Me, The Egoist

As some of you may know, I’ve been having knee problems for the past year now. After talking with doctors we though that the problem was something like a bone chip inside the knee causing swelling and other problems. I had an excellent doctor perform arthroscopic surgery (he did a *really* good job). The pain went away for a week or so, but came back, and they recommended that I see a Rhumatologist, under the suspicion that it was some form of arthritis. I didn’t think so, but then other joints started swelling and I started to think that this might be the case.

I’d been taking Ibuprofen (Thank Advil for candy-coated goodness) at above-label-recommended strengths for a while. It helped out a lot, but it didn’t make life livable - it just made it bearable. So after some wonderful wikipedia research, I decided to try Naproxin Sodium, under the brand name of Aleve. I didn’t want to try this during the week because I can’t take Ibuprofen and Naproxin Sodium at the same time; if the Naproxin Sodium didn’t work, I still needed to be able to move, which is what Ibuprofen allowed me to do. So I waited until Friday night to try some Naproxin Sodium - taking some before bed to see how well I would sleep. Surprisingly, I woke up with substantially less pain and stiffness than usual. I took some that morning and I was able to get up and go about my business, easily putting in two and a half hours of work on the spare bedroom. What a change! Thank you, Aleve.

I don’t know what the long-term effects of this medication will be. I’ll be seeing doctor this week so I’ll ask about that, about what the real actual safe dose limit is, and to see if there are other long-term options that we can indulge. But until then, I’ll stick with my Naproxin Sodium. It’s great stuff!

Well, I got back from PenguiCon a few days ago (conflict of interest note: I’m on the board of directors) and have a much better understanding of urban combat losses than when I went there. PenguiCon is a cross between a Linux technical conference and a science fiction convention. It’s much more diverse than that, however.

At PenguiCon, a company known as “Aegis Consulting” runs events called “Black Sweater Parties” which in fact involve teaching people SWAT tactics - room breaching and clearing, how to sweep a building and clear out hallways and stairs (I hate stairs). They don’t use real weapons or explosives - water guns painted black, imitation flashbangs, etc. However, the principle of operation is close enough that you can get a good feel for what’s going on. If you place yourself in the moment you can even stuffer from PTSD (I did last year - thankfully not severely). The event starts with about 2 hours of teaching how to perform all of the techniques, and the theory behind them. Then the fun begins.

The event that I participated in was on Saturday night - technically Sunday morning at 2:00am, working on 4 hours of sleep from the night before. We were fried. Out of the 9 people we had to play with, 4 had not taken the training - this was an informal tossed-together practice.

The scenario we were given was of the hotel lobby and the three floors immediately above them, which were all open on one side down to the lobby. There were three sets of stairs going from the lobby to the second and third floors - on at each end of the “in-play” area, and one about a third from one end. The lobby itself was not in play, but the stairwells at the lobby level were.

Since we had 9 people, we divided ourselves into 3 teams of 3 people each. 2 experienced hands and a newbie on each of team Alpha and team Bravo. I was in command of team Charlie with 2 newbies. In brief, I was driving the short bus. The plan was to send all 3 teams up the stairwell. Team Alpha and Bravo would proceed up the stairs to the third floor and sweep that while team Charlie would take the second floor. That’s right - the “special” crowd would take a whole floor. This was an exciting idea. I think I was also given this “glorious” task because I wasn’t there for the training the night before, and therefore must not have known what I was doing. Right. The plan is that the Alpha and Bravo teams will come down the two remaining stairwells as we finish sweeping the 2nd floor. I asked how we would know if we needed to clean up or not. I was told that if we heard shooting to assume that everybody was dead. OK. Well, gear up and head out.

We then begin deployment. Since the hotel is completely open for the convention, we have people going up and down the stairwell. This is annoying, but we can’t expect them to put up with us unless we put up with them. Anyways, we line up outside the doors and team Alpha and Bravo charge in. We wait a few moments and then flash-bang our 2nd floor entrance, charging in. We clear the little space which sticks out in front of the elevators and then procede to clear out the hallway (roughly 100 yards long). Nothing. Of course, a bunch of people in the party rooms want to play with us, but we are strictly business. We are walking as quickly as we can while still being silent. Down the hall we go, checking room alcove after room alcove. Fortunately, we don’t need to search the rooms themselves, just the hallways and stairwells themselves. Down the hallway with no OpFor contact. We finally get to the end of the hallway and we have met up with no opposition. Mission complete. Almost.

While we’re waiting for the other teams to finish, we hear gunfire and lots of people hitting the ground on the floor above. We wait a few more minutes and hear nothing more. At this point, mission orders tell us to go up and sweep the 3rd floor - after all, we were told to assume that our teammates were dead. We procede up the stairwell at the end of the hallway opposite to where we started and pause. We aren’t sure what’s on the other side, but it can’t be good. With no OpFor people on the second floor, they must have all been on the third floor. We get ready to breach.

On a count of three our pointman throws open the door (I’m in second position) and notice two people there with guns. Point and I take out the guy standing. There’s another guy lying down which we both turn on next. Sadly, I forgot that I’m supposed to go low with point man high. I am hit by guy on ground. Pointman was hit by guy standing. It takes a moment for us to figure out who’s really dead. In the end, our third man is still alive. At which point the guy on the ground who killed me asks “wait, aren’t you on my team?” Fuck! We just wasted 4 perfectly good people on a friendly-fire incident. It was fast. They had guns. They were in the way. It was fast. We had guns. We were breaching the door. Fuck.

Though we “won” the match by getting all of the bad guys, we lost half our manpower to a stupid friendly-fire incident. It happened in a split second - people trying to get inside the decision curve of the other guy and killing teammates instead. I now understand why and how this happens in a warzone, especially an urban combat area. It is just too easy to kill the wrong person, especially when working on little sleep and pumped on adrenaline.

It was a lot of fun. No PTSD this year - just a lot of stupid dying.

I just wanted to jump back to make a quick post about something that seems to be rarely discussed: washrooms. Specifically, those in travelling rest stops. I’m am tired of poorly designed bathroom stalls.

There are a few things which commercial washroom designers fail to do:

1) Provide enough space. If you walk into a bathroom stall, there should be enough room between the door and the camode that you can enter, turn around, and shut the door. Stalls in airports should be especially large. If they want you to keep an eye on your luggage at all times, you need to use a stall. And because airlines loose luggage all the time, the only way to travel is to carry a few days worth of clothes with you. Thus the stalls need to be large enough to accommodate a person, a large carry on bag, plus door swing space and the camode.

2) Provide a door hook. When I am travelling, I frequently am wearing a jacket of some sort. I would like to hang this up. In addition, if I’m wearing a firearm belt pack or a shoulder rig, there is a good chance I would like to take that off as well. As such, there needs to be a good hook on the door. Preferably one of the double hooks with the smaller hook underneath. This shouldn’t simply be a small upward angular project, but an actual hook so that something fairly heavy can be hung underneath the jacket. Hang it on the door, you say? A well-fitting door will not easily accommodate anything over the corner. Simply tossing your jacket over the top will likely result in your jacket falling on the floor and getting dirty, or stolen. Do you really want to make it easy for criminals to steal guns, as well.

3) Clean them. Enough said. Most wayside-rests attached to freeways are cleaned in a fairly regular basis. Except in Montana. But smaller convenience stores may not do so. I will tell you that on runs I make a lot, I frequent establishments with well lit and clean washrooms. I can buy Twinkies anywhere.

I’ve long thought that how a person quits a job is a very good indicator of their personality. When I worked at the hotel in my past life, most of the desk clerk personelle were known for not showing up on their last day - after all, what are they going to do - fire you? This showed a clear lack of professionalism and respect for their commitments, even if the superficial logic was correct. When I showed up for my last shift, my shift coworker was quite surprised. I pointed out that not showing up would have cost me $80.

I’ve also decided that you can judge a company by how it treats its outgoing employees.

At my now previous employer, I provided the customary 2 weeks notice. I was an “at-will” employee. Since I gave notice on Mon, Dec 18, 2006, I assumed that I would either be asked to leave immediately, or be kept on the whole two weeks. After a little thought, I figured that they would probably keep me on until the end of the week; there is usually nobody at work the last week as people use up any PTO which is going to expire. That wasn’t quite what happened.

Monday I spend most of my time doing knowledge transfer to other employees and cleaning up work left on my plate. Tuesday was a little different.

A little background. The company had 3 floors of a small office building. Since we were loosing large numbers of employees it made sense to consolidate to two floors and save approximately $7000/month rent on the third. Fair enough. The people moved desks but failed to clean up the rest of the crap on the floor. That job fell to the system administrator who happens to be a petit 5′ gal. She knows her stuff, but isn’t quite equiped to move desks that are heavier than she is. So when she was told to clear out empty boxes from a room on one of the remaining two floors, I jumped at the chance to be helpful. I said that I’d cut up the boxes and clear the room out so that our SysAdmin could do something slightly less useless. I think that was the most job satisfaction that I’d had at that company in 4 months. I was able to work on a single task for more than 30 minutes uninterrupted.

On Wednesday, when my boss came into the office after a day off, I told him the status of things and that I hoped that in addition to some additional knowledge transfer, I thought I’d be able to move most of the furniture from the floor we wanted to vacate to the empty room I’d just cleared out. I also indicated that if possible, I’d like to finish out the week at least. His response was: “If we need warm bodies to move furniture, I’m sure we can find some”. The problem is, they CAN’T! That or they wouldn’t. Simply put, they were putting a person on charge of moving furniture who was unsuited to the job, and also a professional insult. I was hoping to speed up saving the company a large amount of money and provide at least some dignity to the SysAdmin, but was told no. I would not have been in the office on Thursday but for a meeting which I was scheduled to be at. The CEO later invited me to an additional meeting over lunch (I like free food).

So I was kicked out the door at the end of Thursday. I asked to stay until Friday and would have been able to be a reference resource for transition in addition to getting helping get some unpleasant work done. Instead, I was told to leave. Yes, I’m bitter over this. You see, the company is having a huge attrition problem with engineers. Much of the knowledge base needed to keep the company going has been lost. One of the hopes of rebuilding the engineering department is to attract former employees back. Unfortunately, this requires enticement, and money alone will rarely do it. A day of my salary isn’t that much, but it shows how much consideration the company was willing to provide to somebody they didn’t have to. I was an at-will employee. They were within their rights to kick me out. But not extending one day does nothing but fuel bad will.

Consider the following scenario:

You are a software engineer working for a software company that is funded by venture capital. The venture capitalist gives a talk stating that you should never invest more than, say, 40 million dollars in a company. The company in question has already received, say, 38 million dollars in venture capitol.

Next, the CEO holds a company-wide meeting telling the engineering staff how great sales are this quarter, thanking everybody for their hard work. In fact, it’s the best month for sales ever. Great, you think. Maybe I’ll get a raise. Well, OK, maybe I’ll get a new workstation. Either way, things are looking up for the company.

A few days later, you talk with some of the people who perform order fulfillment, that is, to make sure that a customer gets everything that they have paid for. The order fullfillment people tell you that sales are not very impressive. They might be able to give you a total number of sales, and knowing what product price is, the exact amount of money that the company is taking in. With a little more digging, you can estimate the costs of the company - the company is loosing money.

You put two and two together. The company is loosing money, and there is little chance of getting additional venture capitol to keep going. This is a skinking ship and you start looking for a job. Pretty soon, the entire engineering team is looking for a job as well. The company no longer needs to worry about engineering salaries, however, they no longer have any engineers. This is bad. There is also distrust between management and the engineering team because the presented business picture does not match the real-life image.

This frequently occurs because high-level managers who don’t understand how to program assume that the converse must be true - that programmers must not understand any level of management of financial analysis. Nothing could be further from the truth. Software engineers specialize in information management and analysis of one form or another - collecting bits of data and piecing it together isn’t all that hard. The “peek-a-boo” model of the universe works up until children are 3 years old - not 3 years into working at the company.

A better approach is to explain - with numbers - what situation the company is in. If the company is in fact in dire straits, it is likely that many engineers will start looking for a new job; they want job security as much as the next person. However, some others will likely stick around. This matches the mentality of people who run start-ups. There is risk, but also reward. Being caught in a lie is even worse. Management suddenly goes from being trusted to untrusted. If you don’t like when your kids lie to you, what makes you think that you’d like it if your boss lied to you instead?

Being in a bad financial position will get engineers to look for safe landings. Lying to engineers is going to get them to quit with prejudice. Likewise, assuming that engineers won’t catch on results in management looking both incompetant and untrustworthy. In short, assuming that keeping information from engineers is just another way to screw up a company.

Well, I quit my job yesterday. I got no sleep the night before, of course. My boss wasn’t surprised. Apparently one of my coworkers leaked that I was sitting on a job offer.

Anyways, I wasn’t escorted out of the building. I was even allowed back on Tuesday, and they haven’t told me not to come back. I figure that they won’t have me back next week, and I’m OK with that. I did all of my knowledge transfer yesterday. Today was spent cutting up carboard boxes so that we can move furniture form one floor to another. I’m doing this so that our system administrator can get on with work that is slightly less pointless.

I’ve re-installed the server. This was done to remove an old 528 MB drive which I was using for swap space. Considering that I leave my computer on all the time, I don’t expect there to be a failure with the hard drive. However, it was noisy. It made a high-pitched whine for years that I’ve just sort of managed to get used to. Of course, with the noise gone I appreciate the silence that much more.

Also, by converting to a version of Ubuntu, software management will be much, much easier. Gentoo provides far more power, but I haven’t the time to take advantage of it.

It has long puzzled union leaders as to why it is difficult to get IT workers to unionize. In the past few weeks, it has become very clear to me. Conditions at my current employer became very difficult. Our immediate engineering manager was able to be overruled by any other manager in the company in order to “accelerate communications”. In short, the rank and file software engineers could be retasked from some critical paired task to work on some cosmetic issue for our front web site, or some such thing. This frustrates not 1 but 2 people.

In addition, people in the department were not replaced when they left. In fact, no attempt was made to look for a replacement. Senior management wanted to get rid of some unwanted people and wanted to reduce the size of the department. Fair enough. unfortunately, their expectations of the department did not shrink but grew instead. The result is that there were twice as many critical projects as developers.

Oh, and everybody is being managed by crisis.

So what happens. In a bad economy, you put up with it because, well, it’s work. After all, the work is only mentally stressful, not physically dangerous. However, when the economy picks up, everybody who can find a job does so. Finding a job is very much an informational task, one which software engineers and IT people in general exceed.

The result has been that we have lost an amazing manager, web applications architect, 2 senior software engineers and 2 expert BSP developers. This doesn’t count the people who left because they were bored. As such, our company is on the verge of collapse due to lack of manpower.

I was out for my usual evening walk/jog-when-I-can-and-the-ground-is-flat/stroll when I came upon a pair of deer - a doe and a baby. This in itself is not uncommon wen I’m out walking - since spring I’ve had a sighting an average of every other two weeks. In most cases, they’re half a block away and simply dashing across the road. In short, their crossing the road to get to the other side.

Tonight was different. Instead of the usual hurried pace across a rather empty road, the two were taking a rather leisurly time crossing a typically more busy road. I also had my flashlight out at the time. Deer tend to become “stunned” by oncoming bright lights like flashlights and car headlights. As a result, the two of them turned and watched me walk by. Just after I passed them, I turned around, turned off my flashlight and just watched them. We must have stared at each other for a good 5 minutes before they trotted off. What a sight! It clearly makes up for the rest of my otherwise shity day.