So yeah, I stayed up too late so I kinda have to go sleep now.
So sorry, see you tomorrow.
I've finished the wordpress project; it is up on the trunk right now!
Thought I'd take a few days off to think about what I should be doing next. Its important to take some time off after major milestones to celebrate and rest up. I'm not in the habit of doing code sprints; I don't think they're sustainable. I'm in it for the long run and must maintain a workable pace for what could possibly be decades. Thus, a few days to renew and catch up on other life outside my pc. Its a small price to pay to prevent burnout. You get burned out; you won't be productive for months. And there's always the risk of burning so bad you'll never go back. The only way of avoiding burnouts is to setup a sustainable pace with well-demarcated timelines, checkpoints and markable progress.
I'm at such a markpoint right now. I need to decide what to do next. Here's my list of options:
Wordpress project:
Currently, wordpress import functionality is borken; it does not correctly import hierarchical comments. This should be fixed within wordpress.
Pros: actually useful, contributing to OSS
Cons: php blahs, not particularly interesting, no idea how involved this might get or even if a patch is possible.
LED project:
At one point I'd done some design work for an led grow light. I'd like to see it actually happen.
At one point I'd done some design work for an led grow light. I'd like to see it actually happen.
Pros: different medium (hw, circuitry, no sw). Physical device as output
Cons: different medium, long lead times for supplies. Kinda blah!
Twitter game:
I've done some thinking about a mafia game over twitter. This could be a lot of fun if done correctly.
Pros: ruby, learning new ruby libraries, possible payoffs
Cons: Arch design I've done shows its going to be not very fun; twitter is wrong medium for this game. Long project with possibly result not being fun to play.
6502 Project:
I can always pick up the 6502 project. Things I need to do with it: sdl visualizations, PIO, mem-mapped io, etc. There's lots of different things to do
Pros: a lot of framework is already there, most interesting for me
Cons: kinda useless, other better solutions exist already.
So sorry, dont have time.
I was gonna write about all the exciting stuff that's happening but you know, I kinda lost track of time.
kthxbye
Saw Knowing with some friends. Oh man, was it bad. Why did you forsake me Ebert?
How could you lead me astray so?
As I've no doubt mentioned before, I enjoy watching teddible horror movies; B-grade or lower. The more nonsensical, the better.
And oh man, did I see a good one today: "Drive Thru". About a serial killer in a clown suit. Totally ridic plot and acting. I hearted it very much
This has been a great thursday. Traditionally my thursdays in college were spent alone in the dorms either drinking or doing homework, often both. My roommates'd leave to go out and I'd never feel comfortable with so many people around so I preferred to stay in. Friday nights were much better for me cause there's no class the next day so I didn't have to half-ass it with the drinking. Thursdays were always rough.
Now that I'm all educated and out its turning into a very nice day; towards the end of the day everything slacks off at work so I can relax and enjoy the beginning of the weekend. Some weeks I don't have to work which is ideal, but on the fridays that I do, not a whole lot gets done. Come in a bit later, go to a long lunch and leave early. What can be better? No shame in doing nothing cause its friday, what can they expect?
Also, thursdays is when there might be a new office episode, and I can just think about that and smile.
When I lived in Israel, thursdays were considered the last day of the week; everyone had friday/saturday off. Which was so much fun cause it always felt like I was getting away with something; partying of a thursday. Why, that's unheard of, scandalous even! Off course, we had to work on sundays which also never felt like a real work-day to me. Yeah, I might have to come in to work on a sunday, but I sure as hell won't be working on a sunday!
Overall, a great day to be alive, a thursday is! The weekend is now tantalizingly close and offers boundless opportunities and yet it is not too close as to dissapoint you when it turns into every other wekend you've wasted.
I'm sitting upstairs minding my own business digging through some codez when my mother gives me the phone to talk to a friend about getting him a job where I work. This is the second time already, and I've heard about a whole lot more people from our community not getting work. Like, a surprising amount. And not just recently, some have on unemployment for a while. This does not bode well for anyone. This is obviously anecdotal evidence at best, but I don't see a recovery in sight till all these people are gainfully employed. Keep in mind, these are all highly skilled workers, engineers or all different types.
Maybe I should not buy a house just yet; I've got a bit of a nest egg saved up for my downpayment but I'll need it to live if I get fired and can't find anything else. Right now, living at home, I'd say I've got at least a year of expenses. Depending on how much the rents charge me. With a house, I'd be going month to month.
Quick question: what does a certain company and drug cartels have in common?
Turns out their internal hiring practices.
Say I'm employee number eighty-thousand and something and I'm on a project and either it ends or we come to a point where I want to go to another department. That happens quite often in real life btw, because people need a challenge every half-decade or so. Or they know the manager of the group and want to work for them. Or there's a new project starting up and they're interested in going over. Movement is inevitable; you can't ever put your employee in a box and forget about them. What the company has to do is provide the employee with opportunities to move inside the company rather than leaving.
What does this certain company do?
Well, supposedly they have a listing of departmental jobs across the whole company. But that listing excludes the project name and manager. And most listings on there are years old, for positions that I know have never existed and probably never will. If you apply, you won't know who you'll be working for or even what program. That is 'confidential'.
In addition, if you need a job, like yesterday, which I've had happen to me (an IR&D project got its money cut and they in turn, cut me), you have to go to your manager and beg for other employment. He in turn will find you 'something' but you're almost guaranteed not to like it.
I'm told all the managers get together every so often and generate a list of all the openings they're wanting to fill and candidates that they have that want to move around. And then they match them up. I've never been able to see this mythical list; its against official policy to share that with the hoi polloi of the company. So you've no idea what is available and what projects you can get on; all you know is what the manager tells you.
This sounds like a cartel situation to me; tight control of information gives the managers an informational advantage over their employees. How employees are matched to available positions is opaque by design; they could be picking names out of hats for all we know.
The effect of this policy is that most 'deals' are made under the table; you have to go around and befriend managers that'll tell you what's coming up and who's got openings. We've now created a black market for information on what's available. Instead of relying on transparency and fairness, we've created a system that is very much like the goings on of the mafia, at least from what I saw on the Sopranos.
I've my connections and when I need a job, I'll go around the company and visit dozens of people to figure out what's available, and email a lot more so they can get their contacts and figure out if they know anything. You must guard who your contacts are, lest they be suborned by your fellow employees looking for work as well. Everything is now being run through this ratfsck of a communication network, instead of normally, using a published list of openings.
Although, I do see how this benefits the managers. Over at this certain company, they're firm believers in mushroom-management, which states that employees must be treated like mushrooms, kept perpetually in darkness and fed only manure. This type of policy is a perfect example of this.
Just created a new repo at my github account with the xanga to wordpress exporter script. What it does is very simply scrape your xanga account and generate an xml document of all your entries (and in the future, comments) that can be imported into wordpress. Currently, there's another such script written in rebol and it hasn't been updated in a few years. I never got it to work (didn't try real hard) so I've reimplemented it with true dom-parsing instead of string replacements. I'll be expanding it out in the next few days so watch out for that!
You'd want to use this if you have had a xanga account but no longer use it and either want to save your data for later use, or move your blog over to wordpress. That is like all of 10 people.
Actually, I was wondering about that. It seems weird to me that this problem has not been solved already because it seems like such an obvious thing to want to do. I mean yeah, the rebol script, but it was clearly not written for anyone having a lot of data on xanga; it only does the first 25 comments per entry and it was not tested back very many years and all these other limitations on how it works. Some of the more popular entries back in the day would have hundreds of comments and I personally have 4 years of blogging in there; almost 400 entries. You would think that more people would want to do this but I've not seen anything else out there. Why hasn't this been done already???
I think I've finally figured out why I dislike my job so much. It could be because my self-interests run almost diametrically opposite that of the place I work for. I've thought about it a lot and the best I can explain it is that both myself and my company are rational actors who want to obtain things in our respective self-interests. That's what rational beings do; they look out for their interests first and foremost.
My company values uniformity and predictability over almost anything else. If they could pay someone lots of money to produce a cookie-pasting type of machine that gives them lots of uniformly baked engineers, they'd be ecstatic. For them the most important thing is predictability of outcomes. Even if that prediction is non-optimal, all that matters is that they're able to achieve the results they'd predicted. What that means in theory is that they want the median engineer; they don't want anyone good cause a good engineer will rock the boat too much and generally be a nuisance.
Most companies that work for the gov't live on what's known as a cost-plus contract. What that means is that the product costs whatever it costs plus a fixed percentage as profit; usually around 7% I'm told. It doesn't matter if they have 5 people on it or 500, their take-home from this is 7% of the cost of the project. With this system, their incentives are not to deliver early or on-budget (cause there's no budget, so to speak). Their incentives are to deliver on the day its due (because if you deliver late, the negative incentives kick in and those are very severe) and to have as many people working on it as possible. The result of this system is the million-monkeys effect; where instead of trying to ship early with as few resources as you absolutely need, you try to pack the contract with as many people as you can.
Really sharp engineers don't last long in places like that. Firstly, you can't really hire that many smart engineers at the same time and even if you did, you'd end up getting finished way ahead of schedule, which looks very bad. So instead, you have to hire lots of mediocre employees to boost up your bottom line. Again, you want mediocre but predictable every time over smart.
This has been institutionalized all over our gov't now to such an extent that its not even questioned. Hiring practices are geared towards hiring middling team-players. Salaries are intentionally controlled to attract the median engineer and to keep them there with generous pension plans. That's really the only reason you have pension plans; so you can retain mediocre employees that don't question the leadership. They do not want a handful of smart engineers; they want a mob of mediocrity. Lest you think I'm being dramatic, I've heard this very idea from the NanoManager himself; he said that just like in remodeling houses, you don't hire an architect to put up dry wall, you get a couple of migrants to do it and supervise them to ensure they don't drink up your alcohol and steal your wife's pearls. True story, that!
You know you're on a cost-plus contract when you might not have any work for months and yet you get yelled at if you take vacation or leave early. Its not their money that's going down the drain, so they expect you to sit there quietly and charge away. If you're halfway decent, you'll always finish your tasks way ahead of everyone else and perennially have nothing to do. This is also where if a smart engineer by accident got through the recruiting process, will get frustrated and end up leaving the company.
Which brings it back to me; I don't agree with these sentiments at all. I'm smart enough to be always bored. Unfortunately, I'm not so smart as to be able to get a job somewhere else. And the reason I don't like it so much is cause our incentives are misaligned. I want to do something challenging and be surrounded by smart people where I can make contributions. The company expects me to do very little and have no input in anything, but mainly I'm expected to be there and charge charge charge.
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