Left VS Right

So I spent yesterday designing touch screens.  Or at the part of yesterday I wasn't sleeping after a location upgrade.  

Anyways...   Proprietary Bob has the old version and the new version of everything they do.  The old version communicates through a bus that can cause all sorts of havoc.  In the new PCI compliance style interface, the old system doesn't work as well as it used to.  A customer can swipe a card and be out the door before the register ever realizes the card was declined.  So you have new technology, linked together using the best of the best of 10baseTX technology.  And you can get rid of the old tech and everything works in sync because you don't have to worry about whether Proprietary Bob wrote CSMA-CD into their algorithms.  By the way, you can tell it's a bus...  They have a piece of equipment that all devices communicate through.  It's a wired bus with a proprietary name.  But it can be replicated with a $10 off the shelf phone jack splitter.  Awesome work there, Proprietary Bob.  Awesome.

By the way, Cisco needs to update the CCNA.  In the description of a bus, they should indicate the best place to find one is a landfill.  Also...  should you ever see a bus in a working environment, quickly slam it in to a wall and break it...  claim you slipped if necessary.  Buses are worthless old technology and the world will be happier without them.

Now that you're up to date, we can go back and talk about touching things.  Essentially, Bob has given you the option of putting the sales list on the right side of the screen or the left side of the screen.  When you are not designing the thing, whether to put the list on the right or left isn't a big deal.  When you are designing things, it is a big hairy deal.

Now... the default is the left side.  I'm going with the assumption that most of the world or employees that would be using this thing are right handed.  And moving the right hand over the screen would block off a display on the right hand of the screen if the elbow flew out like Joe Cashier was about to go throwing elbows in his infamous throw-down of '02.  Now, if Joe Cashier moves their arm like T-Rex, then we've got a limited range of motion thing going and the elbows aren't going to be blocking off right hand side of the screen. 

The real problem is I can't predict how other people are going to use devices that I have to program and design.  If the device is designed well, it won't take 50 pokes to the touch screen to sell a pack of gum.  But designing the thing correctly makes a lot of difference in terms of speed and customer satisfaction.  And because I'm the tech who works on new projects, then I have to design those things. 

The astute out there will be saying this: isn't that an operations issue?  And the answer to the question is yes. 

But the real answer to the question is operations is spineless as a general rule.  They are willing to destroy a single persons' life for miniscule infractions but they are unwilling to make the large decisions that could negatively impact a business.  Screw one person: perfectly fine.  Screw 700: no way.  In IT, we have no designator between the two decisions.  In the end, a choice has to be made and if no one else will make the decision IT will.  Because someone told us to accomplish a task, and we'll get it done with or without the blessing of others.  Because others generally don't know what they want. 

IT is a dangerous job in that we have to go and screw everything up the first time so give the operations side an idea of what can be accomplished.  And then we have to rebuild what we created to please operations.  It's a painful cycle.

Digital Convergence

Growing up with fiction, they talked about the great digital convergence as if it was some strange and amazing phenomenon.  And it really is.  As I write this, I'm transferring all my music to a new computer across the room using Team Viewer (because domain/non-domain file sharing is a pain and it's quicker).  It provides something we never thought possible.  After spending years working with UltraVNC, Symantec PCAnywhere, and Famatech Radmin, I find Teamviewer to be the best of the group.   

 

Teamviewer does what it's supposed to do, and works pretty darn good.  It also provides something Windows XP doesn't: a data transfer rate.  Windows data transfer has always perplexed me.  You would think it would transfer items between a computers in the order selected, but that is incorrect.  It generally picks up 2-3 of the last items, puts them first, and then transfers everything in whatever order it feels like.  That's not what I want when I transfer files.  I want to transfer files in a logical, repeatable pattern.  What happens if that transfer fails?  Then I have to go back and transfer individual folder after individual folder, looking for that one random file that was missed.  Eventually, (hours after I should have stopped looking) I find the point at which Windows quit transferring. 

Perfect example of XP transferring data weird: while copying this from Microsoft Word, paragraph 2 ended up first and paragraph 1 end up second.  Strange....

I guess I could also use DropBox, but that's only a 2GB limit.  Right now, I'm working on a 13 GB folder named A-D.  Before the digital age, my CD collection was around 200.  There's no telling where it is now, or where it would be if I hadn't lost a lot of it here and there.  The acquisition of data itself used to be important to me, now not so much.  I would acquire hundreds of gigs of music and movies, and never watch any of it.  Most of it is now gone from a purge several years back. 

I still burn CDs and DVDs for work fairly often, so that part of the old style of system isn't gone.  Moving pure digital sounds interesting, but there's too much proprietary stuff in the business world to go there.  I suppose you can go with straight off the shelf equipment like eGenuity does but I'm still not convinced that is the way to go.  I still have to reboot the SQL server every three or four days because something has gone funky and isn't working.  With any luck, I reboot a VeriFone Sapphire less than once every 4 months. 

There are tradeoffs and differences in all equipment, but as much as the digital convergence was sold as being a life changer, I'm not convinced yet.  Sure, it changes the way I do things.  But it's still the same things over and over again.  I may not spend as much time transfer files to disk and walking it across a hall, but I do spend just as much time installing and configuring the software.  Let's think...   13 GB of music would be roughly 3 DVDs at 4.7 GB per DVD.  That could be burned in approximately 10-15 minutes per DVD.  Including setup, we're talking one DVD worth of material transferred every 30 minutes or so.  In the last 30 minutes, I've also transferred 5 GB worth of data using TeamViewer.  Approximate time to completion jumps up to about 2 hours.  The only difference between me burning DVDs and transferring using TeamViewer is that I'm perfectly willing to work on other things (like writing this) while TeamViewer is transferring files.  I wouldn't be willing to do so while burning a DVD.  That's got to be something, right?

the last fiction I'd ever read

I don't read fiction anymore.  My life has changed a lot over the last 15 years or so, and fiction books are one of those things.  I still read a lot, but it is all non-fiction.  It was probably sometime late in college that I quit reading fiction.  The last piece of fiction I read was William Gibson's "Spook Country".  It was a good book.  I liked the story.  It wasn't the Gibson I'd grown to love with Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition, but it was Gibson nonetheless. 

I used to spend a lot of time delved into the worlds of other people, vicariously experiencing what they did.  I watched as Paul from Dune grew up and conquered the known universe.  I listened to stories from Piers Anthony about Death driving a sports car (or at least I think it was a sports car).  Neal Stephenson presented the internet as swashbuckling world where making faces move was more important than anything, and a crazy guy finally got his wish of nuking the U.S.  But I don't read those books anymore.

The old me loved them for what they represented.  They provided an escape to go when things weren't looking so rosy in my own life.  They were the escape I needed when I didn't like what I saw in my own life.  Most of the heroes in the stories were all the unlikely kind.  They stepped in from normal shoes and landed on a mountain, one crazy step at a time.  Many of them claimed they were "pawns of fate" and other strange statements, basically taking little responsibility for their lives. 

But that wasn't true.  These people stepped into situations that they didn't create, but they turned those situations upside down and on their head.  It wasn't always the prettiest sight, and things didn't always turn out as planned, but they took control of their own destiny.  And it was never easy fighting against the system.  But in the end, it was worth it. 

And I looked at my own life, tumbling through nowhere and ending up in places I didn't want to go and I wished I was that person who would just step out on a limb, without knowing the full extent of the limb or whether the branch would hold my weight.  I couldn't see through the fog (to make this paragraph so thick in metaphor that it hurts) and was afraid to step around, finding my way. 

But the Marines got rid of the fear of stepping into the unknown.  I remember sitting in some forest trail at Camp Pendleton, California during infantry school, acting as the squad leader for a life fire night assault.  It was pitch black, no moon.  We would sneak through those woods in darkness, setting up to destroy a fake enemy.  Claymores had been planted ahead of us, and they signaled the attack.  Rounds fired away.  Magazines emptied.  Sounds of buh-buh-buh-budget cut and butta-butta-jam came through the night as Marines ran out of ammo and continued their attempt at the assault.  It was beauty in precision and craziness, completely overwhelming to the senses and surreal in ways I can't even begin to describe. 

I didn't even understand what happened then.  I just did things.  Mechanical actions, much like a marionette pulled along by strings.  No happiness, no joy... just a surreal sensation of being wherever I happened to be at the moment.  No joy, no fear, no anticipation, no desire, no care.  It was a very empty feeling and I didn't like it and hadn't for years.

FYI, we didn't do so hot on our night ambush.  The people who were supposed to set the thing up didn't follow orders and screwed up royally.  No one died, but it was still annoying.  At the night assault course, we set the hill on fire as we went through fire and movement with live ammunition.  It was beautiful.    MOUT town was another surreal experience.  Two months before, I could barely climb the hill I ran up twice.  We practiced live fire room clearing, and slept on buses as we moved out of there, on to the next thing.  Always the next thing.

After my third tour in Iraq (as motor transport for all three, not infantry), I read the last piece of fiction.  At some point in my life, I realized everything I had experienced was enough to fill those books I'd read, and they had all passed me by.  I'd done what I had to do, but in the end I never really took charge of my life and stepped out on a limb.  It was always safe actions and safe moves.  Except for that time I went hunting a guy in the middle of the night during a security halt.  Not sure what to think about that anymore. 

After a while, I realized I had lived the crazy life.  My story book was there.  I just had to take charge of my own life.  I had spent enough time living my life through others.  It was time to take charge of my own life.

Asset Management

I was going to write something about the presidential debate, but one sentence sums it up...  Obama got Mitt-slapped.

Moving on to asset management.  I've found asset management to be something that must be kept up with on a daily basis, otherwise it becomes such a giant headache that it's impossible to deal with.  Right now, I'm in that position.  We use SysAid, which is some pretty good software that is sitting on old hardware and I'm pretty sure the raid-array has gone bad.  But I don't know anything about Windows Server 2003, so I haven't built a new SysAid Server.  But that's neither here nor there.

The point I was trying to make was that SysAid could handle all the assets we have, and handle it well.  The only problem is that I'm behind the power curve, and I'm not technically responsible for asset management.  I've got enough jobs on my plate without trying to fix the asset management system as well.  Now, where do you start with some colossal mess?  The answer to that question is anywhere.  Just start it.  

It's a long, drawn out project that simply requires man hours to fix, and there is no such thing as man hours in the IT world.  It's all just work.  I'm sure our location is like many, in that there is no such thing as downtime.  There is always something new and impressive to do, and it needs to be done yesterday. 

So asset management falls to the back of the bus.  But why do you want to do asset management anyways if you haven't been doing it before?  My answer is to track problem equipment some place other than the brain of an IT person.  The brain of an IT person has enough junk running through it on a daily basis that filling it with ridiculousness and old problems just isn't worth the effort.  Computers are good at solving problems and remembering things, so make it a habit to get the computer to remember the problem, not the person. 

With proper asset management, you have a way to track all that broken junk and identify the problem pieces of equipment and get them out of service.  There's no need to keep repairing the same piece of equipment over and over and over again.  Sure, IT is generally salaried, but time is better spent doing things other than repairing the same stupid register.  Get rid of it.  Lost business and revenue because that one piece of equipment is in the shop every week for a year is more than the piece of equipment is generally worth.

But how do you convince people the problem is really with that piece of equipment and lost time/effort amounted to enough work to warrant replacement?  Simple: asset management produces a paper trail.  And if you can show how often a piece of expensive equipment is broke, and how long it takes to fix, then you've won half the battle of getting the device replaced.  Use the tools you have at hand, and create a paper trail with asset management.

The 80/20 rule

The 80/20 Rule

Ever hear of the 80/20 rule?  It's a scary little statement with horrendously profound work and life implications.  But what is it, and what can it do for me?

My company is in a growth phase.  Every time I turn around, we've got some major project or other going.  Store opening at one location, rebranding at another, rolling out project X off at another.  With a five person IT staff, it makes for very busy days.  I work a lot with VeriFone equipment, and have recently become responsible for building new point of sale systems.  Developing the primary configuration doesn't take all that long.  I can get a Sapphire and V950 ready for a store in just a couple of hours.  From there, I almost feel like I'm 80% done.  But then I have to do the individual, line item by line item configurations that make everything work, have the fuel sell at the right grade and the right price, and store the data in the right location.  And that feels like it's only 20% of the work, but takes 80% of the time.

Hence, the idea of the 80/20 rule.  The rule is pretty simple....  the first 80% of anything you do will take 20% of your time...  the last 20% of anything you do will take 80% of your time.  In other words, getting to where we "believe" we are 80% done is a point where we are nowhere near done.  So what should we do then?  Well, if you have an idea and can get it 80% complete, roll it out and try to sell it.  Or deploy it.  Or do whatever you normally do with your projects.  Getting to 100% is a long, almost impossible task.  Getting something to 80% doesn't seem to take any time at all, and it begins a place where you can start profiting from the time expenditure. 

Video game companies make a lot to do about publishing a game "when it's done".  Well, guess what game company: it's never done.  The game is finally complete when you quit supporting the product and quit releasing patches.  Because that's all a patch is: something you forgot to fix or thought would be nice to add, but you didn't do before you sold it.  So the "when it's done" mythology is basically a call to "we're pissing around and don't feel like working 90 hours a week every week".  Either that, or they haven't got the foggiest what they are going to do and are convinced that technology and computers are the future.  Protip: Technology is a tool and a framework for the future...  it is not the future.   The future is just today with a few more bells and whistles.

Thinking comparatively towards the future, I now carry a Motorola Droid that serves as a flash light, camera, scheduler, notification system, and a phone (among other things).  Given 30 years, that new device might also be able to replicate the tools I carry.  I still carry the basic device, but what the device does and how I use it tell me whether this is the past, present, or future. 

Once again, thinking towards the future and at the past, previous to the Droid (or Blackberry), I might carry several different devices to handle each and every single different thing listed.  An iPad might serve similar purpose and merge/remove the need to carry a laptop, but it's not there yet.  Could all the devices I carry one day merge into one?  Possibly...  but it better have a much bigger or easier to use keyboard.  Complex passwords suck on phone screens.  

Followers and Leaders

After a few crazy weeks, the momentum is gone.  But momentum is something we can create.  Momentum and feelings are followers.  The feeling of accomplishment and moving forward happens just so long as we continue doing what we had been doing previously. 

Feelings act in much the same way.  If you don't like your feelings, tell your feelings to shut up and start acting in a manner that produces the results you want. 

I didn't have any inclination to study this morning.  I've been self-teaching myself the CCENT and CCNA by reading the books to myself and recording it.  From those recordings, I make CDs and listen to them as I drive around town doing my normal work.  Following the path set forth by the book, I skipped from the ICND 1 book to the ICND 2 book for a few chapters.  I've been stuck in chapter 1 of the ICND 2 book for at least two weeks.  Sorry, but VTP trunking is not that exciting, even though VLANs are pretty cool. 

Rather than wait for excitement to return, I did what I keep preaching to myself even though I have a tendency to forget: I charged on.  This morning, I had to motivation to work.  Now, ten pages later I can see the end of the chapter that has me bogged down, and I can see myself making more progress.  I wasn't motivated, but after I worked at and did what I wanted to do, the motivation quickly returned.

Motivation to do a task is a follower, not a leader.  If you want to accomplish something, do the task regardless of how you feel.  If you believe you've made progress, your motivation will sky rocket and your feelings will fall into line, putting you where you want to be. 

This isn't that hard, but as a part of the American culture, we are taught that feelings are leaders and feelings are important.  This is incorrect and needs to be purged from our thinking.  Why else do we have an ADD culture?  It spends its time focusing on things that are followers and highly inconsistent.  For a stable culture, we want to follow a stable leader.  Feelings are an inconsistent leader.

Maybe more on this later.  I have to think about it more.