Random Thoughts From the Road: MSU

My wife and I spent last weekend enjoying Autumn's glory on the campus of Michigan State University. I love traveling simply because, to paraphrase my brother-in-law , "if you want to have new thoughts, you've got to do new things." So here are some of things hanging around in my head since the trip:

The Starbury. Worn in the NBA and always only $14.98. No comment from Nike, Addidas, or Reebok.

My impression after driving a PT Cruiser: fun to drive but I wouldn't buy one (it definitely prefers cruising to passing). Though I'm always impressed with the details that Chrysler engineers seem to focus on.

Michigan speed limits: how can you set a limit of 75 for cars and 55 for trucks? Lowest common denominator rules...

If Technology is a flattener, and software-as-a-service extends the metaphor, why is it hard to offshore parts of SAAS?

Why is nearly every mom we know a "sales mom"? How come we never knew about this racket? Another sign of a flat world..?

I'm seeing more and more about biofuels. How come I never see anything addressing the water supply that will help create biofuels? Won't water be much more scarce and in critical supply? Maybe it's not simple. Maybe changes to government, corporate subsidies, water law, and the iconic American farmer are involved. Maybe not. But it's time to start being frank and honest about the environment.

Airport security seems to be much more efficient and less congested when it's dispersed to locations near each terminal rather than centralized in one or two main areas. (Distributed systems rule)

Crushing a beer can in Michigan is offensive. Apparently the can machines need the barcode to pay back the $.10 deposit (or something like that). The general public response to the crush can be quite startling actually.

When I was in college it never, never, occurred to me that I might be talking to a married person in a bar near campus, and that their spouse might be right over there.

WE'RE ALL WASTING AWAY!

Saturday night I took in a concert the likes of which I haven't enjoyed in a loooong time. I saw Kasabian (and here) with Mew and onethousand pictures at the Gothic Theatre in Denver. I'd never seen or heard really any music from any of the bands, aside from the annoyingly short blurbs on iTunes. But being a top-rated band from Leicester, England, and supporting act for Oasis, I'd heard quite a bit of buzz surrounding Kasabian and I liked enough of their annoyingly short sound to check them out. The concert came at an appropriate time, having read Britpop! just two weeks earlier.

I went through a period of about two or three years in college where I tried to cram in as many concerts as possible. Four concerts in five nights was not out of the question: Rollins Band with Sausage and Helmet, Sheryl Crow, Lemonheads with Better than Ezra, and The Cranberries (absent Suede). And I've always been pretty enamored with British bands. Maybe it's their understated stage presence and overwhelming sound, or maybe it's just because they're relatively hard to come by in Denver/Boulder. In any case, save David Grey (technically) and some group of Asian chaps rocking the The Dublin Castle, I haven't been touched by the British sound in about ten years.

Kasabian were awesome and that's just about all I can say. The Gothic is a small venue, holding maybe 500 people (300 of which approximately in attendance), and Kasabian absolutely blew the doors off the place, blew me away, and took me back to my first Brit-band show with Radiohead. It was amazing. And I usually don't look forward to opening acts, but both bands were talented in their own right and really caught my attention. Especially Mew with their abstract visuals playing on a huge screen behind them along with their abstract vocals - almost uncategorizable. Could one expect less from the top-rated band out of Denmark? But Tom Meighan, lead singer for Kasabian, was the star of the night... by far. He came off to me as a mix of Mick Jagger and Liam Gallagher of Oasis. A good friend that saw Kasabian a year ago mentioned it's apparent that Meighan's been influenced heavily by Gallagher in the year they've been touring. In any case, I felt lucky to be that close to the stage on that night.

Concert Quote of the Night, toilet wall scratches: God loves, Man kills

Conversation of the Week

When I asked my four year old son what he learned at school (daycare) today, he said they were learning about water.

"Hey Dad, do you know what water's made out of?"

(Me, thinking, "well, I know what it's made out of but I can't possibly imagine what you're about to tell me.") "No buddy. What?"

"Um, two H's and an O."

(Me, thinking, "I can't believe you just said that; there's no way he knows what that means.") "Huh!"

10 second pause

"Yep. Two Hydrogens and an Oxygen."

(Me, thinking, "I cannot believe you just said that! Unbelievable!") "Wow! That is really interesting!"

"Yeah Dad."

(Me, thinking, "wonder if I should get him started on 'Six Easy Pieces'...")

Back From Outer Space

My wife and I started new jobs on the same day in March and it has been an absolute time warp up to now. For me, I started with a company that I knew no one inside. For my wife, she started back as a professional for the first time since before she was pregnant with our son - nearly six years ago. For a little while we went into survival mode but Memorial Day weekend really marked a point where we've all gotten into our grooves and we're starting to create some time and space for ourselves (as they say in the NHL).

And what a better way to blow off some stress than to help my brother-in-law close down Armida's karaoke bar in Denver. Twice.

My brother-in-law lives in Wisconsin and works on a dairy farm. His girlfriend toured the world with a reggae band and has since become a bar favorite around the upper peninsula of Michigan. I've witnessed the jaw-dropping reaction she gets in bars up there... unfortunately, "jaw-dropping" is not the reaction we got when we took the mic but at least I've managed to expand my karaoke horizons.

The first time I ever karaoked I did just one song: Blister in the Sun by the Violent Femmes. I decided to start off with that one again just to get my legs under me. Unlike some bars that have karaoke off in the corner, Armida's is built around it. You're up front and on stage. So it definitely helps to drop a drink or two and pick a song you can channel, or one where you only have to sound like Gordon Gano of the Violent Femmes. The other subtle point I learned is that there are a few songs that are bar favorites and you can't go wrong by taking a shot; it's smart to get the crowd on your side early. Case in point, my next song was Brandy (you're a fine girl) by Looking Glass. This is a song that I didn't nail but can certainly dial in on. And, after having won over the bar with my opener, had two random young ladies grinding me on stage (which actually threw me off because, c'mon, Brandy's just not a grinding song). Then there's the closer. In a crowded bar, this is the one that everyone's pretty much drunk for. And again, for some reason I can do Turning Japanese by the Vapors halfway decently - which is all you really need for the closer. Champagne Supernova by Oasis, though slightly off-topic lyrically, was thrown in there somewhere as well...

The next outing wasn't nearly as successful but nonetheless fun. My set included: Tainted Love by Soft Cell, Everything to Everyone by Everclear, and Turning Japanese again in a desperate attempt to win back a portion of the bar. Along the way I took note of such bar favorites as Living on a Prayer by Bon Jovi, Santeria by Sublime, Centerfold by J. Geils Band, and Creep by Radiohead. Look out Michigan, I'll be touring the UP this summer!

Random Netflix Musings

Well, the numbers are in for 2005. We watched 116 Netflix movies last year. That's an average of 9.6 movies per month at $1.88 each. Netflix doesn't exactly make it easy to figure this out - except that they send emails that can be collected. Maybe there's some sort of Long Tail or Web 2.0-ish opportunity here...

I wonder how many Netflix disks were lost because of Hurricane Katrina?

The Economics of Expertise

Kathy Sierra, contributing author to O'Reilly's Head First series, Sun's Java certification exams, and Creating Passionate Users makes some interesting points in "How to be an expert". It's another great post embodying the unifying theme of how to kick ass.

In my opinion, there are some very real economic decisions made when evaluating how far down the expert road you want to get. I tend to agree that we practice the things we're already good at. I also agree to an extent that we avoid things we suck at, but I'm not sure it's because we make a decision to be mediocre. I think it has as much to do with the value of our time, or an organization's time, as much as anything.

The point was made, "Yet the research says that if we were willing to put in more hours, and to use those hours to practice the things that aren't so fun, we could become good." I totally understand the point of this sentence. From a pragmatic standpoint, this could describe more time in test-driven development, or an extra evening at a user's group meeting, or really digging into SOAP with that next web service. But I only have 24 hours in a day and I need to sleep for some of that time! So those other 17-ish hours of my day have some real economic value to me, my family, and possibly other people.

It seems the value of becoming an expert sometime in the future is constantly weighed against the near-term value of that time. And the distance into the future seems to be significant as well. For example, O'Reilly's home page currently displays a heading: "Technology Doesn't Wait-- Neither Should You". In other words, we have a relatively short amount of time to maximize our expertise in a technology. Entity beans? Stateless session beans is the way to go. EJB? Why? Don't you know that Hibernate with Spring probably solves the same problem? Struts? You should consider Ajax with JSF. JavaScript and JSP? Why not a C# .NET smart client..? And on and on for eternity. Sure, I can still put in more hours and become an expert in C or SmallTalk. And yes, being an expert in anything at any time is worthy of some merit. But what it comes down to is this: is the payoff at the end of the expert road worth the time that I missed on other things, particularly, playing with my kids? In technology, that value is diminished with every passing day.

So this is probably the reason why I still have not actually changed the oil in my car myself. There are experts out there that can do it for me. And in the end, I guess I'll live with mediocrity in investing, remodeling my house, or playing that saxophone that's in my basement. But that's because I am trying as a software engineer. And frankly, I'm able to convince my employer to pick up a portion of the economic cost of traveling down that road. But most importantly, I'm well on my way to becoming an expert at being a dad. And I think the economic benefits of that to our world will probably outweigh my contributions as an engineer.

Open AJAX Consortium Looks to Ease Development

One of the interesting points that Laszlo Systems CTO David Temkin makes in this interview is the relative lack of good UI developers out there, specifically in the J2EE realm. I think he's correct in stating that a good J2EE developer tends to be proficient more on the server side than on the client. And maybe that's because there's relatively much less Java code actually involved in the display when you're talking about a web application - witness the rise of Ajax. Also, a good UI developer has to be so much more than just a software engineer. A good UI developer needs to be part psychologist, part designer in the pure sense, part artist, part engineer, a users' advocate (gasp), and extremely detail-oriented. On top of that, a good J2EE UI developer probably needs to work well in other technologies such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML/XSL, and even Flash. True, these are not so much of a technical stretch compared with J2EE technologies, but it is a bit of a stretch to expect the same person to be truly exceptional in all of the technologies (jack of all trades, master of none).

The one thing that catches my attention most about Ajax splashed across java.sun.com, developerWorks, and TheServerSide is that these same people were touting XP not very long ago. And granted, I understand that these folks must live on the edge. But I find it so interesting that we've shifted from test driven development and best-practices to getting something out the door quickly. And a "something" which isn't based on a standard framework (as this article points to), can't easily be unit tested, has very little tool support, and actually isn't even grounded in Java!

I'm excited about these developments but I'm also interested in watching how they play out with Windows Vista and XAML lurking around the corner.