The saying typically goes, “never speak about Religion or Politics“, but I will offer a couple of my thoughts on our current political climate in the USA.
That about sums it up, and this very simply view on politics keep me sane in the political silly season.
Have Fun!!
I blogged last year about how the Jet Blue website did not print a barcode on my boarding pass because I owned a rouge Apple product (an iMac).
Well, I need to say that JetBlue got it right this past weekend. I printed the tickets for myself and my son to go racing and the barcode printed! Happy days! A bit skeptical I went to the airport and found that they simply scanned the barcode and all was right in the world!
So, I am quick to judge, but I am also quick to eat crow when needed.
I started a new job on Monday and have commuted now for 4 days on the LIRR and j can say for certain that the LIRR really SUCKS! I am writing this as we crawl past Mineola doing about 5 miles per hour. We are already 20 minutes late and I still have 30 scheduled minutes of this hell ride to go.
I have not been on time once this whole week in the morning thanks to the LIRR, and getting home is even worse! Why do they publish a schedule if they are not going to try to meet it? They should simply publish the time the train leaves the station and an approximate time of the trip.
Why do we do 10-20 MPH from Jamaica to Mineola? The tracks are obviously in disrepair, but I find that really hard to believe.
If I worked for the LIRR I would not be able to look my customers in the eye, but it does get me wondering what it takes to allow people not to care to this degree. When did they give up, and when did bad service become okay. I feel this is happening in many I our public and private institutions lately, and is mirrored in our governments attitude as well.
Do people feel entitled to a job with these institutions? Do they feel that mediocre service is simply okay? Look around you, how many service companies are giving good service lately? It has become rare in this day and age to get good service. Sad really, but I can still smile and try to make the best of it!
Have fun!
While I am on stupid, short sayings I figured I would throw this one out:
This small, stupid saying brings up many questions on culture and how various people handle conflict. I am sure most of my readers have had, or currently have, a manager that will not accept blame, or always needs to be right. How we handle these people is probably more important than the person or the situation itself….
When you do a good job handling this conflict, smile and congratulate yourself! We can only control our own actions in life….
Be well and enjoy!
Great minds discuss ideas;
Average minds discuss events;
Small minds discuss people;
I saw this on a friends desk, and it inspired me to send it to my blog readers.
What do you discuss?
As I blogged about before, I have been working with MongoDB in the last few months, and love it! I have hosted all my Mongo databases in the cloud with a service named MongoLab and am very happy with it. Have I paid for mongolab.com yet? No! Have I gotten wonderful service? Hell yes!
Let me tell you a story of a night ago. I was working on my project, and all of a sudden it stopped working. I checked my iOS app. It was okay, I checked my server that is running my middle tier, okay. I then checked mongo and it was down. This was the very first time this happened and I got worried. By the time I got to the status.mongolab.com page they had an update already there. They were on it. It was a single server issue, and remember that I am using a FREE account. I emailed and within 60 seconds got a response from Will who was working on it. Within less than 10 minutes after that first email the database was back including an email response to me thanking me for my patience!
WOW! Oracle, Microsoft and others should learn from this customer experience.
Remember, again, I have not paid a cent as of yet; even though I certainly will very soon!
Smaller companies can and should be more agile in their response to customers, and mongolab certainly was. Even though I do no agree with everything in his book, Jason Jennings summed it up very well in “It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small…It’s the Fast That Eat the Slow” that these companies can certainly, at least make a dent in the larger companies if they are quick and efficient.
After having worked on RDBMS for many years, I am a strong proponent of NoSql databases such as MongoDB and Apache’s Couch DB. Even Amazon launched DynamoDB a week or so ago. My initial feeling about DynamoDB is it’s about time, but it still feels much more heavy-weight then mongo and I am sure it will change over time. I love the fact that with mongo you can simply create collections and update/change them on the fly. The query system is non-greedy and will ignore any fields that are not present in the document being queried.
To say the least, I was very surprised at the service I received from the monglab crew, and if they keep that up they will certainly not only survive, but thrive as well.
Back to programming….. Stay happy…..
I have been busting my butt the last few weeks, day and night on work, but also building my own apps and doing a ton of activities around the house. Last night I looked at my son and said “Boy am I tired”. His answer was…. ”No pain, no gain“… He is thirteen (13) years old!
Have I taught him well, or is he just a smart ass? Not sure of that yet, but it did make me reflect and re-focus on the projects at hand but also ask a question;
Does gain need to involve pain?
My initial answer would be no, because pain is typically associated negatively. But if my “pain” in this case is hard work and long hours (and maybe a sore back from putting in flooring) is that real “pain” per se? If hard work and long hours, which I enjoy, is negatively equated to “pain” then I am not truly in pain, but simply exerting effort.
Either way, I feel the roll-up of this should be that anything in life that is good typically requires some hard work and effort to make it real. Whether the effort is mental or physical does not matter, it is effort nonetheless. So, the saying should be:
“No effort, no gain…“
Which makes much more sense to me.
Further, effort does not scare me, pain does……
Keep working and be happy!
Alternatively, this post could be title “We all work for Apple” or “Microsoft”, etc.
Speaking to a colleague today, we were talking about Google, searching and automated learning systems. I stole this blog title from him as it summed the conversation up quite nicely.
Every time you go to Google and do a search you are training their system. You are training it to tell them what you are interested in, and the types of items you want to see. Every time you click on a link in Google you are telling them that the search terms you used, and the link content are highly related. I could go on and on with how they learn, but every interaction you have is being tracked and used to provide personalized content for you.
When you speak to Apple’s SIRI, your command goes to the Apple servers. They are certainly using this to train their system to handle different languages, accents and differing commands better. Furthermore, if you ask twice in a row, it most likely causes their system to weight their first response lower further allowing them to improve the service. Apple will have a fully trained voice recognition system that is trained in multiple languages and accents. This will change computing as we know it because they will be able to license it to other technology vendors for use in their systems. If Apple does this right, they will grow tremendously because of it! We are not far off (timeframe wise) from interfacing with our technology via speech. I can’t wait: Hey Hal, get me a coffee…..
But, back to Google. The new Google+ service is not only there to provide a crappy social networking platform, it allows them to associate a hardened identity to you and your interests. Previously they would need to infer identity using fairly soft means of knowing that you had three computers, an iPad and iPhone. Now if you sign into Google+ across all those devices you have created a concrete match for them to customize your experience. If I was writing the algorithm (or more appropriately Growing the Algorithm) I would even put latches in that would enable me to know that patterns on various computers were different, therefore indicating a shared computer system. I am sure they have all of this and more.
We are all helping someones automated learning system learn more about us with every transaction every hour of every day. I for one am not upset or worried about it, I just want to get paid for my efforts! 
Simply think about the amount of automated learning that will happen in the next year. I am not an expert, but the increase in learning due to automation is certainly non-linear! It might not be exponential, but it is probably very close. The point I am trying to make here is that our systems are learning about us for quicker than we are learning about ourselves.
I just hope we (the human species) can at least try to keep up….
Everyone who knows me knows that I love to race cars, and my son loves to race karts. So, this holiday we went to Daytona for “kart week” for the very first time, and my son raced his kart. He was in a new class, at a new track and like any 13 year old he thought he was going to set the world on fire. When he realized he was up against the best of the best in the world I could see the doubt and fear creep into his eyes. He looked at me and simply said “Wow”.
I know the feeling, and made a split second choice to handle it the same way I would handle a client of my business consulting practice. I asked him how far off the pace he was; the answer was .5 to .7 of a second per lap. Okay, I asked what the total field, front to back was separated by, and he said 1.0 to 1.2 seconds. I then asked him to compare and contrast that difference to other racing such as Formula 1, Indy Car, etc. In Formula 1 it is typical to have only a handfull of cars within a second of each other. I then asked him to take my stopwatch (it was actually my iPhone app – RaceWatch – shameless plug) and click twice fast. The result was .3 of a second. He got the message…..
More importantly, I asked him “What do you think you can you do differently to go faster?” He gave me several very good, and surprisingly adult answers on what he should be doing differently. I simply told him to try them, but to also not worry so much, and just go and “have fun”. When you are racing a car/kart/whatever and you try too hard you typically go slower, not faster. If you are worried about doing better instead of just having fun and driving you typically go slower. There are very few drivers who can put huge pressure on themselves and go faster; it is certainly not the norm!
Remember this in your business strategy, and what you may be doing to yourself in your own business! I love putting pressure on myself and challenging myself, but there is a point of diminishing returns that comes very quickly when doing so. Many times I find that businesses of all sizes act impulsively and rush into decisions when leaders are pressuring themselves too much. If you are a business leader, or simply a supervisor, remember that the pressure you place on yourself trickles down and is usually not a positive motivator.
In the end my son finished 28th out of 42 competitors. He was still not happy, but I showed him that if he had made a few key passes quicker then he would have finished closer to the 20th spot. We should all strive to do better, but we also need to ensure that we do not sabotage our own efforts trying to get there!
As always, have fun and enjoy whatever it is you do!
A friend and I were having a conversation the other day, and I mentioned one of my ideas to them that I am currently working on. Their very first question was; “Doesn’t someone else already do that?” which made me think. Why do people, educated people, immediately think that if another person/company has done something that you shouldn’t?
Enough sarcasm, you get the message. My answer to my friend went a bit like this: Of course there are others doing this, but what sets my idea apart is ….. and my vision and passion to make this happen means that I will do it better than the others.
David can fight Goliath… David just needs to be a bit smarter and more nimble…
Happy Holidays to everyone who reads my blog, and all the best!!!
Keep smiling and go kick some butt…