Forget Me Not

Our barista forgot my order again. I hate to be forgotten and wanted to be mad. But then I had to remember that the coffee was free. So I poured my own drip coffee and stormed out of the lunch room. I didn't want all that sweet foamy gunk anyway.

iPhone Yahoos

People connecting their iPhones with Yahoo! Business email accounts found they could no longer send email as of Thursday. Yahoo seems to be trying out new imap servers exclusively for iPhone and while free accounts continued to work okay, business accounts required manually changing settings to pop and smtp port 25, password authentication. Unless you just want to listen, then sit still with imap.

HR of Darkness

If blogs are the new resumes, why are headhunters not filling my answering machine with urgent inquiries?

Darker Than The Coal Mines

I have less than 15 hours before the darkness resumes. If only the anticipation of those black hours did not extend the pain. Hope is what allows most of us to survive our jobs, but I can't see the future anymore. And that's what makes this work so black.

Biggs Breakfast

Driving the Columbia Gorge, there is approximately an hour that I am out of contact of any civilized radio stations. Today this gave me a chance to regain an appreciation of the Japanese band Number Girl. McDonald's coffee is suppose to be better but it was just as burned as always. Burned coffee to wash down discordant Japanese screams.

Dialectical Egoism

I've been waiting for articles like The Rise of American Incompetence to start arriving. But Daniel Gross infers that international contempt towards American management is a recent phenomenon. Nonsense. The level of respect from both inside and outside the U.S. was much lower in the 80s and early 90s. American business climbed out of that morass thanks to Harvard professors who mapped new lexicons on top of Japanese management practices then peddled the ideas as their own.

Our economy is in for some pretty tough times but it is not a collapse of the tech bubble, stock market bubble, housing, subprime, or asset bubbles from which we need to recover. It is a bubble of hubris of which Daniel Gross's Slate article is just an early indicator of an impending and long overdue implosion.

IT Interview

I've heard this story many times, the dispirited American tech trainer tries in vain to engage a roomful of stoic Japanese engineers then watches in bewilderment when, as soon as class disengages, those same engineers become animated with the kind of bluster you find in any IT room in the world. An important purpose of this banter is to signal and scrutinize each other's level of expertise like dial-up modems attempting to arrive at a mutually compatible speed with which to communicate. A component of discovery, i.e. evaluating each other's expertise level, exists to some extent within the communication of every domain, but it comprises a larger share and thus is more overt in the information technology field. Unfortunately, there seems to be no universal protocol recognized worldwide for this important component of technical conversations, no IEEE standard for geek BS. Japanese engineers use a synchronous discourse comprised of carefully crafted questions designed to trap the poser in a corner. Americans, on the other hand, converse asynchronously, unremittingly broadcasting their bravado. Stereotypes such as the belligerent arrogance of the French, the servile arrogance of Indians, the incessant banalities of Americans, are all manifestations of our incompatible local protocols, and the primary reason for mutual incredulity between engineers from disparate cultures.