39 posts tagged “omgwtfbbq”

I Can Haz Paychek?

We often deal with Service Level Agreements (SLA). Basically, these are the "guarantees" around various parameters in the data center. For instance, they may have a power SLA of 99.999% uptime. The provider says have power 99.999% of the time (that's only 0:05:15 of no power per year, on a 24x7 basis). If we have five minutes-sixteen second of power lose, there would be an SLA violation, which may have some financial penalties.

Today, one team asked me to find out about various SLAs one of our provider has. Among the parameters was "Rodent Repellent." I'm almost embarrassed to go to them with this. I'm going to suggest hiring Eddy as a Carnivorous Anti-rodent Technician, to provide a solution to this requirement.

Those who follow GTD blogs know of several of the debates around meetings. For instance, the "topless meeting," where laptops and other gadgets are forbidden. The notion is that, if the meeting is so inconsequential that folks are doing other things, why is the meeting held (or, in the context of an individual, why is he there).

I'm going to try to introduce my own term to the debate: "Read-Only Meetings."

Here's the context: a meeting is called. Several folks are invited. Some are the actual players in the conversation. However, there are folks who are brought in, "just in case" a particular perspective is needed. These folks mostly stay silent, or, out of an hour meeting, talk for five minutes.

A sinister possibility for their invitation--which would not be explored here--is the desire to prevent them from saying they weren't involved in a decision.

I have had more than a few calls where I'm there "just in case." My question is, is this truly an effective use of their time? Could they brought in ad hoc, or looped in after the fact? If they have to provide a five-minute update, couldn't that be e-mail?

Vent Above my Desk

Everyone who follows me on Twitter has probably noticed that, about this time each day (2:30 PM), I start to complain about being cold. I feel it mostly in my hands and the tip of my nose. Everyone near me complains, too.*

I think I figure out what's going on. My desk is on the outer edge of the office. The cool thing is I have a great window with a great view. However, I am also right under the vents.

The other gotcha is that I'm on the East side of the building. In the morning, the sun can be blinding, and, along with a venti coffee, I am quite comfortable.

However, by afternoon, it's hot enough outside that the air conditioning kicks in, which is probably set to cool the whole floor. It's not hot enough outside to offset this. As the sun is on the other side of the building, it isn't helping me out.

That's my theory anyway. I'll probably complain about it on Twitter daily until, oh, let's say June. Then it will be how hot it is. Or how much I want to go ride my bike.

*About the cold, not about me whining about the cold. Not to say people don't complain about me whining. Or, me in general.

With so much going in downtown, it's still sad to see something leave. The first time Walnut Street Popcorn left was in 1998 or 1999. The building they were in was bought out, and it (plus a Penn Station) had to move. They were in Blue Ash for a few years, then, in 2004, returned to downtown.

They were a nice alternative--I would get some popcorn instead of chips with a veggie sandwich. They sold various kinds of popcorn (regular, air, caramel, and cheddar), frozen yogurt, and various things dipped in chocolate (pretzels, oreos, nutter butters, etc.). They did brisk business at the holidays, selling tins given as corporate gifts. They seemed to do OK at Valentine's Day and Sweetest Day (if you celebrate the latter). At other times, they would have a few customers come in here and there.

A colleague who is part time/works from home and I were working on something. It was a tight-deadline situation, so she would, during phone calls, bribe her kids with oreos. After we got through the rough patch, I bought her a package of oreos (for her kids) and a half-dozen chocolate covered ones from Walnut Street Popcorn (for her kids), as a thank you for sticking it out and going above and beyond her normal job.

When walking by at lunch, I noticed they were dark. Not a totally uncommon occurrence--if someone got sick, they sometimes didn't have staff to back-fill. I looked at the door to see if there was a sign explaining what was up.

Instead, I noticed that all of their equipment was out of the building--no popper or yogurt machine. The display case had no chocolate covered potato chips, but was empty. There was no indication what happened. I decided to have lunch at the Subway next door, in order to see if they knew anything. They said they came in Monday, and the popcorn place was shut down, even though things were normal on Friday.

I suspect that, though the margins on the popcorn might have been high, rent in downtown Cincinnati is really high. They probably lacked the year-long volume of business to stay open. Quite frankly, I'm not surprised. I am, however, quite disappointed.

Let me go a nutty step further; if your slides make perfect sense without you talking, they may be too dense.

In high school, I did competitive speech. I took a the basic speech course there (to fulfill a requirement). I took an introduction to speech course in college, again to fulfill a requirement. Finally, to fulfill a work requirement, I took a speech course offered by my company. Essentially, I took the same course three times (though the last one actually mentioned PowerPoint).

All three courses basically took the same stance on visual aids: that they should help amplify what you are saying, not replace in. In short, what Mr. Mann said above is perfectly consistent with the desired approach.Put another way: you should not read your slides.

Unfortunately, I see this in many meetings: a PowerPoint desk is created for a presentation, and, for all intents and purposes, I could be equally well served by reading the slide deck. Occasionally, you'll hear "I'm not going to drain this slide." Basically, it is another symptom of the basic problem: a PowerPoint presentation should augment, not replace, your presentation.

But, meeting after meeting, there are presentations where information is crammed onto slides. Fonts become increasingly smaller. Diagrams become dense to the point of not being intelligible. The deck ceases to communicate useful information, and begins to simply show the complexity or effort associated with what is described.

I have two hypothesises as to why this happens. First, it is simply laziness. To create the desk, they cut-and-pasted from materials they had around, put it on the standard template, and called it good. Or, they didn't want to bother making a separate handout. I confess that the latter does have a certain appeal.

My second hypothesis is that people who are working in business today are not writers. Pulling together an essay (or reading the essay) is not something that is natural, especially when trying to describe a series of ideas. On the other hand, the slide metaphore works for them. They can put each idea on a different slide (and drill down into it) much like they might write index cards. It doesn't require transitions, and doesn't require the audience as much mental energy to process.

As someone who has a liberal arts degree (and only really had essay tests), it is not my default approach. I have been both complimented and critiqued for long essays I send (sometimes even by the same person about the same document). However, I see where it might work for someone.

The problem is that what works in presenting an idea to a reader does not exactly work when talking to a live audience. Beyond simply having slides that are too dense and the frustration of being read to, I think people feel they must give every slide. Again, this may not be an appropriate level of detail, depending on the audience. Again, if you consider saying "I'm not going to drain this slide," you probably have too much detail.

Perhaps one day someone will find a tool that combines the thought-flow of PowerPoint that appeals to people while scaling to how it is delivered (non-interactively (like an e-mail) versus a true presentation). For my part, I'm going to follow what I was taught, and not confuse PowerPoint with Word.

I was doing pretty good this year of posting fairly consistently. This week made it difficult. In part, I blame my MacBook (for decent reasons).

Work and illness have also kept me down. Without having to go into detail, a major project is at risk because commitments weren't kept. Now my team is scrambling to make things work. At this point, all we can do is shake our head.

When I bought my MacBook, I wasn't sure what I'd think, so I went cheap, and regretted it. I upgraded the RAM after just a few months. I discovered that I love Macs, and also that I can do a lot more multimedia stuff. This may be due less to the Mac as it is to the fact that the hardware and software overall are easier to work with. Media takes a lot of space. X-Plane takes a lot of space. For Christmas, I asked for a new hard drive. My wife got me a 160 GB drive--up from 60 GB.

The box said "professional installation recommended." It still strikes me odd that I can legitimately claim to be one of the professionals they are talking about (not that it really takes a professional). It's been years since I've been professionally installing hard drives--I now worry about where we put the computers.

The installation of the drive itself went well, however, I discovered that my DVD-ROM drive was failing. Everything I put in it was said to have errors. I pulled out a an old DVD drive and an IDE-to-USB cable, and was able to install Leopard from one of the "bad" DVDs. This convinced me that it was a drive issue. I talked to Apple--since my comptuer was out of warranty, it would cost $300 to fix it, it would have to be shipped in, and it would take a few days. This is for a relatively cheap part.

I found instructions and a replacement drive on the internet (in fact, upgrading it to a SuperDrive (DVD-RW)), and got the part on Tuesday. I confess I was nervous--laptops are a lot more delicate than desktops. Even if you didn't "break" anything, there was the risk that something wouldn't get together right, and there would be a gap in the case or something. I took out about twenty screws, installed the drive, and spent time trying to distinguish between a 3mm and 3.5mm screw (seriously).

The laptop came together--I was afraid something wouldn't be quite right--and everything worked...except I left out a bit of shielding foil. This is the sort of thing that, for the most part, wouldn't cause a huge problem, but the problem would be a quirky, very-hard-to-diagnose thing. I took the case apart again (keeping better track of my screws), and had it together again.

Through a rewards program at work, I got a copy of iLife '08, which was my test--the drive works great. This cost less than half of Apple's estimate.

At this point, I've replaced practically everything that is an "option" on the MacBook order page. I have one of the most-after-market-upgraded first generation 1.83 Ghz MacBooks out there. I'm actually rather proud of that.

The next day, I got kinda sick. Bad enough that I was miserable, not so bad I felt I could stay home from work. I'm getting better. However, I haven't had a chance to play with iLife '08. I was hoping to pull together a new video. Perhaps this weekend (or next) there will be a video-blog post...