How my mind works...

I'm perverse.

Now, you may all realize this. The folks following my blog probably do. If anyone ever winds up coming here who doesn't know me all that well, they may not get the point, so I'll have to spell it out. For those of you who were already aware, my apologies, I'll at least try to keep it entertaining.

When I say perverse, I mean perverse, not perverted. Not saying the latter is a bad thing, or even that I'm not, but that's not the point of this here diatribe. When I say I'm perverse, I mean that my interest in doing something is inversely proportional to the difficulty. If someone says 'come on, this will be fun, it's easy', I have no real interest in whatever activity they're endorsing, other than a possible basic interest in the scenery or terrain. If someone says 'don't even try that, it's impossible', my interest is peaked.

Now, there are some caveats. While I'm mildly attracted to gambling, I'm not really pulled to things like keno or Powerball (although I'll play the latter if the EV is close to positive). My definition of 'difficult' is not based on artificially generated odds. When I think 'difficult', I'm thinking about something that requires a great deal of skill, endurance, or personal effort to succeed. Marathons intrigue me. Games of skill will forever hold my interest. One of the attractions of writing is that while it's easy to do, it's hard to do right. Anyone can type words (or at least semi-coherent letter groupings) on a page; stringing words together so a reader is intoxicated and enlightened is hard. Doing so on a regular basis is an ongoing challenge that I can't walk away from.

I even know where it comes from, after a fashion. The root has to do with the juxtaposition of being a very bright and literal child and having parents given to particularly bad metaphor and hyperbole.

At any rate, what spawned this whole commentary lies here. Specifically the entry for the 18th, wherein Patrick reports that even the best of handshakes must fall far short of passionate.

Thanks, Patrick. Now I've got an unquenchable desire to write a passionate handshake. And I don't even have a story appropriate for such a thing.

How I learned to drive, and why it worked

Overall, given the amount of miles I've driven, I've experienced remarkably few real problems. I've had some speeding tickets, and I had a few accidents when I was much younger, but overall, I've had very few problems with operating motor vehicles, getting lost, or running into things. After thinking about it, I realized why. It has to do with where I learned to drive.

Most people have some story about learning to drive from a driving instructor, or more likely a family member. Unfortunately, my dad was sure enough about my mad driving skillz to go to sleep whenever I drove, and my mom never let me drive. By the time I was in driving school, it was more of a formality than anything; the only thing that the instructor taught me was parallel parking and proper use of signals. Shifting, navigation, all that jazz were already second nature.

All of those, the core of making a vehicle go down the road without running into things or leaving the road, I learned from video games. Most notably, the video game Pole Position (the original one). Sounds silly, I know.

However, when going off the road or nicking another vehicle makes your vehicle explode, you learn not to do that.

Bob's Head, episode 4

OK, one of the reasons updates are so infrequent is that I get my ideas at REALLY odd times and have no way to record them. I'm starting to take notepad notes on the computer when I'm there, and putting them in my actual phyiscal notepad when I'm not.

Some of them may be short (like this one) but another thing I'm doing is jotting down starter bits of all of them any time I post, so I'll be able to come on here and start up without trying to remember 'what was that cool idea again?'.

That's the idea anyhow. I need to start practicing my wind sprints. NaNo is coming up, and my personal goal is a 100KWord complete modern / urban fantasy. I might even try to make it YA, but I kinda doubt it will get there.

The ideas at the moment in the bullpen are as follows:

Lobbying, and why the arguments for allowing it are Not Very Convincing.
Salary / Wage caps, with a side order of Risk vs. Reward.
Juxtaposition of Pournelle's Political Axes, Spolsky's Leaky Abstractions, and Boyd's OODA Loop.
Inspiration vs. The Need to Write
and what will likely be a multi-parter (if the Juxtaposition above isn't, I'll be surprised),
Crime, Theft of Time, Theft of Free Will, Liberal societies, defining workable optimal societal states (& Laws), Ivory Tower vs. Crapsack World.

Regarding NaNo this year, I'm trying to put together a playlist. Looking for two things. First, any Guitar Rock which brings to mind (even a little) Arthurian / Celtic legend. More looking for tone and music than lyrics, but those are good too. I know, I'm already going to check Queen and Iron Maiden. Any others? Also, any songs where there are at least two covers after the initial recording, wherein the covers are both distinctive from the original and objectively Do Not Suck (meaning they're technically minimally proficient). One example would be Personal Jesus. Another would be Tide Is High.

Reason being I've got three characters who trade the spotlight for much of the story, and I'm trying to stay coherent (hence the same titles) while still making each section distinctive.

Also, if anyone wants to be Tuckerized, I'm populating a High School in this one. I need teachers, students, maybe even janitors. Coaches and security are already taken care of though. Also, I need a name for the school. I'm looking for something something academy. The school is a very exclusive private high school / prep school, so names might be appropriate. If anyone can suggest anything, thanks will be offered.

OK, that's enough for now. Off I go. More soon (tomorrow, maybe Saturday).

Attention Employers...

A very good executive once said to me 'The job of leadership is to get the right people on the right bus to the right destination.' The right people. If you don't have the right people looking for people, you're done right there. If they're not using all the resources at their disposal correctly to find those people, it's fail time again.

I'm writing this because over the past few years, I've heard quite a few comments about how there is a talent shortage. At the same time, I've been hearing from talented individuals that they can't find positions which utilize their talents; instead they wind up in positions that 'pay well', or 'have a good atmosphere'. When I combine those two observations with the first hand experience of technology being misused badly at the very start of an employee search, I begin to have an inkling of where the problem lies.

An example I have seen very frequently recently is the online manual resume breakdown. This would be where a potential employee uploads a resume (fine so far), fills out some standardized contact information (ought to be on the resume, but maybe it's not easily parsed) and then fills out more or less entire content of the resume, line by line, in an online form which often doesn't accept copy/paste from the resume itself.

The information is on the resume. If it's not, there's really no need to consider that applicant any further. If there's some questionable item, forcing them to retype the contents of the resume is not going to present the data any more clearly; they will probably retype the same data from the resume. Use some judgement as to whether the applicant has enough other qualities to bring them in for an interview or not, then move on. If the person reviewing the resumes has no ability to determine if the person is a good fit for the position by looking at a resume, why are they the one reviewing resumes in the first place?

There is a problem here. There are probably a plethora of causes, none of which matter. We're talking about business, and we're talking about something with a very simple solution, part technical, part operational.

First, the technical part. Instead of spending the IT budget on a number of web forms, spend it on a document converter and / or search tool. There are tools built into most OS's that will do either or both, but if you want a bit more speed, you might want something more specialized. The alternate would be to hire more technically capable people in the department that does first review of resumes, but that might not be possible or desirable depending on your field.

Second, the operational part. Have HR use the aforementioned tools to do simple keyword searches with a keyword list created by the new employee's future supervisor, coworkers, and direct reports. They probably know the job better than anyone else in the company, and can let the HR person know what to look for. Once the keyword searches narrow the field enough, send the resumes to those same groups. Expect some to be shot down. Call the remaining folks in for interviews, and make sure one of each of those groups previously mentioned is represented during the interviews. Give each group's input equal weight in the final decision.

I know that last sounds a bit odd; having prospective direct reports interview a potential supervisor. However, if someone is already a valued member of your team, it's important that the new person you're adding isn't going to be completely incompatible with them, no matter the relationship between the two. That's all part of the 'right people'. The direct reports can also tell you if the person they'll be reporting to is going to have any clue whether the prospect has enough technical expertise to tell if the employee is doing a good job or not.

Remember, right people is step one. Without it, you're opening a big can of fail. With that in mind, odd but workable solutions beat conventional but non-functional ones any day, hands down.

Advice for companies hurting in this economy...

In times of economic stress, companies tend to make cutbacks. That's understandable, it's both difficult and risky to grow in a depressed economy. Also understandable is the general strategy of making cutbacks in cost centers and maintaining revenue centers as undisturbed as possible.

The definition of a cost center and a revenue center is the point of this advice. Common wisdom is that Sales is a revenue center, and everything else is a cost. This is based on the thought that if you get a sale, you can find a way to fulfill the order, somewhow.

The trouble is that paradigm requires uninformed consumers. In hard economic times, consumers begin informing themselves to a greater degree. In other words, the harder the times, the more likely a consumer is to see that you've maintained Sales at the cost of Operations. In simpler terms, if you have a product with value, it may not require active selling at all. I can't, for example, recall the last time an advertisement for basic staple foods (meat, fruit, veggies, bread) made the slightest difference to my decision to buy. Price does, but sales does not. The same holds true on entertainment; where costs are equal, I go with the greatest value, no matter the sales efforts made; where costs are inequal, I go with the less expensive option.

The point is fairly straightforward; despite years, even decades of salesmen selling the idea that Sales is the only Revenue center, it's not. Operations is. The revenue center are the folks who Get The Job Done. Sales, Management, HR, Admin are all Overhead.

That said, I'm not actually anti-Overhead. Most of those things are actually multipliers for the revenue generating portions of a business. HR can find the right Operations people and arrange training to make them more effective. Management can ensure that the right people are on the right jobs, and deal with obstacles that aren't within the ability of the Operations folks to deal with. Sales and Marketing can make sure that everyone in your target market is aware of your product, facilitate purchases, and even find entirely new markets for you to enter.

All of those, however, are multipliers. Not additive. If you start with a zero in Ops, it doesn't matter how much you lay on. You still wind up with zero. If you start with too small an Ops division, you wind up with a very brittle organization, where Ops is overloaded; not only will individuals be more prone to failure, but when they fail the effect will be felt far more than in an organization where Ops has enough depth.

Really, the point isn't exactly that Ops is a Revenue center and everything else is a Cost. My point is that everything in an organization costs money, and everything in a for-profit organization should be ultimately directed toward producing revenue. If companies cut back during tough economic times, which can be just as risky as trying to grow during those same times, they need to be very careful to make cuts across the board; ensuring that no portion of the company is cut disproportionately to the others.

And so it begins...

I've heard it said that one way to improve an artistic skill is to observe the work of others, preferably those who have won great acclaim. Really I have. OK, I'm fairly certain I have, and it certainly sounds like a good idea, doesn't it?

With that in mind, having found a list of the top 100 English language novels of all time on Doug Shaw's home page, I recently decided to read all 100. At best, my writing will improve. At worst, it will be more like those 100 novels, but in a bad way. Most likely of all, my writing will meander along the course of improvement through practice that has been it's wont, and I will at least be exposed to 'culture', whatever that means.

I have a personality flaw, a quirk of the mind, that will not let me start at a random point in that list. Given the always entertaining Professor Shaw's description of Ulysses, I thought it rather better to start at the other end. Alas and alack, the local library appears to have never heard of Booth Tarkington except as the author of a novel upon which a BBC television show was based. They have the television show available on DVD, you see, but no novel. It is, however, apparently one of the seven deadly sins of Library Science to forgo having Joyce in your library.

Much like Professor Shaw, I will regale you with my experiences as I wander through the hallowed halls of greatness. Unlike him, I will do so as I wander those halls, rather than later, once I've had time to digest the culture contained therein.

With that in mind, Ulysses: At this point, I have discovered many things. First, Joyce appears to be writing stream-of-consciousness. The big accomplishment, at least in my eyes, is that he writing the stream of someone else's consciousness. Not just one, either, but two relatively different people. I say relatively different, because I've discovered one commonality between them, one that partially explains Dr. Shaw's difficulty in following the narrative of the book. Neither of the characters is a linear thinker. OK, that's putting it too mildly. The characters are almost frighteningly scatterbrained, compounded in one case by being repressed to a degree that he cannot complete a substantial portion of his own thoughts, diverging instead into rambles about religion, self-recrimination and death. Occasionally he does so in Latin and French. In the other case, the character is equally repressed, but in that case the repression is expressed by self-censoring of his own naughty thoughts, but only when they're about other people. He goes on a long, lovingly described flight of fancy about a bath he's going to have later, and the gratification he has planned for that bath.

OK, Joyce is having an effect on me. My own meandering writing style is becoming less concise by the moment. Perhaps that's not the effect I was looking for.

Another reason, perhaps a larger one, that I can see a reader having a problem with the book. The book apparently predates Strunk's Elements of Style. It also appears to predate modern punctuation conventions regarding quoting speech. 87 pages into this 767 page book and nary a quotation mark to be seen. Spoken words are preceeded by a dash, but no indication is given as to when the speaking ends. 'He said' isn't a reliably indicator, as on at least two occasions thus far someone has said 'he said', after which the quote they supply is given in italics.

Overall, between the odd quotation punctuation, the stream of consciousness, and the repressed, non-linear thought processes of the two main characters, I can see where the book might be considered a wee bit of a hard read. I've often compared reading to eating. Pratchett is a literary Morimoto, the total package. Robson is TastyCake, I feel guilty for loving it but can't stop until it's gone. Cherryh is toffee, I love it but it tires my jaws out. King is searingly spicy tam noodles, I love them, but I will regret it later. Brin is a seven course gourmet vegan meal, I feel like I ought to like it, and want to like it, and think my not liking it is a fault in me. Joyce is like chewing on ramen, liberally spiced with whole vitamin, diet and caffiene pills. I'm told it's good for me, will help me build muscle and lose fat, that it's nutritionally sound and has everything a growing boy needs.

To put it another way; I spend 15 minutes warm up on a stair master. I spend 60 minutes of cardio on a elliptical machine. Since I started reading Ulysses, I no longer notice the complaints from my body; my mind is too busy moaning about reading this thing that is begging, pleading, screaming for a copy editor to put some gorram punctuation in.

Still, I'm not done the book. It might get better. I might get used to it. His prose, while a touch lurid for a modern audience, is at least highly descriptive. His stream of consciousness is very stream-ey, although it delves into singsong and acoherence a bit much for my taste. Maybe that's the problem; I'm too much of a linear thinker to really empathize with the characters.

We shall see. We shall see.

Regarding that last...

Specifically the part about enjoying or not enjoying reading.

I've often compared reading to eating. Some books taste good, but are essentially empty calories. Some books are good for you, but taste awful. Some books are the equivalent of a bag of chips; before you know it, you've eaten the whole thing. Others are like good toffee; difficult to eat too much of, because they're crunchy or chewy. Not only that, but every author has a different flavor, even two authors that are writing in what is ostensibly the same genre or subgenre, no matter how restrictive.

There are writers who write things that are good for you, tasty, and quick to read (does my adoration for Pratchett have an upper limit?). There are writers who write pure tasty treats with little redeeming value, or even with significant guilty pleasure factor (Justina Robson and John Ringo, I'm looking at you). There are the producers of filling, tasty food that lasts for several meals (Cherryh's Foreigner comes to mind). Then there are folks who write stuff that is good for you, and really ought to taste good, but is just so hard to gnaw through that it winds up being just not-quite-tasty enough to enjoy (*cough* Brin *cough*).

All that leads to two points I'm pondering now. The first; my recent worries were mostly based on too much not-quite-tasty in close succession. Two doses of candy, even knowing it's candy, still taste sweet. The second; juxtaposing my mental parallel between reading and eating with my mental parallel between writing and sex might explain things, not least of which why I married Yomiko Readman...

On that note, I'm fleeing before she catches me.