mjh++

Tin Foil Hat Brigade, Episode I

2011-01-04T08:35:00.000-08:00

This is deep in conspiracy theory land; much deeper than I usually explore. I admit that up front, and this should probably be taken more as a bit of humor than anything else. But, nevertheless, there are a two strands I'd like to tie together.

The US Government is very interested in a field that they call "Human Terrain Mapping" (wikipedia, BAA #1, BAA #2 as examples), which is basically understanding the pulse of the street: what people are thinking, their moods, and so forth. There's a strong anthropology / sociology component to it, as well as some psychology. One of the crucial things in doing this well is, I believe, a lot of current information about people's moods. There's a huge amount of interest from organizations such as DARPA in mining things like Twitter, blogs, and Facebook to get at mood and sentiment at a population level. There's also interest from high-frequency traders in seeing if this information can be used to do stock market trades. So, this is not exactly just an academic issue.

One of the standard problems here is getting the data. The "firehose" from Twitter costs around $30K a month; Facebook has never offered it, as far as I know. I have no problems with them selling this data; both of these are private companies, trying to make a profit. (Although, as a researcher, I'd love to get a "big" dataset from them.)

Continuing to use Twitter and Facebook as examples, both of these companies were relatively cheap to start up: maybe on the order of $200 million of so. I think they are both even cash-flow positive now. Especially in the world of military systems, $200 million is a total steal. A good spy satellite is easily $1-5 billion.

Now, to put on my tin-foil hat. I wouldn't be surprised if a three-letter agency (CIA, NSA, NRO) supplied meaningful amounts of capitol to one or more of these organizations, in exchange for real-time access to the data. It would have been a very cheap investment for an amazing data stream.

Here's the other thread I want to pull in to this discussion. Facebook (and to a lesser extent, Twitter) have been going to some extents to avoid opening up their books. For instance, here, a moderately complex attempt to get around SEC regulations. What tweaked my thinking was Felix's comment, "Facebook seems to be going out of its way to avoid public scrutiny."

What if there is a $250M hole in the books that roughly says "CIA?"

Not that it's stopped me from using Facebook.

iPad Dry Erase Markers

2010-12-07T21:37:00.000-08:00

I've not been crazy about iPhone / iPad stylii. It didn't seem right. Then, I saw this post, and it was immediately obvious why the stylii didn't work. I've made a slight change to his design: use a metal body pen. This means that the wire is no longer needed.

Supplies:

Sharpie "King Size" Permanent Marker (~$2.50 at Blick)
1.5" x .25" piece of conductive foam (see Note below)
Pair of pliers
Pair of sissors

Instructions:

Using the pliers, pull out the existing nib / point. (This is a bit messy)
Let the pen sit, uncapped, for several days. There's a piece of felt that holds the bulk of the ink, and this needs to dry out
With the sissors, cut a piece of conductive foam to size
Push the foam into the body of the pen.
Done!

Note: There might be something in doubling over the piece of conductive foam (cut it to 3" x .25", fold in half) I used a "dense" foam, but it still feels a little soft in day-to-day use.

Also, if you don't have conductive foam, drop me a note. I have a huge sheet of it that I'm not going to use, and we can work out some sort of trade.

Pages for the iPad

2010-05-02T11:53:00.000-07:00

Some random thoughts about Pages for the iPad:

I can't figure out how to make a document in landscape orientation in Pages iPad itself. I don't think it's possible, actually.

But, Pages does support it. You have to do something like this:

Create a document on the desktop that's in the format you want (landscape, weird paper size, etc.)
Mail it to you iPad
Open it in Pages

I think I'm really waiting for something like InDesign for the iPad. I think it will come eventually, but it will be a while.

Wikipedia Vandalism

2009-11-13T10:52:00.001-08:00

Let's think for a moment about Diane Arbus. One of the premier photographers of the middle of the twentieth century, her photographs of "others:" insane, marginalized, different opened up an entirely new way of looking at photography and how we view photography as art.

Talented, yes. But let's face it, when you're getting pictures of your new-born baby, she's second from the bottom of the list. (The very bottom of the list remains reserved for Joel-Peter Witkin, examples here, here, and here) Unless of course, you're Gloria Vanderbilt, looking for a picture of your new-born son.

And so, Diane Arbus. Baby Photographer. Of course, the son ends up being a little famous himself. I really, really, really want to edit his wikipedia entry to have that photograph of him as the main picture. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure the copyrights on the Arbus piece keep me from doing it. But maybe someone isn't quite as ethical as me.

Random Thoughts: Visas and RaVis

2009-09-24T12:34:00.000-07:00

1. Visas

I'm applying for a visa to the Russian Federation. One of the questions they ask on the visa application is to list all of the countries you've visited in the past 10 years and the years you visited them. This is a non-trivial question for me.

2. RaVis

This is a textbook example of everything that's wrong with open source software. And probably a perfect example of Conway's Law. It's mainly developed by the UN (yes, that UN). I have an import line like this:

import org.un.cava.birdeye.ravis.graphLayout.visual.edgeRenderers.BaseEdgeRenderer

Yeah. Right.

3. RaVis, Part II

Because this took me literally all morning to figure out. Here's how you add nodes to an existing RaVis graph:


// I'm using XML-formatted objects, as per the example code.
var o : XML = new XML("");

// What none of the postings tell you is that you need to
// create the new node on the vgraph (view), not the model
// graph. The vgraph will automatically create the model
// nodes for you.

var n1 : IVisualNode = vgraph.createNode(null, o);

// I'm using an existing node as the second part of the link
var n2 : IVisualNode = graph.nodeByStringId("1").vnode;

// Then, again in the view, link the two nodes together.
// The vgraph will create the edge in the model for you
var ive : IVisualEdge = vgraph.linkNodes(n1, n2);

// If you have MXML edgeLabelRenderers, you'll need to add
// data to the model and view Edge object. (Oddly, the model
// linkNodes takes an object parameter. But the view does not.)
o = new XML("")
ive.data = ive.edge.data = o;

// With this code, you don't have to do something like
// vgraph.graph = graph or a vgraph.draw. It just happens

Hopefully this will help someone else...

Frequent Flying

2009-09-09T08:24:00.000-07:00

One thing I've noticed is that when I've been at one of the high levels of frequent flyer is milage inflation. Basically, if you sneeze on a flight, management will send you 1,000 extra miles.

For instance, I took a recent trip to the Raleigh-Durham area. My routing had me flying 5145 "real" miles (including the 500 mile minimum). But, I ended up getting 22,631 miles for the trip. Or roughly four time more miles than I flew. The bulk of this was a 10,000 mile "loyalty" reward, but there was still 6,486 miles in various "Class" and "Elite" bonuses.

All this is a further reminder that I've never, ever, EVER been able to use frequent flyer miles on myself.

Society For Undergrounding

2009-08-04T09:53:00.000-07:00

This falls into the "Morally Acceptable Business Plan" bucket.

The Society for Undergrounding is a non-profit organization with the purpose of promoting tourism and photography around the world. We give grants to areas of natural beauty, historical importance, or unique views for the purpose of burying overhead wires that would otherwise make tourist snapshots significantly less pretty, or require a good deal of Photoshopping to remove.

We primarily work on the basis of voluntary donations from tourists and photographers, as well as donations from photography industry. We also can serve as an escrow-type agency for a region that might want to undertake an undergrounding operation, but want a neutral party to help negotiate with utilities and mediate between potential competitors.

Regional grants are, of course, done for that particular region. Otherwise, we accept proposals from anyone, and evaluate the opportunity based on the cost of the undergrounding, the expected number of pictures.

[ugh. I just checked, and "undergroundingsociety.org" is available. This means that I probably a) have to buy it, and b) put up a plausible website there.]

The Results.

2009-08-01T18:11:00.000-07:00

248. (301 times)

I mean: Troy? Ferndale? Royal Oak? Not really Change I Can Believe In.

On to come up with another way to find a new area code.

My Google Voice Invite

2009-07-31T11:16:00.000-07:00

I got my Google Voice invite about 2 weeks ago. Every night, I search, and hope that an area code that I want is now available (In order, 212 (New York City); 907 (Alaska, preferably Wasilla); and 867 (Yukon Territory)). So far, I've had no luck in getting a number in any of those three fine locations.

But, last night I had an idea for how to pick a new area code. Texts From Last Night provides the answer. Simply scrape all of the area codes from the texts, and find out which one is most common. And I have my new area code.

Somehow, I think I have to refine my curl and regex skills so that I can do this drunk and stoned to make it "proper."

One less daily habit

2009-07-02T09:35:00.000-07:00

Every day for the past seven years -- almost to the day -- I've taken two pills. Yesterday was the first day I didn't do it. And last night, I took only one pill*. As a habit, it slowly evolved: originally, it was at 11:00am; then when I moved to Seattle, it moved to 8:00am. It varied where I took it, some months I would always do it at home before I left for work, other times, it would be an excuse to get my morning diet Coke. (I may have moved to Seattle, but parts of me are still in the South.) And yesterday and today, nothing. I had to keep reminding myself that this was the plan, and it was ok.

I only missed one dose over the seven years. Which means I was 99.98% compliant. I think it would take a few thousand more years before I could get to six sigma quality. Other random facts is that this is about 3.321kg (yes, kilograms) of drugs. And cost my various insurances around $112K. This of course prompts the question: what's cheaper, cocaine or my drugs? Luckily, we have the internet, which gives us an answer: at wholesale prices, cocaine, but at street prices, my drugs.

--

*: Actually, it was two pills. There's a weird two-week washout regime to get the last of the old drugs out of my system and get the new drugs up to effectiveness as fast as possible. But that doesn't make for a good story. Even worse, the wash-out over-emphasizes the "bad" drugs.

Wolfram Alpha. Fail?

2009-05-16T19:49:00.001-07:00

1. It can't answer, with any degreee of precision, "How much wood could a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"

2. All of the answers are pictures. This means you can't cut and paste in any useful sense. Probably good for 9th graders trying to write a report. Bad for other things.

3. The Matt pointed out this "synonym network" for "homosexuality:"

I don't understand it either.

I think #2 is the more interesting part of Wolfram Alpha. I mean, why? Yes, there is a lot of graphical stuff, but there is also a lot of non-graphical stuff. It wouldn't be that hard to write a set of routines that rendered it in HTML. The only reasons I can come up with basically revolve around "Our data is soooo especialle that we need to keep it safe." Odd.

The Question

2009-05-11T23:12:00.001-07:00

I.

I should have expected that this question was going to come sooner or later. I just didn't expect that it would happen in a fairly non-descript staff meeting, or that it would be directed at me.

"So, is it safe?"

[=trans: "After we do this, can you assure us that, for your area of expertise and responsibility, the airplane and the production system that built it, is safe to fly?"]

I was quiet for a second. My tools are processes are not ideal (nothing ever is), but they work as designed. Now, I'm being asked to say they will keep a the test pilots and test engineers alive. And to vouch for the safety and integrity of the company and its people. To the best of my knowledge (and I spend a lot of time refining this), we have the tools to make sure it is safe.

"Yes, it is."

II.

As I started to understand the company, I developed a theory, the Fundamental Miracle of The Company. Basically, it's a timeline, and it goes like this:

Chaos -> Chaos -> Chaos -> Chaos -> Single Most Reliable Thing Ever Built By Humans

It's that last step that I had trouble understanding. But I'm beginning to wrap my head around it. In the chaos, of people running around, fighting the fires, they begin to understand and trust the systems they've built, the engineering that has been released. In the frenzy, things get fixed. Problems get hammered out and understood. And then, finally, people start asking each other the question: "Is it safe to fly?"

And we're able to answer "Yes, it is."

III.

Days like today, I kinda love my company a bit more.

We build 250 ton machines with over a million parts. And they FLY.

Badge Follies

2009-05-06T23:05:00.000-07:00

About two weeks ago, I left my badge at the gym. It was a gym I don't normally go to, so it meant getting my badge back would be harder than normal. Luckily, the next day, someone turned in my badge, and the nice woman at the local security desk called, and asked if I wanted it sent somewhere. I said that would be lovely, and send it to my normal office. It was to be there by Monday at the latest.

Two Mondays came and went, and still no sign of the badge. I had a 2:00PM meeting in the factory today, and there is a badge office right by the factory. I figured I could kill two birds with one stone here. At 1:15, I headed to the badge office, in the middle of a typical Seattle rain. (This becomes important later.) I park, and get to the badge office at about 1:25, and get in line. At 1:40, I realize I need to leave now if I'm to make it to my meeting on time.

So I leave, and head to the turnstiles with my temp badge. Unfortunately, the temp badge doesn't let me in. And it's raining. I trek along the fence a bit to where there used to be a manned gate. But that's closed now. I trek back to the turnstiles, and still no luck. I trek to the badge office, and they tell me to try again. By now, it's about 1:55, and I'm soaking wet.

I go back to the badge office, and they let me in through the back door. Now I'm inside the fence. But, I'm on the far west side of the building, and my meeting is on the far east side of the building. (East-West length is about 1.1 miles). I get there 20 minutes late, and almost dry.

But now, 8 hours later, I'm getting a cold. I love my employer just a little less today.

House Hunting

2009-05-04T16:19:00.000-07:00

Long-time readers of my blog know that I've been looking for a house
for a while. Although, I am being optimistic when I say "readers" in
this context. After seeing probably the 30th house, I started trying
to put together stories about the house and it's owners: who they
were, why they are selling, and what possesed them to make certain
design choices. After this past weekend, I think it's time to make
this more formal, and try to do a short (100-400 word) paragraph on the
houses. I'm not a great serious writer; what few skills I have I think
lean more towards satire. But I'm going to try.

208 32nd Ave, 98122 ($1.3M, 6br / 4.25ba)

Mark and Travis were married in 1988. Nineteen Eighty-Eight. I was
just barely in high school at the time. I think the first bit of gay
literature I got was 1988. Possibly the same weekend they were
married. Since then, it looks like they've adopted three kids. Which
explains the 6br house. But it's not clear why they are moving. The
pictures and toys point to younger kids; they are not
down-sizing. Maybe a better school system? They've done a huge amount
of work on the house, and it seems odd that they are leaving it. The
only thing I can come up with is that Travis is a minister, and he may
have gotten a congregation somewhere else. Mark is a doctor of some
sort, so he can work wherever he wants.

New and Improved Worst-Case Scenario

2009-04-21T13:10:00.001-07:00

Buyer Furnished, Red Label ##ALT parts in a simulator.

I'm pretty sure these don't exist but I think I'd just give up if they do, and say this is too complex for mortals.

Unfortunately, I don't think I can explain ##ALT in a public forum. It has to do with the differences between ordering parts and designing parts for assembly.

Random Observations

2009-04-17T13:39:00.000-07:00

1. Peas

I've given peas a chance. It didn't work, and I've moved to beets.

2. Gold Leaf

It's true. The stuff is thin enough and light enough that it will conform to the ridges of your fingerprints

3. Duck fat

You can use it instead of butter on bread.

Facebook Thoughts: Middle School and Post-Grad Editions

2009-03-25T15:07:00.000-07:00

Middle School

So, I told Friend A that I didn't want to discuss Friend B ever again. Which made Friend A thinks that Friend B is completely out of the picture. But I still see Friend B a lot. Both Friend A and Friend B are Facebook friends, but not really social friends other than through me. Recently, Friend B posted a photograph of me on Facebook.

One of the perils of Facebook is that it's hard to tell what Friend A sees: does he see that Friend B posted a picture of me? And I suppose that means I need to explain what's going on. Yes, this is entirely middle school of me.

Post-Graduate

I notice that my online real estate agent has a way I can post houses that I'm interested in on Facebook. Just because you can do something online doesn't mean you should. And, besides, once the offer is accepted, the listing is no longer available online. Which is exactly the time you want to share it on Facebook.

Maybe I'll have a chance to try it out tomorrow afternoon.

100% Hip-Hop? And what does Linked-In Know?

2009-03-20T12:54:00.000-07:00

I logged into Orkut for the first time in years. Possibly decades. Like any good social network, it suggested a few people it thought I might know. Most of them were pretty obvious choices. Bietz, Hand, Casner, Gross. All predictable and unsurprising. Then, nestled in the middle of the list is a "Camila 100% Hip Hop." I'm wondering if she's like MySpace's Tom. Or just a weird freak of the algorithm.

Also, I looked at friend recommendations in Linked In a few days ago. There was one that I actually knew. But I can't figure out how Linked In knew I knew him. There is no common friend. There's not even a two-hop friend. He lives in a distant country, and I've actually only seen him twice in my life. I haven't told Linked In about my gmail account. (Although he may have...) One of those, "huh?" moments.

Yeah. I'm spending too much time thinking about social network sites recently. I blame the US Government.

Morally Dubious Business Plans

2009-03-19T10:30:00.000-07:00

I'm not convinced that this is totally bankrupt. I'm also not convinced that it hasn't already been done by a three-letter agency (CIA, NSA and DHS are the most likely ones).

I've been reading a lot of Broad Agency Announcements (BAAs) from groups like DARPA, IARPA, and NGA which are asking for ideas on how to build a "human terrain map." In other words, what are people thinking, how are ideas and influence spreading, and how would this impact either Phase 3 (major operations) or Phase 4 (stability & reconstruction) operations.

I've been thinking that systems like Facebook and Twitter offer an interesting way to gather a lot of data on the pulse of a community (even a nation) without a lot of effort. One of the problems with blogs is that a lot of people start blogs, but rarely stick with them. Like me. On the other hand, microblogging is a lot easier to keep up with, especially since there is some social pressure to regularly update your status.

What we do is set up a cell phone company that offers reduced rates for regularly checking in on a microblogging service. We'll also push out all of your friends updates to you ABSOLUTELY FREE! And we'll manage your social network for you. And we'll have fun geographic location services as well. Targetting the critical 15-30 demographic, we'll be the network operator of choice. Since we're not trying to make a huge fortune here (remember, we have .13% of the TARP covering costs here), we'll be the first choice, since we're cheap.

There are a few interesting challenges though. First, how do you funnel the data back to your three-letter organization? I think the best way to do this is to create a shell company that does most of the work and advertising. It would be owned / funded / operated by locals. They may not even have to know what was going on: the initial idea would come from a US cellular magnate (Craig McCaw, I'm looking at you.) Then, the actual operations would be subcontracted to a friendly US company with experience in network operations. (Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, or IBM would be obvious choices. I know, from first hand experience, one of them has extensive experience in modifying telecom hardware to comply with intelligence agency requirements.) The actual data feed back to the US would be done by off-site replication to another data center, and a network tap would be installed there. That's the morally dubious part.

The other interesting problem is how much useful information can you extract from 140 character updates? It's an interesting problem. Most of the text mining systems seem to work better with big corpuses. Also, we're going to try to impute valence and meaning to short messages, many of which may be sarcastic, ambiguous, and deliberately vague. (And, of course, given that we are targeting the "Twilight" demographic, will be 99.999% about relationships, and .001% about hockey, there's not going to be a lot of actionable intelligence in the first place.)

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if this is already happening. It seems surprisingly straight forward, and not all that expensive. I mean, compare it to Project Jennifer. Given the right set of data, you could probably even make it break even by selling marketing data gathered. Hell, it might even be profitable in its own right.

Old Thesis Ideas

2009-02-18T11:02:00.000-08:00

At one point, I was going to do my thesis computer support for what I called "The Lunch Problem." The Lunch Problem consists of three questions that all must be answered at roughly the same time, because the answer to any one of them impacts the answers to the other two:

1. When are we going to lunch?
2. Where are we going for lunch?
3. Who is coming to lunch?

It's not as easy as it seems. Because if Janine is coming to lunch, I don't want to go. If we leave at 10:45, Brad can't make it. John had sushi last night. And so forth. It seemed like a hard groupware problem to me.

I'm reminded of this because I'm trying to schedule a dinner. I think we're on our third, and hopefully final date. We've also run into a few dietary restrictions on the way (and one date made it even worse.)

Valentine's Day Cards

2009-02-11T11:28:00.000-08:00

I used to do Valentine's Day cards. I stopped doing them for a few years, a combination of inertia and lack of creativity. This year, I'm happy to say I did one, and I think it's one of the best ones yet. It's a short (7 page) comic book, about what happens when terrorists attack. There is a paper version available, but you can also get the PDF now, rather than waiting.

Naive Bayesian Classification

2009-02-06T12:27:00.000-08:00

I was naive. I thought Naive Bayesian Classification would help. I coded up a rough-and-ready version of it. I gave it 30% of my data as training, then see what it did with the remaining 70%. I have 7 categories. So, if I used a really naive classifier (say, something like this), I'd get 14% correct answers. My classifier got 4%.

I think the classifier is failing because it's a really small vocabulary: about 400 words are used total, and there is pretty big overlap. I'm not sure if more data would help. The context has a highly regularized vocabulary (think air traffic control, or emergency dispatch).

But I really enjoyed the exercise.

Emphasis Quotes

2009-02-04T09:37:00.000-08:00

I'm not a big fan of emphasis quotes. Most of the time it is just sad, but sometimes it reaches funny. This time, it was actively painful. It's not just the casual abuse of quotes, but the fact that they don't even match!

And the strangest things seem suddenly routine....

2009-01-19T19:52:00.000-08:00

I.

I was at the bar last night at the tea dance. I was talking to H, and D walked down the stairs. H made a comment, along the lines, "He looks like a dumb Vin Diesel."

I had the wonderful opportunity to reply, "Actually, he's a PhD mathematician."

II.

Assume population of men p = {K, A, J, R}

set of men who hit on me last night: {K, J}
set of men who I made out with: {A, R}
set of men who did other things1: {J}
set of men who I got their phone number: {R}

~~Union~~Intersection of these sets = {0}

1: This being a family blog, send me e-mail and I'll explain.

Two Stories

2009-01-04T12:25:00.000-08:00

I. House as ATM

I read Calculated Risk. I watch the Seattle Bubble. I read the New York Times. And I constantly wondered who were these people? The people who looked at their house as an ATM, and used up all of their equity, and then some. Now I've met one. It took a long time for me to get the full sense of their story, and exactly how deep they are. It's terrifying to me, the amount of debt. I can't tell if this person is typical of the US in general, but if they are, we're going to be in for a very hard few years as these kinds of situations get resolved. "We were going to pay [the credit card debt] off when we sold the house." But the house didn't sell, the credit card debt isn't shrinking, and the mortgage isn't being paid.

II. Be Careful What You Ask For

About 18 months ago, I posted a personal ad asking for a particular kind of relationship. I didn't want a purely sexual relationship, but I wasn't sure I was ready for a full-blown dating thing. Maybe this is "FWB," or possibly "intimate FBs"? Something that had an emotional component to it as well and an intimacy, but that would work with me leaving town every four weeks or so. As it turns out, I got exactly what I asked for. The person is both terrifying and amazing at the same time.

But, I've made a decision to no longer travel as much. To make an offer on a house. In short, to settle down, and try to get my life in order. Now, what I wanted 18 months ago doesn't work. Getting out of this is going to be painful.

And yes, there is a common thread here.

Supply Chains, or, the tenuous nature of modern life

2008-12-28T18:27:00.000-08:00

Over the past week, as Seattle has been blanketed with blizzards of biblical proportions, I've had a bit of a chance to reflect on supply chains. [Yes, I know. In Ithaca or Ann Arbor, the recent snow would be considered a "flurry" and not even merit reporting on the nightly news. But, in Seattle, it is a catastrophe.]

On Christmas Eve, I was in QFC, and was surprised to see the shelves empty of all milk and eggs. Now, maybe people suddenly were in a eggnog kind of mood, but I don't think so. Especially since the milk crisis lasted until at least Friday. Today, I was again at QFC, and managed to grab the last whole chicken they had.

I have experience with deep supply chains, and I know how they can go wrong. (*cough* fasteners *cough*) Or the lead time of custom-forged titanium landing gears. But it took the snow to make me realize that everyone's supply chain is just about as tenuous.

Not sure if this makes me go into full-on survivalist mode, but I'm thinking about it. Especially if it snows again.

New Theory on Teams & Trust

2008-12-17T21:31:00.000-08:00

"Unhappy teams will do anything to avoid working together. Including filling out surveys."

That's my new working hypothesis. All of my trust issues are being driven by a band of malcontents that happen to be at the company for a while. If I had a bigger n, this would just disappear, and I'd have happy results that I could publish.

Alas, I don't have a bigger n.

Trust in my co-workers, II

2008-12-15T21:02:00.000-08:00

The story is getting a little more complex, and I'm not sure I fully understand what's going on. Or, I simply have too small of an n to be able to say anything widely generalizable. Which is very possible, given that my n is around 20. I've been spoiled by datasets where my n is 100,000+.

First off, about the trust measure. It's a 11 question inventory that loads on two factors. Off the top of my head, I think the two factors are an "emotional trust" (would I discuss work problems with this person/team?) and a "cognitive trust" (does this person deliver). It's an established inventory, and for the purposes of my work, I have to assume that it measures what it says, and the constructs are real. It's also been published, so I can send people copies of it. (And, if I could get you to give a modified version of my survey to your team, I'd love it...)

Now, it turns out the trust numbers aren't as bad as I originally thought. I was mis-coding a few questions, and it ended up skewing the final number down. The initial trust measure is now 2.6 (0 to 4 scale), and the second trust measure is 2.67 (taken several weeks later). This is better, but still not great. The two are also highly correlated (uh... r = .80, p < .001), which is nice. The initial bits of data were not correlated, and I had no good explanation for that.

Tenure with the company is still negatively corrrelated with trust in team mates. (r = -.295, but p = .268, so even the most generous readings of significance say "don't worry about this"). But my new scary bit of data is that the second trust measurement is negatively correlated with the time on the team. AND it's significant: r = -.5, p = .025. I think one team is sort of dragging me down here, but I can't exclude them just because they openly admit they are dysfunctional.

Almost nothing else in this data set reaches significance. I'm trying to figure out if I can get some internal money to pursue this a little further. Unfortunately, in this budget climate, that looks unlikely.

Trust in my co-workers

2008-12-11T16:07:00.000-08:00

I'm doing a study that has as one component trust in co-workers. I have a fairly standard measure of trust that can be scored on a 50-point scale, with higher numbers meaning more trust in coworkers. The numbers are averaging about 26 for the people I am surveying.

Honestly, these are horrible numbers. Like so bad I think people didn't understand the questions. But they get the reverse-scored questions right, so I have to think they do. And these people know each other. Very well.

I really wish I had surveyed people further afield.

I am Death, Destroyer of Plants

2008-12-03T21:56:00.000-08:00

I have finally given up hope, and accepted that my stalk of Lucky Bamboo is no longer lucky. In Monty Python terms, it is now an ex-bamboo. It was nearly six years old, originally acquired in Seattle, taken home to Ann Arbor, moved twice, brought back to Seattle, and moved once more. It's had a good life, and I no longer believe it has talismatic properties relating to the marriage where I acquired it.

What I find strange is that I seem to kill easy plants: Lucky Bamboo. Dead. Rosemary. Dead. Lavender. Dead. Hard plants, I do very well with. Pitcher Plant. Thriving. Sundew. Thriving. Staghorn. Thriving. Lithops. Thriving. (As much as a lithop can thrive). This suggests that I should replace the bamboo with something more complex: perhaps a Nepenthes or and Orchid?

Interstitial Moments

2008-11-17T21:20:00.001-08:00

I'm back on the road again. If Delta (née Northwest) is to be believed, I've now passed the 90,000 mile mark for the year, with one more trip to California planned (next week, no less.)

In Prague, I was reading William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, which had the most amazing explanation of jet lag I had heard: Your soul can't travel as fast as your body, so you have to wait a few days for it to catch up. Somehow, this works well for the sense of disorientation and hollowness I feel when I've been traveling.

I'm back in Seattle for a week and a half, but I think it's going to take a while longer before my soul catches up. Probably a day or two.

Media Alert: The Palin Expert is now taking questions

2008-10-02T09:13:00.000-07:00

Sarah Palin. A mystery wrapped in an engima tied up with a pink conundrum bow.

But never fear. The Sarah Palin Expert is now taking questions about Sarah, her life, her governing policies and her fashion choices.

And what makes me the Sarah Palin Expert? Well, I've been to Wasila twice in my life. I know how to pronounce Matanuska-Susitna Valley correctly. I've had 10 minute conversations with native Alaskans. I read lots of newspapers and magazines. In short, I'm more qualified as a Sarah Palin expert than Mrs. Palin is to be VP.

Send your questions here: thesarahpalinexpert@notesfromthefield.net

Kindle, Pt II.

2008-09-30T10:21:00.001-07:00

I'm a little up in the air about the Kindle right now. A major disappointment is that if the battery is well and true dead, it cannot recharge itself via a USB cable. I took it on my recent trip to Europe, with only the USB cable. At some point, the WhisperNet got turned on, and proceeded to drain the battery. And then I couldn't charge it again.

Which was one of the causes of the Worst. Flight. Evar., my 11 hour ATH /ATL, in which the equipment was changed (no power at the seat); the IFE was broken (no movies, not that they were that great to begin with); and I had no reading material (Other than a copy of FT, where I read everything, including the stock tables.) If the Kindle had been able to be charged with a USB cable, I could have been happily reading any number of books.

The iPhone can recovery-charge via USB. Why can't the Kindle?

Travel Anger Management

2008-09-15T14:26:00.000-07:00

I didn't quite scream, but I nearly got to it this afternoon, checking into my "hotel" in London. It's actually a University dorm, outfitted for the lucrative conference market, so calling it a hotel is giving it a lot of credit. The near-screaming was started because there was 1) no wireless, 2) the internet they did have required me to register my MAC address, and 3) I had to pay for this "privilege" of internet access.

In the end, I told the front desk that I was told Internet would be free. I played my very best passive aggressive american traveler, and ended up getting free Internet. Well, not sure if it is free or not, but I didn't pay at sign-up, like I was supposed to. Tomorrow I get to send an even better passive-aggressive note to the conference organizers and tell them to fix things with the front desk.

Cranky Travel Complaining

2008-09-12T19:02:00.000-07:00

I'm leaning against a wall in the Cincinnati airport, after being offloaded from a 767-300 with a fuel pump problem. (but, at least I had a ghetto upgrade!) Hopefully, the problem is going to get resolved, and I'll only be 3-4 hours late getting into London.

This is after the comedy of errors in trying to get my corporate card: first, it didn't come in the mail. Then we had to figure out an over night service that would cross the picket line to deliver (FedEx: Yes; UPS, DHL: No), then we had to figure out who signed for the envelope (No one by that name at the entire company), then discover that the letter is still on the FedEx truck, and headed North to Everett, where I could pick it up at my convenience between 5:30 and 6:30PM (or, when I had planned to pack.)

It can happen to anyone. It just happened to come together for me.

Shrek: The Musical

2008-09-05T10:08:00.000-07:00

In a nutshell, when faced with an artistic decision, the producers and director decided to do both.

It was all a little overwhelming, especially on the Fifth Avenue's stage. I don't know where it will be in NYC, but the staging seemed a little cramped. There was no memorable song, but neither was there a real clunker. At 2:45, it was probably longer than I would want.

Of course, this is still in previews, so I'm guessing that it will change a bit before it goes to Broadway. I thought that Shrek has potential and just needs editing. I didn't think that way about Young Frankenstein

2008-08-29T15:46:00.000-07:00

I took the plunge and got a Kindle. It arrived on Wednesday. So far, I'm relatively impressed, although Caecilia? As a default? The wireless shopping is seamless and very nice.

My fundamental problem right now is the first book I bought on the Kindle is geekporn. I'm going to enjoy reading it (I already am enjoying it), but I'm going to feel a little dirty when I'm done. Like I shouldn't have enjoyed it as much as I should. And hopefully, by making the setting 1700s England and America, Stephenson will manage to avoid another interminable Coyote == hacker metaphor. But as I write this, I realize he still has Loki to make his point.

Two New Books

2008-08-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

I've been pretty bad about updating this blog, and especially after reading K's blog and S's blog, I feel like I should make an effort to write more. Since I got two new books this week, I figure that's a good enough topic for now.

First up is Wolfgang Tillman's Lighter. Unfortunately, it's still sitting on the kitchen table and even still in the shrink wrap. I'm not sure how I feel about Mr. Tillman's work. Some of it I find great. For instance, I'm still deeply in love with the Concorde series of pictures. But then, there's the random disaffected youths that I can't quite get. But the book wasn't that expensive, and I can see if the disaffected youths grow on me.

Next book is Stephen Shore's A Road Trip Journal. I've been consciously playing around with my journals over the past few months, trying to figure out how I want them to "work." My biggest problem right now isn't so much that they don't look the way I want, but that the overhead of making a page is too high. I've been using InDesign to create the digital pages, and firing that up is just too much effort for the most part.

A Road Trip Journal is low tech: done in 1972, it's not clear what tech there was to use. But there is everything in it, from gas receipts, to shooting logs, and a few photographs (polaroids?). One of the things that struck me is that a good day had 16 pictures taken. These days, with digital cameras, you take 16 pictures of a single object.

New Year's Resolutions

2007-09-04T14:43:00.000-07:00

[This is a little late in the posting, but I was tired and sore?]

I did legs 8, 20, and 32 of Hood-To-Coast relay race. Leg 20 was the bad one -- 5.75 miles, longer than I had ever run before (more or less) and mostly uphill. I was the slowest person on the team, but despite me, we still placed in the top 200 teams.

Now I am in a quandry. Phase Three? Or Plan B? Or figure out some way to combine the two of them? I see a trainer this afternoon, so he might be able to help.

Disinterested Buyer, Pt 3

2007-08-20T17:08:00.000-07:00

I'm not making a huge amount of progress in the effort to buy a place, but I am occasionally looking at houses, townhouses, and condos. I went to one over the weekend that honestly baffled me in terms of the floorplan. It was a townhouse, over three levels.

First off, I really don't get townhouses. Most of the ones I have seen just don't make sense to me. The only attraction I've ever seen in a townhouse is that you can do each level up in an entirely different motif. Me, I'm planning the ground floor to be 1890's hunting lodge (bearskin rug, antler lamp), second floor being Louis XVI (gilt, mirrors, brocade and more mirrors and brocade), and the top floor being 1980's black lacquer. But enough about that.

I had two major problems with this particular townhouse. The first was that given the floorplan and model I saw, there was no obvious place to put a television. For me personally, that's not a huge problem, since I rarely watch television. But still, given the importance of "Desparate Housewives" in modern america's life, you would think this would have been thought through in the design of the house. The other problem was the master bathroom. The townhouse was about 2000sq ft, over three stories. The master bath was about 60% of one of those stories. Here's the floorplan:

I'm trying to figure out what people would use this much bathroom for? It's literally about half the size of my current apartment! Just the bathroom! And putting the clothes in the bathroom? That seems odd to me. Anyway, I guess I'm not their target market, since it was $400K more than I could afford. I suppose with double my current salary, I would have a different outlook on life.

Stories from the graveyard, Part I

2007-07-05T03:00:00.000-07:00

There are a few managers here who basically have the responsibility to ensure that only the people who have an absolute need to see the airplane see it. (I won't get into the reasons why, but mostly, they want to keep it a surprise.) However, the managers are also just incredibly proud of the airplane. This is not a good combination, because, invariably, pride of creation wins over keeping a secret. Of course, this might be a little different on first shift when there are lots more people. On third shift, there are only a few people to see, and we're all very well known to the managers at hand.

I thought it looked good unpainted. It looks absolutely stunning painted.

Schedule Changes

2007-07-02T02:52:00.000-07:00

I'm now about 4 hours into my first time on third shift (also known as graveyard). I am working in the paint hangar this week while it gets painted. I was able to see it a few minutes ago, and it is much whiter than when I last saw it. And there is a lot of kraft paper on it as well. (I doubt that's particularly proprietary information. Now, the sharks with the lasers on their head protecting it...)

I'm holding up better than I expected, but I will have to see how I feel when 7:00am rolls around. I can better understand why so many injuries happen on third shift as well. I'm sort of prepared for it, and I am still amazingly stupid. Of course, i just had a regular mountain dew, which really doesn't help the intelligence.

More later...

New Year's Resolutions

2007-06-07T16:26:00.000-07:00

I'm back from Paris, where I did a 100 SCM Freestyle event, in 1:11.47. Thanks to this site, I know that is a 1:04.03 SCY equivalent. I'm going to allow myself the luxury of rounding on the hundreths place, and call it a 1:04. Actually, if the pool had been less unfamiliar, I could have gotten in a flip turn or two, and done it faster.

Now, onwards and upwards for Hood to Coast.

Irony of the Week

2007-03-29T08:23:00.000-07:00

(As I tried to write this entry, I realized that it would be semi-proprietary information. Now I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this such that the irony comes through, without revealing the proprietary information.)

On any airplane, there are various things that are relatively hazardous, but are considered an acceptable risk, or are necessary in an emergency. For instance, small amounts of radioactive substances (tritium) are used for emergency lighting and explosives are used in various places such as emergency escape slides and engine pylons (don't think about why pylons need explosives.).

My problem part of the week is one of these potentially hazardous parts. It's fine on the airplane, properly installed. But, it can't actually fly on the LCF when the part is being shipped on a section. This isn't quite the academic concern; there was a major accident a few years ago involving hazardous airplane parts being shipped incorrectly.

New Year's Resolutions

2007-01-22T17:54:00.000-08:00

Last year, I had four New Year's resolutions:

Become more obsessive about swimming
Develop an eating disorder
Start smoking
Start abusing performance-enhancing drugs

Unfortunately, I failed at all four. This year, I'm not going to call them resolutions but rather goals, and see if I do any better:

Do a 1:04:00 SCY 100 Freestyle (or moral equivalent)
Do a Hood-to-Coast class relay race
Get Colt-model like muscles

The swimming goal is a stretch, but not impossible. The running is not very hard, actually. I'm not sure about #3 though. I'm going to do them in order, mainly because #3 will definitely interfere with #1, and more than likely with #2.

Disinterested Buyer, Pt 2

2006-12-22T15:13:00.000-08:00

This is a follow-on idea to one of my morally bankrupt business plans, but probably legal and not really unethical. This proposed mechanism would only work in a buyer's market, but given the world of hurt real estate is in these days, I think it might just work.

Instead of the buyer making a bid on a property, a buyer instead requests the seller to make a proposal. This process mirrors long-standing standard corporate and government practices. In order for this to really work, you would have to provide the seller a list of "comparables" currently on the market, and indicate that you are soliciting proposals for all of them.

I'm not sure it would work, but I am thinking about trying it...

Disinterested Buyer, Pt 1

2006-12-12T16:52:00.000-08:00

This is going to be an on-going set of posts as I try (slowly) to find a place to live. Currently, I live in a so-so apartment. It's major disadvantage is that it's a little smaller than I want, and not really the greatest shape. The major advantages is that compared to my income, it's cheap, and it has off-street parking. This means that I've been saving up a good deal of money for the past few years, and not having to worry about where to park.

Now, I'm starting to be more serious about buying a place. However, every once in a while, I see a picture online that make me second guess this decision. Generally, it's something like this:

I mean, it's like being in some sort of halloween refugee camp. What were they thinking?

Army Culture for Dummies, Pt 1

2006-12-04T18:57:00.000-08:00

Let's see if I can use HTML in Blogger entries to build this table:

Title	Abbr	Command Group	Group Size	Notes
2nd Lieutenant	2LT	???	???	None
1st Lieutenant	1LT	Platoon	30-40	None
Captain	CPT	???	???	???
Major	MAJ	Company	100-200	First level of UCMJ "Command"
Lieutenant Colonel	LTC	Battalion	300-1,000
Colonel	COL	Brigade	3,000-5,000
Brigadier General	BG	???		"One Star," Generally deputy to a MG
Major General	MG	Division	10,000-15,000	"Two Star"
Lieutenant General	LTG	Corps	20,000-45,000	"Three Star"
General	GEN			Commands all troops within a geographic area

I'm starting a new project. I'm going to try to blog a little bit about my attempts to wrap my head around military culture. The recommendation I got was to read a few modern books on military operations (that would be code for Iraq), and the two in my Amazon.com shopping cart now are:

In the Company of Soldiers
Fiasco (Unfortunately, not in paperback yet...)

More as I learn it.

V4 vs V5

2006-10-12T17:37:00.000-07:00

It seems like there has been a fair amount of discussion about the Dassault V4 and V5 suites recently. (e.g. here, here, and (sort of) here) But no one really seems to explain what the difference is, and why it matters so much. Here's my attempt, as I understand it.

The Dassault V4 suite is primarily geared to producing drawings of what will eventually be built. Yeah, they are often in three dimensions, but it's still essentially drawings. In contrast, the V5 suite is geared towards producing models of what you are building. Everything is geometry that can be used in various ways, for instance, for simulation, for manufactoring producability, etc. If Germany was in V4 and France was in V5 in a recent problem, I'm actually surprised it's only as "small" as it is. Imagine one group bringing a bunch of drawings and sketches to a meeting, and the other group bringing a bunch of models and mock-ups in three dimensions. It's not at all clear that the critical integrations ("Does your wire harness (drawing) fit around my body rib (model)" for instance) can even be done.

There's a little more about the Dassault suite that I don't think I can really talk about, in terms of making the integration a little harder. From my perspective, it seems like Boeing has an edge over Airbus, in terms of proprietary software that helps with the integration challenge.

Word(s) of the Month

2006-10-01T21:59:00.000-07:00

Vel•fea•ture (noun (adj?)) A description of a feature that is implemented well enough to be checked off of a comparison matrix for a give set of products, but not so well as to actually engender utility when used. Usage: "E-mail notifucation [sic] is just another Velfeature.

Entomology, From "Velocity" [Intercim], a private MES software suite from the midwest and "feature," an attribute or function that one of 3 groups believes is absolutely essential.

Vel•con•cept (noun) A description of a velfeature that inspires, in the mind of the supplier, one thing, and in the mind of the customer, something entirely different, using (seemingly) the same set of terms and common ground. The Velconcept is best described in the Parable of the 4 Year Old.

A small child is being dropped off at pre-school. He is a good kid, and as he leaves, turns to his parent(s), smiles, and asks what they want him to draw for them. Both parents agree on the sublime pachyderm, the gentle, herbivore monster of asia and africa, but digress, "or whatever you like."

Later, after a day filled with smiling thoughts of their little kid, they pick him up from pre-school. He bounds out the door with some paper. It's grey, with some flashes of color. The parents love him, but he is not yet an artistic genuis. [His genius will be much later, descibing a general transformation such that P = NP, but that's a different parable.] He proudly shows them his drawing, and asks "Guess waht it is?"

The parents stare for a second, in part at the sheer joy and pride of the child in his acomplishments. "It's an elephant, right?"

"No, it's a rocket. Isn't that awesome?"

The Velconcept in the story is subtle. it's not the elephant or the space rocket. It's request to draw something. One party said what they wanted, a pachyderm. The other party made it into a space-going vessel. This is a velconcept -- the parents got a drawing, but it wasn't quite what they expected. And the look on the vendor's face when they tell you how amazing it is is priceless.

Again, entomology is from "Velocity" [Intercim], a private MES software suite from the midwest and "concept," an idea or an inkling of a feature set that would rock every users world.

Velocity is good stuff. They're just young. (Rulesets! Ha! In my day, we just published a Java API, and then in the configuration file, had the system dynamically load the class. Good times.) I'll rant about rulesets later.

The College Application Theory of the Life Partner Search

2006-09-17T18:59:00.000-07:00

This is only distantly related to the Albert Speer theory of Boyfriends (aka "How much work will he need in 20 years?")

In high school, my college counselor divided up our college choices into three piles, "Sure Bets," "50/50," and "Long Shots." I think in terms of searching for a life partner, it's about the same -- there are some people out there that are (for what ever reason), long shots (for instance, Anderson Cooper. Not to be confused with Cooper Anderson). Then, there are people that are sure bets (for whatever reason, but mainly because you know they have already expressed an interest in you. Or they are gold-diggers. Or you fit into their ideal type.) But most of the world fits into the 50/50 category. You're more or less attractive, smart, funny, well-hung, etc. SO are they. So then it just turns into a game of the right place, right time, and so forth.

Now, I have to go to the gym to ensure that I stay in the 50/50 category.

"These things I do, just to make myself more attractive to you. Have I failed?"

Country and/or Western Bands named after environmentally unfriendly practices

2006-08-22T08:47:00.000-07:00

"Jose Bunion and the Pumice Pickers"
"Dale Lawn and the Meadow Stompers"
"Misty Rimes and her all-star Fog Burners"

Spam Subjects

2006-08-14T07:54:00.000-07:00

I've been long fascinated by spam subject lines (I'll come back and put in photographic references to Miss Information V, the Queen of Spam) I got one that requires commentary the other day:

"Swab Mammal"

So, the question I have: How many of these die to make a box of Q-Tips?

Cameraphone Uses

2006-08-01T10:41:00.000-07:00

I got a camera phone a few months ago, and in general, have been pretty disappointed with the quality. Over the weekend, I was at circuit party, and started to take a few pictures with it. (I decided not to take the big camera, since I am already geekier than both the median and average circuit boy and didn't want anything to make me look even worse.)

As it turns out, I think the camera works really well for the dance floor. Something about the so-so optics, less than impressive image processing, and general luck-of-the-draw in the shutter lag makes it great for that kind of environment. The Flickr set is here, but here is one:

Needless to say, I'm a little embarassed that I was at a circuit party to begin with, but hey, sometimes you have to do those kinds of things. At least there were a few bears at this one party:

Teleconferences at Home

2006-07-05T07:33:00.000-07:00

I've found a practical use for my nipple ring while in a teleconference at home. It's the right place to clip the microphone for my cell phone headset.

Trade-offs and Options

2006-06-28T07:44:00.000-07:00

Work has been stressful. Very stressful. And right now, I don't know how to manage it over the short term.

Unlike many people, I have a great marker for my stress level, and I get it checked every three months. The magic number at the start of this grand project was 660. Now it's 393. That's not good. I have three more weeks of this, and I know it's going to cost me another 20-40. But I don't know what other options I have at this point.

Morally Acceptable Business Plans, II

2006-06-26T14:50:00.000-07:00

It's been warm and sunny here in Seattle recently, which means that I have to start using sunscreen. Being close-cropped hair-wise these days, this means that not only do I have to put sunscreen on my ears, face and neck, but also on the top of my head. One of the things you quickly realize is that sunscreen is really not the greatest thing to put in your hair. It doesn't do much for hair.

My idea is this: something along the lines of a leave-in conditioner and sunscreen combination. Something I can slather on my scalp and moisturize, volumize (I need all the help I can get), and protect against the sun's deadly rays. I realize I seem completely sunscreen obsessed from this blog (given that I have two posts on it already), but really, I'm not.

"Code" in the business world

2006-06-11T11:35:00.000-07:00

I'm struck by the extent to which IT managers do not understand the underlying technology that they are managing. The question is whether that matters or not. The premise of management is that it doesn't. However, Lessig makes an argument in "Code" that (on some levels) details do matter.

Missing CHI

2006-04-24T17:55:00.000-07:00

I'm missing CHI right now. It's the first CHI I've missed in seven years, and I'm even a co-chair of this year's conference. All that being said, I'm not sure I am missing it. Right now, I'm so overwhelmed by work that I can barely think.

Morally Bankrupt Business Plans, Part VI

2006-03-30T11:34:00.000-08:00

High-Tensile Strength Turkey Breast.

Work with me here a second. In deli lines, the turkey breast is always the weakest link. It's simply not very strong, and in the attack of the metal tongs to build your sandwich, it cannot hold up. So, we design a stronger turkey breast. Then when our customers put it out on the deli line, their customers have the pleasure of a large, unbroken slice of delicious luncheon meat on their sandwiches.

I'm sort of thinking of carbon-fiber re-enforcement, but that may be difficult.

Obsolete Electronic Gadgets

2006-02-22T16:34:00.000-08:00

I got a new toy on Monday. On Tuesday, this happened. I think that gave me roughly 12 hours of being slightly ahead of the curve. Admittedly, given the round of late-January/early-February price cuts, I could have predicted something like this happening. It doesn't look like it is a serious upgrade however -- no increase in pixel count, or even a new image processing engine.

Not that I have had time to get out with this beast and do any serious picture taking with it, other than the obligatory cat picture as my first shot.

My first(*) Swim Meet

2006-02-20T13:49:00.000-08:00

I did my first swim meet this weekend. It was a somewhat odd meet for #1, in that it was short-course meters. (I suppose long-course yards would have been even odder) I did three events: 200 free mixed relay, where I was the leader, 50 fly, and 100IM. I was disqualified in the 100IM, because my back to breast turn was illegal; I turned onto my stomach before touching the wall. That's wrong in the IM. (Under limited circumstances, it's perfectly legal in plain back.) Something to work on for the next meet.

---
*: Actually, I was in a swim meet in 1996. However, I can't remember if it was a sanctioned meet or not, so I claim it doesn't count. I do remember I did a 100m breast stroke, back when I thought I still liked breaststroke.

Worst-Case Scenario, Part II

2006-02-15T17:12:00.000-08:00

Buyer Furnished Equipment Red Label Loadable Software Parts.

I know *exactly* where on the airplane I could find them. And, what's worse, is it almost sounds plausible to me that it could happen. But the latest is that there are only two things that are BFE on this program, and neither of them (so far) involve software.

Johnnie Walker and Aviation Electronics

2006-02-14T16:13:00.000-08:00

In Johnnie Walker's world, there are four labels: Black, Red, Gold, and Blue. This has a direct (albeit reversed) relationship to the world of aviation electronics, where there are three labels: Blue, Red, and Black. Blue label is Johnnie's oldest and most mature whiskey. Blue Label is aviation electronic's youngest, and most immature product. For both Johnny and electronics, red label is a nice middle ground -- old enough to drink, mature enough to actually take up in the air and put your life in it's hands. Finally, there's black label. In Johnny's world, it's the cheap one. In my world, it's the only thing I can deliver to paying customers.

Unfortunately, the program I'm working on right now doesn't have blue label products. It would be a good excuse to go out and buy a bottle of it.

Morally Bankrupt Business Plans, Part V

2005-08-15T08:18:00.000-07:00

Seven (or so) words for you:

Sour Cream and Onion Scented Sun Screen

It will make at least a $1.50, I tell you.

Morally Acceptable Business Plans, I

2005-07-12T12:46:00.000-07:00

One of the problems of the Seattle area is that traffic is often unpredictable. Between things like Mariners Games, construction, and mere rain (surprising, but true), it's unpredictable how long it will take to get somewhere. For instance, last night, it took me 15 minutes to get from work to the swimming pool. Another day, it took me 45 minutes. Three times variability in travel time, although those two times are basically the extremes.

Washington State provides some support for us, including a map, and travel times. This is my morally acceptable business plan back-bone. You register at a web site for where you are, where you want to be, and when you need to there. Then, you get a SMS, e-mail, whatever when you need to leave in order to get there on time.

Working Around Software

2005-05-24T15:18:00.000-07:00

For the project I am currently working on, there is a large document that defines what software is allowed to be used for what tasks. (It also defines what the other companies working on sub-parts of the project must use, what they can use, and what they can pick independently of the main project.) There are certain programs that have been specifically banned from that list. In many cases, there are good reasons to keep certain kinds of software off the list; the inability to put the documents created by the software into a revision control system, inability to maintain appropriate security infrastructure, or simply cost of the software.

What is interesting though, is that there is a relatively simple way to get around this restriction. There are already a fair number of home-grown applications on the list, some of them built on top of existing software. This provides the way to get around the restrictions. The underlying application that is wanted (e.g. MS Access) is packaged into a larger application with a new name (e.g. "OPTIK"). There's an interesting blurring here between an application, customization, and the documents produced. In many ways, it reminds me of legacy systems, where the dividing line between the application and the data was often fuzzy.

I'm interested if similar sitations happen in other tightly controlled environments. I know Zuboff talked about "deviant" use of existing technologies, but this isn't so much deviant use as actually introducing banned technologies in an effort to get the job done. I'm trying to figure out appropriate places to look for this kind of behavior. My current best guess is medical environments may provide similar examples of this kind of technology usage.

Morally Bankrupt Business Plans, Part IV

2005-05-15T16:35:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure this is morally bankrupt. It might be illegal, but I doubt it. The real question is whether it would work. There has been much speculation that we're in a housing bubble right now. I tend to agree that we are, and am betting a certain amount of money on it.

The business plan is to see if a small group of dedicated people can pop the bubble. What's needed is a group of dedicated home-buyers. I am guessing that there are several types of home-buyers, e.g. "single unmarried," "growing family," "empty nesters," and so forth. I'm going to need about 4 people from each group, all of which are in a single geographic market. These people will need to be serious about buying a home. They will need to be pre-qualified for mortgages, etc. These people will be motivated to buy, but not overly so.

Then they go home shopping. They go to open houses, look at homes, talk to agents, etc. What's important is what happens when they make an offer. The offer will always be ten to twenty percent *less* than the asking price, with some sort of statement about there being a bubble, and this is a much more serious price.

Is this legal? Definitely the group of buyers are colluding for a lower price. But the question is, in a large enough city (say, Seattle), with a fairly liquid housing market, 15-20 people shouldn't be enough to influence the market. It might be a clearer case of collusion if the buyers were all hitting the same property, but they are not. And it's still a free country. The sellers are free to reject any offer.

In a skittish market though, a group like this could wreak havoc. I hope.

Feeling Young Again

2005-04-08T16:14:00.000-07:00

At a dinner with some Microsoft People where I was once again reminded that my company is just wildly different from most of the CHI community. Microsoft is about 30 years old. Give or take a year. My cubicle mate has been here for 33 years. On some level, this is key organizational strength. The question is how can this be leveraged? Especially since there is a clear demographic "hump" moving through the company, one that embodies a great deal of the knowledge of how things are done.

I had been batting around doing some exploration about organizational tenure and social networks. I think I now have a reasonable number of people from various groups within the company, and a reasonable idea about how to gather data.

No clue yet how to analyze the data, but that's nothing new.

The Albert Speer Theory of Boyfriends

2005-02-11T08:30:00.000-08:00

I've been looking at men recently with an eye towards what I would call "The Albert Speer Theory of Boyfriends." (ASTB, for short) The art-history people have probably already figured out what I am talking about, but for every one else, a brief digression. Albert Speer (and, yes, I know, it is a Wikipedia entry) was the house architect for the Third Reich. He came up with the concept of the "Ruin Value" of architecture: buildings should be designed in such a way as to leave monumental ruins. The Greeks and Romans had this down pat, viz. the Parthenon and the Pantheon.

The ASTB basically says that when selecting boyfriends, one should look at what they look like today, but also take into account what they will look like 20 years later. Will the boyfriend (by then, more likely husband) still quicken your pulse?

Not that I have any good candidates here. But just something I've been thinking about recently.

Morally Bankrupt Business Plans, Part III (a)

2005-02-11T08:21:00.000-08:00

There is a further elaboration to Calendar Spam. It's a subtle thing, but probably one worth pursuing. In Outlook, accepting a meeting notice generates a response to the sender of the meeting notice. Legally, that's probably good enough to be a contract -- there is verification that you accepted the terms of the e-mail. Which means that I have a second revenue stream; one that is probably even more profitable than people going to high-pressure time-share sales pitches.

How do I monetize this? Very easily. Buried in the fine print of the original sales solicitation is a bit of fine print that says that if you accept, but cancel less than one week before the event, you are liable for a $150 late cancellation penalty. When we send a reminder 6 days before the event, people call to cancel. And we hit them with $150 charge. If you complain enough, I may waive the charge. But only after I take you to small-claims court. In a different locale than where you live.

I never said I sleep well.

Morally Bankrupt Business Plans, Part III

2005-01-19T15:15:00.000-08:00

Two words: Calendar Spam.

(and yes, I know I've not yet posted "Morally Bankrupt Business Plans, Part I" yet) I'm surprised an enterprising person hasn't started sending out meeting notifications for people's online calendars that are essentially advertisements.

For instance, those "free vacations" (after you sit through a three hour hard-sell for time shares in Myrtle Beach, SC). My concept is that it comes from a friend ("Patrick" or "James"), with a subject line of "Vacation Plans?" or something similar. We can do a bit of ethnography to figure out the best subject lines. Ethnography may not even be required. Since our marginal cost per advertisement is zero, we can use Jakob Nielsen's Google Ad Words rapid prototyping approach. The body of the ad would be something appropriate for selling time-shares. We would need to be able to geographically target people, but how hard can that be these days?

Just give me 1% of your profits.

Morally Bankrupt Business Plans, Part II

2005-01-10T10:42:00.000-08:00

My morally bankrupt business plan of the day is that the interface for del.icio.us (as it now stands) is an ideal way to start viral advertising for web sites. This is prompted by the observation (no data yet, but that hasn't stopped me before) that people use del.icio.us as a way to find new web sites (I certainly do). And that the number of people who have bookmarked a site is an indicator of popularity.

All that you need to do is to get a group of about 50 people together, and have them over the course of a day all bookmark the same web site into del.icio.us. The web site always stays on the front page, and people click through on it. We take as an assumption that only the coolest of the cool (I'll fill in other names later) use del.icio.us, and therefore, we want trend leaders to see the web site we're (they?) are advertising.

Here's the interesting question / follow-on: How does a community like del.icio.us fix the problem? As it currently stands, I don't think there is a good fix for it. And I'm not sure if a community like Metafilter would be any better at fixing it either. I have some thoughts about how it may be possible to fix, but that's probably another post.

In the mean time, it shouldn't be too hard for someone to monetize this.

Morally Bankrupt Business Plans, Part I

2004-12-09T10:11:00.000-08:00

For a while now, I have been coming up with morally bankrupt business plans. Some of them are posted on my old web site, but since the life span of that site is unclear, I thought I would move them over to here. And post a few that I've come up with since then.

The plan for the day is: Free Cell Phones for The Masses.

Very simple. You give out cell phones. No cost for the phone. No cost for calling during certain hours. (say limited nights and weekends, or something like that.) Cell phones aren't too fancy, but who cares. They are free.

How do we make money? Same way we always make money in morally bankrupt business plans. Marketing! In exchange for these free cell phones, everything is on the table. We can listen in on your conversations, we can track where you are, we can call you with advertisements, we can sell your calling patterns to the FBI, and so forth. With location-enabled cell phones, we can roughly tell where people are. We can easily sell lists of people who walked into a "Hot Topic" three times in the last week. (Or, as a community service, we can also turn those lists over to either the local duly constituted fashion police and/or suicide hotline.)

The data aggregation is the really big thing here, I think. We'll get SMS -- that's easy text mining. Voice recognition is a little harder. Speech recogition is pretty bad right now, but I don't think that really matters. When you have thousands of hours of conversations, accuracy isn't the most critical thing. What we want is the high points. We'll have a data set that will rival the NSA's. (and possibly technology as well.)

Most Likely to Adopt: Google.

(large amounts written after the publication "date," one of the more troubling features of blogger.)

Distribution Lists, Part II

2004-12-03T11:00:00.000-08:00

I've been put on a new project, which is taking a lot of my time. And it's the end of the year, which means I have training to take (6 classes put on my roster in the past 18 hours alone), and performance evaluations to think about ("I was able to not get totally lost in my first 4 months of work here. I also managed to figure out that we make really big things that fly.")

This means that the distribution (list serv) stuff I talked about earlier has been put on a back burner. I'm thinking about it, but that's about as far as I get. I promise there will be pretty pictures before the year is out. I was at a big-big meeting about one of the projects, and the project lead mentioned that there were about 4,000 company people working on the project, then about 1,500 people from other companies working on it. However, in looking at the distribution lists covering the project, there are about 6,500 people on them. Which begs the question, who are the extra 1,000 people? What are they doing?

My sense is that they are support people -- office assistants, schedulers (schedulers will no doubt be the subject of a future post. They're important, but I still can't figure out why), plus everyone who does tools & process support. Or, it could also just be people in other parts of the organization that aren't directly part of this project (supplier & customer management, shared services, and possibly the factory.) I'd probably need to spend some time running the DL list people against the company directory to figure out where people "live" within the organization. Which is not as easy at it may sound. People here have two homes, their organizational home and their accounting home. You may live one place, but the money for you comes from another.

Deep down, I know I'm going to have to learning accounting one of these days.

Gathering Exchange Distribution Lists Programmatically

2004-11-19T14:43:00.000-08:00

Continuing in the vein of the previous post, I'm now moving on to distribution lists. Distribution Lists in MS Exchange are sort of like list-servs, but different. As far as I can tell, when you send to a DL, it appears to come from you, and there is no (correct me if I am wrong) clear indication that it was "amplified" through the DL. There are two types of DLs in Exchange, server-hosted and local. (I'm not sure if I am using Microsoft terminology here, but you will get the general idea.) Server-hosted DLs are stored on the server, with an "owner(s)" who can add and delete people, and require admin support to create. In addition, anyone on the Exchange server cluster can use the DL to send messages. On the other hand, local DLs are stored in the user's address book, and are not shared among all users.

That being said, how might one get the membership of a distribution list programmatically? (and, the better question, once it's gotten, what would you do with it?) Once more, Windows Scripting and Outlook come to the rescue:


Sub scanDL (dlName)

   'First, create / get a reference to Outlook.

   Set olApp = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")



   'I need to get a namespace in Outlook. "MAPI" is the only 

   'supported namespace.

   Set olNS = olApp.GetNamespace("MAPI")



   'I create and try to resolve the user. The user.Resolve call is what

   'fires off the Outlook Security stuff



   Set user = olNS.CreateRecipient(dlName)

   user.Resolve



   If Not user.resolved Then

      WScript.Echo "# Didn't Resolve " & dlName

      Exit Sub

   End If



   Set olMemberList = user.AddressEntry.Members



   WScript.StdOut.Write dlName & "|"

   WScript.StdOut.Write olMemberList.Count & "|"



   For i = 1 To olMemberList.Count()

      WScript.StdOut.Write olMemberList(i).Name & "|"

   Next



   WScript.Echo



End Sub

Call it like scanDL "DL Mark List" and it will output the name of the DL, the number of members, and then each member name. DLs can have DLs as members; the task of expansion is left as an exercise to the reader.

There are a few caveats about using this code in a real world setting. First, this code will fail if the name of the DL is a strict substring of the name of another DL. For instance, if I have DL called "DL-Fuselage" and one called "DL-Fuselage Management", the call scanDL "DL-Fuselage" will fail. (In particular, the user.Resolve(dlName) call won't resolve a user, so it will exit through the If not user.resolved Then check) This can be fixed by prefixing the short DL name with an "=" (equals). This tells Outlook (or Exchange) to do an exact match, rather than a "best-effort" match. So, to get the members of the "DL-Fuselage" list, scanDL "=DL-Fuselage" will do the trick.

The next caveat(s) is that DL names are not as regular as you might hope. In my organization, there are a few DLs that have trailing spaces in their names (e.g., "DL-Fuselage Engineers ") For this situation, I don't use the leading "=" on the DL name, and user.Resolve(dlName) seems to work. I'm not sure what one can do in the situation where there is a trailing space and a sub-string. As well, there are sometimes DLs with characters that look like spaces, but aren't. I'm not sure what they are, but I ended up having to cut-and-paste them from an Outlook "To:" field to get the right characters.

Next entry: what one would actually do with this data...

Gathering Exchange Appointments Programatically

2004-11-15T09:06:00.000-08:00

I'm starting to look at one more set of social network data: meeting invitations. One of the nice things about my organization is that there is a culture of open calendars. Generally speaking, calendars are not private unless there is a compelling reason. This is at the lower levels of the organization. I think this habit may be very different among the top executives. (And, just checking, it is -- there is nothing on the CEO's calendar, nor on the program manager's calendar)

In any case, the problem quickly became finding a way to programatically grab appointment information from Exchange. Luckily, I was at a gathering of a bunch of collaborative computing types, and especially, MSR types. So I asked, figuring this would be a no-brainer. As it turns out, it's a little harder than I expected. I was first cautioned by Gina to avoid MAPI ("with a ten foot pole"), and pushed towards WebDAV. THe only problem with WebDAV is that it appears that the local install of Exchange doesn't support WebDAV. Or I'm not smart enough to implement a client to be able to do it properly. Or I can't figure out what my Domain\Username is formally. (Mark.j.handel? hh292c? hh292ca?) Collaboration Data Objects (CDOs) don't work, since they have to run on the Exchange server. Which brings me back to MAPI. Of course, the Perl MAPI module doesn't do what I want it to do (it sends e-mail, and that's about it.)

Then, a sudden insight. You can use Visual Basic for Applications to script Outlook. (As the many Outlook viruses have shown.) In fact, it's pretty easy. Here's the code to do it:


    Set olApp = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")

    Set olNS = olApp.GetNamespace("MAPI")



    Set user = olNS.CreateRecipient("Handel, Mark J")

    user.Resolve

    Set fol = olNS.GetSharedDefaultFolder(user, 9)

    Set itms = fol.Items



    For i = 1 To itms.Count()

       WScript.StdOut.write itms(i).Start & "|" & _

		    itms(i).End & "|" & _

		    itms(i).Subject & "|"



       Set recips = itms(i).Recipients

       For j = 1 to recips.Count()

          WScript.StdOut.write recips(j).Name & ";" & _

			       recips(j).Type & "|"

       next 

       

       WScript.Echo

    Next

(Of course, this code does not include error checking, nor does it dump the full range of appointment information available. But it's good enough for a short blog entry. If you want the full code, as well as "filters" to get it into neato or dot format, drop me an e-mail.)

Worst-Case Scenario

2004-10-25T13:53:00.000-07:00

Having just voted, I was thinking about what the worst-case scenario would be in the up-coming election. My current one is this: Kerry clearly wins the popular vote. By at least a million votes. Bush clearly wins the electoral college. This would deny Bush any sort of mandate (not that he would be likely to care, as long as he is elected), and make the majority of the US voters feel essentially dis-enfranchised. That's my current worst-case, in that it's a situation where the system works exactly as described in the constitution, but gives an outcome that is sub-optimal.

I think the repeat of a Florida-like event would be, oddly, a better outcome, insofar as that reasonable people could say that the race was close, and for whatever reasons, the courts decided it. My scenario is worse because there is no grey involved: Kerry is the popular winner, Bush is the electorial winner.

What are other people's worst-case scenarios?

Post-Election task for MoveOn.org?

2004-09-30T11:12:00.000-07:00

I watched Fog of War last night. It was, of course, hard to watch this without thinking of Iraq.

I have two thoughts after watching it, neither too happy. The first one looks at the task of re-building a country after a war (or, maintaining stability.) Two models frequently held up as examples are post-WWII Japan and Germany. But the obsveration here is that both countries a) surrendered in a legal / diplomatic sense (I don't believe that Iraq surrendered as ceased to be an on-going entity), and b) lost significant population. For instance, in the case of Germany, it went into the war with a little under 80 million people (not to mention nearly 2 million more women), and lost over 10% of the population, ending up with a population of about 65 million. (I can't immediately find similar data for Japan, but I believe it to be substantially similar). Ten percent is a huge drop in population. I wonder to what extent the simple fact of being under-manned made it easier to establish control over the countries, and rebuild them in "our" image.

The next thought is that it's time to start seriously thinking about what the Iraq War (II) memorial is going to look like. Especially if W gets re-elected, it would be a useful task for one of the 527 groups to hold a preliminary contest for memorials. One could imagine a Maya Lin-like design where a central part of the the work (for several years) would be a daily addition of new names as they were announced. I doubt it would be possible to site it anywhere near the eventual "official" memorial, but I think it would still be worth at least conceptualizing. I don't think it would be too expensive (especially compared to a 30-second spot in prime time), and there would be lots of exhibition possibilities for the finalists.

In terms of FoW, I can't tell what to think of it. McNamara is clearly in a bid to try to clear his name (or conscience, or both), but he has some useful insight. I also realize how painfully unaware I am of the history of the Vietnam conflict (beyond the movie history I glean from things like "Apcolypse Now," and "The Quiet American"). In terms of a documentary, it was a fine piece of film-making, and once that I found more to my taste than the various Michael Moore expeditions I've seen. Of course, in full disclosure, I've not yet seen F9/11.

Social Networks in the Workplace

2004-09-28T13:20:00.000-07:00

In my current project, I keep on coming back to social networks as a good place to do research. Of course, the power of social networks is completely part of today's z e i t g e i s t, so in that way, I'm not being too original.

But my current set of questions revolves around social networks in the workplace. Are they useful? And if they are useful (it's not clear to me that social network analysis has power in the workplace beyond 'gee whiz' type applications), how should networks be measured and then used and/or maintained? I've been playing around with an interesting SN dataset here at work, but it's unclear that it's the 'right' data set. (I've also come up with about three possible SN data sets here, depending on how much time and effort I want to expend, and how deeply into people's lives I want to probe)

SN seems to have two remarkable weaknesses right now: multiple relationships and temporal data. All of the social network data I have identified has temporal aspects to it, and it's not clear how to handle time. (Of course, I don't think people have a good sense about how contacts decay over time which makes this analysis harder. I know there are some friends I can drift out of contact with for months at a time, and then re-build the connection later.)

The multiple relationships are also tricky; most analysis works with a link and a link-strength, not multiple links. Of course, one can create weightings of different relationships to come up with a real-valued weight, but I think that misses some of the richness and complexity of what real social networks are about. "Tools" like friendster and Orkut have only links and no weights (although I believe Orkut now has weights). There is also this related question that some of these resources are automatically gathered from data sources. Are the relationships constructed from these interactions "real"? Are they important? I am hedging here a bit, because I don't want to talk about the particular data sources that I am using here; some of them are considered proprietary data. But there is an argument that the relationships they embody aren't genuine social relationships. (They are genuine *business* relationships; that is perfectly clear from the data, but what of it?)

Not that anyone reads this (yet), but I'd be interested in thoughts.

getting on the blogwagon

2004-09-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

If the New York Times features it in the magazine section, it must be so tragically unhip as to be ready to make a come back. So, I'm starting a blog. Of course, all the good names and URLs had already been taken (like "wonkette," "miswritings," "gawker," or "apophenia").

I note that my blog ID in the URL bar is 8,496,418. Which suggests that there are over 8 million blogs on blogger. (or they pick a random number, which really doesn't help me) I am deeply disappointed that I don't have the option to pick a currently mood ("amused," of course) or what I am listening too ("aqua," if you must know. My taste in music has gone down hill recently.)

MJH