C.W. Nevius.blog : Sorry, but Zidane doesn't get it
Zidane has many defenders. Sometimes, it's not about just yourself. However provocative Materazzi's comments, the consequences of Zidane's reaction were not just to himself, but to his team, his country, and all the fans watching. His reaction was selfish. But perhaps he's too good to "take one for the team". He says he's just a man. If he can't take the consequences into account before he acts, no, he's still a child. And if he did indeed take the consequences into account, that means that his own pride takes precedence over team, country, and "the children". How classy is that?

UPDATE 3-Soccer-Zidane says Materazzi insulted mother and sister | Reuters.com
Says Zidane: "But I was the one who was provoked and I reacted. It is always the one who reacts who is punished, never the one who provokes and this is not fair."
Is it just me, or does this sound incredibly childish?

Drama - Then a Gimmick - July 10, 2006 - The New York Sun
I've been trolling the net for a little more on why Zidane did what he did, and came across this piece of silliness. I wonder if this guy ever actually played, and if he did, doesn't he remember? It was obvious that both sides were pretty exhausted coming into the game. Italy had played 120 minutes to beat Germany. And he faults teams for focusing on the fundamentals. It doesn't matter how pretty you play if you can't defend your own goal. If they want to open up the game a bit more, then either the games have to be spaced out further, to give players time to recuperate, or more substitutions have to be allowed. Why not take the approach of basketball, and allow unlimited substitutions, with players being able to come back in after a rest? Fresh legs will do more than anything else to liven up the game.

Penny Arcade! - Fine Distinctions
Seems the Penny Arcade crew is talking up Steven Brust's Jhereg. I found the entire series to be quite enjoyable, and worth an occasional reread.

Backs to the Future
It looks like the trolls of Terry Pratchett's Discworld have a human counterpart with respect to their spatial metaphor for time.

"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.