"Do the needful?!" I get countless emails from people whining about what problems they are encountering, ended with the vacuous, nonsensical, phrase, "Please do the needful." If you are going to ask me to do your job for you, at least do it politely in grammatical, well-formed English.

Having read a bit more about the bill in question, I would have to agree that the debate is kind of silly. Of course, this silliness got started by SBC declaring that Google was making money off SBC's back. Cable competition is good. SBC charging content providers for higher QoS is regressive.

» Net neutrality extremism versus common sense economics | George Ou | ZDNet.com
Oy, and this is more of the same. Here's the basic thing that both these guys are missing: without net neutrality, the free (as in both beer and speech) internet disappears. Right now I pay a flat fee for all the content and interaction I can eat. If I have to pay for content, I go somewhere else where it's free. The Markey Ammendment might be a bit extreme. I think the bandwidth providers should have the ability provide QoS according to packet type. But as soon as you allow them to restrict by content provider, poof!, the internet as we have known it disappears, and we go back to the world of AOL, Compuserve, and the BBS's, and we go back to a homogeneous, lowest-common-denominator media stream, instead of an interactive, empowering communications medium.

MercuryNews.com | 06/09/2006 | Network neutrality? Welcome to the stupid Internet
Welcome to the world of oversimplification. The argument about net neutrality hasn't been about type of content, but whose content. If Yeehaw!'s search results are just OK, but you can get them in one third the time of GaGa's results, most people will go to Yeehaw! for their search. The worst case scenario here is that I will have to choose my ISP based on what content I want, after the companies that can't or won't submit to the robber barons' tolls disappear.

Pulp novelist Dan Brown has been taken to court over apparently plagiarized research. That confirms my view, after reading Digital Fortress, that he either doesn't do any research, or is incapable of understanding what he "researches". The errors in his understanding of cryptography, if rectified, would have eliminated the plot of Digital Fortress altogether.

Wired News: Lawbreaker in Chief. I don't know how Bush thinks any other country would be influenced towards establishing rule of law when he so blithely ignores it. Brat in Chief, more like it.

Well, I generally like George Will's pieces, as his is a conservatism that I can somewhat go along with, but he's really got his tinfoil hat on with
Our Fake Drilling Debate

Alien abduction or sleep paralysis?
I should be very interested to hear about where lucid dreamers would fit into this.

Fun at work.
Slashdot had a link an article on "optimizing for fun". On the other side of the river....
Somehow, project managers and managers around me seem to think that when the engineers complain about not having fun, it means we need to have team nights out, or that we need to schedule a weekly LAN party. Hello! Fun means working on stuff you enjoy working on. Fun means seeing the positive impact your contributions make. Fun means not having to spend cycles in bureaucratic holding patterns. Fun means having a concrete goal you are working toward, with a sense of how your piece contributes, and at least some enthusiasm for that goal. Fun in the workplace is not going out for beers with my team on some schedule. If I want to hang out with these people after hours, I don't need a project manager to arrange it for me.

Not such an over the top whiner,
but I do have a few comments on this one, regarding the signs that you should get out. First off, always remember, it's a job. It's what you do to make sure there is a roof over your head, clothes on your back, and food in your stomach. If you should manage to get paid to do something you would do for fun, anyway, congratulations, don't ever forget how friggin' lucky you are.

He complains about working in a cubicle farm. I agree, it sucks. But the only places I have worked over the last twenty years that provide actual offices with doors that shut have existed considerably longer than that. Nobody does offices anymore. It should be worth something to note that every knowledge worker's darling, Google, doesn't even give workers cubicles to themselves, they have to share. Typical management doesn't understand because they are in meetings during the workday, and if they actually get things done, do the stuff they need to concentrate on early in the morning or late in the evening.

Which gets me to my next topic, management. Good managers are very rare, in my experience. So many things to juggle. She needs to have a clear understanding of what business results will both be valuable and appreciated by her bosses (not always the same thing). She needs to be able to give her team a clear vision of what its goal and/or job is, both long and short term. She needs to be able to see her team members both as tools and as people ("don't use a hammer to strip cable") so she can assign projects and tasks appropriate to the person and the direction they want to move in. And, the piece that is most often lacking, she needs to build trust with the team, and between the team members. I had another post on building trust, but it comes down to delivering on your promises, explicit and implicit, and sometimes doing things for someone else when it is clear that there is no personal benefit in it. A good manager relies on her team to produce results, and so it is in her interest to cultivate the team.

It's funny. I had a director who said "it's all about relationships". And it really is. But we meant different things by relationships. In his case, it was about sucking up.

The flip side of it is the "individual contributor". If you expect a manager to respect your opinion, you have to respect theirs. That's not just managers. That's people in general. This is especially a problem among young, bright, knowledge workers. They have a little too much of their self-esteem tied up in knowing the right answer before everyone else, and it can take a bit of convincing before they realize that what they jumped to isn't the "right" answer in this place, at this time, for these reasons. Even if it's false humility, show some. If someone disagrees with you, ask questions, find out why they think differently from you. You might learn something, they might learn something. Everybody wins.

And the thing I most commonly tell my younger colleagues: Do not trust in business entities. Believe me, the days of companies showing loyalty to employees is long gone. Even if they've been treating you well for a while, all it takes is a change in management, or even a drop in stock price, for things to change. Find people you can trust, and make sure they've earned your trust in little things before entrusting them with your career.

Whinging engineering washout complains about the quality of teaching and the volume of the workload. I hate to break it to the poor sucker, but the US has the highest quality engineering education available. That's why we have all the foreign graduate students here. There's several issues I have with his article. First, not to put to fine a point on it, US secondary schools by and large suck, in distinct contrast to our institutions of higher learning. So telling me he's got lots of gold stars, without telling me he did better than 700 on his math SAT, is meaningless. Second, it's all well and good that he thinks he's smart, but if you can't figure the stuff out on your own, you won't be much use to anyone as an engineer in the working world. Third, he obviously didn't do his research on his school. If you need someone that can actually explain science, math, and engineering, you don't go to the research factories, you go to a teaching school. I've attended some of the finest schools in the country for physics, and I can tell you that, by and large, none of my professors taught, they essentially read from the book. Now, if you really want to look at the problem, it's that if you are a professor in a prestigious university, publish or perish applies. To the degree that someone pursues the art of education, they take away from their ability to publish research, and hence, their ability to continue as an instructor. Both universities and students will seek out the best practitioner in a field, nobody even knows who the best instructor is.
And, as Edwin Rubinstein points out, we don't actually have a shortage, it's just that employers want supply to be sufficiently higher than demand to pay us dirt.

Recently checked out a couple of "social-networking" toys, namely Orkut and Yahoo! 360. I can't really see the point of keeping a "public" blog on either of them, because only members of those two communities can see it. And Orkut seems to be very heavily weighted towards dating. Especially if you want to date Brazilians. On the other hand, Linked-In seems to be having a surge lately. I had a couple of former colleagues reconnect through Linked-In, and a bunch of my current coworkers suddenly seem to be getting networked that way. Downside there is that functionally illiterate recruiters keep contacting me.

And so my association with the Berkeley Psychic Institute is coming to a complete end. As with many spiritual organizations, the principles are great, but sometimes the execution leaves something to be desired. Three and a half years ago (is it that long, now?), when I decided to take a break from teaching, the new director of that institute gave me the energetic equivalent of "and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out". I've been an inactive member since then, and now, although I paid for last year and this year at the end of last year, they're telling me I'm coming up short. Nice principles, but twenty years of classes and teaching spirituality doesn't seem to guarantee competence in worldly endeavors, like book-keeping. It's not like I've been performing any marriages or done any spiritual counseling in the last three years, so if they want to make it difficult for me to keep my associate, so be it, I'm moving on.

How depressing. I have to come up with a development plan at work. I am actually perfectly happy going on the same way I have been for the last five years, just with more money. I pretty much do what I perceive needs to be done. And I get my satisfaction out of that.
I don't have some other job I would like to do. I am not interested in being a position of power and influence. Just let me keep having fun doing what I am doing.

Bottled water evil? The author of this opinion piece claimed most people couldn't taste the difference between tap water and bottled water. Well, perhaps London, NYC, and San Francisco have tasty water supplies. And, to be honest, until moving to the San Francisco Bay area, I thought buying bottled water was silly, tap water was fine. Until I tasted the nasty stuff that comes out of the taps in some bay area water districts. The last straw was a particular cup of tea made with the tap water in Livermore. I nearly spewed, it was so bad.

I have been filtering the water at home ever since. About 8 cents a gallon for water that I can palate. I don't disagree with that writer's opinion about the wastefulness of bottled water, but perhaps he might want to go on a water tasting tour, what is true in London is not true in Livermore.