Stars 'n b'ars

I don’t know what happened to the candy canes that appeared outside my office a couple of days after Halloween, but on Wednesday they replaced them with this star:

And then yesterday the star was joined by three bears:

(Not sure how it works, but the bears are somehow associated with a children’s charity. UPDATE: Children's Hospital--you go to their website, make a donation and somehow the bears have more wattage?)

Just the week before Thanksgiving. Ho, ho, ho.

Baking bread

Whee, doggies, guys—I got in to work yesterday at 0620 to find a couple dozen emails in my queue requesting reinstatement of access to the product I’m managing. From then until 1630 when I took my laptop home in case any late-ish requests came in, it was a nonstop day.

I barely had 10 minutes a couple of times to check on the impeachment hearings.

But there were a number of clarifications in those 10 hours—much needed, to be sure, but still the fact that we’re circling in on what needs to be done is so refreshing. It’s not endless yakkery of the same old subjects in meeting after meeting. Brioche is going to be a thing, and I’m part of it.

Missed opportunity

Yesterday our corporate spam filter caught something with the subject line, “Your Wish Is Our Command”.

Now why would they think that’s in any way suspicious?

 🤣🤣🤣

Relativity

So, yesterday—well, it started on Friday—one of the products I’m managing kind of blew up. More specifically, we’d changed the access mode from Active Directory to roles-based, and clearly something went wrong.

We’d somehow given everyone not assigned to a specific role (customer support, consulting, systems engineering, etc.) a default role of absolute power: they got super-admin functionality and could do anything they wanted. Friday, Engineering changed the default to what we give sales—which is to say, nearly nothing, because you frankly have to keep your eye on these guys or they’ll give everything away to make a sale.

Well—within a New York instant, Microsoft Teams blew up with people wanting to know why they have access to nearly nothing. Turns out somehow a lot of folks got moved from appropriate entitlements to what we give sales, and I spent a good amount of the day resetting the permissions.

Well, that continued yesterday, and the head of systems engineering was absolutely steamed.

And I happened to be out of the office for a good part of the day, because I had a doctor’s appointment in the District They Call Columbia, which kills half the day, metroing in, appointment and metroing back. So my PM colleague and the director of engineering took a lot of the WTF emails in my stead. I got back in time to sit in on the call with the very steamed SE head (my colleague is a star), and we’re still trying to get people back to work.

While I was in the District, I had a 30-minute catch-up with one of my former colleagues. And let me just say that—no matter how chaotic some of my current work is—I am so, so, so glad that I am no longer in that morass of poor management and organization. It seems that the Clown Car running the program from which I was laid off in June still have not settled on a contractor to build out the complex system they need in order to launch their very worthy initiative. This was supposed to have been accomplished (hiring the consultants) in July. We’re now rounding the corner for December. That means they will have nothing to launch for the foreseeable future.

Gawd.

If I were there I’d still be dealing with master-level ignorance and incompetence. And I’d be dying of frustration. Compared to that a very steamed head of SEs is paradise.

Gratitude Monday: quite the week

Well, well, well. Interesting times in the District They Call Columbia, eh? Quite the spectacle, watching dedicated, principled career foreign service officers send Repugs at all levels into apoplexy.

Roger Babadook Stone: Guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty, guilty.

A surprise visit to Walter Reed Medical Center, possibly setting up the pretext of a resignation “for medical reasons” before the Cheater in Chief is forced to turn over his tax returns to SDNY or congressional committees. Possible flare-up of #bonespurs? That worked for him before...

Outside the District, John Bel Edwards: reelected governor of Louisiana despite the Chaos Monkey’s three rallies in five weeks, at the last of which he begged his assembled knuckledraggers not to let him down and vote for the Repug.

This has been a week.

Today I am grateful for the integrity and courage of public servants, the perspicacity of the jurors in the Stone trial, and even for the bird-flipping voters of Louisiana.

And let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everlasting stream.

Survival of the filthiest

Back in the last century, I could not feature what people saw in Macy’s, and my opinion has not changed much since then.

Their merchandise is unexceptional and it’s put out on the sales floor with all the élan of Kohl’s. A friend of mine in the Valley They Call Silicon used to pick up some extra cash around the holidays by putting clothes that customers had pulled out—refolding sweaters and jeans, and hanging dresses and the like on the racks. After the Cupertino store closed, she was sent to the Stanford Mall one, and I don’t know how she found the strength to come in to work: the two times I went there, clothes were jammed into the rounders and actually just tossed on the floor.

Stanford Mall is one of the snootier shopping centers in the Valley.

Anyhow, a month or so ago when I was in Tysons Corner mall, I wandered through the Macy’s and was reminded why I don’t even like to go in there. These are louvres on fitting room doors:

They haven’t been dusted in donkey’s years.

And here’s the floor of the fitting room:

I was there around 30 minutes after opening time. They obviously don’t vacuum between store closing and opening.

And I remember that, back in the 90s, I saw the same thing.

I do not comprehend how this is the department store left standing over Wanamaker's, Marshall Field, Hecht, Bullock's and the rest.

Another first

Holy cow, guys!

At my 1:1 with my manager yesterday, I brought up my quarterly goals, which include a shedload of ramping up about cybersec; come the New Year I want to have a path (internal and external) to understanding more about the tech and the practice, because I’m behind. I mentioned that I came across my “90-day onboarding calendar” that they give you and said I hadn’t had time to look at it since I printed it out a month ago, because Stuff.

Then I showed him something I’d captured in a customer call (how they categorize cyber threats); I found it interesting because it doesn’t use the nomenclature that seems to be standard in cyber security, and giving customers the ability (through AI) to map what they’re looking for to the categories we use might be A Thing. And I mentioned something that struck me in an IDC report on one of our competitors: one of their customers uses threat intel to rule out vendors if they show up on the Dark Web. (There was a bunch of Cyber Stuff in the report, but I found that off-label use of the data just fascinating, like pivoting on migraine meds and coming up with Botox.)

Well, we got to talking about Project Brioche and I’d just finished spitballing about the prototype demo that’s coming up in a couple of weeks, and what I see as the next steps when he said, “Going back to the start, we made the right decision.”

It took a while for the Pachinko ball to filter through, but I realized the “right decision” was hiring me. I’d just been pointing out some things that strike me as interesting, and a good part of the reason (aside from just the weird things I find interesting) is that I am not cyber-embedded. I’m looking at it from my own different perspective.

Well, I cautiously recounted what the SVP had told me was the explanation given her as to why I, and not the person with much more cyber experience, was their choice. I told him that that description was true, but what’s remarkable is that they value me because of my differences, not despite them. And this makes me very happy.

He said his position was that they can teach me the tech, and the environment, but that my “new eyes” and ability to articulate what I see is not something just anyone can do.

(It helps, of course, that everyone I work with is supportive, generous and professional—which I told him. There are going to be assholes, but there are none on my team, and none in the greater business unit so far.)

Like many other experiences here, this conversation is a first for me. I love this job.

A great beat; I give it a three

I was at a conference last month. Not much of a brainer but the official party at the end of Day 1 was an Octoberfest jobber. The weather was nice, so it was held in the hotel’s courtyard, the sauerbraten and other snacks were fine and the sparkling wine was eminently drinkable.

But then they had a band.

I have so many questions. Like—do they wear those outfits to and from the gigs, or do they change at the venue? You wouldn’t want to get stopped by the State Police and end up spending the night in the hoosegow in those getups. Also, do they have other outfits for when they’re The Mariachi Brothers or play at bar mitzvahs?

Frankly, I find that stuff kind of cringeworthy, although not as much as Morris dancers. Those guys give me the willies.

But my real issue with them (and I was not alone in this) was their volume. Their playing was fine, but they had a sound setup that would have provided enough amplification to fill the Rose Bowl. They’d have been pleasantly audible if they’d turned off all the amps and just gone acoustic.

It was rather amusing, though. I left as they were breaking into that old Bavarian standard, “The Gambler”. America, gonif.

Wintering up

Predictions are for a serious cold spell this week, although it looks as though the worst forecast for our area has been amended. By which I mean that they’re taking back the promise of snow, which is fine by me.

But imagine my surprise when I opened my patio door yesterday late morning to toss out a handful of Fine Tunes seed on the ground for the quintet of juncos that have been acting like vacuum cleaners for the past couple of days and finding the temperature so mild that I left the door open.

Meanwhile, it’s 92 in Palm Springs, and Chicago’s snowstorm is so bad that planes are skidding off the runway at O’Hare.

But the juncos are happy. Although they’re going to have to get by for the next few days with what I toss out in the early morning and then in the early evening. Gotta go to work to be able to afford all this flipping birdseed…

Gratitude Monday: honoring service

At the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, the guns of the War to End All Wars fell silent. The survivors crawled out of their trenches, scraped caked mud off their uniforms and tried to understand how to live normal lives again.

Well—that was a pipe dream; societies always try to return to normal after cataclysms, but the fact is, “normal” is one of the first casualties of wartime service. Along with truth.

I thought a lot about that as I visited the military cemeteries of the Western Front—French, British, German, American. More than other graveyards, military cemeteries display the true democracy of death: the uniformity of the headstones; regular rows; whatever the rank, no one more elaborate than any other. But that’s the dead: the living (more or less) returned to their homes to find that their governments wanted them to resume their pre-war stations on pre-war terms, and their families wanted them to pretend they hadn’t been through what they had.

We still do that—send men and women out to do the worst things imaginable and then ignore the human consequences, pretending that being a sapper or a tanker is just like being a plumber or a marketer. The fact that our longest-war-ever is not even a national effort, the way the World Wars were, keeps the blood-and-treasure costs out of mind for most Americans. If you’re not serving or know someone who is, it’s easy to ignore the price of policy.

Well, it’s Veterans Day here in the US, one of two days that we pay lip service to the sacrifices made by those who serve in our defense. Who take their oaths to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and pay a steep price for it. I am grateful for all of them, all the generations of them. And I’m grateful to be working with many of them who continue their service by protecting our cybersecurity.