Archive for the ‘life’ Category

Iron Man is owed a much longer review than this, but suffice it to say that it’s easily the best Marvel superhero movie ever made, and high on the list of super hero movies period. The X-Men movies were garbage, and this more than makes up for all of their whininess. Give me this and the ‘89 and ‘05 Batman films and I’m happy.

Tonight as the credits rolled, my wife turned to me and asked two questions: 1) “Have you turned into an eight year old?” and 2) “Does this mean you’ll see Sex In The City with me?”

The truth is that I’d like to quit my job and start a rock band.

The truth is that I hate my commute, except for the part when I cross the bridge and the part when I pull into the drive way. The truth is that I stay pretty tired, but it’s okay cause our bed is pretty comfortable. The truth is that I desperately need to get into the gym, and write more posts, and take more photos with a real camera and fewer with a phone. The truth is that Juno was much better than National Treasure Part 2, or whatever is was officially called.

The truth is they might sell the company I work for, and I’m not having much luck caring or even understanding what that might mean—the truth must be that consolidation is Good™.

The truth is I bought a two pound bag of jerky, and have convinced even my wife that it’s awesome stuff. The truth is my XBox finally caught the red ring of death, and we might get a Wii assuming I can find one. The truth is it feels good to tell the truth, even a small one.

So, we close on the house tomorrow. Right now, I’m sitting in an almost bare house that’s almost packed and I’m almost asleep. I’m told that closings take a long time, and before I can attend ours I’ll be cleaning and watching the insulation guys do their thing.

This hasn’t been a bad apartment, aside from the heat that went on the fritz last winter and all the bats this summer. At least the neighbors were quiet, even the Ukrainian strippers.

Sometime tomorrow it will sink in that my wife and I are the proud owners of a pile of wood and brick and cement that we bought to put our stuff in. It’s a little absurd, really; I mean, who would have ever thought that I would buy a house, much less one that essentially is in the middle of nowhere. When I think of all the times that I sat in a restaurant here and mourned the death of our anonymity, longing for the days in DC when everyone didn’t know all of your shit, it seems even more odd.

But it’s perfect in a way, really. I’m not normal, so signing on to do a three hour commute for at least another three years kind of fits. Besides, who wants to pay DC rent? And anyone who’s seen my wife–or talked to her about her work, and heard just how brilliant she is–has even more evidence about why I might forgo a better job in a more stimulating town and sign on for a heaping helping of Beigeville. For this, I’ll take the constant waving at everyone we see; the inability to make it out of the coffee shop in under an hour. The trade off is that I have great friends in two cities, and a wealth of people to help us move all our stuff in that aforementioned pile of wood and brick and cement.

Owning a home is just another club to join, like the married club or the having kids club. After years of actively not wanting to be a member of any club that would have me, I think I’m weakening in my old age. As long as I can stay a member of the PBR and sheetcake club, this should be pretty easy.

My iPhone sustained its first battle scar this morning, as it took a sickening dive to the pavement. My headphone cord caught the buckle on my computer bag, launching the iPhone out of its holster. It made a gut wrenching hollow noise as it hit the ground, but once I was sure the screen was alright (and it is 100% alright) I was regaled with the sound of music through the earbuds. So, this thing can take a spill. I will not be allowing it to do it again, however.

An inescapable fact of life in web development and product design is meetings. Frankly when I was first freelancing I thought the notion of the hours long info share was sort of a myth; as I began to work in teams later I realized they were not mythical, but rather nightmarish. Often, meetings would drag on for hours or even consume entire workdays. It seemed that no one was able to hold focus for much longer than an hour, but the meetings would continue anyway. In fact, these marathons stretched the meaning of the term meetings and veered dangerously toward seminars. Most of them had no real agendas, and almost everyone in the meeting was seeing new information for the first time.

I found myself yesterday in a planning session with a large group of people. We were asked to, among other things, talk a little bit about the stuff we’re asked to do too often in our office lives. Unsurprisingly almost every group mentioned meetings. So the object of this post is to share some ideas for making meetings—something I stress really are important in development—something more useful than they may be for you right now.

I. Meeting types
Meetings are not one-size-fits-all. In so many offices, meetings are held because it “seems like the right thing to do”; you want to build consensus for a project, or take the pulse of several team members about their status while on a project and a meeting with everyone involved seems like the best way. Instead, consider a ten minute standup meeting—all parties standing and looking directly at the features, code or colors in question. Another type of meeting that happens constantly is a document review, where a team might get together to go over a timeline or other shared document. The kiss of death in these meetings is twofold: letting them run over about half an hour, and not giving all attendees an opportunity to see the document beforehand. I can’t think of anything more frustrating than watching someone edit a spreadsheet on an overhead projector that I have either never seen before, or that I only occupy a couple of rows in.

In short, keep meeting relevant and short. When only three people need to talk, three people should talk. Avoid concepts and words, and seek concrete actions that you can dole out to everyone at the table. It may seem childish, obvious, or elementary at first to hear yourself saying, “Bob, crank this widget”—but when everyone leaves the room feeling like they have something real to do, they feel much better.

II. Handouts
In our office we’ve gotten as far as doing meeting agendas, and they really help. Agendas at least make participants feel like there’s a map out of the madness, and if all else fails it’s something you can point to to get back on track. One thing we don’t do is a pre-meeting info share of some kind. The pre-meet can be a short email sent to everyone invited that says:

“Hi all-

We’ll be meeting about Project X Wednesday @ 11am. The agenda is attached to this email. At this meeting the project planner, Bob, will expect the following from the team:

• Sue: Wireframes uploaded to Basecamp
• Erik: An answer from Google about the foo API
• Matt: Status update on the data import scripts from WordPress to Joomla

This gives you guys two more full days to bash these things out. You can expect another task from the list at the end of the meeting.

See you then!

-Bob”

The pre-meet puts everyone on the same page. It takes the meeting from the land of the abstract concept to the land of the concrete task check-in. We have to assume that no one is going to do meeting specific preparation, so substitute the actual work for the meeting related busy work and then talk about that.

It might also be a good idea to send along your meeting agenda, as suggested in the example. If it isn’t ready yet, try to send it along no more or less than one day before the meeting. More than two days no one remembers, and twenty∏ minutes before you might as well not bother.

III. Meeting math
If all else fails, and you literally cannot get a hold on meetings consider this formula.

E(Employees) x Pr(Pay rate) x Ml(Meeting length)

If the cost of the meeting in contrast to the profit or cost of your project makes you want to jump out of a window , someone may end up managing meetings for you.

Warning: This is a post about my job. If you think you may be offended by such a thing, now would be a good time to close this tab.

I have a friend who’s almost universally joshed for being the guy most likely to march into work early Monday morning and announce he hasn’t slept in days, because he’s been coding his way through some problem. For months I had no idea what he was talking about; I was able to turn work off if I wanted to once I walked through the door, so why couldn’t he? Slowly, given enough time pressure, almost any designer or developer can start doing the same thing. I realized this when I sat in front of my Mac Book Pro on Sunday and coded for fourteen straight hours—really only breaking for the bathroom and to eat. The reasons for this are myriad, and are the basis for an anecdote about deadlines and such.

Our company has a tendency to talk about things a lot. Given almost any project, we can find a way to have at least a dozen meetings just about how to get started. Once we’ve figured that out, we’ll have a dozen more to decide what the next steps are. The meetings we tend not to have are the ones about scope, requirements or audience. These things always seem to be someone else’s job. The head of the department I’m attached to has it far worse than me, however, as he gets pulled into essentially every meeting ever planned; it’s left to him to sit through them all offering advice and guidance where applicable, and making the hard choices about milestones and even some development issues. It’s fair to say that we have a ‘meeting culture’, and that we tend to manage by committee. This often leads to deadlines that are set by such committees.

What tends to happen when committees don’t know much about requirements or project scope is that boat docks get built in the desert; one hand is totally unaware of the difficulty (or triviality) of the tasks being performed by the other, unrealistic deadlines are set, and the end product is a mess. I found this out the hard way with my last product launch, which was governed by an arbitrary deadline that could only be met by means of several 90 hour work weeks in the dev room. The “extra time” needed to make things better after launch was almost exactly the amount of time the dev team asked for on the front end of the project. Score one for the immovable, immutable deadline. In the interest of fairness I do understand the business case for setting deadlines and/or milestones on major projects; in large organizations it’s often necessary to attach revenue to projects that haven’t happened just yet.

I guess the only advice I have for planning a project is this: understand that most of what you’ll be doing in the initial phases is really only a guess, and that you need to check your work frequently against your map to make sure you’re on track. You need to give your people the leeway to say “this map does not match this road”, and change the map. But I also understand why this is so hard to do. It’s very difficult, especially in an overcrowded and ever more cutthroat online market, to take the time to breathe through a milestone meeting where you hear things are slipping. It’s also difficult to trust that the project is worth the extra weeks of design and testing and coding and recoding; but if you show up for work everyday anyhow, then you must believe that at least a little, right?

Today when I sat in a meeting and heard all of those things happening—the deadline slipping, the map changing, the request for more time—I felt as though cooler heads had prevailed. I felt like the project managers were sticking their necks out for the dev team, and that my fourteen hour coding sprees might no longer be necessary. Even though I left the office tired of meetings I felt renewed to some degree, even if for a few minutes. Will we return to endless meetings and arbitrary deadlines? Of course we will, but for today we can pretend there is no phantom deadline. That’s worth a meeting or two for me.

Related update: I’ve just been directed to the WikiPedia entry for “Scrum“, a project management system that seems to have some really nice ideas. Your mileage may vary.

So this is what happens: you get married, you buy a house, you have babies. We are stuck on the middle part.

We’ve seen 15 properties in just a few short weeks, and we’re tired. The two offers we’ve made (hey, we’re picky) have come in short. So far, the whole process seems inelegant and labor intensive–and there aren’t many houses around here worth seeing. Only one has really caught my eye–the 1936 Sears Craftsman pictured here–but alas, our offer was low for this one too.

So it’s a work in progress, this home buying business. We’ll get there, and soon all my Apple crap will have a place to live and I’ll have an office to do freelance (lots of freelance) from. Until then, anyone know of any great Craftsman houses going cheap on this side of the swamp?

Although some of you (one of you) is probably waiting on part 2 of the iPhone review, I thought I might relate something else that’s been going on around here. Frankly, I’m experiencing iPhone overload and, well, this is sort of interesting.

My wife and I may be moving into a new house. We’re approaching the whole thing with more than a little bit of caution, and trying to weigh all the possible angles with definite consideration; who wants to get stuck in a terrible house that looked nice from the curb but is obviously haunted by pirate ghosts? In any case part of this process is looking at our current monthly expenses, trimming what we can and dropping what we don’t need. It also means doing the “pre-qualification dance”. This means calling various private and/or government institutions and asking for things, which never works out very well for me. I spend a few hours every month fighting with Sprint or Time Warner, and my wife spends about the same amount of time just with out current rental agency on random mammal invaders. These calls are normally stressful, long and unproductive. But this week I’ve discovered an untapped vein of karma and good will.

A few days ago I need a three year old W2 form. I called the IRS for a reprint and after a brief hold I spoke with a very pleasant IRS employee (oxy moron, if there ever was one) who not only was glad to fax me a copy, but would call me back when I was near my office fax machine and send it to me. She called me back at the very minute she’d promised to, and even explained the transcript to me. Then, last night I had to call Netflix to admit to them that a DVD had gone missing, swallowed up by the monster that is a wedding and a honeymoon. The rep congratulated me on my wedding, cheerfully forgave me the loss of the DVD and even told me how to easily combine my account and Shannon’s while saving me eight dollars. I was on a roll, so I called Time Warner Cable to argue my bill, like every month.

The vein of karma sputtered and coughed, as I was treated to possibly the rudest phone rep in the history of customer service. Finally, in shock, I simply hung up the phone and got myself a beer. Had the well finally run dry? Were the bad old days here again? I called Time Warner again, hoping for someone other then Eva Braun.

Unbelievably the next rep I spoke to was not only polite, but was apologetic on the previous one’s behalf. She expressed what seemed like genuine sympathy (even irritation) for Time Warner’s tendency to double- and over-bill us, fixed it and took my payment without a service charge. Before I hung up I told her, “You’ve just demonstrated one of the major principles of customer service: I would have given this money to any rep, but giving it to the nice rep made it hurt less.” And it kept my karma flow intact. So, what else should I do with all this good will the universe is pointing at me? Maybe this is the week to try fugu.

I have returned with aching feet from an exploration of Montreal. Oh, and as of 2:15 PM last Saturday, June 23rd I am married. I left my phone charger somewhere above Vermont I think (in case you’ve called and think I’m dead), and our house is full of gifts, the volume and size of which basically demand that we buy a house; our apartment, while spacious, simply can’t hold this much stuff. I’m pushing for that house to be in Canada, now that I’ve witnessed first hand the miracle that is a French-speaking city. I’ve hauled out all my Rush records and insist on greeting everyone here with “bonjour” or “bonsoir”, even though it makes checkout people visibly consternated and perhaps a bit hostile.

Getting married was easier than they tell you. Going on a honeymoon was significantly more difficult. But no matter the level of difficulty of all the background activities the important thing is that for 10 days we were surrounded by friends and family or on vacation, and everyday when I woke up I was face to face with the easiest and number one best decision I’ve ever made. Every American, especially the ones who think we live in the best country ever, needs to visit Canada at least once. Canada is clean, polite, and has its priorities in fucking order. Want to know how many times I read about Paris Hilton in the newspaper or saw her on TV not counting the times I flipped past CNN? Zero. Goose egg. Zilch. It was really nice. Being even a temporary participant in a society like that makes you realize just how much brainwashing we go through on a daily basis in the US, making us the irritable frat boys of the world. Oh well. I’m off the soap crate for now I guess, except to say that flying out of an airport where no one knows that the fuck the “TSA” is is a nice experience.

Security Person: Sir, what are you doing?
Me: (Taking complete contents of bag out–including laptop–and removing shoes and socks.) Getting ready to go through security. Duh.
Security Person: Oh. Well, we can just put your things through this powerful x-ray machine. It seems to work much better than having some asshole getting $6.15 an hour paw through your stuff and treat you like a terrorist just for trying to get to Washington Dulles Airport.
Me: (Weeping.)
Security Person: Sir? Here, let me help you.
Me: (More weeping.)

Later, after I put on a pair of shoes my wife bought for me I found myself stuck with a shoebox and plastic bag. Hopefully, I approached an attendant in the airport terminal and told her about buying the shoes, and not being able to fit the box into the trash. I told her I was hesitant to simply put it next to the trash lest someone think it was a bomb. She laughed kindly. “Oh no, that’s fine. This is Canada. Everything isn’t a bomb here. Are your shoes comfortable? They look very nice.”

In two days, I’ll be getting married. After that, I’ll be in Montreal for our honeymoon–not unable to post, but probably unwilling. I’ve maybe mentioned all of this before, almost certainly if I know you in real life, but I’m extremely excited and nervous. For ten days we’ll be either surrounded by friends and family or on vacation in another country; I happen to think that despite the obvious stresses of planning such a thing that this is a wonderful way to begin a life with another person.

Anyone who has suggestions of things to do while in Montreal or Quebec City who happens across the blogint he next eight days or so should feel welcomed to leave comments on this post. We’d really love to have a few more activities than we need while we’re there. Besides, after watching Sicko Canada seems like a nice place to live permanently.