Notes from a Fiery Nest

I encountered a New York Times Magazine article about the "Hollywood Model" of employment, in which an ad-hoc team of specialists is assembled for a project and then dispersed on completion; the article suggests that this will become a more dominant mode of employment in the future. It's an interesting article, but I'm not sure I agree with the degree to which they predict the ascendancy of this model.

Meanwhile, at work, my colleagues and I have been struggling to resolve "integration bugs" in new products. These are the problems which arise when individual pieces of a product or design appear to work when tested on their own, but because specifications are pretty much always incomplete and architectures are imperfect, don't quite work perfectly when brought together in a system. Some such problems make themselves felt immediately, but others can be subtle and sneaky, surfacing only under extraordinary circumstances.

Specialists aren't good at figuring out integration bugs. They require a holistic understanding of a system, and a significant strength of my company is that we have a fair number of bright people who have been there long enough to have not only deep understanding of their own specialties and broad understanding of the company, but significant understanding of the systems we work on. The Hollywood Model doesn't seem to allow for that, and so is vulnerable to integration bugs.

I don't think that every kind of work lends itself to managing integration bugs on the fly or to specifying every element exhaustively, so I think there will be a place for the "Corporate Model", in which people form a structure which remains stable across projects, for a long time yet.

Anyone interested in joining me for Kid Koala's show at (believe it or not) Ottawa Chamberfest this Friday night? Tickets are $35, general admission; show starts at 10:00 p.m. at De La Salle H.S. downtown.

Kid Koala is a Canadian turntablist with a jazzy, storytelling vibe. For this particular show, he's teaming up with a string ensemble and also a visual performance group. I expect that it'll be weird but wonderful!

Cape Breton was friendly, interesting, pretty, and tasty, but also distant and a bit chilly.

(Gee, that makes it sound like I'm talking about something other than a vacation...)

The drive to get there and back was long. Overall, we put in more than 4500 km of driving, which is a bit much.

The weather was mixed, with a few wet days. The temperature ranged from the cool end of comfortable to pretty cold: there were still snowbanks here and there up in the highlands. Where the wind was off the water, the temperature was distinctly chillier. In retrospect, bringing several pairs of shorts was perhaps unduly optimistic.

Cape Breton had lots of variety of land- and seascapes, with mountains, cliffs, meadows, bogs, beaches, taiga, streams, and lakes all vying for attention. We did a fair bit of walking and driving around, as is our usual habit on vacation. Aside from that, we went on a boat trip to look at seals, puffins, and other seabirds, and also visited Fort Louisbourg. We ate lots of good food, especially seafood: lobster, fish, scallops, shrimp, and some utterly amazing snow crab. Our favorite B&B of the four we stayed in was The Yellow Sidecar on the west coast; highly recommended.

I just finished truepenny's novel The Goblin Emperor, and loved it. There are not enough novels about good people, I think. Not that everyone in the book is good--saccharine doesn't appeal to me any more than anyone else--but it allows for the possibility of goodness, where too many other books suffer from an excess of cynicism under the guise of realism (see Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!). It's not a fast-paced or "active" novel (in contrast to, say, Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards series): conversations and thoughts consume the pages, and their material consequences generally occur off-screen. The general flow was good, although I will admit to needing to stop now and then to get my bearings amid a fairly vast array of names, some of them very similar to each other and/or long. For all that, I found it quite absorbing from start to end, and recommend it highly. I hope that it finds some awards worth winning, too!

Three of four new circuit board designs completed on time or close enough as makes no difference (no change to delivery date of assemblies), and the fourth well under way, despite late-breaking changes to the specifications for all of them. It's been a busy week for my little band of merry men.

Dimanche, ma mère et moi sommes allés à l'avant-première du film “Astérix - Le Domaine des dieux”, grâce à un tirage à l'ambassade de France. Ça a bien valu la peine de m'y inscrire: le film est un très bon rendment de l'album BD de 1971. C'était fidèle a l'esprit de l'original, mais avec assez de variation pour garder l'intéret d'un fan qui l'a lu maintes fois. La plupart des gags ont bien viellis--l'avantage d'une oeuvre situé à l'époque de 50 ans avant J.-C. Les effets 3D ne sont pas exaggerés, donc même ceux qui sont susceptibles au vertige pourront l'apprécier.

( English )

I write seldom in French, so this was an opportunity to practice!

We have a European Goldfinch visiting our balcony birdfeeders. The default assumption is that he's an escape from domestic captivity, because its natural range isn't exactly close to here, but it's acting wild, hanging out with a mixed flock of Common (American) Goldfinches, Redpolls, and House Finches, and it arrived with an Arctic air mass. We're hoping that experts can establish its subspecies from pictures, because if it's from a Northern one (rather than, say, the subspecies particular to Sicily, Corsica, and Sardinia), it might be judged a genuine wild bird way out of its range.

If so, the trickle of interest we've had for visiting our viewing area may get rather more substantial!

Alex Feinman on the stupid "rules" our society foists on guys. Snarky, hyperbolic, and very pointful.

An excerpt:

Man Rule 1. If you don’t show it, you aren’t feeling it
“Men aren’t allowed to have feelings.” This is, of course, inaccurate—men are allowed to have feelings, provided they show them in some sort of caricatured, over-the-top way. If they don’t show it, they aren’t really feeling it.

Angry? You have to smash something. Punch a wall. Shoot your TV. Hit someone. It’s justified: you were angry.

Upset? You can’t cry; that’s for sissies. Get really drunk and wreck your car. Glower into the darkness smoking your cigarette, making sure everyone *sees* you glowering and brooding.

Attracted to that woman? Better make sure you tell her. In fact, be ridiculous about it, invasive and over-the-top. Stand outside her window and throw rocks, or yell, or hold a boombox over your head. Buy a thousand roses and scatter them all over. Wolf-whistle at her and call her names. Bitches love names.

The analysis shows how this relates to homo- and transphobia, too.

Cat Pictures Please by Naomi Kritzer.

This article illustrates core problems with corporate personhood pretty well.

It's been a pretty stereotypically surburbanite day... lunch and shopping at the Carp Farmers' Market, more shopping at Pesto's Deli, Jojo Coco, and a hardware store, a bit of gaming, weeding the back lawn (there were some pretty impressive bull thistles growing there, up to well past 4 feet) and dinner cooked on the BBQ. Well, the organic pork chops were cooked on the BBQ, the organic greens went into a salad with an Italian dressing made with fancy olive oil and balsamic vinegar from the deli, and we warmed up the organic dark sourdough bread in the oven.

We so yuppie.

Chameleon vine imitates host plants; mechanism unknown. (Ganked from theweaselking.)

In other plant news, the walking palms apparently don't actually migrate by growing new roots as they are alleged to... it made a good story, though.

The Expert: a 7.5-minute comedy sketch depicting something which is excruciatingly familiar to most tech-employed folks. Neither soul_diaspora nor I could watch it all the way through on first viewing, so painful was it.

Dark Dungeons is coming, a movie based on the famous graphic novel!

I'm off to Costa Rica on Sunday morning with soul_diaspora!

We're going for two weeks, staying at a timeshare via my parents near Quepos. There will be nature-watching, ziplining, sailing, snorkeling, and lots of general relaxing. We went 15 years ago on honeymoon, and this is our first time back. I gather things have changed some, modernizing a bit; it'll be interesting to see.

I expect to be pretty much internet-free while we're down there; don't shut down LJ while we're gone, m'k?

This is an important thing: The Department of Justice Public Consultation on Prostitution-Related Offences in Canada.

On December 20, 2013, in the case of Bedford v. Attorney General of Canada, the Supreme Court of Canada found three Criminal Code prostitution offences to be unconstitutional and of no force or effect. This decision gives Parliment one year to respond before the judgment takes effect. Input received through this consultation will inform the Government's response to the Bedford decision.

This is your chance to influence a socially significant law... speak up!

In a couple of weeks, one of the folks I met in Edmonton last year will be coming to teach a kenjutsu seminar here in Ottawa. The schedule is rather more substantial than most of our aikido seminars, which run 6 hours spread over 2 days: this one will have almost twice that over the 2 days. I will likely do most or all of it... wish me luck!