Happiness is...

I’m heading home from RSAC, and I have to say I am more than ready. I’m also very, very glad indeed that I should be able to start the hyaluronate injections next week.

I’ve learned lots, lots of which I need to organize and report on. But I’ll leave you with these pix of happiness sponsored by a company called ThreatQuotient. Each year they bring in puppies—adoptable puppies—from local shelters.

Also, apparently, an adoptable pig this year.

That's an FBI dog checking out the pig:

Steps: a skosh over 7,000.

Peace out.

Champagne and socks

RSAC, Day Three. Steps: >9300.

Started out the day synching with my Amsterdam colleague (who’s in Pune this week), and then went to a Courageous Women in Cyber brunch held at a Brazilian restaurant across the street from Moscone that’s been taken over for the week by one of the companies.

They were pouring Veuve Clicquot, so I had a glass. The speaker was very good, too.

(Side note: why does Microsoft spellcheck recognize veuve, but not Clicquot?)

At the conference, I sat through enough demos (operative term being “sat”—seriously, I’d have stuck out a revival meeting if I got to sit) to take back to the hotel eight more tee-shirts, a travel umbrella, a wireless mouse, a wireless charging pad, a $5 Starbucks card and a pair of socks. I also attended a talk on using AI and machine learning for digital forensics.

Additionally, I went to a lunch at the Children’s Creativity Museum. I could not eat, due to the brunch, but I ended up having quite a good chat with a couple of product managers from other companies.

By evening, however, I bagged all the parties except the one hosted by the competitor that was such a snot to me on Tuesday. I reckoned they owed me a drink. And maybe some loose talk.nThen I went to dinner with some colleagues, including the SVP. When I got that invitation mid-afternoon, I thought it might be a career-limiting move to decline.

I need your thoughts and prayers, folks. There’s still another full day of this to go.

Competing interests

Day Two of RSAC; steps: more than 12,000. Here’s Moscone South just before the Expo opened:

I mooched around the halls for much of the day, channeling my inner blonde asking competitors questions about their products. Mostly I got away with it. Dave, a sales engineer with one company was mansplaining things no end. Then his colleague Kyle, having apparently looked at my badge, started asking questions about my job. Kyle clearly did not hold with sharing info.

Guy from another company flat out told me, “You’re a competitor. We’re not going to tell you anything.”

Well, joke’s on him, because I’m going to their sponsored party tonight. They haven’t disinvited me from that.

Also, we’ll crush them like a bug.

Speaking of parties, I limited it to three last night. I only went to the third one because it was the personal-via-LinkedIn invitation to the event at the fancy steakhouse. Also, it’s within staggering distance of my hotel and the other two parties. I bagged number four.

And I had to mess with JIRA tickets when I got back in the evening.

Security socials

Day One of RSAC. Kind of proto-day, actually. Yesterday they were finishing up the seminars and such. The keynotes, talks and expo open today.

Actually, yesterday evening there was a boozy-foody preview of the expo, and I did a reco to pinpoint my target competitors. That counts as one of the five parties I hit. I had to bag three others, because enough is enough. By the time I got to number five, even though it was held at a bar with premium liquor on offer, I was guzzling sparkling water, because two parties earlier the other premium booze place made a margarita with 2/3 tequila and Cointreau and a splash of lime, so that was me pretty well gone. Even though I didn’t finish it.

These were just the events I could walk to.

I can’t tell you how sorry I am I missed the CyberTacos party. It was at a tequila bar, which I’d purely love to experience. I’d have splashed out for an Uber ride, and there was another thing going on within walking distance of that. But a girl’s gotta know her limitations.

Steps: more than 11,500. And it’s not a full conference day. I am properly glad I brought that muscle roller stick. I put it to use on the soles of my feet.

Civic duty

Since I’m unable to register to vote in the Old Dominion (can’t get a driver’s license because the name on my Social Security card doesn’t quite match what’s on my passport, so I’m spending a long time considering whether I ever want to vote in this Confederate state), I want to be sure everything’s copacetic with my registration in California. So I called the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters yesterday to check.

Good thing, since—as I hadn’t voted in June’s primary election—I’d been moved to inactive on the electoral rolls. After a lengthy conversation with someone at the SCC office (their website could use some work), I have the form needed to update my mailing address, so I’ll be good to vote by mail come November.

I’m in a safely Democratic House district in the Valley They Call Silicon (as I am here in the People’s Republic; if I weren’t, I might make a more concerted effort to register here), but this year’s gubernatorial election is dicey, what with the kleptocrat messing in on behalf of whatever crackpot RWNJ is running as a Repugnant. So my vote will matter.

I also messaged a heads-up to one of my colleagues who—like me—has retained his California driver’s license even though he and his wife have been in the Old Dominion for three years. If they haven’t voted since 2016, they also might be moved to inactive, and I wanted to make sure they’re able to get their vote-by-mail ballots.

So, with my civic duty discharged for the moment, I can return to making campaign donations to Dems around the country, because when it comes to those spineless, corrupt, know-nothing Repugnant Ante-Bellum throwbacks currently befouling legislatures, it’s time to #votethemout.

Gratitude Monday: reciprocal thanks

My vast experience with the job search has taught me many strategies for getting through the soul-sucking esteem-smashing slog. Beyond optimizing your LinkedIn profile and spiffing up your résumé—and there are as many definitions of optimal and spiffed as there are subject matter experts (SMEs) ready to sell you their guaranteed Nirvana—and the dreaded networking.

(It’s interesting: networking one’s way into jobs is by far the most successful methodology, as agreed by researchers, hiring managers and SMEs alike. And yet the vast preponderance of job seekers I’ve met would much rather—and do—repeatedly revise their LinkedIn profiles and submit online applications for jobs they find on job boards, and waiting like the refugees in Casablanca to be contacted by recruiters…anything but suit up, get out to Meetups and industry events, ask connections to coffee and rinse and repeat.)

One of the strategies that I personally found helpful was regular sessions with other job seekers—either weekly or bi-weekly—to encourage one another, but also to be accountable. If you don’t have to report on progress against your stated goals and tasks on a regular basis, it’s way too easy to just…not. And I know this because I’m guilty of it.

Under the aegis of one of the Valley They Call Silicon job search support groups, run by a church as one of its ministries, I used to participate in a couple of what were called “success teams”—weekly meetings of about five to eight people looking for work, where we’d go around the table, reporting on what we’d done over the last week, and list what we planned to do in the coming week. People gave encouragement and made suggestions. But importantly, someone took notes and disseminated them, so everyone knew what we would have to report on.

The problem with such groups is that you always have members who are basically phoning it in, for one reason or another. One of them, in Mountain View, was a surgical nurse who’d been fired for some reason and was in the process of a union claim. She had no intention of actually looking for a job; she was merely riding things out until the claim was resolved and she could return to the hospital that had fired her. She’d show up week after week, take up time talking about what she hadn’t done, listen to suggestions the other members would make, write nothing down, parry ideas, and make no contribution to anyone else’s report.

At another group, in Cupertino, the dead weight was a Drama Queen of a self-described entrepreneur-engineer (and expert in everything from baking to economic theory). He’d show up every week with a long list of everything that had prevented him from doing anything, declaimed with full histrionics; his greatest skill, as far as I could see, was his ability to explain (as though to children, with slowed speech, careful enunciation and bugged eyes) why any and all of our suggestions just wouldn’t work in his very special case. He once handed round his résumé; it went back to 1973. And he assured me that he could not possibly cut one single bullet point, because everything on it was incredibly important.

Well—but aside from clangers like those, accountability partners are a good thing. So, back in the day when I was looking fulltime, and a couple of friends were also looking (one in North Carolina and one in England), I’d Skype with each of them every fortnight, just to give support, encouragement and reality checks.

Okay—all this is by way of introduction to my actual Gratitude Monday post. Because one of my colleagues from my stint at Monolithic Networking Corporation seven years ago reached out to me a month or so ago to ask for some advice in his latest job hunt. He was treated shabbily by MNC—a not extraordinary thing for that outfit—but always maintained a positive demeanor, and helped me get a much-needed mouse, which enabled me to do my job. Since then he went to work for Phillips in IoT technology, and when his division was basically shut down, he thought he might like to see if he could marry his experience with IoT to his passion for wineries; we’d once talked about analytics and such, so he thought I might have some suggestions.

Well, I Googled “IoT and wineries”, “AI and wineries”, and “data science and wineries” on my hour-long Metro ride home, and there’s some interesting stuff going on. We had a good long chat, I made some suggestions, I asked if he’d like to go the bi-weekly check-in route, and that’s what we’ve been doing. It’s a bold thing to pivot one’s career in this way, and I really admire him for stepping back to look at the possibilities and work toward them. He’s making great progress with his mother-of-all-spreadsheets to wrangle all his research and his conversations with people on the winery side and on the tech side, and I look forward to our calls.

Well—as you know, last week was a bummer for me, and on Wednesday I was feeling well and truly discouraged over the realization that I just can’t count on my current employment to last. But then an email from my friend appeared in my queue:

“[Bas Bleu],

“I hope that you are having a great day. This morning, after my workout in the gym, I was going through my list of things and people that I am grateful for.

“You were on the top of the list this morning. I really do appreciate your support in getting on solid ground in my career transition. I am very fortunate to have your help in this journey. Thank you.”

Well, that just brought me up short. He’s grateful for me. He’s grateful for me. Huh.

What a wonderful thing to read, on any day, but especially last Wednesday. I am so grateful that he took the time to write it. (And also, kudos for keeping a list of gratitudes!)

But I’m also grateful for our calls, that I can give support and encouragement, and also that my experiences can be turned to something valuable for someone else. It is truly a blessing to be able to help. And I give heartfelt thanks for this reminder.

A cold and frosty morning

Maybe three years ago, I was in the Korean coffeeshop in the Valley They Call Silicon sometime early in December. I loved the Paris Baguette in a mostly-Korean strip mall in Santa Clara, partly because it was great for people-watching and partly because of the excellent pastries. But PB locations in Cupertino, San José and Palo Alto offered more or less the same thing, and were all somewhat more up-market (even if San José’s and Palo Alto’s coffee tasted worse than Starbucks’).

The thing I loved most about PB Santa Clara was Kenyon, the store manager, who—the minute I walked through the door and before I’d settled my laptop on a table near an electrical outlet—would start making a decaf latte for me. If he was with a customer, he’d have one of his staff do it, but whenever he was making it, there would be exquisite latte art, even though it was a take-out cup with a lid on it.

Anyway, back to three years ago. I was in PB, sipping my latte, listening to KDFC and writing, when I took out my earbuds to visit the loo. I became aware that the store’s Sirius station was playing Bing Crosby singing “Christmas in Killarney”. I thought this a very interesting choice given that PB’s customer-facing crew were Asian millennials on the young side of that demographic, and the baking staff looked to be largely Latina.

So when Kenyon had a break in serving customers I asked him who chooses the station. He had to stop and actually listen to what was playing, whereupon he kind of shrugged and said, “Management.”

Yeah, I can see that.

When I returned to my table, I considered that if sitting in a Korean-owned French-themed bakery in California, listening to “Christmas in Killarney” is not America in a microcosm, I don’t know what is.

Which brings me to today’s selection for Advent. No, it’s not Bing, nor is it “Christmas in Killarney”. (I nearly went into insulin shock listening to it.) But it is from Ireland, at least this recording of it is. “Past Three O’Clock” is a carol set to a traditional tune called “London Waits”.

And the “Waits” being referred to is a category of watchmen common in England and Scotland from Medieval times up until the 19^th Century. City waites (the early spelling) patrolled the streets using musical instruments to mark the hours. (Carrying something musical also distinguished you from other bands of night-crawlers.) It’s not clear to me how they knew, precisely, what hours they were sounding, but apparently it worked quite well as a system for a number of centuries.

So, “London Waits” as a melody captures the functions of the waits of that city, and George Ratcliffe Woodward put words to it around the turn of the last century. It’s in The Cambridge Carol-Book, Being Fifty-Two Songs for Christmas, Easter, and Other Seasons, published in 1924, so it’s still somewhat new on the Christmas carol continuum, although—because of the provenance of “London Waits”, it sounds much older.

This recording is from The Bells of Dublin, by The Chieftains, and it features along with them the Renaissance Singers.

I like it fine. But I wouldn’t push it onto Kenyon and his crew at Paris Baguette.

Fashion forward, with roomy pockets

This Craigslist job posting for a “personal assistant” came across my Twitter feed Wednesday, and it’s taken me all this time to plumb the depths of its narcissism and oblivion.

Even with the help of the lengthy stream of comments on the original poster’s feed.

Here was the original posting (since amended, which I’ll get to in a bit). I broke it down into chunks; if you click on each, and then click on the resulting screen, it should enlarge so you can actually read it. I can't believe these people got all this verbiage in a Craigslist ad:

A few thoughts:

They have nothing against sloths, but no dry senses of humor need apply? Are they fearful that someone might be mocking them if they think something funny was said, but they have no visual or auditory clues to that effect? I think they might be…

Happy to clean up dog shit and diarrhea; that seems a little unreasonable. Willing, I understand, but if I came across someone who was happy to do that, I’d frankly steer clear of him/her. As for the ability to lift a 40-pound dog up several flights of stairs, that seems like a red flag. There’s not an elevator in their SoMa abode?

It’s okay to be fashion forward, but leave room for the dog’s potty bags in your pocket. Huh. I guess that means that a fanny pack wouldn’t do it? Because there’d be room for the potty bags, but that’s totes not fashionable, y’know? I also wonder about the single hour a day scheduled for cleaning. Maybe their fifth-floor walk-up is very, very tiny?

(Someone on Twitter also called out the one hour per day that was Doodle-the-dog time:)

Also, their limit of five drinks per week seems unrealistic, given the list of duties and expected requirements. As everyone on Twitter pointed out, you work for these whackjobs, you need to drink.

Not quite getting most of the “bonus” characteristics, like:

Multilingual—what languages would these be, I wonder?

Knowledge of how to brush tangled hair without causing pain, starts down to Creepy Town, but it shifted into overdrive with “enjoy giving mani/pedis”.

The full spectrum of cookery seems quite ambitious for someone only being paid around $20/hour (the scale kept going down, and then up, but even the top end is below what a good cook gets), especially when that person is also cleaning, dog rescuing, providing personal protection, running errands, detangling hair, negotiating contracts, and a manicurist. Also, who’s up to date on GoT and Silicon Valley.

As you read through this Russian-novel-long posting, it’s interesting the number of times the writers insist that an applicant be willing to admit s/he is “not perfect”, “can own up to mistakes”, etc. And by “interesting” I mean “pathological”. At no time is there mention that they themselves might not be capable of doing the same.

Well, of course you have to jump through a serious of mindless hoops to apply for this job (including making a five-minute video explaining how you meet 100% of the requirements; yes, 100%), but the good news is they’re interviewing daily.

Now, here are a few interesting nuggets:

The original posting listed an hourly rate of $25-$35/hour. Which is certainly more than minimum wage, even in San Francisco. But it’s nowhere near what a top-notch PA gets, much less the dog wrangler, cook, meal planner, contract negotiator, body guard and all the rest of it.

And there is no mention of PTO or health insurance.

But throughout yesterday, the ad was apparently amended a couple of times, lowering the wage twice before raising it to a wider range.

And the last time I looked at the posting, they’d also included a very interesting datum about what they do that makes them unable to have a life:

They’re in biotech, folks. They’re #PharmaBro, x 2.

 ,

We can only hope that whoever takes this job doesn't give them enough time to reproduce.

And someone should rescue that dog. From them.

The writing on the wall

I was attempting to clear out my hard drive—a task which I find exceedingly difficult because it’s kind of like your junk room: you just heave stuff in there willy-nilly until you’ve got a right mess, with the added layer of complexity that usually you only heave one thing into your junk room, but there is pretty much an infinite number of times you can save a file to your hard drive, if it’s living in different folders—and came across this photo I shot a few years ago.

The tagger decorated the wall outside my condo complex, and I wondered what statement s/he was trying to make.

About foolishness?

About fuel consumption?

About some conflation of the two?

And was the number 1 appended to distinguish it in a limited series of tags? Like lithographs by Andy Warhol?

Sadly, the condo association washed it out shortly after it appeared, so I’ll never know.

I’ll also probably never know how many copies of this I’ve saved to my hard drive.

Moving on

As long as we’re on the topic of obscenely-priced real estate, let’s step back momentarily to the Valley They Call Silicon.

When I gave notice last November to the property manager of the condo I’d been renting, she contacted the owner, who said that she was planning to continue to rent out the place. I thought it was a bit strange, as the owner had moved to Boston, and in the five years I’d been living there, prices in the condo complex had nearly doubled. You’d think she’d want to be shed of it.

(When I moved in in 2011, two bedroom units were going for around $400,000-$450,000; by 2016 they were fetching upwards of $800,000.)

Well, just for ducks, a couple of months ago I looked up the address and blow me if it hadn’t been sold after all. For $795,000. Which is kind of a steal for the area, given its proximity to Apple’s new headquarters. My landlady and her husband bought the condo in 2007 for $575,000 ($100,000 more than the previous purchase price in 2004), so they only made a couple hundred thousand on it.

I love the sales pitch in the listing:

“Stunning penthouse condo w/ soaring ceilings & lots of natural light! Remodeled kitchen w/ Staron Tempest counters, ample cabinets, stainless steel appliances including a wine fridge. Spacious living room w/ high ceiling, wood burning fireplace and glass doors to the sunny patio. Separate dining area w/ laminate flooring. Spacious master w/ high ceiling & large closet w/ mirrored doors. Huge master bath w/ shower over tub w/ glass door & dual sinks w/ spacious vanity. Second bedroom w/ plush carpeting & walk in closet. Upstairs loft perfect for home office or family room area w/ high ceiling. Second full bath with stall shower & glass door. Full size washer/dryer and laundry area. 2 detached single car garages w/ storage. Convenient location near shopping, commute locations & restaurants.”

I love the way a third-floor walk-up is described as a penthouse. The dining area isn’t so much “separate” as it is “on the path between the entryway and the door to the master bedroom”. And the walk-in closet in the second bedroom is the most useless thing I’ve ever seen. It’s “walk-in” in the sense that you can open the door and step in, but it’s a wedge-shaped space that makes hanging anything with any expectation of finding it again kind of a non-starter.

I understand why they have it there, and why they label it a closet: in order to call a space a “bedroom”, it has to have a window and a closet. But seriously…

Yes, there’s a wood-burning fireplace. But who’s going to schlep logs up to the third floor? On the five days in the year when it’s not a Spare the Air day in the Bay Area? (I did, however, make a lot of use of the marble fireplace surround to plan projects with yellow stickies, which I could see in perspective and move around as necessary.)

I also don’t understand the attraction of cathedral ceilings, expensive to heat and cool without being able to, you know, live in the area. They also make it impossible to change the batteries in the smoke detectors that legally have to be set at the highest point. (The property manager had to hire maintenance workers to do that, because the job requires an extension ladder, which necessitates two people. She wasn't happy about that, but when I signed the lease I told them I wasn't doing anything that required a ladder.) And the loft was more unlivable space, on account of it being utterly stifling in the summer, and affording no privacy from the main room. So—the appearance of value without the substance.

As for the “two detached single-car garages”, unless one of your cars is the size of a Mini, only one of them is usable for parking your vehicles due to the placement of the garages and the design of the turn space. (I used the second garage for storage.) And because you technically have the mandatory assigned parking spaces in those garages, you cannot use any of the visitor spots in the parking lot. (Parking violations are rigorously dealt with.) And there’s no street parking for a couple of blocks in either direction. So you’re stuffed.

It also lists “HOA Amenities: Community Pool, Sauna/Spa/Hot Tub”, although prospective buyers would find out pretty fast that there’s no sauna. But in addition to the mortgage they’re on the hook for HOA fees of $421/month.

On the plus side, the flat is indeed bright, and I miss that side-by-size refrigerator and the full-size dishwasher. (Although the new owners are probably realizing that the latter is a little temperamental in terms of when it wants to work.) I also miss having up-to-date wiring, with AFCIs in bathrooms and kitchen, and a circuit breaker box that’s not illegally blocked by a refrigerator that was obviously designed for people who don’t need access to food.

I note that the unit was staged for the sale, and I bet the guys hauling all those tables, chairs, beds and sofa up the two flights of stairs bitched with every step. And repeated it when they hauled it all back down.

I reckon the new owners have discovered the joys of traffic noises, and of living half a block from the fire station in one direction and El Camino Real in the other. And of the construction of a five-story Hampton Inn across the street. And the really crabby guy who lives just below them, and the guy on the ground floor who sits outside to smoke his cigars.

But still—it was a great place to live for me, and I hope it is for them, too.

Property values

One of the things I liked about walking around the Valley They Call Silicon was monitoring real estate prices. You’d see a For Sale sign go up, note the million-dollar price tag, and then the next day (or, generally at most, the next couple of days) you’d see the triumphant SOLD placard.

Almost always the purchase price would be more than the asking price.

Almost never did you see the dreaded “Price Reduced” addition. That inevitably denoted a complete pesthole like this one.

Well, I was walking around the town of Vienna (Virginia) at the weekend and came across this rather sad sign:

Almost as though owner-agent Terry Douglas just couldn’t bear to put that notification that all her high hopes have been dashed.

Here’s the domicile in question, a palais de pretension (yes, I made that up that franglais expression) if ever I’ve seen one:

It turns out that, after four months on the market, Terry has lowered the price (“huge reduction”, according to the online listing) by $30,000. To $1,569,000.

Yeah, okay, it’s 6000 square feet. With hardwood floors. And really astonishingly ugly cabinetry in the 4.5 bathrooms and the kitchen.

But what I find interesting that the listing shows it as having been built in 2015, and the last sale of the property was 1 July 2014, at $620,000.

Which means that the last sale was of the house that formerly occupied the property, which was then demolished to make way for this ludicrous monstrosity. And, in fact, one of the online listings shows the previous structure, with a surprisingly frank description:

It’s definitely unprepossessing, but I’m not sure that the new house is all that much of an improvement. And apparently househunters agree with me.

Reality ping

Following on yesterday’s post that harks back to the world of corporate recruiting, I was interested by this story in the Wall Street Journal about the possibly parlous state of tech companies’ health.

It posits that you may be able to predict whether these enterprises are doing well by checking on the state of sales of ping pong tables. One of the examples used to illustrate the point comes from Twitter, which was apparently buying table tennis equipment like it was going out of style until a year ago. Then bupkis, followed by last quarter’s poor performance.

It’s a cliché—but a largely true one—that tech companies (especially those on the start-up side of their growth) in the Valley They Call Silicon ply their engineers with “free” food and games that they refer to as benefits. “Come work for [insert Disruptive Tech Name here] and get catered dinners, Foosball and the use of noise-cancelling headsets!”

Good health coverage and retirement plans—not so much.

(And if these kinds of enticement look good to you, just consider what they mean. The first two are indicative that they expect you to be around every night for those dinners, and that you’re supposed to unkink your computer-focused vision without actually leaving the premises. Although you will have to go outside if you want to call your gynecologist because of the open-plan office, which is why they’re giving you the headsets.)

The mindset as articulated by the CTO at Lithium Technologies is indeed there: having the ping pong table (or whatever is the game-du-jour) validates your credentials as a thought-leader ninja rockstar serial entrepreneur. Like all the other thought-leader ninja rockstar serial entrepreneurs. It’s part of the whole package that you present to VCs and technology journalists.

I question the correlation between their purchase and predictions about a company’s financial performance. I mean—at some point, don’t you hit ping pong saturation? Not only are they rather large (9’ x 5’), but you also need space around them to actually play. So after the first two or three—what are you going to do?

As for the CMO with his $100 paddle in its special bag—well, that’s more an indicator of individual arrogance and excess than of corporate success.

But that’s the Valley for you.

Gratitude Monday: On the sidelines

 Having popped in to Trader Joe’s last Friday to pick up enough milk to see me through the next week, let me devote today’s Gratitude Monday to expressing my relief and thanks that I have no call to go grocery shopping before Christmas.

Because the normally idiotic drivers of the Valley They Call Silicon have upped their game by an order of magnitude, and my own bandwidth has narrowed somewhat, so I don’t want to put it to the test.

Not needing to be anywhere that shoppers are likely to congregate frees me up to focus on other things, like observing and commenting, for which I am also grateful.

Parallel universe

I’ve spoken before about the habit of tech companies turning English into Jaberwocky in job postings. It’s partly because they think that the cool kids with the skills they’re looking for are basically magpies, attracted by anything (and only a thing) that’s shiny and different. And it’s partly because the people who write this stuff (or copy it from competitors) are completely ignorant of the language.

By way of example, here’s a recent posting for a product manager position from Foursquare. They’re the wonderful folks who built apps that allow your friends to flood your social media with notifications every time they turn a corner or enter some place of business. That being the case, you know they want to attract top talent, so here are their requirements for the PM role:

It’s the parallelize that eats my lunch. It’s actually a computing term, to do with a program that runs functions simultaneously. It’s something machines do. Humans, on the other hand, multitask. (As it happens, recent research indicates that when we do multitask, we do none of them very well. But employers don’t care about that; they just want someone who looks like they’re basically intelligent octopi with no tentacle unoccupied.)

What’s interesting to me is the detail that follows the offending word. Eventually they get to the do-everything-at-once part. But under the rubric of “parallelize” the first prompt is “must be a self-motivated team player able to work in a small, fast-paced environment without much oversight.” That’s nothing to do with running parallel activities; what they want is someone who sees what needs to be done and does it without regard to whether it’s in his/her job description and without asking for validation for making the decision. But they don’t seem to know how to make that sound hip.

As for the requirement that the candidate write succinctly, I’m not sure Foursquare would recognize that if it leapt up and bit them on the nose.

Atmospherics

Yesterday morning we had clouds, which eventually brought a bit of much-needed rain. They also made possible a beautiful sunrise, starting with just the palest tinting of pink on the closest edges—so delicate, I couldn’t capture it on camera, just in my eyes and heart.

Then, as I approached the Apple HQ-in-process, it got fired up some:

And finally, when it died down in the East, the West gave me this:

This kind of sky show only happens when there are clouds, and they’re a rarity here. But it was a perfect time for me to be pulled out of my routine and watch the spectacular around me.

Carted away

Shopping cart retention has been an issue for a long time. It’s apparently right up there with shoplifting as a factor in the rising cost of goods.

There are companies that make a living sending trucks round neighborhoods near supermarkets to pick up and return carts that that have gone walkabout. And at some of its newer stores, Target has installed a tech solution that combines a transmitter in their carts with something embedded in the gribbly pavement that forms a barrier to parking lot exits. Once the cart passes over the yellow raised dots, the wheels lock.

Well, that’s the theory, anyway. I haven’t tested it.

However, on one of my walks the other day I came across this notice in a cart, which basically advises the consumer that it’s equipped with that wheel-locking capability, so leave it in the parking lot:

However, the cart in question was about a mile from the nearest grocery stores, so someone defeated the device.

Hmm—possibly someone from VW?

No help for the holidays

This is what you end up with when stores bend over for the food Nazis—you know, the organic-only gluten-free soy-substitute vegan crowd.

I was in Trader Joe’s the other day, and I had flour on my list. Just regular old cookie-making flour. Here’s what Trader Joe’s offered me:

Yeah. I could buy gluten-free, almond or coconut flour (at totally jacked-up organo-hissy vegan prices), but no five-pound bags of the stuff you need for getting the holidays going.

I despair.

Our last best defense

It pains me to share this with you, because I found it at the Cupertino branch of the Santa Clara County Library:

Seriously, when library staff allow this to happen, we are just plumb on the express train to hell.

Hit the road, Jack

It’s rather comforting to know that even here in the Valley They Call Silicon, where Disruption-R-Us, there are some traditions that live on.

Like the proper disposal of post-Halloween Jack O’Lanterns:

I personally think that not nearly enough force was applied in this operation, but I suppose that the terms of execution are open to interpretation. And to the strength/age category of the pumpkin tosser.

Well done, little thought leader(s). Well done.

Creepy crawlies

We’re on the cusp of Halloween, so I thought I’d check in on how people are preparing to impress their neighbors for the occasion. As you know, in the past, there have been quite the elaborate yard decorations, from zombies to a couple of dozen skeletons. From what I’ve seen in the past few weeks, inflatables have begun to take market share for the holiday, and bones are big.

Entire yards have been turned into graveyards—rendered with greater verisimilitude on account of the residents letting the grass go brown in the drought.

Your usual skeletons and ghouls (with the addition this year of snakes):

And this unique skeleton—recycled, as befits a house with one of those three-wheeled electric cars attached to the power mains in the driveway:

A few witches, including this one in a tree swing:

And I rather liked the glow-in-the-dark bat (one of many hanging in a tree that trick-or-treaters will have to pass to get to the Snickers):

Spiders seem to be hitting their stride this year—I’ve seen them in all sizes and colors, and it's a good thing arachnids don't bother me, or I wouldn't be able to leave the house:

 

And, finally, one house that pretty much tries to do it all.

Own the dark, people.