Government Workers and Religious Holidays

Here’s an interesting mental exercise:

Should government agencies be prevented from taking Sunday off because its a religious holiday?

If you doubt that Sunday is a “holiday”, then check your “red-letter” calendar. While Saturdays are marked in black, traditionally all Sundays are marked in the red, “holiday” color.

Also, is a national holiday of Christmas a violation of church and state separation?

 

12/8/2005 9:41:17 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Unintended Consequences
So, has anybody thought that global warming might be beneficial?
12/6/2005 9:57:50 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  

What does it mean to be "Tolerant"?

Michael Barone published an interesting entry on the limits of tolerance. I think that it raises an interesting question: Does tolerance require the tolerating intolerance?

For me, it brings to mind the “fact” (at least I think its a fact) that America’s religious freedom was born out of religious intolerance. Part of the “free expression of religion” that folks like the Pilgrims and Puritans came to America for was to limit free expression within their own group (or even locality).

There seems to be a fine line here.

12/6/2005 9:11:56 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  world affairs | politics | general

IT Motivation

I was reading the tail column in the November 21 edition of InfoWorld, “Off the Record (Anonymous Tales from the Front Lines)”.  The title of the article is “When Your Clients Hate IT”. The author relates a story of having to deal with users who’ve been burned by a previous BPA (Business Process Analyst). At the end of the article he says “I sometimes wonder why people, especially the customer-facing ones, in the IT profession forget that they belong to a service organization”. While I understand, and empathize, with his feelings, he doesn’t seem to understand the realities of the IT world. Having worked for five years in IT, I learned quite a bit about that particular viewpoint.

There are three typical attitudes that you’ll see among IT workers:

1. “This is just a job”: These folks come to work and do their job. It’s a paycheck to them, and they have not real personal investment beyond that. They’re the IT equivalent of the civil servant. These folks don’t seem to realize that this attitude is not conducive to a long career in IT. And, in fact, they’re usually the first to go in a downturn. On the bright side, they’re extremely rare in the IT industry. As a whole, there’s just too much stress and overwork to make this type of job attractive to the paycheck crowd.

2. “I’m here for the users”: These folks get their “reward” from empowering and supporting the line workers. Judging from the tone of the article I read, this is the type of IT worker who wrote it. And, this was the type of IT worker I was for those five years. As I learned the hard way, career advancement for these types is also limited. This is where the “reality” of IT enters the picture, and the third type of IT worker.

3. “I’m here to get ahead”: These folks know which side of the bread is buttered. They know the primary fact of life for IT, and act accordingly. Which leads to this important fact: IT gets its rewards from the executives, and its the executives that a successful IT worker must keep happy. Often, this means ignoring the “needs” of the line worker while satisfying the needs of an executive or executives. This is the dirty, little secret of IT: success is not connected to satisfying line workers (at least not directly) or even to business success of the company, it’s all tied to keeping VP’s, Presidents, and various “Chief” officers happy. When they’re happy, IT is rewarded. If they’re not happy, then IT feels the brunt. The sad fact is that because IT is seen as an “internal” “service” department, their productivity is rarely connected to the success/failure of line workers or the company as a whole.

12/2/2005 10:12:43 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Well, this is a surprise!

A few moments ago, I went to the OOPSLA 2006 site, just to see what’s going on and where it will be. Well, did I get a surprise! It’s going to be in Portland next year! sweet!

12/1/2005 12:01:39 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  development

New Media

I don’t (as yet) have a “movie” category, so this gets cross filed as both “TV” and “General”.

In checking the news today, two thoughts concerning the current state of the Entertainment industry popped into my head:

1. The movie industry is overdue for a paradigm shift. Theaters are not cutting it anymore. Personally, I’m going to about 1 movie a year now. I’d much rather be sitting in my living room, complete with surround sound and a wide screen TV, watching a DVD than schlepping to the movie theater just to “share the experience” with a bunch of strangers. And, frankly, the picture quality at the theater is not as good as what I have at home. It’s time for the theaters, and the movie industry as a whole, to do something about this. So, either they give up on theaters (not an impossibility, where are all the drive-ins now?), or they remake them into some kind of super living room. Frankly, if they don’t figure out something soon, the movie going public with figure it out for them.

2. Then, there’s TV. According to New York Metro, this summer Universal did an interesting thing: they released a movie based upon a TV series that flopped. Of course, I’m talking about Serenity, the movie version of the Firefly series that Fox cancelled (they also cancelled Family Guy. sounds like a pattern forming). The article (much later, but read the whole thing anyway) goes on to speculate that if Joss Whedon were to do a new season of Firefly, direct to DVD, he could end up with $40 million to play with, without a network or advertisers, or even a schedule time slot. How sweet would that be? TV’s due for a major shakeup. The big thing’s not that you can download Lost or Desperate Housewives to a little hand-held device, but that this technology lets you watch the show whenever you want! It’s only a matter of time (and not a lot of that) before people are watching TV shows when they want, where they want with (possibly) little or no commercial interruption, or commercials will be targeted specifically to them (a la Google), so folks will actually choose to watch them. I can’t wait…

 

11/30/2005 5:08:28 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | TV

Unintended Consequences

According to FuturePundit, through Instapundit, the demand for biofuels is destroying rain forests. As Glenn Reynolds said, “oops”.  Apparently, the worldwide market for “green energy” (mainly from Europe) is driving the need for vegetable oils, especially palm and soybean oil. And, this is being met by countries in the tropical climates cutting down their rain forests for farmland.

On the other hand, I keep thinking of the beginning of the last century, when the advent of the automobile was looked upon as a pollution reducer. Imagine a city the size of Manhattan with a horse for every car…

I also remembering someone calling hydrogen burning “non-polluting” because it “just” produced water vapor. Of course, water vapor is a greenhouse gas…

 

11/23/2005 4:02:29 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | world affairs

My suspicions are confirmed!
Computerworld just published an article that has confirmed what I’ve suspected for a long time: Linus growth is affecting the Unix community a lot more than its affecting the Windows community.
11/23/2005 3:08:06 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | development

Education and Intolerance

Today on Sean Hannity, Sean was interviewing Rebecca Beach, a college student who was verbally attacked (via e-mail) by a professor. Of course, this was a case where a left-wing professor clashed with a right-wing student (why else would Sean be interviewing the student). However, this isn’t the first time I’ve noticed this. My eldest niece, who recently graduated from a state college, had similar experiences, where her professor presented a position that she completely disagreed with. And, she felt that by commenting on this, she would be placing her grade in jeopardy.

When did this happen? When I was in school, the educational system was a haven for right-wing thought, and (surprise, surprise) the “powers that were” did not hesitate to cut off any open discussion on the topics of the day. The professors of today also grew up in this period, and you’d think they would have learned something about the necessity of fostering a free expression of ideas. Instead, we have a current educational system that is at least as closed minded as that of the previous generation.

Schools, especially colleges, should be places where discussions happen, not indoctrination. We need to foster the development of educators who put education and discussion first, not their own particular beliefs.

11/23/2005 2:05:22 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

TDD
Microsoft has been receiving a lot of criticism over their TDD Guidelines. I didn’t realize what the real issue was until I read Scott Bellware’s comments. I recommend his his article (and probably his blog) to anyone interested in: agile development, TDD, or (generally) the future of software development. This is good stuff.
11/22/2005 10:54:03 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  development