He was the greatest Designated Hitter in the history of the game of baseball. Everyone agreed. So, why wasn’t he in the Hall of Fame? Because, the voters decided he couldn’t play well enough to be in Cooperstown.
A major league baseball team has 25 players during the regular season. In September, during the last month of the season, the rosters are expanded to 45 as teams call up players from their AAA teams to see who will get an invite to spring training. But, for the majority of the year, there are 25 players.
And while they all play baseball, they don’t all play it the same way. Most teams will divide up their team this way.
- 5 starting pitchers
- 5-6 relief pitchers
- 1 Closer
- 2 catchers
- 4 starting infielders
- 2-3 backup infielders
- 3 starting outfielders
- 2 backup outfielders
- 1 Designated Hitter (American League only)
You’ve probably played baseball, or at least softball. True, the pitcher had to have some specialized skill. The rest of the positions on your softball team may have been interchangable. Maybe you put the big slow guy at 1st base. You put the worst player in right field, because softball doesn’t really have left-handed batters who pull. But, you probably just put people in a position without thinking about it much.
On a professional baseball team, there is very little overlap between roles. Take the relief pitchers, for example. The five or six pitchers are going to have very specialized roles. You’ll typically have a mix of left and right handed throwers. You need a long reliever, who can eat up a lot of innings if your starter gets in trouble. You have a setup man. The guy who comes in the eighth inning to get three outs and turn it over to the closer. The closer is expected to pitch the 9th inning.
If you’ve ever seen a game where the closer blew the save and let the game get tied in the ninth, the manager doesn’t leave him in there long. Why? How is it that a starting pitcher can go 120 pitches, but a closer will get pulled after 30?
Because while the roles look similar to you and me, they are very different.
A project team has very specific roles. And just as a baseball team can’t mix and match their players, you shouldn’t do that on your project team. Here are some of the roles needed on a project team.
- Engineers
- Testers
- Writers
- Product Managers
- Trainers
- And of course, the Project Manager
Every project is squeezed for resources. It might be tempting to skimp a little on the roles. We must have the engineers, but can’t an engineer also test code? Shouldn’t the guy who wrote it be able to teach it? Can we combine writer/trainer? Product and Project managers sound sort of the same. Can’t we combine them?
The answer to all of these questions is no. Well, I guess you could, but it would hamstring your project. When engineers test their own code, they tend to miss things because “it’s obvious.” Writers are introverts. Trainers are extroverts. Asking one to be the other is a fruitless. And Product Managers are concerned with selling your project to the customers or stakeholders. The Project Manager is the guy who owns the schedule. He’s the one that has to make hard choices when it’s time to cut features. He’s also the one that gets to tell management that the project is going to be late. That’s not a job the Product Manager wants.
The point is that as a project manager you need to identify the resources you need on your team, and then build to that design. Sometimes you are forced to build a team out of the resources you are given, rather than the ones you choose. Okay, that’s most times. But, you can still identify the roles you need.
The player I mentioned at the beginning? Edgar Martinez.
(Photo credit: Seattle Mariners)
In a 14 year career, all with the Seattle Mariners, he compiled a .312 batting average with an impressive 514 doubles. He is on the Hall of Fame ballot, but hasn’t earned near the 75% of ballots needed to get into the Hall. Edgar had a big strike against him. He spent most of his career as a designated hitter. He rarely played the field in his later years. HoF voters seem to feel that he needed to be more balanced. Never mind the fact that American League pitchers don’t bat at all, and they get elected to the Hall.
The point is that roles are important; in basebal and in business.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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There are two ways to throw a curveball for a strike. First, you can start the pitch outside the strikezone and let it break through the strikezone after the batter has given up on it. Any ball that passes over a portion of home plate that is also between the batters shoulders and knees, is a strike. Home plate is 17″ wide. A curveball can break 15″ from when it leaves the pitcher’s hand to when it reaches the catcher’s mitt. A changeup that is clearly WELL out of the strike zone, suddenly cuts in and catches a corner of the plate. The batter often simply stands there with the bat on his shoulder looking slightly foolish.
To look truly foolish, the batter needs to face the second type of curveball for a strike. That’s when the pitcher throws the curveball for what looks like a strike and then at the last minute it breaks sharply away and the batter swings hard enough to screw himself into the ground. However, if the ball doesn’t break; if the pitcher got the mechanics slightly wrong, you are left with what’s called a hanging curveball. The batter is going to hit that ball a long, long way.
A friend and I were discussing baseball movies. I told him that I hate when a baseball movie gets the baseball part wrong. I’m not a jerk about it. I’m willing to overlook Dennis Quaid using a radar sign designed for cars to test his fastball. I’ll even forgive Field of Dreams for turning Joe Jackson into a right handed hitter and including the catcher as a member of the Black Sox.
But, when a movie gets it too wrong, it spoils it for me. Many years ago Disney did a movie called “Rookie Of The Year.” A kid breaks his arm and can now throw 120 mph fastballs. Okay, that’s a fun premise, but they go on to destroy it. Why? Because the ONLY pitch he can throw is a 120 mph fastball. No changeup, which looks like a fastball, but is much slower. No breaking pitches. Certainly not a curveball.
Why is that so bad? Becuase in a baseball game, the pitcher (and the catcher) are playing a game of “guess what I’m thinking” with the opposing batter and manager. If a batter knows the pitch he’s going to get, he’s going to hit it most times. The reason a fastball works is that a changeup looks like the same pitch. So, the batter will spend the entire at bat trying to figure out what the catcher is going to call and the pitcher going to pitch.
Like the curveball, deceptively breaking in for a strike after looking like it’s way outside, fastballs and changups rely on deception. It’s probably more accurate to describe misdirection. The batter thinks fastball and swings way to early. He’s thinking changeup and swings too late. He’s thinking way outside and the pitch breaks.
I’m sure plenty of you are now saying, “Enough with the baseball pitches! What’s this got to do with business?”
In business, deception is bad. Misdirection less so. In fact, like a well thrown curveball, misdirection can be a used to your advantage without compromising your integrity. I can hear you now,
You’re just justifying lying to your customers!
And at first glance it looks like that. But, let’s face it; no one is totally honest. Or, I should say BRUTALLY honest. All software has bugs. Everyone knows that. But, software companies don’t lead with that piece of information. You don’t see a Microsoft advertisment saying,
Download Windows 10 for free! (BTW, it has bugs in it that we haven’t fixed yet.)
We were launching a new Line of Businesses. It required a very specialized backup solution. We’d never used one before. My engineers weren’t even sure it would work. It cost over $20,000. We needed two of them to record everything. I decided we would buy one and install it for the launch and then if everything went smoothly we’d get the second one.
There was just one problem. My client wanted us to have both when we launched. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him right? Contractually, we didn’t have to have two. But, the client wanted it.
I was stuck. I didn’t want to order equipment that was going to have to be scrapped if it didn’t work. I also didn’t want to delay my launch. We needed the second system in case there was a problem with the first. If everything went smooth, we’d be fine.
It didn’t go smooth.
Our fancy backup system broke. That shoudln’t have been a problem. . .if we had actually had two systems. My client wasn’t pleased.
So, when were you going to tell me that you only had one backup?
When it became necessary. It just became necessary.
Did I lie? I certainly didn’t tell all I knew. The client understandably felt betrayed. I was trying for misdirection.
Here’s the reason why. The client wouldn’t have let us launch with a single backup. But, contractually we didn’t have to. We didn’t even have to tell the client. Had the launch gone smoothly no one would have known.
When a batter swings and misses at a curveball, he looks foolish. And even though he has no real reason to, he feels foolish. That’s what happened with our client. They felt foolish. I wasn’t feeling good either. I felt foolish. However, eventually the client realized that we could still launch within 24 hours. The launch was slightly delayed, but we quickly recovered. It took longer to rebuild my relationship with the client.
It is wrong to lie to your customers. That’s true. But, that doesn’t mean you have to announce your next pitch.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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He certainly had the body of an athlete. He was 6’6″ 205 lbs and in great shape. The problem was he wasn’t a particularly skilled baseball player. And he was old. Thirty one in a league where the average age was nearly 10 years younger. In the AA league he was in, the leaders might have a batting average in the mid to high .300 range, he was barely batting .200. In fact, he was batting slightly below his weight and dangerously close to the Mendoza line (players batting below .200.)
His biggest problem was the curveball. He couldn’t hit it. Ironically, he was the most popular player on the Birmingham Barons, the White Sox AA affiliate. It wasn’t an exaggeration to say he was the most popular player in the entire league.
But, he just couldn’t catch up to the deceptive curveball.
The meme writers will tell you
“If you head can conceive it, and your heart can believe it, you can achieve it.”
Internet memes are not a great source of career advice. They certainly didn’t help that poor guy struggling through the AA Southern League. They are probably not a great source for you or me, either.
I once had a job that I liked, but I wasn’t particular great at it. In fact, I was downright poor. It was a program manager job at Microsoft. I had kind of fallen into the PM role without any real training. I was working hard. I was working my tail off, but it wasn’t bringing the results I wanted.
I wasn’t experienced enough to even be able to build a plan for success. I kept showing up everyday, spinning my wheels and going home frustrated. Looking back, I can think of a lot of things I would have done differently. I’m actually qualified to be a PM. But, if I weren’t, my plan would have been to go find a different job. I wasn’t very good at that one. At the time, I wasn’t that mature. I ended up having the decision made for me. It was much worse to be asked to leave than it would have been to make the call on my own.
I once had a system administrator who worked for me who wasn’t great at his job. We needed him to install software, and backup our server. He could do the first, he never managed to accomplish the second. I tried working with him. I tried giving him access to resources that would help him backup the server. I tried everything I could think of. He was always working on it, and he was working hard, but it was simply beyond his abilities. It was his curveball. We had to let him go.
Not everyone is cut out to be a professional baseball player. Not everyone makes a great PM. Not everyone can be a system administrator. The nirvana of employement is to find a job that you enjoy and that you are good at. But, don’t assume that every person can do every job. We each have strengths and weaknesses. Take advantage of those with your teams. If you have a valuable team member, but they are in the wrong role, change them, or let them go.
That’s eventually what happened with the inept baseball player. It became obvious to everyone, including him, that he was never going to be able to play baseball at the highest levels. He hung up his cleats and went back to his day job. He was pretty good at that job. In fact, he was better than pretty good. He was the best in the world at what he did. He may have been the best of all time.
The failed baseball player who couldn’t hit above his weight was Michael Jordan. He went back to the Chicago Bulls where he let his team to three additional championships, brining his total to six. Despite being a world class athlete. Despite having won multiple championships. Despite having the heart and mind of a fierce competitor, Jordan simply wasn’t good enough to play baseball. There are guys you’ve never heard of where better than he was.
If you find you can’t hit the curveball you may want to look for another line of work.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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It is between 9.00 and 9.25 inches in circumference.
It is between 2.86 and 2.94 inches in diameter.
It weighs between 5.00 and 5.25 ounces.
It has 108 stiches.
It’s those red stiches that give baseball one of it’s most amazing characteristics. The curveball. For years, basebal players and fans alike assumed that the curveball was an optical illusion. Because, it’s impossible for a ball to do what the curveball appears to do; change direction in mid-air.
When a pitcher throws a curveball, he grips it with two fingers on the top of the ball and his thumb below. As he releases the ball, he “flicks” his wrist, spinning the ball. If he throws it right, the ball will fly relatively straight and then at the last moment, “break” sharply down and to the left for a right handed pitcher. Down and to the right for a southpaw.
The modern baseball was invented in 1872. That’s when they started making them look like they do today with the raised stitching and the “figure eight” leather pattern. The cover was designed by a kid named Ellis Drake. He never patented the design. Prior to that, the ball had a sort of square cover.
But, who cares, right? I mean what’s the design of a baseball have to do with computers, or curveballs for that matter?
Unintended consequences: Around the time baseball was agreeing on the design of the ball, pitchers first figured out the curveball. It was either Candy Cummings or Fred Goldsmith. The thing is, it would be over a hundred years later before anyone figured out why a curveball curved, and it had to do with the stitches.
You’ve probably got one of these devices in your car.
We all know them as USB auto-adapters. Have you ever wondered why they are shaped the way they are? It’s an odd design if you think about it.
No, Rodney. See, they are designed this way so they will fit into the power receptacle in the cars.
Yes, that’s true. But, why are the power receptacles shaped that way? It’s because of these things.
This is a cigerette lighter. Chances are your car has a place for the cigerette lighter, but has no ashtray. Back when smoking was cool and people didn’t understand you were literally killing yourself, people liked to smoke in cars. Automobiles had ashtrays and these cigerette lighters. You pushed this in and after a couple of minutes, the coil inside heated up enough to catch tobacco and paper on fire.
When computers came along, especially laptop computers, someone had the brilliant idea of using the cigerette lighter to provide 12 volt DC power. (Okay, the use predates computers specifically, but go with me here.) The power from these adaptors is actually not particularly great. It can vary from as low as 5-6 volts during starting to as high as 14-15 volts. Computers don’t like this type of dirty power. Most adapters will attempt to “level” the power somewhat. But, it’s still a less than optimal solution.
But, the cars already had the adapters. I drive a near classic (1996) car. It still has an ashtray and right next to it the cigerette lighter. And virtually every car on the road will have an adapter outlet. The guy who invented the cigerette lighter didn’t know he was inventing a power standard for electronics.
And the guy who invented the design of a baseball didn’t know he was creating the perfect scenario for a curveball. It’s the stitching that makes it work. Those stitches grab the air as the ball rotates like tiny sails. The ball “pushes” the air in front of the stiches. That makes the air around the ball travel at different speeds. The ball wants to equalize those speeds and if thrown correctly, it does that just as the ball is crossing the plate. A curveball can break as much as 14″ from the pitcher to the catcher.
If a baseball were perfect round, a curveball would be impossible. So would a slider. And a knuckleball would have a lot less movement.
Sometimes we think we are building one thing and build something else entirely. And when it comes to baseball, and car adapters, that’s a very good thing.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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Imagine a sport that builds in a break 2/3 of the way through the event for the audience to stand up and stretch.
Imagine a sport where two of the most exciting scenarios are first that no one hits the ball, but even better, no one gets on base. In fact, the sport refers to that last scenario as PERFECT.
I don’t mind playing baseball, but I can’t stand watching it.
I get it. I realize that as an unabashed baseball fan, there are some people who would rather get a root canal with no Novocain than sit through nine innings of the greatest game ever invented. I used to be one of them. But, then a funny thing happened. I actually attended some professional games. I read up on the scoring. Not the number of runs recorded at the end of the game. But, baseball has an entire system of scoring every play.
Ever wonder why a strikeout is called a “K”? It’s because when scoring a baseball game, the letter S was already used. Originally it was (and is) used to record a single. (When a batter gets a hit that puts in at first base. It denotes a Save; the situation where a pitcher is the finishing pitcher in a game won by his team, where is is not also the winning pitcher, he pitches at least 1/3 of an inning and comes into a game with a lead of no more than three runs and pitches for at least one inning, or he enters teh game regardless of the score with the potential tying run either on base, at bat, or on desk, or he pitches for at least three inning.
Baseball scoring is just one of the many archaic rituals that endear the game to fans and make non-fans go “See? THAT’S why I hate it.”
As I developed first an appreciation and later a love for the sport, I also realized it is the pace that sets it apart from many other sports. There’s an ebb and a flow to a baseball game that doesn’t exist in any other sport. First off, there’s the fact that in baseball, unlike football, or hockey, or basketball, or just about any other sport, the defense controls the ball.
Then, there’s the fact that baseball is the only game where there is no clock. Literally, two teams could play forever if they stayed tied. The longest major league baseball game was in 1984 between the Chicago White Sox and the Milwaukee Brewers. It went 25 innings and lasted over eight hours. There was once a minor league game that went 32 innings. The Pawtucket Red Sox and the Rochester Red Wings battled over two days with Pawtucket taking the win in the end.
These are the exceptions. Most professional baseball games go about three hours. But, more than that, the tempo of a baseball game over those three hours is beautiful. In a 9 inning game, each batter will come to bat at least 3 times. The starting pitcher will throw about 100 pitches.
Like a three act play, each third of a game has it’s own purpose. The first time through the batting order, the advantage typically is with the pitcher. He’s fresh and probably throwing his best pitches. Also, if he’s new, the batters have no idea what to expect from him. It’s 60’6″ from home plate to the pitchers mound. A 90 MPH fastball is going to take a fraction of a second to travel that distance. During that fraction, the batter has to decide to swing or not, and then get his hands and arms moving. He often guesses.
During the middle part of the game, the second act, if you will, the advantage is about even. The batters have seen the pitcher and probably seen him throw all his pitches (fastball, change-up, slider, curve, etc.) And they’ve started to get a read on his timing.
During the final third of the game, the advantage can be with the batters, the pitcher is going to be getting tired. Of course, that’s why you bring in relief pitchers. But, the idea is the same. There’s a rhythm to the game that the players and the fans get into.
I’m a project manager. Projects also have rhythms. It’s not as cut and dried as a three act play, but neither is baseball despite my oversimplification above. But, a project has a beginning a middle and an end. Understanding the schedule helps to keep the project on track and the stakeholders engaged. Last week we had a project meeting. The meeting took about 15 minutes. We are past the beginning phases where assignments were made. We are not yet to the phase where engineering work gets done. It’s a bit of dead time as we wait for equipment to arrive. We wait for circuits to be installed.
Just as people can get frustrated if they don’t understand the pace of a baseball game, if you have stakeholders who don’t understand the pace of a project, they may be pestering you for updates when there are none to be had.
It doesn’t mean the project is behind. It doesn’t mean that nothing is happening. It’s just happening at a pace that they may not understand. Last year the big projects were building out new call centers. The call centers kind of took an 80/20 approach for much of the schedule. It seemed like we did 80% of the work in the last 20% of the schedule. As the project hit it’s final phase, we had deadlines occuring one right after another. The schedule was tight enough that a delay of a few hours by one contractor had a cascading effect on three or four other contractors who were lined up behind him. Eighteen hour days were not uncommon.
It’s easy to look at that kind of a schedule and ask, “Why? Why not put some of those projects into the slower “middle” portion of the schedule?” The answer is slightly complicated, but essentially boils down to timing. The timing is such that everything is going to happen right at the end. Like a baseball game, the middle section can get a little slow. That’s why they put the 7th inning stretch in that part.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. 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) 2015 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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I didn’t know.
We didn’t do a lot of canning when I grew up. I learned it after I married my lovely wife. Our first year together we decided we were going to can applesauce. We ended up canning about 300 jars worth. . .and that was for two people and a baby. But, that wasn’t the problem.
We are both college educated people, so naturally, when we decided to start a new hobby, we bought a book. Then, we bought some jars, some lids, a canner and a “turn apples to applesauce” grinder thingy.
We did everything right.
- We washed the apples
- We cut up the apples
- We boiled the cut up apples
- We ran the boiled apples through the “turn apples to applesauce” grinder thingy
- We washed the jars
- We washed the rings
- We put the applesauce into the jars
- We put the rings and lids on the jars
- We put the jars into the canner
- We waited 12 minutes
- We set them on a towels to cool
- We put them in our pantry. . .and the basement. . and under the bed (We made A LOT of applesauce)
All of that is great, except we forgot one important step. And we didn’t remember it until it was too late.
I’ve had projects like that, both at work and at home. I enjoy woodworking. There is saying among woodworkers.
“Everyone makes mistakes. The good woodworkers find the mistakes before the glue sets.”
Part of the role of a Project Manager is to find, or anticipate the problems before they impact the schedule. I was working on rebuilding one of the floors in our building. We’d done a complete remodel. We stripped the space down to bare floors and walls. We rewired. Brought in new furniture. We even added walls. About 10 days before the project was scheduled to close, one of the network managers came to me.
“Rodney, I’m going to miss your deadline.”
“Why?”
“The fiber cables didn’t come in. The manufacture said it will be at least two weeks before they can get us any.”
The fiber cables were important. They were more than important, they were critical to my project. I wish the manager had let me know it was a risk. As it was, he ALMOST waited until it was too late. After a bit of scrambling we figured out that the fiber cables were the exact same kind we were using on the other two floors. We always build redundant systems. So, I had twice as many as I needed on the first and second floor. A quick trip to the wiring closet and we cannibalized enough to get us into production. When the new ones came in, we replaced them on the first floor.
This week I canned peaches. As the peaches were cooling on my counter, I remembered my applesauce experience, and the critical step I had forgotten. (Forgotten because I didn’t actually know.)
The rings.
When you steam fruit, it actually boils, and some of it gets on the outside of the jar. It’s sticky. . .like glue. That’s why, it’s critical that after the jars cool, you REMOVE THE RINGS.
We didn’t when we canned applesauce all those years ago. The first time we went to open a jar, the ring was welded to the jar. We tried all the techniques to remove it; “Here, honey would you open this jar for me?”, pounding on it with a knife, putting a towel over it for a better grip. Finally, it was by running it under really hot water that we finally got it loosen enough to remove. We immediately removed the rings from all the jars. . .all 300 of them.
Better to do it before it’s too late.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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This is not what I had in mind. This is not what I planned to spend my night doing. Canning peaches is an involved process. You have to
- Scald them
- Skin them
- Slice them
- Put them in jars
- Make syrup
- Add syrup to jars
- Heat the lids
- Put them in the canner for 25 minutes
- Let them cool
But, there is no arguing with peaches. There is no compromise, “If you’ll hold off on being ripe until the weekend, I’ll get to you then.” When they are ready, they are ready. Yesterday, they were ready.
Five bushels of peaches yielded 108 quarts.
There are times in our jobs where we have to deal with something that cannot wait. I had one of those. I have them alot.
Everyday, we have about 1100 call center agents taking calls. They need certain things to work in order to do their jobs.
- Phones
- Computers
- Application programs
- Time Keeping programs
If any one of these is not working, that agent cannot take calls. If the agents are not taking calls, we are not making money. And if I screw up and break my system so the agents cannot take calls, not only do we not make money from their calls, we end up paying a system availability penalty.
I had other things to do yesterday when my phone rang.
“Rodney, we have an outage on the production floor. We need you to join our conference call.”
It’s a call I get way too often. Fortunately, the problem was not affecting 100% of our agents. But, it was affecting enough that we needed to focus on it. So, for the next several hours, that’s what I did. I had meetings scheduled, they were cancelled. I had emails to send, they got sent late. I had about 100 other things on my list. But, there are certain things that cannot wait.
We got the outage resolved. The meetings actually went on without me. I sent the emails later in the day. You just have to put certain things first.
I had about 100 todo items when I got home from work. They all got pushed off. Time and Peaches wait for no man.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. 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) 2015 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Where are you from? Hopefully, you know. Personally, I’m not sure. I’ve lived in Utah for years and my kids are from here. I spent much of my early childhood bouncing around from eastern Washington to Minnasota to Alaska, back to eastern Washington. But, when I was eleven we moved for the last time. We moved to western Washington. We lived outside of Olympia.
I’d never been anywhere that was so green. I road with my dad from Spokane on the eastern side of the state to our house in Lacey. I remember two things from that trip. First, I sang every verse to “99 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall.” My dad, who had only been with my mom for a few months didn’t say a thing. When I started into the song for a second time he finally spoke up,
No! Not again.
This was not what nearly killed him, although it probably drove him slightly crazy.
But, the second thing I remember is looking at the side of the freeway and seeing the incredible green plants. In hindsight they were Scotch Broom and blackberries, both weeds. But, to me, they looked like they were planned and planted. I didn’t realize they grew wild, and worse.
I never realized I grew up with briar patches until I was working for Microsoft and a trainer from North Carolina came out to Washington and labled our blackberry bushes as “briar patches.” But, as a new transplant from the desert of eastern Washington, blackberry bushes were amazing. The fruit just grew wild on them and you could stop on the side of the road and pick all you wanted. No one owned them.
I laugh every time I see blackberry starts sold in nurseries. No. those are weeds. Tasty weeds, but weeds non the less. And it was my lack of understanding of blackberries that nearly killed my poor dad. My brother and I decided we were going pick a bunch of blackberries. My dad loved them on ice cream and it seemed like an low-key way to get to know him better. He didn’t go pick with us. If he had, the unfortunate event later wouldn’t have happened.
How do you start at a new employer? Do you rush in and make an impact right away? That might sound like a good idea. Everyone wants to hire someone who can “hit the ground running,” or as my former boss would mis-malign it, “Hit the ground rolling.” But, is that really the right course?
Typically, the things you think you know don’t exactly mesh with the new culture. It might be better to do a lot of watching and listening and less talking until you figure out how the organization runs and who the major players are. It might also be valuable to figure out how to identify ripe blackberries. Well, if your business has blackberries.
My brother and I picked at least two cups worth of the dark delicious looking fruit. We didn’t even eat any ourselves. we were determined to let our new dad have all of them. I don’t know exactly how many he ate. But, do know that he about died from the tartness. An unripe blackberry tastes like you steeped a lemon in vinegar and dusted it with alum.
They looked good though.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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The engineer thought he knew what he was doing. The task was simple enough, swap out some hard drives on the server. He wasn’t actually an engineer. That was part of the problem. He was a student studying to be an engineer. It was his lack of experience that got him assigned this task.
Hot-swappable drives are designed to be replaced “on-the-fly,” while the server is still running. Unfortunately, our not-an-engineer didn’t fully understand what that meant. He thought he did. He was wrong. And his mistake had drastic consequences.
I recently had some computer trouble. (Why My Kids Have No Shoes.)
Computers are kind of like cars. They all include the same basic pieces, but you can customize them a million different ways. The problem with my computer was that the hard disk that had the operating system installed, what we would typically call the “C” drive on a PC, was failing.
My lovely wife is still angry that 3 years ago I failed to backup one of my hard drives and lost irreplaceable pictures. The hard drive is currently in a plastic bag in my freezer, like some low tech cryogenics lab waiting for one of my truly technical friends to make a try at recovering the pictures.
So, backups, which IT people are terrible at doing for themselves, have become kind of a big deal for me. That’s why my hard drive failing didn’t bother me in the least; because my server has two hard drives (actually it has five, but I’ll explain that in a minute.) One hard drive, the C drive, holds the operating system. The other hard drive holds all the data, including more pictures. My C drive is a single point of failure. Meaning that if it breaks, I have no backup, I have to delete everything and start from scratch. But, that’s okay. I don’t store any data on the C drive. I install from the Windows DVD and that’s about it. It’s a 1 terrabyte drive. (A terrabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, or 1,000,000 megabytes.) Most of it is empty, but I don’t care. Because the really big drive is the data drive, we’ll call it drive E.
Drive E is what’s called a RAID array. Specifically it’s a RAID 5 array. It has four disks that all share the same space. Each disk is 2 TB. Drive E is just over 5 TB in size. You probably noticed that four drives times 2 TB per drive should equal 8 TB, not 5. That’s where RAID, and my ability to stay out of my wife’s dog house come into play.
RAID arrays take a little bit of each drive and store it on another drive. So, the data on disk 1 is also replicated on disks 2, 3 and 4. The reason for this is that disks fail, just as my C drive is failing. With the C drive, I might end up replacing the entire drive. And if I had to do that, all data would be lost.
But, on the RAID drive E, if I lost a disk, I wouldn’t lose any data. If disk 1 fails, then Windows will go to the shared spaced on 2, 3 and 4 where the copies of disk 1 reside. These copies take space that you can’t use for other things. That’s why an 8 TB array only has 5 TB of available space. The other three are used for storing the copies. So, although I had to reinstall the operating system on drive C, when I did, I linked to drive E and all my data, including those pictures were there waiting for me.
Hot swappable drives take the RAID concept one step further. In order to replace my drives, I have to turn off the server, pop open the case, unhook the wires and undo the screws holding the disk in place. With a hot swappable drive, I can replace it by pulling it out of the server without all the rest of that work. When I pull out a drive, the operating system notices it’s gone and redistributes the data from the shared spaces. Likewise, if I add a new drive, the OS notices and redistributes data onto the new drive as well.
All of this was understood by our not-an-engineer. And, since he needed to replace all the drives in the array, he started pulling out old drives and replacing them with the new ones. So far, so good. Except. . .the OS needs a little time to redistribute the files especially when a drive is added. Time, that the not-an-engineer didn’t give it. Depending on the size of your datastore, the copying process could take 15 minutes, or it could take hours. It will finish eventually. Just give it time.
Unfortunately, our not-an-engineer missed that small detail in his education on hot-swappable drives. He started replacing drives as quicky as he could pull them out and push the new ones in.
The server tried to keep up. It really did. But, finally, it succumbed with a crash that set off alarm bells all over our Network Operations Center. The drives were trashed. Physically they were fine. But, the file allocation tables were so much digital confetti. We ended up restoring from tape.
I don’t know what became of our not-an-engineer. He may have gone on to a successful career in IT. And, if this experience encouraged him to read the instructions better, then it wasn’t a total loss. For my part, I was just just glad the affected array didn’t hold any of my family pictures.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. 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) 2015 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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You might as well ask, “When did you learn to speak? Or walk? Or read? Some things are so inextricably tied to who we are, to what we are, that it’s impossible to separate them from ourselves. Which of us remembers our first tottering steps? Who among us can recall our first mangled attempts at “mama” or “dada”?
You would think, although they came later, that our first attempts at reading and especially writing would likewise we lost to the failed memories of youth. And, while it’s true that I do not remember when I first learned to put words down on paper, I very clearly remember when I learned to write. Mostly I remember it because I was so bad at it.
I’ve failed at many things in the course of my life. I take solace in the adage that “If you’ve never failed, you are not trying enough.” However, my first failure at writing was so spectacular that it has stayed with me for the ensuing 35 years. And I expect, it will stay with me for as long as I attempt to put pen to paper. I was a skinny 14 year old high school freshman. I was one of those “high potential” students. A terrible student with the ability to excel if I’d only apply myself.
My untapped potential, more than any history of academic prowess, landed me in Ms Thomas’ freshman Honors English class. One of our first assignments of the semester was to read and critique a short story, “The Most Dangerous Game,” by Richard Connell. The details of the story are still fresh after three and a half decades.
A noted hunter falls overboard in the Carribean. He washes ashore on Ship-trap island. A private game preserve of General Zaroff. The general has grown bored with hunting animals and has turned his attention to a more dangerous quarry. Rainsford, the hunter turned huntee, must attempt to stay alive for three days. If he succeeds, Zaroff promises to set him free.
The story is timeless. I read it in 1979. At that point it was already over 50 years old, having been written in 1924. Reading it again today, it retains every bit of it’s intrigue and suspense. Like the best of short stories, its ending provides a delicious twist.
And, as a new high school freshman, my task was to write a simple one-page report on this timeless classic.
I panned it.
I ripped it to shreds. But, not in any skilled literary fashion. Instead, I critiqued it as one would a student essay. Connell, had failed to follow the three step essay process: introduction, body, conclusion. He hadn’t started each paragraph with a topic sentence. He didn’t have an overarching hypothesis that was clearly stated and then supported with facts. In short, I concluded in my adolescent arrogance,
“The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connell will never be a great short story for the reasons listed.
Even now, writing those words again so many years later, and having written books, and articles and stories, I cringe at my utter lack of ability. Fortunately, my teacher was a much better teacher than I was a student. She did not eviscerate me, as my critique might have warranted. In fact, while I remember the assignment vividly, I cannot recall what feedback she offered. No doubt, it was kind, but designed to point me toward better writing.
Two years later, I was again in Ms Thomas’ class. This time an Advanced Placement English class. I did well enough to earn college credit for my scores. I’ve gone on to some modest success in publishing books, and articles. I’ve been recruited to write reports and marketing copy. And yet, no matter how much success I achieve, I am always reminded that what we think we know is a poor measuring stick. Even now, I resist the urge to assume that I understand much of anything, especially about writing. Who’s to say but that some concept I’m 100% positive of today, might not be shown to be completely false tomorrow?
I am grateful for that assignment all those years ago. For, although it still causes me some measure of embarrassment, it serves as a constant reminder of the importance of constant practice, constant improvement, and never taking for granted my own knowledge of anything.
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday at 7:00 AM Mountain Time. 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) 2015 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved