How They Did It

Barack Obama: How He Did It | Newsweek Politics: Campaign 2008 | Newsweek.com

“I just remember him saying that if he were to do this, he wanted to make sure that it was a different kind of campaign and consistent with his philosophy of ground up rather than top down,”

I just read Part One of Newweeks insider look at the presidential campaign. And you should read it, too!

How do you cry out against your frustrations?

It seems that every group I work with seems to evolve a special key phrase that let’s us vent our frustrations yet maintain humor to lighten the mood.

Example #1

I worked techical support for a fairly involved software application — clients on different platforms and a central server running SCO Unix (!!!) in the middle.  One particular client has their Unix Admin as the technical contact, but they really knew nothing about Unix.  It was amazing. They were nice people though, and rarely called, but when they did . . . oh boy.

We were forcing an upgrade and they wanted us to step them through it over the phone. Yes, this was before web meetings where we could have done it for them.  The tech lucky enough to get this task (not me!) was an interesting guy.  He was great on the phone with the customer, but after he was done you never knew what would come out of his mouth.

Needless to say, this upgrade should have taken an hour and four hours later he’s still on the phone with them.  We know they aren’t following our instructions, yet how do you let the customer know that?  Once we get them to realize they aren’t doing what we are saying, it goes smoothly.  When he is done, he thanks our customer for their patience, hangs up the phone, and screams out so everyone hears,”For the Love of God!“  Hence our catchphrase was born.  After that, whenever we were frustrated by something our servers or customers were doing, you would hear someone say, “For the Love of God!”.

Example #2

A few weeks ago our new project manager and I were talking about the current state of our projects and, really, it’s not good.  He suddenly cried out: “By the Eye of Thundera!”  And I cracked up. It has been a long time since I had heard a Thundercats reference.  As the days went by we both muttered that phrase back and forth.

I was gone on Friday, but this Monday morning I had an email from him with the subject line of “grrrr…”.  When I opened it, I almost fell on the floor laughing at the picture that greeted me.

So another phrase is born.

I wonder if this is normal for most IT shops?  I think so.  ”And there was much rejoicing” is a very common phrase in a lot of places.  Where I worked in college we said “broked” a lot.  Does anyone have any other catch-phrase?

From delicious to magnolia

If you subscribe to my blog, you get a nice group of links that I save throughout the day (or, really, when I have time to surf). Lately you may have noticed that I switched from delicious to magnolia.  The reason is simple: because I want to have access to my bookmarks at work as well as at home.

You see, delicious recently made a change where if you go to http://del.icio.us (their original URL) redirects to http://delicious.com.  Well, it turned out that my employer has blocked access to http://delicious.com. In fact, when I tried to save a bookmark to delicious, I was accused of looking at porn.  Nice, huh?  

I had to rack my brain to think of another service and suddenly remembered magnolia.  Some nice things about it:

• More room for comments when saving a bookmark.
• Community-based (though I haven’t delved into that).
• I like how the feed comes out, with snapshots of the pages I saved.
• Your bookmarks and comments are covered a Creative Commons License.
• They are making an open source version of their software.

Just so I don’t have two weeks since my last post

It’s not that there isn’t anything to blog about, it’s just that there is little time to do it.  So where should I begin?

• The battery of my Mac Book Pro went bad late this spring and I finally got a new one.   Working on a laptop is annoying without battery.  Especially with Apple’s cord that comes out if you look at it wrong.  At the beginning of August, I ordered the replacement off of eBay because it’s much cheaper than from Apple.  I did a Buy It Now and things went well. When I got my shipping notification I noticed it was being shipped vai HKPS.  A quick google showed that as Hong Kong Postal Service. Yeah, it took a while to get here — I finally picked up last Saturday.  And it works great!
• At the end of June, we started having problems with our wifi at home.  Due to a busy summer, I didn’t start trying to figure it out until a few weeks later. You can read my post on the local LUG list for all the details. I said later in the thread that I had it working, but only temporarily.  Now that I have a battery, it’s much easier to troubleshoot.  The problem is something in the living room is interfering with the signal — taking the MBP into the kitchen gives me plenty of signal.  The signal dies as soon as walk with it into the living room.  Of course, we have added no electronic equipment in the living room for at least a year.  I’m blaming the DirectTV DVR we have.  I’m not sure a good solution.
• Gina has been inspired by Sea to Sea. So much that she wants to pick up biking.  She already had a bike, and Leah has two (one for now, and another for her to grow into. And we didn’t buy either of them) but I didn’t have a bike.  Gina found one on Craigslist last week and I went to pick it up. The seat was horrible, so I got a replacement.  And the gears seem to be adjusted (Gina disagrees).  Leah is very excited to go on a long bike ride with her parents.  We have already did several trips around the block.
• , I’m team teaching Junior High Sunday School with Gina this year.  Gina did it last year with other gal and she dropped out this year (she had been doing it for a while).  No one had stepped-up to teach it with her and, really, there is no reason why I can’t help.  I’m most excited about doing it with my wife — that is what I think will be the best part for me.
• Once again, we’re heading to the Lifelifght Festival this year. I’m not sure who I’m excited in seeing, but there are some Souled Out acts that seem interesting.  Leeland will be good (they’re much better live, IMHO).

Digging Yourself Into the Circular Injection Hole

Late last week I had to do some major refactoring.  One of the things I needed to add was some Spring injection from SomeClass1 into SomeClass2.  No big deal — I do this all the time.  But after I did that, Spring would error out, saying that there was a circular injection.

This circular injection was not something we did on purpose, but instead was something that evolved.  We have functionality in SomeClass1 that we needed in SomeClass3, so we just injected that whole object into SomeClass3.  The problem was that SomeClass3 was injected into SomeClass2.  Then, when I tried my injection above, Spring rightfully said, “Uh, sorry, I can’t do that.”  So I ended up spending a few days taking two large bits of functionality out of SomeClass1 and put them each into separate classes to be injected everywhere we needed them to be.  Their injection was kept to a minimum, of course.  Then inject these classes into the places that needed them, and run all the unit tests to make sure everything is still okay.  Only after all that could we continue.

Why didn’t we do this in the first place?  Because we took the fast and easy way of just injecting our classes every-which-way and then getting bit when we least expected it.  I mean, the SomeClass1 was really called “XXHandler”!!  Injecting a handler class should have told us we were wrong!

So, never again.  I want small, simple classes that I can inject into other classes without fear.