2014 — 15 September: Monday
Well, I'm rather hoping this morning1 will see both the arrival of the SHIELD Tablet's miniscule microSD card and no resumption of the gastric upheavals (I use that word advisedly) after 30 hours with only three cautiously-sipped mugs of tea as input.
Mind you...
... being freed (if only temporarily) from kitchen servitude does have an impressive effect on the amount of time available for other activity. Cleaning out, for example, 32 recent emails from Jeff Bezos suggests I've been keeping his little enterprise afloat. I'm sure he appreciates my efforts. I also started watching "A New York Winter's Tale" last night, but soon decided that I wanted to read Mark Helprin's book2 first. After that, it was time to catch up with the latest (for me) season of "The Big Bang Theory" — still a reliable endorphin raiser while my stomach was settling down.
There's an equally thoughtful...
... piece offering an opposite conclusion to the one I noted yesterday. Source and snippet:
Establishment representatives approached a savvy, philosophical electorate with threats, insults and bungs. They implied yes voters don't love their children and suggested Scots working-class women have the intellectual capacity of herring... The financial world, so fond of representing its own interests as manifestations of natural law, has muddled its narrative, faked figures, played the usual shell game. The pillars of establishment control — politics, media, finance — and the Omniterror that gives them carte blanche have been examined and found unconvincing.
I'm not convinced...
... "immiserating" is a real word, despite the credentials of the chap who's used it. He's rather sternly criticising the opinions of William Deresiewicz on the admissions policies of the Ivy League universities. He's none too keen on Stephen Jay Gould, either. Perhaps because of the way he spells his name? Source and snippet:
Details aside, it's hard to see how a simple, transparent, and objective formula would be worse than the eye-of-newt-wing-of-bat mysticism that jerks teenagers and their moms around and conceals unknown mischief.
So why aren't creative alternatives like this even on the table? A major reason is that popular writers like Stephen Jay Gould and Malcolm Gladwell, pushing a leftist or heart-above-head egalitarianism, have poisoned their readers against
aptitude testing.
My Lower Sixth form grammar school class was selected to take part in an experimental predictive assessment (by the guvmint) of academic aptitude. Did I end up in a data base somewhere? The test looked like a simplified (for machine-marking) variant of IQ tests I'd already familiarised myself with several years earlier, courtesy of Hans Eysenck. I kept my opinion to myself, but I still sometimes wonder what happened to the results.
ICL gave me a somewhat similar test during my job application in 1973. IBM didn't bother in 1981 :-)
Speaking of test...
... results, my breakfast has been staying where it should. I regard this as progress.
Good job...
... I've never been a cynic. Just spotted this comment (made by a long time IBM STG employee) buried, quite deeply, on a Cringely blog entry:
That said, you're correct on the Roadmap being one of the roots of IBM's problems today. Financial performance is supposed to be the result of strategy and execution, not the strategy itself. And you're correct that IBM is doing this off
the backs of its employees and contractors (most of whom should be employees).
You might want to add a page or two on IBM's bonus (variable pay) calculations, explaining how the formula that applies to regular employees (based primarily on revenue growth) calculated out to ZERO bonus (for 2013), while the EPS-based
formula that applies to Ginni calculated out to 1.8x her target bonus (I think that came out to about $8M). Ginni turned that money down, despite the fact she was entitled to it. Nice, but how do you rationalize those two different formulas?
Ginni succeeded wildly, while all of the employees failed miserably??!?
And, yes, I've bought his damn' book.
Hyperion Records...
... helpfully make available PDF files of their CD programme notes for my personal use. I've just been reading the notes, by Harriet Smith, that accompany the Stephen Hough "French Album" of piano music Mr Postie just tried to shovel through my letterbox (before I stopped him, but not before he'd cracked the jewel-case). I bought the CD to be able to hear again the extraordinary piece by Charles-Valentin Alkan that Stephen Fry selected last Thursday:
The eighth Prelude, La chanson de la folle au bond de la mer ('The song of the mad woman on the sea shore'), is one of the most unsettling of all his works, prefiguring by several decades Liszt's late style in its unmelodic melodic line, and a claustrophobic sense of ennui, reinforced by an almost maddeningly incessant accompaniment.
Works for me!
Rats!
I was just wondering where my microSD card had got to, too...
I am sorry to advise you, that your order has encountered a 24 hour delivery delay due to operational issue's with DPD.
Since I was initially promised delivery last Friday, and since last I heard from the seller they were using Parcel Force, I'm not left much wiser. Never mind. I've just heard Steve Reich live on the phone from New York, and there's a world premiere of his coming up if I remember to check the details.
As well as...
... the Cringely book I also bought, and am already halfway through, one by Pete Greulich called "A view from beneath the dancing elephant". It's a powerful counterstrike against Lou Gerstner's 2002 book "Who says elephants can't dance?" and — if nothing else — confirms the correctness of my decision to get out of IBM. At one point he describes a call from John Akers' admin assistant following up on a Speak-Up...
There was silence on the phone. Finally the administrative assistant repeated, "These are tough times."
Until that moment, I had been the one missing the point — upper management no longer had any trust or confidence in us.
My conversation with Akers' assistant was just a sneak preview of what we would eventually discover was a complete lack of faith on the part of the executive leadership in its employees. In April 1991, some executive meeting notes were
published in the press, including a memo from John Akers stating that too many employees "were standing around IBM water coolers."
The incident killed company morale. Some blamed the person who leaked it; I blamed our CEO for thinking it.
Somewhere in a box in my loft sits a 6 cm pile of neat A4 sheets containing a printout of many of the comments made by hundreds of IBMers in internal IBM forums in the immediate wake of precisely that "leak". The execs apparently hadn't realised that this 'underground' IBM communications network even existed. Of course, the first thing they did was try to shut it down :-)
I also finished Lev Grossman's "The Magician King", but that's an entirely different story.