Its just a model

Yesterday, I got an earful from my boss over handling a meeting badly. Today, compliments. The difference?

In yesterday's meeting, I charged into the conversation with a mistaken impression that my CFO had made an unreasonable condition on a contract we were negotiating. Today, instead of charging into a conversation where I thought my QA manager peer had made an unreasonable request, I asked him, neutrally, to explain because "I wasn't clear on what he wanted".

While to the experienced negotiator, and indeed, the experienced business person, its blindingly obvious I'm jumping to mistaken conclusions,  this was a revelation to me.

See, I was sure, absolutely positively sure in the same way in both cases that I was completely correct when another person had done or said something unreasonable. And in the second case I phrased my query on it as if I just didn't hear him correctly, and got an immediate response that clarified things, mostly clarified that my earlier impression was wrong.

In my career, I've been absolutely positively sure on a lot of things, and to my everlasting shame, I truly do think that I am eventually proved correct more often than not. This level of surety, warranted or not, is the pivot point of my challenges as I get further in business, because when I'm right, I'm either really good, if I'm humble about it or I'm arrogant if I'm not. When I'm wrong, then its proof positive that I'm a big jerk.

One thing  I'm going to try to do in the future: I'm going to think twice any time I even consider taking someone to task for what I think is an unreasonable request. My history on this topic is poor.

We have a cable from the usb on the back of our appliance to the back side of the FIPS crypto card. So we called it the "reacharound" cable. Which we then named the "Gateway Device Configuration Cable " = GDCC = "God damned common courtesy"

FMJ reference for the win.

An interesting article that cites sources in regards to cherry picked sources for Gore's powerpoint. I found the bit about the ocean temperature particularly good science:


It's high school science that water will dissolve more CO2 when cold than when warm.

Work is going great.

I'm off for a week. A couple days next week D and I are going to a resort on the island for some R&R. Can't wait.

No really. This blows my mind. He basically threatens the US government and the oil companies: He's published the patents, its all there, China will just build it, and kill the oil economy. Fund me now, or the Chinese will pwn y'all.

I was always a bit suspicious of the Tokamak. Its cool that the math for this thing is beyond "a Cray" and my immediate thought was about the usual Beowulf cluster ideas. 

Google techtalk on the topic.

An interesting view. Regret and anticipated regret cause paralysis. Its a fair cop, actually.

The number one frustration I have with myself is keeping a lid on my inner voice when confronted with things I find blindingly obvious, things that people should have figured out for themselves. I'm told by reliable sources that this is either the textbook definition of arrogance, or the next best thing. It gets in the way of me succeeding as well as I want to at work, and it causes all sorts of other problems in my personal life.

Today, I encountered possibly the most obvious example of how that must appear to others. Today in a meeting, one of my people said "I don't know what other people don't know so they have to tell me when something is not clear, and I'm not going to explain everything from first principles". That's a totally honest view, and on the surface its kind of innocuous.

But the implications of this are staggering. First of all, the topics in question are well understood by maybe 100 people on the planet, 6 of them around the same table. One topic was so narrow, and so specific to our company, there are only 3 people in the world who understand it at all. With even a moment's thought you'd realize that for just about all values of "anyone else", they don't know. At all.

His main interactions on a daily basis are with those same 6 people. From a statistical sample, 100% of the people he regularly talks to understand the topic. That's the myopia that is the root of geek arrogance. How can you have any empathy if you never interact with anyone that doesn't have the common knowledge that you do. And its self fulfilling: if you aren't understood, how can you feel comfortable, therefore you tend to associate with the people who you know understand, etc.

Perhaps I'm naive, living first in Ontario within 20 miles of a large Nuclear station, and then in BC with our hydro-electric projects, but Coal just seems so 19th century, coal stacks belching sulfurous fumes into the air in some dystopian David Lynch hell. I know coal is not that dirty any more, but still.... I saw the haze around the oil refineries in Denver, Co driving to Boulder back in November 2005 and that day it was particularly Mordor-esque. Considering Denver's location in the mountains, its even more apt.

I watched The Great Global Warming Swindle on youtube. Its a rebuttal, of sorts of Al Gore's truths. This prompted me to notice that the two videos share some commonalities: The sources. They don't really have time in video to cite sources. So I went looking independently. I found this "global warming is real, but we'll let you read the refereed studies and make up your own mind site"  by an author who went digging like I've been doing.

Um, ya know, from what I can gather, there's a gap between the mid seventies and now. That gap is filled with arguments back and forth:  There's tons of places where one theory or another coincide with various observations, but there's also places where they don't. Some crazy italian named Cesare Emiliani argued with them all for about 30 years straight. Got some vindication, but not total in the early eighties. Read it, and weep  Why can't we all get along?

I do have an observation: TGGWS describes the global warming movement as "religion". Al Gore barely lost the election by pitting his fragmented "left" against the well organized right, with its deep trappings of religion. When I'm in a cynical mood, I think "Mr Gore has just found a left wing 'religion' that is equally strident, better organized than the Democrats, and like Bush, he's going to ride that into the White House." Actors are popular in politics. With his fresh Academy Award, he can nail it this time.  Not that it would be a bad thing, but it is Curious.

On Sunday, I discussed the aforementioned Clapton concert with two other musicians: The singer and the guitar player in the Sunday Jam band. Both of them expressed some disappointment:

The singer complained that our Eric had several times been "off mike" so his singing wasn't heard. Dunno what he expected, but when I go to see a concert of a guitar player once heralded as "Clapton is God", I don't really give a fuck about his singing. His playing was fabulous, and the singer did notice that.

The guitar player was on the floor near the stage. It was loud and the eq was bad, apparently. Where I was sitting, in the 22nd row of the opposite end of the arena, the sound was fantastic, not too loud, and the eq was great. So I guess his expectation, in a modern arena would be that the sound was great everywhere. I suppose its a fair complaint. He did like Robert Cray's singing better too, so go figure.

Clapton has still got it. Robert Cray is a better singer, but as a showman, Clapton rocked my world. He was way better than he was in '87 or so when I saw him in Hamilton with Knopfler on guitar and Buckweat Zydeco opening for him.

Cray came on at 7:34, played 35 minutes, a bit of a quiet guy, and not really a good rapport with the audience. Great singer, and a good songwriter.

Clapton, on at 8:30 played two hours solid. Longest break was to set up the short acoustic set: about 2 minutes. He played tunes from the new album, tunes from the just previous one, really cool re-arrangement of some classics and finished off with killer versions of the hits. Layla, Cocaine, Running on Faith, I Shot the Sheriff,Key to the Highway, ... He never paused more than 10 seconds between songs. That was the most consistently great concert I've ever seen.

Came across this comment on some bizarre openGL code:

To avoid spreading the stupidity like peanut-butter on the hood of a Porche as it races down the highway we have instead put the stupidity in a jar and set it on the gear shift.

Huh?

Because I thought I might practice writing.

At work, we use a wiki for doc and internal planning stuff. I write a lot of stuff there, but for some reason I don't get any compliments on my writing. Blogging is attention whoring at its most basic, but some of us are more clear on that.

So what do I need to work on? Punching up the lead? More colour in description? Lose the Canadian accent?

Well, at least one guy thinks were were right, after all
( Read on the continuing saga of .... ) ( Edit: I found his reference )

At lunch today with friend G, he brought up a totally new to me thought: Gene Wolfe wrote that the ancient Greeks originally considered the concept of being a skeptic as "one who thinks about things" as contrasted to "one who accepts the things others tell them" . He went on to say that skepticism seems to have been lately conflated with a tendency to reject new information. Its a fair cop. Being skeptical has a bad rep.

Brendan: if only canada would invade ;)

Your Intrepid Correspondent: we did.

Brendan: we would welcome you as liberators
Brendan: no you didn't

Your Intrepid Correspondent: we're using expendable troops.

Brendan: you were british colonists at the time

Your Intrepid Correspondent: Celine dion.
Your Intrepid Correspondent: Also Samantha Bee.

Your Intrepid Correspondent: See?
Your Intrepid Correspondent: Expendables.
Brendan: damn
Brendan: I for one welcome our new igloo-bound overlords.

Gah
I wish there was a way to get the date of when these aerial photos were taken. At first blush it looks awful, but there's no way to tell if its 10 years old or new, so you could jump all over someone who's being a good corporate citizen.

Thats a quote from ardaniel, lo these many years ago.