Wrong-way Street

You know, there seems to be a lot of news recently that just strikes me gobsmacked. And here’s another item: there’s a Facebook petition urging that the folks at Sesame Street let Bert & Ernie get married.

Hello? People? They’re Muppets! MUH-PETS. And on Sesame Street only the actual humans are over the age of about five (well, except for maybe Count von Count) with attendant over-five characteristics, because the show is all about childhood.

You remember childhood, right? That great place where you don't have to worry about sexual orientation, designer drugs or cosmetic surgery? (Unless your parents are planning on getting on a reality show.)

All I can say is that, as per usual, people on Facebook have way, waaaayy too much time on their hands.

Arbeit macht...arbeit

I had an epiphany of a sort yesterday about life in the company where I’m currently working. This place is like swimming upstream in molasses.

For the past couple of months I’ve had a core list of seven tasks. I’ve been unable to cross a single one off the list because there’s no point in the company processes where you can say, “there it is, done and dusted.” Every time you think you’re rounding the corner on closing in on the final bits you find that you’ve got at least three more corners to go.

The only thing that’s happened to my list is that more crap gets added to it.

The whole point to having a list is the sense of accomplishment you feel when you scratch something off. What I get from this place is the feeling that nothing will ever get well and truly done. But you can wear yourself out in the attempt.

The squash of summer

Monday was Sneak Some Zucchini onto your Neighbor’s Porch Day. I’m a few days late in marking the celebration, but trust me: if you have spare squash, you have it by the shedload. They should make all of August Sneak Some Zucchini (or Courgettes, if you’re a Brit) onto your Neighbor’s Porch Month

Zucchini have the amazing property of exploding from fingerlike to lethal-club-sized overnight. Anyone who’s ever grown them will attest to that. So after your initial pleasure at picking your own veg, you start getting desperate for ways to use it. You go from sautés to zucchini bread to heaving it into your compost pile.

A friend of mine who used to live in Huntsville assured me that during summer, it was more than your porch that was in danger of being squashified. If you left your car unlocked, you most likely came back to find a bagful on the passenger seat.

Ah, summer!

London's burning

The news from London is, well, shocking. Rioters have looted and burned quite disparate areas of the city since Saturday night, two days after a fatal police shooting incident. A peaceful protest by the family of Mark Duggan on Saturday somehow morphed into violence, and it’s been continuing ever since, dying down in one area for a few hours and then popping up somewhere else.

Gangs of apparently mostly young men have cleaned out cash registers in grocery stores, ransacked jewelry shops, and set fire to police cars, city buses and buildings. The images are appalling, reminiscent of photos of London during WWII, only this time in color.

As of this writing, Tottenham, Hackney, Brixton and other areas have been affected. That would be North London, the East End and south of the Thames. These neighborhoods have not much in common—except that they’re poor. More than 200 have been arrested and I don’t know how many are in hospital. And the cops are getting massive amounts of overtime pay.

I have a few thoughts (probably as disconnected as the neighborhoods) on this:

It seems as though all elected officials, from London Mayor Boris Johnson to PM David Cameron, were out of the country on holiday. Only the Home Secretary, Theresa May, could be wrenched away from her Chiantishire villa by Monday. I guess you have to weigh how important it is to do the job you were elected to do against those lovely Tuscan summer nights with fresh pasta and a nice glass of pinot grigio.

But once the rioters got to Hackney, which is next to one of the showcases of next year’s Olympic Games, it apparently became more of a priority than it would otherwise have been. Unless, of course, Knightsbridge or Bloomsbury started going up in flames.

There have been allegations that Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger have been used to spread the word, urging flash mobs with face masks to show up at this place or that to “beat the feds”. I presume that by “the feds”, that particular tweeter meant “the man”. Whatever. I wouldn’t be too surprised if mobile technology played a major role in directing the rioters, since it’s been my observation that no one seems to be so poor that s/he is without a cell phone and an apparently unlimited talk plan. I don’t think that makes Twitter or BlackBerry somehow culpable; if you’re going to cheer the resisters in Syria and Egypt for using social media, you can’t condemn the platform if it’s used by thugs.

Which brings me to thuggery. No matter how economically underprivileged you are or aggrieved you may be with your government, cleaning out sporting goods and electronics shops is hardly the moral equivalent of blocking a line of tanks at Tiananmen Square or even mobbing a G-8 summit. My guess is that there are going to be a lot of new “for sale” listings on London’s Craig’s List pretty soon. And that that was precisely the point of the activities ever since Tottenham caught fire.


I have no take on the law enforcement efforts except that they're using (amongst other things) mounted police; I say: keep the animals out of it. They didn't start this; don't put them in harm's way. Oh--& now would be a good time to knock over a liquor store in Bristol or Leeds, since every cop in England seems to have been sucked into the riot control.

Finally, from all reports, hardly any of the burned and looted companies have been big chain stores. They’ve mostly been local establishments, owned & run by people who live right there. Shopkeepers who haven’t yet been attacked have shuttered their stores. And since public transportation has been severely curtailed, that means that the residents of those areas better have stocked up on groceries, because it’s going to be a while before they can find a store that’s open for business. Ditto medical care and getting to work.

It's going to be a long, hot August for Londoners..

Recruiters 20

Last year, while still in Seattle, I was approached by a recruiter working for Ariba Networks; he was looking for a product manager for their headquarters in the Silicon Valley. I had a conversation with him, sent my CV, he allegedly set up a call for me with the hiring manager; then…nothing.

He didn’t reply to voice or emails and didn’t pick up on my calls (I assume he had caller ID). So, fine—another in a long list of crappy humanoids dressed up as “talent acquisition” professionals.

So when I got an email from him two weeks ago, announcing that he’s now working for another company that produces mobile clinical care apps for physicians and that he’s looking for a PM, my initial response was, “Big whoop.” His email didn’t even have a phone number for me to reach him on; how serious could he be?

So I wasn’t surprised when my reply elicited no response for several days. Then he left me a VM (with a number)…last Saturday. I connected with him on Monday for about 12 minutes—got a lot of guff about this company and the fact that, while they’re doing mobile apps, they don’t require mobile experience; in fact most of the people there didn’t have mobile experience when they came. They’re more interested in someone who’s owned a product before. He emphasized that what they’re really looking for SaaS competency and, of course, healthcare experience.

Blah, blah, blah.

He wasn’t interested in what I’ve been doing since last we spoke, just said he wanted me to speak with the HM—to whom he’d evidently already shown my CV (picked up presumably from Dice). As in, before determining whether I was interested. Well, the call was set for Wednesday afternoon.

In the intervening period my research turned up the fact that a good 70% of this company’s revenue comes from big pharma, who use the apps to push their latest drugs—usually more expensive and less effective than the older ones on which they’ve lost the patents. (Since one in four physician refuses to see pharmaceutical sales reps any more, the drug companies are looking for ways to get in prescribers’ faces; and handheld devices work just fine.)

And in the conversation with the HM I found out that he’s in fact hiring PMs to work on those precise mobile apps, not their new, SaaS-based EHR, which I actually find interesting. Also, he’s evidently interviewing scores of applicants, so I’m just one of who knows how many 30-minute calls. And there’s that whole snout-in-the-pharma-trough thing, which I find really troubling.

Ever since that call I thought about this. My current employment is…unsatisfactory; but I don’t see how I could feel like I had a scrap of integrity if I went over to that particular Dark Side. Any more than I could work for Wal-Mart.

So Thursday, when I got home from my daily snake-wrestling exercises, my thank-you email to the HM was a thanks-but-no-thanks.

Congressional credit downgraded

Poor, poor Congressmorons. It seems your actions do have consequences: Standard & Poor’s has downgraded our national credit rating—citing political instability as the main reason. Yes, the economy’s tanking, but S&P has got it spot on: turns out it’s not the economy, stupid, it’s the politicians who are more concerned with balancing their own re-election fund checkbooks than the nation’s.

Enjoy your vacation, the “August break” that you couldn’t wait to get off to, regardless of the state of the economy. Housemorons didn’t even stick around for the Senate vote on raising the debt ceiling, barreling their way to the airports to get their auto-upgrade-to-first-class seats home to their districts or summer homes. And having not a care for the tens of thousands of FAA employees who’d been “furloughed” while ’Pubs shut down operations in an attempt to score points against Dems.

The FAA shutdown—the whole national dysfunction distilled to a single episode—swirled around a Florida Congressmoron tacking on a couple of provisions to the otherwise-ordinary FAA funding extension bill: to cut off subsidies to small airports (only in districts represented by Dems) and to throttle the ability of airline employees to organize and participate in unions. John Mica, that particular moron, quite the posturing puff-pigeon when he thought he’d be a Tea Party hero, spent Friday whining to Dana Milbank of the Washington Post. Seems, unlike Sally Fields, we don’t like him; we really don’t like him. And he just doesn’t get it.

No kidding.

But Mica’s not the only one we despise; the NY Times reports that 82% of Americans “disapprove of the way Congress is handling its job”. Two thoughts on that: 1) 82% seems low; 2) For “disapprove” I’d have substituted something along the lines of “consider them the lowest form of life on earth.”

So, the Congressional credit rating has been downgraded. Me, I’d put it at about a C: In default with little prospect for recovery.

Imagine that—you screw with the lives of thousands of FAA employees and millions of Americans…and there are negative consequences? Who’da thunk it?

So, pity the poor Congressmorons, who may discover that because of them causing the downgrading of US credit rating and subsequent tightening of money, their corporate contributors may find it harder to write out the really fat checks to their re-election campaigns or sweep them, their families and staff off in corporate jets on “fact-finding” junkets to Costa Rica or Lausanne.

Sadly, though, no matter what hard times these hacks face, the American people will have it worse.

That nuclear glow in Sweden

I was under the impression that Swedes didn’t have to worry about much more than the high price of alcohol & the high suicide rate (which may or may not be connected); but it seems like another potential concern has popped up on the worry radar: whether or not your neighbor is building a nuclear reactor in his kitchen.

Richard Handl, a resident of Angelholm, a town in the west of the country, attracted police attention last month when he contacted the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority to inquire if it’s legal for an individual to construct a reactor at home. Well, you can imagine how that might perk up official ears, can’t you? It turns out that you’re not allowed to have radioactive materials without a permit in Sweden.

Handl was arrested and released after a hearing. But the cops took all his radioactive stuff away.

Now, here’s the thing: look at the photo of his “melt-down” that Handl posted on his blog. From the number of cigarette butts in that ashtray, I’d say he’s in greater danger of lung cancer, or of setting his building on fire, than of achieving fission.

Following Newt: no human involvement

This should come as no surprise to any human with three synapses firing in sequence:  it’s been reported that 92% of Newt Gingrich’s followers on Twitter are not human.

No, we’re not talking Tea Partiers here; a search company has determined that only 8% of little Newtie’s followers are verifiably humanoid. The rest are spambots.

The report goes on to say that an unnamed Gingrich staffer has admitted that he’s paid for followers. I suppose that’s less slimy than paying for sex; but just as sad.

Mashable has produced a chart tracking the human-vs.-bot Twitter-follower ratio for a number of Republican presidential hopefuls. What I am finding hard to believe is that Michele Bachman’s is as high as 28%.

Navigating the galaxy

So, if you don’t like the voice of that cow, Jill, who directs you on your Garmin sat-nav device, you can now let The Force or The Dark Side guide you. According to a report in the LA Times, for a mere $12.99 each you can download the voice—and speech patterns—of Yoda & Darth Vader.

I suppose if you require entertainment with everything, including GPS, it’s value for money. Me, I think either of them would get on my nerves after a while. Jill certainly has, & I got her for free with the device.

I wonder how either Jedi handles the dreaded “reCALculating” that I hear much more often than I’d like?

Tax dollars actually at work

I went trawling the Web to try to find any politician who doesn’t behave like our Congressmorons in D.C. And--imagine this, there is one.

I give you the mayor of Redondo Beach, Calif., a gay, Asian Republican who works with his constituents to maintain both a satisfactory level of services and a balanced budget.

I understand this is a solution that is not, as we say in the tech business, scalable. Mike Gin’s election didn’t come at a campaign cost of millions, so he didn’t have to sell his soul to multi-national corporations. Therefore he’s able to focus on, you know, the work and the outcomes to people who don’t pay his bills.

But, given what we’ve had to put up with for the past few weeks, months and years on a state and national level, I want to focus on the concept that elected officials can actually do right by the people who put them in office, even if it’s just in Surf City USA.