May you live in interesting times.
– Chinese proverb
Actually, it’s probably not really Chinese. At least the sites online that try to source quotes cannot tie it to any Chinese literature. But, it sounds true and that’s good enough most times. It’s also not a blessing. It is widely considered to an ironic curse.
I live in interesting times. Sometimes they are of my own creation. I chose to have a large family. I chose to adopt 10 children from all over the world. (Including China.) I chose to work for Microsoft for nearly 10 years at one point. I chose to move my family across the country on nothing more than a handshake agreement that turned sour. I choose to live in a state that regularly gets snow and ice in the winter. (And never cancelling anything because of snow.)
Many of my interesting times are a result of my own choices. I fully accept and to a large extend expected those times.
It’s the unexpected interesting times that are the hardest to deal with. I never thought I would spend as much time in junivile court as I do. And, sadly, I attend so often, it’s become routine. And then they aren’t. My children remind me that their lives are different than that of their friends. In fairness, I told my parents the same thing. I was right and so are my kids.
As an adult, I can point directly to events in my childhood, traumatic at the time, that not only make me the man I am today, but provide me with tools I wouldn’t have otherwise had. My interesting times not only defined me, they helped me.
That which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger
Right? We’ve all heard this. And yet, it’s not true, of course. Ask a victim of sexual assault. They become broken. Sometimes they never recover. Sometimes it takes years. Those around a victim of sexual assault, especially when it’s a child involed, become secondary victims. They would not describe themselves as stronger.
You might be tempted to say, “But, your strength of character, ability to overcome hardships, etc. . .” Unless you’ve been through it, you cannot possibly know. Sure, we see some survivors who seem to flourish. While the assault was horrible, they emerge stronger. A strength born of unspeakable pain and suffering. I do not doubt those people for a moment. They did get stronger.
Not everyone is like that. For some people, victims and family, it’s like a cancer that, while treatable is incurable. It’s always there, sapping emotional strength, sowing distrust in all future relationships. Physical wounds heal. Emotional wounds remain forever. They may scar over, but they shape the future in a way that cannot be avoided.
You have a choice, but really you have no choice. The choice is to deal with it, accept that your life is changed forever and move on, or not. But, “not” isn’t really an option.
To victims of assult, physcial, sexual, emotional, I pray for your strength to go.
Please pray for me.
NOTE: This post should NOT be interpreted to mean that any NEW events have happened to me and mine. Just acknowledging that the road goes on forever and sometimes you just want to stop and rest a few minutes.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Bad money drives out good
It’s called Gresham’s law. It says that if you have two classes of money, one “good” and one “bad” and both are legal tender, the “good” money will disappear from circulation. We saw this in the United States in 1965 when the US Mint reduced the amount of silver in coins from 90% to 40%. If you were going to pay for something, and you had a silver quarter and you had a quarter with that copper line on the edge indicating it has less silver, which one do you use? Of course, you use the one with less copper. Technically both were worth the same amount.
Gresham’s law is why counterfieters are pursued so aggressively. If counterfeit money was allowed to get any sort of quasi-legal foothold, it would quickly drive valid money out of circulation.
You know, kind of what debit cards have done, but for different reasons. (For the record, I like cash, but that’s only because I’ve known too many computer programs.)
So, what’s this have to do with my weekend? This weekend, two of my boys and I attended a Star Trek Attack Wing tournament. The game is really fun. You play on a desktop using miniture models of the ships from the Star Trek universe. So, you are playing as either the Federation, the Klingons, the Romulans, the Vulcans, the Ferengi. . .(There’s a lot of races and ships.) And what is the games biggest strength is also its weakness.
I just recently started playing this game. My brother gave us some ships for Christmas and my boys and I really enjoy it. And honestly, I like the fact that it gets my boys to engage with me. When I looked for a game store that hosted games, I realized that Star Trek Attack Wing is losing popularity. It’s being replaced by X-Wing, a similar game set in the Star Wars universe.
When you attend a tournament, you configure your own set of ships from the ones you own. While my brother has been very generous in sharing dozens of models with us, the cost of the game is not insignificant. Each ship costs $15. It’s not unheard of for someone to own dozens or even hundreds of ships. Each ship package comes with captain, crew, weapons, and technical upgrades. As a player, you are free to mix and match these cards to build the most powerful fleet possible.
And that is the problem. And it’s also a version of Gersham’s law. Certain cards, of course, are more powerful than others. A Captain with a skill of 9 is more valuable than a captain with a skill of 4. In fact, unless he had some unique skills, you would never use the lower captain if you owned the more powerful one.
As Star Trek Attack Wing became popular, it started to seperate itself into two types of players; brand new players who are just starting and have a few ships, and experienced players with dozens of ships. And the problem is that the beginning player has no chance against the experienced player. It’s not a matter of skill, it’s the fact that the experienced player owns hundreds of cards from which to build his fleet. The novice has a limited group to choose from and is going to lose.
There are certain cards that are the ultimate cards. For example, there is a card for Captain Kahn, from the original Star Trek series. This card has a special ability that allows Kahn to match the highest captain skill on the board. People who own Kahn always play him. Like Tom Brady, he’s too good to leave on the bench.
Kahn is a limited resource. New players don’t have access to him. Well, you can go online and buy the card for $125 on eBay. And so, the longer Star Trek Attack Wing continues, the worse the problem gets. As more cards enter circulation, the great cards will become part of the experienced players’ fleets. The strong will keep getting stronger.
In the mean time, I’ll continue to enjoy playing with my boys, but it was a little disappointing to realize that it will become harder and harder to find tournaments to play in.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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The email wasn’t unexpected:
Your Project Manager Professional (PMP) certification will expire in 3 days. Click here to renew.
The certification is good for three years. I took the test three years ago. It was the hardest test I’d ever taken. I think that certification was the the difference maker in me getting the job I have now. The certification is very valuable and I certainly want to keep it.
So why was I nervous about recertifying? There’s no test involved. PMP is all about projects. You have to accrue 60 PDUs, or Professional Development Units. You can get them for anything. If you attend a luncheon sponsered by a technical group, you get a half PDU. Work as a project manager for a year and you get five PDUs. Attend a class related to project management and you get 1 PDU for every course hour. Heck, even reading a book related to project management gets you PDUs. You have to accumulate 60 and record them on PMI’s website to be eligible to renew.
Why was I nervous?
I had recorded zero. Oh, I’d done the work. I’ve been a full time project manager for years. I occasionally write about project management. I read lots of business books. I’ve even taken some technical classes. Actually, quite a few technical classes over the past three years. But, would it be enough?
PMI, the organization that sponsers PMP and related certifications, allows self reporting. If there is a question about your self reporting, they will flag it for follow up. I wasn’t sure my experience was going to be good enough.
I needn’t have worried.
I finally logged in and started filling out a form reporting my PDUs. And almost immediately I started getting confirmation and approval emails. Eventually, I listed 60 PDUs worth of activities. I immediately got an email congratulating me on being eligible to renew.
I didn’t understand. There is no doubt that I’ve done the work, study, writing and other activities to easily show 60 PDUs, but they didn’t flag anything? That seemed almost too good to be true. And when I got to the last page of the application form, I understood why.
Several years ago, I got an offer in the mail to become part of a “Bliss Families in America” book. I could send the author my name and the names of my kids and parents and he would put them into a book that was designed to include as many Bliss family names as possible. I wasn’t worried about identity theft. Other than names, there was not much personally identifiable information.
I talked to my dad about it. (Obviously, he is also part of the “Bliss Family in America.”
I don’t get it Rodney.
What do you mean?
I mean, why is this guying doing this. Think. What’s in it for him?
Honestly, I hadn’t thought what was in it for him. But, my dad was right. An idea, especially a business idea needs to make sense financially. A couple months later, it suddenly made sense. I got a letter in the mail asking if I wanted to buy a copy of “Bliss Family in America.” It went on to explain how excited my kids would be to see their names in print as part of the larger Bliss family. It was only $24.99 and discounts were available if I wanted to buy one for each of my children.
I don’t begrudge the author. I don’t even feel tricked. It’s common today to see targeted ads on Facebook. Unles you are a relative of mine, you probably don’t get ads for sweatshirts that say, “It’s a BLISS thing. You wouldn’t understand.” Yours say “It’s a DOUGHERTY…” or SMITH or JONES. The point is that they are trying to sell you something around your name.
Most importantly, I now felt better about that original offer to add my name to the “Bliss Family in America” book. Because it now made sense.
As I reached the last page of the PMP renewal form, it also made sense. It costs $150 to renew a PMP certification for three years. PMI wants to make sure that people aren’t abusing the credential, of course. But, I had to prove that I was a professional PM to get the cert in the first place. And then I had to pass a rigorous 4 hour test to show competency. PMI is pretty sure that I have a grounding in project management. At this point, they are less interested in digging into my PDU history than they are in making sure I remain a dues paying member.
I’m okay with that. And like the family book project, now that I understand the process, I’m okay with them giving my PDU requests an automated stamp of approval. I just wish I’d know this was a test I’d passed before I started. I wouldn’t have spent nearly as much time agonizing over it.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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It was billed as a romantic comedy. And back in 1998 it was. That’s because we had no idea that it was poisoning our entire society. In “You’ve Got Mail,” Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan play characters whose online life eventually conflicts with real life with funny and eventually romantic results. The premise is based around the fact that they meet online and only know each other by their screen names: NY152 and Shopgirl. At the time it was a clever premise. Not the least reason being because they are both involved with literature and yet neither one has a problem with the villain constantly berating them with the grammatically incorrect phrase “You’ve got mail.”
Yes, America Online, the ubiquitous email and ISP from the late nineties is the villain in this story. At least with the benefit of nearly 20 years hindsight it is clear that email is the enemy.
I say they met online, but really, they just met over email. In fact, back in 1998 the “online” experience was limited tobulletin board systems (BBS), kind of an early version of Facebook without the funny cat videos and email.
I was working for Microsoft in the late 1990s on their email projects. First with Microsoft Mail and then the early versions of Exchange and Outlook. I remember trying to convince my mother to install Exchange for her small CPA office.
We don’t need email. We have plenty of those pink “While you were out” message pads.
I made her a promise.
Let me install email and if after one month your staff doesn’t like it, I’ll take it out.
A month later I went to see my mother.
So, how did the email trial go? Still want me to take it out?
My staff said if I let you remove it they’d all quit.
Back in the 1990s email was cool. It was the Snapchat, Facebook and Texting of its day.
Now?
Now, it’s the bain of my existence. It goes in the category of trips to the dentist and meeting with your CPA: necessary tasks that you would eliminate if you could.
I helped Microsoft implement the MESSAGE RECALL feature. I previously worked for WordPerfect, whose misnamed product “WordPerfect Office” was an email server that provided for seemless message recall. We often called it the “Save your job” feature. After I switched to Microsoft I had the toughest time getting the program managers to see the value of it.
Who would even want this? I mean, if you think about it, when you drop a letter into a blue Post Office mailbox, you can’t just reach your hand in and pull it back.
Yes! That’s the point. That’s why you should add it. It makes email work better than snail mail.
Eventually, I convinced them. Or the marketplace did. Now, if you recall a message that you’ve sent to someone on your company email, it will either tell you it can’t recall it, because they’ve opened it. Or, it will silently delete it out of the other person’s mailbox.
However, if you try to recall a message that you sent to someone at another company, your recall attempt posts a message to their email saying:
Rodney would like to recall the message titled: “Review This Before Sending To Client”
It used to be that when you got a Message Recall notification it made you just a little curious. (Or a lot curious) about what was in the original message. Even if all it said was “Cookies by the printer.” You still wanted to knwo what was so secret that you weren’t supposed to see.
At some point that excited faded. I get 75-100 emails per day in addition to the automated reports that get shunted to a folder for review. My goal, like many knowledge workers is not to empty my inbox. We’ve long ago given up on that prospect. Instead we try to manage it. To keep the number of unread messages below 100. So, when a “Reggie would like to recall this message” shows up, I’m excited. Not to read it. I’m excited that I can delete two more messages without reading them. (101 unread down to 99! For the win!)
It’s kind of sad to watch Tom Hanks, and to a lesser extent Meg Ryan, get sucked into their email. I want to yell at the screen,
Don’t do it! It’s a trap! Run away!
And if you’ve seen the movie, you know that it’s not until they break the chains to their inbox and stop their auditory addiction to “You’ve got mail” that they actually start living and falling in love.
Because of his devotion to email, I think Hanks’ character was an idiot. How do I know?
Takes one to know one.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I’m not sure when it happened. I guess I need to be okay with it, whether I choose to or not. She was never a baby. She came to us as a toddler, about 4 years old from an island in the Carribean. She came with brothers and a sister. From the time she arrived she has been universally cheerful and happy. She’s not happy every hour of every day, of course, but she’s skipped most of the morose, or petulant teenager stages. There’s still time for it to show up, I guess. But not much.
My daughter turns 16 today. Every daughter is precious and every dad goes through the “What happened to my baby girl?” phase, I think. We want the best for our kids. We want them to have it better than we did. We want them to avoid the mistakes that we made. We want to protect them from hurt and harm.
And yet, we want them to be strong. To be strong, you must challenge yourself. If you stretch yourself, you risk failure. By failure comes growth. We want them to be kind. To be kind, you must have empathy. To get empathy, or the ability to feel what someone else is feeling, you must have suffered anquish. We want them to be smart. To be smart, you must study and in studying you will at times become frustrated at trying to learn new things.
I want what is best for my kids, as I’m sure you do. There’s a challenge, as I see them not quite done with childhood, but not quite ready for adulthood. The challenge is to let them grow. Let them learn. And yes, let them fail, without letting them crash.
My children are the source of my greatest sorrow and my greatest joy.
Today, I’ll watch her excitement at the things that come with coming of age; driving, boys, thoughts of college. I’ll step back and continue letting go so that she can step forward and fly.
Even if I want to hold on tight for just a little bit longer.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
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LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Rodney, are you in your office?
Yeah.
Where? I don’t see you.
Office? What office? Do you have an office? If you are like most IT workers you have a desk and a phone and three cubicle walls that do nothing to block the sound of your coworkers. But, we still call it an office. We talk about our “office phone” as opposed to our cell phone. We tell people when we’ll be “out of the office.” We engage in “office gossip,” or “office politics.”
I have three offices, and yet only one of them qualifies. I recently wrote about my tiny (I mean, doll-house size) home office. In addition I have two cubicles that qualify as my “work office.” They are pretty much interchangable. I have a desk phone, a docking station for my laptop and two monitors. Their location is different, of course. One is in our executive office building. That’s where my manager and the other members of my direct team are located. My second “office” is in our production building where my agents and most of my virtual team is located.
I recently read an article decrying the evils of the “open office. (Washington Post article here.)
It got me thinking about how I work and when I’m effective. I have severe ADHD. I didn’t realize it until I was an adult. (High school makes so much more sense now.) My office location has a direct impact on my effectiveness. At one point, we did a reshuffle and my cubicle ended up in the middle of the cube-farm. I was directly under the ceiling mounted TV and in one of the main shipping lanes for trips to the printer or the manager offices. It didn’t work. It’s my own fault. But, even with noise cancelling headphones and blinders, there were just too many distractions.
I moved to a cubicle in a corner, far away from the TV and out of all shipping lanes. The difference was like night and day. You would think that would mean that working from home is equally effective. Yeah, you’d think that. I work from home on Tuesdays. But, I also have 7 high school kids living at home. My lovely wife manages the schedule for most of them. But, it seems every day there’s at least one of them at home. Ah well, they’ll be gone soon enough and I can always shut my door.
Cube-farms don’t have that option, sadly.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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That title, “When Good Men Do Nothing” is misleading. I fear in this story I wasn’t one of the good men. I was a scared little boy, more interested in winning the praise of someone I admired then sticking up for someone I should have defended.
We are all the hero of our own story
We play the scenes out in our minds. The damsel in distress? We ride in as the rescuer. The plucky group of soldiers surrounded and outnumbered? We unhesitantly step up to volunteer to sacrifice for the team. Hollywood, of course, gives us plenty of opportunity to indulge in this self-delusion.
Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant – We who are about to die, salute you!
– Gladiator –
True courage is harder to come by. I don’t know how I would react if I were on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001 and only got to choose the method of my death, not the timing of it. Would I be with those who calmly declared “Let’s roll” as they went to sacrifice themselves? I hope so. In my private daydream moments, I’m always that guy.
I was a sophomore trombone player in our high school band. Band class was for all ages. Gerald* (Name has been changed) was a junior and he was cool. I mean really awesome. He was great at basketball. He was first chair in the trombone section. And he wanted to be my friend. I was pretty excited. Gerald and I attended the same church. So, I had known him quite a while. That he wanted to be friends with a geeky underclassman meant a lot to me. Much more than it should have.
The problem was that Gerald was a jerk. Sure, in high school we were all jerks at one time or another, but Gerald took it to a different level. And he was a bully. And the subject of his bullying was Chris. Chris was also a sophomore, although we weren’t part of the same group of friends. Honestly, I don’t know if Chris had a group of friends.
Chris suffered terrible teenage acne. He wore large hornrimmed glasses. And he played clarinet in our band class. Gerald took it upon himself to make Chris’ life hell. But, Gerald was smart enough to not attack Chris directly. His taunts and insults were more subtle than that.
First he gave Chris the nickname “Woody.” Sure, because clarinet is a woodwind instrument, right? No one believed that for a second. But it gave Gerald cover. The clarinets sat on the opposite side of the horseshoe shaped band room from the trombones. Chris had no choice, but to see and be seen by Gerald for the entire period. I don’t know why, but Gerald would put his hand into a weird #1 symbol and while jabbing it into the air look at Chris and say, “Hey, hey!”
He never crossed the line into doing anything actionable. Gerald was a master at the put-down. Chris, to his credit did his best to deal with it. He never got mad. He’d laugh along with Gerald and the rest of us. I’m sure he was silently hoping that if he just went along with it, Gerald would lose interest. He didn’t.
Daily, Gerald did everything he could make Chris’ life miserable. Chris, smaller, awkward and with limited social skills, had no choice but to take it.
Yeah, Gerald was a jerk.
I was worse.
See, every day as Gerald set out to make Chris’ experience horrible, I sat right next to him. . . silent. I didn’t want Chris to be picked on. While we weren’t friends, I certainly bore him no ill-will. But, I struggled with two conflicting fears. First was that Gerald would no longer be my friend. But, worse, I feared that if I spoke up, he might turn his poison darts on me. So, I said nothing. I felt sorry for Chris. I should have felt sorry for me.
I thought about Chris the other day. I’m ashamed to say that I couldn’t even recall his name. I just remembered him as Woody, a name I’m sure he absolutely hated hearing. I dug through my old yearbooks and picked him out of the band pictures.
He left Timberline High School in Lacey, Washington sometime between his sophomore and senior years(1980-1983). I didn’t even notice. Gerald also left during his senior year to attend a different high school in the district.
I wonder what happened to Chris. I hope that he went off to college, got married, had kids and never had to endure that level of ridicule again. And if he ever does have to endure it again, I hope he is surrounded by braver men than I was.
If anyone has contact information for Chris Battle who lived in Lacey, WA in the early 1980s and attended Timberline High School, I’d love to hear from him. I’d like to say I’m sorry that by my silence I contributed to his torment.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
– Edmund Burke
I now try to be a better man than I was.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Small doesn’t begin to describe it. My office is tiny. It’s almost cliche to talk about small offices. When we moved into our house, we had some work done. The contractors finished the basement and they built a pantry in the kitchen. The pantry is 32 square feet. It’s 16 feet long and two feet wide. (We had 8 kids at home, the pantry is just barely big enough.)
We also had the contractor build a small office for me in the basement. Most of the space went to kids’ bedrooms. We have eight kids and nine bedrooms. Most of the basement was devoted to bedrooms and a small family room. But, we decided that we could spare a small amount of space for an office. At 4×7 or 28 square feet, it’s smaller than our pantry. Although, fortunately it’s better proportioned.
Several things happen when you have a small office. Wall space is at a premium. I have kids art, a few pieces that my friend a professional cartoonist did, and clocks. The walls are floor to ceiling covered. But, more importantly, if your office is small, you have to very carefully choose your office furniture.
I have a rolltop desk that I love. It’s too big to go through the office door. My lovely wife just bought me an office chair. There’s not enough room between the desk and the wall to fit a chair in. And yet, my office has a rolltop desk with a new office chair.
A professor presented a class with a mason jar. Into the mason jar he dumped several large rocks.
Is the jar full?
The class agreed that it was. The professor then dumped in sand that filled the spaces between the rocks.
Is the jar full now?
The class was a little more hesitent in their answer. Next, the professor poured water into the jar, filling it to the rim.
What is the lesson we learn from this?
You can always cram more into your busy schedule?
No, but good guess. The trick is to put the large things in first.
His point was to not fill our lives with so many trivialities that we don’t have room for the big things. What are the big things in your life?
I took time off from work the last two days to deal with a family member who was in a car accident. He’s fine, but he is one of the “big things.” Were there work tasks that I could have spent that time doing? Sure. And now I have to play catch-up. I use the “20 year rule” to decide the big things. When presented with a choice, I think, “Will it matter 20 years from now?”
If my child had been seriously hurt would I care 20 years from now if I took time off to be with him? I’m pretty sure I would care. Will the tasks from yesterday be important to me 20 years from now? Of course not. The choice was easy.
Put the big things in first.
So, how did I manage to get an oversized rolltop desk into my office?
The rolltop desk breaks down into pieces. Each piece is small enough to fit through the door. I then assembled it in my office. I did the same thing yesterday when I put the desk chair in. I literally had to assemble it in place. To get it out, I will most likely have to disassemble either the desk or the chair.
Put the big things in first.
One of the world’s smallest offices.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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It’s beautiful isn’t it? Not a cloud in the sky. It seems like you can see forever.
It’s a lie. It’s an illusion. But, it’s an illusion that we’ve been so programmed to accept that right now you’re wondering what kind of click-bait this article is turning out to be.
I live in Utah, on the side of a mountain. (We call em “moun’ins” here but that’s not really important to the story.) I didn’t buy my house for the view. I bought my house because it’s 4000 square feet and has 9 bedrooms. (With eight kids at home, that was more than a coincidence.) However, my house has an awesome view. Looking West, I can see my small town of Pleasant Grove laid out before me. Five miles away is Utah Lake, the largest non-dam controlled freshwater lake in the Western United States. On the other side of the lake are the Oquirrh Mountains. (Pronounced OAK-er moun’ins, if you’re reading this out-loud.) And the town of Eagle Mountain at their base.
The view changes day to day. And month to month. The above picture is from last summer. This month has been really snowy. At times, I can’t see passed the end of my street. Sometimes the inversion kicks in and the valley lies under a greyish-brown blanket of smog. Other times, especially after a storm, the air is clear and I can see for miles and miles.
So, why say that it’s an illusion?
In my job I work with a lot of numbers.
I’ve lost 134 times.
You count them?
This is baseball. We count everything.
“For Love Of The Game”
I don’t work in baseball, but we count almost as much as they do. Personally, I have to keep track of how available our computer systems are. If a program fails, I not only have to work with the team that will fix it, I have to work with the team that tracks how much it impacted our agents. There are several variables:
- Start time
- End time
- Total staffed agents
- Total impacted agents
- What lines of business the impacted agents staffed
- What percentage of the impacted agents job was affected
And we track all of that in 30 minute intervals. And I have four sites that I track. That’s a lot of data points.
I get a report everyday that shows me how much time we lost the previous day. Most days it says 0. (Our systems stay up about 99.95% of the time.) But, if there is an outage, I see the daily updates. Then, the dailies roll into a monthly. I have to calculate the average availability of each line of business for the month. We have penalties based on how many minutes we lost.
The amount of data that goes into my report is staggering. And since I am doing rollups of data, my report is by its very definition not comprehensive.
Rodney, I noticed on your report that our 1117 line of business was at 99.8% available for last month. Can you explain where we lost minutes?
Sure, I can, but not from the report I sent. the 1117 line of business involves agents in four different states and the 99.8% was for 31 days. I have to go dig to find that data.
However, if I were to send my raw data instead of the report, whould that be better? It would have all the information that someone might possibly need. Would that be more clear? Of course not. My report is actually very clear, including only a few rows and columns with a color coded results column showing what penalty we incurred, if any.
In my report, I got clarity by obscuring data.
Let’s go back to the view from my front porch. The reason the sky is blue, is because moisture in the air causes the light from the sun to refract. The blue light is scattered more than the red light. But, think about that. The molecules in the air scatter light. They are actually obscuring our view. They just are doing it with only a small amount of water. We don’t see clearly, we see less obscured.
When we get clouds, we get more obsuring, of course. Fog? Even more. But, because we have an atmosphere and because we have water, even the clearest day is actually obscuring our view. What would happen if our view wasn’t obscured? We’d get a view like the astronaughts got on the moon. They could see the sun and the stars at the same time.
But, like my end-of-month report, the obscuring we get from the sky is important and helpful. It screens out the stars, but it diffusses the light so that we can see things in shadow and under tables and things.
The next time you stand on a mountain top (and you should really set a goal to stand on a moun’in top at least once before you die) and you gaze across the valley, appreciate what a beautifully obscured view you have, even if you can see the horizon.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
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or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I spent a year battling a briar patch. Or, as we call them in Washington, a blackberry bush. The thorn protected vines grow voraciously and take over everything. Killing them is nearly impossible. Where I grew up, NO ONE plants them on purpose.
I was surprised when I moved to Utah to see them sold in nurseries. It astounded me that people would pay for a weed.
I have an office plant. In parts of the world, it’s considered a weed. It’s a bamboo plant. If you plant bamboo in your garden, it will quickly take over everything. You eventually have to fight it back. That’s the thing about weeds. They grow everywhere.
Except it didn’t. I adopted this bamboo plant from my wife. One of the kids gave it to her as a gift. Bamboo grows in water. We kept the small pot filled with water but the plant struggled. The leaves would yellow. Nothing seemed to work.
My coworker has a bamboo plant on his desk. It’s gorgeous. It’s large, and lush. I asked him if he’d maybe try to nurse my sickly bamboo plant back to life. Whatever I was doing wasn’t working.
My friend decided that the plant might have become root-bound. One of his first steps was to repot the plant. And that’s when he discovered the problem. The roots were root-bound, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the roots were bound in a plastic bag. I never noticed because they were buried under the rocks and typically under water. Whenever the bowl started to get dry, the water level dropped below the level of the top of the bag. The bamboo, a plant from the tropics ended up in a desert.
My friend freed the roots and the plant is finally starting to respond. Perhaps they should update the warnings on plastic bags to warn they can suffocate bamboo as well.
The end
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
Follow him on
Twitter (@rodneymbliss)
Facebook (www.facebook.com/rbliss)
LinkedIn (www.LinkedIn.com/in/rbliss)
or email him at rbliss at msn dot com(c) 2017 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
