A Renewing Mind

JK, our bus driver, promised epic skiing today atGrand Targhee and he was right. Lot’s of light, fluffy powder fell over night and even though two of their three main lifts were closed, we had a great time. No wet cement today (like yesterday over at JH), this stuff was pure joy. High winds, falling snow, and low clouds made for poor visibility so Steven and I made for the trees whenever we could.

We saw learned something about mountain passes on the return trip this afternoon. Wyoming Hwy 22 is a major pass through the Tetons for this area. It’s a steep pass,  a 10% grade and a peak at 9,000 feet (the ski area peaks are about 10,400 feet here). It is not uncommon for the highway to close for avalanches and the cliff-hugging hairpin turns add to the excitement. Tire chains are required equipment and semi-trailers are not allowed at this time of year (or at least not during the current inclement weather). We followed a truck driver carrying a load of granite that decided to try his luck. He got stuck as soon as the grade got steep and he had no place to go. JK tells me that not only will the driver get hit with a steep fine but he will also have to pay for his own rescue. I wonder how they do that? Maybe a big wrecker with chains.

My friend Tim returned from a week of cat-skiing in Park City, UT last week and told me he was up to his arse in snow. He had the pictures to prove it. Now I know the feeling. We had 12 inches of new snow last night, albeit a wet, heavy, skiing in wet cement kind of snow. It was rough going between the thick snow, the continued flurries, and the incredibly flat light, but, hey, it was a whole lot better than a day at work. Tomorrow we’ll go over to Grand Targhee on the other side of the Tetons. The base there is about 1,000 feet higher so I’m hoping the snow will be a little fluffier (and easier to work with).

I’m watching a presentation by Accenture trying to convince us that we need them to rethink our long-term content strategy. One slide suggests that in the 1930s 80% of all work followed standard processes and rules. Today 80% of all work requires judgement and flexibility - stressing the importance of good content to enable good judgement. If correct, this begs the question, why do we spend so much time, effort, and money stressing development of processes? Wouldn’t we get a better payback by focusing on the judgement side of work? If only 20% of my work even lends itself to process-oriented decision making, then most of my work is custom, one-offs. That suggests I’d be better off developing my ability to work with knowledge than trying to develop processes that optimize just 20% of my work.

I really like what Chuck Colson has to say today about the election results this week. Specifically, that the republicans lost because they deserved to because of their hypocrisy. The Foley scandal, Tom Delay’s violation of campaign finance laws, Bob Ney and the Jack Abramoff mess - there are many more and I’m not going to name them all. You can find it all on Google. Colson is right. Republicans came to power expressing conservative values (which, among other things include preserving moral order) and their disdain for corruption amongst their liberal colleagues. They said this, then they turned around and did the same thing.

The democrats will fare no better, I think. In time, they too will become corrupt. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” as Lord Acton said. The real problem, I think, is our ethics (actually, our lack of ethics) and our inability or unwillingness to demand moral character from our leaders.

I met Ms. Dewey this afternoon. She is the Information Maven to top all Information Mavens. She provided pretty good answers to all of my questions. She’s got an attitude though. I guess that’s worth putting up with so long as she digs up the information I want.

“Doing things by hand leads to good design” - David Heinemeier Hansson

I love thos quote from David and wholeheartedly agree with the principle. Learn more about it (and Ruby and Rails) at the Rails Conference 2006 Keynote Addresses.

Last week the world was “stunned” by the pope’s remarks concerning radical Islam. At least the media reports would have you believe that. It seems ironic to me that the pope points out that violence is not an appropriate way to advance faith and muslims in many parts of the world react violently, proving his point about their violent tendencies. I’m not the first to point this out, but it seems to have been widely missed in the mainstream media.

I see a similar irony in the interpretation of the National Intelligence Estimate this week which shows that the war in Iraq has been used as a successful recruiting tool for Islamic militants. So as I understand it, some believe we should cease hostilities and withdraw because doing so will undermine the recruiting effort of Islamic militants. I wonder what the Islamic militants might do with their new-found free time? Maybe they would focus their rage on cartoonists.

Retired Major General John Batiste criticized Donald Rumsfeld’s handling of the war in Iraq today, saying that Rumsfeld knows everything “except how to win”. He went on to say that US troops had been given inferior vehicles. I heard this particular sound bite on the radio this evening. This last part is an excellent example of the deceptive language in common use today amongst politicians of all stripes. What exactly does the General mean by this remark? I can think of three interpretations.

I’ll rule out the first interpretation since our enemies have no military vehicles to speak of. The second is a blatantly obvious statement. Nothing is as good as it could be because we lack infinite resources and infinite funds. We could always spend more money to improve the design of a military vehicle. Of course, that money must come from somewhere (since money is a finite resource). Therefore less money must be given to something else (like food for our troops). This statement would appear to have no real value. It’s a bit like claiming that 2+2=4 with some surprise, as if people should be outraged about the fact. The third is interesting. If this is what the General meant, why didn’t he name names and initiate some call to action to improve the shoddy manufacture of military vehicles? Why indeed?

There are a plethora of wonderful tools on the web that I would like to be taking advantage of. The problem is, I haven’t been able to come up with good guidelines on when to use what. For example, I really like 37 Signals’ tools. Specifically, Writely is also pretty good. The latter is geared more towards word processing while the former seems better for informal sharing of information. But that only provides a clear case for Writely when I want to do word processing online (which is not often). Then there is Basecamp, a great easy to use project planning tool. It is not nearly as sophisticated as MS project, but that is its core strength. On the other hand, my whole company uses Project so to use Basecamp, I need an easy way to export a plan into some format that can be imported into Project. We also use Sharepoint a lot, but in a crippled fashion. They is something like a 3G limit for each Sharepoint (making it near useless as a document repository) and we only allow people to use the Sharepoint Services functions (basically folder management). That makes me want to use a Wiki and/or Backpack.

I’ve decided that software architecture is really about convincing clients that you have a vision. It doesn’t really matter much what the vision is, as long as you can depict it on a piece of paper. People want to see pretty colored boxes that fit together. If the boxes have plugs and recepticles, so much the better. There are some general guidelines that any architect should follow: