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.