If these yards could talk

I pretty much never go anywhere without my point-and-shoot camera. Because you just never know what you’re going to run across that no one will believe without photographic documentation.

In particular, I get a bit of a kick out of how people express themselves via their front yards. Around here, it’s not like anyone’s using their front yard to, you know, play in. They’re driving their young-uns to soccer practice and tae-kwon-do classes, not letting them chase each other around the lawn.

No, yards are just another medium for folks to project an image to the neighborhood. Like this handmade statement on a garage in Cupertino:

This sign, however, tells an entirely different story:

Evidently this is enough of an issue everywhere that the sign is available (for $16.95) on eBay. It’s advertised as a “dog lovers [sic] gift”, but I’m thinking that the people who buy it and display it aren’t at all wild about dogs, and even less happy with their owners.

Search-suggestion Bingo

Okay, since yesterday I had a go at Google’s auto-complete algorithm, I thought it only fair to do likewise with Bing. Interesting differences.

For What, Google first gave a techie suggestion—“what is my IP”. Bing cuts directly to the bottom line.

Evidently a lot of people on both search sites are feeling a little peaky, and for Why Bing must feel it’s especially important to suggest a search for those who are really too tired to complete their thought.

It’s interesting to me that When brings a whole thing about Father’s Day on both search engines. Are people seriously so vague about when this holiday hits (even though it’s the same third Sunday in June every year) that they’re asking this question year round?

I’m also a little concerned for those who are asking about Father’s Day 2014. Still.

How brings some of the most varied suggestions—perhaps because by the time you get around to asking about methodologies, you’re all set to go. I could spend a lot of time fleshing out the stories for the How queries. Madonna? Belly fat? Ebola? Dunno about Howard’s Appliances, though.

Where gets us to a more existential place, as you might expect. I wonder a little about Bing giving pride of place to not only suggesting a tax-related query, but straight out coughing up the URL to the IRS refund page. Lotta stories there, I’m betting.

I expect the confederate flag query is fairly recent. I’m afraid to seek out wheresgeorge.com in case it turns out to be a porn site. And I have no idea who the host of The Amazing Race is, so I don’t care where he was born.

I’m very disappointed that Bing doesn’t seem to care about who let the dogs out. But I can see how knowing who invented the toilet would be high on the let-us-help-with-your-query list.

P.S. The tallest trees in the world are just up the road from me, in Redwood National and State Parks. You’re welcome.

Gaming Google

Sometimes I just like to poke things. I refrained this morning from poking the bumble bee that was exploring squash flowers in someone’s garden, but I thought I’d have a go at Google.

Because it’s fun to see what those crazy algorithms come up with as you’re searching for things. I mean, I love auto-complete; it's the online version of getting so stuck on various words in the dictionary that you forget what it was you went there to look up.

Today I thought I’d try those stalwarts of journalistic inquiry, the six honest serving-men of Kipling (from one of my favorite stories, “The Elephant’s Child”).

I keep six honest serving-men

  (They taught me all I knew);

Their names are What and Why and When

  And How and Where and Who.

I send them over land and sea,

  I send them east and west;

But after they have worked for me,

  I give them all a rest.

I let them rest from nine till five,

  For I am busy then,

As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,

  For they are hungry men.

But different folk have different views.

  I know a person small-

She keeps ten million serving-men,

  Who get no rest at all!

She sends'em abroad on her own affairs,

  From the second she opens her eyes-

One million Hows, two million Wheres,

  And seven million Whys!

So here’s what Google auto-complete suggested for me, when I typed in just the word in each case:

What stories could we make up about these suggestions? For example, is the fox's poop green? Why or why not? Do you measure Madonna's age in human or dog years? What's all the concern about Father's Day, especially a month after the event? Where does hope grow, and do you have to fertilize it?

And, the ultimate question: who did let the dag-blamed dogs out?

Business modeling

Here’s an interesting thing about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)— you’re not buying a permanent license to use it; you’re paying a monthly (or yearly) subscription to have access to it. The approaching-senility set may recall, in the dim-dark past, subscribing to things called “magazines” (or even “newspapers”), which arrived at their doorsteps either by delivery or mail. Back when mail actually got delivered.

SaaS is like that, only it’s an application showing up on your computing device.

There are a number of attractions to SaaS in the enterprise world: you don’t have upfront costs of buying a huge license at an even huger price, and you don’t have to have the hardware and platform infrastructure (also expensive) to run the application, since SaaS is most often hosted at an independent data center somewhere. Also—new releases just propagate themselves in the ether, and tech support for users is generally handled directly by the software vendor, not the client company.

Basically, SaaS means that companies don’t have to have IT staff to install, maintain, upgrade or support these sometimes very complex software systems. In return, the client company pays subscription fees—usually based on the number of users licensed to access the application—on a monthly or yearly basis.

To lure consumers and small businesses into their software capabilities, some SaaS companies give free access to basic versions of an app with limited capabilities. Kind of like drug dealers hanging out by a schoolyard and handing out little tastes of crack. You get accustomed to the functionality. Then—if you want more—you gotta pay.

Well, I’ve been working with someone who really likes Evernote as a collaboration tool—note taking, document sharing, that sort of thing. So I signed up for a free account using my junk email address. (That’s the one I use for Meetup, Dice, email lists and everything else that I don’t want cluttering up my blog, personal or job-seeker email accounts.) Yeah, it looked fine.

Then my friend sent me something through Evernote using my personal email account, so I had to log in using that one instead of my junk mail account.

Both of those activities were about a month ago.

Last week I got two come-ons from Evernote, offering a special deal if I buy a year’s subscription. But notice the difference in how much they want me to sign up.

The offer to the junk mail account—which I opened, played with for 30 minutes and then never accessed again—is six months free with a one-year subscription:

In the offer to the account associated with actual exchange of information with a paying subscriber I only get an extra month with a one-year subscription.

Now this is something I find very interesting—and I see it throughout the business world. They’re so busy trying to woo a new customer, they basically blow off the one who’s already using their product or service. What I find interesting is that they don’t really bother to disguise that at all.

Gratitude Monday: Feral parrots

Sometimes a girl just needs to step away from the mean streets and take a walk in the clouds. I did that recently when I got a film from the library that my BFF recommended, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.

As you know, I tend to treat TV as a talking lamp—I’m usually multi-tasking when there’s something on, and I just connect the dots however I feel like it. If the plot isn’t gripping, I’m not sticking.

But Wild Parrots kept me glued to the screen the entire time. My friend really appreciated the colors—and they’re indeed brilliant. What reached out to me was the gentleness: a guy finds purpose in life from being a neighbor to a flock of wild parrots in San Francisco.

Mark Bittner does not anthropomorphize the birds, or make them his pets. Yes—he gives them all names, he feeds them, and he looks after the ones that are ill. But otherwise he appreciates them and respects them. It’s just beautiful.

Even when it’s time for him to move away from them (and I have to say that the thought of the market rent of that house he was living in is enough to lay me flat), he advocates for them to the City Council. Let them live as they are—don’t exterminate them, don’t put them in the zoo for their own protection, just let them carry on.

I felt so much better about the world after watching this documentary, so I recommend it highly to you. And on Gratitude Monday, I’m very grateful that I got a couple of hours of beautiful enchantment in my life.

Tweeting for dollars

If you’re on the Twitters-dot-com, you’ll have noticed their craptastic new revenue-generating capability: “promoted” tweets.

For whatever amount of money (look it up if you care; I don’t), you can have one of your tweets appear in some algorithm-determined number of people’s timelines, whether or not they follow you. (Apparently you can pay to have them appear for a long time, because I’ve seen some that originated last year. Don’t they understand that tweets, like fish, go off after a few days?) Basically, it’s like TV commercials, because they interrupt the flow of the nonsense you already have signed up to get, by virtue of following people.

Actually, it’s like TV commercials from the last century, precisely because they show up in the timelines of people who have neither need for nor interest in your product, and all you do is piss them off. (Like high school kids and garage bands being offered great deals on Siemens infrastructure or call center solutions.)

And Twitter is exactly the platform for people to express their pissed-offedness.

For example: this promoted tweet from Grey Goose, inviting folks to “engage” with these ESPY awards. (Yeah, right—no idea, and no desire to investigate.) So between the product and the honoree, we struck gold with the first two responses.

Then there was this one from…well, dunno, really. The White House? The Conference on Aging? The Society for Honoring Lots of Stuff?

Again, the first two responses are just stellar.

Twitter is obviously making money off this crap, so it’s not going to stop. In the meantime, as I’m blocking the hell out of these twits, I do enjoy watching the pushback.

More career advancement

Oh, looky here—another great opportunity for me from one of the many contract vendors without whom tech giants like Microsoft, Cisco, Adobe, Symantec and Google would have to hire and adequately compensate the people whose labor earns them their amazing profits.

There are several things I find interesting about this particular come-on.

First of all—yes, of course I’m going to jump at something that pays two whole dollars above minimum wage, especially for a client that is clearly so cash-strapped.

Okay, I’m pretty sure Accenture is not the actual client. I don’t know where Ashutosh, the recruiter, got that company name, but I’m pretty sure (from a bit of, well, Googling) that the job is at Google, another corporation that really does need to cut costs everyplace it can.

I especially like that they want this person to “master policy knowledge” so s/he can “perform a wide variety of application policy reviews” and “take action on violating apps”. For $17 per hour.

And I wonder where they got the requirement that there be no bad attitudes? I mean, how many people have been run through this job and, after seeing what was actually expected, told them to stuff it? At this end of the pay scale, you tend not to get folks who have a long-term interest.

Then there’s the recruiter. He lists a New Jersey phone number, but as is usual with Collabera and its competitors, when you look up the individual, he’s actually in India.

They use VoIP phones to give the appearance of being in the US. Because they don’t even want to pay the low end of US recruiter salaries when they can get the work done for 80% less in India.

Finally, old Ashutosh must be having a hard time filling the role, for some reason. I got a follow-up reminder about it yesterday.

It's all in the definition

A friend who’s never worked in the software industry offered to help me explore the job market in his area, and he asked for a copy of my résumé. Well, the level of what he calls jargon about broke his brain, so I sent him a second copy, this time annotated with some definitions.

You know—marketing-type stuff like value propositions, sales enablement tools, messaging, and go-to-market planning. Also, in the software product management line, such terms as product roadmaps and feature-benefit presentations.

(And let me say that I understand perfectly how opaque a résumé for someone in a different field can be. I’ve helped friends in tech support and user experience design—both of them areas my work has occasionally touched—rewrite theirs, and at a certain point in each discussion I had to say, “Okay, I assume that when you say [blah-blah-blah] your target reader is going to know what you’re talking about, right?”)

There’s a whole language specific to this industry that users are not privy to. In fact—if you’re doing it right, there’s no reason on earth why they should know that that language exists. All that should be visible to them is when they fire up their device, does the application do what they were told it would do in the manner they were led to expect that it would, without making them tear their hair out in the process? Yes?—fine. No?—#fail.

So, understanding that there’s a whole world of humanity out there that does not have the vocabulary to get this visual joke, I’m still putting it out there. On account of it makes me laugh every time I look at it.

Hint: you may think you’re seeing one thing, but the product manager will tell you it's a…

Allons, enfants de la patrie

Today is Bastille Day. The French and the French-at-heart will be celebrating the awakening of democracy on the European continent that was represented by an insurrection in Paris on this day in 1789.

Yes, it’s taken the French a while to work things out—a bunch of republics, a couple of empires and one or two half-hearted attempts at restoring the Bourbon kings. (Is there a band called the Bourbon Kings? There should be. And they should play Zydeco.) Plus a Commune and some années noires.

But nobody’s perfect. And I really like the French.

I particularly love how anyone can celebrate their national holiday. For example—the traditional French waiters’ champagne race (like this one in London) held all around the world:

Well, to mark the holiday from here in the Valley They Call Silicon, I’m going to give you a bit of Hollywoodized French chauvinism, because I don’t believe it’s ever been captured better than in the iconic scene at Rick’s Café Américain.

You know, where Major Strasser and his boys, full of caviar and Veuve Cliquot ’26, have commandeered Sam’s piano and are belting out “Die Wacht am Rhein”, and Victor Laszlo demands that the house band play the French national anthem. For a few moments, there’s this amazing quodlibet going on between the master race and the conquered, but you know who prevails.

Vive la France! Vive la République!

Gratitude Monday: A walk around the park

Meetups can be a mixed bag, as I’ve discussed here in the past. It really is a case of having to kiss a lot of toads before you find the good-looking heir to the throne.

So I’m grateful that I’ve come across one that looks like a keeper. Perhaps that’s because its goals are modest: a group of ambulatory folks get together on a Saturday morning at a park in Cupertino…to walk. And talk. Just an easy pace, for an hour, in the neighborhood around the park, and light chitchat.

When you think of it, really pretty disruptive to the ethos of the Valley They Call Silicon. No athletic competition, no real fashion statements, no self-important strategic positioning. Such a relief from every other meetup I’ve been to here.

It was great to explore an area that’s new to me, with a slightly different take on mid-century architecture than I see in Sunnyvale or Mountain View. However, there’s a similar breadth of approach to the current drought: some lush green lawns, some drab brown, and more than a couple of plastic ones.

Interesting that the little brown rabbits I’ve previously only seen on hikes around the Stevens Creek Reservoir appear to have moved into suburbia; I’m thinking that the drought may have something to do with that.

They look so very cute, partly because it’s not my garden they’re chowing down on.

Our organizer had timed the walk perfectly—just on the hour, we were back at the park. Pedometers were checked, conversations concluded, and we set off for our Saturday activities.

And I’m very grateful that I had the opportunity to recharge my humanity batteries in this simple but profound way.