Welcome to Autumn. Days get shorter. Temperatures drop. We FINALLY got some rain. Snow in the mountains. And, of course, the gorgeous fall colors arrive. Did you know there is no real reason for leaves to change color?
This summer, my neighbor’s yard was full of beautiful flowers. The area under his trees was full of reds and yellows, purples and blues. They were beautiful. But, there’s a reason flowers are bright. . .and smell pretty. There’s an evolutionary reason. The brightest flowers attracted more bees. More bees meant more pollination. The flowers that got pollinated more reproduced more. So, nature had a reason to make flowers bright.
We just get to take advantage of nature’s reasons for making pretty flowers.
Charles Darwin, of course, wrote the book Origin of Species. He talks about evolution. But, it’s not a book about how life started on earth. It’s a book about how species evolve. Darwin went to the Galápagos Islands. There he saw species that had evolved in a way to fit their unique environment. Nature does that.
I saw a picture one time of what some activist suggested humans might look like a couple hundred years. They were sure the seas were going to rise and humans would have to go live underwater. The “humans” in the picture had gills and web feet. This would be useful if we were going to live under water, right?
The problem is that’s not how evolution works. Things, animals, plants, even people evolve from generation to generation. In nature, it’s whichever individual gets to pass on their genes. It even happens with people. Each generation is slightly taller than the previous generation.
Napoleon Bonaparte was born in 1769. He was 5’6″ tall. Obviously, that’s why we say that short men have a Napoleon complex. Here’s the thing. Napoleon was about average height for his time. (The English propaganda called him short.)
So, the problem with the web feet, is no one is going to marry someone with web toes specifically so they can pass on the genetic trait of webbed feet. And I don’t even want to imagine how we’d evolve gills.
So, nature selects. And scientists are really good at figuring out WHY nature does certain things. Sometimes birds may develop longer beaks when they are in an environment where the seeds fall into cracks between rocks. Short beak birds can’t get as much food. The longer the beak the more food. The more food, the more baby birds. . .who also have long beaks.
So, what’s that have to do with fall colors?
Nothing, actually. But, it should. We know why birds get longer beaks. We know why humans are getting taller. We know why flowers are bright. But, we don’t know why fall leaves change color.
There is no reason, no natural selection reason, for leaves to change color. Brighter flowers get more bees. But, there’s no advantage to brighter leaves. None. The leaves could all be grey and the trees would do just as well. So, why are the leaves so vibrant? Why are our hills suddenly ablaze with color? Driving through the Alpine loop last week felt like literally being inside the color yellow. It was amazing.
The maple trees in my yard have started to put on their Fall finery. I have eight of them. Only two have started dropping their leaves. Soon, my lawn will be awash in leaves. The entire city and the mountains around us will be bursting with color.
As you enjoy the beauty of Autumn, just remember that there’s really no good reason for it. Sometimes God just does stuff because He can.
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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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I started a new job a couple months ago. It’s in my field. I’m good at my job. Well, I’m good at my field. But, the job was new.
And it’s a hard job. Not hard as in physically challenging. Most jobs in the IT field are embarrassing light. It’s comforting to say we get paid for our brains, but I don’t think that’s true. I once volunteered for a day on a Habitat For Humanity house. We were putting siding on a house in Orem. Four of us were volunteers under the direction of the one guy who knew what he was doing.
We were putting siding on a large dormer. It had sloping angles and it had a window in the middle. We had to install the siding around the window and the weird angles. The guy in charge was amazing. The four of us volunteers were up on the roof and he was doing the cutting.
Measure that section right there. Yeah, from the corner to the window. Now how far from the top of the bottom piece of siding to the window bottom edge?
We would measure and shout the measurements down to him. He would pause, do some quick calculations in his head and then make several cuts to a siding piece. He’d toss it up on the roof for us to install.
And every one fit perfectly. The man was very good at what he did. Add on top of that he had to train volunteers daily. He also managed the schedule. Arranged for inspections. He was doing a lot of jobs and doing them all really well.
I’ve spent the last few weeks learning my new job. I’m learning our software product so that I can be the project manager on an upgrade. I’m a smart guy. Or, at least I’m not a dumb guy. But, at times I’ve felt positively stupid.
One day I was more stupid than usual. I got a flu vaccine shot. And for whatever reason it made me stupid. I went to work the next day and couldn’t remember a single thing I’d learned about our product. Unfortunately, my boss wanted to review what I had learned.
He seemed worried that perhaps he’d made a mistake in hiring me. Fortunately it was a passing stupidity. And I started to make some headway. And then, suddenly I topped out on the learning curve and it was difficult to remember being stupid. Of course, I know how to provision a new user. How could I ever have been confused about how to set up Domain Codes?
We were going over some configurations topics today. He was recapping.
They have logins in each of these environments.
Domains
What’s that?
Well, we’re creating accounts in domains.
Oh, yeah. Right. In the domains.
It wasn’t a big point. And he obviously knew. . .knows the system much better than me. But, it was clear that I was finally past the stupid part.
At least until I have to learn the next part of our program.
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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) 2021 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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Stay safe
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) 2021 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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My friend Jason is a photographer. I don’t mean he takes pictures. He creates memorable images. He mixes light and color in ways that I can appreciate, but couldn’t begin to duplicate.
Autum is a wonderful time for photographers. Especially in Utah. Utah colors are beautiful in the fall. We got our first significant snow this week. It hasn’t touched the valley floor, but it’s clothing our mountains in white. And the high meadows and lakes are already putting on their winter finery.
Jason is happy to share his work on Facebook. I enjoy following him, not only because he’s a nice guy. But, because his pictures are magnificent.
He posted one earlier this week of Silver Lake. It’s up above the snow line in American Fork Canyon. Jason posted his picture like he often does. Among the many complimentary comments that people posted, one fan posted a similar picture. It was nearly the same shot, taken about the same time of day from the same location. She captioned it,
Similar to yours, just not as good.
In addition to posting on Facebook, Jason is also active in the comments thread. And, as I said, he’s a really nice guy. His response was one of the most remarkable I’d ever seen. It managed to both acknowledge his own skill, but the skill of fan. He was more than willing to share the experience and the praise. He said,
It’s better, because it’s yours
And knowing Jason, He was being honest. He wasn’t only being humble.
Art and artists are funny folks. What they do is something that anyone can do, but no one can do exactly the same. I think my friend Jason was saying we are all artists. And while it’s okay to appreciate art created by others, we need to appreciate our own art, whether that’s photography, painting, drawing, music, dance, or whatever your muse inspires you with.
Absolutely, it’s better because it’s yours.
You can find Jason Robison’s photography here.
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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) 2021 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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The more experience I got in showbiz, the less I read the contracts. Now I don’t bother. If I can’t make the deal in a phone call, and have them understand it, then it’s not a worthwhile deal. You’re making a deal with the people, not with the contract.
Penn Jillette – Magician, author and producer
I love Penn Jillette. He’s a wonderful magician, an extraordinary entertainer and seems like a really nice guy. (Although I’ve never met him.) And if I were to ever book him for a show I would be confident that whatever we said over the phone, or accompanying a handshake would be good enough.
With that said, I’d really like to take his advice on contracts. Basically, just decide what you are going to do, talk about it with the client and everyone just does the right thing. It’s my experience that is not how business works. Even when two companies want to work together, a contract, like a backyard fence, helps keep straight the boundary lines.
In my previous role at Teleperformance, we had a very large and detailed contract to cover how to would build a call center for our clients. The contract had multiple pages and multiple sections. It included sections on
- Facilities
- Backups
- Inspections
- Computer types
- Headset make and model
- Outage notification process
- Call trees for escalations
- What could be shown on the televisions
- Turnstiles
- Security
- Background and drug tests
And dozens more. Most of the contract was fairly standard. And while each call center was slightly different, the processes and procedures were virtually the same across all sites. I became very familiar with the contract language.
Business relations, especially between companies are a little like negotiating with my teenagers about curfew.
Can I come home at 12:30 on Friday night?
You’re curfew is 12:00.
I know. But, the party might go a little late and Jamie is my ride. I didn’t want to have to ask him to leave before it’s over.
Okay. You can come home at 12:30.
Jamie might be dropping other people off also. How about 12:45?
If you have raised teenagers then you know this discussion only has one conclusion. It will continue until you, as the parent say, “No.” Typically negotiating with my kids meant they were going to attempt to get as much as possible and would only stop when they reached a boundary.
Companies are similar. Even companies that are on good, great terms with each other, are obligated to increase shareholder value for their own shareholders. And that’s where contracts come into play.
In my previous role, I often did audits or inspections with our client’s team. And sometimes (pretty much all the time) they would press for additional items or restrictions.
Rodney, we’d really like you to encrypt your harddrives on all the workstations.
We haven’t done that in the past.
I know, but we feel it would add an additional layer of security.
I’m all for security too. But, with a remote workforce I would have to arrange for 2000 employees to unhook the computer at home, bring it to my call center, have my desktop team disinfect it, have the same desktop team encrypt the hard drive and have the agent take the computer back home and then plug it all back in.
Oh, and the agent gets paid for their trip to the office. And since we only get paid from the client when the agent is taking calls, this represents a pretty substantial financial commitment. All so they can feel a little better about security. (We didn’t store ANY data on the hard drive, so encrypting it was kind of like locking an empty cupboard. Even if someone broke in there is nothing to steal.)
Before telling the client yes or no, I went to the contract and to my security team. We all scoured the requirements and no where did it say we had to encrypt the hard drives. Okay, the contract is in my favor. Now what?
What I didn’t do at this point is say, “It’s not in the contract. We’re not doing it.” Granted that is what I wanted to say, but it’s not good for business relations. What I did say was,
My team agrees that we can encrypt the hard drives. I’m not sure the business folks would sign off on the time off the phones. We are looking through the contract to verify our obligations. If you could look your copy of the contract and help me identify where that requirement is documented, that would go a long ways toward convincing the business to block out the time for it.
I knew it wasn’t in the contract. And I’m pretty sure my counter-part at the client knew it wasn’t in the contract. But, I didn’t want to tell him no and I also didn’t want to spend the money to go through the exercise. This answer prevented me from having to do either.
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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) 2021 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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You know that tow hitch that you put not he back of your SUV? Okay, maybe not you, but people who tow boats, or trailers, or campers. Or, sure, maybe you too. Even if you don’t have a tow hitch, if you have an SUV, or a van or a truck, you have that square hole that the hitch goes into right?
Did you know there are different sizes of tow balls? And you have to have the size of ball that matches the trailer hitch you are pulling. The most common is a 2″ ball. And In fact, you could go your entire life of owning an SUV, or a van, or a truck and never even know there was a different size.
If you are going to pull a heavier trailer, you need a bigger ball. If you have a big boat with double axles, you probably need a 2 5/8″ ball. I didn’t have a big boat, but I did have a trailer that took a 2 5/8″ ball at one point. But, like most people I had the 2″ ball on my tow hitch.
So, I bought a 2 5/8″ ball. Now I had to install it on my tow hitch. It takes a really large socket to fit the bottom of that ball. And it takes a 3/4″ socket driver. And then I needed a pipe wrench to hold the ball while I was unscrewing the nut.
It was about $75 by the time I got all the needed tools. And now I could swap the 2″ ball and the 2 5/8″ ball as needed.
My lovely wife had a question.
How much would it cost to just buy a full tow hitch with a 2 5/8″ ball?
Ah. . . .
The tow hitch costs about $30.
I was so intent on how to swap the ball that I didn’t really think about how else to solve my problem.
I was working with a company that needed to take some files from one format to Microsoft Word. The old software didn’t have a conversion feature. Well, it only kind of had a convert feature. The company spent a long time working with the converted files trying to make them work.
I’m not part of the decision making team on the client side. My company was providing a service and API that the client would call. How they created their documents was an internal decision. But, I just had to wonder,
How long would it take to create the files in Word from scratch?
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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) 2021 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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This book was new when I started reading it
Don Quixote is 768 pages long. At least my copy of it is. It’s a long book. In fact, other than the Bible, it may be the longest book I’ve ever read.
Of course, the Lord of The Rings trilogy is long. It might be more than 800 pages long. I’ve read it multiple times. There are other series that are also long and I’ve read them. What makes me point out Don Quixote’s length? Because it felt long.
You are no doubt familiar with the story. Don Quixote thinks he’s a knight errant. And he, along with his squire Sancho Panca, roam around the Spanish countryside getting into hilarious adventures.
Have you ever played Dungeon & Dragons? Really any role playing game. But, D&D is the archetypical role playing game. In D&D you play a a knight. Maybe you have a squire. You roam around the countryside having adventures.
Sound familiar? Yeah. It did to me too.
When my brother and I used to play D&D as kids we tried to write some of the stories down. After all, it was really exciting to play D&D. We’d play for hours.
But, you know what? The stories were boring. They were unreadable, even considering they were written by teenagers. Because it was the “same story, different day.” Your character would show up, fight a monster, get the gold and then move on to repeat it at the next encounter.
What makes literature interesting, engaging, is growth. Lord of the Rings isn’t just stories of hobbits and dwarves and orcs and wizards. Frodo is a much different person at the end of the story than he is at the beginning. In fact, the events break him. He stumbles to the end, rather than running.
Every good story is the same way. Harry Potter, the boy who lived, is much different at the end of the seventh book and eighth movie than he is when we first meet him.
And that was my biggest problem with Don Quixote. After 700 pages, he was the same person that we met on page 1. Sancho is just as stunted. He’s an interesting character, and certainly as the link between reality and madness, the key figure in the story.
He spends the first 600 pages hoping that Don Quixote will win him a governorship. In a surprising turn of events, he actually gets it around the 600 page mark. And we see, amazingly, growth from the perpetual sidekick. He has to learn to govern. Previously he’d been fond of dropping platitudes and parables. Now we see that his wisdom was actually genuine. He rivals Soloman in some of his judgements.
It was really interesting. And then? Cervantes takes us right back to Sancho the side-kick. But, it was a really interesting 100 pages.
Cervantes wrote his masterpiece (and it really is a masterpiece, more on that in a minute) in the 16th century. A couple hundred years later P.A. Motteux translated Cervantes into English.
So, the words and stories we read in Don Quixote are 500 year-old stories translated into 300 year old English. And still we laugh at Sancho’s antics. We smile at Quixote’s naïveté. The stories read very much like short stories, loosely collected into a larger narrative.
If you “study” Don Quixote, you learn that Cervantes was writing a social commentary. His story was a response to certain contemporary writers and popular stories of his day. I’m sure when viewed in its historical Context, Don Quixote is a brilliant work. And it’s obvious in reading it that you are reading something important. Like looking at a brilliant painting, but having no idea what makes it special, only that it doesn’t look like a woman, weeping or otherwise to you.
What I Liked
The writing was amazing. The actual stories that Cervantes tells are each interesting and engaging. He describes his characters and his settings in wonderful detail. When you consider his narrative was translated, it’s even more a complement to his amazing skill.
What I Didn’t
About 550 pages of it. Not that it wasn’t entertaining. Just that it was like eating potatoes. . .everyday. . .for 768 days. As I already mentioned, the characters has no growth. Don Quixote was a caricature of himself for the entire book. He was an idea more than an actual person.
What It Means To You
If you are studying classic literature, you MUST read Don Quixote. If you don’t have to, you can get the story from the excellent movie “Man of LaMancha.” And it has very memorable music.
My Rating
3 Stars
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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) 2021 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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The story worried me.
Richard Bliss, an engineer working for a US technology company was arrested in Russia on charges of espionage.
The year was 1997. I knew Richard Bliss. And while I wouldn’t have called him an engineer, he certainly worked for a technology company and travelled internationally.
I called my sister-in-law.
Hey, this is Rodney. Ah. . .my brother hasn’t been in Russia lately has he?
.
No. But, you’re not the first to call. I just hung up with your mom.
Yesterday I talked about meeting someone with my same name, (Talking To Myself. . .Hello, I Don’t Think We’ve Met.) This is a picture of Richard Bliss, who was arrested for espionage in Russia in 1997.
This is a picture of Richard Bliss who was not in Russia in 1997 and is definitely not a spy.
If you google Richard Bliss, most of the links will be for my brother. He’s a published author. He’s a successful LinkedIn coach. He ran multiple successful podcasts. He’s popular online and not hard to find.
But, because 25 years ago a man who shared his name used an unauthorized GPS device in Russia, and because the Internet never forgets, my brother’s name is forever linked to spying in Russia.
More recently, in 2018, a man in Florida got into an argument with some people at his business. He ended up shooting a man and was shot himself and was killed. His name was Richard Bliss.
Google makes it easy to find yourself, or at least those people who share your name. It also makes it easy to find other people who share names.
Most of the time it’s a strange version of looking in the mirror, but seeing someone else’s face. In my brother’s case, it does screw up a background check.
Ironically, my brother and I both know one more Richard Bliss. Our older brother named one of his kids Richard. And he’s not a spy either.
Stay safe
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) 2021 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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My friends call me Rod. You can call me Rodney.
I had a conversation today with Rod Bliss. His name is also Rodney. We’ve never spoken. But, we are both working for the same company. Me as a contractor, him as a fulltime employee, what we used to call a “blue badge” when I worked for Microsoft.
But, this isn’t Microsoft.
Rod got my mail. Well, he got a meeting invite that was intended for me. It’s hard to blame him for being confused. The invitation was addressed to Rodney Bliss. He reached out to the meeting organizer via Microsoft Teams.
Why do you want me in that meeting.
Sorry, that meeting invite was for Rodney Bliss
Well, that’s ME!
It’s weird to talk to someone with your same name. I reached out to Rod and let him know that I was new to the project and my name appears as a contractor RBLISS-C in the address book. Rod called me.
Hello, this is Rodney.
Hello, this is Rod Bliss. How are you?
It feels like a weird version of talking to a verbal mirror.
Yeah, tell me about it!
What do you say to someone that shares your name? Of course, we talked about our family background. My Bliss’s come from Montana, his from Nebraska by way of Seattle. Which is the area I grew up in. But, despite our best efforts, we couldn’t find any near common ancestors. But, all the Bliss’s in America descended from a couple of brothers who fought in the Revolutionary war. He’d heard the same stories. I sent him a link to the blog post I wrote about Capt Abdeil Bliss Hero of theRevolution, But Was He A Captain?
I also asked if he had a brother named Richard. He does not, but I do. And my brother can never pass a background check. There’s another Richard Bliss (no relation to either of us that we can tell) who was arrested for being a spy in Russia.
Bliss is not a common name. And Rodney is not a common first name. There aren’t that many of us. I do know of one other, a Rodney A Bliss that used to sell real estate in Maryland. In fact, the website for this blog is staging.rodneymbliss.com (notice the “m”) because Rodney Bliss already had rodneybliss.com. I used to get his email from prospective buyers. Unlike Rod and I, I never spoke to Rodney.
I don’t imagine we will interact much. Rod works in a completely different part of the company than I’m involved with. But, we both appear in the address book, so it was worthwhile to at least say hi.
How about you? Ever met yourself?
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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) 2021 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved
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It comes from the James Dean movie Rebel Without a Cause. Two cars driving toward the edge of a cliff. Last one to jump out “wins.” The game is called “chicken.” Just a brief sidebar, I never really considered the James Dean cliff scene as the origin of the game of Chicken. In fact, most versions I’ve seen involved two cars headed toward each other and the last one to swerve wins.
But, the Internet said it was James Dean, and honestly, that’s a WAY cooler origin story than I was imagining.
Alright so what does the game of chicken have to do with project management?
Quite a bit, actually.
Software project management is pretty simple. You have three variables
- Features
- Schedule
- Resources
As a project manager, you can change any two. Stake holders will insist that you deliver on all three.
The schedule says we must ship on September 1. That can’t change.
Well, we need to cut features.
No, that’s not acceptable. Every feature is critical.
Well, we need to hire a bunch more people then.
You can’t increase the budget. Just make do with that you have!
There’s an excellent book called “The Mythical Man Month.” It explains that at some point in the project, adding more people actually makes things worse not better. The logic is,
A woman can have a baby in 9 months. But, 9 women cannot have a baby in 1 month.
Software development is often measured in terms of how long it takes to create it. As project managers we get estimates on how much it costs to build each feature. In other words, how long to create each feature. The results are added up. Then a healthy dose of buffer space is added and the project manager puts it into a calendar.
Projects are projects because they have an end date. But, some projects take years to complete. A schedule never gets shorter. Not on its own. It’s a project manager’s job to keep the schedule on track. It’s often a near impossibility. And a large project will have multiple project managers. You might have someone over the database upgrades. Someone else is responsible for the user interface. Still another group handles the public facing APIs.
Everyone has a schedule and if everyone meets the schedule the project ships on time, on budget with the agreed upon features. But, that doesn’t happen. I might say “rarely” happens, but that would assume that it EVER happens. I’ve only been in project management for about 20 years, so it could be I just haven’t seen it yet.
So, everyone is late, but no one wants to admit they are late. That’s where the game of chicken comes in. Project managers hold weekly, sometimes daily, status meeting. No one wants to be the first to say they won’t make the schedule. So, everyone pretends that things are fine. Really, they are waiting for someone else to admit they can’t make their dates.
Eventually, someone blinks and says,
We are going to need another four weeks to put the print feature in.
Now, everyone can relax. They just an extra month and they didn’t have to take a hit for it.
In case you are interested, I’m a pretty good project manager. I don’t play chicken and work very hard to keep the teams I’m working with from playing chicken.
In the movie, James Dean’s character wins his game of chicken. But, for the wrong reason. Dean would have jumped first except he gets trapped in the car. He wanted to bail out early, but was unable to. He would have fit right in at a project management meeting.
Stay safe
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) 2021 Rodney M Bliss, all rights reserved