In the movie business, continuity refers to the process of making sure that scenes shot out of sequence line up contextually in the finished movie. The best example I can think of is in Ocean’s Eleven, where Brad Pitt’s character is talking to Matt Damon’s character while eating a shrimp cocktail. In the middle of the scene his cocktail switches from a plate to a goblet. Whoever was in charge of continuity between the two or three takes that make up the final scene botched their job.
In business there are continuity plans, which are devoted to how the enterprise will continue in the face of some catastrophe, like a major storm, building fire, or other devastating event. Unfortunately, these continuity plans rarely extend down to the individual employee level. The team I am leaving does make good use of a “vacation plan” document, created by the person going on leave to provide guidance on projects and issues in their absence.
We don’t, however, have a good process for employee resignations. And certainly no process for multiple resignations and vacations at the same time.
Our business is calendar year driven, so next Thursday is a big day. Product revisions are going live, data changes are being made, and new customers are coming on board. Consequently, the weeks leading up to January 1 are hectic, stressful, and not nearly long enough.
The six-person team I am a part of had a resignation that saw one team member leave last week. My resignation is effective next Wednesday. Two additional team members are on vacation this week; and one of those has had to be hospitalized unexpectedly and may or may not return as planned on Friday. We are normally shorthanded, so the loss of one person plus the holiday time off schedule has crippled us this week.
Normally when you resign the amount of work you are assigned undergoes a dramatic reduction. You start handing off responsibilities to other people and begin transitioning out of the daily process so your departure isn’t an abrupt halt. Due to the circumstances described above, I am busier this week than I’ve been in two years here, with no time to think about transition, and no one present to transition to.
People outside of my immediate team are still unaware of my status, and the demands being placed on me through their ignorance are putting the continuity of this position’s responsibilities at risk. Indeed, a non-trivial portion of the new-for-2009 processing is at risk simply because I won’t be available the day it goes to production. Ideally a company would have a process for transitioning responsibilities away from a departing employee; one that didn’t rely upon 100% commitment from someone who has published their intent to leave the company. I’m willing to do the work, but their reliance upon my character and integrity ultimately hurts them, as the transition won’t happen until after I leave.
It’s funny when you find a continuity gaff in a movie, it could be financially harmful to not ensure continuity when employees resign and move on to other pursuits.
This evening we decided to treat ourselves to pizza rather than cook something at home. We both like the personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut on occasion, so I called their number to place my order.
And got to listen to a canned ad for the newly added “Wing Street” offerings. We’ve called them enough times now for me to feel confident in saying that while you are listening to the initial ad, the phone in the store hasn’t even rung yet. The initial ad is always the same and it is never interrupted by the phone being answered. They’ve got you captive and are going to milk the moment for all it’s worth. Eventually the ad ends, and then the hold music/advertising starts. The hold loop is almost always interrupted immediately by the takeout order taker, adding to my belief that the phone call isn’t put through to the store until after you’ve had your commercial.
Most of the DVD movies we own have some kind of preview, and quite a few have a commercial at the beginning. The most egregious have an anti-piracy commercial. I just paid for the DVD and now you are forcing me to watch a anti-piracy video? Hitting the menu button or fast forwarding to the next chapter are blocked, so you have to endure their self-righteousness in order to watch the movie.
In both these instances I am already a paying customer. Well, in the pizza case I want to be a customer. Does upper management at Pizza Hut feel they will increase revenue by forcing me to listen to a commercial extolling the virtues of their new expanded menu? And does the movie industry think that insulting customers who’ve already paid money with an obnoxious commercial will increase their goodwill?
I will continue to endure the force-to-listen to commercials at Pizza Hut because once in a while I want their product. And I will continue to endure force-to-watch anti-piracy ads on DVD because I want to watch the movie I’ve purchased. But I will not have sympathy for organizations that take advantage of their customer’s goodwill and then cry foul with people find ways around the system.
What better way to start off the new year than with a new job? I recently accepted a position as Software Architect with the Office of Mediated Education at Kansas State University. I’ll be working with several teams that develop and support web-based applications for use in online classrooms, student ratings, grade submission, and a university-wide authentication system among others.
I am very excited by this turn of events, and both Sibylle and I are looking forward to completing our move to Manhattan Kansas at the end of the month.
Three years ago, on December 5th, I installed Mint for the first time. Since that time it has recorded 26,000 plus page views and almost 15,000 visits to my humble site. Along the way I have added and taken away various peppers, and I upgraded to version 2.0 this past year. Mint has worked flawlessly the entire time.
On December 5th this year, when I tried to view my Mint page all I got was the End User License Agreement (EULA) acceptance page. I was very reluctant to accept the license for fear it would truly install Mint again and somehow overlay all my statistics. I post a question to the Mint troubleshooting forum and waited for an answer.
Meanwhile my site itself was taking a very long time to load. I called Sibylle and asked her to try an view my Mint page thinking that the problem could somewhere in my browser cache or cookies. She also got the EULA screen, not the log in page that I was hoping for. I used phpMyAdmin on my site to back up the Mint database just in case. I had a back up from late November when I had last updated Wordpress on my site, but I was hoping to not lose the statistics collected since then.
By early evening I still hadn’t gotten any responses on the forum so I accepted the license and waited to see what happened. After a very long time loading I got the “Create new account” page. Fearing that my statistics were about to be lost I entered in the same id and password I’d used before and hit Enter again. After another very long wait I was back at the EULA page. Somehow the installation was caught in a loop.
Sibylle commented that my site was extremely slow to load on her computer as well. Wondering if there might be something wrong with my host, I called their technical support. As an aside let me say that Bluehost has phenomenal technical support. I pressed “2” for support and was speaking to Jason in 5 seconds. Wow.
Jason had me look at the error logs for my site, and he made several suggestions, but the one that caught my attention was to repair the database. Turns out phpMyAdmin has a table repair utility built-in. I selected all the tables in my Mint database and ran the repair option. Within seconds it was done (it’s a small database) and voilà!, my Mint statistic page was back again. Complete with all the statistics from the past 3 years. Even better, my site was running normally. Page loads were no longer taking several minutes to occur.
Apparently, around 3 am on the 5th, something happened on my site that caused one or more of the Mint tables to need repair. Since every page on my site calls into the Mint software, and hence touches the database, this “needs repair” state brought my site to its knees. And it caused Mint to think it was still being installed.
Tonight, more than a day after the repair was done, both my site and my statistics are working normally. I cannot imagine what caused the error with the database, but I am grateful that it was easily fixed.
From 456 Berea Street comes this tip on forcing Safari to open targeted links in a new tab rather than in a new browser window. (NB: I changed the order of the steps slightly to suit my way of thinking.)
Recently Jason Kottke twittered:
When I was 13 or 14 years old, the last year I was an active member of the Boy Scouts, my troop spent a week at camp. The camp was new and modern and full of great activities. The pool director liked to have people tossed in the pool. Birthday. New merit badge. Any kind of recognition at all was an excuse to pick someone up from the dinning hall, carry them to the pool and toss them in. Great fun.
The night before camp was to end it was decided that the pool director needed to be tossed in the pool. When he tried to escape, and was caught, everyone ran out of the dinning hall to watch the fun. I tripped and fell in front of several hundred people and was trampled in the stampede. To this day I can remember seeing all these boots and shoes come at me and running over me.
At the time I was fine. One of my assistant scoutmasters managed to wade into the tail end of the crowd and scoop me up from the floor. I was seemingly okay. Several hours later I came out of my tent, turning blue in the face and collapse on the ground. I remember coming to in the local emergency room. “Delay stress reaction” was the diagnoses. Other than a couple of bruises, I was physically okay.
To this day I have a lingering hesitation, almost a fear, of large groups of agitated people. I would not enjoy a European soccer game at all.
Managing a crowd is a difficult thing. Masses of people do funny things and once they are headed in a direction it is nearly impossible to stop them. To read today that a Walmart employee was trampled to death while trying to unlock the doors for “Black Friday” shoppers sickens me.
Are we so desperate to save a dollar or two that we are willing to trample a fellow human being to death? I am outraged and saddened. Somewhere a child is going to get a toy or gift that was purchased over the dead body of another human being. All because their parent had to buy it at 5 am instead of 9 am.
Only in America.
Yahoo! News is reporting the results of a simple literacy test given to US government officials. The results are dismal. Elected government officials scored just 44% on average on the test which asks questions about history, economics, and civics.
You can take the test yourself. I scored 27 out of 33 for 81.82%.
Last week I was fortunate enough to attend a two-day overview of the capabilities and features of Adobe’s Dreamweaver CS3 product. The session was a highly level look at the major features and workflow the software provides. My employer is looking at using the tool for interface mock ups and screen design. With that responsibility shifted from the Information Technology department to the product planners and their Business Analysts, something was needed to give the BAs a way to capture web page layouts and interface designs.
What struck me most about the two day session was the utter lack of consequence presented with most of the features. The focus was on what the tool could do for you, but there was an utter lack of discussion about the merits of the technique at hand, or the costs (hidden and otherwise) of using it. For example, Dreamweaver allows you to point-and-click your way to embedding some dynamic controls on a web page. The controls are JavaScript based and rely upon proprietary, copyrighted code that Dreamweaver inserts into your site. As long as you continue to use Dreamweaver you can modify those controls as needed.
However, if you should stop using Dreamweaver, you would lose the ability to modify or maintain those controls. In our case, the page or site developed in Dreamweaver will be used as a guide for development, with the actual code being written outside of the Adobe product. It will be impossible therefore to do any kind of roundtrip engineering; once the site is developed and placed in to production, the proprietary code will be long gone. The Business Analyst will be forced to start over fresh, or try and build upon the non-Dreamweaver code to design the enhancement.
Simply because a tool or process gives one the ability to create a thing, doesn’t mean they understand that thing. Yes, Dreamweaver is a powerful tool, and it allows people with relatively little, or even no, web design experience to create a feature rich site. However that doesn’t mean they can support it, not does it mean that the output of their efforts can be integrated into a larger workflow. Tools which detour around the understanding and skill that comes from an apprenticeship have a hidden cost. Knowledge doesn’t equal skill or understanding. I’m not saying that Dreamweaver is bad, or that sites generated and maintained with it are bad either. I am saying that relying of the software to be your experience base, rather than having some experience of your own, is potentially dangerous.
We were all taught how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide in our heads using nothing but pencil and paper. Most of us use calculators today to perform these functions but we all have experience and skill doing it ourselves. Without having gone to the trouble of learning how to “do it by hand” we would fully appreciate simple mathematics nor would we really understand how it works. Building a web site is the same way. Without at least a cursory apprenticeship, using a point-and-click tool to generate a site for us may cripple our ability to fully appreciate its true potential or its real cost.
Apprenticeships, indeed, artisanship, is a lost and dying art.
Going to the movies isn’t what it used to be. Or maybe it isn’t what I fondly remember it as being. The timing of our weekly trip to Manhattan this Saturday allowed me to take in the new Bond movie while Sibylle was teaching. The 1:45 show time fit neatly into our usual schedule so I went to the movies.
1:45 brought the start of eight solid minutes of commercials, including one overly patriotic National Guard recruitment piece. Commercials. After I’ve paid $6.50 for matinee.
From 1:53 until 2:12 we had previews. Obviously the previews are geared to the feature, so they are usually of interest to me. But 19 minutes of previews? The one for The Spirit, a graphic novel coming to the big screen, probably contained the entire story line in the several minutes it ran.
Finally at 2:12 or so we go to see the theaters self-promotion clip, filled with people happily consuming overpriced soda and popcorn.
The movie itself began around 2:16. A full 31 minutes after the advertised starting time. Unbelievable.
Oh. As Bond movies go this one was fair. I haven’t seen the previous one (or ones?) with Daniel Craig in the title role, so I didn’t have the back story for what is apparently a sequel. The new actor is cold-blooded and almost robotic. This is not your father’s sexy, double-entendre Sean Connery Bond by any stretch of the imagination.
Next time I think I’ll wait for the DVD and watch it at home.