I'm re-reading Red Storm Rising because it just feels appropriate about now...

I don't know about you, but while I read about record heat everywhere, I find myself in the San Francisco Bay Area where the temperature has peaked at 70F and not really gotten past that all "Summer" so far.

"Summer" in air quotes.

Sure seems to me I should relocate and be working from a beach somewhere.

Just a quick note on the current AI kerfuffle - the genie is out of the bottle. You can attempt to regulate AI all you want, but those who wish to use it unethically will do so. When you can stand up your own stack in your machine room, you can do what you want.

What's needed right now is immediate pushback on the USE of AI. In the context of entertainment, for eample, writers should demand in their contract that AI may not be used by studios without consent. Actors should be contractually guaranteed the right to their likeness and voice and that AI cannot be used without proper compensation. And there should be penalties for misusing AI (and this is a huge depate on what "misuse" is). 

Treat it as a tool you can't control, but focus on what is done with it. Lock that down now or it, too, will get away.

My official position - tools like ChatGPT fall into three buckets for me:

1. Factual generation is a complete fail. I ask for a list of "five things that happened on this day in history" and it just makes stuff up, but insists that it's factual. Nope.

2. Assistance with code and design. Moderately useful. It eliminates a lot of grunt work and is good at templates that I can then customize. Things that I would usually look up in a reference (and I know where to look) are now at my fingertips more easily. Properly used, even buggy code is easy to polish. But don't ask it for architecture. That's not ready for prime time yet. This is, more or less, at the function level. It's good at things like "give me a function implementing the best sort for this kind of data."

3. Creative assistance. This simply rocks. Given a good prompt, I've gotten multi-page creative articles that simply blew me away. Laugh-out-loud funny when I want humor. It actually feels like it understands comedy. It gives me writing prompts that my human friends don't come up with. This is where the technology really shines for me.

Open Office floorplan is a conspiracy. That's a hill I'll die on!

You know you're really back in the domain name industry when your registration for NamesCon is secured.

Somehow I can't seem to quit this frothy industry! :-)

Well, the domains were available, so a parody site is being created.

https://trumpsantos.com and https://trumpsantos2024.com 

They're directing here for now, but soon... :-)

I looked up, thinking it was noon, at most. It's 2:30pm and this explains why I'm hungry. I sent my assistant out to get lunch, but since my assistant is a cat, I'm not hopeful.

I get the idea of software subscriptions. Back in the day, you'd buy software, get a CD (or a stack of floppies if you're that tenured), install the package and away you'd go. After a while, a new version would be available and you'd either get it as part of your original purchase or have to decide if you wanted to pop a few bucks for the new version, almost always at a discounted price.

These days, most software now costs a monthly fee to use. Stop paying that fee, and some packages lock you to the current version while some go as far as to just stop working at all. That is, you get to use the software as long as you keep paying. It's almost like renting the package.

Now, in the case of something like, say, Adobe Photoshop, I can see this model as viable. Adobe regularly pushes not only performance improvements, but refinements and new features as well. Consider what the suite used to cost, including the typical 12-18 month update cycle, and the subscription comes pretty close. Adobe provides value to the. model.

On the other hand, I'm looking at a package that automates an Internet task. For the most part, the package is very static. Now and again the producers have to make a small change to adapt to changes in third party integrations, but those are few and far between. Further, they support eight platforms and charge $29.99/month for one, and $59.99/month for all of them. Those are the options. Yet knowing how this software works, the differences are almost non-existent. The configuration considers all platforms and it's just an upload task that differentiates them. 

There is absolutely no value added in paying monthly for this software that not only doesn't change, but has very little differentiation and uses zero resources provided by the author. That is, it's not even a web service. It's a reasonably robust automation engine. That's it.

Further, this is the kind of package you'd use initially, and then would likely sit unused for months until you had another need for some automation. You'd be paying a monthly fee for no updates and just the option to have it available should you need it.

But people are conditioned now to pay a subscription, even for software that doesn't justify it. Thus, almost all software now carries a subscription model.

I believe this is where I say, "get off my lawn!" :-)

Have you noticed that in science fiction movies made decades ago, electric cars had a particular noise? That whining-whirring noise that everyone thought electric cars would make? And have you noticed that, sure enough, that's exactly the noise that they make now?

Maybe it's just me, but I think that's kinda cool and interesting. 

Or I'm just killing time before lunch ;)

My first real software development job out of college was with Microsoft. The year was 1997, and the boom was in full swing. Enthusiasm was high, parties were epic, and it was a time we've not seen since. It was also the era of "everyone has an office," and nobody really questioned it. Indeed, the only place on campus that I can remember not being this way was a large room in which something like the "open office floorplan" was used for contractors. And I remember thinking it was counterproductive, even then.

As a developer, I liked having my own space. Shelves for my reference books (and I'm still old-school that way). Some posters on the wall to set the nerdy mood. A huge white board that was all my own. It was my space, and the mindset that went with it had a direct impact on my morale and productivity. Of course, the real benefit was the door. It was open 90% of the time. Anyone could come by, and collaboration never suffered. But I could also close it, meaning that if I wanted some "in the zone" time I could have it. I could even put a sticky on the door, letting people know that I was unavailable except in emergency.

You simply can't do this with an open office plan.

Headphones are an invitation to be tapped on the shoulder. A "quick question" never is, and even when it is, pulling someone out of the zone means that quick question cost a half hour, at best. White boards are shared, so you can't keep a design up for weeks while refining it. And the chocolates on my desk seem to mysteriously disappear overnight. That one is still a mystery.

Open Office in the Age of COVID

What I've discovered, though, is that for the past 18 months, "working from home" has reinforced these beliefs and given some concrete experimental evidence to support them. So what have I discovered?

Working from home has the same issues

A private space to work provides the same benefits as an office in the building. I can close the door. I can socialize to family members that when the door is closed, I'm concentrating, and please don't interrupt unless you have to. This is generally respected in my household, with the notable exception of the cats. But cats are jerks. Working from home means I can have that private space that isn't afforded in an Open Office building. My point here being that I believe we've all experienced this, now. Has anyone, working from home, not found it better to have your own private space? Do you honestly work in the common areas all the time because the distractions are something you seek out? I doubt it.

Asynchronous Communication Works

When working from home, if someone needs you, they have to get in touch electronically. They don't get to walk over and tap you on the shoulder. Or, worse, stand there and wait for acknowledgement. But with the exception of a ringing phone (who calls unannounced these days?), all communication can be asynchronous. Emails can be read and returned in their own time box. Slack allows you to mute notifications except when urgent if you want. Even chat applications let you set your status as "busy" if you want. I wish Slack had a status called "In the Zone," but that's a feature request. I truly hope this understanding persists once we all return to the office.

Working from remote locations also works (at least for me)

I confess, I have a remote work habit that sounds ludicrous but actually functions at the highest level: I work from Las Vegas. Yes, I live in the San Francisco bay area, but, at least when the pandemic has allowed, I will often travel to Las Vegas for a week. I get a nice hotel room at my favorite center-strip resort, usally complimentary, and work from the comfortable hotel room where I have good Internet connectivity, a decent sound system, and a desk. I honestly get up at the start of the day, work without interruption, and put in a full day. My productivity is even more than at home, as there are no family members (or, as I said, cats) to interrupt, even legitimately. Meetings for the past 18 months have been on Zoom anyway, and the worst I got from those who didn't know my plans was a comment that my artificial background looked like a Vegas hotel room. In the evenings, I got good food, perhaps saw a show (nothing refreshes the mind like Penn and Teller!), and got to play some poker or roll dice. I don't really drink much, so I got up the next day refreshed and ready to go.

This may or may not work for you. You have to have the discipline to actually get the work done. For me, the enjoyment of my evenings wouldn't be there if I knew I had work piling up or people suspicious of my work ethic.

Tl;Dr

I remain of the opinion that Open Office Floor Plans are a drain on productivity and morale, and in light of 18 months of solid "work from home" data, I see no reason to change this opinion. And now I have some solid experience to back it up.

You go, Tuesday! You're so Fetch!

Day 1 of the new job: Holy crap, I have Imposter Syndrome!

Day 5 of the new job: I’ve seen this all before and done this all before. Holy crap, I have Dunning/Kruger Syndrome!

There's a commercial that plays on satellite radio with a jingle that's a really annoying earworm (no, not Kars-4-kids, but just as sticky).

I am about to sign up to use the service.

Dammit! The annoying jingle worked because when I realized I needed this, it's what came immediately to mind.

I feel... icky.

To have an application autopost to Facebook requires that you give Facebook access to your web site and allow their "engineer" to log in and test your app. These are, without exception, clueless and underpaid non-technical people in third-world countries.

I've gotten all of my applications approved after much angst.

What I didn't do was turn off Facebook's access after. Now they are asking that access stay open and they pop in every month or so and post a test.

1. This test gets on my production web sites, cluttering it. They don't remove the post afterwards.
2. This test goes to all of the pages and groups that get the autopost, again, creating garbage. They don't remove these, either.
3. The last time they did this, I didn't even notice. They did it wrong. It broke the auth token and my system hasn't been autoposting for over a week now.

I'm beside myself with distain.

With billions of users, Facebook owns this market. There won't be a "MySpace Event" that unseats Facebook. Ever. The only way they'll lose their dominance is if we get decentralized social feeds, much like we have a decentralized web of HTML sites.

We need a social protocol like HTML and browsers that support it.

We then need unassailable identity verification (or proper anonymity) and a protocol for creating a social graph (think "your friends" or "your followers" and such).

At that point, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, et. al. become obsolete and the users take back their content and control.

It'll be another 3-5 years.

There have been more than just a few instances where interactions "at work" have gotten a little too personal or awkward for my tastes. Nothing with me, thankfully, but I've seen it in meetings.

Now that we're all working from home, I think I know what it might be - we're working in the same place we live and play. To me, this often makes work feel more informal. We work in our pajamas (or less). We can get up and go into the bedroom to get something. Lunch is from our kitchen.

I think, perhaps, it's natural to feel more informal while working, perhaps subconsciously, and this leads to violations of work protocols and professionalism.

This is probably obvious to everyone else, but it just occurred to me ;)

You know what I'm missing? Improv comedy. Not that I got to go all that often, but now that there's no theater at all, I miss comedy shows. When things start up again, it's high on my list to re-engage.

New year, new logo, same place for those of us without our science fiction and fantasy conventions.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/concellation

https://www.concellation.com

Protip - before you cancel that meeting because you're just so busy, ask yourself if anyone else is likely to be in the same boat. Is that meeting really going to happen? Especially during the holiday time, odds are that someone else will be the person to cancel or postpone it and you'll get the time back without being "that person."

Or maybe it's just my experience ;)

This is what they call art, right? ;)

One Insight

I travel a lot for work. Often, dinner is going to be at whatever the hotel offers, and a lot of the time, that's getting food at the bar. It continuously amazes me how much people will say, out loud, during a conversation in such a venue. A lot of the time it's office gossip, which is fascinating. Some of the stories would curl your hair, especially when the participants have had a few drinks. But sometimes the conversation is all work, and just paying attention turns me into a fly on the wall of the company meeting room. I know how projects are doing, which initiatives are getting traction and which aren't, what's likely to be canned, and who's on the up or down as far as promotions go. Potential mergers have been mentioned, with the people talking presuming that they're just sharing information with each other that they already know or should know. Now I know. Something to keep in mind if you travel, yourself (from either end of this dynamic).

One Hint

Speaking of traveling, I'm often asked what my number-one top travel tip is. I'll give it to you here as one Thing, but look for an expanded post on it in the future. The tip is this: stop thinking about leisure travel in terms of "here's when I'm going, and here's where I'm going, now how can I get the best deal?" That's a trap. The options, once you've locked yourself into a time and location are often very limited. Instead, invert the model. Make a list of places you'd be interested in going. Make a range of dates you could travel. Then start looking. Be flexible and look for sales to destinations or drops in prices when you can go a week before or a week after your first guess. Last year I wanted to get away for Thanksgiving, but chose to not fix my sights on any particular location. I looked at prices in the time range I was considering and ranked them based on both the price and the attractiveness of the destination. One morning, for whatever reason, Japan went on sale. I mean a big sale. I booked it then and there, and spent an incredible week in Japan for next to nothing.

One Bit of Humor

President Trump just said that he's now going to start calling the "Fake News" the "Corrupt News." This is his new term.

I just registered corrupt.news

Happy Wednesday. ;)

Just remember, everyone has their fandom!

And, of course, if it bites itself and you die, that's voodoo.

Donald Trump not human? Cut me a little slack on that one...

Who knew that sperm whales are the noisiest animal on Earth?

I'm often asked about my personal productivity strategies, and the number one tip that I like to give out is the benefit of making habits of the things that you find valuable. It is said that it takes 21 days for form a habit, and that one must be committed to establishing it. I could argue that if you can remember to do something for 21 days, you've already made it a habit. If the habit I want to create is eating delicious cake every day, I suspect I could do without help. When it's remembering to floss, on the other hand, I might forget if I'm in a hurry, or even blow it off. In this case, I find that checklists help.

Applications like Todoist work for me, as they let me make a checklist of tasks and set them to repeat daily (or in some cases, on weekdays, weekends, or whatever schedule works for me). Initially, I had a single checklist, but I found this difficult to work with. Sometimes there are tasks that are expected on a given day but just aren't going to get done, often for very good reason. For example, one task I have is to make a daily journal entry about a particular topic. The problem is that the topic doesn't generate activity every day, so checking off this task when there is nothing to journal about is perfectly okay - but I get "credit" in the app for actually doing it. There is no way to mark it, as we'd say in the betting world, "no action."

My solution was to split out my list into two categories and then split those into two more. The two categories are health habits and all other habits. I treat health differently because many of the items are non-negotiable. Take my blood pressure medication, for example. That goes into the second split of "maintenance," which means that it's a "no excuse" task.

Tasks that aren't maintenance are improvement, and those are the ones that, more often than not, wouldn't get done if I didn't hold myself accountable. Improvement health tasks like working out or meditating (though that's becoming more attractive the more I do it). Improvement habits like committing to writing at least one sentence a day (hat tip to Stephen Barnes for this one).

In all cases, checking them off provides the dopamine reaction I'm after. I want to see, every day, 100% on maintenance tasks, and as close as I can get on the improvement tasks. If something can't be done regularly, I re-evaluate it to see if it must be dropped from the list or if I need to make adjustments to make it possible.

Bonus List: I have one for "Memorize." This is, obviously, anything I need to commit to memory. I put the text in a task and read it once per day and then check it off. After a time, the every-day repetition gets the job done and I can remove the task. Ask me to do some Shakespeare for you some time - this is how I memorized Dogberry's part in Much Ado About Nothing ;)

Do you think this would work for you? I'd love to hear thoughts and refinements! What would you add/change to this?

My son likes to think he's a lawyer and, unlike many children who ask the same question over and over will often ask the same question multiple times but with different angles. At some point, usually pretty early (I like to think I'm a smart guy), I realize he's doing this, and I shift into giving a response that I've found works well. I can't claim credit for it, I read it on a parenting blog.

Uber's new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, has been all over the media trying to rehabilitate Uber's reputation by telling us that Uber cares and will make things right when they go wrong. This is great spin, but is it really true? If my experience with Uber, lately, is any indication, it's not. It's business as usual at Uber.

Have you ever contacted Uber's customer service? First, you can't do anything except send a message with the app, but even then, you are constrained in your topics and ability to do so. Often, to get someone to read your issue, you have to select an irrelevant topic.

Once making it past that hurdle, you then send your message and wait for the inevitable misunderstood response. I have honestly never sent a message to Uber in which the response was in any way relevant to my actual complaint. Once going back and forth for the better part of a day with Uber, one may get a response that is aligned to the subject, but there's no guarantee there.

In my latest interaction with Uber, I requested a ride while in San Francisco. The app told me the wait would be about 8 minutes, and I waited while watching the car make its way to me. Once it was near, it was clear that the driver was going the wrong way and would never be able to reach my location. Sure enough, as the app was telling me that the driver was arriving, the car disappeared and the app told me that the driver had to cancel. Just like that.

I had to start over, wait another ten minutes and then... same thing. Driver cancelled.

The third time was a charm, some half-hour after I'd requested my first ride.

I contacted Uber and explained the situation and the response to me was that I should be fine, I wasn't charged a cancellation fee.

Wait. What?

I explained that it was the driver who had cancelled and noted that had I cancelled, I would have been charged $5, but when a driver does it, there's no consequence.

The response I received asked me for a screen shot of the $5 charge I incurred.

After going back and forth, I finally managed to explain what happened and was then told that this is the policy and there would be no refund. Not even an apology.

So... Dara? How is this "making it right?"

One thing I've come to realize that really gets me down...

It's one thing to sign me up for spam. It's another for a company to do it and claim it's some kind of benefit.

When I was in high school, in the 80s, I was part of a group that hacked into corporate voicemail systems so that we young hackers could communicate. Voicemail was pretty obscure then. You could find me, around lunchtime, at the payphone on campus, picking up and leaving messages. (Note for the young, look up "payphone" if you need to).

Life moves pretty fast
Web site left alone too long
Must update daily

Welcome to the future! I'd heard that Jean Michel Jarre was working on a new album, and last night saw a post that noted that it's out. I remember growing up in the '80s, and when an artist I liked had a new album, I'd have to make my way down to Big Music and go see my buddy Bob. He'd almost always have it in stock, but sometimes he'd have to order it and it would be a couple days before I got my hands on the CD. Before that it was waiting for the vinyl to show up. Those were the days, right?

So last night I see the post and click through. There we are on iTunes, with the album available. One click and my account is debited the $14 or so, and the download begins to my iPad. I'm not worried about single-device, of course, since I know that any iDevice I have (or even my PC with iTunes installed) can get the bits. I close iTunes, open my Sonos controller, and tell it that I'd like to listen to the album on the master bedroom speakers, please. Five seconds later I'm listening to the opening notes of Jarre's new offering.

And wow, this is good stuff! Collaborations with a whole bunch of other artists (including Tangerine Dream!). Clearly Jarre's style, and even more cool, clearly some of these artists are fans, as you can hear their components are often in the style of Jarre's older works. Musical respect.

The takeaway? This is the future I imagined when I was 21. If you'd asked me to describe "a day in the life" when I was in college, this is it. And that's simply amazing.

The album: https://itun.es/us/rpbO8

The very talented Matt Zanzibar has delivered the logo for Sleestaq, LLC, my new company for all of the web development and properties I'm working on. Much more about all of this to come, along with my new goal of a daily blog entry here at Bit.Parts!