Month: March 2009

I stood in the gleaming mirrored palace that was an eyeglasses store at the mall. Row upon row upon row of eyewear stared at me from the walls. Though anything beyond a foot or two was blurry; the lenses I was wearing now were not up to the task of correcting my vision.

Which is partly why I was here.

The other part involved my somehow hurting my right eye. Parts of my right eye that were normally white were now angry pink. Dr. Bruce said it was simply a burst blood vessel. Dr. Bruce said it wasn’t serious, and there was no sign of infection. Dr. Bruce had told me to stop wearing contacts for 7 days, to put medicinal eye drops containing antibiotic and steroids in my eye four times a day, and to come back and see him in a week.

Without contacts, wearing a prescription that didn’t function well… not a good way to go. Time to update my glasses.

The short, redheaded sales girl, Lisa, had pulled out several frames for me to try on. Thicker frames than the wire-frame I was currently wearing, per my request. But they were all… brown. “Can I see some in black?” I asked.

“Well… OK. I normally encourage brown,” she said. “Black is often too harsh.”

“Perhaps, but black goes with everything” I said. Lisa left me alone for a bit while I tried a few more pairs on.

I texted Lindsey to get her opinion: black or brown? She replied “You have to wear them, so go with your gut. That said, black can sometimes be pretty harsh…”

That was two votes to my one, and almost word-for-word. I still liked black, though. I settled on a pair that looked, with my blurred vision, to be OK. “I like these…” I noticed the “Two frames for the price of one!” sign. “For this deal,” I pointed at the sign, “do the frames have to be the same?”

“No, not at all!”

“Then I’ll get these,” and held out the black frames, “and these,” and pointed to the brown frames.

Problem solved. Easy-peasy.

A bunch of stuff too short for their own post.

• Mississippi Pizza, in North Portland, is pretty awesome, though a bit crowded early on a Saturday night. One of the cashiers was Jacob, who used to work at Taco del Mar. Also, they had gluten-free pizza and beer; my friend liked the pizza crust, but the guy sitting next to us who had some kind of foot scar said the beer was just so-so. Also, belly dancers!
• Why is it that the financial CEOs whose bad management have led this country (and the world) to economic disaster can have a nice sit-down and photo-op with President Obama, but the CEO of General Motors is forced to step down by that same White House? What’s the difference here?
  Update – 12:25pm: OK, I stand corrected. Via Jed @ dKos, a pair of articles from September 2008 showing that the head of AIG, and the heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, both stepped down upon receiving taxpayer assistance.
• The Da Vinci exhibit at OMSI is pretty interesting and chock-full of details about the genius’ life and work. I though the bait-and-switch of presenting a Da Vinci-esque wooden bicycle, which turns out upon close reading of the included materials seems to be a hoax, was more funny than annoying.
• Ran my fastest 4 miles of the year on Sunday morning. Which isn’t all that fast, but, y’know… still. 7 miles in 1:15:37 for an average 10:48 pace. Stopped at least twice for water from the fountain, and at least once for traffic, and a couple of walking breaks.

I thought I had more than that. I’ll post more later if I think of it. Happy Monday!

Republican Co-worker (RCW): Well, ol’ [High-Level Manager] is not too happy about [some dumb thing RCW thinks is important].

Libertarian Co-worker (LCW): Really?

RCW: Sure! There’s going to be payback, for sure!

LCW: You’re saying that [HLM] is angry? Well that can’t be true. I ran into him in the elevator today and he seemed like he was in a good mood.

LCW sounded sincere and not sarcastic when he failed to make the connection between the political actions of HLM and HLM’s mood.

I did not think someone could be so naive that they assumed there had to be a connection between a) being polite while being observed in a public space by one’s employees, and b) whether or not that person was going to seek a consequence for a political decision that had been made.

It’s almost… childlike. Is that a lack of awareness or of empathy?

A couple of days ago, Steven Lloyd Wilson over at the snarky entertainment site Pajiba sat down to watch some classic Star Trek (did I really need to link that? Really? Fine). Y’know, classic Star Trek, the kind with cheesy sets filmed in the late 1960s, young Kirk and Spock and McCoy, where all the women wore go-go boots and mini-skirts and most of the guys wore too much eyeliner and girdles under their primary-colored pajamas.

Man, I loved that show when I was younger. I hate to get all “get off my lawn” on you, but I remember back in the days before there were seventeen different Star Trek movies and a new TV series every couple of years. I remember when all we had was just three seasons (and an animated series!) of Star Trek to obsess over. I remember having fanzines full of deep philosophical discussion about every little nuance of every single one of the 79 filmed episodes, which were collected into books, which is where I read them because I never went to one of those fancy Star Trek Conventions I kept reading about.

Star Trek in the 1970s was relegated to weekday afternoon showings on our local independent station, Monday through Friday, with an extra showing on the weekend. Those episodes were cut down, edited from the original airing, to make room for lots of commercials. I’d have to fight for a chance to watch it because we had one TV for the four people in my house (mom, dad, my sister, me), and we had no way to record it and save it for later. Of course, in Portland we only had five channels which meant either a lot of competition or no competition, depending on what the other stations had to offer.

Because of Wilson’s Pajiba article, I wanted to sit down and watch some Star Trek. I had not seen an episode in years. So Kevin and I planned an evening. Kevin mentioned that he had never seen the ending to the episode where an alien babe steals Spock’s brain, which I knew, from all those books, was unanimously known as the single worst episode of classic Star Trek.

And so we did. And it was so very bad. The Enterprise crew encounters an alien ship with “advanced ion drives”, and while they are admiring it, a hot brunette in go-go boots and a miniskirt shows up on the bridge, puts everyone to sleep, and fondles Spock’s head. When they wake up (after the commercial break), Spock is down in Sickbay (how’d he get down there so fast?) on Dr. McCoy’s operating table. And he’s missing his brain but still alive, which is chalked up to his “Vulcan physique”… um… somehow. McCoy doesn’t really know, but he does know that if Kirk can’t find the brain, Spock will die in twenty-four hours. Everyone just takes that as a given, like it’s common knowledge that Vulcans can’t go without their brains for the same period of time that planet Earth spins on its axis and that’s not weird at all.

Oh, the cheese. Kirk and Chekov spend nearly ten minutes trying to guess which of three possible planets in the Sigma Draconis system could be the one that was home to a race with “advanced ion drives” (hint – it’s the one with the off-the-scale energy readings, guys!), and down they beam. They find a planet with giant bearded men on the surface, and the “Givers of Pain and Delight” below. And, oh, my, yes, Kirk has quite the wink-and-nod at the “delights”. Half the time he’s trying to find the women on this Ice Age planet, and the other half of the time he’s badgering the women into giving him back Spock’s brain. Poor Nimoy has to walk around like a zombie with a hot plate on his head (which gives McCoy remote control over his body, you see, because apparently in the 23rd century, people lose their brains all the time and need a doctor to move them around like life-sized meat puppets. I’m sure there are no ethical problems with this technology at all).

Luckily McCoy can take advantage of the advanced alien knowledge of brain surgery that is kept on tapes (yes, tapes) just long enough to get Spock back up and running, leaving just enough time for everyone to poke fun at how boring Spock is once he’s got his brain back.

We only had time for one more episode so I chose “The City on The Edge of Forever”, which was universally acknowledged as the best classic Star Trek episode.

The off-set battles between Harlan Ellison and Gene Roddenberry are the stuff of fan legend and are well-documented so I’ll skip that aspect and focus on the show as filmed. But I have to say, with years between me and the last time I watched this episode… the years have not been kind.

Yes, the story is better-structured and there are fewer logical or plot holes. And Shatner reigns in some of his patented over-acting. And Joan Collins’ English accent seems a bit out of place in what is supposed to be 1930 Brooklyn. Wait, I slipped into the negative points.

Suffice to say, this is still a cheesy science-fiction show from the late 1960s, with all the flaws that that entails: low budget, poor acting, sterile sets. But the idea, the story… what a huge difference.

McCoy gets injected with some kind of super-drug, goes on a paranoid rampage, and beams himself down to a planet with a time machine on the surface. Wait, that’s not the idea yet – it’s the set up. I know, it bends probability to the breaking point. While Kirk and Spock and crew go looking for him, McCoy jumps into the time machine and ends up in Earth’s past, which changes something that eliminates the Federation and gives Uhura her big moment: being scared and looking to manly Kirk for reassurance. I know, I know, but that’s not the big idea yet.

Spock and Kirk jump back into the past to go looking for McCoy, stranding Scotty, Uhura and a couple of redshirts, and end up in Depression-era New York City. After stealing some clothes and beating up a policeman, they break into the basement of a soup kitchen and Kirk promptly falls in love with the proprietress, one Edith Keeler, while Spock gets snarky because he can’t build a 23rd Century computer out of stone knives and bear skins. Hang on, wait… that isn’t the big idea. Yet. They’re trying to find out what McCoy changed. Even though he’s not here (and by “here” I mean “at that moment in time”).

McCoy shows up after Kirk and Spock even though he jumped first (time travel is funny that way) and ends up in Edith Keeler’s basement but somehow never runs in to Kirk and Spock (I know, I know…). Spock finally gets his jury-rigged computer to work long enough to find out that either a) Edith Keeler must die (which Spock repeats a dozen times for the rest of the episode, I swear) or b) she goes on to found a peace movement which allows the Nazis to get the A-Bomb and win World War II. Of course, Kirk has fallen in love with Edith Keeler (who must die! according to Spock), so he’s got a difficult choice to make.

There. That’s the big idea. This pretty brunette with the peaceful lovin’ ideas has to die or the Nazis win and Kirk and Spock’s personal history will have never happened.

De Forrest Kelly gets a couple of great scenes; the one where he fondles a bum’s head and rants about him having the right amount of cranial development to account for the obvious illusion of 1930 Brooklyn is good, and so is his moment of laying in a cot and telling Edith Keeler (who must die!) that he doesn’t believe in her, either.

The writers and director teases the big idea with a little scene where Kirk catches Edith Keeler (who must die!) from falling down the stairs, and Spock scolds him. But the final moment is wrapped up almost too quickly, when McCoy, Spock and Kirk reunite and turn their back on Edith Keeler long enough for her to get fatally killed dead by a runaway car. Kirk remembers that Edith Keeler must die long enough to prevent McCoy (who has just come off a days-long bender on cordrazine so has no idea that Edith Keeler must die!) from saving her life by, I don’t know, running out into the street in front of the killer car?

Man, the look of almost-crying on Kirk’s face as he turns away from Edith Keeler’s now-dead body is so cheesy. Which is OK, because now they’ve played out the big idea.

The Enterprise command crew changes out of their period costumes, jumps back to their own time, and everything gets wrapped up in a neat little bow.

Just like I remembered it. Man, I loved those old Star Treks.

Ever wonder how Google gets all the images for Street View in Google Maps?

With lots of these.

Yes, that’s a small sedan with a roof-mounted four-way camera, a magnetized Google logo on the door. They drive around major cities, updating all the images required for Street View. Here’s the FAQ. I believe

Tracy and I were at Taco del Mar for lunch this afternoon, and I ran outside to snap a quick picture or two when she pointed it out. Luckily it was stopped at an intersection.

Cool! I think it’s cool. You?

I eat a lot of pizza. In the past week, I’ve had gluten-free pizza, free pizza, leftover free pizza, and several slices of Schmizza.

Pizza Schmizza is downtown, just a quick bus ride across the river from my office building. Of course, there are lots and lots of places downtown to eat, but for some reason, when I go downtown, my first choice is Schmizza. Lots of variety, I can get a slice plus a salad for cheap (I need veggies, too), and… well, I’m a regular there. They know me by name and by face. You shouldn’t underestimate the value of recognition.

And there’s a girl there I like to chat with. I’d like to, I mean, except that I rarely get to. She’s tall, she has white-girl dreads, and she dresses kind of granola, but she seems bright, energetic, and positive.

Oh, and she calls me “doll”.

“Thanks, doll, that’ll be right out,” she’ll say after I place my order. “Sign right there, doll,” as she passes me the debit card receipt and a pen. “Anything else, doll?” she’ll ask when she knows that I just ordered my usual Combo #2.

It was cute. I liked it. I didn’t read anything more into it beyond what it was – a friendly verbal tic for a regular customer.

And then I heard her call someone else “doll”. What? That was my nickname!

I looked around the room, all tall windows, green curtains, white marble, and mirrors. “I’ve never been here before,” I said. The light outside was yellow-bright, but faded from moment to moment, a partly-cloudy day outside.

Lindsey and I sat at the bar. Why green curtains, I wondered, if the name of the place was Bluehour?

Our waiter brought our drinks, and apologized in advance for being a bit unfocused. “We’ve been open for 24 hours.” Our tall blond waiter looked worn around the edges and his eyes seemed ready to close at any second.

“Oh, right, the concerts. No problem.” I said, referring to the 24 one-hour concerts next door, in Wieden + Kennedy’s atrium, in honor (dishonor?) of the seventh anniversary of the Iraq War. Lindsey and I had just snuck out of there in search of some food. “Have you been up 24 hours?”

“I was up until four AM, I think, and then I crashed,” he leaned on the bar with both arms, “took a nap, then came back. It’s been… interesting.”

We ordered our food, me a cheese pizza, her a Caesar salad (minus croutons). I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, hours ago, and neither had Lindsey. We sipped our drinks and talked and watched the room and the staff and the customers, and the afternoon hour passed pleasantly.

Except… the food kept not arriving. Our waiter apologized for being so out of it due to lack of sleep that he had forgotten to put our order in. “Your drinks are on me,” he said. A nice gesture, and appreciated, though my friend was only drinking a club soda. What we’d like, though, was our food.

A young man, formally dressed, carrying a violin case, approached the bar and asked us if the open stool was taken. “Why, hello!” Lindsey recognized him. She introduced me to him. “This is Jun Iwasaki, Concertmaster for the Oregon Symphony.”

He, too, looked tired; we asked him if he was playing later, and he said that he had played early that morning. “I had just flown back into town, got a brief nap, then met up with the others to practice. That was at 2.”

Lindsey laughed. “Oh, my!” Jun and Lindsey shared a look; I must have looked confused because she said to me, “I could not have done that. But Jun plays at a far higher level than I have ever could.” Oh. Right. An hour to practice with musicians you’d never met an hour before performing; that does seem difficult to pull off. On reflection I was impressed. Writers get to polish their work as much as we want before we let anyone see it; musicians make it fresh every time they perform live, with all the risks and rewards that entails.

She and Jun and I talked for a bit, until Jun was joined by a woman, and they moved to the far end of the bar where there were two open seats.

And we continued waiting for our food. Two ladies further down were served a fondue and the smell of melted cheese floated our way. A couple received a plate of French fries. “They ordered after we did,” I said. Lindsey just nodded.

Eventually a different waiter apologized for the wait, and explained that the pizza I had ordered had just been put in and would be out soon. I asked that the salad be brought out as soon as it was ready; no need for her to wait longer. The waiter assured us he would do that, and asked if we wanted anything else. We ordered some French fries. “Of course, of course,” he repeated. “And I just want you to know that” he gestured at the empty space in front of us where eventually food would appear “this is on me. I’m very sorry for the delay. It’s just… we’ve been open for 24 hours…”

It didn’t even connect with me then. I accepted our waiter’s (perhaps he was the manager; a waiter would say it was “on the house” or “on us”, but a manager would have more ownership and be inclined to say it was “on me”) apology and offer. But primarily we were hungry.

Lindsey left the bar for a moment and by the time she’d returned our French fries waiting in front of me. I did a Vanna-wave over them, smiling. “Look what showed up! I’m so glad you’re back; I’ve been trying to hold back so that there were some left for you,” I joked. We dug in.

And soon enough her salad (with croutons, which were huge and easily picked off) and my pizza (which was 10″ across and would be a “medium” anywhere else but here was an appetizer) were placed in front of us. Again, the waiter (manager?) asked us if we needed anything else, and said, “Don’t worry about any of this, it’s on me.”

That’s when it hit me. Anything? And we weren’t paying? I turned to Lindsey. “We have an open tab.” I picked up my top-shelf gin and tonic. “I could drink a few more of these… Are you sure there’s nothing else we want?” I said, smiling. “Maybe I should call a friend or two…” I laughed. I think Lindsey did, too.

We ended up leaving a nice tip, after all that. I’m OK with the service there, and I’m sure it was a fluke. Things happen, but when they happen, as long as the staff keeps me informed and makes an effort to put things right, as they did that afternoon, it goes a long way toward restoring my goodwill.

For the past several years, “Cinnamon” by the Long Winters meant one thing.

And for most of those years, I avoided the song, because of that meaning.

Tonight, this evening, the song was chosen by iTunes on shuffle. And I realized that I can finally put that old meaning away, and hear it as if it was new again.

Time to play the whole album and see what I can see.

It’s been a good day.

The team I’m on is in IT but we’re just one small team. Our responsibilities are narrowly defined; we’re responsible for just one small piece of the action. This is a consequence of a combination of a large organization, public sector service, and union contracts.

The goal of the larger organization, IT, is to solve problems, so, in total, we solve problems. However, problems don’t always come nice and neat and narrowly defined. Often they’re messy and complex and they take more than one team to fix… or at least resolve.

Luckily the many separate teams of IT have a tool that was sold to us as a “communications tool”. It’s a database that is supposed to be used to collect customer problems in one virtual place, generates trouble tickets for those problems, and that all of the teams of IT refer to and update and check off as we all complete our parts of the problems that customers have.

But because of the vagaries of customer problems, and the minutia of communication in general, and the fact that no database can be designed to cover every possible interaction of fallible imperfect human beings… sometimes things get lost in the process.

Know what the difference is between a “system” and a “process”? A process takes an input, and generates an output. A system then adds feedback; was that output the right output? How can we make it better? Systems are circular.

IT does really well with processes. Systems, not so much. Or maybe that’s just the IT department I work for.

My team got an email the other day from someone on another IT team, asking about a customer problem that we had shared responsibility for. In the email, the tech asked a simple question: “Can this ticket be closed?”

Simple questions often aren’t. I don’t know; can this ticket be closed? I mean, it’s possible to close the ticket. It’s a simple matter of choosing “closed” and clicking “save”. But I’m sure that’s not what she meant.

The ticket in question is weeks old, and there were no notes in the appropriate fields showing that the customer, or the customer’s boss, had called in to complain that the work in question (it was a request for work to be done, not a crash or problem that needed resolving) had not yet been done. Since the work wasn’t a high priority, and my team is strapped for time and resources, if I had noticed this ticket still in our bucket, I would have been sorely tempted to simply log that the customer seemed happy enough not to complain (covering my ass in case of review) and closing it. But that’s not our process.

In the strictest terms, we could only close a ticket if the work had, in fact, been done. That was the most correct interpretation of the tech’s emailed question.

Our boss copied everyone involved on his reply, but directed his response at my team. “Is this done?”

Ah, now my boss is asking a different question. “Is this done?” Standing by itself, what does that sentence mean? It hinges on what “this” is referring to, doesn’t it? Is “this” pointing at the previous email from the tech and referring to the action of “closing the ticket” that she specifically asked? Or does my boss’s “this” refer to the strict interpretation of her question and the process of “work done; close ticket to document”?

Since my boss supervises our work and therefore holds the responsibility to discipline in case work is not done, the best interpretation of his question would include the assumption of the process we have in place for actually getting work done. I mean, if one was going to overthink things, that’s the assumption that would result in the most happiness; for us, the customer, and the other IT teams.

One could interpret my boss’s question as just being about the actual process of closing the ticket. But that path, while strictly logical and defensible in a linguistic sense, isn’t politically viable.

So my teammate makes a couple phone calls for information from the customer, and then replies to our boss and the other tech (and copies my team) with, “I checked with the customer and it’s done.”

His response seems to cover all bases. He mentions calling the customer, which implies that they are satisfied with whatever happened, and he uses the phrase “it’s done”.

But again, the language barrier of ambiguity strikes. What is “it” that is now “done”? Is “it” the ticket being closed, or the work that was requested by the customer?

Because our boss responds with “But is the ticket closed?” Frustrating, in that it circles back to the original choices presented by the other team’s tech and her question. Can the ticket be closed? Isn’t closing the ticket just the last step in the process of resolving customer problems? Or is it a separate act in itself?

Didn’t my teammate address this with his reply? Or should he have gone into more detail about everything he’d done – called the customer, asked if the work was done, documented and closed the ticket, then replied to our boss?

Is it any wonder there are so many barriers to getting work done at my job? We spent at least a half-hour, maybe more, parsing all the ambiguities of this exchange to try to figure out what, exactly, our boss wants from us and how best to communicate back and forth with him and other teams.

What is “it”? It’s it.