Entries tagged with viz

Entry tags:

health,
viz

I don't think so...

Dear $health_insurance_provider,

I am in receipt of your letter, sent on your behalf by my employer, urging me to fill out a "health risk assessment" so that you can provide me with an "action plan for [my] health". It appears that you are proposing to make recommendations for my medications, lifestyle, diet, and, for all I know, hypothetical affinity for skydiving, all on the basis of a questionnaire.

You are, of course, aware that as a condition for acquiring your insurance services, I designated a primary-care physician who is responsible for overseeing my care and who is, you know, an actual doctor. If you care to open up your file on me, you will see that I do in fact avail myself of his services on the conventional, recommended schedule. In other words, I already have a source of sound health advice, and I do not need to augment it with a source of less-sound advice offerred absent any actual examination of me. I understand that some of your customers might not be availing themselves of their doctors' services, but perhaps your effort would be better spent encouraging them to change that instead of offering medical opinions via email.

While you do, of course, influence my doctor (through your decisions about what you will and will not cover), I think my doctor is more likely than you are to prioritize my health over your costs. So if it's all the same to you, I plan to stick with my current plan for continued good health.

Entry tags:

random bits

Quote of the day: "If you ask an engineer at KFC to describe their product, he'll tell you they make deep-fried dead chicken parts. If you ask a marketing person, he'll tell you it's finger-licking good." (Anonymous marketing person, to Dani.)

Today I learned that the company I work for gives employees small gifts on (certain) anniversaries. I learned this when my manager walked up to me with a framed certificate and a catalogue of stuff from which I can choose one item. That was a surprise. On the one hand, I've never made it to five years anywhere else (nature of the industry); on the other hand, I don't think I've ever worked in a place that would have given me loot for doing so.

I think Erik's fever broke; his nose doesn't feel hot today like it did last night. His appetite is picking up (though not quite at normal levels yet).

Once a year there is a local ulpan for teaching conversational Hebrew -- five 3-hour sessions in a bit over a week. This morning I hunted down the coordinator of the program (after finding an unsatisfying web site) and signed up. (It's in early June.) She asked me what level and I said that was a good question. After I described my background she suggested a level but said it would be easy to move to a different class if we discover on the first day that it's a bad fit. (I'm mildly surprised that this conversation occurred entirely in English; I figured she'd try to talk to me in Hebrew and see what happened.) Then five minutes later she called to invite me to the last few sessions of a currently-running (weekly) class. I can do that, and then maybe we'll have a better idea of placement for the ulpan.

Tonight/tomorrow is the last day of Pesach, which, like the first, is a holiday.

Entry tags:

bad design

I discovered today that our office has a race condition.

The doors from our space to the hall are connected to an alarm system. To enter through one of those doors you have to swipe a card and enter a code; to leave through one of those doors you have to push a button, which (we were told) disables the alarm for 60 seconds. 60 seconds ought to be long enough for anyone to walk the 10 feet to the door and get out, so I've been puzzled by the frequency with which the alarm goes off. We're all smart people -- are we really that bad about remembering to hit the button?

This afternoon I hit the button, saw the indicator light that said I'd connected, opened the door -- and set off the alarm. That's when I learned that closing a door resets the alarm; it's not really a 60-second window. So if I hit the button while the other door is open, and that door is closed before I walk over and open my door, the alarm goes off.

Bugger. While I don't sit right next to the alarm like some of my unfortunate coworkers, I sit close enough to hear it when it goes off. (That sucker is loud.) And I'm told there's nothing we can do about this problem. This seems like poor design; while it would come up only rarely in, say, your house with a handful of occupants, with close to 100 people and the restrooms and smoking area on the other side of those doors, there's a lot of traffic.

(Of course, we could address the problem informally, rather than with the alarm company -- but we have to be motivated. A door-cam would do it, but I don't care that much.)

Entry tags:

electronic isolation

Starting tomorrow, I will not be able to access personal email at work. Many web sites are blocked (including all known to offer email); LJ access is unknown. You should assume delays in responding to, or even seeing, email, interesting web sites, national news... If you have my cell-phone number, you can use that to reach me if it's time-sensitive. If you think you should have my cell-phone number and you don't, send me email (which will, err, be delayed, so don't wait until you need it).

Entry tags:

random bits

Sometimes I am too optimistic when it comes to other drivers. I left work at 6 tonight, expecting to go home (not quite four miles away), feed the cats, take care of a few other things, and then drive over to my synagogue (a mile away) for a 7:00 meeting. Heh. Right. It took more than half an hour to go the first mile. The roads in question weren't icy, just wet. I should have known better, I guess.

My bathroom scale isn't accurate enough to weigh Erik, but it feels like his ribs are getting less prominent. He's still bony and underweight, but I think he's gaining. I hope so. We have an appointment with the vet on Monday where I'll find out. (On average he's been eating 7-8oz of canned food per day. More on the weekends and sometimes less on weekdays, because it works better in small doses every few hours.)

I've been at my synagogue for something every day for the last week. We just interviewed a candidate for a rabbinical position, which is a big part of that. That's been an educational process for me.

In a few weeks our comapny's network configuration will change in major ways. One change is that we'll be using an Exchange server for mail instead of our current IMAP server. (No, we don't get a vote on this.) So all of us who have been using other mailers have to move to Outlook, and we're being smart and doing that part of it before the server change. It'll be fine in the end, but I keep feeling like I've just moved five years' worth of mail and now I can't find anything. (I had to move all of my saved mail onto the server so I could then download it into Outlook, as no direct translation path existed.) On the bright side, the tech-support person the company sent to get everyone configured was one of the most fun I've worked with. I'm pretty sure she's a Unix user when her employer isn't looking; she definitely groks geeks.

Seen in a locked entry: "You know you're living in 2006 when... you pull into your own driveway and use your cell phone to see if anyone is home to help you carry in your groceries." Guilty. :-) Hey, calls between our phones are free...

A lab report that's more honest than most (link from ian_gunn).

The Slow Crash argues that civilization will fall not with a bang but with a whisper (link from brokengoose). I'm reminded of one episode of the short-lived Dilbert TV show where there was some sort of economic crash and the very next day everything looked like a scene out of the middle ages. It was a nice spoof.

Entry tags:

new office

Another in the "what were they thinking?" file: indirect fluorescent lighting reflected off of chartreuse/lime walls. Um, yeah. (John, you've got to see the demo when you get back! It's special.)

There is definitely too much ambient whitish light in our space. A coworker has already offered to help install a bead curtain if I produce one and promise not to implicate him. (To clarify: this was his suggestion, not mine.) Bead curtains don't come off-the-shelf in 9-foot lengths, though, so I don't know. Could be fun with the right beads, but it would have to be hand-made. Or we might be able to do something clever with thick-enough (or dense-enough) fabric. Or maybe some of each.

The distance between the top of the wall and the ceiling is 22 inches. The walls are 5 inches deep. Anchoring from the ceiling might be difficult. We ought to be able to do something interesting with this space, though.

I like the suggestion of the "cave" motif, including bats and phosphorescent moss (well, reasonable facsimiles). I wonder what we can do with this.

I'm betting that if I post this, I'll come back from Simchat Torah to some amusing suggestions. As you might infer, "tasteful" can be trumped by "fun". :-)

Entry tags:

moving

My company is in the process of moving to a bigger space a few blocks down the street. There's been a lot of packing and move-logistics foo over the last few days, making it harder to continue to get work done. (I was chided for doing a build finishing at 11:50 against a noon shut-down.)

I saw the new space today for the first time since it was a vast unfinished area. It's kind of funky, but should be fairly nice in most ways when it's finished. (There are still unfinished bits, because no construction project is ever done on time.) There are a couple things that elicited the (silent) reaction of "heaven please save us from designers", but oh well. Most notable in this category is running a checkered carpet at an angle in rectangular rooms, giving the impression that the walls are at angles other than 90 degrees. Non-rectangular rooms would not be out of place in this company, but that's not what the advance diagrams showed.

The work spaces are smaller than I had been given to understand, by about two feet in both directions. I hope things fit the way I want them to, but I suspect they won't. We'll see.

More people than I initially expected will be affected by my need for a darker work area; I hope that doesn't pose a problem. Or we might hang curtains or something. Must consult "office"-mate and the aesthetics police. (Our "office" has walls on three sides, high but not to the ceiling, and is open on the fourth side. Only people at the director level rate real walls and doors.) They chose white light throughout; I find yellow to be much easier on the eyes. We'll fix that in my immediate area, though there's nothing I can do about public areas. It's mostly indirect light, at least, and I didn't notice a pronounced fluorescent flicker today.

I feel bad for our IT people, who are going to be working all weekend (I suspect) to get everything back up before Monday morning. I guess you know about that sort of thing when you take an IT job, but it still sounds like a hassle. I hope they get some time away next week to compensate -- but not on Monday. :-)

Entry tags:

short takes

Erik has been more clingy than usual lately. I'm vaguely thinking "for about the last month"; I wonder if it's been since Pennsic. I didn't notice it immediately, if so. I wonder what it means. (He is especially clingy when I am working at the computer, alas.)

Last night Dani and I went to the Coldstone Creamery for the first time. (Yeah, we're slow -- but let it never be said that we are slaves to fashion. No, I don't think you were going to say that anyway.) The ice cream was good but maybe not as good as the price would suggest. We couldn't help thinking that while it would defeat their gimmick, a blender would speed up processing of the customer queue.

Seen at work: "Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."

Today was our company's annual retreat, where we close the office and go do company-focus-building stuff in a secluded cabin or the like. It's a good idea, but I don't think we actually needed to go as far out of the city as we did this time. (This was a new location for us.) It took almost an hour to get there. I'm really glad I hitched a ride, because some of the signage was quite poor and I probably wouldn't have found the place on my own.

We actually have budget for conferences; I wonder what it would be most beneficial for me to attend. (I didn't get my act together for SIGDOC this year, which is happening as I write this.)

Entry tags:

login chaos

Now that we've been bought by a large company with large infrastructure, I've had to acquire quite a few more username/password pairs -- benefits site, HR site, sites for specific health providers, VPN, timesheet system, etc etc etc. (This is, of course, on top of the normal stuff -- machine login, email, etc.)

This wouldn't be so bad if all of these systems used the same pattern for the user name and maybe even the same requirements for passwords. But they don't. So there I was, trying to access one of these sites, getting "user name or password not valid" complaints, and having to try all the possible combinations of all values I could think of (because telling me which it disliked would give away too much information).

The problem turned out to be the user name. It wasn't my last name. It wasn't my email address. It wasn't my SSN. It wasn't my employee ID (actually the first thing I tried, since it was a corporate site and that's a corporate-issued ID). No -- it was the first letter of my first name plus the first four characters of my last name plus the last four digits of my SSN. I kid you not. Yeah, now that they mention it I recognize that. But who remembers stuff like that? Especially when there's exactly one system among the myriad that it applies to?

Is it any wonder that people write these things down (including passwords) or tell their browsers to take care of it?

Entry tags:

random bits

Great. My car has a heisenbug. The pesistent warning light failed to persist through today (it cut out on the way home from work on Friday). I called the dealership to ask if my inability to demonstrate the problem would preclude their exam, and they said yes. So I didn't have it looked at tonight. And I have no idea if the problem is gone temporarily, gone never to return, or a sign of a burned-out indicator. I'm going to assume not the last, for now.

Speaking of bugs, the cable connecting the DVD player to the TV is not at fault. Drat. The guy at Radio Shack, after applying a testing gadget, described it as "astonishingly good". I don't have either a spare TV or a spare DVD player to debug with, but the DVD player is more portable so I'll start there. Aside: the set of connections on the back of the TV only slightly resembles the picture in the manual, and they're not labelled. Whee. I might have noticed that earlier had the folks who delivered the TV not also wired everything up for me.

My new SDK developer started work today (yay!). I anticipated and planned for a bunch of possible problems. The only one I missed was network failures with the computer she'd be using. Oops. It's kind of hard to fetch things from various internal web sites without a good network connection. Fortunately, we got that fixed before I resorted to burning CDs. (This is a temporary, floater, machine, as the one we actually ordered for her is apparently still on a truck somewhere.)

sanpaku on a certain class of PS2 games: Honey. You don't really think that fantasizing about blowing people's heads off in the mall could ever take the place of you, do you? Just wait over there while I run over this hooker.

Entry tags:

hiring tech writers

The company formerly known as MAYA Viz is currently looking for one or two technical writers to work on end-user and system-administrator documentation and training materials. This is interesting, cutting-edge visualization/collaboration software, not some boring "document version N.0 of $decades_old_package" job. There'll be a mix of commercial and military applications. We're in Pittsburgh and not set up for remote work; sorry to my friends in other cities.

I'll be happy to talk with folks and pass on resumes. I might get a finder's fee if we hire you (I'm not sure how that works yet; it's new), and if that happens I'll do something nice for you, but my main motivation is that I want to work with good people.

My email address is in my profile.

Entry tags:

dnd,
tv,
viz

short takes

Welcome to LJ,

osewalrus (aka

hfeld_blog).

Last night's D&D game was fun (though long). The campaign will be ending soon, and that makes me sad even though it's necessary. Ralph set out, four years ago, to play out a particular story arc, and we're almost done. We've had some great moments, and we have some good story yet to come. I wonder what we'll do when it's all over.

We're nearly done watching Wonderfalls, a half-season TV show we borrowed on DVD. The first half-dozen episodes were wacky and quirky in a fun way, and on that basis we bought a copy for a friend as a gift. The last few episodes have been growing more dark and weird. While I know that the decision to kill it was made by episode #4 (that's all that aired), I'm not sure the outcome would have differed if the entire run had been allowed to air. But then, maybe something's coming in the last episode to tie it all up; we'll see.

From the "just shoot me now" department: We got a glimpse of the new time-tracking system we'll have to use at work starting in a couple weeks. The first sign that this would not meet our usual high standards for user interfaces came in the text shown in the desktop icon: "3270". Yup -- text-based COBOL system, no shortcuts, no UI brains. Whee.

One WallMart now requires employees to commit to work any shift, 24x7, or be fired (link from revlaniep). Got kids with specific day-care hours? Have a problem working on the sabbath? Tough noogies. I found this quote from the article ironic: "The officials who did know were attending a conference on diversity and could not be reached, he said." Diversity, huh?

Entry tags:

more about Steve

Thank you everyone for the condolences.

I went to the funeral today. It was packed! There was no real mingle-space; it was go in, sit down, wait for service. So I didn't get a good sense of who all the people were -- many coworkers, probably some colleagues from CMU and maybe elsewhere, and of course family. Oh, and I assume some people from the congregation, though I didn't spot anyone I knew.

My rabbi gave a really good eulogy, blending the many aspects of Steve's life. Ok, I've never heard him give a eulogy before so I have no baseline, but it sounded good to me. (This was my first Jewish funeral, too.)

The burial was private, but my company had arranged to take over the back room of a nearby restaurant so we could spend some time together. I didn't realize until I was leaving that we'd spilled over into a second room, which would explain the apparent absence of people I'd expected to see there.

Steve's Hebrew name was Tzadik. It fits.

I went to tonight's shiva minyan and it, too, was packed. We ended up holding it out on the porch because of geometry and weather. I wonder if the first night will have been abnormally large or if it'll be that big every night. (I've seen this go both ways.)

I held up well through all of this. I think I've gotten past the first couple stages. What's supposed to come after denial and anger? I think I've made it to acceptance, actually; I mean, it sucks and things are going to be rough, but he's gone and there's nothing to be done about that.

I think part of why this hit me kind of hard was the timing. ( Read more... )

Entry tags:

people,
viz

a very sad day

When I arrived at my synagogue Sunday night for Shavuot, services were still going. (I had failed to make the beginning, so I was aiming for the late-night study.) The synagogue director intercepted me in the lobby. "I need to talk to you before you go in there." I was puzzled.

She told me that Steve Roth, a member of our congregation and the CEO of the company I've worked at for the last four years, died suddenly that afternoon. This is a real shock! The timing is especially sad as, after two or three decades in the field, he was about to see all his research and development efforts bear real fruit.

This news made me sad Sunday night, but I was able to somehow build a little fence around it and contain it for the duration of the evening. I'd occasionally wondered how hard it is to not mourn on a festival (or Shabbat); now I have some insight into that. Several of the people who stayed for torah study knew him, so I wasn't the only one struggling with this.

This morning during Yizkor (the memorial service said four times a year, including on Shavuot) it really hit me. My rabbi talked about him, and about the tragedy of the timing (among things, his son was being confirmed that night), and even though he didn't eulogize (he was talking more generally) I found it very hard to fight back tears. Steve was a colleague but not someone I actively considered a friend, but still, it hurts. I expect the funeral tomorrow to be a real challenge.

My manager called in the morning to give me the news. I had intended to save him the heartache of delivering the news by telling him I already knew, but something in his voice told me that he was about to deliver carefully-prepared words and I shouldn't derail him. So I didn't.

I managed to somehow set this aside for most of the day and evening, acknowledging the sadness without being affected by it. Tonight, as I read the day's email from work, it hit me again. This is not going to be easy.

Edit: Obituary.

Entry tags:

a small bit of company culture

The company I work for just got bought. As part of this, we have to change our name -- but there's some flexibility in what that new name will be. People have been making lots of suggestions via our Wiki, but a Wiki is not a good way to track popularity of individual suggestions.

We're a data visualization and collaboration company. We have tools for solving this. :-)

One wall of our kitchen is now covered in stickie notes. Each note contains a proposed name and two vote tallies, one for and one against. People can add new stickies and vote on existing ones at any time. (One vote per stickie, vote on as many as you want, honor system.) The position of the stickie on the wall is governed by the two vote counts -- positive votes on one axis, negative votes on the other. Yeah, we could have done this through software, but this is more fun -- and much more interactive.

This is one of those odd bits of company culture that it's important to preserve. I've worked for places where the answer -- if people got input at all -- would have been to email your top three choices to so-and-so, who will tally them and publish a list. But that does not capture nearly enough information about the data.

Besides, that sort of process would also filter out the wacky suggestions early on. I think it's fun to see the wacky ones alongside the serious ones. Who knows -- a wacky one that catches on might be able to be tweaked to be workable anyway.

Entry tags:

a nice outcome of moving

One nice side-effect of our office move in a few months (just down the street) is that we'll have an entire floor -- and the corresponding restrooms -- to ourselves. This presumably means an end to the stench of hairspray from the mid-afternoon shellackings that someone on our floor goes for. Eww. Those people, and the ones who marinate in perfume, really need to develop a better understanding of what ventilation systems can and can't do.

Entry tags:

a job change

On Friday the company I work for was acquired by a large defense contractor (no fooling!). This surprised me; I didn't know that we were looking to be acquired. It's too soon to say how it will all play out.

I've been casually trying to figure out if this is the largest company I've worked for or the second-largest. Information on how many people worked for IBM (total) in 1994-1995 turns out to be hard to find via Google. (That's when they bought the company I was then working for.)

Entry tags:

weekend stuff

This Shabbat was the first of four in a row where we have no bar or bat mitzvah. This means our rabbi gets to stay for the entire informal morning service -- yay! It's nice that we have lay people who can conduct the service and read torah, but this really is his minyan in many ways, and I feel bad when scheduling makes him miss some of it.

Torah readers are assigned through mid-March. This is the farthest ahead we've been scheduled for a while! I don't know when I'll next read there; I'm probably reading for a women's service in February, but that's a different group. (They asked for volunteers to read torah or lead parts of the service; I said I could do either but have Opinions about content of the latter that I'd like to discuss before committing. So it looks like I get torah reading, which is fine.)

( minor puzzles )

Saturday night was my company's holiday party. It was huge! We've been growing a lot, but when people are spread out it's not as obvious. Put us all in one room with significant others and... wow. We missed the party last year, and this was much bigger than two years ago.

The party was fun; the organizers did a good job with it. This year, unlike last year (I'm told), we did not run out of food. Dani found a wine that was sweet enough for him (a Riesling, but I failed to get specifics). Some people brought instruments and were jamming in the front room; I didn't bring any on the theory that it would be Christmas music, but it turns out that would have been ok (they were improvising, mostly). On the other hand, for expedience I would have brought drums, not the hammer dulcimer -- and one of my coworkers is really good on drums, so there wouldn't have been much I could contribute. But I enjoyed listening, so that was fine.

Today the washer and dryer rebelled. (What did we ever do to them?) The washer has decided that it doesn't like the rinse cycle, so it just stops there. We can drain the water and reset it to get it to fill and agitate again, hacking a rinse, but it won't spin. Bah. And then the dryer decided that heat was optional, though once we took the front panel off to look for a fuse (unsuccessfully) and took the vent stack apart looking for a lint clog (nope), it began to give us lackluster heat. I guess we just needed to speak sternly to it -- for now.

The appliances came with the house (five years ago) and weren't new then. I wonder what the usual life-expectancy is on these things. I guess we should find out what a service call costs, and whether he'll give us a break for two appliances in one visit.

So, hours after I expected to be done, my shirts are slowly drying, jeans are queued up behind them, and Dani has a load queued up behind that. Whee.

Entry tags:

random bits (TV, fish, work)

That was cute. The TV show Jack and Bobby is (mostly) set in present-day US. Wednesday's episode was set on election night 2004 and included a scene referring to the outcome. Obviously they had two versions of that scene prepared; I assume they were smart enough to have three. I wonder how much lead time they needed. It's network TV, not syndication, so I'm guessing they had until about 30 seconds before that scene aired to choose.

Grouper is quickly becoming my favorite fish to cook with. (But where do they get these names? :-) ) When baking fish there's a fairly small window in which the fish is cooked all the way through but not over-cooked. This window seems to be wider with this particular fish. I don't know why, but I'm not complaining. (It's also a fairly sturdy fish without strong flavor, meaning you can do just about anything to it.)

Tomorrow my company is having its annual retreat, so I won't be online. Usually they have these on some mid-week day; this year it's a Friday and after the time change, so I'll have to leave early due to Shabbat. Fortunately, it's in a location that's not hard to drive to and from. (There's one site we've used in the past for which my reaction would be to not go unless I could ride with someone willing to leave early.)

(Shabbat before 5:00, all of a sudden, feels weird. I'll get used to it, of course; I always do.)

Our company plans to grow pretty substantially over the coming year, so I assume a major theme of the retreat will be growth and change. We've got a lot of good people, so I think we'll mostly come through this growth fine, but there are landmines we have to watch out for, mostly (based on past experience) in the areas of communication, general management, and (avoiding) disenfranchising people.

Entry tags:

paper-pushing

I've just learned that my (physical) "out" box has a built-in router. The specific case here is expense reports. My manager doesn't know who processes them either, but apparently we don't need to. I just put the report in my outbox and the office daemons take it from there. Or something like that.

I assume that there are some types of traffic that the router doesn't know how to handle, but that's what the "in" box is for.