On The Nature Of Perceiving Time

I know it's not an original thought, but I was reflecting last night while I lay awake in bed on the nature of our perception of the passage of time. How unfortunate it is that when things are great, or at least status quo, time evaporates before you know it. When things are lousy, each moment is torture and seems to last forever, yet you can look back and not know where the last week went. Why can't the moments of flow seem to last forever, too?

I guess we're evolutionarily wired to be very aware of what's going on when we're under stress. If there's a tiger in the bushes, you don't want to be sniffing at the roses and daydreaming. Perhaps the combination of seeing evidence of a loved one's mortality and knowing you are also mortal is what keys the stress that causes time to stretch out. Even though there's no one to fight and nowhere to take flight, you get wound up when confronted by incontrovertible evidence of the inevitable.

Not Such Good News

Dad's been having some complications. The exact nature of the complications is not really relevant to the story. I'm more worried about him getting tangled up in the Medical/Industrial Complex. It seems like no matter how good of a medical care facility you go to, there's always the threat of this tipping point where the unintended consequences of the treatments you receive start to snowball and cause more problems than the number of problems that get solved.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that he hasn't crossed such a line, but I'm getting the same nervous tic in the pit of my stomach that I sometimes get about the Netflix website when I see something hinky on one on the graphs or reports. Any given signal is innocuous all by itself, but everything goes up in flames before you know it.

I guess I should keep the travel websites handy.

This made me laugh

Heard about a fabulous party idea via LinkedIn. A Depression 2.0 party. What can I say? It made me laugh.

As I said on the invitation's comments:

That is *freaking* hilarious. Or, it would be if current economic conditions weren't so sad. Talk about making lemonade from life's lemons, though. Speaking of which, have a Lemon Drop for me.

Progress on Dad

Turns out it's metastatic melanoma, and it's stage IV, which means that it's spread to places other than the skin cells where it started. The places I know of are his lymph nodes and liver. He's going to head over to the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, since his oncologist advised him that there's a team that specializes in melanoma over there. Clinical trials are a possibility, but if there aren't any new treatments to be tried, then 'regular' chemotherapy will start in a bit less than three weeks.

I'm pretty bummed about it, but probably not as much as my dad is. My dad had called me to let me know what he knew as I was coming back from lunch with a vendor. Not really a pleasant way to end a conversation, but the guy I was with was very kind and understanding about it.

I've sort of been caught in between immersing myself in work as a means of denying it's going on and the fact that I'm having a bit of a hard time concentrating on work at all because it's going on.

Then throw the fact that it's 360s season at work, and I'm just about ready to implode under the weight of all this introspection.

At least they found the termite nest while doing the water damage/fungus repairs, but that's another story.

By the way, I feel a little better now.

The subject kind of says it all. Work's been a little stressful. Dad's in the process of being diagnosed with something that looks like lymphoma. At least Isaac seems to be sleeping through the night reliably.

Been reading a really good book. It's by this guy.

I'm going to finish it before recommending it to our Chief Talent Officer as something she should hand to everyone here the day they become a manager.

The Danger of Attachments

I'm not talking about the email kind. The joys of having a relationship are overshadowed from the very beginning by the darkness of that relationship's end.

It may be a business relationship that runs aground upon the shoals of a changing economic climate. It may be a high school sweetheart from whom you grow apart. It may be a beloved spouse who is lured away by another person, or lost to some other obsession. Worst of all, it may be a child or parent who is lost to an untimely death. Every beautiful and tender thing in our lives can be ripped from us by random or premeditated events that are beyond our control.

Death can come slow or quick, through a freak accident with an umbilical cord, a suicide or the rise of a rebellious clump of cells against the greater good of the body that hosts them. It can be hard to see the simple joys of connecting with others through the haze of pain unleashed by ripping away relationships you already have.

Even though the joy of every new attachment contains within it the seeds of its own painful destruction, it's important to seize today's connections for the richness they bring, regardless of the eventual, inevitable costs. Otherwise, why are we here?

A Very Original Spam

As annoying as spam usually is, I was somewhat tickled to have received an email from a "Mark Madoff" who was interested in obtaining my help in sheltering $45MM in an offshore account from the authorities. Full text below:

From: "Mr. Mark Madoff" <mark@blminvestments.com>
To: <undisclosed recipients>
<no subject>

Hi

I looked up your contact details and I am contacting you because of the urgency this situation demands.I am
Mark Madoff son of Bernie Madoff founder of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC. My father is currently
involved in a $50 billion Usd swindle with investors and the U.S government has decided to confisticate my family
empire worth billions of U.S dollars.

We need your assistance to help us receive and conceal 45 million Usd ($45,000,000,00)from one of our family
offshore accounts as we are currently under pressure from the U.S government to give up all family assets. For
your efforts my family is willing to compensate you with 35% of the total funds. Note also that we have to be
careful due to the huge nature of the funds.I will update you with more details as soon as I confirm your
commitment to this deal.

Should you be interested please send me your details via email to enable us work on this together. @


1:Full Names
2:Occupation:
3:Private Phone Number:
4:Current Residential Address:

Regards
Mark Madoff
N:b
Look up the below links to understand the urgency of the issue.

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=4432249

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081212/bs_nm/us_madoff_arrest

http://www.usdoj.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/December08/madoffarrestpr.pdf

'blminvestments.com' exists as a server, but there's no website, and I tried connecting to port 25 and couldn't get a proper SMTP response (but perhaps my knowledge of how to do so is out of date...). Here's the whois data from http://www.robtex.com/ (which appears to be a niftly little toolkit for resolving domain name and IP info:

Registrant:
BL Investments
P.O Box 9137
Coral Springs, FL 33075
US

Domain Name: BLMINVESTMENTS.COM

Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
BL Investments jeff@blminvestments.com
P.O Box 9137
Coral Springs, FL 33075
US
954-344-4700


Record expires on 29-Apr-2009.
Record created on 29-Apr-2003.
Database last updated on 17-Jan-2009 12:12:32 EST.

Domain servers in listed order:

WINNT.NETWORLD-INC.COM 208.249.244.1
NS2.NETWORLD-INC.COM 208.249.244.2

So, it looks like there's possibly some real people in the US on the end of this particular spam. Not sure if there's an upside to following up further, but still, it was amusing.

Updates on open positions at Netflix

Couple of minor matters:

1. These positions will all be available to apply for at jobs.netflix.com some time soon.

2. Because of this change, someone else will be doing the hiring for two of them.

I'll be looking for a configuration and release engineer in the next 30 days or so. The test automation engineers will be hired by the new functional QA manager (who hasn't yet been hired).

Eloise and Lucy Trying On Glasses

Here's a couple of Eloise and Lucy, but they're sideways. Not quite getting the use of the cameraphone 100% yet.

Isaac in glasses

A picture of Isaac while we were out waiting for an eye exam to be over.

New Job, Old Job

We've made some organizational changes at work recently, and instead of managing the entire Web QA team, I'm not focused on what I'm calling the Operational Quality team.

We're going to be focused on the downstream functions formerly handled by the whole WebQA team. Anything to do with building, deploying, configuring and monitoring the production website and supporting middle tier applications will now be handled by me and the new team. The rest of the WebQA team will be focused more intently on functional testing, performance testing and preventing bugs from making it out of the lab in the first place.

I think this is a great opportunity to focus more intently on filling some gaps in the Experience Chain.

Open Positions at Netflix

I have an immediate need for a software engineer in test for the Customer Account group on the Web QA team at Netflix.

I have an upcoming need for a software engineer in test for the Software Infrastructure group on the Web QA team at Netflix.

I also have an upcoming need for a build and release engineer.

Any help from anyone that happens to read this message in a bottle would be most welcome.

For all of them, I need someone who has a proven ability to:
• get the right things done when there's always too much to do
• solve problems in a proactive and elegant way
• communicate clearly and succinctly

First, a description of what I'm looking for in the Software Engineer in Test -- Customer Account

THE ROLE:

Netflix has a goal of 20 million members by 2012. Part of keeping those members happy is helping them manage their own data and efficiently sharing that data with other parts of Netflix. Your team provides services to members, internal Netflix teams and external partners. These services span authentication, account information management, and authoritative answers to questions about member data.

We are in the process of consolidating our business logic into services and SDKs from where it lives today: the presentation tier and stored procedures in the database. As we untangle and streamline our code, we need a safety net of automated tests. The tools and automated tests that you build will help insure that planned changes don't cause unintended consequences. What you build will help prevent defects by finding them in the test environment and detect defects that make it out to production.

At Netflix, you will work with a team of intelligent and capable software engineers who are committed to delivering high quality software through test driven development, test automation and a deep partnership with quality assurance.

REQUIREMENTS:

• Expert in assessing software quality in an ecommerce environment using:
- Test driven development
- Java, Tomcat, JDBC and Apache
- jUnit test automation (or equivalent)
- Web services
• Tests as part of cross-functional teams and supports back-end application interfaces
• Understands relational databases and SQL deeply
• Develops and maintains production system and data monitoring tools
• Desires to work in a fast paced, evolving, growing, dynamic environment

Now, here's the description for Software Engineer in Test -- Software Infrastructure

THE ROLE:

The number of people getting their movie entertainment through the Internet is continuing to grow at a rapid pace. Between DVDs by mail and Instant Watching, Netflix wants most of those subscribers to be Netflix members. Part of keeping those current and future members happy is making sure our systems are built from components and services that will scale to handle the volume.

The Software Infrastructure team builds components that include:
• management of Queue and rental history data
• a Netflix server reference implementation
• security APIs and services
• session management APIs and services
• message bus services for logging and data transfer
• explorations into The Cloud for all of the above

You will be a key part of the core team that ensures our broader development teams are using an intuitive and robust set of services to build the website and operations applications. You will ensure that we capture and accurately deliver data, and that we do it in a timely fashion. You will ensure that our internal services meet the needs of the developers consuming them. At Netflix, you will work with a team of intelligent and capable software engineers who are committed to test driven development, test automation and a deep partnership with quality assurance.

REQUIREMENTS:

Expert in understanding, assessing and providing feedback on the quality of high traffic, n-tier, web based environments including:
• Test driven development using Java, Tomcat, JDBC/Oracle, service buses and Apache with jUnit or TestNG test automation (or equivalent)
• Cross-functional testing of back-end system interfaces

Experienced with testing:
• Traditional and non-traditional e-commerce applications
• High traffic/high availability components
• Service oriented architectures

Deep understanding of:
• relational databases and SQL
• Linux or some other unix flavor
• a scripting language like Perl or Python

Familiarity with:
• testing under open source frameworks, such as Struts, Hibernate, Spring, etc.

Desire to work in a fast paced, evolving, growing, dynamic environment

Finally, I bring you a description for what I'd like to see in a Configuration and Release Engineer:

THE ROLE:

Web Engineering at Netflix provides our public face to our customers, so it's very important that we deliver an easy to use and engaging web experience. As part of the Web QA team, you'll be responsible for the team's test servers and their environment. Other duties include herding the changes to the code base from development, through testing and out to production. You will coordinate the change process across all of the teams involved, so you need not only technical chops, but also excellent communication skills. This position is part Linux admin, part software engineer and part project manager. The ideal candidate should be equally comfortable owning bash scripts, java code and ant configuration files, and will have an insatiable craving for making the deployment process more and more push-button and more and more secure.

REQUIREMENTS:
• Excellent communication and inter-personal skills
• Working experience in web based environments utilizing:
- Java, Tomcat, Apache and other web applications
- Perforce and other source control applications
- Ant and the 'x'Unit family of test automation applications
• Skilled in Unix shell and SQL
• Desire to work in a fast paced, evolving, growing, dynamic environment

DESIRED SKILLS:
• Perl hacking
• Bugzilla maintenance and modification
• Configure and use Kintana (Mercury IT Governance Center) deployment application
• Build and manage automated build/test/deployment environments

What is Applesauce the Gateway To?

In the last few weekends of September, I was making applesauce from the Fuji and Granny Smith apple trees we planted a couple of years ago. I had just picked the last apples, except for one lonely Fuji. At the time, I wasn't sure if it would ever ripen to the point where it would come off easily when one of us happens to be there to test it. It might have just dropped off in the middle of the night, and wind up in the ant's larder instead of ours. As it was, it did come off just before Thanksgiving.

Back in September, I had just finished putting a batch of cooked applesauce into a couple of 2 quart containers and left them on the counter-top, loosely covered. I wanted them to cool a bit before sticking them in the refrigerator. It was very deeply satisfying to pick and wash and peel and core and dice and simmer. Sampling the apples at different stages along the way lit up paths in my brain leading to very comfortable and comforting places. The snap and explosion of biting into a freshly picked and washed apple is like summer fireworks. Peeling the apples, I felt the juice slip over my fingers, making the peeler and the apple slick. I wondered just how much of the juice went down the drain instead of into the sauce. I've asked Jen to put a peeler on my Christmas list and I wonder if it will make next year's applesauce any different.

Lucy had introduced me to chewing some of the peel just after it drops into the sink. You get the tartness of the skin without the moderating sweetness of much juice or flesh. It's work, chewing on the peel, but it recalls other pleasures that are satisfying because they are work and not pure pleasure. Running is like that for me as well: it's hard work, but I feel better afterward.

Coring the apples is always an adventure. Attempting to pop out the heart of the apple with the seeds while minimizing the degree of flesh that goes with them. I ponder whether an apple corer will have a better or worse core/flesh ratio, since it's an indiscriminate cylinder versus the custom "cone plus wedges" that I'm cutting out.

If you compare the dollar cost of a quart of organic applesauce at Trader Joe's to the time and effort of growing, waiting for and harvesting the apples, then processing them all the way into sauce, it seems penny wise and pound foolish to spend the time. However, like many other things in life, the main value comes down to the doing, and not the monetary value of the physical product.

Software As A Manufacturing Activity

Another book that I read recently was Goldratt's The Goal. It's gotten me thinking about software development within the context of manufacturing. If a software development cycle is constrained by one of the intermediate steps, it either will starve the downstream processes or let software of inferior quality out in front of the paying customers. Neither is a desirable outcome.

So, you have two problems from the world of moving around atoms that may be applicable to the world of moving around bits. First, the problem of coordination and scheduling that supply chain management gurus have thought about. Second, the problem of throughput and productivity that constraint based manufacturing theory has gone a long way towards optimizing.

How much can be applied directly, and how much just doesn't apply because turning out software doesn't suffer from the same scarcities as turning out physical products?

I guess that's why I'm trying to think and write about it.

Experience Chain Management

You heard about it here first, folks. I've just created a new discipline: Experience Chain Management.

It was fueled mostly by some reading I did of Lou Carbone's writing, in his book Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again.

The core of it is that every business is trying to create a valuable customer experience to keep the money coming in the door. However, nobody thinks about the internal consumers of the business processes that deliver those experiences to the paying customers. Someone upstream can sabotage the effectiveness of the downstream team members and, without even realizing it, impair the customer experience.

Simple example that I'm periodically wrestling with:

• Developer publishes a code change past the start of the testing cycle
• The QA engineer doesn't regress that part of the code because they don't know about the change
• A bad bug slips through to production
• A customer can't get what they want done, and gets angry instead

I'm thinking that there are probably some lessons to be learned from all of the work done on supply chain management. Even though you're shuffling bits instead of atoms, when you have a team turning out software that drives a customer experience, it's still an awful lot like manufacturing. You have:

• raw materials (product ideas)
• manufacturing (coding)
• assembly & testing (build, configure, QA)
• delivery (deployment & operations)

Of course, the thing I need to think about more is how downstream components and processes can block or impair the productivity of upstream partners. For that, you need to look at a different discipline (see next post).

The Morning Report

The dorkiness continues. Caught myself on film with Isaac this morning and was playing around with annotations.

Definite mst3k potential there.

I've Joined Generation Stupid

As is evidenced by the following:

And of course, being stupid, I recorded the following before realizing that the one you see above wasn't broken after all:



And then, of course, the quick obligatory shout-out to a relative.

I'm astounded

I received a multi-forwarded email from a relative older than me, and the content actually interested me! I don't know if this has ever happened to you. It's really eye opening that it's even possible that the content from this person was something worth more than a quick scan and deletion, because the probability of it being something you've seen before approaches 100%.

Regardless, here's the text:


Dear Friends and Family,

I was one of the ones who wrote my friend, Anne (as mentioned below in her letter) as soon as Sarah Palin was chosen to run for Republican V.P. I received her really informative reply plus another informative letter from a friend of hers. I think it's really good info...and not all of it is negative...a lot is strictly informational. Sorry I didn't forward it right away: since then, Sarah Palin emails are flying around me like bats in a belfry!

I have put info about Anne herself at the very bottom of this email, in case you would like to know.

Hope this is useful to you...in whatever way.

xxoome

------------------

Date: Tue, 2 Sep 2008 15:46:40 -0700

From: anne......

Subject: Sarah Palin

Big Alaskan-sized hello to one and all,

Over the holiday weekend I received several emails from friends and family asking about our relatively unknown governor who has suddenly become a name you all recognize. As I started to write an email response, I received a copy of an email sent by a woman I used to know very well. She has a way with words that I think you'll enjoy. Additionally, I will mention:

I like her as governor, but won't be voting for her in November. As another dear friend of mine (who also lives and works in Alaska - and may have even more access to the Palin administration than I do) said, "she's not the one you want just one fluffernutter away from the presidency."

The ethics reform bill she signed recently was actually the work of Alaskan Democrats who pushed it through.

While she turned down our infamous bridge-to-nowhere, she accepted the federal funds to build the road to the bridge, and built the road, which goes to exactly nowhere.

She pronounces nuclear the same incorrect way the our current president does.

Yep, she wears her hair like that all the time. Who doesn't love a sexy librarian?!? There's a reason we have bumper stickers that say, "Alaska... coldest state but the hottest governor."

Trooper-gate... if it hasn't hit the news yet where you are... it will.

Although she didn't fish this year, she and her husband have fished in Bristol Bay for years. Even though her family has been deeply involved in the fishery, she announced a week before the election last week that she would not be supporting the ballot initiative that would have safguarded the water quality of the salmon natal streams in Alaska. A no vote on the initiative made it easier for large-scale metallurgic mines (like the controversial and poorly planned Pebble mine at the headwaters of Bristol Bay) to pollute, redirect and otherwise destroy the water that supports people and salmon resources. Her vote swayed thousands of undecided voters and ultimately defeated the initiative. Our salmon aren't in trouble yet, but yours??

I could go on and on, but... Anyway, below is the email referenced above. Enjoy!

Anne

She is very scary on a number of levels....one big one that Nancy identified is that she'll be underestimated.

D

-----Forwarded Message-----

>Subject: Sarah palin
>
>Hi Everybody,
>
>Five of you have written and asked about our Governor Palin as VP, so
>here's what I know from Halibut Cove. First off ... every single person in
>Alaska is just as surprised and amazed as everyone else about this. I
>was in Anchorage on Friday listening to NPR and when I first heard the news - I
>thought it was a joke or just hypothetical. Then the phone started
>ringing... As many of you know, we Alaskans talk about our politics
>constantly and this year with an indicted senior Senator, our sole
>Congressman under investigation, etc etc etc it's juicier than ever, but the
>Palin announcement takes the cake. Imagine what it would be like if any of
>you was asked to be the Vice President. That is the level of experience
>that Palin has. She's not kidding when she describes herself as a hockey
>mom - she really is. She really did grow up in a small town in Alaska.
>She really was the mayor of Wasilla (population 9,000). I would
>imagine most of you have been in Washington DC more than she has.
>
>On the one hand Palin's nomination is preposterous, but at the same time she
>will be a formidable candidate. We live in a celebrity culture which
>thrives on the personal story, and Palin's story with all the fabulous
>Alaskan scenes as backdrop will be hard to top. I think of poor John
>Kerry trying to carry a gun around in 2004 or Michael Dukakis in the
>tank, and then think of Palin's parents who were out on a gold panning
>expedition when the news broke.... She is the real thing - small town
>girl, father a teacher, grew up in Alaska, goes hunting and fishing,
>likes snow machining because "it pounds the snot out of you", husband
>is the Alaska version of a NASCAR dad, he's handsome and known as First
>Dude. On top of all that Palin is both beautiful and HOT. Look at the
>pictures of her versus Cindy McCain and you'll get the idea.
>
>I did not vote for Sarah Palin and have always wondered if her blowing
>the whistle on the head of the Republican party was pure calculated ambition.
>On the down side she not only opposes abortion (think of the Supreme
>Court
>appointments) but is a creationist. Despite her father being a science
>teacher, she seems to have little regard for the subject and recently
>was accused (like Bush) of overwriting her own staff scientist's
>recommendations on the polar bear endangered listing. On the other
>hand, she picked a very competent unbiased scientist (a friend of mine)
>to be Commissioner of Fish and Game. I asked my friend, the
>Commissioner, about what she's like in Cabinet meetings and he said
>"she's just insecure enough that she actually listens". She is a
>lightweight but a quick study, and a brilliant natural politician.
>
>Which is why I, and 80% of all Alaskans approve of her as Governor.
>(That's down from 87% five months ago.) She has made excellent and
>independent appointments to her Cabinet. She has vetoed our legislature's bloated
>budget items. She has pushed through major changes in the state's
>relationships with the oil companies. She has cajones, no doubt about
>that. In addition, she is what she is, a wonderfully attractive down
>to earth person--Kathryn even saw her shopping with her husband and new
>baby at Costco!
>
>And that will be the killer in this campaign. She may not know
>anything, but I believe more than anyone else (including Barack) she
>will attract people from a wide, wide swath of the population. No one
>can accuse her of being elitist. I looked at that picture of her
>signing photographs after the announcement and I was reminded of Mia Hamm and the
>women's soccer team.
>That's the kind of appeal Sarah Palin will bring to the Republican
>ticket, and it'll be tough to resist. Sarah Palin is the type of
>person that people tend to underestimate, which is partly why she was
>able to come out of nowhere and knock off a 20 year Senator and
>incumbent Republican Governor AND a past two term Democratic Governor.
>
>Wish us luck. Best to all of you, N

Automated Testing and the Mayan Apocalypse

Odd idea that popped out of a conversation yesterday. What if the trend towards test driven development and behavior driven development is a harbinger of the apocalypse? Automated testing could be a first step toward machine self-awareness if it were married with self-modifying code. Genetic algoritms could optimize themselves towards the specified tests and behavior, but what happens when the self-modifying code creeps into the tests (which are, after all, just more code)?

I think you get an increasing rate of accelerated change leading to Skynet launching the nukes in 2012, just in time for the Mayan calendar to be right about the end of the world.

Dr. Horrible is Fantastic

Thank goodness that Saturday on the east coast starts around 9pm on the west coast. Didn't have to wait until tomorrow to see Act III of Dr. Horrible. Recommended is not strong enough of a word. Go watch one, two and three RIGHT NOW BEFORE THEY DISAPPEAR ON SUNDAY AND YOU MIGHT HAVE TO PAY FOR IT!!! (even though paying for it would probably be a good thing because it would encourage more things like it through the action of the free market blah blah blah)