Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Baby pictures are in!

Not much to say here. Just click on the photo to the right and look at my child through the glorious wonders of ... black and white ... something.

Monday, June 25, 2007

The sign says all you can eat...

...not all you'd care to eat. This line comes from a Far Side comic from many years ago. I was reminded of it yesterday for some reason.

Robert, a colleague from my previous school (some of you may remember him from the wedding) finally joined the 21st century and bought a computer. He consulted with me to select the computer and then Joan acted to bargain for him. This gave him a pretty decent laptop for a good price.

To reward us for our efforts, Robert, together with his girlfriend Xin Xia, took Joan and I out for dinner at "Kaiwei Beer House" -- a sort of upscale hotpot/buffet restaurant of the all-you-can-eat variety. There everybody pigged out (even Joan: she's entering her "permanently hungry" phase of pregnancy it seems) and we sat for close to two and a half hours talking, eating and generally enjoying ourselves. Finally we asked for the bill.

Now there were some food items left on the table. The waitress apologetically told us that if there was food left over we'd have to pay a surcharge. This led to some initial consternation, but this was rapidly followed with shrugged shoulders and us chowing down further. Then Joan decided she wanted more of this item. Xin Xia wanted more of this other item. Then the desserts were spotted and grabbed. Then salads were proposed and consumed. (Yes. In that order. Don't ask me to explain. My brain hurts.) A half-hour later we finally finished. Again. This time with an empty table, so no surcharge.

So let me get this straight: if we leave some food behind (and it wasn't a lot!) we have to pay extra but if we eat that food, plus a whole lot more, and we occupy a table for an extra half-hour, the price isn't raised?

I love this place!

Monday, June 11, 2007

This comes as absolutely no surprise to me

The Onion

Study: 38 Percent Of People Not Actually Entitled To Their Opinion

CHICAGO—In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago's...



If I never hear the expressions "to each their own" or "it takes all kinds" or "everybody has a right to their own opinion" ever again in my life, well it's 41 years too damned late. Not everybody's opinion is equal. Not everybody's opinion is informed. Not everybody's opinion is interesting. Not everybody's opinion is valid.

As far as I can tell, it is the people who live mediocre lives, think mediocre thoughts and otherwise excel at mediocrity who hold this view. Since they can't actually argue a position that's coherent, believable (or even plausible, at times), they recite mantras to make all disagreement go away.

I really think that The Onion is a better news source than the major news sources, despite being essentially devoid of what would ordinarily be termed "facts". I'm not sure if this depresses me or delights me.

Of course a lot of this comes as a reaction to teaching now. Before I joined the profession, I really didn't "get" Mr./Mrs. Garrison, one of the characters from Comedy Central's South Park television series. The various teaching jokes like "there's no such thing as a stupid question, children, just stupid people" and "OK, would someone like to try that who's not a complete retard?" just fell flat for me. It wasn't until I started doing the job that I realized the pain of being a teacher. There are students I've had in the past who I just inwardly winced at when I saw them eagerly waving their hands to ask (or worse, answer) a question. Why? Well, the two quotes from Mr./Mrs. Garrison say it all, really.

I think that this is the kind of thing that you can really only understand when you live it. I'm sure that many of my rants on software and software development in the past caused blank incomprehension in the non-technical.

Thursday, June 7, 2007

"Summer... turns me upside down."

Free cookies (nice salty ones with chives in them -- I'm in China, remember!) to anybody who can figure out where the title comes from.

So summer is officially approaching. Technically I'm still in spring here, but I find it difficult to refer to 33°C@80%+ as "spring". Still, this is approaching the end of my sixth year in China, so I'm getting used to the heat. I'm not even using the air conditioner yet. I've partially adapted, it seems.

Maybe the massive weight loss has something to do with it?

Anyway, with summer comes all sorts of other fun things besides heat and humidity. As usual these things come in two forms: the good and the bad. Maybe that should be "the good, the bad and the ugly". Only I'm in China. Let's modify this to "the good, the bad and the positively weird".

Let's look first at the good:

  • As the temperatures rise, the clothing gets skimpier and skimpier. Yes, I'm married, but this doesn't mean I'm dead! Watching the cute local girls wander around in clothing that would make a By Ward Market streetwalker gasp in shame (without the cynical, self-consciousness you'd find in said streetwalkers) is a good way to take my mind off of the searing heat.
  • The city explodes with greenery and flowers. A city that in the winter is the epitome of dingy industrial cities, grey and lifeless, suddenly sprouts green everywhere. The underlying acrid scent of pollution that permeates everything is masked very effectively by a bewildering variety of sweetly-scented flowers. They're even nice on the eyes—almost, but not quite, matching the scantily-clad girls.
  • A lot of my favourite foods here are summertime foods: especially the cold noodle(-like) dishes. These are coming to the table more and more often.

OK. That's pretty much it for the good. Now let's talk about the bad:

  • There is, of course, the searing heat. Today it was "only" 33°C. It's been warmer already—today was actually a bit of a relief—and it's going to get worse and worse. I've seen as high as 42°C with humidity well in excess of 70%.
  • The growth of all this greenery includes some plants (which I have yet to identify) which drive my nose nuts. This starts in early spring, goes away for a while, restarts around this time of year, disappears in early summer, then comes back at the tail end of summer. Every year for the past six I've lived through this and I hate it. I was allergic to nothing in Canada. It was a bit of a shock to find out how the allergy-plagued people live, let me tell you!
  • One word: mosquitoes. This place is a positive paradise for those little blood-sucking vermin. They invade everything. They'll even fly to the 20th story of skyscrapers and plague people. They're merciless and they're beyond counting. If you spend an evening killing them and managed to destroy 20, you can rest assured that there's dozens more hiding where you can't find them ready to come out at you when you're no longer looking for them.

Now it's time for the positively weird:

  • First on the weird list is the sheets I sleep on. If you click on the image to the right you'll notice something odd on the side of the bed farthest from the camera. It looks like the bed is covered with little pieces of wood, right? Well, it's not wood. It's bamboo. And it's hundreds of little pieces (slightly smaller in area than a Mah-jong tile) threaded together with fishing line and edged with stretchy rubber stuff. It keeps you cool in the heat. It sounds ridiculous and uncomfortable, but it is neither. It really works and it is actually quite comfortable. (The more hirsute among us have to wear light underclothes to bed, however, to avoid some truly painful moments.)
  • The second weird thing is probably leaping out at you in that picture while I babbled on about the sheets. Notice that funny dome over the bed? It's a tent. There is a tent over my bed. It is mesh on all sides, including the bottom. It zips up tight allowing nothing to get in. Since Joan is pregnant now she doesn't want us to light mosquito coils at night (what we used to do to keep mosquitoes from eating us alive). So instead we bought a tent to put on the bed. I was a bit sceptical at first, but it does work well. I even (mostly) fit!
  • The final weird thing is the bedding again. Ignore the covered half of the bed. For Joan the weather is still too cool for the bamboo sheets, you see, so we've folded a quilt for her side of the bed. Back over on the bamboo side, look at the odd pillow. It's made of woven grass on the side you can see. The other side is thin strips of bamboo. The filling is buckwheat husks. (It was once scented with chrysanthemum blooms, but those have long since faded away.) This is the pillow you use to keep your head cool at night. The side I have up now is suited to moderate heat. The other side is stiffer (and takes a lot of getting used to!) but is very suitable for the blazing heat later in the summer. Of course by that time I'll be firing up the air conditioner, so that side of the pillow will rarely see action. But it's there for the inevitable days where the power company decides to just shut down the electricity without warning. (Let's hope they at least pick a windy day for that!)

So, that was my little taste of China for this post. Hope you enjoyed it.

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

My eyes! They're burning!

One of the wonderful things I've found here in China is a set of eye drops. They are made by the Rohto (Mentholatum) company in Japan and the particular version I've got seems to be unavailable outside of Asia. (Other Rohto/Mentholatum eye drops are available in the USA, but none, for some reason, are available in Canada. This is too bad.)

I encountered these eye drops first about two years ago. My eyes got something caught in them that was very painful while I was walking down the street with Joan one day. We happened to be near a pharmacy, so we went inside and asked for eye drops. Joan looked over the available set and latched onto these ones. Right there in the shop we opened the package, undid the top and Joan dropped them in my eyes. As the bottle was moving to the first eye, I was thinking to myself, "hang on, this smells familiar – what is it?" Just as the drops hit my eye it struck me what that familiar scent was.

It was menthol. (Had I known that it was a product of the Mentholatum division of Rohto, of course, this wouldn't have been a surprise. Here, however, there is no such division. It was just the Rohto brand.)

Ten seconds of intense burning later something miraculous happened. The burning vanished. So did the pain of whatever it was that got in my eye and made it feel like a (very small) knife was stuck in it. So did all visible blood vessels when I checked the eye in a mirror the shop had. Indeed the eye that didn't get the drops looked positively unhealthy by comparison. Too, the eye in question not only felt better, it felt... cool, like someone had built a tiny air conditioner in it.

I quickly put the drops in the other eye and endured the ten seconds of burning and had the same magic feeling (and lack of redness) occur there as well. I've been using these drops ever since.

Monday, June 4, 2007

Living the Life of Cassandra

I've always felt some affinity for Cassandra of Greek fame. (For those not up on the classics, she was given the gift of prescience by Apollo, who was smitten with her, spurned Apollo's advances and was then cursed to have her accurate predictions of the future never believed.) I have a variant of her curse, you see. I see something. I have a very good idea of where it's going to go. I tell people. I'm not believed. It comes true.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I had this problem in my places of work, for example: a case in point being the company Entrust. The code name for one version of the software that was being pushed was "Project Banff". It was late and by all estimates was going to be slipping even further behind. Management came up with a "brilliant scheme" to provide "incentive" for getting it out on time.

"On time" for them was, if memory serves, the end of August of that year. Realistic estimates for completion put the real delivery date around October. This was unacceptable, so one of the VPs—the development VP—came up with this brilliant incentive scam scheme: if the product is shipped by August, the company would take all the developers and all the testers out for an all-expenses-paid trip to Banff for a week (or maybe two? -- memory fails from so long ago).

Now I was in an unusual (or, as it turns out, not so unusual) position in Entrust. I was a lowly software developer. Further, I had absolutely zero ambitions for a management role. Yet I think I may have been the only person in the whole company who'd actually taken, you know, honest-to-goodness management courses. Further, I was one of five people I knew—none of us managers (sorry, Jeff – you had no budget, so you were a supervisor, not a manager)—who actually read... well, anything, really, but especially books and articles on management and motivation. And what I knew from my training and my reading (as did anybody else in the vanishingly small group of us who knew anything on the subject) was that performance bonuses tied to a timetable failed. Always. 100% of the time.

You see, the management thinking behind such bogus schemes is that workers are malingering and grossly overestimating the time required to do tasks. If they are given an incentive, they'll stop goldbricking, put their noses to the grindstone blah blah blah blah blah blah. But this is, not to put too fine a point on it, total bullshit. At least in high tech it tends to be total bullshit. (It may be in other fields too, but I'm not in a position to knowledgeably discuss such.) In reality, in high tech the workers tend to be strongly self-motivated and, if anything, are too optimistic in their estimates. A fairly popular agile development process (or unprocess) has, in fact, as one of its techniques a way of calculating just how overly optimistic developers tend to be in their estimates and using these calculations to get a better approximation of the real amount of time required. So when you have an estimate for delivery in October, one thing is 99% certain: the absolute earliest that it will be delivered is in October. Further, any attempt to squeeze it out earlier without reducing the features to be delivered will have the opposite of the intended goal. You will delay final delivery.

I pointed this out to the VP in question. (Stupid me: I believed him when he said he was interested in employee feedback!) I further made the prediction that the actual delivery date, if this incentive plan wasn't unhooked from delivery date, wouldn't be August nor even October. I said that the delivery date would be more like March of next year. I was, of course, not believed. Because the VP in question, based on his almost months of experience in upper management, believed firmly that he could mutate reality just by wishing it so.

Fast forward to August. The release is a disaster. Only a small number of groups had actually delivered their stuff by the due date (the toolkit group I was part of being one of them – Jeff's influence here, and true to the "no good deed goes unpunished" adage he was viewed with suspicion for this). The product is nowhere near ready. The delivery slips past August. Past September. Past October. Slips all the way to April of next year (proving my point that developers are overly optimistic, seeing as I had predicted March). Because exactly what I predicted happened: an initial push of hard work started. Then people noticed that, despite putting in 12-hour days (testers especially), no real extra progress was being made. In under two months the whole company realised that the Banff incentive wasn't going to happen. In that time the developers and, more so, the testers had burned themselves out completely. Despair set in, followed by ennui. Developers didn't care any more, so the product slipped further and further and further behind. When it was finally shipped in April, this was with features scaled down on top of everything else.

So how was my foresight rewarded? With a rueful "I guess you were right", right? Wrong. My foresight was rewarded with an accusation that I had personally seen to the project's utter, complete failure. I was specifically named by the VP as one of the reasons for the failure. I guess my negative vibes (which didn't actually impact the productivity of the team I actually worked with, oddly enough, seeing as that team was one of the very, very few who delivered everything on time for the Banff trip...) were transmitted to the company as a whole—even people I had never met—and caused the project to die. Or something.

So why am I regaling the world with this tale now seven (or is it eight?) years later? Because this is only an example of what hits me every damned day of my life, practically. Joan giving me another perfect example of this.

On Friday Joan's laptop (my old Sony) starts acting up. The "L" key doesn't work at all and the "Backspace" key is flaky. I tell her, very candidly, that the computer needs to be repaired; that we should take it in on the weekend. Joan, of course, doesn't believe the only person in the household who knows anything about computers. Besides, she wasn't going to need the computer for anything in the near future anyway.

Well, the distant future of three days later, she's got a big task to do that needs the computer. (This being China she's given the big task with under 24 hours of notice before it's due, of course.) And not only is the "L" key not working now, nor is the Backspace working at all. Nor the delete. Nor the right arrow. Nor the shift key. Nor ... You get the picture. Too bad nobody warned her at all about having to get it fixed, eh?

This is my life, almost every day. See why I feel for Cassandra so much?