Potluck 'Round the Hearth

While discussing the issues of public space for resources in Peopleware, the authors quote from Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language:

"Without communal eating, no human group can hold together. Give each [working group] a place where people can eat together. Make the common meal a regular event."

The authors go on to highlight the relationship between shared space in broader societal terms (the home, in particular) and the office workspace.

As so many of us spend a great deal of time and a large portion of our lives at work, I believe strongly in extending my definition of "family" to include the people I work with. This fits naturally with the hierarchical structure found so often in work places: my immediate circle of co-workers becomes my brothers and sisters; my managers becomes parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts; other colleagues in the organisation become cousins and second cousins.

From this mindset (and, admittedly from a mindset that includes fun and enjoyment!), I introduced my team to the potluck lunch about a year and a half ago. The potluck concept was not my idea: I attended a party held outside work by a colleague from my previous employer and the party was themed around the potluck; the people and layout of the workspace of my new employer simply allowed me to suggest we bring the team together on a regular basis and everyone bring a single dish of food.

Although we don't measure many things at Tourism--let alone productivity increases, the potluck lunch concept has proven successful in general. At the very least, it's a great opportunity to sit back with my work family, indulge in new and interesting food, and have a chat... a scheduled group downtime. It's also been an interesting way to introduce new team members to others in the office and give them a sense of how we work and what it feels like to be a part of our team.


We aim for a monthly potluck lunch and usually go in for some kind of theme. When our first potluck was held, we had a very diverse team and everyone brought food representative of their home culture. We'll also hold a goodbye potluck when someone leaves the team.

The rules of potluck are few and simple:

1. Each person only brings enough food to feed one to two people (or a single dish);
2. Each person tries their utmost to make something at home the night before--food purchased the day of the potluck is usually a rush job and tends to be deep-fried;
3. Alcohol is a suitable food substitute (but this works at Tourism).

We don't usually plan who's bringing what--it usually just works out. As we do have a few vegetarians about we try to cater for them and generally try to arrive at a balance of savoury vs sweet (dessert is always nice!).

Reach for the Light

So close... yet so far.

ebay Retailers That Suck

My wife bought an MP3 player a few weeks ago and after deciding she wanted an arband for it we hunted around and finally found a workable version on ebay from Accstation (www.accstation.com). We won the auction at $0.99 and after adding a few dollars shipping and handling, it looked like yet another successfull online transaction. Then came the payment part.

Accstation uses a third-party company to process credit card payments (they also offer payment via PayPal). I opted to use the credit card payment method, completed the online forms, and clicked the submit button: transaction failed. Okay... I thought, probably just a temporary problem with their servers or a network issue, let's try again. Same error. Well, I thought, since I'm seeing this error, the transaction surely can't be reaching the payment gateway; let's start again from the beginning and double-check all my details. Transaction failed. Okay, I'm fed up now... one last time for the fun of it and I'll call my credit card company. Transaction failed.

At this point I give MasterCard a buzz to ensure my card hasn't been blocked and I have sufficient funds to pay the lousy $0.99 + S/H. The representative tells me everything is fine with the card and my account BUT four transactions just went through for the same amount. They haven't been approved yet but there are my four failed transactions. Blow gasket now.

I email the seller directly, I send the seller a note via ebay, I email the credit card processing company. Accstation's autoresponder autoresponds with a useless email message and the credit card processing company refuses to take any responsibility for this fiasco, despite their involvement in processing my payment four times over. A day passes while I wait for a response from Accstation and then another day and another day. I browse their web site and email their accounts department, their sales department, their customer service department, and their auctions department. MasterCard tells me they can't do anything until the transactions are approved.

Someone finally replies and asks me to email them back with my credit card number, expiry date, amount, etc and they'll get back to me within three to five days. There's no way I'm going to send a mysterious bot my credit card details via email and they shouldn't require that information anyway. I never hear back from "Tammy."

In the end, ebay notifies me I won the auction and must pay up before the week is out or I'll be stricken down by the Internet gods. The four payments finally disappear from my MasterCard account and I log in to Accstation's payment system to pay my $0.99 bill, this time via PayPal. The planets align and this time everything works... a week later and my wife has her arm band.

$0.99 plus shipping and handling works out to very little profit for Accstation but I did not hesitate to leave a negative feedback rating on ebay and there's no way I'll ever buy anything from this company again. For the minimal effort it takes to reply to an email from an upset customer, the end result could have been a win-win situation.

The Final Effect

Friday morning and the cummulative effects of yet another change request set in...

Code monkey loves it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W_wd9Qf0IE

Creative Zen Neeon 2 (2GB)

My wife bought the Creative Zen Neeon 2 (2GB) on Saturday for a mere $99 (AUD) from MYER. Shopbot and MyShopping were listing the same player from $179 to $226 at various online retailers so it all seems like a great deal from a big department store! 2GB is by no means huge but for the price you can't go wrong.

The sound quality on this device using the supplied earbuds is quite good with a nice range. We had the bass boost turned on initially and had to turn it off because some songs were distorting slightly. Bass response was still great.

The user interface isn't bad once you get used to it (my wife isn't a technophile and she cottoned on in no time) and the thumb wheel works quite well. I don't have huge hands but my hand did start getting tired after playing with the thing for a while. The unit has volume controls and a record button one side and a play/pause/power button on the other side with the thumb wheel. Neither of us have used the iPod wheel before so I guess we don't know what we're missing out on--and don't care!

The Zen plays MP3, WMA, and WAV formats. It also plays video but the video has to be transcoded using the supplied software. Images are viewable as JPGs. The radio reception was a little iffy and was coming in quite fuzzy while the FM radio on my mobile phone had crystal clear reception right beside the Zen. I haven't tried the line-in function yet. The display was nice and bright and the shiny black surface of the case didn't show too many fingerprints.

Without installing the software suite, we connected up to a USB 2.0 port off a Windows XP computer and were able to start copying files immediately. Transfer time wasn't exactly fast but nothing to complain about. The internal folder structure on the device is extremely logical and you could probably copy other files onto the player for moving to and fro. We also connected the device to a Windows Vista computer using slower USB 1.0 ports but the player wasn't recognised and we didn't persevere.

The unit came with earbuds, a USB cable, a line-in cable (1/8"), a lanyard, a DVD with a user manual and software, a printed user manual, and some stickers. The battery is built-in and presumably not user-serviceable. I'm pretty sure this thing has a 1-year warranty.

I don't think I'd pay full-price for a player of this size but at $99 the iPod and variants don't really compare.

My "Cubicle" Rocks!!!

I recently reconfigured things at work...

Disabling the "Reply to All" email button

Gotta love it when the CEO sets the technology direction in your office... (the identities of those involved in this memo have been obscured but this is a genuine email). Guess that's the final nail in the coffin for Outlook on my desktop.

Surely there's a Dilbert strip for this?

From: xxx
Sent: Thursday, 21 June 2007 10:25 AM
To: All Staff
Subject: Disabling the "Reply to All" email button

The CEO has requested that Corporate IT disable the “Reply to All” button for all staff in order to assist with email and time management.

We will trial this for a few weeks and then I will seek feedback on how effective this has been and request executive directors to bring the feedback to the executive management team for discussion.

The process will happen progressively over the next few days.

Thanks

xxx
Executive Director

Saturday Shopping

I don't understand what went wrong with my parent's generation. They showed so much promise with their bombs, telecommunication, and political reform but they make out as though the race to the moon was only the first stage in the race of life: hussle, bussle--they can't get there fast enough no matter the price. In contrast, I believe our generation is now responsible for putting the humanity back into a world left devoid of everything but some elusive end goal.

Saturday grocery shopping, if you do it regularly, makes the Christmas rush seem like nothing out of ordinary. The shops are busy, the shelves are empty, and no one really wants to be there. I'm a happy Saturday shopper and I use each experience to test and develop my patience. Most times I make it through.

This Saturday seemed especially busy for whatever reason. It was the first cool weekend in a long while so my guess is families were out to stock up after a month of lying around sweating. Nevermind, I thought, I'm in no rush today so I'll just have to try extra hard to be patient and polite; "after you", "go ahead", smile and say "excuse me, thank you." With the narrow isles full of the overweight, carts, and mothers with strollers for triplets, there would be, I knew, a lot of standing around waiting.

At one point, momentarily frozen int time waiting for the isle to clear before I could move past the stacks of broken eggs and on towards the vegetarian sausages, my personal space suddenly vanished as a well-dressed, dark-haired woman well into middle-age squeezed up next to me and then bolted past into the gap only to stop in front of me. "Now that's pushing it, lady," I thought to myself. No "excuse me", no smile, only an in-grained push to get there sooner, get the job done, and trample anyone in the way.

"Have a taste of your own medicine, if you're going to be that way," I shouted at her in my mind as I plowed into the melay of shopping carts and unwashed Saturday shoppers. With her cart in the mix, the gap had narrowed significantly so I pushed forward, nosing my cart into what must have been the one piece of unoccupied real-estate in the entire store. I plowed her cart out of the way and then knocked it again for good measure before continuing on my way, a dazed mother glaring at me all the while. Yes, shame on me for my childish retaliation but let that be a lesson to the pushy woman.

I shuffled on in my sandy thongs not feeling any better for my actions--on reflection, feeling worse. Nevertheless, my calm depened as I resolve to kick back against the rush and hurry imposed on me by this boom-time generation. With all the man-made pressures built into our lives I'm finally beginning to understand why so many of me friends and classmates turned to cigarettes, booze, and pot over the years.

I always think back to my drives between Montreal and Ottawa as a university student returning home for a weekend or during the holidays. The old Grand Marquis I drove (a 5.0 litre V8) handled the drive at 140km/h quite happily but as the car moved ever closer to the scrap heap, exaust fumes seeping in through the salt-rusted holes in the floor meant the trip had to be completed at 90km/h in the slow lane. At either speed, the journey always took two hours.

Metric Time

As a computer scientist, working with standard units of time can be a frustrating experience. I'm sure the existing time and calendar systems made sense when everyone followed the gods, the moon, the sun, and the seasons but I think it's safe to say most of the first world population rely on a digital watch and computer-based calendar (and for those who don't, then there's even more reason to move away from their old world equivalents). Since no sane person uses imperial measurement anymore unless they're American or my mom (are either really sane?), I, Pope Michaelus I, hereby deem it 'time' to make the move to metric time. I think we all can handle it.

Everything in glorious units of ten (except weeks—a ten day week might kill me... oh yeah, and months will be a bit weird). So I propose not quite metric time and it all hangs on the seven-day week:

1 year = 10 months

It's pretty simple and time will seem like it goes even faster but you won't get old as quickly.

1 month = 4 weeks

We definitely need to keep months so we can continue having cake days at work once a month. I guess they're communal birthday celebration days really but it's not like I know half the birthday boys and girls anyway. Anyway, cake day might get lost in a year without months. 4 weeks (or 28 days) is a nice compromise and even though 28 is a weird number, at least it will be static. And no leap years—time can move independent of the sun so let it. A month could, following debate, be drawn out to 5 weeks for quasi-metric support but you know what those 31-day months are like—imagine every month being 35 days long. 28 days = more cake.

1 week = 7 days

I'm working a lot of overtime at work these days—mainly weekends—and from current hands-on experience I can tell you do I don't want a 10 day work week. Without a doubt, the business analysts and project managers would jump at the idea so this one's gotta be a special case and it's got to be set in stone up front. 7 is also a lucky number.

1 day = 10 hours

This is where things start getting a bit difficult. A ten hour 'day' is miles off our current 24-hour day so there'll definitely be some adjusting to do. If you put this in context with a week and weeks in months and months in years, those units also start going a bit wonky. But fingers crossed, it'll all work out something like Mexico with lots of sunshine and siesta time. And burritos.

1 hour = 100 minutes

I'm tempted to stick with 10s on this one but seeing as how we've already shrunk down days and stuff... 100 minutes per hour makes sense anyway. Sort of like those 90-minute classes they made me get through in high school—bearable, just. I think all the clock watchers at work would blow a fuse if an hour went by in ten minutes. At any rate, 100s are still metric, so stop your complaining.

1 minute = 100 seconds

No one cares about seconds anyway so just K.I.S.S.

1 second = 1 second

No more of this milli and micro b.s. Like I said, K.I.S.S. and I can never remember which is which so just forget it. Just talk about half a second or tenths of a second or .0484822999299000123 and you'll be fine. That's the beauty of the metric system. Could even just get rid of seconds altogether and just think about bits of a minute—easy!

And of course, most importantly, there will be no daylight savings. I actually read a post out from some guy who manually hacked the Windows registry to program Western Australia Daylight Savings into his PC before Microsoft released their dodgy patch that doesn't work with Vista. I'm a west-aussie so I had to dig around, you see. Anyway, geeks being geeks, I think this guy could have put his time and talents to better use. The debate rages over here but simplicity for us programmers pretty much blows all other arguments out of the water.

By the way, metric time started about half an hour ago so someone better find that registry hacker and see if he fix up our Windows clocks to work all metric like. No doubt Outlook will be off for a while but meetings are a waste of time anyway.