Category Archives: Work

Stuff related to my current job of a broader interest.

It’s the whole point

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There seems to be some surprise and indignation at the idea that the IRS would be used as a weapon against political opponents. I don’t understand.

First; what did you expect from a communist administration? Really. Can you say, “DUUUH!”? Second; the entire tax code is a weapon of political power. Always has been. It is designed to nudge you into behaviors you’d not be engaged in if you were left to your own devices, and to nudge you out of other behaviors. The very concept of a progressive tax is a political weapon, designed to substantially reduce wealth creation and accumulation. Raising revenue is far down the list, or it is only an ancillary function of the tax code and the IRS. I could on and on, but you should have gotten the point by the time you received your very first paycheck.

The specific targeting of individuals and groups is nothing new at all either. The Clintons were famous for it. Rush Limbaugh has been getting audited every year for many years. The list is longer than this whole blog since its beginning.

A “Gosh, we’re sorry” will change nothing. The only solution, assuming anyone wants one, is to abolish the tax code, abolish the IRS and go to a single digit flat tax. Otherwise quit your bitching– this is exactly what you’ve been asking for. Begging for, actually. Don’t bother pretending to be surprised– it makes you look even more stupid.

Tab clearing

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I have a bunch of open tabs in my browser and I only have a few minutes before I’m leaving for 10 days to put on Boomershoot. I’ll have some time to make a few blog posts but I want to clear these up before I go.

It’s rare but sometimes they really do say the incredibly stupid things that we accuse them of:

Rep. Jackson Lee: ‘Don’t Condemn the Gangbangers’ – We Need Gun Legislation

Jackson Lee took the House floor on April 9 to argue in favor of increased gun control legislation, “Don’t condemn the gangbangers, they’ve got guns that are trafficked — that are not enforced, that are straw purchased and they come into places even that have strong gun laws.”

“Why? Because we don’t have sensible gun legislation.”

Jackson Lee continued by saying that current gun laws need to be enforced,  “I’m going to agree with my friends on the other side of the isle. Our Republican friends, let’s enforce the gun laws that we have – - who would run away from that. That’s a sensible proposition. Put a resolution on the floor of the House – - let’s enforce gun laws that we have.”

Yes. She said that. Blame the gun not the criminals.

Yes. She said that. Put a resolution on the floor to enforce existing laws.

Her babblings should qualify her for dementia medicine trials.

I could only see four out of the ten weapons being in the category “you won’t believe are legal”. And then only if you don’t understand the 2nd Amendment. They had to be desperate for content:

10 Weapons You Won’t Believe Are Legal

  1. Flame Thrower
  2. Miniguns
  3. Katana
  4. Cannon
  5. Crossbow
  6. Grenade Launchers
  7. Nunchucks
  8. Umbrella Sword
  9. Speargun
  10. Chain Whip

There has to be more to this than what I have had time to dig into.

Judge: lawsuits can proceed against theater owner in Colorado massacre

A federal judge refused on Wednesday to dismiss wrongful death and personal injury claims brought against a movie theater chain on behalf of victims of last summer’s mass shooting at a suburban Denver screening of the Batman film “The Dark Knight Rises.”

U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson ruled that Cinemark
USA, owner of the theater where 12 people were shot
dead, could potentially be found liable for damages under a
Colorado law that holds landowners responsible for activities on their property.

What? The best I could come up with for a plausible grounds for claiming the theater was responsible was if the plaintiffs believed they were disarmed and unable to protect themselves. And I think that is only about 10% chance of being the case.

Yes. Some people blamed the 2nd Amendment for the Boston bombing:

I once had a boss suggest that I was making so much money at time and a half on weekends that I shouldn’t fly back to Idaho to visit my family. I should just hire a hooker to give me blow jobs under the desk while I continued to write code. I laughed and went home for the weekend.

It turns out there might actually be a market for that sort of service:

Silicon Valley’s other entrepreneurs: Sex workers

In a quiet cafe outside San Francisco, “Josephine” — a local prostitute — arranges a collection of t-shirts across the table. They’re emblazoned with phrases like “Winter is Coming” and “Geeks Make Better Lovers.” She wears them in her online ads to catch the eye of the area’s well-off engineers and programmers.

“I’m trying to communicate to them that I understand a little bit what it’s like to be techy, nerdy, geeky,” she says. There’s another thing Josephine and her clients have in common: Like many of the techies she caters to, Josephine views herself as an entrepreneur.

Unintended consequences

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Or; Action, Reaction, Synthesis
Or; Thesis, Antitheses, Synthesis
Or; “I’m not sure that it means what you think it means.”

Refusing to sell to government entities that attack the second amendment is fairly popular, it certainly has made good press, and I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but I’m not sure people are thinking things through.

Oskar Schindler was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party, and he had extensive business dealings with the Nazis. Just keep that in mind.

Let’s say we all refuse to sell to any government entity that even infringes (literally; “touches around the fringes”) on second amendment rights. That would be all of them. Just keep that in mind; we are talking ONLY about degrees of violation when we say that New York or Chicago is bad and OUR jurisdiction is…what…a bit less egregious? Or does your state and local .gov commit zero infringements? So we all refuse to sell to any government entities. What will be their obvious reaction, for 100% sure and for certain? Taxpayer funded, government owned munitions factories of course, with union workers, full benefits and a retirement plan, and now they are, one way or another, competing with the private industry. Good luck with that. OR, you know all it takes is for one individual company to sell to your worst violators, they will become the next General Electric, i.e. a pet company for the tyrants, funneling their profits via multiple channels into the Democrat Party. They’ll arrange it that way just for that purpose. It’s what Progressives do.

More on phonetics

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As often happens, I was talking to a customer over a poor cellular connection today. We have to exchange a lot of data to complete an order. He’s spelling the name of his street.

“Wait; that’s A, T, T as in alpha tango tango?” I say to confirm.
“No, it’s hotel echo papa”
“Wow!” I said “I really got that wrong” and I’m thinking to myself, “Bam! We’re home free– this guy knows standard phonetics.” Without it, we’d have had a hell of a frustrating time.

So, Young Grasshopper; learn your Standard Phonetics.

I’m still amazed and disgusted that most cop shops have their own systems, which makes it more difficult because for one, they don’t always use words that all sound completely different from one another, and too, if you know Standard Phonetics, their retarded cop phonetics don’t sound familiar and it therefore takes longer to comunicate. Moron phonetics.

Learning the standard system is easy. There are only twenty six of them, and as it happens, each one starts with a different letter of the alphabet (fancy that) so it’s really easy. It’s an international system, and most pilots, military and ham operators already know it hands down. Whaterya waitin’ for?

Practice. For example, if I look to my left on my desk, I can read off in my mind, “Hotel Papa…Delta echo sierra kilo julliette echo tango.” Stuff like that. Road signs, what have you. This should be taught in school, except for the fact that kids should know it before they get to school.

On a similar note; use text on your phone when the signal is too poor to use the more bandwidth-hogging voice communication. If you have only one bar on the s-meter it still works like a charm whereas vioce communication is two steps below impossible. I explained that to my daughter a while back, and was surprized that she hadn’t thought of it. I’d though it would have been obvious even to a teen-aged school girl– a few dew drops of bits verses a tsunami/torrent of bits, you know.

My morning adrenaline rush

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As I was riding the bus into downtown Seattle to go to work this morning we stopped at Yale and Stewart for a traffic light. Initially I thought there were gunshots close by. Then as I did a “playback” in my mind and observed the subsequent sights and sounds more carefully I realized the flashes were white. Muzzle flashes are red/orange. Multiple explosions? But the flashes from explosives I am familiar with are reddish too. I was on the far side of the bus from the source but I ultimately located the origin.

A NW bound truck on Yale had tangled with a power line, and broken a power pole holding three transformers. The sounds were the breaking power pole, arcing of the power lines, and the exploding transformers. The truck stopped for a bit then left. Our bus remained stopped at the intersection and most of the passengers exited out the rear door and walked around the intersection. Some stupid and/or ignorant people walked OVER the downed power lines. At least one person turned around and took a different route after I yelled not to walk over the wires.

WP_000002

The bus in the picture above is the one I was on.

I was late for a meeting at work.

Update: Ry sent me an email with this link to the news story.

Kelvin-Helmholtz Waves

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Or KH waves, or a KH instability. It’s a result of two distinct layers in a fluid traveling at different velocities. You’ll see it in rivers and streams, between bands in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, in your coffee cup, etc. In this case it’s made visible by the bottom layer being cloud, interacting with a clear layer above. The wave pattern extends from one side of the photo to the other. I had to darken the image a lot to bring out the detail. Through my polarizing glasses the waves could be seen curling in on themselves more dramatically. For really good detail in sky photos you need a polarizer, and probably a UV filter too, but my little point-and-shoot isn’t set up for such things. These KH waves are over the Clearwater River canyon above Lewiston, Idaho, seen from the south end of Moscow on my way to work the other day.

Kelvin-HelmholtzWaves

It isn’t complicated

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We occasionally get someone who wants to submit an idea for a new product. They’ll want us to evaluate it in hopes that we will help manufacture and market it for them.

Here’s the deal. If it happens to be something we’re already thinking about, I most certainly do NOT want to even know what you have. You can figure out why.

Somehow there has come to be this strange attitude, or belief, that if you’re a “little guy” with scant resources, that you must tug on someone else’s coat tails and convince them to “give you a chance” otherwise you have no chance.

It doesn’t work that way, or rather it certainly doesn’t need to work that way. If you have a little gizmo you want to turn into money, start searching for companies that do machining, or injection mold building, or casting, or whatever type of manufacturing you need, contact them, get some quotes for a few hundred or a thousand units. There are small shops that do these things in practically every town larger than a mere whistle stop. Many of them will not want to talk to you about such small numbers, but some will. Keep at it. Register yourself a domain name, take some nice photos, build a simple web site and get a web host for it, place a cheap ad in Shotgun News or what have you, and BAM! You’re in business. Just like that. What’s stopping you?

It probably will not cost more than the annual or twice annual beer and cigarette expense for the average, unemployed trailer park dweller. The rest is leg-work– finding people who can provide the specific services you need, and so I think that if you’re not willing to give yourself a chance, why should someone else give you that chance? Hmm? You won’t go out on a limb for your idea, but you want me to go out on a limb for your idea?

I’d rather play with explosives

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I work in downtown Seattle. I don’t like cities in general because I have strong introvert tendencies and crowds of people “drain my energy”. Go to a lower, more detailed, and less personal, level and it just gets worse.

This happened January 1st in a place I walk through twice a day:

Several shots were fired inside the Westlake bus tunnel in downtown Seattle Tuesday night, according to the Seattle Police Department. But, officers were unable to turn up any suspects, witnesses or victims.

Two bike officers heard the shots while patrolling Westlake Park around 11:40 p.m.

Several people were running out of the Metro tunnel when the officers arrived. But, the man officers stopped said he only heard the shots and didn’t see the shooting.

Officers found six bullet casings and fragments on the tunnel’s mezzanine level and are reviewing surveillance video in an attempt to come up with any additional information.

Within the last few months the bank, essentially across the street from where I work and where I do most of my banking was robbed at gunpoint and there was a shooting in the hallway I traverse to get to the pizza place in the mall where I frequently get lunch.

This morning as I was riding to work the bus was stopped and could not enter the Westlake tunnel station where I usually get off. There was a fire in the tunnel and it was being evacuated.

Two years ago this happened in that tunnel where I get on and off my bus.

Had someone been kicking a 15-year old girl in the head while she was on the ground when I was around and within range they likely would have been shot (the guards just a few feet away doing nothing could have been collateral damage that I wouldn’t have been too concerned about at the moment—They have standing orders to “observe and report”). That would make for a very messed up existence for weeks and perhaps years for me.

I just want to go home to Idaho away from everyone but a few close friends and do something safe in the middle of a 100 acre field. Something like play with explosives.

People who actually DO things

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I installed an Aimpoint sight on a 500 S&W pistol for a guy today.  He lives in North Idaho and has been hunting here and elsewhere for 30 years.  He’d been in and out of our shop, trying to figure out how to make the little Micro sight stay put on his 500 bore, G-force production factory, so we’ve gotten acquainted.


Today he brought in one of his many hunting photo albums.  He keeps records of each harvest; date, details of the animal, distance, and so on. 


One of his kills was of a circa 2,000 lb Bison bull he got in South Dakota using a traditional muzzleloading rifle.  He used a 200 grain XTP 45 caliber handgun bullet in a 50 caliber sabot.  Muzzle velocity; ~2000 fps. (he could state his velocity extreme spread off the top of his head).  He knows his rifles and his trajectories from years of practical use.  That bull was shot from 150 yards.  I ran the numbers in Modern Ballistics, and the impact velocity would have been around 1280.  The jacketed hollowpoint bullet struck inside the front shoulder (so as to avoid the heavy shoulder joint, he said) in a quartering-toward shot, penetrated the heavy hide, busted a heavy rib, penetrated both lungs, the diaphram, and stopped in the spleen.  The bull walked a few yards, laid down and never got up, shot with what amounted to (energy-wise) a 45 magnum handgun.


Some (most)(no; virtually all) would say that his choice of round was drastically too fragile and drastically under-powered, taking a shot at the “practical” range limit of the firearm, but he’d worked with this system for years and knew it’s capabilities and limitations from experience.  Do not try this at home.


Anyway; it’s fun to talk with people who actually do things.


By the way; Installing the Micro sight on a 500 Smith requires the “permanent” red (as opposed to the “high strength” red) thread locker.  I had to special order it as no one in town knew it existed.  According to the tech I spoke with at Aimpoint, you also need to crank the cross-bolt down far beyond the 180-after-contact spec in the instructions, if’n you’re mounting it on the 500 hand cannon.  This time we used a ratchet wrench.  He’ll try it out tomorrow after the required 24 hour cure time and we’ll see if it worked.  I wish they’d go with a square cross bolt for high recoil applications, but in nearly all other applications it matters not a bit, one way or the other.

Overheard in reality

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Phone salesman; “How soon do you need it?  Right now, I suppose.”


Me; “Yeah, I have the thing apart, and the customer standing right here, waiting…


continued in my head…


… How much to get it here yesterday?”


Phone salesman; “All the money in the world, times infinity”


Me; “OK.  Do you take installment payments?”

Brains, learning, and school

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I had started writing a essay on learning and the brain and
current understandings about it, and realized as it grew HUGE that it revolved around examining some rhetorical
questions. Here are some of the core questions, with their import and details left
as an exercise to the readers and commenters, unless there is significant
interest in a particular one being addressed in some future essay.

Compare and contrast data,
information, and knowledge.
                Why do people use them
interchangeably, and what problems arise when people do?

Compare and contrast school
and education.
                Must one imply the other
(or the other, one)?

Compare and contrast smart
and educated.
                Why do educated people get
them confused so much more often than smart people (both in themselves and
others)?

Compare and contrast teaching
and learning.
                How do you measure the
effectiveness of a teacher?

Compare and contrast knowing,
understanding and wisdom.
                How does one get turned
into the other?

Compare and contrast intrinsic
aptitude and interest.
                Can one be leveraged into
the other, or are they merely randomly connected?

What is the most important thing a human should learn?
                Rank, in order, the top 10
things one should learn by voting age. Why?

How can you tell truth from falsity?
                How often do you ask
yourself “how do I know that? What
are my assumptions?”

At its most basic (biological) level, what is learning?
                What makes this happen?
How are repetition and strong emotional tagging different?

Is it important for children or young adults to learn how the brain learns and works at some point, before they become an adult?
               How could learning this help children in school?

How can a neural connection be strengthened, or made more interconnected
with others?
                Compare and contrast a
single, strong connection, with highly interconnected knowledge.

How many strong emotional “tags” are there in a very safe,
nearly risk-free, environment?
                Would this present a
challenge to learning?

What makes the brain think something is important enough to
learn (that is, remember and think about enough to apply the knowledge later)?

What is the brain designed to do, and in what sort of
environment?
                WHY? HOW? Can we use this to help teach and learn?

Nomenclature…

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…or…


Words Mean Things


Hundreds of years ago, when most long guns were stocked to the muzzle, there was usually a metal part known as the muzzle cap at the end of the stock to protect the thin wood and end grain there.  The half stock rifle, with which we are all familiar, often has a cap at the forward end of the stock also, but since it’s not at the muzzle, we call it a nose cap or a forend cap.  The forward end, or forward portion of the stock, for hundreds of years, has been called the forend or forestock.  For some reason hardly anyone, it seems, uses these terms anymore.


When I tell someone they need a nose cap on their AK before they can use a standard forend, they’re at a loss to understand.  For one thing, it is no longer a forend but a handguard, and there is apparently no longer any such thing as a nose cap.  In these modern times, when we’re still using the exact same features, we need the new term “handguard retainer”.  If I try to add clarity by calling it a forend cap, it still doesn’t work.  I have to use some version of “That metal thingy what holds the handguard on at the front of the handguard” but that’s a lot more syllables than the centuries old “nose cap”.


“Stock forend” or “forestock” no longer works.  I hear “forearm” more often, but most common is “lower handguard” (but some AKs only have the one, so using “lower” only adds confusion.  If a rifle doesn’t have an arm or arms, then it cannot have a “forearm” (the forward portion of an arm).  Since a rifle is an “arm” (in a different sense of the word) then a “forearm” would be the muzzle, wouldn’t it, or the front sight or something out there?


What really throws me for a loop is the term “foregrip” which I always take to mean “forward pistol grip”.  We sell forward pistol grips, so when you ask me for a “foregrip” I can only conclude that you mean forward pistol grip, which is after all a “foregrip”  We sell forends too, but you need a nose cap for a standard forend.  “You know; that foregrip you sell” applies, potentially, to a wide spectrum of products.  When I ask, “Which one?” I almost always get a “what?” or a “the one you have on your web site”.  We have a lot of them on our web site, which you would know if you’d looked at it, which I assume you did or you wouldn’t be talking about it.  You might as well say, “You know– the one I’m thinking about.  I can see it right here in my mind– why can’t you see it in my mind?”


Do you know where your rifle stock’s heel, toe, comb, wrist, forend, nose and nose cap are located?  Or is each feature “That thingy, there, next to or at the end of that other doo-hicky, what holds the thing you hold on to…there…by the bracket”?  I swear; I have several conversations per day that go along those lines.


Recently I had a guy completely reiterate everything I said, “just to be clear” in his words.  He knew all the parts, he knew how to use the language, he knew what part he had called to talk about, and he got everything exactly right.  I had to take a break, take a deep breath, and tell everyone about it.


Anyway; I take the common misuse of terms, or unfamiliarity with the jargon, to mean that there are a lot of new gun owners out there, so I try to be as patient as I can.  The other day I told a guy he needed to be sure he got Picatinny rings for our M8 rail.  Problem was, he didn’t know what “Picatinny”, “rail”, or “rings” meant, nor “Leupold” nor “Burris”.  I had to explain the meaning and derivation of each term and how it applied to his situation.  “Leupold is a manufacturer of optics including rifle scopes…”  At one point in the conversation he said he’d have to call those folks at the Picatinny Arsenal and order some of those rings.  He ended up spending a couple hundred dollars with us, so I must not have sounded too exasperated with him.


While I’m at it; a sight is not a site.  This is the first time I have cited the use of “site” when “sight” would have been right.

It’s good to have clarity

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After I had forcefully expressed my extreme frustration with my insane boss at Microsoft a manager higher in the chain of command told me, “It’s good to have clarity.” Although I was infuriated at the time the phrase stuck with me and I see it’s application to many situations.

Obviously, with clarity of the problem the solution set is smaller and more likely to succeed. What’s even more interesting to me is that in so many of the cases the clarity of widely varying situations lead to the exact same, obviously correct, solution.

Some examples will make my point. The following are not even half of the things that immediately come to mind. But some were close enough telling the stories would have been somewhat repetitive.

Nearly a dozen years ago I met a young woman, Patrycja, at a party who after learning I was an engineer cheerfully told me of all the money she had been making recently. She was a stripper at a club (no, she wasn’t working the party I was at, she was fully clothed) and although she made very good money there it was nothing to what she made from a recent “gold mine” she had been working. Some middle aged engineer who had near zero social skills and had never had a girl friend had been paying her for private visits to his home. No, she never had sex with him. She would strip and/or just spend time with him a couple times a week for a few hours. He had lived alone and frugally for many years while making good money. He had a lot of savings. In the last few weeks he had paid her over $20,000. He had another $80,000 or so left in savings and in a few months she expected she would have collected all of it.

Maybe the guy thought he was getting his money’s worth but my thoughts were different. I never, ever, wanted to have anything to do with this person again. I knew I probably wouldn’t remember what she looked like a year (or 20) later but I wrote down her unusual name so that I wouldn’t forget.

It was good to have clarity. That relationship, even though just a few minutes at a party, needed to be terminated.

Over 30 years ago my boss repeatedly told me, “You’re the project engineer on this, make the decisions and get it done.” But then a few weeks later a group meeting he was telling us how important my project was and how it was going to make such a huge impact to the company and especially those that had stock options. “Who gets stock options?”, I asked. His answer floored me, “I of course have stock options and at review time the company allocates options that I can distribute to the people I manage. I give them to my project managers.” I was shocked that he would say this in front of everyone in our group because most of them were clearly not project managers. Still, it would be good for me even though I hadn’t been awarded any stock options yet. But then he continued, “And my project managers are Jim and Bill.”

When he told me I was the project manager on the project he just meant he wanted me to assume that role. He didn’t mean that was my actual title or that it meant anything beyond assuming responsibility for making the decisions. And further research indicated that the two people with the actual title of Project Manager were more than we really should have for the number of people in the group. I wasn’t going to be promoted anytime soon.

It was good to have clarity. I terminated the relationship and moved on to another company.

For many years I unsuccessfully tried to get my wife to go to counseling with me. I finally got a highly recommended book for couples and we listened to it as we driving from the Seattle area to Idaho. After a couple chapters she asked me what I thought of our marriage and what needed to change. I told her we needed to work on some things and I enumerated some items that could be improved. She unfastened her seatbelt, opened the door, and tried to jump out as we were driving 60 MPH down the freeway.

That was sufficient clarity that something was seriously wrong and further investigation was instigated. There were compelling signs there was a personality disorder involved. If true then there was no chemical imbalance that drugs could mitigate. Counseling and therapy is so rarely helpful and problematic that most therapists refuse these type of patients.

I was 95% sure but not entirely convinced it was time to terminate the relationship. Within an hour and 20 minutes after having been served papers she tried to kill herself again.

A few days later when talking to my counselor she said the last suicide attempt pretty much confirmed my suspicion about the personality disorder. But what was odd, she said, was that my wife had only one husband for 35+ years. Most women with her condition would have had three or four by her age. “Mere mortals,” she said, “Would have left her years ago.”

It was good to have clarity. There are no second thoughts or wondering if terminating the relationship was the right thing to do.

The government deliberately gave and let sales go through for thousands of guns to known violent criminals hoping to “recover them at crime scenes.” And just what sort of crime scenes would they expect those guns to show up at? It sure wasn’t going to be jaywalking, tax evasion, or running a lemonade stand without a license. If they had two or more brain cells to rub together they had to know some of those guns would be used to murder and injure innocent victims. Hundreds died from the use of those guns and there are laws that if enforced against the government for those gun transfers would put people in jail for decades if not life sentences. As far as I know there are no exceptions in the law for government agents and I know for certain there aren’t going to be any prosecutions for those gun transfers. Those people believe they are above the law. U.S. Attorney General Holder and President Obama all but.admit that by refusing to cooperate with investigators.

Although it is not yet certain the leading hypothesis for the motivation was to justify another assault weapon ban. The direct infringement of a specific enumerated right under the color of law which results in the death of innocent people is punishable by death under 18 USC 242. Hence, a case can be made for the death penalty for the government perpetrators. But that will not be given even a second’s thought by prosecutors.

It was good to have clarity. It was clear to me but perhaps not the general population who really don’t know the law and the details of Operation Fast and Furious.

The day Obama Care was ruled constitutional Ry told me something like, “Things are clear now. There is no mistaking where we stand.”

The constitutional limits of power are relegated to the status of a myth. If taxes and/or penalties can be levied and collected for failure to buy a product or service imagine the corruption that enables. What kind of return on “investment” can made by a company which bribes enough politicians such that every family or person in this country had to buy a particular service or product?

The only limits to government corruption and power in our country are the limits of physics and economics.

It’s good to have clarity. It’s time to terminate the relationship.

I need a new frontier.

Quote of the day–Kurt Eichenwald

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Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees.


Kurt Eichenwald
August 2012 Issue of Vanity Fair.
Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant
[Via email from Ry. I could rant for an hour about this. It was a strong contributor to my leaving Microsoft.


But the final straw was a manager who several people on my team independently concluded, "He's insane!". The most inspired and brilliant thing I have ever done with software, a new algorithm for estimating the location of device based on the presence of cell and Wi-Fi signal, was termed by him to be, "A negative contribution to Microsoft." A month or so later the bug this algorithm change would have fixed was termed to be a Priority 1 bug that had to be fixed ASAP. When I pointed out I had been telling him for months that we needed to make this algorithm change he then marked the bug, "Won't fix" and it was forever ignored.


He asked us all what we liked to do best and did well then gave us tasks there were just the opposite of that. The most incompetent "engineer" on our team was promoted to a senior engineering position, the same level as me. He didn't qualify as an engineer in my book. Had he been an intern I would have recommended he not be hired or brought back for a second internship. Others "promised" promotions by our previous manager were given poor reviews and told they were on their way out of the company if their performance didn't improve.


I could, and have—just ask Barron, rant for many hours about this guy. He was the worst manager, by far, I have ever had in nearly 35 years of being an engineer. And I've had an alcoholic, one who said things to me that would be considered sexual harassment, and just plain stupid and incompetent managers. But seldom would they get in the way of you getting your job done or doing it right. This guy was counterproductive, actively destroyed moral, and degraded the quality of the product.


Four out of five people on our team complained to our skip level manager about this guy. He did nothing. Three out of five people on the team quit Microsoft because of him.


The last I heard he still works for Microsoft. If I ever get a call from a Microsoft recruiter I will tell them there is no point in continuing the conversation if this guy still works there. Any company that holds on to someone like that is not a company that I will work for.


Still, I think Windows Phone 7.x is finest mobile phone available and I am extremely proud of helping build and ship that product. I will continue to favor Microsoft products over others. But Microsoft has problems. The culture I experienced in the mid and late 1990's was gone when I joined as a full time employee in 2006 and while I thought the culture from the earlier time needed some changes what it changed into was worse for both the employees and consumers. Microsoft needs to make some serious changes and I hope they are up to the task.—Joe]

Red Flags

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I could go on and on and on and on about all the times I’ve been scammed in business.  When you’ve been in business for 35 years you accumulate a lot of stories of woe and intrigue.  One of the dumbest scammers was a couple of kids using a stolen credit card, who wanted us to deliver thousands of dollars worth of musical instruments, picked out over the phone sight unseen, each being the most expensive of the available choices, to a parking lot on a Sunday.  We just got as much information out of them as we could, called the cops, and found out that these kids had been busted multiple times in the past for check and credit card fraud.


Just the other day, we got an order for multiple units of the most expensive thing we have to offer.  First red flag.  Not enough to get all suspicious, but it makes you wonder just as little bit.  In the comments box, he/she/it says to hurry, but offers no reasons why.  Second red flag.  That may sound innocuous to you, but it’s extremely rare.  When we try to process the transaction, it comes up with a no-match on both the cvv number and the billing address.  Third red flag.  When I reply, asking for the correct cvv number and billing address he/she/it has no idea what I’m talking about and therefore can’t provide any info.  Fourth and fifth red flags.  That’s two more; one because a person spending a lot of money for something needed right away couldn’t get the numbers right, and two because someone is doing all this as his/her/its very first time making an on-line purchase (if you’ve done it before, you know the meaning and importance of a cvv number and a billing address).  If you don’t know what “cvv number” means I can maybe sort of forgive you because some sites refer to it as a “security code” but I can’t forgive you for being unable to use google for a few milliseconds to find out.


My long legacy of being scammed tells me this is a kid with a stolen card, or some other dirtbag loser/gangsta and that I shouldn’t engage in any more messing around.  It’s not any one or two red flags, but the accumulation of red flags that made me nix the deal.  I know full well that it is possible that this is an innocent, inexperienced buyer, but it’s too unlikely a scenario to gamble a lot of money.  Nor will I offer any explanation to this person, beyond “…our security department has rejected the order.  Please look elsewhere.  Sorry.”  Other red flags I won’t tell you about.


Those of you who aren’t in business do understand (don’t you? no, you probably don’t– no one learns about business unless they actually do it, because most people go through public education) that any time there is a problem with a credit card, it is I, the business owner, who always eats the shit on the deal.  No one else is responsible.  You may THINK that the credit card bank is letting your unauthorized charges go at their expense, but they’re charging the vendor (that’s me) whenever that happens (it’s called a “chargeback”) and then merchant services threaten to cut off, or jack up the price on, my merchant services.  The business owner is always at fault.

This Would be Cool

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…but the manufacturer defaced it horribly by putting lettering and numbering all over it.  I wouldn’t mind owning one, but then I’d be forced to advertize for Colt’s without compensation, flashing that company name and address around everywhere I went.  They should pay me to own it.  And those serial numbers?  Those weren’t required by law in the 1840s and ’50s, and the gun would look SO much tidier without them.

(This in response to people who complain that my products have to be defaced with my company’s name and the model number, or the patent number in some cases.  It turns out that there’s also a significant culture in the muzzleloader world that hates the idea of signed or numbered guns.  That fact that maker’s marks, serial numbers, inspectors marks and proof marks have been a necessary and worthwhile part of manufacturing since Grok made his first stone club seems to get lost on some people.  Maybe the famous works of art would be worth more if they’d never been signed, too [they were such shameless self promoters they turned every work of art into an advertizing billboard for themselves].  We do refrain from using flashing lights in our logo if that’s any consolation.  Our engraved logos are matte black on matte black, but they’re still too obnoxious for some people)

High Praise for Windows 8

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From John at work. We are both working on Windows 8. Occasionally we will complain about some problem or another we have run into with the prerelease bits we are dealing working with.

This morning he sent out some email:

I don’t know what all the Windows 8 bashing is about the new UI is clearly superior: 

image

Obviously he is correct. As Greg (at work) pointed out, “This is a much more pleasing shade of blue.”