Cleaning a whale from the inside

Revisiting my whale theme of a few months ago, this seems like a miserable job: vacuuming and dusting a 100 year old whale that is suspended from the ceiling :)

Here's a bonus link. The editors of the kooky/quirky muckraking website CounterPunch published their list of the top 100 non-fiction books originally written in English. I was reading another top 100 list and followed a link to that one. The thing that caught my eye was that Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire was the first one on the list (because it's alphabetical by author :) That reminded me that the first Edward Abbey story that I remember reading is "In defense of the redneck" in Abbey's Road. Anyway, I didn't think Edward Abbey would appear on a top 100 list. Other ones I noted were the Sunset Western Garden Book (it's been published since the mid-1950s?) and Norman Maclean's A river runs through it, both classics :)

Quay Valley Ranch

Last week I was in a meeting that reminded me how good it is to throw ideas around on a college campus. The meeting was about Quay Hays' proposal for a new sustainable community west of here. Quay Hays says:

We are planning Quay Valley Ranch so that its residents will never have to pay a power bill

(the quote is from an article about the project from a business point of view).

I didn't realize until I saw him that I knew the main presenter for the meeting: the father of "systems thinking", Russ Ackoff. I think I might have read one of his books back when I was in junior high (I'm not kidding).

He had some great stories. You can get a flavor of the the meeting by looking at the Ackoff Center blog.

Also presenting at the meeting was Vince Barabba who has a real passion about this project.

Two recent newspaper articles

The Fresno Bee reprinted an AP story about one of my recent topics -- "jerks":

Passion is an overrated virtue in organizational life, and indifference is an underrated virtue

Yesterday the paper ran a story about geocaching. A "dutiful state employee" is quoted about his alter-ego:

I don't smoke and I don't drink, but they do call me The Obsessed One

Beverage recommendations

Steve talks about getting (or not) coffee at Starbucks. Two things: first, the out-of-coffee Starbucks barista obviously hasn't read the story in Steve McGuire's Debugging the development process about coffee-making and software process (if you are an Amazon customer with enough standing you can do the "search inside" and read the two pages -- 25 and 26 -- about coffee and process). Second, I recommend going to the World Handcrafts (aka Ten Thousand Villages) store in Reedley for a package of "Reanimator" fair trade, shade grown, organic coffee (a related article is in the Pasadena Weekly :).

My other beverage recommendation is "pulque fino" (at the bottom of the "mead" page) from Full Circle Brewing on F street in Fresno.

That is all.

People still use film?

I try to treat my time with airport security as an opportunity for serendipitous amusement: sometimes lip balm is needs to go into your ONE QUART ZIP TOP BAG, and sometimes not. Sometimes a tube of antibiotic ointment need to go into the ONE QUART ZIP TOP BAG, sometimes not (one TSA agent loudly told me that Neosporin specifically did not have to be bagged, so she took it out of my ONE QUART ZIP TOP BAG and threw it in the gray plastic bin with my shoes, after everything had gone through X-ray, hmm). Sometimes the agent will say "hey you missed one" after spotting a small tube of something or other in my bag. Cowering like a bad puppy I await my humiliation. But they just wave me through. But then one time post-X-ray an agent, made an example of me, held up my clear zip top bag over her head and loudly says "THIS IS NOT A ONE QUART ZIP TOP BAG!", but it is clear, has a zip top, and was given to me by LAX so that I could "zip through security". "WELL I DON'T KNOW WHAT LAX IS DOING GIVING PEOPLE NONSTANDARD BAGS". Whatever :)

And then there is the shoe carnival.

All this doesn't bother me much, but then I haven't lost a bunch of money like the producers of Lost did when their film was X-rayed.

The state film office said it has worked with TSA and United Airlines to put a new process in place that will prevent future accidents.

"The issue has been addressed, and they have procedures in place to make sure it doesn't happen again," said Dawson, the state film commissioner.

You can read more about it here.

And that Neosporin stuff? It is specifically mentioned on the TSA website, and has to go in the ONE QUART ZIP TOP BAG. Vindicated again!

P.S. The Jetsons-looking restaurant in the middle of LAX is closed since a panel fell off the building. The cool observation area just above the restaurant has been closed for years. That was a great place to watch planes.

The revenuers are coming

This week I was talking about my next car being powered by vegetable-oil. Steve M blogged about our friend Steve F and Ken and driving cross country on fry oil. You can see their photo travelogue, and you can listen to a short mid-trip audio interview.

But in Illinois at least, the revenuers have gotten wind (whiff?) of fry oil. Hmm.

Hey! Watch out for that fomite over there!

Many television news stories (particularly during rating sweeps time) take a UV light into hotel rooms to elicit the ewwwwww-yuck response.

But this article in the March 2007 Conde Nast Traveler is really disgusting. I've heard of people taking extra ziptop plastic bags in their luggage so they can bag the TV remote control, and after reading the article that sounds like a good idea :) There's already a commercial version available.

People mock me for using hand sanitizer! Not anymore! I am vindicated! (Just make sure your hand sanitizer has a high enough percentage of alcohol to be effective)

:)

Getting better and better at not caring

As a follow-up to my previous post, this almost-five-minute video of Bob Sutton is pretty interesting. To pique your interest, he talks about littering, both literally and within organizations, and about constructive uses of indifference.

Another update: this week's free Designing Interactions chapter (and videos) is about multisensory and multimedia human-computer interaction.

The ethical mind (and bonus link)

This conversation with Howard Gardner in the March 2007 Harvard Business Review is sort of the other side of the coin of my previous post. A quote:

... there is no substitute for detailed, textured, confidential oral recommendations from individuals who know the candidates well and will be honest. I don’t particularly trust written letters or the results of psychological tests. A single interview is not much help, either. A colleague of mine says “It takes ten lunches,” and I think there is truth in that.

I might also ask a young person about mentors. Our studies found that, across the board, many young professionals lack deep mentoring from individuals in authoritative positions. This was in contrast to veteran professionals, who spoke about important mentors and role models. So I might ask, “Who influenced you in cultivating a particular moral climate, and why?” The influence of antimentors—potential role models who had been unkind to their employees or who had shown behavior that others would not want to emulate—and a lack of mentors is something that we underestimated in our studies. Negative role models may be more powerful than is usually acknowledged.

You might remember Howard Gardner from the mid 1980's days of cognitive science.

Changing subjects, here is your bonus link of the day: Jakob Nielsen's list of the computer skills kids should be learning in school, and why. He says:

Understanding usability heuristics like "recognition vs. recall" or "consistency" will be as important to the educated person as having dissected a frog.

As someone who didn't want to dissect a frog in high school, I feel vindicated! :)

The Giant Orb from Niihau

An article from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune was reprinted in today's Fresno Bee, and it reminded me of finding a fishing float (about a foot in diameter, plastic, not glass) on the beach on Niihau. Long story which I might post sometime so that I never feel the urge to tell it again, but the reason I call it an orb is that I checked it as baggage, and it was "sort of lost", and when it arrived at the Fresno airport the next morning I got a voicemail saying that my "orb was available to be picked up at the American Airlines counter."

Here's the article: "The sand, the sun, the sea, the squalor:
The Great Eastern Garbage Patch, twice the size of Texas, spreads litter to far shores".

It definitely gets you thinking about trash in general, and besides, when was the last time you read an article that used the word "gyre"? And when was the last time you read a blog posting using both "gyre" and "orb"?

More trouble than they're worth

Judging from all the references I'm seeing to Bob Sutton's new book The no *ssh*le rule (I've edited some of the vowels), I'm late to this party. So far I've seen it mentioned in the March Fast Company, in CIO Insight (from back in 2004), and in Guy Kawasaki's blog.

I can't find a web copy of the original column in the February 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review (which I am embarrassed to say I thumb through occasionally).

Some of the comments to Guy's posting are funny, like this one, and this one.

I got Sutton's book yesterday -- it's short and easy to read.

Speaking of books, the new one by Bill Moggridge is Designing Interactions, and it is incredible -- almost a coffee table book. It's not very expensive, but if you don't want to spend the money you can download one chapter a week free from the website. It's really great that all the videos of interviews are on the website (although in smaller format than the book-accompanying DVD). I highly recommend that you watch the video of Bill Verplank.

Computer Science bachelor's and graduate degrees

The January 2007 Computing Research News has a lists of the most prolific producers of bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees. Guess who is #1? Here's a hint.

See how many of the "top" colleges you recognize.

The article says you can go to the NSF site and create your own queries. I tried to replicate the author's table and got this. Sometimes it is sorted by decreasing value, sometimes alphabetically by name of college. I'm not sure why.

Anyway, the top California bachelor's producer is UC Irvine (#10) and the most prolific CSU is San Jose State (#27). Cal State Ebay (nee Hayward) is #19 for master's degrees, and UC Santa Barbara is #23 for CSci doctoral production, whoo hoo!

Don't care about CSci degrees? You can do whatever query you want at http://webcaspar.nsf.gov

Now that you are fascinated with landing an airplane

I liked this site, and its description of a Cat IIIC landing:

Pray that your electronics and autopilot are reliable.

You can go on the pilot's trip around Florida and his eight ILS approaches. Kissimmee to Melbourne: not to be missed! (I'm kidding)

I think you can fly his route if you have Microsoft Flight Simulator.

What are they thinking up front?

This is the best, most detailed, and easy to read description of commercial pilots being diverted from their original destination and doing a Cat III landing at BWI.

I think they were doing a Cat IIIB landing (50 foot decision height). A Cat IIIC landing can be done in zero visibility.

If you are planning on doing a Cat III landing at LAX you should probably look at this diagram, or practice first at FAT.

Spaf on security

Here's streaming audio and video of Spaf being interviewed about "US Computer Insecurity". This is a nice layman's level discussion.

I was going to try to joke about how the next interview in the series is about "Redefining Masculinity" and how much more interesting it would be if the producers had mixed up the guests for the two weeks, but I refrain.

In the spirit of my recent postings about HICSS, here's some trivia: I first met spaf at HICSS-22 in 1989. As I recall, someone in his posse was collecting our unused drink tickets. Allegedly.

Disclaimer: I wouldn't have written the two previous paragraphs if I didn't know about spaf's tolerance of bad attempts at humor. Judging from his recent post to Web-Heads about a man and a dead horse, I think he's still warped :)

HICSS slides

Hal Abelson's slides (promised in a previous post) from his distinguished lecture are posted, along with other HICSS-40 highlights.

Sittin' on a plane

I'm glad I wasn't on this plane from FAT-DFW, or the infamous SFO-DFW flight that was also diverted to Austin for hours and hours.

Using Information: New Technologies, Ways & Means: How to Have a Great HICSS Experience

A few more notes from HICSS:

• I went to a session about development of secure software. There were statements about how it's not feasible to formally specify and verify something as complicated as an operating system. Hmm. Well, in before 1980 aspects of UCLA secure Unix was formally specified and verified. In fact, work on "multilevel secure operating systems" is one of the most developed example of formal V&V of real, complicated (and really complicated) systems. And, work on multilevel secure operating systems paid for a lot of my UCSB education :)
  
  In any case, this is all related to the infamous Orange Book.
  
• Yesterday's plenary by Hal Abelson was good. It was essentially a pitch for Creative Commons, and how the knowledge-creation community should shun commercial publishers and some professional associations such as the American Chemical Society :) I will post a link to his slides when they are posted.
  
• I'm currently in a session about automated testing. Also here is my former UCSB professor, and father of design-by-contract, and Eiffel, Bertrand Meyer. It was nice to say hello.
  

One thing I like about HICSS (my first one was 21 years ago!) is if you make good selections about what to attend you'll hear some great ideas. Looking through the program I see the following software engineering names in addition to Bertand: Shari Lawrence Pfleeger, Barry Boehm (HICSS distinguished lecturer two years ago), John Carroll, et al.

Jonathan Grudin has a blog about HICSS and Using Information: New Technologies, Ways & Means: How to Have a Great HICSS Experience

Do you aspire to be a Scrum Master?

Steve's post about stand-up meetings (see the three questions at the end of his post) reminded me about the HICSS session I am attending today on agile development techniques, Scrum and XP in particular.

Some very interesting comments made by the speakers such as

• in one industrial case study presented about the use of pair programming, very few defects were found by the "navigator" of the pair.
  
• you can use rock-paper-scissors at the beginning of each day to determine who starts driving and who starts navigating.
  
• a Scrum case study (about 1000 KLOC) showed "linear or better" productivity increases by adding people. Note this is opposite to Brooks' "adding people to a later project makes it later". The general claim by the speaker was that by going to Scrum you can double productivity, in contrast to outsourcing which he claimed gives a 20 percent productivity increase.
  

Other impressions: There's actually been quite a bit of research done on pair programming, from a software development productivity point of view and from a cognitive approach. The industry people seem to be reinventing the wheel on some of these basic things. Not surprising since it feels good to reinvent a good idea like the wheel :)

Seriously though, I recommend that software engineers flip through Barry Boehm's slides from his ICSE 2006 keynote slides (ICSE is the big practitioner-academic yearly conference). He notes (on slide 7) that we are losing our history:

Median ICSE 2005 paper has no reference before 1984-85
77% have no references before 1980

In any case, everyone should look at his figure on slide 9.

A Goshen College - University of Hawaii connection

The chancellor of the Manoa UH campus got her undergrad degree at Goshen College. She was in a one-hour live chat today hosted by the Honolulu Advertiser, and I was able to get in a question about how attending a Mennonite liberal arts college influences her approach to UH. Her answer is toward the end. Most people were asking about boring things like parking and dorm space :)

Here's more Goshen College trivia. Henry D. Weaver, professor emeritus of Chemistry, former provost, and former interim president, was hired by the University of California system to direct the study abroad programs for the system. He was able to do this from an office at UC Santa Barbara, which is where I met him.

What does this have to do with today's chat? The connection is in her answer to my question.

Bonus points: As you might suspect, Henry is an amateur radio operator (W9BHX). The radio world was recently rocked by what FCC action? Hint: /-. ---/-- --- .-. ./-.-. --- -.. . / You can figure that out by looking here (left is . and right is -), and you might want to ponder why the letters ETIAN are near the root (top) of the tree.

Further hint: It's the same reason that simple substitution ciphers are so easy to crack.

Here is the answer.