“You know it’s cold in our building when I’m the one saying that it’s cold.”

Seriously … someone has the air conditioning on in here today. Brrr!

In continuing talking about civility in politics, Glenn Swogger, Jr.’s letter to The Boston Globe regarding gay marriage and current politics is worth a read, in my book.

Of course, I always feel like the “Hey, sorry your side lost” is a bit smug. That isn’t to say that I’ve not done that myself.

Over The Rhine has announced that they will be releasing a new album, Born, on March 29, 2005.

When I got the email last night, I went into a fit of insane howling and hooting.

I’m geeked.

Just a taste of life from my morning email …

Subject: RE: EFRAM FOD issue

We also need to include EADS since the origin of this PR (DN) came from the SPPF at the time of VSSA IA installation onto ESP2. The paper trail and disposition need everyone’s input since most likely it will be UA.

I actually had to look up EADS and SPPF [though I felt stupid about not knowing the latter]. We always call EADS “Astrium”. I’m 99% sure about IA.

And if acronym hell wasn’t bad enough, I just had my NASA program office chief engineer call and play 20 questions on some testing we’d just done. Oi!

I wonder how big of a sign I need to put above my alarm clock that reminds me, “If you were awake before this thing went off, you need to just go ahead and get out of bed, regardless of whether you want to do so or not. Going back for another half-hour of sleep is just going to wreck your morning.”

I’m such an idiot. I was so awake at 0550 and am so not right now, despite about 20 minutes of sitting here flipping through stuff on the computer in an attempt to wake up.

Feed on Feeds tells me: “286 feeds, 692 new items.”

That’ll take a while to sort through, I’m sure.

I should’ve followed my gut instinct, which told me to set my WP installs to “all comments must be approved by a moderator” while I was [mostly] Internet-less for the last few days.

Oh well, the comment spam only took a couple minutes to clean up.

In other news … Heavy rainfall + winding hilly roads + three nights of crappy sleep == Geof sleeping like a log when he gets home from his grandmother’s house. Seems like it’s, oh, 1030 or so.

Yes, it’s time to go visit family over Thanksgiving. I get to go over the Tennessee River and through a couple of state forests—and parts of a National Forest—to get there.

If, for some sick reason, you need to get a hold of me … well, you should have my cell number. If you don’t, well, tough.

I must give a shout-out to the man who taught me HTML way back in the day: Anand Thakur.

Anand probably doesn’t even remember doing that. [I think we were working on our ill-fated robot at the time, and we needed a diversion at 0130.]

Proof that MSMS alumni are smart: Anand uses WordPress.

… is Ron Artest’s Punch Out.

Actually, no.

From: Doug Morris
To: Geof Morris

I should have this bookmarked — but what’s the web address for your wish list on Amazon?

I saw the new video game Ron Artest’s Punch Out — but didn’t think you’d want that.

I absolutely lost it at Ron Artest’s Punch Out. That just made me giggle for a few seconds.

But any how … Geof Morris’s Amazon Wishlist … for your gift-buying needs. [As if you need to buy me anything. This is posted for the three people who'd actually need it.]

It’s funny that we get the most serious about Murphy’s Law when it really bites us in the but. Jeremy Zawodny is now serious about keeping backups.

It’s taken me just eight months to be completely sucked into Over The Rhine.

With The Darkest Night of the Year and Patience, I now own every major recording of theirs.

See that nice hook in my cheek? Check the line … it runs to Powder Springs, Georgia.

Things are just generally blah with me right now.

Work is frustrating because we’ve got two customers, one with each of the major American aerospace BigCos, but on both we have the same end customer in the same NASA project office. That project office likes to talk to directly to us, which neither customer really likes but we can’t help. I understand their frustration; I’ve been a middle-man on contracts before and have had my customer go to my vendor and totally side-step me. It’s a frustrating place to be.

Our contractual situation doesn’t help; on one contract, we’ve been shifted from a contract we’d had for years to a new contract that’s controlled far more tightly [which is generally a good thing] but is far less flexible [which is generally a bad thing in a rapid-response environment like we're in on that one right now]. We really are working towards Return to Flight in earnest now, and people need their stuff RIGHT NOW, DAMMIT! [Some of you are undoubtedly thinking of the old adage, "A failure to plan on your part does not necessitate a need to panic on mine." However, our Rapid Response capability is a core competency.]

[It's also sad when I use the term "core competency" without any sarcasm or thought. I'm a drone trainee, man.]

The other contract isn’t any more fun; parts of it are time-and-material, parts are cost-plus-incentive-fee, and parts are firm-fixed price. With every job, you have to stop and take a moment to think, “Now, is $project T&M, CPIF, or FFP?” That affects how we go about working stuff. We’ve had a couple FFP projects go rapidly out-of-scope in the last week, and honestly … we took these as FFP in an effort to help our customer control costs, and we knew it was a bad thing when we did it. Now we get to expend effort making estimates on what the impacts are going to be … we can’t do a “variance at completion”—one of my favorite terms in contract, cost, and schedule, mind you!—but rather are stuck with the fun of taking time to say, “This is what it should cost,” and then hope that we don’t make the right estimates so we don’t lose our shirts.

As a result of all this insanity and its general unresolved nature, it sticks in my craw and occupies some part of my mental process at all times, which, of course, means that you’re continually processing something that you can’t solve. Not very GTD of me, now is it?

All that leads to general malaise, which when coupled with the stress that’s always attendant with holidays with my family plus the radically shorter days … yeah, I feel like a sack of crap.

But I’m still kickin’.

Jeff Veen: My Whole Life in Happy Little Folders. I will totally do this as soon as Feed on Feeds supports categorization. You would, too, if you were closing in on 300 feeds. :blink:

Matt Haughey’s feeling a little bit of remorse for unintentionally creating a lot of flak for TiVo with his recent posts about the new ads-during-fast-forward “feature”. I can see where he’s coming from, but I don’t think he should have too much guilt over it.

I don’t have a problem with the ads; I won’t be any more likely to pay them much heed than I do the ads that are screaming past me. Many of them have their numbers up for most of the commercial … but it just doesn’t register with me unless I’m interested in the product. I do actually stop and watch commercials that interest me, and I’ve clicked on the “Thumbs Up for more info” button that uses the same commercial start and stop tagging that this will use.

With my pen poised above the palm of my left hand, I said to a co-worker, “Such are the perils of leaving my Treo in my office … I’m writing on my palm instead of in my Palm. If I walked back down to my office to get it, I would undoubtedly forget everything I need to write down right now.”

:yawn: I don’t know about you, but me … I’m getting pretty doggone unmotivated.

It’s time to break out my empirical equation of motivation for another year.

Today was our Thanksgiving celebration at work.

All in all, it’s a good thing that my cable company scheduled an install this afternoon … I got back to my desk and was really struggling to stay awake.

I have the sudden urge to watch the Detroit Lions on TV…

Oh my. What a delicious prank: a portable stereo system designed to alight on a toilet and make people think that someone really shouldn’t have had the habanero burger.

That’s a delightfully evil prank. If I still worked in Building 1 …

[HT to FG.]

Anil Dash’s “It was news” pointed me to Malcolm Gladwell’s long narrative about plagiarism, intellectual property, and derivatives in The New Yorker. It’s quite worth your read, but at 6500+ words, it’ll take some time!

I was struck by this near to Gladwell’s conclusion:

Creative property … has many lives—the newspaper arrives at our door, it becomes part of the archive of human knowledge, then it wraps fish. And, by the time ideas pass into their third and fourth lives, we lose track of where they came from, and we lose control of where they are going. The final dishonesty of the plagiarism fundamentalists is to encourage us to pretend that these chains of influence and evolution do not exist, and that a writer’s words have a virgin birth and an eternal life.

My friend Derek Webb is a fan of Wilco, and one can certainly hear influences from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and a ghost is born in his latest album, I See Things Upside Down. But Webb, in his show, has chosen to cover a song by Woody Guthrie—”The Blood of the Lamb”—in the spirit of “getting to know the influences of those who’ve influenced me”. What a great confluence.

The most notable dove in a hawkish group of national security advisors, Colin Powell, has resigned.

:sigh:

The Orlando Sentinel has an important piece today on concerns among mid-level NASA managers about cost and schedule driving the Return to Flight [RTF] mission. I want to pull two relevant quotes:

“Schedules are a necessary management tool, but they can get out of control,” said the CAIB chairman, retired Adm. Hal Gehman, who added that he is unaware of any new shuttle-budget and schedule problems. “We found schedule pressure to be a cause of the Columbia accident, and it could happen again.”

“The safety of the astronauts always has to take precedence,” the Johnson manager said. “Each of us needs to be prepared to step up and say, ‘It’s not safe. We’re not ready to fly,’ and let the chips fall where they may.”

Now, I’m one that always says, “The folks riding the rocket know the risks, and if they accept them, I can.” But let’s be honest: we’re not going to get a free pass from the American public on this one. They think that we can do it right every time, and if, God forbid, we lost two in a row, we’d be shut down.

We have an imperative from the CAIB to do it right. That takes time and money, and right now, we’re being given insufficient amounts of both.

Eric Meyer writes about guiding a large [5,000+ member] mailing list community and how css-discuss is very much civil.

I also participate in the community as best I can, setting an example for how questions should be answered and list members should act. Of late, I’ve been too swamped to offer more than token participation on the list, which is why I just yesterday selected four list members to be moderators. They’ll be helping with administrivia, but more importantly, will be helping to keep things on-topic and civil, although I honestly don’t expect them to have to work very hard at that last part.

The founder’s influence is key. Back when the Rumor Forum was far more nascent, Bryan’s influence is what made it what it is. The heavily-involved users in 2002 are, in large part, still around, and they’re the ones that continue to guide the community as it gets far larger. As the RF is a variegated Web discussion board centered around a few themes, the topicality that Meyer speaks is out the window, and so we have, as a result, a pretty high volume for a far smaller group [~850 at present] of users. There’s no way that the RF—and the community at large—would never run as well as it does without our wonderful group of moderators/community leaders, which we call Bartenders, following the meme that our little forum is a lot like your corner pub.

In short, Eric is totally right: good leaders will make for a good community.

I apologize for not posting much this week. [Not that it's ever much worth reading, really.] I’ve spent a lot of time getting my work computer back to the way I like a workstation to behave, and I’ve spent a lot of time getting data I already had stored … on the old hard drive. :sigh:

In fun news, my friend Mark is visiting today, tomorrow, and Saturday. In honor, I think I’m taking all of tomorrow off. I’ll at least take some of it off. Huzzah.

Ryan Boren explains how themes will work in WordPress 1.3. This will make the upgrade path much, much easier.

This is huge, in my mind.