Rodney M Bliss

October 1, 2018

Relearning Old Lessons

Did you ever have a hard drive crash? A hard drive that you hadn’t gotten around to backing up?

Ironically, despite what you might see from Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory, most IT professionals have lost an unbacked up hard drive. After it happens, I am determined to do better. And I do. I dutifully backup up my brand new hard drive. Of course, it’s empty, because I lost all my data, but I do the backup. . and then I forget about doing it again.

Ever have a hard drive crash?

Yeah, I sometimes have to learn the same lesson over and over again.

I use lists. Lists help me get things done. With lists I’m more effective. But lists also make me anxious. If you make too many lists, or your TODO list gets too long, instead of helping me get more done, they immobilize me.

So, the trick is to have just enough lists, or lists that are just long enough, but not too long. Unfortunately the right number changes day to day, week to week. The number is never less than 3 nor more than. . .well, 5 is typically a good number.

I heard a story one time about a busy business executive. He never had enough time to get everything done he needed. One day a consultant approached him about a time management technique. The executive was naturally skeptical, but he finally agreed to hear the man’s proposal.

The consultant went on his way and the executive tried out the technique. After two weeks the consultant returned and the executive handed him a check for $10,000.

I understand the technique. But, I also understand that eating better and exercising will improve my health.

Today was a good day. I put three items on my list and after six hours of uninterrupted work, 2 of them were done. That was a very good day since those two things have been not on my list, but needing done for weeks.

Tomorrow, I’ll start with one item, add two more and work on it uninterrupted.

At least that’s the plan. I’m pretty sure it will work. It did before.

September 28, 2018

Cops And Vikings

I attended a high school football game Friday night. It was my kids’ high school homecoming game. There were everything you expect at a high school game, bright lights, an expansive green field, high school kids, a band, and of course police officers with M16 machine guns.

Oh, and helicopters including a news chopper over the football game.

There was a threat made against my kids’ high school today. Well, the threat was discovered earlier this week. The date in the threat was today: Homecoming.

The police didn’t rate the threat as credible, but of course, had to take it seriously none-the-less. A kid found one of the programmable calculators in the math lab. Someone had typed a threatening message on the calculator’s display.

Police from all over Utah county converged on Pleasant Grove High School today. K9 units roamed the halls. Counselors were standing by to help anyone that didn’t feel safe.

My kids reported that their classes were mostly empty. The joke was,

Why were my kids there? Did they not care about a potential school schooting. . .even a less than credible threat? Of course they did. But, they also didn’t see a need to live their lives in fear.

A few months ago I wrote a post called “Leading Boy Scouts To Their Death.” I asked the question “Why do we take our children into the wilderness and risk their deaths?”

I think my children went to school today because they learned the lesson from my earlier post. Life isn’t safe. Sure, we take precautions. But, when it comes down to it life isn’t rated “E for Everyone.” It’s dangerous at times. You can choose to deal with the danger or ignore it. Ignoring it either looks like YOLO (You Only Live Once) where you become reckless, or more importantly it becomes a matter of figuring out the risks and then choosing to live your life anyway.

My kids are the second type. So, they went to school. They noted the dogs and the cop cars. They noted the snipers on the roof. They noticed the automatic weapons at the stadium gates. And then they went off with their friends and cheered their team, The Vikings on to a 56-0 victory over Westlake High School.

Life is crazy. It’s messy. It’s hectic and yes, sometimes it’s dangerous. Don’t ignore the danger, but don’t let it immobolize you. You never know what you might miss.

September 27, 2018

A Night In Salt Lake. . .And Seattle

I don’t drink and I don’t party. . .unless you count the occasional birthday parties for kids and grandkids and I live in quiet, even boring Utah county. So, what was I doing in a bar in Salt Lake City at 10:00 pm on a Thursday night?

Well, I was watching the Seattle Mariners but that was happy accident. I was really there for a karaoke contest. I wasn’t in it. But that wouldn’t have bothered me.

I recently spoke in church. It’s a peculiarity of the Mormon church that members of the congregation are asked to deliver the messages each week. The people I attend church with are no more interested in speaking in public than you and your friends are. Most people begin their remarks with some form of “I wish I wasn’t up here.” Instead I said,

And it was true. I have other insecurities, but getting up in front of people isn’t one of them. But, I was there to support my friend Rory.

It’s about a 45 minute drive from my house to Salt Lake City. My radio is broken in my truck. So, my phone was streaming the Mariners broadcast. Yes, I’m that big of a baseball geek. Last week the Ms were eliminated from the playoff picture. They’ll finish with a winning record but, they will be sitting home in October.

They are hosting the Texas Rangers. Texas was out of playoff contention weeks ago. So, why was I listening? Because I couldn’t see the video stream. Seriously. It’s $15 to buy the audio stream for all MLB teams for the year. Getting to watch a game is a rare treat.

The venue, The Green Pig Pub in Salt Lake City is a fairly typical bar. Lots of neon, a beautiful wooden bar, a stage area, lots of tables and plenty of TVs. Every single one was tuned to the Thursday night football game.

I knew exactly one person in the mass of humanity. I said hello and then headed to a quiet corner of the bar to nurse my Coke and wait for the competition to start.

And there I discovered the one TV not tuned to football. It was showing a baseball game between two teams who were out of the playoffs and simply playing out the season.

Yup, I walked into a bar in Salt Lake City and found a live broadcast of my favorite team, the Seattle Mariners.

There’s something about live music that I really enjoy. Karaoke gets a bad rap because many of the singers are . . .bad. Fortunately this was the second round of the competition. The singers were passable to exceptional.

My friend Rory didn’t move on to the next round. . .and the Mariners lost. . .again.

September 26, 2018

The Coal Powered Car And The Green Electric Dryer

Which is more ecologically friendly, a Tesla Model 3 Roadster or an electric dryer?

Did you know the United States CO2 emissions actually have been going down over the past few years? It’s not because we are so great at fighting climate change. No, there’s a much more mercenary reason. Natural gas is cheaper than coal. We’ve been switching our electric grid from coal powered power plants to natural gas powered power plants.

Natural gas (NG) provides more energy (measured in British Thrermal Units or BTU) with less emmissions than either coal or oil. It’s cheaper for energy companies to power our electrical grid. The lower carbon emissions are an added bonus.

Even Climate Skeptics are willing to reduce emissions if it saves money. But, not every change in the name of Climate Change actually reduces our carbon footprint. For example, that $50,000 Tesla not only looks cool, but it’s environmentally friendly, right?

Let’s skip the issues of lithium mining and the long term disposal of lithium batteries. The long term ecological cost of that is uncertain. Let’s just talk about the day to day cost of running your 0-60 in 3.5 second sportscar.

The big deal with Tesla, of course is that it’s an electric car. No smelly gas or diesel liquified dinosaurs for your car. Just pure, clean electricity.

Remember that discussion a little earlier about why the USA CO2 emissions are on the decline? Our electricity comes from a variety of sources.

– 45.50% from Coal
– 23.99% from NG
– 19.30% from Nuclear*
– 6.43% from Hydro*
– 2.10% from Wind*
– 0.95% from Petroleum
– 0.91% from Wood
– 0.42% from Biomass
– 0.37% from Geothermal*
– 0.03% from Solar*
*Renewables

Our electrical grid is only 28.23% renewables. The remaining 71.77% is those nasty dirty fossil fuels. (Okay, Nuclear might not be completely renewable, but it does have zero emissions. And Biomass and wood are not really fossil fuels, but they do burn. And, seriously, wood? Wood produces more energy than solar?)

So, you beautiful shiny new electric car is really being powered mostly by coal. And then some Natural Gas. Kind of gives a different look on the Tesla marketing.

Now, what about my nasty old electric dryer? I have five teenagers at home. Each is responsible for doing their own laundry. That’s a lot of loads of laundry each week. Given the choice, we’ve always had gas dryers. Not only does NG have fewer emissions and cost the electric complanies less, it costs consumers less too.

My current house didn’t come with a gas dryer. It came with a gas dryer. But, now I’m glad. In fact, my electric dryer has suddenly become more ecologically friendly than a gas dryer would be. Two years ago we installed solar panels.

When you install solar panels, you have to decide how many to install. The more panels, the more power you generate. Also, the more expensive it is. We had eight kids at home at the time and designed a solar panel setup that was 85% of our (at the time) current usage. That meant that we generated 85% of our electrical needs from the panels and we bought 15% from the power company.

As the kids grow up and move out, we use less and less energy. We are to the point where we are now producing most of the electricity we use, including all those loads of laundry in our “inefficient” electric dryer. In fact, had we gone with a gas dryer, we would still be producing CO2. Instead, we have turned our dryer into a green, zero emission appliance.

(Well, if we ignore all the related costs of producing solar panels. Nothing is truly free.)

September 25, 2018

Our Scout Troop Mascot Retired This Week

On June 12, 1994 an airplane took off from Boeing field in Seattle and changed the nature of air travel. The very first Boeing 777 took it’s first flight that June morning.

If you lived in Seattle, or the surrounding areas, it was a big deal. People lined the fences at Boeing Field. Kids skipped school. It was like watching a rocket ship taking off. Well, except it was an airplane.

The test flight that day lasted over 3 hours. The pilots put it through it’s paces and took it up to 19,000 feet. The plane passed every test with flying colors. . .white colors mostly, because it was a test. . .

I wasn’t working for Boeing, but I knew a lot of guys who did. The triple-seven, as it was quickly dubbed, was a major leap for Boeing. It had tons of innovative “airplane” things that I don’t remember because I’m not an airplane guy.

What I do remember is that it was the first Boeing plane designed entirely on computer.

I was working at Microsoft and we had our own big project. Windows 95 was just a few months away from shipping. Like the 777 was for Boeing, Windows 95 was viewed as the future of the company. Microsoft was moving away from the boxy look that had been part of Windows for years. Windows 95 was going to be a whole new interface.

One of the bragging points of the 777 was that it had more lines of code than Windows 95. I think they talked about a million lines of code to make the 777.

To those of us at Microsoft, this wasn’t reassuring. We knew how buggy Windows code was. Not that it was any worse than any other piece of software. . .(Okay, maybe that first version was a little worse, but it got better.) The thing is all software has bugs. And Boeing had just told us that they designed the 777 using software.

There’s a joke that was popular at the time called “If Operating Systems were Airlines.” For Windows 95 it says:

Fortunately the Boeing engineers made airplanes that didn’t crash as often as our operating system.

The very first 777 retired this week. It’s going to a museum. Pima Air & Space Museum in Arizona. Twenty-four years is pretty good for a plane. It’s odd to me to be old enough to remember the beginning of things that end after a long time.

The 777 is more than just an interesting story for me. I actually carry it with me on every campout and hike. When the 777 was being readied in Seattle, I lived in Renton, Washington. We needed to form a new boy scout troop. Every boy scout troop has a number associated with it. The troop I work with currently is Troop 832 of Pleasant Grove, Utah. Some of the fathers who would be involved in helping run the troop were also Boeing engineers. And they quickly realized that no troop in the United States had the troop number 777. So, we formed Troop 777 of Renton, Washington.

Around this same time I cut a five foot section from a vine maple tree in my backyard and started making it into a hiking stick. I’ve carried that stick across the country and back, through forests and deserts and up and down mountains. And every step of the way, it’s proudly displayed the number 777.

So, when that airplane made its way to the Arizona desert to become a tourist attraction, a piece of my history and our old troop mascot retired.

The end

September 24, 2018

My Greatest Success. . .So Far

I’ve had some great success in my career. I worked for Microsoft during the glory years when we were top of the world. I worked for WordPerfect in the early years. I single-handedly saved the largest email account from abandoning WordPerfect Office (later renamed Novell GroupWise.) I performed one of the largest Exchange -> GroupWise migrations in the history of those two products. I wrote the most successful Microsoft Exchange training course.

More recently I oversaw the migration of 3000 agents to a cloud-based Voice over IP (VoIP) architecture. I’ve released many products and successfully sheparded project. I have had success, either large or small, in virtually every position I’ve had.

And yet, when I think about what my greatest success was, I have a difficult time picking any of the these. Not because they weren’t accomplishments, but because success was a matter of picking a valid process and seeing it through.

I once had an employee named Jake. Jake was a good employee, but not one of my superstars. And then Jake made a mistake. It was pretty big. He accidently deleted an entire department’s network credentials. And to make it worse, Jake lied about completing the task on time. And then he was gone for two weeks while his team cleaned up the mess.

I was Jake’s manager.

My manager wanted me to fire Jake.

If I’d fired him, no one would have batted an eye.

I opted for a different approach, against my boss’s wishes, but he agreed it was my team to manage and discipline as needed.

I tried to understand why Jake had screwed up so badly. It seemed to me that Jake was overpromising and then underdelivering. I told Jake that for his 90-day Performance Improvement Process he had only three tasks:

– Every Monday by 10:00AM send me a list of project he was working on
– Every Friday by 3:00PM send me a list of projects he worked on
– Don’t allow anyone to interrupt him during the week (Send them to me if needed)

My manager was skeptical. And honestly, so was I. For the first two weeks, Jake didn’t send me the required emails. Finally, on week 3 he seemed to catch the vision and really embrace my suggestion.

An amazing thing happened. Jake started to get tons of stuff done. He also became a lot more comfortable at work. Forty-five days into his 90 day probation, he came to me,

Eventually, the probation period ended and Jake no longer had to send me emails twice a week. But, even years later he commented that he still uses that technique to keep himself focused during the week.

I could have fired Jake and no one would have complained. In fact, I had to fight my manager to get a chance to keep Jake and coach him. And there was no guarantee that my coaching would work. The fact that it did was a credit to Jake. But, when I think of what I’ve accomplished in my career, I often think of the people I’ve been able to influence. And I naturally think of Jake.

At the end of my career, when I have a chance to look back on all the successes, I think I’ll remember Jake long after my recollection of projects and programs has faded.

People really are the most important asset a company has, and the most important asset you, as a manager, will ever influence.

Wherever you are today, I wish you the best, Jake.

September 21, 2018

The Million Dollar T-Shirt

It was a fairly typical scene. Fans clammering for free t-shirts, as booth workers tossed them out as fast as they could pull them out of the stack of boxes.

We were at Safeco Field in Seattle, Washington. The home of the Seattle Mariners. But, we weren’t there for a baseball game. In fact, the number of people in the stadium that day was well below the 47,943 capacity. It was closer to 6,000.

I was there for a Microsoft company meeting. Microsoft held company meetings once per year. It was a a full day event. We had speakers and new product demos, as well as plenty of food and occasional alcoholic beverages. We also had plenty of SWAG handed out.

The t-shirts were pretty simple. They were white with a stylized American flag with computer monitors in the field of stars. Microsoft was locked into a battle with the Justice department.

The year was 1999. Microsoft was the big dog of the technology world. Google was still not even the biggest search engine, let alone the biggest IT company.

I was a technology guy, not really a business guy and certainly not a legal guy. Microsoft hadn’t really lost a battle in their history. They had knocked off the biggest companies in the history of IT. They beat IBM, although they didn’t kill it. They beat Novell, the leading network company. They beat WordPerfect, the leading word processor software company. They beat Borland, a leading programming language company. They beat Apple and then gave them $100M to not die. Microsoft was riding a pretty big winning streak.

And that made them arrogant. Steve Ballmer famously said, “We could put a ham sandwich in Windows if we wanted to.”

Eventually, Microsoft would lose to the Justice department. And eventually they would lose to Google and ultimately Apple.

But, in 1999, we were on top of the world. We were kings of the IT world. The Microsoft stock price was making many of us millionaries. And yet, we were still just a bunch of IT geeks clamoring for a free t-shirt.

September 20, 2018

My Greatest Mistake (At Least That I Remember)

It was a casual conversation. Back before I knew that there are no casaul conversations in business. We were reorganizing our teams. I would no longer be manager of my team. A team that had been disfunctional when I inherited it, that was now among the top performing teams in the unit.

I was talking with my coworker, one of the other senior managers and I mentioned that I had shared with my team the fact that I would no longer be their manager.

The problem was the announcement hadn’t been shared with the rest of the unit yet. I knew my team would not talk to anyone. I was right. But, I was also wrong.

It was a mistake to tell them. I had the best of intentions, but the responsibility of leadership is sometimes lonely. I also put my coworker into a tough spot: either report me, or “go along to get along.”

I’d like to say I was young, but I was old enough to know better. Like I said, it was a mistake. It cost me a promotion and moved me off the career track. I deserved it. The consequences, I mean.

But, a mistake can be a learning opportunity too. In fact, if you don’t learn from it, you are likely to continuing making the same mistakes over and over.

I had a conversation recently with my counterpart at our client. Our client has multiple suppliers, of which we are one. Likewise we have multiple clients. Mine is one, of course. During my conversation the question came up about other clients we might have with a similar infrastructure.

I didn’t think back to the casaul conversation I had so many years ago. I didn’t need to. The lessons I’d learned over a lifetime of business came easily.

It’s a lesson I wish I would have learned much earlier in my career.

September 19, 2018

But Are There Any Jewish Pirates?

My friend announced that he was not eating or drinking today. I didn’t think much of it. Maybe a medical test coming up?

My religious ignorance normally isn’t this bad. Today, September 19 was Yom Kippur. I guess it started yesterday on the 18th and finishes up today. It’s the holiest day of the year in Judaism, also known as the Day of Atonement.

I admire my friend (whom I didn’t know was Jewish) for his devotion to his faith. I’m not sure of the proper salutation for Yom Kippur, if there even is one. But, whatever the proper greetings, I hope all my Jewish friends had a meaningful Yom Kippur.

I didn’t know today was one of the most holy days in Judaism, but I did know the slightly more irreverant holiday associated with September 19. It’s International Talk Like a Pirate Day. (It’s a thing, you can look it up.)

It was started by a couple of guys who came up with the idea on June 6, 1995. They realized that there was no way they could make June 6th (the anniversary of D-day) somethings so irrelevant. They picked September 19 because it was co-founder Mark Summers’ ex-wife’s birthday.

So, whether you were fasting today, or whether you greeted your confused office mates with “Ahoy, m’hardies!” happy September 19th.

September 18, 2018

I Cursed My Favorite Team

Today is September 18. There are 12 days left in the Major League Baseeball Season. The Mariners, my favorite team, have 11 games left. They don’t play on the 20th, but other than that, they play every day for the rest of the season.

There’s a saying that unless you are thhe champion, your season ends with a loss. I’m not sure who says it, but I’ve heard it said.

It’s not true.

In fact, the Mariners will have a winning season this year. A Major League Baseball season has 162 games. (Yes, it’s as long as you always felt it was.) The Mariners have 83 wins and 68 losses. If they lose the rest of their games, the worst they will finish is 83 – 79. More likely they will finish somewhere around 89 – 73. They might even win their final game on September 30 against the Texas Rangers. But, unless something drastic happens, they will miss the playoffs.

They are currently seven and a half games out of the second Wildcard spot. And Tampa Bay is a game and a half in front of them.

It’s tempting to say that the Mariners season is a disappointment. After all, it’s been 17 years since the last time the Seattle Mariners made it to the playoffs. And they have never been to the World Series. The odds of them making it this year are not looking good.

The Mariners last went to the playoffs in 2001. That was the same year they set a record by winning 116 games. I was living in Seattle at the time. I told my friends that I would rather the Mariners set the single season wins record than win the World Series. My reasoning was that the single season wins record lasts for decades, the World Series champion changes every year.

I’m afraid I may have jinxed them. I’m sorry.

So, 2018 will be another fruitless season, but I’m not disappointed. I’ve listened to nearly every game. I’ve had a chance to watch a few of them online. The reason I’m not disappointed, is that we are less than two weeks away from the end of the season and the Mariners games still matter. While they odds are long, the fact is that the Mariners are playing meaningful games in September. That doesn’t happen every year.

So, I’ve felt guilty for 17 years about cursing my team, I am excited to still be caring about baseball games at the end of the season.

The end

Rodney M Bliss

Relearning Old Lessons

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Cops And Vikings

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A Night In Salt Lake. . .And Seattle

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The Coal Powered Car And The Green Electric Dryer

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Our Scout Troop Mascot Retired This Week

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My Greatest Success. . .So Far

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The Million Dollar T-Shirt

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My Greatest Mistake (At Least That I Remember)

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But Are There Any Jewish Pirates?

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I Cursed My Favorite Team

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