A Random Guest Star

Well, tomorrow is my birthday,^* so you’ll get no blog post from me this week.  But, luckily for you, I’ve engaged a guest blogger to keep you amused until my return next week.  This is a story that my elder son wrote for school, and is reprinted here with his permission.  I’ve edited it only slightly; these words are all his, and convey a bit of genetic talent for the craft, if I do say so myself.  Whether he will pursue this or not, I can’t say.  But it seems a promising start.



The Bard’s Tale

There was once a man, many years ago, who was said to be a great bard, and also, the luckiest bard in all the world.  He would travel from kingdom to kingdom, country to country, singing songs and generally enjoying a carefree life.

It was one day that he was in a kingdom, having been requested to play a song for the king.  He played a happy, joyous song, but the king was sad, and simply sighed and motioned for the bard to leave.  The bard slung his lute around his shoulders once again, and before leaving, asked why the king was so sad.  The king said his daughter had been taken away, as a sacrifice to a group of trolls that would otherwise destroy the kingdom, were they not sated.  The bard, being a heroic sort, offered to save the princess.  The king sighed again, and said that he was certainly welcome to try.  The bard ignored the king’s pessimism, and set off for the trolls.

He asked around, and learned the road down which sacrifices were taken, and happily set off.  After a few days of travelling, he came across a forest, which he happily skipped into, singing a merry song.  A group of bandits heard him, and set off to find him.  They leapt out at him, baring knives and crossbows and swords.  The leader walked out and asked for everything the bard could offer.  He smiled and said although he had not much of material value, he had songs.  The bandit leader rolled his eyes.  “Another merry idiot,” he said.  “Open fire.”  The crossbows all fired at once, sending a hail of arrows at the happy bard.  He simply stood still as every arrow missed, the closest simply shooting his hat off his head.  “A fine shot!” he remarked.  “Now, may I have a turn?”  As everyone stood astonished, he took a bow from a pack on his back, drew it, and aimed it at a rock.  It hit the rock, ricocheted into an archer’s arm, preventing him from shooting any more, through the arm, into several more lined up in a row, hitting the chest armor of one, and bouncing into the leader’s shoulder.  The injured fell and held their wounds, while the uninjured stared in amazement.  They all ran, fearing the bard, who happily marched forward, through the forest, and up a rocky mountain path as night fell.

He saw a fire ahead, and the ugly warty trolls gathered around it.  They were lighting it, and intended to cook the princess.  The bard saw why they were a threat to the kingdom: each was as tall as fifty men!  The bard walked up to the colossal trolls, four in all, and introduced himself.  A troll swatted at him with his club, which the bard hopped back from, just in time.  “Well, that was rude!” he said.  The trolls grunted, clearly not conversational types, and another tried to hit him again, which he jumped back from, again.  He slung his lute from his back into his hands, and began to play a song, dancing and jumping, merrily dodging the giants.  He did this for two days (it is said), until the giants all began to tire, and collapsed onto one and another.  He smiled, and walked around the cluster of bodies, and untied the princess.

“My love, I have rescued you!” he shouted, smiling.  He moved his head sideways, expecting a kiss on the cheek.   “Thank you,” the princess said simply, walking down the rocky mountain path.  He followed, asking “aren’t you going to kiss me?”  The princess looked at him and shook her head.  “Just because you saved me doesn’t mean I love you,” she said, moving her hand to brush away branches from a tree.  “I appreciate the gesture, surely, but not enough to marry you, or whatever you intend.”  The bard looked shocked.  “But ... but ... I’m the luckiest bard in the world!  Courting is so simple for me!”  The princess shrugged, and walked off.

The bard sat, sad.  But, he had an idea.  All he had to do was serenade the princess!  Days later, the princess sat at her room in the palace, when she heard music.  Opening the door she saw the bard.  “Look, really, I appreciate everything you’ve done, but I do not love you!”  She shut the doors, but he was determined.  Every day for the next month he sang to her, becoming more and more unhappy with her determination not to love him.

Eventually, she married a prince, and the bard was devastated.  It is said he threw himself off a cliff, singing his song of love.





And there you have it.  I thought it was a bit of a downer personally, but its author says it’s just a story with a message.  And the moral of it is:

Don’t be so fucking cocky that you commit suicide at the first girl who doesn’t return your affections.

Sounds reasonable to me.





* Now, if you’ve been paying attention, you already knew I’m a Scorpio and a Horse, and I’ve dropped a few hints as to which decade of life I’m in, so at this point you should be able to work exactly when I was born ...

Tourney the First

First, the background.

I’ve talked many times about one of my favorite games: Heroscape.  I have even mentioned, in passing, the existence of National Heroscape Day.  Now, obviously this is just an excuse for us gaming geeks to play our favorite game even more competitively than usual, and we all just pulled the whole “holiday” out of our collective butts, but, still, it’s a big day for us Heroscape geeks.  I’ve also mentioned the fact that Heroscape has been discontinued, and that makes keeping things like NHSD alive a bit tougher.  Finally, I have discussed the fact that my middle child, who I sometimes refer to as the Smaller Animal, is also interested in the game, despite his tender age.  He was in the waning days of five years old, at the time of that post.  Now, of course, he’s a much wiser six-and-a-half.

Of course, all these things must converge at some point.  And so they did, a week ago yesterday, at my younger son’s first National Heroscape Day tournament.

Secondly, the preparation.

Now, I didn’t imagine for a second that my son, precocious as he may be, was actually going to be able to handle a real tournament all on his own.  This may be just a wargame where (mostly) adult geeks push around plastic toy soldiers, and my fellow members of the SoCal Heroscape League may be extremely tolerant of playing with young children (which they are, and I’m so thankful for them all), but a tourney is still a tourney, and we take it seriously.  Nobody was going to let him win because he was cute, so I had to prepare for teary losses.  Nobody was going to take it easy on him because he was playing an army that he liked as opposed to something that was truly competitive, so I had to help him shore up his ideas of what a good army consisted of.  And no one was going to let him break the rules just ’cause he was young and inexperienced, so I had to work on getting him to adhere to even those rules that he generally found annoying.

Basically, that meant practice, practice, practice.  And I didn’t have enough time to do it all myself, so I set my eldest to work on it.  He had decided he would go ahead and enter the tourney himself this year (he’s done so before, but he’s also sat out and waited for the after-tournament festivities, when other games that he likes even more can be tackled, like Munchkin, which is his current favorite), so he had to work on his army anyway.  The Larger Animal (natch) is also not prone to taking it easy on his little bro, so there were some useful lessons there as well.  This also helped the apprentice see where his army wasn’t necessarily as powerful as he might think, just from having spanked his father with it a few times (see descriptions of previous battle reports for why he tends to beat me).  He favors elementals, for some reason: I remember when those packs first arrived, and he was just fascinated by them from the get-go.  So his idea of a “good” army is one with as many elementals in it as I will let him field.  It took a while for me to even convince him he needed the elementalist (without whom the elementals aren’t really even an army; they’re more like a pack of disconnected brawlers).

But, the thing is: all elementals aren’t created equal.  Fire elementals kick some major ass, if played right.  Water elementals can be pretty devastating too, plus you really need them for their “water bomb” power, because they’re the only ranged elemental unit in the game.  Air elementals, on the other hand, are just “meh,” and earth elementals are hardly worth their cost.  And don’t even get me started on the huge ice elemental: he’s pretty to look at it, but no way is he worth it unless you know you’re going to be playing on a snow map (which you don’t, in a tournament setting, where you generally play on a different map every round).  So, what I needed to convince the Smaller Animal was that he needed to beef up the fires and waters, scale back the airs, drop the earths and the ice entirely, and bring in some protection for the elementalist, who, being the only thing holding the entire force together, naturally has a giant bullseye painted on his back.

Next we looked at the “backup army.”  Now, each group that holds Heroscape tourneys gets to do things a little differently, and our group (mainly because of my lobbying) adopted a plan last year where you could switch armies in the middle of the tourney if your primary army looked like it was getting its butt kicked a little too often.  We decided to do the same this year as well.  After some discussion, he decided to go with a “dragon army” as a backup.  Which presented another problem: another thing our group has decided on is to use a “restricted list,” which is a common thing for Heroscape groups to have.  The issue is that, as much as Heroscape units are supposed to be balanced, there are a few units which are just plain better than the rest.  These are what we sometimes call “A units” (or even “A+ units”), and, the thing is, if you bring an army composed of nothing but A units, your army is really tough to beat.  But not because you’re a better player, if you see what I mean.  So the point of a restricted list is to level the playing field a bit, and your army is not allowed to contain any more than one unit on the restricted list.  But dragons, being pretty kick-ass units (as you could well imagine) are quite often A units.  In fact, of the 5 big dragons in the game, 3 are on the restricted list, which makes an “all dragon army” a bit of a challenge, not to mention that they’re expensive (in terms of points), and you can’t afford but so many dragons in your army.  But, in the end, we picked one big dragon off the restricted list, one not, and then took one each of the baby dragons (called “wyrmlings”), which are fun little guys to play, to keep the dragon theme going.  An army like this has a fair amount of power, but it also means that, if either of the big guys goes down, you’re essentially only fighting with half an army at that point, so it can be tricky to play well.

Finally, I decided that my son and I would play as a team.  I needed to keep an eye on him, so there’s no way I was going to be able to play my own games anyway.  And this way, if his attention flagged, I could keep him on track, or, in the worst case, just take over entirely for him.

Finally, the tournament.

As you might expect with a discontinued game, turnout is getting lighter.  We only had 8 entrants in the tournament this year, and I brought 3 of them with me.  Which is somewhat disappointing, but I think it just goes to show that I need to put more effort into building some excitement (this year I was too distracted by other stuff to put much work into it).  Also, we’d decided not to allow our new community-supported customs (against my pleadings), which may or may not have contributed to the low turnout (my own theory is that keeping the options open to new figures keeps the game from growing stale).  But 8 people is enough for 4 games per round, and we decided that we could play 3 rounds and then have enough to decide the final standings.

So the 8 were: our host and the Larger Animal, both of whom have a tendency to come in lower in the standings, one guy who typically comes in second or third in tourneys, two guys I knew of but hadn’t seen play in tourneys before, two newbies (one who had only been playing for a few months and one, my eldest’s friend, who we literally taught how to play that day), and the Smaller Animal, who, with me on his team advising and possibly taking over at some point, should be at roughly the same level as I, who am basically very average.  In fact, I’ve come in just below dead center at every Heroscape tourney I’ve ever played in, except one (when I had a bad day and came in very near the bottom).  So, overall, it didn’t seem like a crowded field, and most of the historical heavy hitters were absent.  I was feeling good about our chances.

First game was against our host.  Luckily, he’s one of the most patient players with the kids, and the fact that my little one takes forever to make up his mind about what to do (even if I’m trying to advise him about best plans of action), and even takes forever just to roll dice, does require an opponent with patience.  The elementals were a good counter against vikings and protectors (a squad of winged “kyrie,” or angel-like beings).  Protectors are a great squad—one of the few squads that can both fly and shoot from range—but expensive, which means you can’t put very many of them in your army.  It was a close battle, but the kid and I prevailed.

In the second round, we had the unfortunate luck to go up against the person I considered the biggest threat.  He brought several squads worth of redcoats and a hydra.  By this time, another kid around my son’s age had come and he found he had other things to do than mess around with silly Heroscape games.  So I was all alone against a fellow who had not only beaten me before, but had beaten plenty of other people who had also beaten me.  I didn’t do too bad for all that: I managed to whittle down most of the redcoats, but by that point I had practically no elementals left, and he still had the hydra, which had never even had to enter the battle.  He won on points by a wide margin.

In the final game, after consultation with my son, we decided to switch to the dragons.  We drew one of the unknown quantitiess, and I had to play most of this game alone as well, although my son and his newfound friend joined us toward the end, mostly to roll the dice for our team.  In this game, it was more him advising me than the other way around.  This was a pretty close game too—our big red dragon was uniquely poised to wipe out most of his army, but he also had brought a hydra, and I made the mistake of letting him get a few too many licks in on our green dragon before trying to close in for the kill.  In the end, the dragons took out nearly everything but the hydra, but the hydra took out our whole team.

In the final standings, one of the newbies (not my other son’s friend) came in first, surprising us all.  The fellow who had beaten us in the second game came in second, which gave us a boost in the “strength of schedule” category.  We came in 5th, once again (for me) just south of center.  But pretty decent for my kid’s first time out, even if he did only play about half the time.

So that was the story of my younger son’s first Heroscape tourney.  He had a blast and is already planning out his armies for next year.  I hope we can keep the game alive long enough for next year to be a viable option for him.

National Heroscape Day Fallout

Yesterday was the Smaller Animal‘s first Heroscape tournament, and I would love to tell you all about it.  In fact, I will ... but next week.  We’re all wiped out, plus behind on chores, plus I’m on call this weekend and I still have more work to do.  Next week, I promise.

It’s a good story.  Not that you should care.  But apparently you do, ’cause you keep coming back.  So stay tuned: it’ll be worth the wait.  Or, if it’s not, I’ll remind of the name of the blog, yet again.

Arcing in Chicago: the Dresden Files

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been reading the Dresden Files, and it’s getting really, really good.  I’ve been trying to put my finger on exactly why it’s such a good series, and I think I’ve finally got it.

Now, don’t get me wrong: there are a lot of very obvious reasons why it’s very good.  First of all, it’s an example of a fairly new subgenre called ”urban fantasy,” which is a moderately cool thing in and of itself.  The standard definition includes the urban setting (natch), plus the supernatural elements, which are typically varied and often unusual.  Oh, sure: there are often your standard vampires and werewolves, but usually an urban fantasy goes far beyond those.  The central idea behind urban fantasy seems to be all the monsters that we’ve ever imagined are out there, somewhere, living amongst us in the modern world, and where better than the crowded, dirty cities, the sprawling metropolises (metropoles?) for the monsters to hide?  If you’ve ever seen Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and, if not, why not? it’s excellent early Whedon), you’ve probably already got the picture.

But a lot of urban fantasy is more about private investigator-type characters, which means it combines the best of horror fiction with detective stories, usually of the hard-bitten crime drama / film noir type.  Although Harry Dresden is not technically a PI, his status as Chicago’s only openly practicing wizard puts him in the position of finding lost people and items, and helping the Chicago police department on their weirder cases.  So he might as well be.  This is of course a great recipe, but let’s face it: it isn’t substantially different from any of the other urban fantasy series I’ve read.  Well, there’s only two of them, really—Greywalker and Kate Daniels—but they’re both pretty darn cool, at least in terms of concept.  In fact, strictly based on premise potential, Dresden isn’t the big dog in this pack.  And yet he leads it.

Part of that is because Jim Butcher is a stellar writer.  Now, Kat Richardson is no slouch either, although the husband-and-wife team known as Ilona Andrews is a definite step down (repeated consistency errors tell me that they need a better editor, at the very least).  But Butcher is a real cut above the rest: not only does he have a wry, witty style that endears him to the reader, and personally reminds me of first falling in love with horror, reading King and Koontz, but his pacing is insane.  You know how practically every paperback you pick up has, somewhere in amongst all the blurbs proclaiming it to be the best book ever, at least one which calls it a “roller coaster ride of thrills” or somesuch twaddle?  Yeah, well, they never are.  But the Dresden Files is the real deal: after tearing through seven books at breakneck speed, I’ve practically got whiplash.  As a would-be writer, I’ve of course analyzed this to see just how the hell he does it ... my personal pace is pretty deliberate, being acquired primarily from reading folks like King, Straub, and Barker, folks who like to take their time.  I think I’m a bit north of Rice and Jordan, certainly, but no one will ever accuse me of being fast-paced.  Butcher, on the other hand, is practically dizzying.  He does it by starting off the first few chapters—perhaps anywhere from a tenth to no more than a quarter of the book—as normal chapters, regular pacing, nothing special.  But then he picks it up, and he does it by ending every chapter on a little mini-cliffhanger.  I’ve literally taken to choosing my stopping points in the middles of his chapter, because I know if I get to the end, I won’t be able to stop.  It’s almost exhausting.  But exhilirating, too.

And of course the characters are interesting as well.  The central characters, Harry Dresden and head of Chicago “Special Investigations” Karrin Murphy, are well-drawn, with interesting backgrounds.  They have some of those plot-demanded misunderstandings towards the beginning of the series, which I find very frustrating, but those get resolved and then we can move on.  The other characters we meet—Michael Carpenter, Thomas Raith, Billy the werewolf, Warden Morgan, and many others—are likewise interesting, and only a few of them (notably Morgan) are one-note stereotypes.  But, again, that’s not particularly unusual: lots of series have very interesting characters.

No, I’ve finally figured out why this series is so damn good.  Allow me, if you will, a brief tangent.

Let’s think in terms of television series (it’s a bit easier than starting with books).  We can divide the world of television series into two basic camps: episodic, and story-arc.  An episodic series is a series of disconnected stories.  Each episode has little to do with the others.  In fact, you can watch them pretty much in any order and it wouldn’t make much difference.  Almost all sitcoms are like this.  Most of the Star Trek series are like this too, as are almost all crime dramas, and doctor shows (all the CSI’s, all the Law & Order’s, ER, House, etc etc).  In fact, once upon a time, nearly all shows were like this.

But lately there’s been a tendency to try to make the other type of shows: the story-arc shows.  These are the shows where every episode is just part of one giant story.  Now, if you have to worry about your show getting cancelled constantly, you can see why this is a dangerous road to start down.  For just two examples of the cruelty this can engender, we could mention the decent Invasion and the excellent Carnivàle.  But, then again, if your show survives the caprice of network executives, you can end up with a fantastic story.  Six Feet Under, Babylon 5, Twin Peaks ... these are all excellent story-arc shows.  Few other shows are, particularly in television history, but all soap operas are, including prime-time soaps such as Dallas.  The best way to identify a story-arc show is to miss an episode and then see if you’re completely lost.  If you are, that’s a story-arc show.  Of course, that’s a disadvantage too: especially for a long-running show, if it’s difficult for people to jump in in the middle, how are you supposed to attract new viewers?

Now, I say there are two kinds of shows, but you guys know me: I don’t actually believe in binary descriptions of anything.  This, like most everything in life, is a spectrum, and there are all kinds of attempts to blend the two or come up with something in the middle.  It could be something simple, like just trying to apply some basic continuity to an episodic show: actions should have consequences, after all, even in a fictional world.  One technique I see becoming popular these days is shows like True Blood or Dexter, where each season is a story-arc, but the seasons themselves are episodic: with perhaps the exception of the first season, you could pretty much watch the seasons out-of-order and not notice much in the way of oddities.  A slightly better technique is to let most of the shows be episodic, but weave in some story-arc episodes to tie things together.  Monk is a good example of this, as are early seasons of Fringe, before it devolved into the sort of insanity vortex that J.J. Abrams is seemingly inexorably sucked into.

Or, what you could do is make every episode like that.

The only example that springs to mind is the quite excellent Burn Notice.  The vast majority of episodes have a pretty simple basic structure:  The main plot is an episodic one, where Michael Weston helps out the victim-of-the-week with their problem-they-can’t-go-to-the-cops-with.  And then there’s the secondary plot, which advances the overall story-arc of the series, which is about Michael trying to find out who framed him.  So the subplots of the episodes are the main plot of the story-arc.  Every single episode advances the story-arc, but usually only a little, so if you were to miss one, you wouldn’t be lost.  And nearly every single episode is also a stand-alone story, so it’s fairly easy to jump in, even without knowing the whole history, and still enjoy the episode.  It’s quite brilliant, if you think about it.  Best of both worlds.

Now let’s hop back over to books.  Most book series, particularly fantasy series, are story-arc series.  They’re actually one giant book, just broken up for your convenience, so you won’t break your back carrying it around in your school backpack.  In fact, the Lord of the Rings, which is generally considered the original fantasy series, was actually written as a single book, but Tolkien’s publishers made him break it up.  Thus, the modern fantasy trilogy.  But, no matter how many volumes, most fantasy series are one giant story.  Narnia, Amber, the Wheel of Time, a Song of Ice and Fire, Harry Potter, the Dark Tower: all story-arc series.

But of course there are exceptions.  The Conan stories, for instance, are so episodic that they weren’t even published in the “right” order.  There are a few other notable fantasy series like that (the Vlad Taltos novels and I believe the Black Company books as well), and a few that are chronological but still basically episodic: the Xanth books, the MythAdventures series, and some others.  Also, the urban fantasy series that I’m familiar with tend to fall into this category as well.  For instance, at least as far as I’ve gotten in the Greywalker series, the stories are very self-contained; the Kate Daniels book has a little more of a story-arc, but it’s still moderately episodic.

Then there’s the Dresden Files.

It starts out with a very episodic feel to it.  Oh, sure, there’s some background info on Harry dropped in the first book, but it feels like just that: background info.  Filling out the backstory.  Just some interesting tidbits to keep us interested in our erstwhile hero.  Even the second book, which fills out a bit more of our understanding of Harry’s past and his family situation, still feels like just another episode in a show about a paranormal PI.

Then it starts to pick up.  More and more info about who Harry really is and what his past has been like comes out.  Then Harry starts to learn stuff about his past that even he didn’t know.  As I say, I’m only on book 8, and there are 14 (so far!), so for all I know it gets even better as you get even deeper in.  And it seems like Butcher intends to keep on going ... one of the advantages of an episodic series is that you can keep writing it forever, if you like.  Of course, you may not like, and then it can be difficult to stop, as luminaries such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have discovered.  But the Dresden Files feels to me like it has enough of a story-arc basis that there will probably be a natural end somewhere down the line.

I’m looking forward to seeing where this one is going.

Things We Lose in the Timestream

Well, as it turns out, I’m swamped with doing stuff this weekend, so there’s no blog post for you.  Not that you should care anyway, of course.

You know, it occurs to me that occasionally I come along and tell you I’m busy with stuff, but I never actually tell you what the stuff is.  In retrospect, this seems unfair.  You come along (despite repeated warnings to the contrary, even), expecting to see some blather you can kill some time with, and here I am telling you there’s nothing to be read and not even bothering to say why.  Well, fear not, gentle reader: today I shall regale you fully with tales of my goings-on.  And this shall, hopefully, convince you never to wonder again.

So, firstly: often people mention what they’re reading, or listening to, and all that sort of thing.  Right now I am currently working on book 7 of the Dresden Files, and determined to push all the way through to the end.  It’s just getting really good (it was good before, but now it’s really good, if you follow me).  Musically, I recently picked up a digital copy of Extractions by Dif Juz, which is one of the 4AD bands that I somehow missed all this time.  I knew Richie Thomas’ fine saxophone work from Victorialand, of course, but I’d never heard this album before, and it’s quite good.  You should give it a listen if you’re into dream or ambient or that sort of thing.  Visually, I just picked up my Blu-ray of The Avengers, which of course I had seen in the theater, but it was just as good the second time around.  That Joss Whedon really knows what he’s doing behind a camera; I hope he does more of the superhero movies.

Now, of course, all of that is not really keeping me from writing.  There must be other stuff going on around here ...

Well, I do still have a few hours to put in for $work.  I would tell you a bit about my work, but I’ve had to sign so many things at this point saying that I will not ever “disparage” the company that I feel a bit like Stephen Colbert talking about Islam: my company is a great and true company and Blessings and Peace be upon my corporate overlords.  Don’t point, even.  You’ve seen enough of that one.

So, tomorrow I have to do a presentation for my new co-workers (of which there are quite a few), plus I have a meeting about my current project, which I just started, and I’d really like to learn a bit more about it before I have to start explaining it to other people.  But mainly I want to prepare a bit more for the presentation.  I could just wing it, and I’d probably do fairly well, but the more prepared I am, the better I’ll do (most likely), and one does want to make a good impression on people that you’ve just hired.

Let’s see ... what else ... well, there are still some weekend chores left, despite the fact that I generally try to knock those out before Saturday night, or else I find I have no time to myself.  I’ve still got to go to the grocery store, and direct my older children to clean the den so that you can actually walk in there again.  (The youngest is excused from such things, although I’m sure she’d like the floor to be cleared as well, as right now there are a lot of things blocking her from getting to the catfood, which just pisses her off.  Nothing feels quite the same rolling around inside your mouth as a big ol’ handful of catfood.)

In hobby news, the things which are supposed to be my relaxation from other parts of my life occasionally have the power to provide their own sources of stress.  For instance, in my role as a CPAN author, right now I’m about three issues behind in taking care of some issues for the Method::Signatures module I work on, and one of them is for a guy who’s fairly well-known in the Perl world (and, even if you don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, the fact that the guy has his own Wikipedia page should give you a clue).  And, in my work to keep my favorite game going, we’ve been working hard to address a number of issues with one of our recent releases.

So, there’s lots to do, and (as always), little time to get it all done.  It seems that, the older I get, the less likely I am to have one big excuse for not doing what I should.  I mean, remember, back in college, when the reason you didn’t finish your essay for class was because of a party (or the resulting hangover), or one of your friends broke up with their boyfriend or girlfriend and you were up all night with them, or you were helping someone move?  But nowadays it’s never one big thing; it’s a million little things, that peck away at your time jot by jot, frittering away your ability to focus in dribs and drabs.  It’s death by a thousand cuts.  But such is the way of life.  The older you get, the more you take on, I suppose, and the more people you meet, the more that end up depending you for one thing or another, in large ways or in small.

Which is all a very roundabout way of saying to you, my oh so persistent blog connoisseur: no cookie for you!  Not this week, in any event.

Perl blog post #10

This week I’ve been catching up on a lot of Perl & CPAN stuff that I’ve been neglecting because of work.  The resulting work was very interesting, and inspired a technical post on my other blog.  Hop on over if you’re a Perl geek.  If not, you’ll just have to wait until next week for something interesting to come around.

If you’re lucky.

I'm too old for this shit ...

I believe in self-reflection and self-analysis.  (Of course, I also believe that such things are necessarily flawed, but perhaps that’s a topic for another blog post.)  I think it’s important to know what your faults are, what your limitations are.  Of course, I think that sometimes people want to identify their faults so they can correct them.  I have a slightly different approach:  If I can’t identify all my faults, I’m a blind moron, bumbling through life not even knowing the damage I’m doing.  Contrariwise, if I can identify all my faults, and if I could somehow correct them all, then I would be perfect.  I know that I cannot ever be perfect.  Therefore, either I’m never going to be able to see all my faults, or I’m going to be able to see them all but never fix them all.  I choose the latter.

That is, there are some faults that I have that I’ve just learned to live with.  They’re bad, sure, but they’re not so bad, and, if one has to have faults anyway (and, lacking perfection, one does), you may as well have some that aren’t so bad, right?  For instance, I’m too loud.  I have a naturally loud voice, and it carries, and the more excited I get about a topic, the louder I get.  Especially in an office environment, I’ve been asked many times throughout my life to keep it down.  Another problem I have is that I get pissed off at little things.  Not things that people do, so much: more like inanimate objects.  Like if I drop a cup and spill water all over the place, I am pissed at that cup.  This is moronic.  I know this.  But I still do it, and mostly I can live with that.

Now here’s the fault that I wanted to talk about today: I try to be too helpful.  Yeah, yeah, I know that sounds like one of those bullshit “flaws” that you dredge up during an interview.  (“Mr. Jones, what would you say is your biggest failing as an employee?”  “Well, sir, I’ve often been told that I just work too gosh-darned hard.”)  But note that I’m not claiming that I actually am too helpful, only that I try to be.  And, really, it isn’t correct to say that I try to be too helpful ... the truth is that I try too hard to be helpful, which is subtly different.

If you ask me a question, I want to give you the right answer.  If I can’t give you an answer, I feel bad.  Like, unreasonably bad.  Much worse than I would if I were to screw you out of a parking spot—worse even than if I were to screw you out of a job (unless perhaps I knew you personally).  That’s messed up.  But that’s the way I am.  If I give you an answer and it later turns out I was wrong, that’s even worse: then I feel hideously awful.  I have friends that think I have a burning need to be right.  I don’t think that’s true.  My father, for instance, has a burning need to be right.  He doesn’t ever admit that he was wrong.  I, on the other hand, have absolutely no problem admitting I was wrong: I just feel really crappy about it, if I think that someone was misled somehow (and that’s nearly always true, unless you were talking to yourself or something).  It’s sort of like a savior complex, but on a smaller scale.  I don’t feel the need to save people, only help them out a bit.

And, at first blush, this doesn’t seem so bad.  So I go out of my way to help people; what’s wrong with that?  Someone with a savior complex often has the problem of taking care of others so much that they forget to take care of themselves, but I don’t have that issue.  So where are the downsides, and how is this a fault?  Well, there are two main areas that I’ve identified, one smaller, and one larger.

The smaller issue is that I’m so constantly afraid of giving people the wrong information that I often over-qualify all my statements.  Now, I’ve talked before about my fear of absolute statements.  So, in one sense, this is just another facet of that.  But it goes further, I think: if I qualify everything I say to a large enough extent, I can never be giving you misleading information, right?  Many of my friends think I’m wishy-washy.  I don’t think that about myself, but I certainly understand why they do, and this is at the heart of it.

But here’s the bigger problem.  When I think someone is wrong, I have a desperate desire to “help” them by correcting their misconceptions.  Which can be okay, sometimes, if the person is receptive to that sort of thing, but often people aren’t.  And that just makes me try harder.  Which is code for “I’m a jerk about it.”  And, of course, it’s one thing if it’s a fact we’re discussing.  If I can tell you that you’re wrong, and we can look it up on Wikipedia or somesuch, then the question will be settled.  You may not appreciate my correcting you (especially if I did it in public), but at least there’s no more arguing about it.

But suppose it’s more of a matter of opinion.  Now, I’m okay if you have your own opinion about something.  If you have an intelligent, informed opinion, and I just happen to disagree with you, then fine.  I don’t have a need to “correct” you then, because you’re not really wrong.  But, let’s face it: most poeple’s opinions are not intelligent, informed opinions, and that includes mine.  I try (really!) to have the good grace to back down when it’s obvious that you know more about something than I do, but I find that I’m in a minority there, and sometimes I can’t resist either.

Here’s the situation that brought this to the forefront of my mind and inspired this post:  Just two days ago, I was in a meeting with several other technogeeks that I work with.  There were five of us, and were talking about architectural decisions.  For some reason, the topic of TDD came up.  Now, I’ve actually talked about this exact situation before, and I even specifically mentioned TDD in that post.  I also mentioned my good friend and co-worker, and he happened to be in that meeting.  Perhaps I didn’t mention it, but he’s also my boss (everyone in the room’s boss, for that matter).  We don’t usually treat him any differently for all that, but it’s a fact that should not be ignored.

So, suddenly we find ourselves debating the merits of TDD (again).  What those merits are is not important to the story.  Suffice it to say that my friend, and one other co-worker, took the con side, and the remaining three of us took the pro side.  And the discussion got heated.  I found myself geting more and more frustrated as I tried to “help” them understand why TDD was so cool.

On the one hand, it made perfect sense that it should upset me so much.  Neither of the fellows on the con side had ever actually tried TDD.  And it was obvious from the statements they made that they didn’t have a very thorough understanding of it.  Them saying it was a bad technique was basically the same as my six-year-old claiming that he’s sure he doesn’t like a food despite the fact he’s never tried it.  It’s just silly, and therefore somewhat maddening.

But, on the other hand, I have to be careful, because I know how I get, because of my fault.  Here are people making a mistake: they’re espousing an opinion based on incomplete information and zero experience.  And, trust me: even if your opinion happens to be accidentally right, that’s still a mistake.  So, I see people making a mistake and I want to help them.  And I know that’s going to blind me to common sense.  (Well, I know it now ... seeing that at the time was pretty much a lost cause.)

And, here’s the thing: the other two people on the pro side didn’t get into the argument.  Why not?  Is it because they were scared to get into it with the guy who’s technically their boss?  No, not at all: we’ve all had technical discussions where we’ve been on the other side from our boss, and we don’t back down when we think it’s important.  So maybe they didn’t think it was important, then?  Maybe.  But I think I see a better explanation.

When your own kid tells you he’s not eating the fish because he doesn’t like it, even though you know perfectly well he’s never tried it before, you can get into it with him.  As the parent, it’s your job to teach your children to try new things, not to be close-minded.  If you don’t, who will?  Because, when it’s someone else’s kid telling you he’s not eating the fish, you just nod and go “okay, sure, kid, whatever you say.”  Because, and here’s the crux of the matter: why the hell do you care?

These other two guys are both younger than me, but they’re apparently much smarter.  The fact that our two colleagues are radically misinformed about TDD and think it’s bad even though they don’t understand it isn’t hurting them one whit.  It’s not stopping them from using TDD: the boss has said he doesn’t believe in it, but he certainly hasn’t banned it or anything.  In fact, he’s been supportive of other people using it.  So why bother to get into it?  Let the unbelievers unbelieve, if that’s their thing.

At the end of the day, who really gives a fuck?

Apparently I do.  Apparently I have this burning desire to convert all the non-believers and help them see the light.  And here’s where we fetch up against today’s blog post title: I just don’t have energy for that shit any more.  I’m looking at myself doing it and thinking, “why oh why am I even bothering?”  It’s not like these guys are thanking me for my “help.”  No, they’re just irked at my stubborn insistence.  And who can blame them?  ‘Cause, as I mentioned above, the longer this goes on, the more of a jerk I am about it.  So, here I am, pissing off people that I care about, over something that really doesn’t make that much difference in my life, just so I can say to myself afterwards that I corrected a misperception.  Seriously: what the hell am I doing?

I really am too old for this shit.  I need to learn to let go.  Today, when I logged into my work computer, it presented a pithy saying to me, as it always does.  I mentioned previously that I’ve customized these quotes, so mostly they’re familiar, but every once in a while it surprises me and hits with something I’ve forgotten, or something that’s just eerily appropriate.  Today it was both.

The aim of an argument or discussion should be progress, not victory.

    — Joseph Joubert

Yeah, good advice.  I think I’d forgotten it, somehow.  I need to try to remember that, next time I have this burning desire to “fix” somebody else’s “wrong” notions.  I’m going about it all wrong, I think.  And my family has a history of high blood pressure, so I need to chill the fuck out.

Ommmmmmmm ...

Guides: Bernice Pierce

[This is one post in a series about people who have had a great impact on my life.  You may wish to read the introduction to the series.]

Back when I wrote about my views on political correctness, I mentioned that I have a fair number of friends who were black, including one of my best friends of all time.  You may not find this unusual at all, being that, if you have (despite my repeated warnings to the contrary) read all my blog posts, you will surely have noticed that I’m a California liberal.

But, the truth is, it is unusual.  It’s downright unlikely.  You see, I’m from Virginia, which is part of the South.  I know some of you Northerners think it’s not, but where do you think the capitol of the Confederacy was?  I was also born over forty years ago.  Forty years ago in a small town in the South ... where I grew up, there literally was a set of railroad tracks running through the town, and all the white people lived on one side, and all the black people lived on the other.  Literally.

But, even more importantly, I am descended from 4 white Southerners: my paternal grandparents were born in North Carolina, my maternal grandfather in Kentucky, and my maternal grandmother in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia, all between 1900 and 1925.  Now, I’m not saying that every single white person born in the South during that time period was racist.  Really I’m not.  But I am pointing out that the odds swung pretty damn hard in that direction.  And my grandparents didn’t beat them.  Every single one of them was racist, to one degree or another.  And at least two of them (one on each side) were very racist.  My mother used to tell me that her father would get up and change the channel if a black person appeared on the television.  I could go on, but it’s just too depressing.

Now, when people are raised by racists, it’s very difficult for them not to be racist themselves.  So let’s look at the mathematics of this: four racist grandparents raised my two parents.  Logically, they should both be racist themselves, and, since they raised me, I should therefore be racist.  And, you know what?  If I were, I wouldn’t be me.  When I look back on my life and think about all the experiences I’ve had, if I were to eliminate all the black people from them, I just couldn’t possibly be the person I am today.  Too many lives have touched mine and changed me, for the better.

So what happened?  Well, my parents were born in a 14-month span from 1945 to 1946.  They were, as most children were back in those days, raised primarily by their mothers.  My father grew up in a working-class household: both his parents worked at a factory.  His mother was every bit as prejudiced as my mother’s father, and he’s still prejudiced to this day, although I suspect he’s less open about it these days.

My mother, however, grew up in an upper-middle-class household; in fact, in my small town (I grew up in the same small town where my parents did), my mother’s family were considered wealthy, although I’m sure they wouldn’t have been in a bigger city.  But my grandfather had his own construction business, and it was very successful, and they lived in a big house.  And they had a maid.

Now, you’ve no doubt seen movies like The Help.  That movie is set in the ‘60s, but you can be sure it was similar in the ‘50s, when my mother was growing up.  Wealthy Southern families had black servants, and, if they had children, those black housekeepers often raised the children more than the mothers did.  My mother’s mother was even less interested in children than most women of her time and status, I suspect.  I do not know for sure, but I have many reasons to believe that my mother was raised almost entirely by their maid: Bernice Pierce.

Now, Bernice was still my grandparents’ maid when I was a boy.  I remember her dimly but warmly: I remember her making my lunch for me when I was visiting them, I remember talking to her and her responding and treating me like a regular person and not a pesky child that was in her way.  But her influence on my life was not so much direct.  Her influence on my life is that she broke generations of Southern racism and gave my mother the gift of an open mind.  And my mother in turn gave that gift to me.

Without Bernice, my life would be very different.  The first house I ever lived in that wasn’t owned by a family member, I rented along with my friend and coworker from Burger King: a black man.  The lawyer who got the charges dropped when I was stupidly caught shoplifting (or perhaps I should say “caught stupidly shoplifting”) was a black man.  My first (and only) one-night stand was a black woman.  The manager at the pizza joint who encouraged me to fiddle around with the office computer on which I performed a crude electronic prank which ended up introducing me to the man who was my first business partner which eventually led me the job where I met the mother of my children ... that manager was a black man.  I’m certainly not suggesting Bernice herself would have been proud of me for having all those experiences—I’m sure there are a least a few she wouldn’t have approved of.  I’m just pointing out that, without her, my mother is not my mother and therefore I am not me.  Without all those formative experiences, I am a whole different person.  And I could never have had those experiences, been able to have those interactions, if my mother had not taught me to be far more tolerant and accepting than my ancestors were.

And it’s not just a matter of black and white.  My gay and lesbian friends, my Chinese and Mexican friends, my Jewish and Hindu and Muslim friends ... how many of these people would I have gotten to know without my mother teaching me that all people are the same on some fundamental level?  Some of them, perhaps ... but then again, perhaps not.  Right now, the two people that I spend the vast majority of my time with, outside my family, are a Cuban and a French-Lebanese Armenian.  Would I have been able to forge such strong relationships with people so culturally different without the example that my mother set for me?

Now, I’ve never discussed this in detail with my mother.  I don’t know if Bernice ever talked specifically with her about racial matters; I suspect it was more just a question of being exemplary.  That the racist rhetoric that my mother was faced with from her own parents paled in comparison to the kind and nurturing example that was set for her by the person she looked to most for love and attention.  I suspect this to be so from what my mother has told me of her childhood, and from my own remembrances of Bernice: as I say, I honestly can’t remember much, but I remember a woman with a large heart and a calm disposition, a woman who always knew the right thing to say and the right way to say it.  I suspect that she was a woman who knew perfectly well that she worked for people who held hateful beliefs, and never held that against the children she was employed to care for.  I can’t imagine doing it, myself.  I would never have had the patience or the self-control.  I have an over-developed sense of injustice sometimes.  But that just goes to show you that Bernice was a better person than I, in many ways.

Bernice died a few years ago.  I never had a chance to discuss these sorts of things with her, let her know the impact she had on my life, even if indirectly.  But, then, I’m not sure I could have articulated it so well as a younger man.  Sometimes it takes a certain amount of perspective to understand the impact that the past has had on you.  From where I am now in my life, I can look back and see how much I owe to this woman.  Who, in many ways, was more of a grandmother to me than the woman who bore my mother.

I know my mother always maintained a special place in her heart for Bernice, and I don’t think she ever thought of her as “the maid.”  This was the woman who really raised her.  And, for that, I will ever be grateful.

Guides: Those I Owe

This week I’m out of town, celebrating my eldest child’s birthday, so I don’t have time for a full post.  However, here’s an intro post for a new series I’ve been contemplating.

I’ve been thinking lately that I’d like to do a series of posts on people who have influenced my life.  Partially as a thank you, and partially just as a way to preserve the stories of these folks for posterity.  I know I tell you not to read this blog, but my children are another matter.  Them I can assign it to as schoolwork or something.

But I’ve also been thinking that I’d like to expand the common definition of “influence.”  Generally when we think of people like this, we think of the people who inspired us, who taught us, who mentored us.  Our parents and grandparents are often at the top of this list.  And I don’t mean to discount those people: those people are of course the prime influencers.  But there are others as well, perhaps others that we don’t think of at first blush, and perhaps don’t ascribe enough credit to for our lives turning out the way they have.

For instance, say there’s a person you don’t know all that well—just an acquaintance, really—but this person just happens to be the one who introduced you to your spouse.  How different your life would be without that person!  Can you honestly say that this person has not influenced your life?  It may not be influence in the way we normally think of it: this person didn’t teach you any philosophy that you adopted to live your life, they didn’t pass on any virtues that you later took as your own, and they didn’t teach you any skill that you later used to earn a living.  But, still, they did something, without which you would not be who you are today.

Or how about the person who inspired your parent to choose a certain career path: all your life, perhaps, your parent has been that thing—doctor, lawyer, teacher, grocery store manager, motorcycle repairman, social worker, police officer—and that’s always who they’ll be to you.  Perhaps that career is how they met your other parent ... without that inspiring teacher or parental figure or helpful coach, you may never have been born.  Can’t say that person didn’t have a profound influence on you.

This is all tied up with the idea of fate that I talked about before.  The idea that the thousand unlikely coincidences that have come together to weave the tapestry of your life are not so random.  Only, this is a slight twist on that, because now we’re adding a hint of human agency to the “coincidences.”  Sometimes these people meant to change your life (or at least they were influencing you on purpose); sometimes it’s entirely accidental.  But my point is ... does it really matter?  The people are important either way.

So all these people are ... somethings.  I’ve been trying to think of a good word, but so far I’ve come up blank.  The closest I’ve come is “psychopomp”.  Now, technically, a psychopomp doesn’t have to be a guide specifically into the land of the dead, but that’s the usual imagery associated with it.  The word literally means “guide of souls,” which is a nice image, and fits this category of person.  Imagine that your life is a bit like wandering through a maze.  Sometimes when you choose the correct path it’s because you’re smart; sometimes it’s just dumb luck.  And then, sometimes, someone else just happened to be there, showing you the path, and you never could have found your way without them.  That’s the image I’m looking for.  Openers of the way, like Papa Legba or Wepwawet.  Or Door, even.

But “psychopomp,” besides having the close (and undesired) association with death, also sounds a bit psychopompous, if you know what I mean.  I’m looking for a nice, simple term: something to put at the beginning of a series of blog posts, that might be a bit more concise than “People Who Made Me Who I Am Today” (which would naturally be abbreviated “PWMMWIAT,” which I suppose would be pronounced “pwim-wyatt,” which is just silly).  I think I’m just going to go with “Guides,” although I’m still open to suggestions.

But the point is, these are the people who were my guideposts, my compasses, whether from exerting a strong magnetic force on me, or just from jerking a thumb over their shoulder and indicating a better road.  Both are important.  Both have had significant impacts on my life.  Both make interesting stories, and that’s what it’s really all about.

Well, that, and saying “thank you.”  Whether they put a huge amount of effort into their actions, or whether it was an offhand gesture, whether they did what they did out of a sense of duty or whether it never even crossed their mind that their actions would have such significance, whether they’ll appreciate being thought of or not, or whether they’re even still alive to be appreciative, they all still deserve my gratitude and my kind remembrances.  They made me who I am today; it’s the least I can do.





IMPORTANT NOTE: This list is no particular order, and most especially not in any order of importance.  In most cases, the posts were just written as something came up in my life that reminded me of that person.  If you’re a friend or relative of mine and you don’t appear on this list, it’s probably just because I haven’t gotten around to you yet, that’s all.  Stay tuned.

• Bernice Pierce
• Willie Vadnais
• Marion Burden
• Benny Millares

Three + One

The first, phantom peach fuzz lipped, too tall now, cocky and self-absorbed, yet somehow still vulnerable, searching for a place, staking out opinions, trying on tastes, eager for independence—unless, of course, that were to mean doing his own dishes, or laundry—morning grumpy, easily elated, quick bright smile, not too old for a kiss on the forehead, in passing, even if he must duck his head to receive it, but, still, for all of that, a wonder of existence: mine.

The second, cherubic cheeks backlit by charming smile, industrious, finicky, miniature Monk, obsessed with closing cabinet doors but not with picking toys off floors, ever in search of the next scam, anxious to prove the lesson is learned even when unable to remember what specific lesson it may be, quick wih a hug but disdainful of kisses, water obsessed—no need to ask how the pool is: it’s perfect, it’s always perfect—not too old to snuggle up in a lap of an evening, but, still, for all of that, a miracle of survival: mine.

The third, protuberant ears unfortunately inherited, determined, confident, ever smiling with broad joy—capable of smiling with every part of her face, even her tongue—ready to experience new things, affectionate, fraternally appreciative, capable of transforming tresses into reins, surprisingly communicative, delicate, drooling, penetrating eyes, not to young to reach, to clasp arm around neck, even in sleep, but, still, for all of that, a marvel of determination: mine.

The three, giggling, squabbling, full of love and idolization and frustration and tenderness for each other, united front to the world, willing to sell each other out, ready to protect each other to the death, rowdy, cautious, roiling mass of unbounded enthusiasm, eager to teach, anxious to learn, an object lesson on the importance of life, an unlikely confluence of genes and circumstance and adorable body parts, too stubborn for their own good, but, still, for all of that, a melody of delight: ours.

For I have nothing without you: small bits embedded in them, a nose, a curve, a temper’s flare, a sneaky smile, time, patience, tears, dogged persistence in the face of overwhelming resistance, a kind word, a firm hand, steady, sacrifice—body and years and income and opportunity and more—being there, educating, guiding, shaping, not too tired to plan all the outings, not too serious to tolerate all the foolishness, not too impatient to give all the requisite embraces, but, still, for all of that, a phenomenon of unlikelihood, more than deserved, never less than desired, exactly as much as demanded: thanks.





Dedicated to The Mother, who is celebrating another birthday and perhaps not feeling as appreciated as she fully deserves to be.

Employees First

I had occasion this week to discuss my software business, which I started in 1992 and ran for 12 years.  I never made a lot of money with it, but then that was never the goal.  Unlike many people who start technology companies, I never had an “exit strategy”—the concept of building a business just to sell it to someone else was utterly foreign to me.  The only point to my business was to provide myself a living while being able to do things my own way, and, for that purpose, it was remarkably successful, for a while.  It wasn’t just for me, though; I employed many of my friends, and many other people who later became my friends.

In the context of a discussion earlier this week, I outlined my primary business philosophy, and, reflecting on it now, it occurs to me that it was pretty damned radical, for the time.  And still is, to some extent.  So I thought I might expand on it a bit in the hopes that someone else will pick it up and make it their own.  We could use more businesses like mine was.

Now, full disclosure: my business was never hugely successful, and for the last four years or so, it wasn’t very successful at all.  We made money every year, though ... considering I started the business with around three thousand dollars and never took a dime of venture capital or bank loans, we had to make money every year, or else there was no business.  But I’ll freely admit that there were several years where we made close to nothing, and eventually we called it quits.  It is my opinion that what I’m going to talk about below has nothing to do with the failure of my business—I posit that it was partially because of macroeconomic factors, and partially because of my continued failure to locate a partner who could handle the sales and marketing side.  But that’s just my opinion, and you’re certainly free to draw other conclusions.

Here’s my philosophy, stated simply: every day, in every business decision I made, I put my employees first.  Now, you may very well say, this is foolish.  You should always put your customers first.  But I think that’s the wrong approach, and I’m going to tell you why.

Over the years, both from the outside and from the inside, I’ve observed many, many companies who put their customers first and treated their employees like shit.  This approach is always doomed to failure, for one simple reason: the work that your company delivers, the work the customers receive and pay for, is performed by those employees.  Unhappy employees produce crappy work.  This is unavoidable.  There just is no way to get good work out of people who don’t give a crap if they’re there or not or, even worse, who actively want to be somewhere else.  The entire field of “management” exists to try to solve this problem.

A moderately well-known quote (usually attributed to Robert Heller) states: “The first myth of management is that it exists.  The second myth of management is that success equals skill.”  Like any quote, its exact meaning is open to interpretation, but I’ve always interpreted it to mean that management is mostly imaginary, and when it does work, it works mostly by accident.  And let me tell you why: because you wouldn’t need to manage employees if you weren’t treating them like crap, or at best mostly ignoring them.  Study after study shows that employee engagement boosts productivity, increases efficiency, and improves the bottom line, but, in your typical company, little more than lip service is paid to these concepts.  True, there are some companies who are starting to realize the potential here ... Zappos has become somewhat well-known for it, and to a lesser extent Google has made some waves in this area.  There are others.  But these are the exceptions.

So here’s a large body of research telling us that employees do better jobs and make their employers more money if they’re happy, and yet most employers don’t bother trying to make their employees happy.  Most companies put their customers first and their employees a distant second ... if the employees are lucky.  Now, many people would say, aren’t the customers supposed to come first?

But, here’s the thing.  Your customers really only care about one thing.  They don’t care about fancy lunches or swag with your corporate logo on it or the fact that you remember the names of their spouses and all their children’s birthdays.  Oh, sure: sometimes the people who work for your customers care about those things.  And sometimes you can get pretty far by using such things to fake it.  But, in the end, the one thing that your customers really care about is: results.  Results trumps everything else.

Your customers want excellent work done for reasonable rates.  And here’s what I discovered when I ran my own company: if you make your employees happy—not just a little happy, but deliriously, ecstatically happy, or as close as you can damn well come—they will do excellent work, and they will do it for reasonable pay.  If they get reasonable pay, I can charge reasonable rates.  Now I have excellent work for reasonable rates, and that’s called outstanding value.  If I put my employees first, I can make my customers happy without even trying.  If I put my customers first, my employees are not as happy, and they won’t do their best work for reasonable pay, and I can’t make my customers happy.  Maybe I can fake it for a little while, but I can’t deliver in the long term.

So I tried every day—every single day—to put my employees first.  And my customers being happy mostly took care of itself.  As it happens, I learned a lot about how to keep the people who worked for my customers happy.  I learned about managing expectations, and I learned about communication, and I learned about honesty and forthrightness and avoiding playing the blame game.  I learned when to give in to my customers even when they were wrong, and when to put my foot down and say “no” even when they were right.  There’s a lot to be learned about those things.  But, you know what?  That stuff still isn’t the most important part.  Because the weird thing was, I wasn’t learning those types of things as a businessman or company founder.  I was learning those things as an employee, and my employees were learning those things too.  Because I, like them, valued my employment so much that I wanted to do everything in my power to keep it going.  And keeping the customers happy was one way—the most important way—that I did that.

I think I was actually very successful at making my employees happy.  Several of them told me that it was the best job they’d ever had.  Very few of them ever quit; mostly it was a matter of us no longer having work for them.  And most of those ended up coming back to work for us later; I had one employee who waited for my call for nearly a year and a half without a job.  And he eventually got that call, and he came back to work for us.

I paid my employees well, but not outlandishly.  They all worked hourly, and they were paid for every hour they worked.  They all knew what everyone in the company made (myself included), and everyone was paid a rate based on their proficiency at their job.  In most companies I’ve worked at, the programmers have a lot of competition amongst themselves: there’s always a constant struggle to prove who is the alpha coder.  But, at my company, you could just look at your hourly rate and compare it to everyone else’s and you knew where you stood.  If you thought you deserved more, you had to work hard and prove it.  And there was never any silliness about raises not being handed out more than once a year, or not allowed to exceed a certain percentage.  I gave raises whenever you showed me you were better than your rate said you were, and the raise was for as much as you deserved.  I gave someone a 50% raise once.  I gave someone a raise once before he ever got his first paycheck, and I made it retroactive to his first day, because he demonstrated that he was better than I thought he was when I hired him.  Also, every employee got a commission of some sort, above and beyond their hourly pay.

Every one of my employees earned stock as well.  Not stock options, but actual stock.  The company was employee-owned.  I maintained a majority interest, but I kept giving more and more of my stock away every year, and, when there were stockholders’ votes, I proxied many of my votes to the other employees so that their vote was not hollow.  I constantly refused both the CEO position and the chairmanship of the board of directors so that other people could take on those jobs.  I never had any desire to be in control.  I only wanted to make this the best place to work in the whole world.  I know I was not a perfect boss.  I know I pissed people off sometimes, and frustrated them sometimes, and made them crazy sometimes.  But, in the end, they were who I cared about, and they knew that.  They knew they weren’t going to get a better deal anywhere else.  They worked their asses off for our customers, and they pushed themselves to excel, and they did things they wouldn’t have dreamed of doing for faceless corporate overlords who wouldn’t bother learning their names.

If I ever start another company (and it’s a giant pain in the ass, running your own company, so I don’t know how likely that is), there are many things I will do differently.  This is not one of them.  I will continue to put my employees first, because there just isn’t any better way to get the best out of them, and that means there isn’t any better way to deliver value to my customers.  Would my customers be upset that they don’t come first?  They might be ... except for those pesky results.  That excellent work at reasonable rates: it can’t get any better.  And, when you’re getting the best results you could possibly be getting, isn’t that all you really want?

Scott Baio Gave Me Pinkeye

Well, gave my kid pinkeye anyway.  The vast majority of my weekend has been taken up worrying, comforting, and administering medicine of various stripes.  So, no time to write anything substantial this week.  So sad for you.

(By the way, if you didn’t catch the reference in the title, you should really get out more.)

Perl blog post #9

Still trying to get caught up on everything around here, and work is not helping.  I’ve got someone lined up to help take some of the burden off me for work issues, but it takes time to make that transition, and, in the meantime, I’m still working way too hard to get all the info transferred.  (Interestingly enough, I’m in the same situation for the hobby forum where I’m a sysadmin.)  It’s hard to keep up with blogging in the midst of all that.

Still, I managed to bang out a new technical post this week.  I got an email earlier in the week from one of the Perl luminaries wanting to discuss a new feature for one of the CPAN modules that I co-maintain.  Always cool to have an online discussion with someone whom you’ve previously only known from watching him give presentations at conferences (and damn good ones, at that).  So I was inspired to turn that design discussion into a blog post, so I did.

In other news, my middle child (also sometimes known as “the smaller animal”) just got his first laptop today—a little Acer netbook.  Now he can do things like “play monkey bloons” without needing to steal our computers.  We’re so proud!  Also, having your own computer is an excellent way to force you to learn to read.

Anyways, hopefully by next week things will have settled down back into some semblance of normal.  Not that you should care, of course, but just in case you do.

Delays and Excuses

So remember how I said last week was a reading week?  Well, I’m still reading.  I went all the way back to the beginning, and it takes time to work through all that text.  Man, I wrote a lot.  I could probably use a good editor.  Except that she (or he) would probably cross out all my adverbs, and that would just piss me off.

So I’m not ready to present a new semi-chapter of my ongoing book.  My next thought was to fall back on a technical blog, but I’m not ready there either.  I’ve got a couple of really good ideas, but I’ve not had the time to work on them sufficiently to make them ready for blogination.  In at least one case, I think I could actually slap together a CPAN module, which would be pretty exciting.  Of course, to do that, I’d probably need to finish my Dist::Zilla customizations which I’ve been working on forever—well, I don’t need to, per se, but it would be more convenient, and I really want to finish that anyway.  Except, I got stuck on this other thing that I wanted to do for that, and I ended up making a suggestion to another CPAN author and then I agreed to do the thing with the thing and ...

Sometimes I worry that I’m too much of a perfectionist.  I do like things to be just right.  Sort of like Tolkien was ... or at least, like what the stuff I’ve read about Tolkien indicates that he was.  He always wanted to create just one more grammatical construct in Elven, detail just one more century of Númenorean history, retranslate just one more line of Beowulf ... so much so that he had difficulty fininshing things, at least according to some.  Not that I’m claiming to be as brilliant as Tolkien, of course—I still have some modesty—I’m just saying that perhaps I feel his pain.

I’ve often been told that Meg Whitman was fond of saying that ”‘perfect’ is the enemy of ‘good enough.’”  To which my response is, generally, “perhaps, but ‘good enough’ is often the enemy of ‘we’d like to have it last for a while instead of falling apart due to shoddy craftmanship which was deemed “good enough” at the time.’”  Still, there’s no doubt that Meg’s formulation is pithier than mine, so probably hers is more true.

That was a bit of sarcasm there.  Sorry.

Still, one can’t deny that she (or, if we want to be pedantic about it, Voltaire, who originally said “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien”) has a point.  As you may guess from my previous posts, I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle.  But the tricky part is knowing where to draw the line.

Today I’m leaning a bit more toward the “perfect” than the “good enough.”  Although, one could make the argument that, in settling for this particular blog post (which is about a third as long as I normally strive for), I’m actually taking a pretty firm stance on the “good enough” side.  But mainly I’m saying I want a little more time to polish things.

Also, I’ve been putting in an unusual number of work hours lately, and that ain’t helping.  Plus ... I ran out gas.  I had a flat tire.  I didn’t have enough money for cab fare.  My tux didn’t come back from the cleaners.  An old friend came in from out of town.  Someone stole my car.  There was an earthquake.  A terrible flood.  Locusts!

Or, er, something like that.  Yeah, that’s the ticket.^*





* Eek! Stop me before I cross-reference again!^**

** Too late: SNL trifecta.

To Orphan or Not To Orphan

It’s another reading week for me.

If you don’t know what I mean by “reading week,” then you should probably refresh your memory on that point.  We’re talking about my fiction here; specifically, the on-again, off-again novel whose semi-chapters I keep inserting randomly into my blog.  (And, if you don’t care anything about that, you can move on immediately and save yourself some time.)  Last time I mentioned a reading week, I managed 3 more installments over the following 3 months, and I haven’t returned to it in the 4 months since.

Of course, I also have a 4-month old child now, so that’s probably not a coincidence.

Still, I need to get back into the groove, if I ever plan to finish.  And, excitingly (at least for me), I actually did have a useful idea—remember when I said that I was having trouble figuring out how to get from where I was to the end of this book?  Well, I had an epiphany a couple months back, but I haven’t had the opportunity to do much with it.  I need to put it into words before I completely lose it.

Of course, 4 months is a long time.  So long, in fact, that I’ve gone all the way back to the beginning of the novel to really refresh my brain about the story.  Another thing I do besides reading what I’ve written, as if I were reading someone else’s work (that’s the reading week post again), is I interview myself.  That sounds really weird, I know ... some people say talking to yourself is a sign of insanity.  It’s not, really, and that’s good, because I do this all the time.  I practice difficult conversations I need to have with other people, I explain things I’m working on to an imaginary audience, sometimes I even psychoanalyze myself.  I do this because I’m naturally a verbal person, and saying things out loud, putting abstract thoughts into actual words, makes them real for me in a way that just pondering doesn’t.

Take that second example, for instance.  I’m working on a difficult problem at work, say, and I’m not sure what’s the best way to design the solution.  So I’ll pretend I’ve already done it, and now I’m giving a presentation on it, perhaps to my co-workers.  I explain what I’ve done, and defend my choices.  If I can get all the way through the presentation without stumbling, I’ve got a pretty good design there.  But, essentially, that never happens.  What happens is, about halfway through, I’ll trail off in the middle of a sentence, because I’ve realize that what I’m about to explain is the stupidest thing ever.  And that makes me backtrack, and rearrange, and refactor, and come up with a better design.

Same goes for my writing.  By pretending I’ve already published my book, and now people want to interview me (’cause, you know, I’m a famous author at that point), I force myself to verbalize why I made this authorial choice, or what I was trying to say with this particular passage, or whatnot.  And that, in turn, brings many things that I was doing subconsciously out into the light where I can stare at them a bit and go “hey, that’s interesting,” or sometimes, “no, wait a minute ... that’s dumb.”

In a way, this is just a continuation of the reader/writer dichotomy I talked about in the reading week post.  Me the Reader is the interviewer, asking questions to try to understand the story more completely.  Then Me the Writer comes along and answers the questions, as best he can, talking about what (or who) has inspired him, why he made certain choices, etc.

One day recently, I was conducting such an interview on the way to work (I have a 40-minute commute on a good day, so it’s a perfect time for this sort of thing), and Reader Me asked what Writer Me thought was a very interesting question: why isn’t Johnny Hellebore an orphan?

Although the story of Johnny Hellebore is aimed more at an adult audience (as I explained previously), there’s certainly no denying that he is the latest in a long and venerable line that includes Peter Pan, Dorothy Gale, James Henry Trotter, Harry Potter, and the Baudelaire children ... all of whom are, in fact, orphans.  So, why not Johnny?

Of course, the simple answer would be: because he isn’t, that’s all.  In other words, Johnny might have been “born,” as a character, with parents “built in,” so to speak.  But, the truth is, he wasn’t.  I described how Johnny came to me: fully-formed, in a dream.  He was ragged and unkempt, and I knew he lived on the streets, and I sensed somehow that he was parentless, but that’s not really the same as being an orphan.  Giving Johnny parents who were alive, but absent—and more than absent: ineffectual—that was a conscious choice on my part.  Why did I do it?

Well, to a certain extent, it was just to be different.  The orphan thing’s been done.  Done very well, by authors much more talented than I.  If I tread those same boards, I have to step up my game quite a bit to compete.  Safer—and more interesting—to try some new territory.  I’m not entirely sure why I chose to have Johnny’s parents be the way they are now (probably it started with the dream I had that became the prologue), but, upon reflection, I really like it.  It reminds me of one my favorite movies: The Breakfast Club.  Remember the scene between Andrew and Allison?

Andrew: What is it?  Is it bad?

Allison: <silence>

Andrew: Real bad?

Allison: <silence>

Andrew: Parents?

Allison: <softly> Yeah ...

Andrew: <nods> What do they do to you?

Allison: <whispering> They ignore me.

To me, that’s one of the most powerful scenes in that movie, and that’s saying something.  The idea that you might have parents who would hurt you is frightening.  The idea that you might have parents who don’t care enough about you to even bother ... somehow that’s even scarier.  And, intentional or not, that’s how Johnny’s parents turned out, as I began to develop his backstory.

Johnny’s father was interested in money.  Climbing the business ladders was all he cared about, and, in the end, he resorted to extra-legal measures to achieve the level of success he was aiming for.  In those circles, being a family man was important.  It showed stability.  He could have gotten where he wanted as a bachelor, but it was easier to just go out and find a wife.

Johnny’s mother was taught that men were the key to financial security.  She didn’t particularly feel like she needed to fall in love; she just wanted to have enough money to be comfortable and didn’t particularly want to have to work for it.  Some might call her a gold-digger, and she probably wouldn’t even have objected to the characterization.  Along comes this man, and he’s obviously successful, and on his way to even bigger things; he isn’t hideous or anything, fairly quiet and non-obnoxious ... sure, why not?

And they were married, so he got what he wanted, and she was left to her own devices, which is what she wanted, and then he said now we need a child, and so she said, okay, but just one: I’m not getting fat and screwing up my back more than once, and one was all he needed, and there was Johnny.  His father only needed the fact of a child, and his mother didn’t even need that.  As an actual, physical being, they had no interest in him.

What happened to these people when they were children to make them this way?  I don’t know, although it’s an interesting question, and perhaps we’ll explore it someday.  I suspect it was pretty awful, although probably not as awful as what Johnny grew up with.  Although, remember: this was Johnny’s life from day one.  In a very real sense, he had no idea that parents were supposed to love you until he started school and met other children.  In fact, if it wasn’t for Amiira, Johnny would be a very cold person, and quite distasteful himself.  This is why Amiira keeps coming up in the story even though she’s been gone for years before the story starts.  She’s Johnny’s anchor, the one person who helped him realize that people could make connections with each other ...

Anyway, it was interesting for me to ponder all this, and I thought it might be interesting to share with you as well.  Plus now I have it written down for me to review later, in case I need to return to this topic for future reference.  And you, fair reader, will now be able to experience some déjà vu when you hear my first interview as a famous author.  You’re welcome.