Grandfather Rice

The Continuing Blindness of the Colon

Thu, 4 May 2006 19:04:00 GMT

So.

I've gave an example in my last post of Government-funded stupidity. Whether you chalk it up to stupidity or just ignorance, it's a good example of people put in a situation to make decisions on things they had no expertise in. Did they mean well? I can't really think otherwise. But did they know enough about what they were doing? Obviously not.

There's always going to be stupid people in the workplace. The law of averages promises that. The aspect of stupidity I'm trying to single out, however, is that portion that is company mandated, as my previous example indicates. "Stupidity" probably isn't the best word for this kind of ill, as the items in the list cover the gamut from blatant ignorance to poor communication to practical larceny. All of it has a negative effect on Average Joe Worker.

Think on the following situations, and see how many apply to you:

A CEO records a record year for bonuses while slashing jobs.
A member of upper management announces that there will be no job cuts until a precious few months later when such cuts become "Inevitable"
A policy is put in place that is counterproductive

An interesting example of the second bullet happenened to a friend of mine, who works for a popular hotel chain. The hotel he works at is measured against other hotels by a single metric: Increasing profit. In essence, the hotel has to not just keep showing that it's making money, but that it keeps making MORE money then it did before. So even if the hotel has a good month it might not be good enough if they "only" made the same amount as they made in the prior month.

Let's think about this somewhat mathematically for a second. The hotel has a fixed number of rooms. If the same number or rooms rent out a month, you're going to have the same amount of money coming in. So how do you raise profits? Well, assuming that they can't just add rooms (Which seems sensical) what avenues of possible adjustment are there?

Get more people in the rooms you have
Increase the cost to the customer per room
Decrease the cost associated with running the hotel

So let's see. If we get more people in the rooms, profits go up. But there's only a fixed number of rooms, so we can only have so many people in the hotel. If we tend to run mostly full most of the time, we're not going to get a lot of gain there. Not to mention that you can't just magically create more customers reliably. You could potentially draw more customers by dropping prices (Which makes it that much harder to show a profit) or by advertising, which again cuts into our income, but that's about it.

If we increase the cost per customer, we'll end up with more income, but eventually we'll have fewer customers due to competition from other chains (The "WalMart" effect). We may be able to get more customers by lowering costs, but again that's a narrow range to play with.

So we come to the third option - cut costs. Figure out ways to provide the same service less expensively

So the hotel tries a number of things. They get creative. They raise costs a couple bucks, they fire the dude who never really worked anyway, we change our advertising around. Profits go up. But after a while, the company is looking grimly at you again: "Is that the best you can do?"

This cycle continues, and finally you're in the hard position of nowhere left to grow. The rooms are as full as they're going to get. You can't really cut any more people without descreasing the quality of service. Any more price increases are seriously going to start costing you customers. So what's left?

Fire half your support staff and make the other half work twice as hard? Or hire not quite twice as many people, but make them all work half-time so that you don't have to pay any of them benefits? Cheapen services like laundry & food? Put off maintenance and let the hotel get a little shoddy - and when you do fix things, do the cheapest most superficial job possible? Or outright hire illegal immigrants because you don't have to pay them much of anything and you can always act saintly and surprised if INS turns up? What do all these items have in common?

To an extent, they're all varying degrees of unethical. Note I didn't say "Illegal", I said "unethical" (Although "unethical" by and large contains "illegal). You're trying to convince people that they're getting the same quality of product, but you're doing it through means that degrade the product or degrade the people providing that product.

Now, I'm not saying that every cost-cutting measure is inherently unethical. Replacing workers with robots or some other automated service? No problem - You're providing the same quality of service at a reduced cost. Figuring out ways to reengineer your process to be more efficient? No heartburn here. Business owners should constantly be looking for "better" ways to do business.

So when is it unethical, and when is it merely good business? Where's that line?

Unease - Are we all so blind?

Mon, 1 May 2006 21:18:00 GMT

So.

This is going to be a little rambly, but given how well I know my reader, I'm willing to bet that the casualties will be minimal

I'm at my parent's house again. EG is quite ill, and as with all great timings, this week is delivery week for the project that I've been poking at for the last month. So I'm here with my parents, and she's home with her brother, sleeping all day and barely being able to walk.

Maddening.

I was having a discussion with my mother when it occurred to me (again) that the United States people, taken by and large, have their heads up their collective anuses. This is not some sort of poltical commentary. I'm not going to slam the president or make references to the repeated indescretions of sports team or some other sort of upheavel-du-jour. This is not some ploy with which I can shake my head at a particularly reprehensible class, or race, or legal station. It almost universally appears to be, with little variation of depth, people wearing their butts as sweaterhats.

Let's think about this a second. The phrasology chosen suggests several things. Blindness. Deafness. A certain impenetrable coloncurtain between oneself and the world. It lends one to think about a lack of common sense. Creating a fantasy world rather then choosing to live in the real one. An aggressive thing to suggest about an entire heterogeneous culture, certainly. Some would say even an arrogant thing to suggest. I'm inclined to agree with both of those statements. Any expressed idea that differs from the cultural norm by definition is a mold filled with molton ego.

Think of this: Do you like your job? Do you feel like you made anyone's world better by your work today? Do you go to bed at night taking comfort from the fact that, by and large, more people were pleased with the results of your efforts today then were displeased?

No?

Do you know anyone who does?

This is not, of course, to suggest that such people don't exist. I certainly don't know any, but that doesn't preclude their existence. But why are such so rare? Is it that they are limited to a single, perfect career path? Perhaps. Perhaps they've just decided to vacate their intestines.

In the course of what I'll refer to as my "Working Career" (Because "Pitifully written satire of a badly written fanfic" is too wordy) I have worked for (roughly) 3 employers. They cover the gamut of Small Business, Large Business and Government Funded Shop (In reverse alphabetical order). The latter two, however, had some things in common, chief among them blatant stupidity.

In discussions with my mother (a nurse educator) and some of her experiences mixed with stories from elsewhere (And elsewho) I find that this blatant stupidity isn't limited to merely me (As much as admitting that cripples my opportunities as a defeatist), or even my field (Which most call "IT" (Information Technology - The phrase means crap-all to me too) which is about as specific as the concept of "Oriental"). Blatant stupidity seems to abound.

Think on this: Have you ever had some member of your "Management Structure" express to you grave concern about something that you either strongly suspected or outright knew wasn't important? Did you feel a little pang of despair if the words "Mission" or "Vision" were used?

An example seems called for:

At Government Funded Shop, one of the big pushes for a period of time was conservation of resources. Any person brighter then an old-style red Christmas light buried under a rock, upon hearing "Conservation of resources" hears "Save the company money". No one really believes that any corporate entity is really concerned about conservation of resources. Disagree? Fine. Hopefully we can at least reach a peaceful Detente over the fact that with the sole exception of paper products, the average office building isn't exactly a font of conservation opportunities.

They started with the paper in the Photocopy machines, switching to this grey crunchy recycled stuff. This waxed in and out of fashion based on how many reports needed to be delivered to big customers. But the hilarity came when they started to put policies in place to save electricity. You can imagine how this went. Signs designed by paid professionals, printed by expensive color printers on good cardstock and then laminated in liquified seal toenails (Fine. You tell me what laminate is made out of. :P) to politely suggest that people turn off the lights consuming around the electricity required to light 2 60 watt bulbs. Way to go guys.

Then came the "turn off your computer at night" policies. Daily reminder e-mails were sent to repeatedly ask a building full of (by and large) college graduates to turn off their computers at night. "We'll keep sending e-mails until electricity consumption drops!".

Then, after noticing that some machines were still left on at night, they took matters into their own hands. They walked along an entire building of cubicles, turning off machines that had been left on.

Like the servers. The computers that fed the needs of a 24-hour around-the-clock critical task approx 50 miles away. When no one is in to turn them back on or, heaven forbid, get them running the way they were before they were shut down.

This example has run long. More on this thought next time. And just remember: Just because it's invisible doesn't mean it can't hurt you.

The Surreal nature of Life

Tue, 11 Apr 2006 18:01:00 GMT

So the oddest thing happened the other day.

I was skimming the Caller ID for a phone number that I had forgotten. I found the listing for a number I did not recognize attached to a name similar to a friend of mine. Let's call him... Evi..an..dad. Potter. ( Not his real name.). I hadn't spoken to this friend of mine in quite some time as we no longer work in the same place. Anyway, the Caller Id was for a "Bob and Mary" ( Not their real names.), so I (quite naturally) assumed that my good friend had called from some relatives of his, perhaps to invite my family out for some rollicking fun with their family (Similar things have happened before).

So I call "Eviandad", and inform him that I am happily returning his call, my voice full with happy reunion related expectations. He was complely confused. He admitted that while he should be keeping in better touch, he had not actually called. He asked the name on the Caller ID, and confessed to not knowing them (Which generally (but not always (There's those damn parentheses again)) indicates that they would not be directly related). Oh. I make a lame attempt at creating conversation, and end the call.

Now I'm really confused.

So there's nothing else for it: I must call the number on my caller ID and find out who called me. (Some may question why I didn't just do this in the first place. I could tell them, but I'd rather leave a trail of hidden clues for the sleuthful to unravel the mystery for themselves and then revel in the quiet contentment of secret knowledge. Sure.) So I call. A nice lady answers the phone. After the initial conversational confusion of this sort of call where both sides prove that they don't know each other yet still have a reason to be conversing, The nice lady admits that it was her daughter who had called, looking for a young man by the name of Jake (His real name, but so far removed from me as to be completely useless to share with everyone.) who shares my last name. I admitted to not knowing a Jake, and we ended the call cordially.

As I hung up the phone, A thought struck me. For the sake of this discussion, let's assume my last name is.. Cake (Not creative or overly creative? Reach your own conclusions).

Ms. Potter Had called the wrong Mr. Cake looking for Jake Cake because they shared a last name.

In response, Mr. Cake called the wrong Mr. Potter because THEY shared a last name.

A wrong number leading someone to call a wrong number?

I called Eviandad back to share this funny bit of surreality. He laughed, and then suggested what would be the perfect end to the situation.

He would have to call Mr. Jake Cake, and invite him to Young Ms. Potter's Birthday party.

I wonder if bizarre situations like this happen to people like Terry Gilliam ALL the freakin time.

Big thoughts come later.

Mon, 29 Aug 2005 08:33:00 GMT

I've been percolating a couple of "deep thoughts" in my head lately, but I think they'd take entirely too long to write out and I'm fairly busy today. So what's left is this, which is shorter and hopefully more interesting to more people.

Here's a fun excercise to get your mental juices flowing this morning! Rev your brain while learning some deep personal secrets about yourself.

Write down your age.
Add 3.
Subtract the number of teeth you have. (Fillings only count if you are older then 10)
add the contents of what you had for breakfast.
multiply by your checkbook balance as of your third birthday.(If you haven't had a third birthday yet, or you have no checkbook, put in a default value of $43.67)
divide by the number of memes in the phrase "Britney, Keanu, Ben and Jennifer drank Pepsi while driving a honda. Isn't it ironic?"
add 135.6 for each 12 oz portion of Mt. Dew you have drunk or plan to drink this morning.
1/4 cup milk.
1 teaspoon cinnamon.
divide into quarters.
Chill, serve with bacon bits
add the average rainfall of the amazon basin. (European Swallows, please)
subtract the original number you started with.

Well, how'd you do?

1: You come the raw prawn.
2 - pi: You're a cancer married to an Aquarian. Your oldest pet is a Pisces. Draw whatever conclusions about your immediate reaction to this information as you feel pertinent.
3.5 - 17: You will fight for bovine freedom.
20-350: You are average of all takers of this test. This makes you a mean person.
36-40: You are an inside joke.
355 - 412.6: Reply hazy, try again.
415-7: Yes.
18-19: No.
Over 6,524,329.7477168: Math error. Try again. Count your teeth more carefully this time.

Spooky how accurate it is, isn't it?

Didn't get a solid answer on the test? Did you fall into one of the incredibly few "Gray" areas? Well leave me a comment with the value you got and an appropriate phrase (Or phrases, if you wish to have high cheeky bones.) Given enough interest, I'll add it to the test! Won't that be neat!

She found out. and a math clarification.

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 14:01:00 GMT

Well, what a surprise. As I imagined, I couldn't keep myself hidden for long. She has tracked me down like a oddly rendered beagle hunting errant truffles. I had originally set the journal to not show up on web searches. This had the unfortunate side effect of preventing any of my posts from showing on the front "New posts" page, meaning that no one was directed to read my stuff. Given that I had intended this page to be secret from my wife, but not from everyone else (If I wanted something just for myself, I'd just talk to myself. It's faster and simpler), I foolishly stopped hiding from search engines. She pounced immediately, quickly directing an acidic spelling correction my way over IM.

The salad days are over. That bright morning period where I wrote brilliant prose yet had no readers. Ah, how it fades from my memory alrady.

Oh well, I detest salad. Bring on the meat and potatos!

In other news, I've received word that some have found my mathematical rant a little difficult to understand. I have decided to reform the whole argument into helpful grandfatherly advice:

The number three? Hate it. Hate it deep down inside your soul on everything but a religious level. Eschew (This means "Masticate" in Spanish) all threes . Three twinkies to an economy pack? Walk on the other side of the aisle. Walk on the other side of the isle if you can spare the distance. Complain loudly to the manager. Find something that must be divisible into thirds? (or sixths, or twelphs, or..) Threaten violence on the manufacturer and the manager of the establishment. Rant and rave. Foam at the mouth a little if you can. Don't let them get away with calling YOU a fool. Show them who's the boss, and let Tony Danza say it for you!

It will make my life all the easier..

The complexities of simple math and the power of cat drawings.

Sat, 27 Aug 2005 11:23:00 GMT

As some of you (assuming someday that people will read this) may already know, I'm a software engineer by trade. This means that I write programs (Or more often parts of programs) that are used to torment presumably innocent people. We'll have to get into discussions on the need and practical use of torment on the undeserving some other time (This is a literary tool called "Foreshadowing" which means "I'm much too lazy to talk about this right now so I'm going to pretend I'll be less lazy later. (Parenthesis are another literary device I refer to as an "Annotation". Whether other people refer to it this way is questionable, but they should. It would be one step closer to making them more understandable (Nested Parenthesis are a nasty habit Software Engineers get into too.))).

A good way of thinking about programming is to take fairly complex tasks, reduce them to a rediculously small level of detail and then feed them into a device that's so hideously single-minded and anal it makes Rain Man look like Albert Einstein (And I don't just mean by making his hair grow out and turn white. (See, here are those pesky parentheses again. If they bother you inordinately, just don't read them. As with all good "Annotations", the text should be perfectly readable if you skip over anything between parentheses. More boring, certainly, but perfectly readable)). A good example of this behavior is with basic mathematics.

The stuff I've been working on recently has to do with writing musical notation. Music is handy because most of the time it's very attached to the number two. If you know anything of music, the very names of the notes are all into the number two. Half notes (1/2), Quarter notes (1/4 or 1/(2x2)), Eighth notes (1/8 or 1/(2x2x2)), etc. Even time signatures tend towards powers of two. Most everything can be happily halved or doubled and still make sense.

This is great for computers, because computers have an infatuation with the number 2. Computers run off a numerical system called "binary" which essentially means they only have two fingers to count everything on. As such, they seriously seriously dig things divisible by two. Since fully half the numbers are divisible by two, this is a fairly useful thing.

Let's do some basic music-notation to decimal (10 finger counting) conversion. I know that's a little odd, but bear with me.

1(Whole note) = 1
1/2(Half note) = .5
1/4(Quarter note) = .25
1/8(Eighth note) = .125
1/16(Sixteenth note) = .0625
1.32(ThirtySecond note) = .03125

Mathematically, these are pretty well-behaved decimals. They're fairly short (even .03125 you could memorize without a lot of effort) and they're nicely related. You could even call them "polite". This is a fact that I've been luxuriating in for quite some time now on this project. Until yesterday.

Yesterday, you see, I needed to make "triplets" work. A triplet, in music, is a grouping of three notes that happen in the same period of time as 2 other notes. 3 Triplet eighth notes, for example, take the same amount of time to play as 2 quarter notes. Besides being somewhat smarmy (Personal opinion), this plays merry hell with the math, because we're callously introducing the number three into a system that works incredibly well with the number two. Let's see what happens.

Let's say that we're working with triplet eighths. You need to fit three of these bad boys in the same time as two quarter notes.

So, two quarter notes = (1/4 + 1/4 = 2/4 reduced to 1/2). In decimal this would be .5

We need to fit three things in the same space so we divide by three (1/2 * 1/3 = 1/6). Fairly simple so far (If you missed a couple of turns in that last step, ignore and move on. Trust your Grandfather. Thousands of Chinese can't be wrong, unless they are.).

So computers don't like fractions. They're entirely too abstract. So they try to keep numbers as decimals. so what is 1/6 in decimal? .166666666666666666666666... and you can keep writing sixes until your arm gets tired or your soda gets flat or something altogether more interesting distracts you. You'll notice that this number is not nearly as polite as the ones we were looking at earlier. It's a selfish, greedy decimal that takes all the space you have and scoffs that you don't have more.

Further examples:

1/12 = .083333333333333333....
1/24 = .041666666666666666....

So computers have to store this nastiness somehow, and they only have so much space to do so. So what do they do? They keep figuring 3s or 6s to only so long, and then they round to keep every thing a fixed length (This is a simplification. (This was another annotation. Isn't learning fun!)). Well that's just ducky. But if you're trying to keep track of how far you've gotten, it just screws up your nice clean math. Say that you want to put a measure line when you have a total of a half notes worth of space. We need 3 triple-eighths to do the job (Again, trust me.). So we do some adding. Try this with a calculator. You can simplify the example by using the number .166. Just put in .166 and multiply by 3. Go Ahead. I'll wait.

What did you get? Well, my calculator says .498. In reality, since we're dealing with many more sixes, it's really something more like .49999999999(lots more nines)99998. So here comes the ass-chapping part. Is 4.999999etcetc = 5? Nope, never and twice never on Thursdays. It's close, really really really close, but no fig tree. The Idiot Savant computer will never say "Close enough for practical purposes". So now, as a programmer, I have to complicate all my calculations to handle this, just because some smarmy renaissance composer thought he'd be all rebellious and rule-breaking and inject triplets in an otherwise number-2-loving system. He probably wore his tricorn hat backwards and his shoes on the wrong feet and ran with a violent crowd of teenage gutter-composers defacing public property ('Mozard fo lif3') in the streets of venice (Although he wouldn't run very fast because his shoes were on the wrong feet and you don't run very fast on water. (See what comedy you would miss if you didn't read the annotations?)). Anyway, some prehistoric gang-banger is making my life difficult. I have no realistic path of retribution. So I shake my fist towards Italy and write about it in a blog. Way to go, me.

In other news, my son Av asked me to draw him a picture of our cat on his toddler magnetic etch-a-sketch thingy this morning. This is utterly and completely fantastic for two reasons:

I understood what he was asking (Minor miracle, that).
It was something I could and was willing to do (No, we can't smoosh crackers into the carpet. No, we shouldn't wake mommy, she's tired. Come back here!)

I rendered something mediocre which he was delighted with. He proceeded to take the picture and shove it two inches from the face of our cat and repeatedly tell the cat that it was a picture of him.

I smiled. It was awfully cute.

What is grit if not a bunch of fine detail?

I have some Grit in my eye.

Fri, 26 Aug 2005 09:39:00 GMT

So.

Last night my brother-in-Law (J-spot by reference) pointed me to a humerous page in my wife's Blog (Electric Grandmother by name). The humour of the entry was pleasant, and dealt with a homey detail of earlier in the day. Far more concerning to me was the sudden knowledge that my wife had a blog that I was unaware of, and had had one for over a year now. As I started to read, he hurridly called the house to beg forgiveness from my wife because he "thought he had done a bad thing."

When confronted, she allowed as to how we keep having this discussion. She'll admit to the travesty of public journal-keeping, I'll say something like "Oh, you have a blog?" and then some period of time down the line she'll have the pleasure of having the whole conversation again.

I had no ready answer for that.

Well, that's not exactly fully true. I most likely did have a ready answer for that, but it was something stupid like "Nuh-uh" and a troubled frown. Nowhere near useful enough to fling as a literary retort to the accusations that alzheimers disease is settling in early.

I think I would remember a confession of something this revolutionary. Blogs, in my mind, have always been about teenagers with lots of free time playing a game of "Greater angst than thee" with each other. This isn't what I read in her blog, however. I found the unexpected. Which is obvious. If you go searching and aren't searching for anything in particular and you find something, it's unexpected. It's just common sense.

But what I found intrigued me. Some deep thoughts. Memories of friends long gone. Pleasant ruminations about me and our marriage. This wasn't the teenage game I had presumed.

In hindsight, the only thing I can figure is she slipped her blog confessions into times where she knew I either wasn't paying attention or was otherwise distracted. I can imagine her leaning over my sleeping form and whispering "I have a blog" into my ear, prompting a poorly understood restless night's sleep. Perhaps she would inject it in conversations where it didn't belong, suspecting that I (innocently) wasn't offering all of my attention to the discussion.

"And so I think the slipstream value of War and Peace in relation to Dostoyevsky's post-modern grocery lists I have a blog could be viewed as so much Post-Modern Pabblegum."

"Mmmm." I would reply, my subconcious mind waking up enough to offer an ignored "Wait, what?"

So, anyway, the only meaningful retort I could muster was to start my own blog, and get over a years worth of posts and feedback before letting her know of it's existence. Deep down, I know this excercise will prove a failure. I'm come to her stomping ground now, and I feel certain that she is sure to detect me like a rat can detect falling gas prices. But I sally forth (Or really Maggie forth in this case) with hope. If she finds me, fine, but please don't tell her. It'll ruin the surprise.

Now. Some important things about myself.

I am not a grandfather.
My name isn't really Rice

Both of these things are creations of my dear wife's imagination, and to avoid confusion or misdirection I must match her idiom. Blame Bradbury.

I can offer the following:

Wholesale abuse of capital letters (I like them).
A complete lack of regular updates.
Lots of extra words
Grit.

Grit is probably not a concept many of you are familiar with. To most of you (And to me as well), grit is a lost idea from a bygone age. Cowboys had grit (Particularly in movies). Grit is what they had before they started getting Edge. Before things were Edgy, they were Gritty. I remember reading Pat McManus implying that grit (among other things) was the ability to pass off any pain or indignity with nothing then a dusty humerous comment (Which often times must be prepared in advance). It is endurance under load. It's when the chips are down and you get to see what you're made of. McManus also implied (AIR) that in his youth he had been accused of needing more grit enough times that he wondered if there was some kind of grit-vitamin he could take to correct his obvious deficiency.

When I say I offer grit, one of the things I mean that occasionally intend to shine the light of harsh realism on my wife's writings. I will be adding details that she left out to make for a more pleasing narrative. I will be holding up rough spots that she has carefully sanded down.

For instance, in this entry, we're led to believe that a beautiful woman travelling with her husband sans 3-year old (Av, I refuse to call him Avadore because I'm male. Shortening names is genetic) in a nicely lavish hotel room has nothing worth reporting between "Arrived at Hotel" and "Eventually went to bed very late". Well, I'm here to burst your bubble of innocence, my friends. I can report with all honesty that the following took place between those two innocuous bullet points:

I started recharging all of my electronics so they'd be ready for the next day.
I ate some rice-flour chocolate chip cookies and shared with no one.
We probably changed clothes
She may have read something

Pulling no punches here, my friends.

In other news, the cat has decided that I'm boring.

In other other news, this is a wonderful gift for all of your friends that you think are a little backwards.