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2004-02-22
Goodness
I am slowly getting used to those business trips to Frankfurt, it seems like I'm actually starting to like them even.
Uhm, no, that would be saying too much, when I think about it. Getting up at half past three sucks, no matter how often you repeat the excercise. The business meetings themselves aren't getting any better, either, even if those I had last Friday (one about the Guinea Pig project, the other about the Hamster Transportation project) amazingly were quite productive.
But there are other aspects of those business trips that I'm getting to value. One of them are the ten hours of more or less undisturbed reading time (most of them paid for by my employer) which the long train journeys provide me. That, in fact, was almost a problem this time, because I'm almost out of dead-tree books to read. Of course, there are more than 50 electronic books waiting on the HD of my notebook, and even more awaiting their download from sites like the Project Gutenberg, but my old, well-used notebook is rather heavy (it's a schlepp-top more than a laptop, really) and doesn't run more than two hours on one charge, and spare batteries of decent quality for the old Toshiba Satellite cost almost as much as the whole notebook cost me on eBay.
Fortunately, I lucked out on my short detour through the small book shop at the Berlin Ostbahnhof train station while waiting for the announcement for my train to Frankfurt. More about that in a few days when I'm through with the book...
Another nice aspect of those long, early train rides are the sun rises. I've always loved the silence, the calmness, the sheer, undisturbed beauty of nature in a sun rise, and the dawn on Friday was stunning.
It all started with the wisps of clouds that had gathered on the eastern horizon of an otherwise clear sky slowly gaining some color, changing from the slate gray of the night to a birght, vivid pink. While the early dawn was bringing a pale, greenish blue to the rest of the sky, the clouds slowly became brighter, changing hue from pink to a glowing orange with golden highlights on the edges of the clouds, and some remaining blue-gray shadows here and there.
During those magical minutes, the view of the landscape, rushing by at 150 mph was no less spectacular, the forests with their winter-naked trees and the villages huddling between the vast expanses of the empty fields painting their silhouettes in stark black contrast to the ever brightening morning sky. The silence of the early morning hours, only occasionally broken by the odd song from a bird who got fooled by the mild weather of the past weeks could be felt even in the express train.
Then, from one moment to the next, the brightening world lost its magic, the black silhouettes transformed into ordinary, grayish, three-dimensional objects, the trees looking sad without their foliage, and the villages looking deserted and almost desolate in the morning grayness. Even the sky was shedding its silken garment of brightly orange clouds and slowly replacing it with a dark grey cloak of solid cloud cover.
Then, just as suddenly, the magic was back when the sun broke through the gathering clouds, bathing everything it could reach in a bright red glow, restoring with this the magic of the dawn. This second moment of the wizardry of nature didn't last long though, and soon everything was swallowed again by the advancing grayness in the sky.
When nature's performance of the morning had ended thus, I returned to my book. I didn't look up again until we were almost in Frankfurt and thus missed the moment when sun and wind conspired to drive the clouds away, and thus gifted us with a clear and bright though also rather cold and windy late February day.
When, after having survived two business meetings with two different project teams at the customer, I settled back into the seat of the train that would bring me back to Berlin, the sun had already set, which deprived me of another, similarly spectacular sight.
But then, all was not lost. In the train that was booked out to the last seat I came to be seated beside a rather breathtakingly beautiful women who was, at my uneducated guesstimate, about 15 years older than me. Not only did she have impossibly big, green eyes a man could drown in, she also had lips that looked so inviting and kissable that they surely must be illegal. Her voice was a mellow contralto, and we talked quite a while until we both returned to our respective books, and finally said goodbye when she left the train, while I continued on to Berlin Ostbahnhof.
Yes, I could get used to those train rides.
2004-02-18
Asking for advice I had never hoped to need
My wife is on friendly terms with the assistant of a colleague, let's call her O. She has had for some time a new boyfriend, T, who is a truck driver and is therefore frequently out of touch for weeks on end. T is divorced, and has a daughter, D, who until recently lived with her mother, E, and E's new lover, A. It now transpires that the walking asshole A has been abusing D for about two years without E or T noticing, which is unsurprising, as E mostly seemed to want her daughter out of her way and out of her eyes, and T was almost never there to begin with.
A is in police custody now, so no immediate danger. E, who will not further concern us, is in guilt about not noticing anything until her daughter finally found the courage to speak up. The problem we're dealing with is the chain of misery starting at D, continuing at her dad T and O, and arriving at my wife and me: D now basically trusts no-one except for her dad and perhaps O, which specifically means that she won't trust a therapist and neither does she trust her mother. In fact, she wants nothing to do with her at the moment and wants to live with her dad and O for the time being, which we find reasonable, except that T is only ever here over the weekends, if that, O is constantly struggling with her own problems most of which stem from the fact that she's a single mom with a low income.
So what's happening as far as we can gather is the following: D spends every minute that T is available with him, and occasionally talks with O. T doesn't really know how to handle all this, talks about it at length with O, who isn't much better at any of this, either, and therefore is utterly miserable as well. When the going gets too rough for O, she seeks out my wife, pours her heart out to her, who yesterday did the same to me. All of this amounts to a lot of unhappy people who don't really know how to handle any of the shit handed to them.
So, what I'm asking is if there is any way we can help them, and by extension us, to remain half-way sane through the ordeal. I realize that therapy is probably the best bet for D (as well as T and E) in the long run, but doesn't look like a possibility right now or for the foreseeable future.
I am at this moment open and grateful for any and all advice, good thoughts, whatever you can give us.
2004-02-15
Something's Gotta Give
After being pummeled with all the Valentine's Day oriented hype about this movie, I was a bit sceptical about our decision to go and watch it yesterday evening. But then, that decision predated the V-day hype by a comfortable time span, and seeing as we had to do some shopping at the nearby mall anyway, we pre-ordered a pair of tickets on Friday.
When we arrived at the mall, the parking lot was still packed, and so was the mall itself. Bugger, but I hate such high concentrations of people. At least we got some of the things we were looking for, although we hunted in vain for others. (Why the hell is it next to impossible to find a pair of very comfortable and moderately elegant black shoes for me? All the possible candidates were clearly produced to either make me look at least a couple of decades older than I am, or ruin my feet within just a few hours. Gah!) With all the time spent on hunting shoes, we had too little time left for diner at a real restaurant, and so had to placate our rumbling stomachs with a visit to the nearby McD - not exactly the greatest atmosphere for a V-day diner, but oh well.
The cinema was packed to the rim, so we were glad to have fetched the tickets before starting our shopping spree, because we could now simply bypass the long queues at the ticket counter. They showed "Something's Gotta Give" in one of their biggest theaters, and it was sold out - congrats to the marketing guys!
We enjoyed the movie tremendously. Jack Nicholson does what he does best, namely playing quirky, older men, and he was brilliant. So, too, was Diane Keaton, playing a divorced and lonely, aging play writer who finds the old man on a weekend retreat with her much younger daughter when she unexpectedly for the two comes to her own house, her sister in tow. In fact, the whole ensemble did exceedingly well, with the only somewhat disappointing performance coming from Keanu Reeves in the role of the ER doctor who gets to treat Nicholson's heart attack and finds himself in love with the screen writer and thus in a strangely competitive situation with Nicholson.
The movie is laugh-out-loud funny in places, thoughtful in others, all the time carried along by the excellent performances of Nicholson and Keaton, who each play a character finding themselves in an unexpected place - he for the first time in a relationship with a woman who is older than 30 while he is 63 himself, she in love for the first time after her divorce - which besides providing them with heretofore unknown feelings, also makes them extremely vulnerable to each other. It is this poignant mix of vulnerability and excitement, fear and confidence that is the main theme of the movie, and I love it for this, for all the laughter, and for the fact that two older people are once again allowed to fall in love and have sex in mainstream cinema.
If you haven't already, go watch it! Afterall, what better way to spend a Sunday evening? ;-)
2004-02-09
No end-of-tunnel light supplied, please bring your own!
Said tunnel is approximately eighteen months long, and under different circumstances could be the equivalent of exploring the Glittering Caves. But that, alas, seems like it's not meant to be. The problem is twofold. For one thing, said tunnel, aka the Project From Hell isn't the only underground place I'm working at or supervising. In fact, it's the fourth such place, with the breakdown roughly as follows:
There's Project Q, the oldest of our projects, or rather, the nth continuous improvement of the original Project Q. The software is working steadily, the customer is satisfied, including the people who actually have to work with it, and they thankfully come up with a steady stream of ideas for improvement and the budget to fund our implementing these ideas. In other words, it's a nice, steady, almost soothing project to work at - no big excitement, no drama, lots of solid work.
Then, we have Project A, which deals with implementing Project Q for our Austrian customer. This one seems to be every bit as nice as Project Q, the people there are more technically cluefull than those from Project Q, and realizing this project has allowed us to redesign and reimplement a component of Project Q that has been bothering me ever since I learned of its existance a year and a half ago. This looks like bliss so far, right?
Yup, except there's Project R, the scheduling of which collides heavily with Project Q. Also, I've been uncomfortable with R ever since I first saw the requirements document for it, which made it clear to me, but sadly not my boss, that acquiring Project R was a Bad Idea (tm). Well, boss wanted us to get that project for strategic reasons. This is something I seriously don't understand, because while we deal with, say, hamsters, and both projects Q and A deal with duct-taping hamsters (thanks, Helen! :-), Project R is exclusively about guinea pigs, which seem superficially similar to hamsters but aren't really, and the occasional rabbit thrown in for good measure. And while the requirements document looked like they might be interested in duct-typing both guinea pigs and ferrets, which would already have been an altogether different procedure than that used for duct-taping hamsters, reading between the lines left me with the impression that that wasn't really what they wanted to do. Turns out I was right, as I was about my hunch about them not really having an idea what they want or need from Project R, and having built the requirements document using input from a competitor's product which they had evaluated before we made our offer (below cost, of course). The first project meeting made it painfully clear that they weren't really interested in manually duct-taping their guinea pigs, but wanted to automatically slather them in some fluid glue and then take it from there. Gah!
In addition to being project manager in projects Q, A, and R, I'm also assistant project manager in Project L, the Project From Hell. This is actually the most interesting and complex of all those projects: a highly available, fast system for fetching hamsters from various places all over the country, then delivering them to other systems like, e.g. the duct-taping process or the hamster fur peroduction. To fulfill the countless requirements, we'll have to design a robust system with a clean architecture, clearly defined interfaces, and lots of clever solutions for tricky problems while at the same time trying to understand the rusty old hamster delivery system, which sounds like an opportunity to have lots of fun, especially with all the other great, talented guys in the team.
Which is where problem number two enters the picture. He doesn't have a clue about software development, doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell to ever understand geeks and hackers, is the most extreme control freak I've ever had the misfortune to meet, and is so fixated on questions of layout and appearance that he makes it almost impossible to ever work conceptually on something, which is exactly what we desperately need to do in this phase of Project L. He also happens to be my boss, which makes it kinda sorta hard to continuously contradict or ignore his demands.
In order to counterbalance all that long tunnely darkness I foresee laying ahead of me, my wife and I paid a visit to our travelling agent and booked a week-long vacation in Andalusia, Spain in April. I sure hope that immersing ourselves in the sun, the Spanish cuisine, the different culture, and the various sights of the area including the Alhambra, will provide enough illumination to help me get further along in that tunnel system.
Right now, I'm just fixating on the spark of illumination in the distance that thinking about Andalusia in spring provides.
2004-02-02
The Insanity Is Spreading
Well, it seems reinventing old words to mean new things and inventing new words for old meanings which already have perfectly serviceable words attached to them is no longer the exclusive province of politicians and Microsoft managers. No, my own employers and its customers seem to be suffering from the same affliction.
Now, using imprecise language, words with ambiguous meanings, and new, inventive vocabulary is all fine and good - I like to do so too, when the occasion warrants a somewhat more flowery mode of expression. But if this kind of thing turns up in the requirement analysis phase of a project worth more than a million bucks, things have the potential (and hence the near certainty) to get real ugly real fast.
To be honest, I should have suspected that something is fishy when the decision was announced that we'll do "something like a requirement analysis, but we won't call the resulting document by its usual name - which has a rather well-defined meaning - but something similar instead". It now looks like I should have inquired more deeply at the time. It so happens that I didn't, which means that me and two co-workers as well as our project manager, who will be back from vacation tomorrow, will have a fun-filled week with lots of overtime before us. *Grumble*
Don't expect anything even remotely resembling coherence from me this week (as if you ever did).
So this is where we are headed?
John Walker of Autodesk fame is a lucid thinker and writer, as well as a reasonably good programmer. His dystopia of where the internet may be heading is to frighteningly plausible to be discarded out of hand. Heck, some of the new proposals, like Bill Gates' public proposal of the not quite so new idea of signed and paid-for email services post-dates his essay "The Digital Imprimatur".
So, read it, and weep.
A certain, oft-used quotation about freedom and safety by Abraham Lincoln, and a proverb about the materials used to line the upper surface of pathways to undesirable locations immediately spring to mind.
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