at Disney World for a couple of days of meetings a few years ago. Earlier this year I was at a conference on a cruise ship. Lately I have been reading about a couple of conferences taking place in Las Vegas. Vegas is a place I have been to on vacation a couple of times but never for work.

The problem with work events at these venues is that you are pretty much doomed to feel like you are missing something no matter what you do. When I was at Walt Disney World we could see EPCOT Center (my favorite part of WDW) from the hotel but we were booked into meetings or working dinners from breakfast until after the park closed. Talk about a tease! You can guess what I felt like I was missing. To be honest a couple of people missed one of the dinners and walked to EPCOT for a couple of hours. I cannot confirm of deny if I was in that group.

On the cruise ship there were similar problems. Lots of things to do that were fun but lots of work related things to do as well. The organizers of the event were smart enough to schedule some good time for pure fun stuff. Also that is a venue that allows for people to socialize in a fun environment in the evenings and a lot of that happened. I would have really been disappointed if I hadn't had a couple of hours on the beach. This is the sort of thing I think smart organizers take into account when they create the schedules for events at this sort of venue.

Now Vegas I wonder about. A few years ago I went to a conference in Reno which has a lot of similarity to Vegas. Except for one work related party event I never left the hotel and I didn't see any of the sights. I played about 10 minutes of slot machines and generally could have been anywhere. But some things have changed since then. For one thing these days I play some poker. At an event in Vegas I'd really like to get in a game if I were there. Unlike Disney World where things close at a reasonable hour Vegas is open 24 hours a day. That means that one can try to "do it all" if one is willing to give up on sleep.

So here is the dilemma. Suppose organizers fill up the "normal" work day, say 8AM until 10PM what happens later? In other places people may stay at the bars until 1 or 2 AM but the bars close eventually. There is not normally much to do after 10PM in most places so people are likely to go to their rooms and go to bed. In Vegas people have to exercise some judgement and self-control. I wonder how many people do that and how many "party on?" How productive are people after a couple of days of that sort of thing? It might not be bad for younger people but people my age would, generally, have a hard time. So for them their choice is between missing fun and missing work. I imagine that different people made that trade off differently.

The key thing is probably what sort of job the organizers do of making sure the work events are worthwhile enough that people feel they have more value than the entertainment options. It would probably be a good idea if they leave some fun time in the schedule as well. Tough to do. And perhaps that is why less exciting cities get to have some of the less exciting conferences. :-)

PS: Yes I found some relax time while I am on the road. Feels good actually.