Seeping Matter

James Stewart has been referred to as the “Fastest Man on the Planet” (although that is pretty much just referring to the Supercross racing crowd – certainly anyone in a Bugatti Veyron is faster).  But his 2011 season will be most remembered for crashes, not wins.  In 18 main events this year, Stewart crashed in fully half of those main events and a total of eleven times (twice in a couple of races).  It’s bad enough when you crash once out of every two times you race, but the real problem with James Stewart is that he frequently is taking someone else out along with himself.

I did some quick research on RacerX’s website last night, glancing over this year’s race reports.  Here’s the list of people Stewart collided with in 2011 main events:

• Houston – Chad Reed, Justin Brayton, Chris Blose.  Stewart came into the turn too hot, couldn’t make the turn, and plowed across the field, taking Chad Reed and the other listed riders out with him.
• Houston – Jason Thomas.  Later in the main event, as Stewart was trying to make up ground, he jumped his bike right on to the back (literally) of Jason Thomas, taking Thomas out of the race.
• Atlanta – Chad Reed.  With both competing for the win on the final lap, Chad Reed dove inside the leading Stewart in a 180 degree right hand turn, taking the line away.  But Stewart tried to take the line anyway, and both Reed and Stewart went down.  After the both got up, Stewart forgot about racing and tried to take Reed out again, but this plan backfired on Stewart as Reed found a way around for third.  Stewart went from first to fourth on the final lap.
• Jacksonville – Michael Byrne, Matt Goerke.  On the first lap of the main event coming into the first rhythm section, Stewart was, in my view, too committed to jumping through the rhythm section when he was bumped by Michael Byrne.  Stewart shot clear across the track from the right to the left, collecting Matt Goerke in the process, taking them both out of the race.  It seems like some other riders were also involved, but the race report doesn’t say for sure.
• Toronto – Ryan Villopoto.  After a poor start by both Villopoto and Stewart, Stewart and Villopoto both got together in a 180 degree right hand turn, and both riders went down.  This crash was oddly like the Reed/Stewart incident in Houston, yet it wasn’t on the last lap for the win, yet nobody was getting up in arms over Stewart’s “dirty riding” tactics for this one, unlike how things went for Reed.  At least not yet.
• Dallas – Chad Reed.  Stewart was trailing Reed coming into a whoops section.  Stewart came through the whoops fast and eventually out of control, crashing into Reed in the turn at the end of the section.  Reed was sent over the top of the berm and crashed onto the concrete.  Stewart went on to take 4th.
• Las Vegas – Kevin Windham.  Having taken the lead from Windham just laps ago but still under intense pressure by Windham, Stewart went into the whoops section, lost control, and crashed in the whoops right in front of Kevin (who, despite popular belief, was NOT following Stewart’s line through the whoops – Stewart crashed into Kevin’s line).  It happened so quickly that Windham had nowhere to go other than to run right into Stewart’s bike.  Both Stewart and Windham were out of the race.

These were in addition to his crashes in Los Angeles, Daytona, and Salt Lake City (twice) where he somehow managed to not hit anyone else.

So, Stewart crashed eleven times involving at least ten other riders besides himself, three of those times involving Chad Reed.  It was odd that Reed was so criticized for his pass attempt for the win at Atlanta, in an agressive but legal move.  Yet this pass only cost Stewart one position; Stewart’s stupid antics for the remainder of the last lap cost him more points and more positions than the crash with Reed.  What people don’t remember is that Stewart also crashed into Reed on two other occasions, along with Villopoto, Windham, and others.

Somehow, when a rider under control makes an aggressive but legal move for the win and a crash ensues, that rider is a dirty rider, especially if the rider is Chad Reed and the rider being passed is James Stewart.  But when a rider is riding out of control and crashes people out of the race, it is not dirty.  I don’t get that.

It isn’t my intent to suggest that Stewart intentionally crashed into all those people.  You don’t win a championship that way, and Stewart wants to win.  It’s just that the guy rides out of control, assumes he can do whatever he wants, and cares so little for the safety of other people in the race that it doesn’t matter to him if he hits anyone else or not.

To make matters worse, of the ten other riders he crashed into this year, at least three of them — Thomas, Goerke, and Windham — paid a visit to the hospital as a result of their crash with Stewart.  The first two had season-ending injuries, joining other riders like Ivan Tedesco and Chad Reed in the list of riders whose seasons have ended due to a collision with James Stewart.

All of this was in addition to his off-track problems.  He was arrested in Florida for impersonating an officer when he used flashing red and blue lights to pull another vehicle over on a highway, a vehicle which just happened to contain off-duty policemen.  Somehow, this felony arrest doesn’t merit any disciplinary action from the AMA, whereas Jason Lawrence got suspended for a year for his misdemeanor a couple of years ago.

I hate that Kevin Windham was racing so well in Vegas only to end the night at the hospital with internal bleeding.  But in a way, I’m kinda glad it happened.  Stewart rides without any respect for the safety of other riders on the track, and has done this for years.  I can’t recall any other top rider who has had more collisions involving other riders — even Ricky Carmichael is among the list of riders who have been victims of Stewart’s wrecks.  In the past this has seemed to get by without too much fan attention, but Kevin Windham is different.  He’s the most adored rider in the whole paddock.  And maybe, just maybe, this time it will incite enough ire from the fans to get the AMA to do something about it.  I hope they do, because one of these times he might be ending someone’s career.

So I described earlier the incident I had recently in my 350Z where I was run off the freeway by another vehicle who moved suddenly into my lane.  I’ve told this exact same story 100 times over the past week and a half:  I was established in the left lane, I was slowly passing a car in the right lane with my cruise set at the posted speed limit, and as I was already partway past the vehicle he moved completely over into the left lane, requiring me to leave the road to avoid hitting him.  I distinctly remember seeing the other car’s rear taillights flashing just ahead of my passenger-side A-pillar, which would put his rear bumper roughly equal with my rear wheels.

Clearly, I was established in my lane, not doing anything wrong, when the other driver made an unsafe lane change into my lane, and my actions avoided a more serious accident.

Well, apparently not to clearly to the insurance company or the Utah Highway Patrol.  After discussing with the UHP, the insurance company came back and told me that they have determined that I am 100% responsible for the accident.

(???)

I spoke with the insurance company some more today and got some additional clues.  ”For one thing,” she said, “running into a stationary object will always have you at least 50% responsible.”

I admit, I did hit a stationary object.  I was unable to avoid striking an aluminum pole when I was forced off the road at freeway speed.  At my age, I guess my reaction time is not down to mere thousandths of a second.  Or I didn’t want to roll the car over by making too abrupt a correction.  But what about the whole part about BEING FORCED OFF THE FREEWAY?!?!?

I asked her about this, in a somewhat calmer tone.  It appears they’d forgotten that part.  I explained, “You do realize that I had to leave the road to avoid a collision with the other vehicle, right?  If I had not done that, we would be talking about a multiple vehicle accident, much worse damage to both vehicles, and we would likely have medical bills, even serious ones, in addition, right?”

I’m thinking, You are holding me 100% responsible because, when thrust into near-accident situation by another driver’s carelessness, I took the only course of action available to me to avoid serious damage and injury?

I figure she has some lookup table or database on her computer that says I’m responsible.  Where is the common sense in all this?

Needless to say we are having some discussions about this until I am able to get them to be reasonable.

Something in all of this seems wrong to me.  While driving like a normal, sane person, making a normal, sane pass on the freeway, another careless driver (or, possibly, ruthless, but let’s not judge, shall we?) cuts directly over into my path.  Because I took action to avoid the accident, he got off scott free while I have to pay the deductible and deal with the UHP and the insurance company telling me I’m responsible.  If, instead, I’d stood my ground, or simply failed to avoid the accident, I probably would have totaled the Z, totaled their car as well, and we might be writing this from a hospital bed.  But hey, I wouldn’t be paying for the accident!

Given the options, I’m still glad I avoided the accident.  But it still seems like I’m getting it from all directions and I didn’t do anything wrong.

Yesterday we had about a foot and a half of snow at my house in Spanish Fork.  Since they (uncharacteristically) closed the schools, the snowplows didn’t plow the secondary streets like ours.  I spent many hours of the day digging myself and my neighbors out so we could get cars into the street and downtown.

Today the snowplows came by to clear the street that did not need to be cleared anymore.  This was the result:

Snow Boulder

I have a hard time seeing how anyone could think this was helping.  Next time, Spanish Fork Snowplow-Person, if this is how you are going to “help”, don’t bother.

(Tagged “humor”, because I’m sure it will be funny someday.)

So last night was the big finale of “Lost,” the TV show sensation that proved you don’t actually need to have a workable plot to make uber-gazillions of dollars selling flashing pictures to people.

I haven’t actually watched the finale yet.  I may or may not, but the murmur I’ve seen on the interwebs about it today indicates that the finale is probably pretty much what I thought it would be.

A month or so ago I read about this in my issue of “Wired.”  I like Wired, but admittedly the authors are guilty of a bit of fanboyism with some things.  Like Google.  And Apple.  And, apparently, Lost.  They did a big write-up where, among other things, they discussed with the writers of “Lost” many of the unsolved questions in Lost up to that point, and asked the writers if all the questions would be answered.  The writers pontificated, talked in circles, praised themselves and their genius, and in many other ways answered, to paraphrase:  No, not really.

I was going to post a link to the Wired article, but I changed my mind because they used a potty word.  But you can get pretty much the gist of it here.

Anyway, I figure I better chip in here, to help people understand the finale of “Lost.”  I think I owe it to the global economy to just cut to the chase here and end the debate.

Episode 1: A bunch of people miraculously survive a jet airliner crash-landing on a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, only to find they are deserted there.

Episodes 2-(Finale-1): The writers attract a devoted following as they create more questions than answers by throwing everything into the show they can think of.  Lifelike inanimate objects.  Unexplained wild animals.  Intricate past and future lives.  A mysterious sequence of numbers.  Others.  Dharma Initiatives.  Moving islands.  Magnets.  Time travel.  Alternate universes.  Nuclear weapons that don’t kill people.  Dead people who are not dead.  An island that needs protecting.  As best I can explain it, the writers would get together on Monday, do drugs all week long, and on Friday they’d take whatever they happened to write down or remember from the week and make that into a show.

Finale: Panic sets in as the writers realize that people want an ending.  Then they remember:  We’re artists!  We’re elite!  We don’t have to explain ourselves!  If the audience can’t understand our art, that makes them uncultured swine!  And we can even tell them this and they will worship us all the more!  We don’t have to explain anything!

Somewhere in here, in an incredible act of hubris, they actually tell people in magazine interviews that they are doing this.  And even more incredibly, most people hear this and say, “Oh, yes!  We ARE uncultured swine!  Thank you for not answering any of our questions!”

Anyway, I hope this clarifies things for you.

Have you ever sent your child to school when they had a sore throat?

You probably thought it wasn’t too serious.  You probably didn’t want to have to deal with them being home sick.  You probably didn’t want to have to take a day off work or cancel your lunch date with your girlfriends.  (By the way, if that last one applies to you, I hope you are a girl, or not married.)

Anyway, you sent your child to school with a sore throat.

Well, guess what, Mr. Selfish-Pants?  Your child has strep throat!  Yep.  You didn’t even know it.

And then, since your child has strep, and since your child is in class with my child, now my child has strep.

And guess what else?  Maybe my child reacts differently to strep.  Maybe instead of just getting strep throat, my child gets a much more severe infection.  Did you know that thousands of children under the age of 12 are hospitalized each year for strep infections?

I’m not really sure if that is true, because I just made it up.

Nevertheless, maybe my child has a severe reaction.  Maybe my child ends up having some form of vasculitis or a fever or severe muscle and joint pain or pneumonia or swelling in her abdominal organs!  Maybe my child ends up severely ill and hospitalized for days and days while doctors try to figure out what is wrong!  Other than the fact that she gets to take narcotics, almost nothing good has come out of this!  All because you sent your child to school with strep throat.

That’s not all.  Maybe I had to miss several days of work to help take care of my sick child in the big scary hospital.  Maybe this happened right at the end of a project deadline, so as a result maybe my project missed its delivery date.  Maybe that means that our software product is not going to ship on time.  All because of you.

If that were to happen, maybe Microsoft misses its earnings projections. (In seriousness, please see below. Really.)  As a result of reporting bad earnings, our stock tanks, costing thousands of Microsoft employees and other shareholders thousands or even millions of dollars.  Revenues in Best Buy stores in the Redmond, Washington area drop 50% over the previous year due to unrealized bonuses.  The economy plummets as the S&P drops hundreds of points in a single day due to Microsoft’s bad numbers.

People all over the country lose their jobs due to the tanking economy.  This death cycle continues as one company after another fails to meet revenue targets.  More and more people lose their homes.  Homeless rates skyrocket.  Anarchy reigns as people band together in small militias to stay alive, using force to raid convenience and grocery stores for food and water.  Larger militias take over entire towns and enforce their will through starvation of those who will not align under their rule.

Martial law is put into effect as the entire country becomes a military state in attempt to maintain some semblance of peace.  Basic freedoms guaranteed by the constitution are lost as the military takes over.  Local militia groups band together under an evil leader and take over the government by military coup, installing that leader as a supreme fascist dictator in a new communistic government.  Millions are needlessly slaughtered in public executions in order to bring the rest of the populace under control.

Then a huge asteroid is discovered, hurtling through outer space and heading straight for Earth.  And since the government has been overthrown and the new government no longer has any money, we can’t hire the world’s best deep-water drilling team to come and learn how to be astronauts in two weeks and fly up into outer space, slingshot around the moon at 35 g’s and drill into the asteroid, put nukes in there and blow it up.  The asteroid hits earth and everyone and everything on earth dies.

All because you sent your child to school with a sore throat.  You selfish, selfish, selfish, selfish, selfish little self-centered selfish-person, you.

DISCLAIMER: I work for Microsoft, but I don’t speak for Microsoft. I already said this before, but I’m just making sure you know, in case you don’t know how to tell when I am joking around. Seriously, I have no idea how our earnings will go. I have absolutely no inside information. I’m just a peon. Whatever you do, don’t make investment decisions based on my blog posts. If you saw my portfolio you would know what I’m talking about.

Against my better judgment I’m writing about education.  Education is a topic where, if you disagree with the status quo, you are automatically labeled as anti-education, which is logically ridiculous.

So, for the record, I’m decidedly pro-education.  I have a lot of opinion on the topic, and since this is my blog I guess it’s time I break the ice here and start talking about it.  Nevertheless, I’m sure that there are people who are going to take my opinions as being an attack on education or even themselves personally, even though I’m just now calling them out on it.  It isn’t meant that way.  But whatever.

Back to the topic.

I was thinking about this question the other day.  Actually, quite a while ago.  It was picture day at school, and so that morning the kids were concerned about what to wear and what does their hair look like and other such things.

For some reason it occurred to me:  Why do they even have picture day at school in the first place?

The de-facto knee-jerk answer to this question is:  ”So you can have a picture of your child!  Don’t you want a picture of your child?  You know, someday your child will be grown up and you’ll wish you had something to remember their childhood by!  What is wrong with you anyway?!?”

See, the thing is, that is not the answer to my question.  That’s the answer to the question, “Why should I have portraits taken of my child?”  But my question is, why is it done at school?

It surely was not always this way.  If you went back far enough — 50 years, or 80, or 100? — you would certainly get to a time period where kids went to school but there was no picture day.

I can envision the business model here, for a company like LifeTouch that does school picture days all over the place, or at least Utah.  It is actually pretty sweet.  There’s no real estate costs, since you don’t have a studio.  You just set up at the school you are at every day.  You’ve got business automatically provided to you.  In a single day, you might shoot 100, or 200, or even 500 portraits.  Even if you only sold a $20 package to half of the, say, 200 portraits you shoot in a day, that’s $2000 of income in a single day!  That’s a pretty sweet business!

What really struck me as odd was when I asked my wife why our kids were even participating.  See, my wife worked as a professional photographer when we were first married, shooting high school, prom, bridal, and family portraits among other things in a full studio setting, with adjustable lighting and props and everything.  She can do just fine shooting pictures of my kids.  So for years we’ve avoided spending the admittedly lofty prices for boring picture packages from school and instead we’ve shot our own, which are much more interesting and are of comparable to better quality, and less expensive.

Knowing this, I didn’t understand why our kids were even having their pictures taken.  I mean, we know already that we aren’t going to buy any.  Why make the photographer shoot and develop pictures we know we aren’t going to buy?  So I asked Amber, and she said, “Well, it is harder to get them out of it than just to have them go along with it.”

I thought about that, and it makes sense.  Of course it is hard for the teacher to monitor kids that are getting pictures taken if some of them are also back in the classroom not getting pictures taken.  And of course it is hard for the teacher to know if the kids parents really don’t want their picture taken or whether it is just that the child himself is trying to avoid the picture for some reason.

But why is it even the teacher’s responsibility in the first place?

This was what finally hit me.  The teacher’s job is to teach my kids.  Why is there even a school picture day?  Why is it that educators, who have a minimum number of days that they must provide instruction for our kids, are counting as a day of instruction one where time is spent shuffling kids through a picture-taking process that has nothing to do with their education?

I don’t know the real reason, but I’m willing to bet it rhymes with Sick Jack.  But for most people, including education professionals, I don’t think they ever even think about it.  We’ve always had school pictures.  It is just part of the schedule.

I’m not particularly opposed to school pictures, but I fear it is setting a bad precedent.

In years past, they’ve held a book fair at my kids’ elementary.  I seem to remember this going on when I was in elementary school also.  The kids would go down to the book fair, as a class, and look through the books that were available for purchase.  Then their assignment is to come home and pester their parents for money to buy books.  Presumably this is allowed because books are educational, although one time I actually went to the book fair and only about half of the items for sale in the book fair were books.

It gets worse.  This past year at my kids’ elementary, there was another similar thing going on.  It operated exactly like the book fair.  As classes the kids were taken down to this little store that was set up in part of the school.  They were instructed by their teachers to go through the store and identify the things they wanted to buy, and how much they cost.  Then they were told to come home and discuss with their parents the things they wanted.  Then the next day they should bring their money, because they would go down to the store again as a class and anyone who brought money could buy stuff from the store.

Consider:  At this point, we’ve given up on trying to have anything in the store even remotely resemble education.  They pitched this as a finance unit, where kids could learn about how much things cost and how to pay for them.  In our case, however, this was no different than when our kids come with us to a regular store (you know, the kind that pays for its own real estate), where their job is to ask us for money to buy stuff they don’t need, and our job is to say, “No.”  The only difference is that the crap in this store at the school was significantly overpriced.  Significantly overpriced.

Well, when our kids came home and asked for money, of course we said, “No.”  We told them they were free to blow their own money on stuff, which they did.  The sad part of this story is that my daughter spent about $25 of her own money to buy Christmas presents at the store.  She spent about half of what she earns in a year to buy stuff she could have picked up at the dollar store for about $5.

She did this because the store was at the school, and because she was taken down to that store with her class, and encouraged to look at what she wanted to buy, and then come back with the money.  And she spent her own money because, unlike much of the world, we don’t want to encourage our kids to blow money on stuff they don’t need, and so we push back.

It angers me that this situation was even there in the first place.  Someone is setting up a business where they don’t have any real estate, instead setting their shop up in public schools.  Why in the world are we allowing private businesses to run out of a public school?  Why are we allowing children to go down to patronize these businesses as a part of their day that is supposed to be spent learning?

This is something that simply should not be happening, in my opinion.  The only logical reason I can think of why this happens is because the school system profits financially from doing it.  I can’t explain it any other way.  And if I’m right, it really makes me upset to think that the public education system is tricking people into funding the system and shortchanging our kids education in the same process.

Last week Novell announced that they are finally getting rid of their CTO, Jeff Jaffe.  It’s buried in the press release, but if you look hard enough you’ll find it.

It’s really too bad, because this press release really did not do much in the way of raising Novell’s stock price.  It must be because the news of Jaffe’s departure is buried.  If Novell had made a press release just about that, stock would surely have gone up.

As far as Novell goes, things can only get better.  I heard people were literally cheering in the hallways when they heard the news.  No, I’m not making that up.

Understand, I don’t have anything against Jaffe personally, so this isn’t meant as a personal attack.  I really don’t want to get too critical of people, generally.  But the fact that Jeff Jaffe was a CXO-level professional says a lot about what is wrong with corporate America in general, and Novell in particular.  He was very well compensated because he was expected to lead the company, but instead people at Novell wonder what he even got paid anything for at all.  If you had worked at Novell, you would know what I mean.

In a technical company like Novell, the CTO, if you have one, is expected to provide the technical leadership.  What products should we be focusing on?  What company strengths are we going to leverage?  Who is our target market and our customer?  What is our go-to-market strategy?  What is our partnering and third-party-developer strategy?  You’d expect a CTO to be intimately aware of all this stuff, and providing clear, consistent, and frequent direction to his engineering core to help bring about a technical vision that will win in the market place.

Jaffe’s strategy, on the other hand, was to completely disappear.

In fact, the only time I can ever remember him saying anything at all was just after he’d held a two-week-long brainstorming session with a bunch of his distinguished engineers.  I knew they were doing it, because it was going on in a conference room on my floor at Novell, right by the bathrooms and the elevators.

Presumably, the purpose of this session was to get the Novell brain trust together and answer questions like these to come up with a competitive strategy.  Of course, I wasn’t in the meetings, but the accounts I heard were a bit different from what I’d expected.  Apparently Jaffe went into the meetings with an idea of what the strategy was.  The first week was spent with the distinguished engineers trying to help him see that his strategy was not going to work.  Towards the end of that week they collectively gave up, and spent the second week trying to figure out how to not make his strategy sound so ridiculous.

A few days after the meetings, he announced his strategy in a company-wide conference call.  Basically the strategy was this:

• The open source community is full of people who like to develop software and give it away for free.  They just like to work on interesting projects.
• We like to make money on software and we have lots of great ideas.
• Thus, perfect synergy.  We will give the open source community ideas of software to create that will make us money.  Since they have nothing better to do, the open source community will gladly make this software for us.  Then our engineers will add a few key features, tie pretty bows around it, and sell it.

This same day I received an offer to work for Mozy.  It was pretty clear that Jaffe’s strategy was a joke.  Embarrassing, even.  I remember thinking, “Things are never going to change around here if this is the best strategy our CTO can come up with.”

I was pretty discouraged about it.  It is hard to work for management that doesn’t instill confidence.  It is really surprising to me that a person could make the kind of salary he made with the kind of title he had and still do such a lousy job of leading.  How in the world did he ever get the job in the first place?

After the call, I walked to the office of a teammate to vent about it.  I told him, “I know in the past I’ve joked about some of the decisions different people in our upper management team have made, and I’ve quipped, ‘I could do their job better than that!’  Of course, we both know that I was kidding.  But this time, I’m completely serious when I say this:  I could do the CTO job better than Jeff Jaffe.  I know I could.”

My friend said, “Yes, I know.”

When I was at Novell, this happened fairly often.  Employees regularly felt very discouraged, disheartened, and demotivated because of executive management.  I figured that was pretty much just the way companies worked, and that it happened like that everywhere.

Which is why I marveled at this fact, when Jaffe left.  I contemplated how I’d felt that way, and realized that I’ve never once felt that way about my management chain at Microsoft.  On the contrary, I find that I am continually amazed at the level of professionalism, attention to detail, quality of decision-making, and overall caring about the company that I find in my management chain.

I thought perhaps it’s just because I’m new, so I mentioned this to a guy on my team who’s been with Microsoft for over ten years.  He said, “Pretty much, that is how I’ve always felt about my management chain too.”

Novell breaks my heart.  I wanted so badly for Novell to succeed while I was there, and I still want good things for Novell.  I know many great people who work there.  Novell’s problem has never been in the individual contributors; it’s been with the company leadership.

So getting rid of Jaffe can only be a step forward.  It may be too little, too late, but it’s worth a try.

When I first heard about our country’s new CARS program, my reaction was, “Hey!  Free money if I trade in my Durango for a new SUV!  Despite the dumb name, this seems like an excellent plan!  Almost too good to be true!”

Of course, that should make us stop and think about it.

And I have.  I have some problems with this new plan.  I get the sales pitch:  Make it easier to buy a new, more fuel-efficient vehicle.  Help out the auto makers by increasing sales.  Help out the environment by replacing a number of higher-pollution vehicles with lower-pollution vehicles.  Reduce our oil dependency by replacing a number of less efficient vehicles with more efficient vehicles.  And I get a new car.  Everybody wins!

Well, I do have a number of problems with it.

I have a nomenclature problem.  I don’t understand why we have to come up with a cute little acronym name for this program.  It is also known as “Cash for Clunkers,” which is equally dumb.  My 1998 Durango, which definitely qualifies for the full $4500 rebate, has been a great vehicle for me, runs quite well, and is definitely not a clunker by my definition.  This lets you know what sort of vehicle standards the folks in Washington have, and how disconnected they are from the world in which their constituents live.

I have a fundamental problem.  It should not be the place of the government to get involved in consumer affairs like this.  We’ve had a lot of ever-increasing government intervention in society over the last 60+ years, but rarely has this intervention actually done any good; often it hurts more than it actually helps.

I have a financial problem.  Where does all of this money come from?  Well, ultimately it has to come from the pockets of the taxpayers, either in increased taxes or in increased prices due to inflation caused by printing money to cover it.

I have a principle problem.  Taking a perfectly good, functioning vehicle and scrapping it is flat-out wasteful.  There’s this part of my being that screams out that we can’t expect a net good to come from a plan that isn’t founded in solid principles.

I have an economics problem.  Junking these cars will have an inflationary effect on the general price of cars.  It’s simple supply and demand.  Given a closed ecosystem with 100 car owners with one car each, suppose 10 are new and 20 qualify for the CARS program.  Under normal conditions, we might assume that twenty people are buying a car each year, half of them are buying new and half are buying used, and so ten cars are cycling through the ecosystem per year.  Now you inject CARS into the mix.  There will be people participating who might normally not have bought this year at all, or who might have bought this year but would normally have bought used instead of new.  If half of the 20 participate, and half of those would not have normally bought this year at all, that means instead of 10 new cars entering the ecosystem we have 18, if my math is right.  To balance it, there must be 18 older cars leaving the ecosystem instead of the normal 10.  What you end up with is fewer used cars — 82% are used instead of 90% — and the average car value has gone up.  But note that, at best, the economic condition of the people in the group hasn’t changed.  In fact, it should have gone down by around $400 per person ($3500 to 4500 times ten participants, divided among all 100 participants).  With fewer used vehicles in the ecosystem but the same number of buyers, the demand for used vehicles will go up, driving up the price of used vehicles.

So if you already own a used vehicle in that ecosystem it is only partially bad, because the value of your used car should be higher now.  It’s only a problem if you want to buy.  But I’m not sure this will help automakers beyond this year.  What effect will higher used-car values have on new car sales?  I think you could just as easily argue that it will hurt as much as it will help.

At any rate, it causes yet another economic bubble.  This program artificially inflates the market for car sales and makes adjustments to the ecosystem, based not on the GDP of the people in the ecosystem but on government intervention to make affordable a good that is less affordable if free market economics are left to do their thing.  The government tried this same tactic with the general housing market, and I think history shows that did not turn out too well.

So what we really have here is yet another government program with a dumb name, based on poor principles, with dubious economics at best, that you and I get to pay for.

It’s doubtful it will do anything but hurt us in the long term.  Which is why I’m considering participating.  I mean, if I have to pay for it anyway, I might as well get a new SUV and $4500 out of the deal.

It took me a while, but I finally settled into my routine and got to where I’m reading my RSS feeds most days again.  I was going through the posts of the past month or so, since the job change, and ran across this article on the “Making Good Software” blog about things that keep someone from being a good software engineer, outside of (and often in spite of) an ability to engineer software.

I’ll summarize here.  It isn’t my intent to plagiarize; if you are remotely interested go read the article.  Here are the things:

• Lack of discipline
• Big ego
• Poor communication
• Forgetting the customer
• Lack of proper work prioritization

I have known many of these people during my career.  Indeed, I was one of them.  I remember coming to Novell from IBM almost ten years ago.  I thought I was pretty hot stuff and I made sure my team knew it.  In fact, I actually said (this is embarrassing to admit) on more than one occasion, “There are people who know C++ better than I do, but I haven’t met any of them.”  My ego surely made me hard to work with.  It definitely was a cause of friction between myself and my management chain, and ended up being a (deserved) source of frustration and difficulty for me, until I recognized the problem and started working to address it.

I’m pretty ashamed of having behaved that way back then.  I hope I’m better than that today.  I guess recognizing the weakness is a good first step.  Fortunately for me, back then I was on a really great team with a lot of very capable, patient, and talented engineers that waited for me to learn from my mistakes and to grant them the mutual respect they deserved.  I consider myself pretty fortunate to have been able to learn from them what real software engineering is about.

Over my career I’ve had to work with people like this from time to time, software engineers that manifest one or more of these traits.  Sometimes these guys are pretty talented technically.  I’ve felt sorry for them as I’ve observed, realizing that these weaknesses are going to hold their career back until they recognize them and work to overcome them.  No amount of programming prowess will compensate for it.  And what’s even worse is, often because these people have the personality issues they have, you don’t get anywhere by trying to bring these weaknesses to their attention; they are often unreceptive to this type of feedback.  Like I said, you just have to wait until they recognize it themselves.

I can imagine being in a performance review with someone like this, having them explain to me all the technical awesome they did, and me replying, “Your poor soft skills are shouting so loudly that I cannot hear your technical awesomeness.”  Or, as I said in the title, actions speak louder than code.

I really believe this is true.  To write software professionally, of course you must have technical ability; however, this is a necessary but not sufficient condition for greatness.  The best software engineers I’ve had the fortune to work with in my career, past and present, not only had awesome technical ability but did not exhibit weakness in these areas.  And I’ll tell you what:  Those teams are wonderful teams to be a part of.  Those teams create strong. uplifting work environments and are able to deliver great products that meet customer demand.

Another way to say this is, in order to be a good software engineer, you must first be a good employee.

In fact, I’ll tell you how important I think this is.  The ability to mitigate or eliminate these defects from a software engineer’s persona is so important to me that, if I had my own company and were making the hiring decisions, I would not hire a candidate that I knew had these problems, no matter how incredible their technical ability.

A person with these weaknesses is really only suited to be set to the side to work on a special side R&D project where interaction with other employees is limited, and they don’t have to interact with customers at all.  Problem is, those kind of projects are either a) strategically important to the long-term future of the company, or b) of little to no real value, or c) a combination, often high potential value but with a lot of inherent risk that causes the real value to be low.  If the project is strategically important or of high value, do you really want to reward the biggest jerk in your company by giving him the highest profile assignment, leaving your best engineers to maintain the legacy project?  Wouldn’t you want to have someone working on that high profile assignment that knows how to collaborate with others and assemble all the best ideas to solve the problem the best way, even if that solution isn’t his/her own?  Contrariwise, if the project is of little real value or has so much risk that it offsets the real value, why even do it at all?

Nope.  In my company, if I were ever to have one, I wouldn’t hire or keep an employee who had these weaknesses and was not committed to addressing them.  I’ve seen the difference, both in morale and productivity, between teams where they don’t have these problems and teams that do.

I joined my first frequent flyer program when I started working for IBM. Before then I did not really do any business travel. But when I first went to IBM I had to travel to New York just a couple of months later, and I joined the United Airlines frequent flyer program, since I was working in Boulder, and DIA is a United hub.

When I got back from New York, I had somewhere around 4000 miles in my account. Not “points” or “credits” – miles. I did some quick math and figured, “Gee, 4000 miles is enough for both Amber and I to fly round trip to Las Vegas! Let’s go!” So I called United to schedule the trip, at which point they carefully explained to me how stupid I was, because everyone knows you need at least 25000 miles to fly anywhere at all, and what was wrong with me anyway.

One day, I will meet the person who came up with this dumb scheme, and then I will spend the rest of my life in prison. Just kidding. I figure the jury will probably side with me.

Not long after this, I left IBM for Novell, and I also left those precious miles behind as I moved to Utah, where there is a Delta hub, and we are free to bestow upon United Airlines the loathing they deserve. I got a frequent flyer account with Delta instead. But I just wasn’t getting the miles. Traveling once or twice a year to San Francisco or Boston was just not doing the job.

Then one day my boss came and told me he needed me to go to Bangalore. Bwa-ha-ha-ha! At long last! A trip to Bangalore will accumulate nearly 25000 miles in a single trip! That’ll show ‘em!

I’ll tell you what – anyone who has to fly clear to Bangalore and back deserves a free flight.

So I had this nice little balance of, I think it was, 29000 miles. And then it was 30000. And then it was 32000. And all this time I could never actually get a chance to use the miles, because where am I going to fly by myself?

Two trips to Seattle this year bumped me up to 38000 exactly. My mom said if I ever went to Seattle again and wanted to take Amber, she’d watch the kids. And then my new boss at Microsoft asked me to go to TechReady in Seattle. All the stars aligned! I was finally going to get to use my miles!

Ah, if only it were so easy. I logged into Delta’s website to buy Amber’s ticket. What a shocker – the flight I needed Amber to take to come with me cost not 25000 miles, but 40000.

40000. And I had 38000.

I saw a link that said, “Transfer points from another rewards program.” One of the participating programs was the Starwood Preferred Guest program, which I’m also a member of, because the W hotels rule. It said that Starwood points convert 1 for 1 into Delta miles, so I logged into my Starwood account, and lo and behold, I had just under 2300 Starwood points! Hurrah!

Starwood told me you must transfer a minimum of 2500 points. Bummer.

I saw another link that said, “Purchase miles.” I did the calculation and saw that I could buy those 2000 miles for only about $60. The only bad thing was it said it could take up to 72 hours for the miles to be credited to my account – and I needed to leave in 70. I called Delta, to see if I could just buy the miles over the phone, and then book the flight. Alas, they could not do anything about it – 72 hours! Amazing – they are powerless!

The Delta rep suggested another approach. “Sign up for the Delta American Express card,” she said. “After you make your first purchase, your account is immediately credited with 20000 miles. You could sign up for the card today, get the card number, make an online purchase, get your 20000 miles, and then buy the flight with miles.” Ooh, that is a good idea.

So I had her transfer me to American Express. They also explained, “Yes, if you sign up, once you make your first purchase with the card, your Delta SkyMiles account will be immediately credited with 20000 miles.” Sweet! I signed up over the phone for the card. After I got done, the American Express rep said to me, “Your card should be there in about three weeks.” I said, “Okay. Can you please give me the card number now, so I can make a purchase with it today.”

“Uh, I can’t do that,” she replied.

“Well, I need to get those miles today, to use to book a flight, so I was told I could get the number and buy something online today, and get the miles.”

“Well, I can’t do that,” she explained. “And even if I could, you would not actually see those miles or be able to use them for about 6-8 weeks.”

This is a new definition of “immediately” that I am not familiar with. (However, now that I am aware of it, I plan to use it often. Amber: “Matt, will you please change Oakley’s diaper?” Me: “Sure babe, I’ll do that immediately.”)

Anyway, I got approved for the card, but I still was 2000 miles short. There was no way for me to book the flight with the 38000 miles and cover the difference. I had to take one flight in order to be in Seattle in time for a mandatory meeting, but the only way for me to put her on that flight was to pay cash. So I had to book her on a different flight, which meant she would fly out of Salt Lake four hours after I did.

Lame, Delta – lame.