aubreyturner.org

It always seems like I get sick after traveling.  The week before last I traveled for business and I started feeling nauseous and exhausted early last week.  It’s been dogging me ever since, and it really hit me yesterday.  It seems like there’s something about airplanes that does it to me.  I guess the cramped quarters and dry air make it easier to transmit airborne “stuff.” 

Feeling a little better today, but still very tired, and the heat doesn’t help much.

I am presently waiting for the person who scheduled this conference call to come on the line.  At the time I joined I was told by the perky machine to say my name at the tone, followed by the pound sign.  I can sometimes understand the need for having a record of who attended a conference call, but for small groups the need to say your name when joining the call is annoying at best.

I kind of doubt anyone actually does anything with the name recording, since we’re always asked who’s on the line when the moderator joins.  I’m sorely tempted to respond with “Annoyed” as my name next time to see if anything happens.

I was sorely tempted to launch into an intemperate rant about the Kelo decision, but given everything that’s been happening lately, it seems pointless.  Besides, if push came to shove, I wouldn’t want to give away the store with regards to how I might deal with the minions of the local government if they tried to steal my home.  Regardless of my silence on the issue, I’m still stewing about it.

However, I will say that there are ways of dealing with politicians and their minions that don’t necessarily involve direct violence.  Everyone has secrets.  And with the proliferation of laws, regulations, and ordinances everyone is vulnerable to the state in one form or another. 

So I will issue this warning to both the corrupt politicians and their supporters:

Once you try to steal my home, all bets are off and I will no longer be Mr. Nice Guy.  You may get my home.  But don’t think you’ve escaped with impunity.  Eventually you will pay for your crime.  One way or another, as long as it takes, you will be brought down.

I saw a commercial during the morning news that was touting the website of an area car dealer.  The tagline for the commercial was “click it and pick it.” 

I wonder if they realized that this might put off some potential customers?  For me, it has a bad association with the odious Click It or Ticket campaign.  Heck, they might even have used that as the inspiration for their ad campaign.  I am sadly coming to the conclusion that many people now welcome the tender ministrations of the nanny state…

That previous post reminded me about something I’d been meaning to say about The War On Drugs™.  I haven’t said much about it lately, but I’m against the war on drugs.  Mainly, my issues have to do with misuse of state power (i.e. it’s unconstitutional unless you distort the commerce clause beyond recognition) and the erosion of our civil liberties in the name of eradicating (certain) drugs from society.  There’s also the fact that it’s a losing battle.  If we can’t keep drugs out of prisons (where the inhabitants are subject to cavity searches), what makes us think we can keep them out of society at large? 

Anyhow, none of this should be construed to mean that I think drugs are a good thing.  It wouldn’t matter to me if heroin and cocaine were available at the local drugstore.  I’m not going to go start using them because I think they’re stupid.  Heck, I don’t even drink very much anymore.  Being in a profession where clear-thinking is required, I’d be putting my whole livelyhood in jeopardy. 

At the store recently I noticed that the register required the cashier to answer whether I was over 18 when scanning the bottle of Cascade I’d picked up.  It occurred to me then that anyone who would try to huff Cascade has to be a pretty pathetic loser.

Actually, it had never occurred to me that anyone would try to huff the stuff.  I guess I’m just hopelessly disconnected from the drug culture.  Which is fine by me.

Acidman pointed out this article about an Austin police officer found passed out drunk behind the wheel of his truck.  I was going to comment on it, but his comments are broken.

While I understand his anger about the situation, especially given his experience in this area, I think he’s missing something important about the DWI laws, at least as they apply in Texas.  In order to support a charge of driving while intoxicated, someone has to be able to testify that they actually saw the person charged operating a motor vehicle.  I know that we can all, through common sense, understand that he was very likely driving drunk, but as long as no one was found that can testify to it, then they won’t be able to prove the charge in court. 

I learned this during one of the ride-alongs I went on with Keller PD.  There was a traffic accident that was caused by a driver who was obviously drunk.  When the officers got there he was standing next to his vehicle in the parking lot.  However, while not drunk, the other drivers had also been drinking and weren’t willing to get involved.  Since no one would testify to seeing him actually driving the vehicle, all they could do was write him up for public intoxication and wait for someone to come pick him up.  I know it sounds silly (since he was obviously driving), but that’s the way the law works sometimes.  Every element of the offense must be proved in court, and if no one will testify to that element, and it can’t be directly proved, then the offense can’t be charged.  The phrase “obviously” isn’t allowed in our system of laws.

As I mentioned earlier, I am going to be transferring to a different division on 7/1.  There is a little bit of a story behind it, but I have been thinking about how to tell it without identifying the company I work for.  While my company doesn’t discourage blogging, I think it best that I keep my blogging separate from the company.  Many of my opinions are too politically incorrect for the company’s corporate image.  If it ever comes out where I work, then I’ll just add a disclaimer, but I’ll burn that bridge when I cross it… 

I’ve worked for this company in one capacity or another for nearly 12 years.  For the last nine years I have been working for an organization in a particular division whose primary function is to do software development on a contract basis for both external and internal customers (although I’ve been working on internal projects the entire time).  I never signed on to work for this organization.  My job was transferred there when the project I was on at the time was moved into the organization as part of a company-wide effort to move all development efforts into this organization. 

To say that it was something of a culture shock would be an understatement.  We moved from direct management to matrix management and from a team environment into a project-based billable system.  Instead of having a manager who knew your work, you ended up with a manager you were lucky to hear from once a quarter (one guy I know only hears from his manager during the yearly evaluations).  My team’s first communication from our new manager was a notification that we weren’t meeting our “billable utilization” targets.  Our first response was of the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!” variety, since we had no clue was he was talking about.

You see, this development organization (DO) requires that each employee bill a certain number of hours each year, which basically means that you have to make up for your vacation and holiday time.  Regardless of whether your project or tasks really require overtime, if you don’t bill a certain number of hours, you get dinged on your yearly evaluation.  This was a shock to us, since in our previous organization we were just concerned with meeting deadlines.  Sometimes this meant working 10-12 hours per day and other times you worked a standard day.  From what I could glean over the years (from various snippets of conversation), the DO’s business model requires this level of overtime to make up for lowballing the bill rate (and to support all the layers of management).

Over the past three years I’ve been working on various projects for the same internal customer, who has projects in two main areas: web and backend.  I’ve done projects for them in both areas and gotten to know them fairly well.  Lately they have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the DO because of the high level of bureaucracy and red tape required to engage us.  The DO has a reputation of being hard to work with (which I suspect is richly deserved).  Also, it was difficult for them to get “what if” questions answered for projects they might want to start but hadn’t formally begun.  In general, employees of the DO have a negative incentive structure to perform any work outside of their currently funded projects.  Any significant time spent on something that doesn’t have a project billing code means that the employee has to either find an existing project to bill against (a lie?) or make up the time on a billable project (lost time worked basically for free).

Lately,  the DO executives have been working hard to send most of the development overseas.  Those of us left here are doing design and project management work with most of the actual programming done by teams elsewhere.  Sometimes they’ll send some people here to learn about the project, but mostly the teams are in other countries.  At the same time this is going on, they’ve been making noises about signings and revenue being down.  So I suppose it wasn’t a big surprise that layoffs would be coming in the U.S.

I need to go back a little bit before I get into the layoff situation, though.  In early May a little birdie told me that there was a move afoot on the part of our customer to move the backend team out of the DO and into another organization.  I was glad to hear about this, but I took a wait-and-see attitude, since I knew it would take them a long time to get anything done (the wheels of bureaucracy move slowly in any big company).  In late May I heard that they were pretty serious and that the customer had given the DO a list of people it wanted to transfer.  This would turn out to be a dangerous thing for all of us…

On the morning of 5/31 I was sitting at my computer trying to get through my morning email when my teamlead sent me an IM saying that he’d just been given notice that he was on the layoff list and he had 30 days to find another job in the company or he was going to be let go.  Given that this guy is absolutely critical to the project, I immediately knew what was happening: the DO was jettisoning all of us who were on the transfer list.  Sure enough, within five minutes my manager IM’ed me to ask if I had time to talk. 

From experience, I’ve seen that the DO doesn’t like having business taken away, and will do things to sabotage any other business unit that tries to move development back in-house.  Of course, legal notification requirements and the need to get us out before end of 2Q likely influenced their decision, but the fact that it would severely impact the customer would likely just put icing on the cake from their perspective.

This event set off a set of panicked meetings on the part of my customer, who then had to accelerate the transfer negotations.  Even so, it took nearly three weeks for them to finalize the deal, and we didn’t get notice until last Friday that it was completed. 

It’s interesting, but I took the news of the prospective layoff pretty well.  I did some calculations and determined that with the severance package and some savings that I could get by (provided I didn’t splurge on anything) for a little more than a year while looking for another job.  I think this was motiviated by the fact that I was pretty burned-out working in the DO and I was really wanting to get out of it.  Whether this was accomplished by a transfer or by leaving the company didn’t really matter anymore.

I was even considering my options for getting into a new career.  Working for the DO really saps the life out of you.  Body shop development is really a game for naive new-hires.  It gets really old, really fast. 

I’m looking at the transfer as a chance to start over.  I can now concentrate on getting the job done, rather than how many hours are billed.  It should also mean less silly process nonsense.  Heck, I may even end up working more hours when all is said and done (don’t know yet, although all the people in my new organization seem pretty balanced and happy from what I’ve been able to glean from them).  But it doesn’t matter to me if the job is interesting and I can focus on it instead of process and hours.  It will also be good to have a direct manager who knows what I’m doing on the job.  It’s hard to describe the feeling, but it’s really like a great weight has been lifted.

I received notification that Gov. Perry has signed HB823.  This means that as of 9/1/2005 it will be legal in Texas to carry a handgun in your private vehicle, with a few restrictions (see bill text for details).

I flew out of the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport yesterday.  My flight was supposed to depart at 12:06pm, but we were slightly over an hour late getting into the air.  Several people on my flight missed their connections at DFW.

Why did we get delayed?  President Bush was in the area and was returning to the airport from the location where he had been speaking.  All incoming and outgoing flights were stopped while he was coming in.

Somehow I don’t think the founders would have approved of the way the President has become near-royalty.  Everywhere he goes people get stepped on by his “security measures”, usually without any warning.