Infinite Shades of Grey

George Bernard Shaw said : “There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it.”  I enjoy photography and every once in a while I will get a shot that is great. I do hope though I never get the ultimate shot. You know the one they will hang in the Musée du Louvre in Paris. Why? All the fun is in the quest. That’s where life happens. That’s where you encounter obstacles and subsequently exciting paths around them and you meet new people on your quest who add to the richness and colour of your life.

Despite the risk of theft,  today I always travel with my Nikon. The risk of losing $6k worth of gear is worth taking versus the risk of being in a place where just for a moment “the shot” is available to take and you are camera-less.  All the fun is in the quest.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianzphotoz/

Some consultants I know are on the quest for the IT Executive, CIO or CTO job. They believe that these positions will be the penultimate career objective. In many cases, once achieved, the role is short-lived and according to a recent survey results in an 58% job dissatisfaction rating. I spoke to a Corporate CEO who recently fired his CIO. (The 4th in 9 years) He said about this person. “He was our top IT projects guy. He got the CIO job and he just went to sleep.”. His quest was over, the fire that had pushed him forward was extinguished.

I routinely turn down senior management offers to stay in the heat of battle, working with my clients and to make sure that the fire burns brightly. It is where all the cool problems are, the innovation, the ideas, the camaraderie of the teams and the fun of seeing a solution created. 

Ayn Rand’s novel went to print some 53 years ago and while becoming iconic to the conservative political movements, it is not as well known as the philosophy behind modern day object-oriented programming languages. If you are in software development  or architecture, Atlas Shrugged should be on your reading list. Her fictional community of self-contained, highly specialized people with very well-defined methods and interfaces drove the principles of object-oriented thinking. By contrast she also describes a community of highly coupled, interdependent people with ill-defined interfaces and highly fragile operation. It is a philosophical book. One that is read mostly (unfortunately) in university political science classes instead of comp-sci classes and to my amazement and dismay also banned from use in our local high school.

If you read Atlas Shrugged and found its protagonists as hard-hearted, hard-shelled, selfish people; read it again. You will find compassion, love, art, beauty and selflessness but only within well defined methods and interfaces.

I feel sorry for the people (including our local head of the High School English Department) who have such a shallow view of Ayn Rand’s works, dismissing it as right-wing propaganda. They have missed an opportunity to think, an opportunity that should never be wasted.

Today there are Atlas’es everywhere in every job, in every industry and in every public service role, taking a much larger share of the burden and responsibility than perhaps they should. Sometimes they are rewarded for shouldering the extra work, but many times they are not.  Their reward is the feeling that they have put forth their very best effort in fair exchange for the (hopefully) best efforts of others.

If you’re an IT consultant, don’t back down from the big challenges. An Atlas doesn’t shrug. Bring it on!

By the way… I am a proud owner of a first edition print.

My youngest daughter’s fascination with Orca whales lasted until she turned 12, when her second favourite animal the horse, took the primary position. For many years she had attended a Summer Camp in Severn Bridge, where she would ride and learn rodeo skills. One year she returned from camp with those fateful words. “Dad…. Daddy, I’d like to get my own horse….PLEEEEEZ” Every father knows exactly this situation. Your instinctive common sense tries to respond with “are you insane?” but the Daddy gene generally overpowers this with compromise statements like “save your money and you can get one someday”. Your daughter goes away smiling, perhaps encouraged and you feel that you are pretty much off the hook. Then 24 hours later, she comes back and says; “I got a job, I’m saving for my horse!”
My daughter was very diligent working at a horse farm and doing chores that would disgust most kids. She put a picture on her wall of a horse one of her camp counselors had for sale “Poco Pines Pride”, a 2 year old registered American Quarter Horse mare that was “broken but green”. Two terms I had never heard before but clearly the horse was brown and did not appear to be broken but in good health. Some months later, after saving every penny, doing additional chores and banking every birthday cheque, she comes to me and says. “Dad, I have saved $2,000 and I now have enough to buy Poco. Can we buy her?” I had counted on it taking YEARS for her to save enough money and perhaps she’d want a car instead. But no, it was time to honour my part of the deal. “Sure honey, you did great. I am very proud of you. I’ll call Shayne and let him know we’ll be sending the money and he can bring her to the farm or we can get her picked up” “Awesome!” My daughter screams. “His number is 403-555-1212.” “403?” I say. “That’s Alberta, are you sure you’ve got that right” “Yes. He and Poco are in Alberta” Yes indeed the camp counselor is from Alberta, not in Severn Bridge, Ontario or some neighbouring city. My education in all things equine begins.

Horse lesson number 1

After phoning around to numerous horse transport companies it became obvious that the average cost of transporting a horse from Alberta to Ontario was about $4,500 or roughly 2 times the actual cost of the horse, unless she could “hitch a ride”. Hitching a ride was the term for becoming the last passenger on a multi-horse transport to fill it up. Something akin to flying stand-by on an airline. Poco went on the stand-by passenger list for a while, but to no avail for weeks. We did get a call from a carrier who could pick her up, but it has to be that day. They are on the road and have an open stall. A more  reasonable cost and my daughter will be ecstatic, Perfect! So I agree and they say, “Please fax us the Coggin’s certificate and we’ll pick her up”. “A what?” I say. It’s a horse blood test required for stabling or transporting horses. It requires 3 days to get one, so Poco misses her ride. After many misfires and attempts to get her to Ontario cheaply, I give in to my daughter’s pleas and book Poco out on a highly reputable carrier. Lesson number one has been learned.

“Always ask where the horse is located before you buy it”

Horse lesson number 2

While Poco is in transit, my daughter reminds me that she will need:
• lead rope
• helmet
• chaps
• riding vest
• gloves
• lunging line
• surcingle
• polo wraps
• crop
• halter
• brushes
• hoof pick
• fly spray
• fly mask
• bridle
• bits
• saddles (yes plural)
• saddle pad
• bucket
• monthly board
• shoeing
• training/lessons
• veterinary care
• vaccinations
• de-worming
• hay
• bedding and
• horse treats.

You are not buying a horse, you are adopting a family member that needs everything you have never heard of and certainly don’t have

Horse lesson number 3

When it’s all said and done, it’s priceless.

  Then

  Today

Project Orca
My youngest daughter from the age of two was fascinated by Orca whales. Mesmerized by the lead actor in the “Free Willy” movies, she would also instantly snap out of the deepest slumber when a Marineland commercial was overheard on the television. So unlike some children who are fascinated with puppies, kittens or ponies, my daughter developed and retained a deep love of Orca whales. All parents have an instinctive desire to satiate the desires of their children. For dog lovers, you get them a puppy. For cat lovers, you get them a kitten. For the horse lover, you take them to fairs where they can ride a pony or perhaps take riding lessons. For whale lovers you …. do the best you can. You partake in the occasional trip to Marineland, purchase a healthy stock of “Free Willy” movies and acquire a few hundred stuffed Orca whale toys for the “deep sea” motif bedroom. For a number of years when my children were very young, I had kept one of those $200 Canadian Tire aluminum wrapped algae ponds in the backyard, commonly misrepresented as a “pool”. After a few years of risking my children’s health, I had accumulated the means to put in an in-ground swimming pool. While insufficient in size to contain an Orca whale as a pet, I could indeed acquiesce to an Orca whale themed pool liner and the usual menagerie of whale-shaped floating toys. The summer I was to put the pool in, I was working in Des Moines, Iowa. Des Moines is over 1100 miles from the Atlantic Ocean and 1700 miles from the Pacific Ocean and thus an unlikely place to find an Orca whale. However, I did. She was cute. Currently ensconced in the display area of a concrete lawn ornament manufacturer, she was a 5 foot long Orca shaped bench. Her Orca shape, including dorsal fin and black & white colour would certainly be a thrill to my daughter when the orca was added to my yet-to-be-built pool deck. So I bought her…. in Des Moines and hence Project Orca begins. It was my good fortune to have a close Canadian friend who also worked on the same project as I and he frequently chose to drive back to Ontario instead of fly. He also had a small pick-up truck, so the transport logistics for the new family pet seemed quite easy, when my friend agreed to bring her home for us a distance of over 800 miles. I called the vendor where I had purchased her to let them know that we would be picking her up the following weekend. He then provided the first clue to what would turn out to be a substantial project.

“What time will you be arriving? I need to order the crane.”, he asked.
“A crane?”, I asked.

Yes, I had never had the intellectual curiosity to ask how heavy she was. It turns out our new friend was a healthy 1480 pounds of solid concrete, ¾ of a ton, or roughly 680 pounds beyond the legal payload capacity of my friend’s Ford Ranger pickup truck. Fearlessly, my friend accepted the challenge in spite of the laws of physics, states and provinces and headed to Ontario with my whale. Steering when the front wheels occasionally touched the ground and remembering to brake roughly one city before he intended to stop, he arrived safely at the US/Canada border. “Anything to declare?”
“Just a 1480 pound concrete Orca whale”.
“Carry on”
While my friend was in transit, I had flown home and was preparing to receive my new whale. Pool construction had not yet begun, so I needed a place to store the whale until the pool was completed. Knowing that she was quite rotund, I devised a dolly platform onto which she could be lifted. The ¾” plywood reinforced platform included 8 industrial rolling casters on the bottom, so that she could be easily rolled out of the way of pending construction activities. I then rented a Bobcat skid-steer to lift her from the truck to the dolly on our driveway. The whale arrived and the truck look like it was running with flat tires, weighed down beyond capacity. Some sturdy tow ropes and we lifted her to the waiting dolly. I carefully placed her on the dolly and the dolly prompting sunk to the wood burying the casters into my newly paved asphalt driveway, to remain there as a unique driveway ornament for the neighbours to point at for the next few weeks. Construction on the pool begins and as part the contract I have asked the builder to put the whale (now named Valerie by my daughter) on the pool deck when they are done. He agrees. In the process of digging the hole for the pool, the crew has unearthed 2 massive, multicoloured boulders. My guess is that each boulder would be in excess of 1,000 pounds and I chose to keep them for landscaping instead of having them trucked off with the rest of the earth removed. So after removing them with an excavator the builder left them for me to deal with in the front yard. The pool is built without issue and the last job is just finishing early in the am, pouring the concrete pool deck. The builder comes to me and asks if his crew can move onto the next job, since they are done early. He says that he is sorry he can’t move the whale yet because the concrete is not yet set, but if I don’t mind doing it, he’ll leave me the bobcat skid-steer. Perfect! I love playing with heavy equipment. The next day, it is time for some fun. First, I’ll do the boulders, it’ll give me some practice before moving “Valerie”. It has been decided that the ideal place for the boulders is in the back yard, one on each side of the steps of the newly built wooden  patio deck. I climb aboard the Bobcat, pull the metal “amusement park” style safety bar down over  my shoulders and chest and start the engine. In a few minutes, I am completely comfortable with the controls and successfully demonstrated that I can tear up a lawn with the skid-steer professionals. So I put the first boulder in the bucket. Well actually … it looks like it would fit in the bucket, but it won’t. So for the next hour, I chase the boulder all over the front yard, trying to flip it onto the bucket but for the most part just pushing it around the yard like some sort of mechanized game of polo. Eventually, I give up and push the boulder into a small hill, get out a hydraulic jack and literally push the boulder into the bucket. I climb back aboard the skid-steer and now lift the boulder and drive slowly to the backyard. I have marked off where I  want both boulders put and I line up the first boulder at her mark. Tilting the bucket to slide the boulder off, it does indeed. While I was pretty good at high school physics, I seem to have forgotten the basics any more. A 1,000 pound boulder when lifted high into the air and then tilted out of a bucket (ramp) will respond to the force of gravity, rapidly accelerate down that ramp and will not in fact drop straight down but will crash into your new wood deck rendering the deck useful for kindling or toothpicks. So with this demonstration of skill and competence under my belt, I go to get something much bigger, much heavier to move, “Valerie”. I have now wrapped “Valerie” in nylon tow ropes and attached the rope securely to the bucket of the Bobcat. I climb in, set the safety bar, start and lift. With the bucket 4 feet off the ground Valerie lifts a few inches off the dolly for the first time. Ever so slowly I move her towards the side of the house for her journey to the pool deck. Between the house and my newly installed fence is probably a distance of 8 feet or so, my lawn slopes up gradually from the front to the back yard and slopes away from the house. This means that it is both a reasonably tight fit and the slope makes it necessary to lift the height of the bucket as you approach the back yard. I am being very careful and moving slowly. As the ground rises in front of me, I lift “Valerie” an inch or two and move a few feet further. I keep repeating this process until I am about half-way down the side of the house. I am about to repeat the process again when “Valerie” heads for the fence, pulling the Bobcat over on its two downhill wheels and the two other wheels now up in the air., the entire 8,000 pound machine now precariously positioned now to simply roll-over and roll-over my new fence as well. Physics lesson of the day #2. While I was fixated on ensuring that “Valerie” was just above the ground as I moved forward, I was paying much less attention to the fact that the bucket was now some 7 feet in the air, creating a highly unstable centre of gravity and with no apologies for the laws of physics, simply fell over. Okay what do I do? First, turn off the Bobcat. Yell at the kids to stay away. Time to think.Okay, this will be simple enough, start the Bobcat, lower the bucket, Bobcat will right itself and then put on a much shorter lift rope and start again. An audience of neighbours has now gathered to gawk and offer helpful suggestions. I stick with my plan.
Makes sense, push start.
Beep, Beep. Indicator light – Not Level – The Bobcat can’t be started on an incline.
Okay then I will just have to right the Bobcat manually somehow. I lift the safety bar to exit. It won’t budge. Anytime the bucket is lifted, the safety bar locks down to keep it’s driver inside and safe. So I am now locked into a Bobcat that I can’t start, almost tipped over, with a whale inches from destroying my new fence. What could be worse?
The neighbours are killing themselves with laughter and has asked one of their kids to run and get a camera in order to keep this particular moment for posterity.
I am muttering about moving when their youngest arrives with the Nikon. I wriggle out from beneath the safety bar after a few minutes, crawl between the arms and
bucket it was to have kept me from and now apprise the situation from the outside. Okay. All I need is my hydraulic jack again. So I put the jack under the nose of the whale to lift it up with them intention that the whale will rise and the bobcat will right itself. Crank… whale lifts an inch. Crank …. Whale lifts another inch. Crank… whale slides off the jack and down the hill. The bobcat, which was in a precarious position before, has now been pulled even farther over now certain to roll-over and crush the fence and the unsuspecting neighbour’s dog who has just now come over to investigate the ruckus. Now it is one thing to screw up and make mistakes, it is another to do it in front of your kids, your neighbours, your neighbour’s dog and a Nikon. I hesitantly admit to myself, that the situation has gotten out of control and I need some professional advice. I call the builder at home and ask him if there is an override switch that will allow me to start the bobcat on a grade. Suspicious, he asks me why I need to know. I ruefully explain that indeed while attempting to move the whale after demolishing my wooden deck with boulder, I have indeed almost rolled the bobcat. Worse than the sound of a Nikon “clickwhirr” as it frame by frame captures my misfortune, is the hilarious laughter of the builder followed by “Oh this I gotta see… I’ll be right over. Hah-Hah!” True to his word, he arrives few minutes later and enjoys with the rest of the crowd the spectacle of the “bobcat and the whale”. He explains that short of calling for a crane, there is little we can do to right the bobcat except dropping the whale. So we cut the nylon tow rope. THUD! Valeries lands on the ground and the bobcat comes back upright. Problem solved. Well not quite. I still have a 1480 pound whale that has slid down the hill and a bobcat incapable of lifting it without falling over. So we push it with the bobcat. Yes, we pushed the whale with the bobcat, tearing up yard until the whale was safely in
the back yard, where we once again pick her up and finally placed her on the pool deck to remain forever. Someday when I move from this house, Valerie will stay to be adopted by the new family and I will leave them with a copy of this story, so they can explain why they have an Iowan Orca in their backyard.

A colleague of mine was recently proposed on a consulting engagement but was turned down before she started. The reason, the client did a quick check on linkedin.com and facebook.com and didn’t like what they saw. Point taken.  I decided to update my grossly out of date linkedin.com professional profile.  I put in the usual information and then decided to bolster my contacts and references for the 20+ years of work that I had completed.  For the most part I could find many of the people on linkedin and simply requested that they join my network. It took less than a few hours to add near 100 contacts. What was interesting though was reading some of their own profiles.

One of my contacts was the President of a $300 Million company and yet it appears nowhere in his work history. Just 10 years of “marketing director” at that same company. So I am not sure if it was embarrassment of falling from lofty presidential perches to his current humble position that cause the detuning of his profile or perhaps he felt that no one would hire an ex-president into a normal job.

Another of my contacts with whom I had worked daily with for over 3 years , had no indication at all on his work history that job had actually happened. Has was a CFO during those years according to linkedin.com not a database architect.  Again I wonder if the linkedin profile has been specifically crafted to generate a certain impression.

At the other end of the spectrum, the President of a $3B business unit I have worked for directly, that according to his summary; invented the internet, invented the bar code, turned around a multi-billion corporation and had 160,000 people worshipping at his feet.  Perhaps a slight exaggeration….

Now everyone has known for years that resumes are at best inaccurate representations and at worst imaginative pieces of creative writing, the same now applies to Social Networks.  In fact there is an entire CV industry out there that will help C# programmers convince prospective employers that they should be allowed to architect and design the next mission critical system the employer wants developed. Perhaps we’ll see professional linkedin.com polishers soon.

detritus (d-trts)

1. Loose fragments, such as sand or gravel, that have been worn away from rock.

2. Matter produced by the decay or disintegration of an organic substance.

So what should be a helpful business tool, to get a realistic picture of a professional career and establish bona fides is in danger of being just bits of truth, worn away from the actual facts and perhaps even worse crafted into some other visible object.

I am not certain why people are so afraid of the truth.

Perhaps Gowan McGland, the lead character in the black comedy “Reuben, Reueben” http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084591/ sums  up linkedin.com the best. 

“ I adore the truth, I don’t  practice it…  but I cherish the truth”

So beware of the flotsam, debris and detritus bobbing around in the social network waters.

By the way, my colleague in the introduction, was completely qualified to take on that engagement.  I’ll blog about the social/professional facebook gap  later ….

The highway traffic act in Ontario. states you can use your cell phone if….

“14.  (1)  A person may drive a motor vehicle on a highway while pressing a button on a hand-held wireless communication device to make, answer or end a cell phone call or to transmit or receive voice communication on a two-way radio if the device is placed securely in or mounted to the motor vehicle so that it does not move while the vehicle is in motion and the driver can see it at a quick glance and easily reach it without adjusting his or her driving position. O. Reg. 366/09, s. 14 (1).

(2)  A person may drive a motor vehicle on a highway while pressing a button on a device that is worn on his or her head or hung over or placed inside his or her ear or is attached to his or her clothing and is linked to a hand-held wireless communication device to make, answer or end a cell phone call or to transmit or receive voice communication on a two-way radio or a hand microphone or portable radio. O. Reg. 366/09, s. 14 (2).”

Otherwise nope.

I am a long distance commuter. In an odd way, the new law gives me back 90 minutes to 2 hours a day , that would have been spent talking or at least glancing at in-bound emails.  Now, I have a respite. It has been years since I pushed the  seek  button on the radio to see what is on. Even longer since I had listened to CBC Radio. It is absolutely astounding what they will put on the air. Today an un-notable author who felt “hyper-responsible” for dairy cattle. Truly a uniquely CBC quest for the atypical. Thanks to the new law, I am now wiser with respect to the trials and tribulations of dairy cattle and perhaps has moved me from my auto-renewal of my membership in PETA (People Eating Tasty Animals).

In addition to arcane minutes with the CBC, I have also found enjoyment in revisiting classical music stations, some long forgotten rock and have recently downloaded a number of albums to my Zune (no, it’s not an iPod) for my leisurely listening. I expect I am not alone and that sales of music in Ontario have likely jumped as the commuters now spend time listening to both new and old music and are renewing a love affair long submerged under the 3G network waves.

So since the ban, I have purchased an amazing album by Claude Bolling (Jazz/Classical) and purchased an album by Alias with songs that I had never heard before, despite in being a Platinum selling album in Canada. What was I doing?

So thank you, Solicitor General. You have given me back about 2 hours each day that I can spend on things I actually enjoy. You can call me during my commute, but I’ve now got a real good reason not to answer.

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king punished in Tartarus by being cursed to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout eternity. While an iconic representation of constant frustration. He has made a critical error. He pushed the boulder back up the hill the second time.

So here’s the improved plan. Try it once and when the darn thing rolls back to the bottom. Leave it there. 

So this to me has direct application in the monster eHealth projects taken on by various forms of federal and provincial governments. There is “The Plan”. The plan is a fully integrated coast-to-coast, Electronic Health Record that allows every citizen and the people they provide explicit consent to to access and update their information.

Very noble. But it’s a very big rock, a very steep hill and quite frankly the combined muscle of the governments and citizenry lack the power to push it up the hill. But for  each time we try, we vacuum another $100 Million or so from the tax payer’s wallet.  So here is the plan. Let the big rock just stay at bottom of the hill. Let’s see if we can find small hills with smaller rocks to push on.

When 95%+ of health care occurs within 100 miles of a patient’s home, is it really important that my Toronto Health Record is instantly accessible in Iqaluit, Nunavut. Likely not.  But could the hospitals and clinics in my neighbourhood agree to either federate or centralize data? (Amalga technology or Proprietary HIS respectively)

I think so yes. As both a consultant and a tax payer to these endeavours, let us start with some common sense concepts. Affordable, pragmatic and that can be completed in a timely fashion.

It’s time to stop pushing on the big rock.