Please Don’t Arm Sister JE

One of the more bizarre ideas that has been floated over the last week to address the problem of school shootings is to arm each teacher – in their classroom – with an adequately powered assault weapon to repel any odd attacker that wanders through. Now I have no problem whatsoever with Out-of-the-Box thinking as a way to solve problems, but this idea just has so many issues that, originally I thought it was being floated as a joke. But apparently there are actually some folks that are quite serious about it. IMHO, the risk-reward quotient is just too out-of-whack, the training and implementation costs would be high and wouldn’t scale well, and the financial liabilities/lawsuits would soar. There is another problem associated with this proposal that I haven’t yet seen cited:

Sometime the teacher in the classroom is a few bricks shy of a load. Bat-shit crazy is not always limited to the shooter or the students!

One of the more unstable nuns in my sordid Catholic School past taught us music and art at St. Leo’s in 4th Grade (1971-1972).  Let’s just refer to her as Sister JE. Quick refresher: At the school I attended, McNelis Catholic, due to large enrollment, we used the school building across from The Cathedral for Grades 1-3 and 7-8. For grades 4-6, you went to St. Leo’s up on the hill about 7 or  8 blocks down 13th Ave. Sister JE’s order was the Sisters of Charity of Seton Hill, one of the celestial farm teams that would feed nuns into the Catholic school system in the Altoona-Johnstown Diocese.

CheppedHam

When I commute my 23 miles to work each weekday morning, my typical route leverages Interstate-85 to the Durham Freeway South which I stay on through Durham, exiting at Alexander Drive right on the northern edge of the Research Triangle Park. From there I take Alexander to South Miami Blvd and then a mile or so down Miami to the office. At the ever-active intersection of Alexander and South Miami sits this massive Sheetz Convenience Restaurant. The place always seems to be packed and buzzing with activity– folks filling up – coffee or gas or MTOs ordered through their touch screens. This Central PA kid just shakes his head and chuckles every time he encounters this scene. Imagine that  – Altoona-based Sheetz on Tobacco Road - and not just thriving, but expanding.

The Mirror recently did a story on the company’s history and growth as they celebrate their 60th birthday. Though the tale has been told many times before, it is still a good read. A driven, competitive, visionary creates and grows a company in his image with a corporate culture rooted in his small town values. An obsession to customer service. A continuous loop of customer feedback, reinvention, and adaptation as your company, your market, and the world around you changes. Some good timing and fortune, no doubt, but, as with most of these successes, the recipe includes huge doses of intelligent business planning, innovation, and good old elbow grease in the execution phase. The “Sheetz Story” is all the cooler, for me at least, since the seeds of this success story were sewn on the same streets of the city in which I was raised. (Damn, that last sentence has some high-quality alliteration. Props to, among others, Ms. Patricia Winstead, 9th Grade English, BGHS Sixth Avenue, 1976-1977.)

Ad-dition By Subtraction

Loyal readers will no doubt recall my post earlier this year describing my decision to enable Google AdSense on this blog (see Monetizing Your Content). I thought it would be interesting to share with you an update. It seems that the high-quality content that I have been developing for this weblog over the last (almost) three years is starting to pay off - I am starting to enjoy the fruits of my labor. Since enabling AdSense-based ads on my blog on March 15 of this year, I have accrued $6.14 USD in earnings. Putting to good use the Minor I obtained in Mathematics from the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh in 1984, that looks to be about 2.34 cents of earnings per day. $6.14 won’t even cover the price of a cup-of-coffee at Starbuck’s anymore.

Why Don’t You Get Off My Back?

Today, for the first time in a little over a week, I was able to do some running. It wasn’t my usual three mile jog on the treadmill, which I try to get  in every other day. Rather it was a little over two miles of running and then another thirty minutes of walking (all on the treadmill). The reason for my recent inactivity was a lower back muscle strain that I have been hobbled with since last Saturday morning. Now, I’d like to tell y’all that I strained my back as a result of some intensely masculine activity like lifting a fallen pine tree while clearing brush or delivering my signature devastating cross-over dribble while playing hoops against one of the three stooges. But, alas, I am afraid the episode was of a domestic (and frankly much more embarrassing) nature. I am filing this post using the cloud label "aging gracefully”, but there is nothing inherently graceful about any of this.

Last weekend was the first weekend in a bit that wasn’t accounted for in terms of either a Duke game to attend or “work work” to handle. We had just completed the last development sprint on the current release of the product on November 9, so I wasn’t even going to think all weekend about the day job that pays all the bills. With all of this free time, from a planning perspective, I had been eyeing the weather forecast all week and it looked like Saturday and Sunday were lining up as perfect days to attend to the blowing, raking, and bagging of the gazillion leaves that I had permitted to pile up over the previous three weeks or so. So that activity was on the docket for sure. I also had my eyes set on the SEC Game on CBS (Alabama and TA&M) and the PSU-Nebraska game as well. (Since Pitt got its crap-the-bed-this-week loss out of the way on Friday – sigh – I wouldn’t have that emotional challenge to deal with over the weekend.)

Toilet Humor

Weird department meeting at work a couple of weeks ago. The department meeting is contrasted with the many project-related meetings that are held each week. For example, I have six regularly scheduled project meetings each week that are basically just related to gathering and reporting project status:

• I am a Scrum Master so I hold a 30 minute Scrum Meeting on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday with my team of 10 Scrum Team members.
• There is this Scrum-of-Scrums that all the Scrum Masters have to attend on Monday and Thursday. This covers project-wide communications between the various team leaders and the project leadership (Release Manager, Project Manager, and Chief Programmer).
• There is a weekly project status meeting on Wednesday that has all the various project stakeholder sub-teams (development, test, writers, localization, etc).

Department meetings, on the other hand, are usually scheduled every couple of months. Their primary purpose is to allow your manager to cover topics that are typically of an Human Resources-related nature. In the first part of our last department meeting, The Boss covered vital topics like how to deal with contractors and where to go during a fire drill (stressing that one shouldn’t stop to pick up their smart phone or block exit ways by checking their Facebook status during the drill – you can never take anything for granted with engineers).

Rush Concerts

(This one really belongs in a journal instead of a blog as its utility is mostly limited to moi, so it won’t get publicized with a FB link. In a couple of years, by which time I will have completely lost my mind and my memory, I will need all the help I can get to recall this sort of data. So without further adieu, an inventory of the four Rush concerts attended over the last thirty years – and what I can remember of them.)

Date: April 4, 1983

Venue: Civic Arena, Pittsburgh PA

Tour: Signals (Set List)

Ticket Price: $11.50

Age 20. Junior year at Pitt, right at the start of Finals for the Winter Semester.  The same Monday evening that NC State shocked Phi Slamma Jamma in the NCAA 1983 Final. Went to show with a bunch of guys, most of whom at I met as a freshman (Dutch, Hoagie, Joe Long, Bob P, et al). Pre-concert “Arn City” brews (enjoyed responsibly, albeit underage) in the dorms at Litchfield Towers C before moving our party to an apartment in South Oakland and then hopping on the PAT 61C Bus for the four-mile trek from Oakland to “Dahntahn”.  Awesome set list.  Was already hooked completely on the band by then, but, like about 8 gazillion other fans, completely related to “Subdivisions”. Ged subbed in “One likes to believe in the freedom of baseball”  in TSOR (Bucs opening day was the next day – the golden days of Johnny Ray and Jose DeLeon). Sat in section C8 at the Igloo (roughly center ice) on Alex’s side. Opening Act: Jon Butcher Axis.

The Nanny State Vs. The Mommy State?

I have a Voice-Over-IP (VOIP) phone system in my home in addition to my cell. This is of course one of the clearest indicators that I am indeed “Old”. The VOIP number really doesn’t get a whole lot of use. Every year around this time, I’ll noodle on whether I really need to carry this line item forward into next year’s budget. The chief reason I keep it is for the infrequent occasions where (for whatever reasons) I need to take work-related conference calls at home. I think I have worked from home a grand total of 1.5 days in 2012, so the cost/benefit equation is probably heavily skewed toward the cost side. The VOIP line is provided via Vonage.

One unintended side benefit I have derived from the VOIP line over the last few months is the (somewhat juvenile) pleasure I get from reading the various butchered translations of political advertisements left as messages and converted to text by Vonage’s Visual Voicemail software. Of course this pleasure will all come to an end on Wednesday. As with most of the VOIP systems, Vonage can be configured to send email to you when messages are left by callers. The email will include an attachment that includes the encoded audio file for the message (to which you can listen) and also the text of the message (output from the Vonage Visual Voicemail speech recognition software).

The Garden

On Tuesday night Joe, Jr and I will be driving down Interstate-85 to the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, NC as the Canadian power-trio Rush pulls into the Old North State for a stop on their “Clockwork Angels Tour”. The band has been a large part of my life since the age of 18 and has provided the proverbial soundtrack for so many of those moments (both good and bad) that one piles up after half-a-century on this rock.  I can imagine what you are thinking: A socially-challenged engineer who can’t get with the whole religion program is a Rush Fan – you must be joking! What do they say about the kernel of truth that resides in almost every stereotype? The Imaginative Conservative does an almost perfect job of capturing what drew so many of us to the band in the first place and what has kept us there over all these years (as well as providing a delicious review of the current disc.)

Cold Cocked

Bizarre day last Saturday at the Duke-Carolina game. I already posted about the episode where the Parking Attendant, upon entry to the lot, referred to son Chris as a Sheila. But that was just the start of things. While I was tending to the grill during the tailgate, we were treated to an appearance by this creepy middle-aged lady dressed up as a clown who was parading through the parking lot creating balloon structures, all the while never saying a word to anybody.  (Billy Crystal in Spinal Tap: Hurry Up, Mime is Money!). She snuck right up beside me at the grill and crouched down, staring up at me while creating her balloon art. I paid her no attention and was focused on the grub – take your crazy somewhere else please - while everybody else (thanks Lora!) conveniently did the SplitsVille routine and left me on the island with her. Weird. She eventually moved on, but Lord, that was awkward.

It’s Not That Long, Is It?

It is about 2:50 PM on Saturday October 20th and I am pulling my Civic into the Chemistry Lot on the campus of Duke University where we will conduct our tailgating festivities before the epic Duke-Carolina game at Wallace Wade that evening. In the Civic I am joined by “Big Bro” Rich and sister-in-law Lora who came down for the weekend from Manassas, VA. Behind me are my three sons driven by youngest son Chris in his 1995 Toyota Corolla.

Styling and Profiling

Over the weekend, I revisited my copy of The End of Faith, a 2004 book from one of those “angry” New Atheists, Sam Harris. As an aside, you ever consider how almost universally the adjective angry is nowadays applied to discredit an idea or a person or a movement and paint a narrative? As if the emotion used to convey an idea somehow alters that idea’s merit. The OWS protesters are angry. The Tea Party is angry. The Angry Left. The Angry Right. Hell, frequently it is applied to people, like Harris, that aren’t angry at all, but rather simply speak forcefully. From what I can tell of his exchanges and debates on the ‘Net, the dude is about as laid back as they come. My dive back into Harris’ bestseller was triggered by two events at different ends of the spectrum;

1. The wave of yet more Islamic murderers killing in support of their “Religion of Peace” in Benghazi and throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
2. A despicable “Vote for Obama, Go to Hell” video and column from Springfield, IL Catholic Bishop John Paprocki.(Much more on this in the next few days.)

Stress Test

So I was sitting in a conference room with colleagues today waiting for a meeting to begin, when the message (highlighted in red below) popped into my In-box. (The Mothership internally uses Lotus Domino-based Mail Servers and most employees still use Notes Mail Clients – we all have our crosses to bear in this world.) Now one gets so many emails during the course of a day, that filtering is applied immediately to decide if you even have to open it up, whether it needs immediate attention, or can be moved to the back-burner and processed later. We get a bunch of emails from the Mgrinfo alias – these are non-project-related and provide updates on various IBM HR and site issues. Generally, I’ll not even open those up, just register the subject in my memory and hope the recall works OK later when or if I need that info.

White Whine in Altoona

You might be familiar with the Internet meme termed First World Problems. These are trivial, in the grand scheme of things, inconveniences suffered by well-off folks living in industrialized nations. One of the simplest pleasures in my life is ridiculing and mocking folks that bitch and moan about their First World Problems. (Little Joys for Little Boys?) I am almost sure there is some direct correlation between one’s Douche bag Factor and their associated rate of personal First World Problems.

A Star(ling) Is Born and Godzilla in Durham

While performing some periodic purging of crap (technical term) from the old Lenovo T61p laptop, I came across some photographs from a couple of Durham Bulls games that I attended in the spring. Figured it’d be a good time to get these uploaded onto Flickr and captured in the blog.

It has been a rough year for the Bulls. They have had a great stretch recently and have pretty much owned the International League Southern Division over the last half-dozen years. Since 2002, they have won three IL championships. The Durham team usually feature a number of top prospects. But this year has been lean -they weren’t really even competitive in the two games we attended earlier this year.

I Don’t Feel Any Different

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again.
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older,
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Pink Floyd - “Time” – Dark Side of the Moon (1973)

The Big 5-0! So apparently, the 50th anniversary of your arrival on this big ball of rock is supposed to trigger all sorts of emotional crests and valleys and evoke various mid-life crises. (Like those of Walter White in AMC’s most excellent Breaking Bad series – I am currently working through the first four seasons of BB on Netflix and really enjoying it.)

Scraping By On 173 Million Dollars

I made a trip Sunday to Home Depot in Hillsborough to pick up some furnace filters. (Don’t worry, I actually bought the correct sized ones this time.) I haven’t been in that store for quite a long time - mostly because it is more convenient to hit up the two nearby Home Depots in Durham when stopping on the way home from work.

A brain cramp ensued when I went to the wrong section of the store for the filters. Could have been because the three Home Depots seemed to be configured slightly different. Most likely just another Senior Moment. Anyways as I was wandering around looking for the right aisle, I must have had a sufficient look of bewilderment such that one of the helpful associates pounced on me. I was proudly sporting my black Pirate hat with the Nike swoosh.

RIP – 1521 Ninth Street

1521 Ninth Street - Altoona PA

As detailed in this article from the Altoona Mirror, my childhood home, 1521 Ninth Street in the Fairview neighborhood of Altoona, is slated to be razed and paved over to create some new parking spaces for Altoona Regional Hospital.

It Doesn’t Hurt to Ask

On the way back from Altoona on Sunday, we took a route that led us down I-81 and then US-29 through Virginia into Greensboro. After three days of bar-and-grill food, ballpark food, and pizza in the hotel rooms, we were all ready for something a little different. 

I had my heart set on a Cracker Barrel as I was hankering for some breakfast and strong coffee. I especially enjoy their Momma’s French Toast Breakfast, but when we located a CB, that restaurant was packed up with two tour bus’ worth of patrons, so we ambled down the road a bit. We settled on a stop off at a Golden Corral in Waynesboro, VA off of I-64 around 2:00 PM.

Bad Information

Tomorrow at 9:00 AM, the "Freeh Report on the Pennsylvania State University” will be published at this site. The report is the output from the $12 million USD investigation into “the facts and circumstances of the actions of The Pennsylvania State University surrounding the child abuse committed by a former employee, Gerald A. Sandusky”. The investigation was driven by former FBI Director Louis Freeh. I hope the IT staff that administers that website knows what they are doing. Something tells me that there might be some serious HTTP traffic heading their way tomorrow morning.

Top Ten Signs You Are Suffering from Pirate Fever

With apologies to David Letterman – From the home office in Hillsborough,NC, here are the Top Ten signs that you are suffering from Pirates Fever (2012 edition). Drum roll please….

MLB.TV on the Roku

Three and one-half and four. That is what I am going with as the record of the Pirates since I purchased a subscription to MLB.TV last Sunday afternoon. I am generously counting the Sunday game against the Royals as the one-half part of the win total since I had everything up and configured and running in time to watch the last couple of innings of that game. While it remains to be seen whether I will once again have tragically bought into the Pirates at their “52-week high” like last year, I am feeling much better after the weekend games against the Tribe and last night’s Twin’s game. How about El Toro?

When last seen, I was off to research and eventually buy a streaming digital video player to supplant the streaming capabilities of my Sony BDP-N460 (which doesn’t support MLB.TV). There are a ton of players in this space, but going in, my preconception was that this was a two-horse race between Apple TV and Roku. That preconception was validated by my research.  I won’t go into the boring details on the feeds and speeds - there are about a gazillion articles comparing the two product lines. The nutshell that I was able to ferret out was that:

Decisions

Saturday afternoon I was really jonesing for some Pirate’s baseball and came this close to an impulse buy of the MLB Extra Innings baseball package from my cable company, TWC. What can I say – it’s in the blood. My team is playing well, winning close games with pitching, defense, and a sprinkling of speed to offset the anemic sticks. The bullpen looks incredibly strong this year and the starting rotation a good bit deeper. Anything can happen, but I just don’t see a complete collapse occurring this year. The division is considerably weaker than last year’s edition – and the schedule, really front-loaded this year with strong teams, thins out a bit over the next couple of months.

Chicks Dig the Long Ball

Random Observations from the Nationals-Pirates game, which I attended with several other family members on May 17 at Nationals Park in Washington, DC.

Customer Service With a Smile. My sister-in-law Lora and brothers Rich and Steve are standing outside the Will Call window at Nationals Park around 6:20 PM. Rich has already picked up our tickets and we are waiting for the arrival of nephew Sam and niece Paula Jo, her husband Matt and daughters Megan and Emma.  Standing outside the ropes to the Will Call, there was this Nats employee, a middle-aged woman with an attitude who confronted all the incoming customers queuing up at the Will Call, barking something about “Are you Goldstar Will Call? That is down the street!” The accompanying tone was aggressive, loud, and quite off-putting.

The Year of Wiffle Ball Statistics

In looking back, the years of 1973 and 1974 had to have been the pinnacle of our Wiffle Ball playing days in the Ninth Street Alley in the Fairview neighborhood of Altoona. By 1975, I was starting to get more into basketball and we were all outgrowing the physical dimensions of the Alley. But for those two years before that, we must have played hundreds of games of WB during those summers.

For some reason that I can’t recall, during 1973 or 1974, in addition to the multitude of other “casual” Wiffle Ball games we would play all summer, it was decided that we would have an official league with set teams. We would keep standings, play a defined schedule, and we would track statistics. As overall Alley Neighborhood Organizer (yikes, scratch that, it sounds dangerously close to Community Organizer), I was tabbed to be the Official Scorekeeper. Not sure why I signed up for that – I guess it sounded cool at the time and I always had good chops with numbers and such.

I Think He Meant “Inconvenience”

True contents of a work email sent to our Project Distribution List earlier this week:

It seems our mocked system still has problems at this point. Defect 19105 is opened and TDToolkit team is reviewing. The problem and the status is:

You will see non mocked items for sccd apps (Like Change, Config, etc) If you login the systems with base language ( non English, including JP and all others).

You may login the system with non base language (non English) for mock testing at this point. However, this kind of test has limitations for some apps as I mentioned yesterday.

Sorry for any incontinence.

Sometimes, you just can’t make this shit up.

(Queue rim shot! I’ll be appearing at the Comedy Club tonight – 9:00 and 10:30 shows, folks.)

Quality Control

Things have been really hectic at work since March 5. This has cut into blogging time, but that isn’t that rare of an occurrence. Unfortunately, I have been so busy, I had even forgotten to “check” my blog since the first week of April. You see, even when I am not actively developing content, I do try to, once a week or so, “smoke test” the blog – make sure it is formatting/rendering correctly and that URLs, videos, and images that I am linking to are still active. Now that I have enabled AdSense, I also check my earnings - $1.51 so far this month. (Do I drive some serious traffic or what?)

So imagine my embarrassment earlier this week, when, after work one evening, I jump into my blog after several weeks and see that selected posts have these ugly-ass rectangular boxes overlaying my content. The overlays were transparent rectangles with a thin outline on Google Chrome (my browser of choice) and white rectangles on Microsoft Internet Explorer – didn’t have the heart to check Firefox. Yuck. The only thing worse than a blog that doesn’t feature new content is one that doesn’t render correctly. One of my favorite recent posts was afflicted and a spot check of other posts told me it was not an isolated issue.

I Got Your Awkward Family Photos

In this blog post, I highlighted the awesome Awkward Family Photos website. The reason that site works so well is because it is so universal – we all have awkward moments captured on film. I’ll discuss one of the awkward photos from my past in this post.

Here is the back story on the photo to the left.

The Place: The backseat of Dad’s Invicta, parked outside Aunt Jean and Uncle Jimmy’s cottage in Ardenheim, PA on the Juniata River.

The Time: In the last few hours on the last day of one of the week-long vacations we took at the cottage in the early 70s.

The Anguish: I had made a simple request to Mom to take one last swim in the Juniata before the return trip to Altoona and had been shot down (with extreme prejudice). So I pitched a fit, shut the mother down, and sulked off to the backseat of the Invicta to suffer in silence and solitude.

The Social Network

I have a love-hate relationship with the Internet. In my last post, I briefly touched upon how the Net has naturally evolved into yet another in a long line of advertising and marketing mediums (albeit an incredibly efficient and optimized one). Newspapers, radio, TV, magazines, Internet. The beat goes on. I am sure another one will come along soon. The Next Big Thing.

The anonymity of the Internet also seems to bring out the worst aspects of our human nature. Ever visit some of the leading Left and Right Wing Websites and actually read the public comment sections? I’ll admit that, when reading them while shit-faced, they do provide some level of entertainment. But, Jeez Louise, what is the point? Nobody is going to change anybody’s mind – you can’t even get basic agreement on facts anymore. You think you are going to sway “The Other Team” over to “Your Team”? Sigh.

It is just a great big steaming pile of Race-to-the-Bottom where the most “successful” are the loudest, rudest, and most-willing-to-caricature, lie, and offend (Hi Bill Maher). Of course, since there is good money to be made in that gig and all the talking points have been so well-refined and market-tested by slime-ball political operatives, we are pretty much guaranteed status quo forever on that front. A deadlock in the truest Computer Science sense of the term. Each team (Go Team!) is waiting for the other to release the lock (be converted). I know how we deal with software deadlocks - time to kill the process.

Monetizing Your Content

The Internet has become probably the most efficient mechanism ever devised for selling us stuff we don’t need.

There are all these sophisticated advertising engines available that can be integrated into your website and serve up relevant advertisements based on the content of your website, the geographical location of the user viewing your site, and other contextual information.

By using one of these advertising engines and, as they say, “monetizing your content”, the content owner (like Your Faithful Servant) can actually get paid based on ad traffic that your site generates. The key metric here is something called Click Through Rate (CTR). This is a ratio between the number of times an ad is displayed on your website and the number of times a visitor to your site clicks on the ad. CTR and your overall site traffic (page views) determine whether you can make any money.

GasBuddy

This post is a topical and quite relevant Public Service Announcement on an “Oldie-But-Goody” website: GasBuddy.

These days, who among us isn’t interested in getting the best deal on their fossil fuels?  Anybody doesn’t want that? The premise behind GasBuddy is quite simple: maintain an up-to-date database of gasoline prices for major markets in the US and Canada by enlisting the help of your volunteer user base and provide capabilities to search this database for your geographical location of interest. It is certainly not a unique concept – there are other sites just like it. But it works for me: I find the user interface acceptable, and most importantly, the data accurate and current.

Stomp

There is a bit of an uptick in the optimism meter at work since the return from holidays. At the macro-level, the financial outlook for The Mothership continue to be relatively strong. Closer to home, The Long One is almost ready to come out of the oven and RTM – which means hopefully some new opportunities for Your Faithful Servant on the next release of Whatever-We-Are-Calling-The-Product-This-Week.

Most importantly it seems that the Product-Formerly-Known-As-Pittsburgh is actually something that folks might, egad, actually want to buy and deploy. Our Sales teams closed on a couple of big software/services deals in January with some very large customers whose names you would recognize, but that I can’t divulge (remember the BCG).

Canis Rufus Annoying Drunkus

(Finally carving out some time to blog. I am only about eight weeks late with this one.)

Canis Rufus Annoying Drunkus is Latin for Annoying Drunk Red Wolf (sort of) and is also the title of this post which reviews a road trip to the Belk Bowl on December 27, 2011 in Charlotte.

Not having any real rooting interest in this game, we took this trip to break up the Christmas week (along with a Carolina Hurricanes hockey game a couple of nights later). There is certainly nothing wrong with a little tailgating and college football and the short drive to the Queen City is manageable for a nice day trip, so why not? This game pitted the NC State Wolfpack and the Louisville Cardinals and was an 8:00 PM kickoff for a nationally televised ESPN audience.

IGM Economics Expert Panel

Came across an interesting (at least to me) website associated with the Initiative on Global Markets. IGM is an initiative associated with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and these smart folks have come up with, what seems in hindsight, to be an obvious and interesting idea:

• Get together a online panel (termed the IGM Economics Expert Panel) of the biggest brains in economic research. Real heavy hitters – researchers at the top of their profession at the most prestigious of research universities with an interest in public policy. Nobel Laureates and folks who have sat on the President’s Council of Economics.
• Make sure that the panel comprises Democrat, Republican, and Independent viewpoints and a mixture of both younger and older researchers.
• Pose a series of relevant, contemporary, economic policy questions every week or so to the panel.
• Record their answers and an associated confidence weighting.
• Aggregate and publish the results.

It Is Only February, Huh?

It really is the Season of the Weird. In the middle of the Republican primary season, we now have a full outbreak of Catholic outrage, contraception mania, personhood amendments, abortion-inducing prenatal testing, and government-mandated unnecessary vaginal sonogram probes (mandated of course by small government conservatives). Guess the Social Conservatives just can’t help themselves. BTW, when did Virginia turn into Mississippi?

At the forefront of all of this crazy stuff is Rick Santorum. I am just an outsider, but I am frankly puzzled why a party that has, in its stable, proven executives (Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, Haley Barbour, Tim Pawlenty, Jon Huntsmen, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, Bobby Jindal, etc) is apparently seriously considering a two-term senator who got his clock cleaned in his home state the last time he ran for anything. Particularly in a year where, you would think, the economy and basic executive competence, would come to the fore. Why in the hell are these social issues even being discussed? Beats me and who am I to tell them who to coach their team, but, damn, those Social Conservatives, they do love them some Rick Santorum.

Senior Moment #718

My house has two independently controlled HVAC systems. The downstairs is fed from a gas-package system (propane-based forced air furnace and heat pump for AC) and a separate heat pump system handles heating and cooling of the the upstairs (standard split system -- outside unit with an air handler in the attic). The upstairs system gave up the ghost awhile back and after roughing it for awhile, last fall I had a new replacement heat pump installed.

Ask and You Shall Receive

The ACC recently announced their new divisional alignments/scheduling models for football and basketball incorporating newcomers Pitt and Syracuse. There was so much conjecture on this topic since the expansion announcement last September. Some were promoting a North and South partition (with the North Division consisting of the five former Big East schools, UVA, and Maryland). This option would have been nice for nostalgia, but I don’t think UVA and Maryland (or Virginia Tech for that matter) were too keen on that.

The Long One

In the late 70’s, The Eagles released a disappointing album entitled “The Long Run”, their eagerly anticipated follow-up to “Hotel California”. The plodding pace of the recording process (almost three years in the making) as well as deteriorating relationships between various band members led some of the band members to start sarcastically referring to the album as the “The Long One” by the time it was released. Except for the part about the deteriorating relationships, Project Pittsburgh sure has the feel of “The Long One”.

Business Conduct Guidelines

I guess George didn't complete his BCG certification.

In addition to being the month for the annual performance evaluation, January is also the month when my company’s employees must complete a mandatory annual process called BCG Certification. This is a three part process where one must:

• Read the Business Conduct Guidelines (I guess I never realized these were available outside of IBM, but the hyperlink is provided in case any of my blog readers are having trouble falling asleep. Really compelling stuff.)
• Complete an online course on the BCG,
• Electronically certify that you have read, understand, and agree to the BCG.

Office Space

So long Office 1C13.

I have been working in the same physical building since February, 2000 and in the same office since October, 2005. Both of these are personal records for me, though the latter came to an end on Monday, when I moved offices about 15 yards across the same floor.from 1C13 to 1A32 in glorious Building 510. 

It turns out that several of us on Project Pittsburgh are violating the (until now unenforced) rule that states that only Managers and Band 9s and above are permitted to reside in Windowed Offices. I am a Band 8 (for life). Some additional teams are moving into our building in January and now, as my manager Michael remarked: “Your cover is blown.” As a result, me and half-dozen other peeps got unceremoniously evicted to interior Windowless Offices. Oh well, I think I’ll survive. After six years and a couple of months in the same office, I guess it is time for a change – and a move to another non-descript office with modular furniture in the same non-descript professional office building.