Social Sciences n00b

I miss my sunglasses too much.

Maybe I was on some sort of weird emotional bender, or maybe my brief spurt of optimism has run dry without any psychological stamina to handle the magnitude of the task I set for myself (see An impossible ideal). The whole thing about trying to somehow connect with people on the train and the bus just seems ridiculous now in hindsight. People don't want to be vulnerable to strangers during the fleeting encounters while in transit so whatever ideal I was thinking of was just going against the current of a river that is too big.

So the sunglasses are back, and my local library just got in a new novel from Terry Pratchett, "Long Earth". My head will be buried in that during my commute for the next few days.

Some people...

You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your relatives. Tragically you don't get much choice in your work colleagues either. Sure, if there's something particularly bad then you can quit or transfer internally if the company is large enough. But if your industry is in a rough economic patch, or maybe too lazy to switch jobs, then you could be in for some interesting times.

The company I work for does software, and they employ a person as the build/release manager. If you're not sure what that means, essentially think of them as the person who provides a quality control factory environment for the software. He ensures that it is labelled clearly, so that if there are any problems it can be traced to a date and easily audited. Its an important role in any software company that wants to be commercially viable.

I used to do that role, but then yearned to hop the fence, so they went through a couple of people in trying to fill the role and currently have a young man who is here on a working visa from Italy.

Where this guy gets interesting is in his style of communication, and as a person who used to do that role, I've had a lot to do with his orientation and ramp up with our tools. In addition, my current role also means that I also interact with him on an ongoing basis with further work and refinements.

He seems to know his stuff, but the problems I have are:

• He doesn't listen. The number of times I find myself repeating myself to this guy, or referencing emails I sent to him earlier that day is crazy. But maybe it is a learning style, and reading isn't his thing.
• He doesn't seem to care about the company.

Now, if people are honest, if I'm honest, I wouldn't say I care for the company that I work for in the same way I (for example) care for my wife or even my cat. If the company folded, I wouldn't be grieving for the company as much as I am for the now absent paychecks.

But I believe in a certain amount of professionalism and that people should do their job to the best of their ability with a sense of pride that they are achieving a service or goal with all their colleagues. Maybe I'm naive.

Anyway, in the two years that I've worked with this guy, the two ways he has managed to lose all my respect is:

1. In a discussion about a change in process, he loudly sided continuously with another team member who was against the changes, but could provide no reasons or justifications why he felt that way, other than my original proposal would mean more work for him. When we proposed an alternative where we would take care of that work on his behalf, he still objected to the changes. I have nothing against him objecting, and his role meant that he should have valid, well formed input to this item, but objecting without a logical reason? That isn't cool. At least the other team member had his technical reasons for why he was against it.
2. He recently encountered an issue where his working visa almost lapsed. He wouldn't have to leave the country, as he would be able to switch to a tourist visa while he addressed the working visa issue, but it would mean that we would have to suspend his employment legally, until it was sorted. We had a mass of confusion because he didn't explain this to the rest of the team properly, most of us thought he was intentionally leaving the company. When asked if he was leaving, his response was "if something better comes up". We had to go to HR to get the full story.

Dude, what? I thought maybe he was just messing with me, but he was giving the same coy answer to any of the other staff who asked him, even the ones who were friendlier with him.

In preparation of the possibility of him leaving, we asked whether he would document his work in case we have to transition, or have someone cover him temporarily, and his reply to that was that he didn't have much to write down, and people would pretty much work it out.

So now I find myself kinda torn. Finding people to fill this sort of role in the corner of Australia is a little hard, and can take months before you get a suitable applicant. If we get someone new who has to decipher what this guy has left behind, then that could be a month or two of headaches in itself. Yet on the flipside, I am done with this guy and really don't see it being in the company's long term interests for him to stay on.

Il tempo per voi di lasciare, amico.

North Korea

I have nothing personal to add about that country as I have not even been to an adjacent country, let alone North Korea itself. I've also never personally met any North Koreans. Closest is a South Korean who attends my church, and she herself has no real knowledge of what goes on in that country. Not sure if anyone does.

But a couple of years ago I came across an interesting blog from a couple of europeans who took a train trip from western Europe through to North Korea. They wrote about the train trip, and they are really into their trains, and have a stack of photos from the entire experience as well. Its a fascinating journey to read, but make sure you keep a few hours set aside for the experience.

Vienna to Pyongyang

I find it interesting that the Wikipedia article on the first Kim (Kim Il-sung) to begin communist North Korea, mentions that he reported he was the son of a Protestant minister. He must have held some deep seated resentment for Christians as they're now automatically considered traitors to the state.

Egg on face

Man, what a rollercoaster the past few days at the office have been. One of the exciting aspects of my job is dealing with people's fault reports. I work as a software developer providing tools and support for a software test automation team at the company I work for.

So alot of my job is creating tools, and making ammendments, in order to have software automatically testing software. Kinda sounds like the build up in plot for some sci-fi horror story.

Anyway, things occassionally don't work as planned. Sometimes I make a change to a tool and it breaks something else, sometimes I don't understand what they originally needed and I need to make changes to the behaviour. All up it means that I need to understand them, but I almost never understand them on the first try of any issue. This is actually normal for people talking about complex topics in relation to unexpected technical situations.

Where this whole arrangement baffles me sometimes is that it is the test teams' job, their specialty, a core part of what they do each day, is communicate about unexpected things to other people. For example, when they determine a way which causes a system to fail, they then need to clearly and concisely report to the original software developrs about what they did, what happened, and how to accurately reproduce the issue.

I've spent large chunks of the past four days locked in a tense standoff with one of the testers who I couldn't understand the details of her problem. She's a bright lady and hard working, but perhaps tiredness and frustration at the issue meant that on this occassion she was not inclined to go into much detail. So I was left guessing and trying to pick up pieces from other sources. That did not go well.

I ended up with a situation of providing a resolution for her that was part right and wrong. The problem was she didn't want the solution, because it only partly worked, but also she wanted something now that would fix the issue without her having to make any changes. Of course this aggravated me as there was no logical way to achieve what she wanted.

Managers got involved, answers and solutions were demanded to be provided in short time frames, and in my rushing around to make things happen, I made some mistakes and assumptions because I didn't do proper checks before presenting results.

End of the day, I achieved a good solution, but managed to also confuse and mislead a few people on the way. Weeks like that have me looking forward to friday night drinks. I need something to wash this egg off.

Yee haa

Fooling around with Blogger has been interesting. I've heard about all the things you can do to track popularity and viewing stats so that authors can keep track of their popularity and also try to gauge who are their main audiences.

I just noticed I can see what countries some of my hits are coming from, and I'm getting a bunch from USA. I don't know how that works as I'm pretty sure I unselected the option to make this page visible to Google, so I'm guessing a couple of my friends are using something to hide their IP.

But just in case; greetings uncle Sam.

Should I go public?

I guess its that desire for a little bit of fame. Perhaps jealousy of other blogs sites that have become quite popular and the curiosity about whether I could achieve the same heady heights of fame. But every now and then, I wonder whether I should set my blog to be visible to blog searches on this website, and even to appearing for corresponding Google searches.

But then there is one thing that holds me back, and that is the knowledge of what a portion of the vocal users of the internet are like. You hear of the nonsense that comes out of flame wars on twitter, the abusive comments that get made in people's blogs, and even on mainstream commercial news sites things can get unpleasant. And it doesn't even have to be the expression of a difference of opinion, there are individuals out there who will say things because they seem to enjoy seeing the reaction.

I know that in terms of the vast majority of people in the world, and even in terms of that smaller set of people who do actively engage in leaving comments on pages, it is a tiny minority who are offensive for the sake of it. Yet the whole adage of:

  "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me"

Seems to be rather shallow, especially if you weren't expecting a personal attack.

A couple of webcomics I really enjoy reading, have made comments on a few occassions how they have struggled with some of the content that people have posted as comments. In many cases it wasn't that the commenter was intended to be outright malicious, but perhaps they forgot that the author was providing their artwork and storytelling free of charge, with nothing asked of in return. And some of these artists are really very good, investing a lot of time to create remarkable illustrated stories for the free enjoyment of readers.

Anyway, all this leads up to me realising that no. No, I'm keeping this private as its just to develop my communication and also stay in touch with the people that I know. And its ok if you guys say something mean as I know where you live, heh heh heh.

An impossible ideal

You've probably been around people who have lamented the fact that there seems a little less community now compared to the past. That on the bus and train, everyone has their head buried in the phone or tablet, or have their ears stuffed with headphones pumping out music, isolated themselves from each other.

I've wondered about this from time to time, whether it really can change. Alot of the people who wish for change may be perhaps forgetting that there wasn't just the absence of the current portable technology, but the city used to be a lot smaller and attitudes were different a couple of generations ago. Now, it is rare that I bump into someone I know, even though there are about 20 people who I know from work, my church, or just family friends who share much of my regular commute. The buses are larger, the trains are longer, there are more people, and the trip is over fairly quickly. You also don't know if the person next to you is going to flip out or just ignore you. In the end, most people just want to get home.

What am I going to talk to the stranger next to me about? And what do I know of what they are going through? My skateboard has been an item that has opened up a few instances of conversations with strangers but the conversation is stifled in many ways because the stop to get off for one of us arrives, or perhaps my mind was off somewhere else with the long list of things to prepare for other commitments and I really wasn't engaged for conversation.

Part of me likes the idea of a fantasy world where, instead of people with bad posture, sore necks and lousy hearing, there instead are people who greet each other with a "Whassup?" and chin wag about the weather and other pleasantries.

But the other part of me is honestly not sure I could face that all the time. How much meaningless conversation with strangers do I want to have, that will just get thrown away due the low chance of crossing paths again? Do I want to get into more deep and personal issues with a stranger to have a more meaningful conversation when time is quite limited with the fairly rapid links in transport?

Maybe it all seems daunting because we are thinking about how far it is to go to achieve this ideal. I remember one morning on the train I saw a friend's wife site down across from me. I smiled and waved to get her attention but her first reaction was to wonder who is this thug trying to get her attention. Once she worked out it was me, she told me that with the headphones, sunglasses, baseball cap and jacket, I was not a friendly image at all. Not only did I not look like a person she'd want to talk to, but she was initially freaked out when this person approached her.

So I'm leaving the baseball caps at home, and trying to stop wearing the sunglasses when I'm in the train. I'll look to have a ready smile and be polite, and hopefully I can inch my way to not being part of the reason that strangers don't make eye contact anymore.