Teleidoscope

Fri, Apr 11, 2008

Brown

Posted at 7:19 pm MDT to Technology

The new laptop arrived at 11:30, fortunately. I think being interrupted during the conference call would have wiped me out. I opened the package after I came off the clock at 4pm, and it booted into Ubuntu

It's brown. Not tan or beige. Brown. With interesting grooved textured strips near the hinge that will make it less slippery than smooth metal would be. I find myself wondering which Mac model inspired it: it is very sleek and designed.

The power brick for it is about 1/4 of the size of sophia's. I hope this means it will be less of a space heater.

This weekend I will get it configured: KDE and my standard apps. And I'm going to make it an LDAP client with userids and passwords served from my big server.

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3 AM Rant

Posted at 6:46 am MDT to Miscellaneous

I went to bed at a reasonable hour, and woke up at two AM. At three, I decided I need to explain while I'm alert and coherent, which I was then and am unlikely to be at noon due to lack of sleep. At about four am I sent the following to my bosses at my company and the client, and too our sales manager.

---

One key requirement of this current contract is that I am supposed to mentor
various technical teams in the practical applications of various [client]
standards and procedures, in addition to mentoring them in the use of
ClearCase and ClearQuest per se. This implies that the standards and
procedures must exist at the practical level and that they must be
communicated to me in a usable form. This is not the case.

When I ask technical questions about the application of [client] policies and
procedures to specific real world situations, I occasionally receive a direct
answer. Experience indicates that if I perform tasks based on that answer,
the results will often turn out not to be what was actually desired, so I
need to re-do the tasks.

Repeatedly asking for verification and clarification, with paraphrases of my
understanding of the instructions I have been given, does not prevent
problems. I will be repeatedly assured that what I am planning or doing is
correct, until it is done, and wrong. (The same pattern affects instructions
I am given for specific individual tasks.)

If I am not given a direct answer, but instead receive a pointer to a document
or real world example, the document or example that I am directed to will
usually not, in fact, address the specific technical question I originally
asked. When I attempt to generalize from the simple cases that are actually
discussed or the examples I am given, to determine a rule that fits my
particular technical case, the result will be wrong.

Through trial and error, I have managed to determine some procedures and
standards at the practical level that apply to the specific cases I have
encountered. This has been a slow process, and I have no confidence that the
rules I have derived are applicable to any other specific cases (quite the
contrary: the policies as applied seem to exist as a disjoint enumerated set
rather than as a system of general rules with specific exceptions).

It is difficult to approach providing mentoring about something that does not
appear to exist in an articulable form.

It is difficult to complete specific tasks when the requirements provided turn
out to have been imprecise, or simply wrong, and requests for clarification
provide either no additional information or inaccurate information, or
information that is subject to change without advance notice.

---

When I am really upset, I don't go to four-letter words as much as four-syllable ones.

I'm glad tomorrow is Farmers' Market day. At least lettuce and onions are solid and tangible. I am so tired of chasing smoke with a butterfly net.

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