Ice

My God, I hate winter. I hate it with a passion as deep as the deepest fried batter's ability to freeze my arteries into something as dead as coral.

But sometimes ... sometimes ... winter can do something strangely unique and beautiful, something that takes your mind off the cold, the dark and the icy roads. Sometimes winter creates a form of natural art, works that disappear with the season but create something awe-inspiring till then.

In the picture above, two days of intense wind churned the Saint John River and twisted the water into a chaotic river art that gave me thoughts of the earth warning of things approaching our cozy little world.

But I still hate winter.

Team Player Myths & Truths #1

MYTH: You’re not a Team Player if you’re consistently the first person to leave the office at the prescribed quitting time.

TRUTH: If you’re leaving at the right time, it’s probably because you know what you’re doing and you have all your work done, but because you’ve left on time, your Team Player co-workers (who you keep in business by actually getting something done) will spend the rest of the evening talking about how you don’t carry your share of the work load.

But don’t worry, they’ll smile at you the next morning and treat you like somebody they didn’t backstab for most of the previous evening.

Should We Cut Spammers' Hands Off?

((I posted this at 8008135 recently. For the full thread, visit http://8008135.org/2006/01/16/blacklist-blackmail-even-godaddy)

The message was definitely a sales pitch, but I wouldn’t call it spam. Nobody has a clear cut definition of spam. Some say it’s ANY unsolicited email or posting. Others define it as a generic posting or email sent to an inappropriate site or address. In this thread alone there seems to be a wide range of definitions.

Personally, I don’t think it’s as simplistic as “ANY unsolicited email or posting.” The Internet offers all us common folk a chance to be on a par with the big companies when it comes to getting out the message about our products or services. I write books. I send unsolicited emails to libraries and bookstores announcing publication of my books. I send the same message to each, but I don’t send one email with a hundred addresses. I post each one individually. It’s time-consuming, but it’s a lot cheaper than sending letters. I’m a near-starving writer. I can’t afford stamps and stationery. But I have an Internet connection and email. That may not give me the clout of a New York advertising agency, but it gives me a marketing reach for my books that I wouldn’t come close to having otherwise. It gives me a chance to get the word out about my books without a hundred thousand dollar budget.

It puts broadcasting into everybody’s hands.

I even posted a message to this site (www.digg.com). It was dugg a whole five times. It was a notification about a contest I’m running through a fictitious corporate website to promote a book about the IT industry. The content of the book is related to the people who post to this site. The spirit of the fictitious corporate website is appropriate to the people who use this site. Some could construe it as an unsolicited invitation to, ultimately, buy a product.

So what about spam? It does exist and it’s a pain the ass. I wouldn’t even think of calling your message spam. It was a sales pitch, but not spam.

Spam is getting ads for Viagra with a subject line like “Hey, buds, check his out” or “The information you requested” when you never requested anything. Spam is in the subject line that lies to you and tries to trick you into reading like “Response required … legal action pending” for a penis enlargement ad. Spam is the automated message you get from ten different addresses, all with the same subject line, none of them appropriate to you.

Spam is equivalent to the mass snail mailing that says FREE OFFER on the envelope, but you have to pay some kind of fee for something else before you get the free stuff. But spam isn't the snail mail from the new deli that just opened in the neighborhood and contains a menu and an invitation to come in try the food. That one is appropriate to the people who receive it. It’s personal in that it has a good chance of being useful information to the recipient.

BTW, in my emails to libraries and bookstores, I try to make the content apparent with subject lines like “New novel by ______” or I mention the name of the novel.

I hate spam, but using email and posts as a means of advertising is a legitimate use of technologies that level the ball field - if they’re used honestly, and not used to trick or scam the recipient.

NotAPixelOfSanity - Biff Mitchell Invites IT Workers to Share the Pain and Be Published

Summary: Author Biff Mitchell is running a contest for all members of the information technology (IT) industry to submit their most ridiculous work experiences and have them published in a book about the absurdity of the industry, NotAPixelOfSanity.

“The insanity of the IT industry can be so extreme as to be hurtful,” said Biff Mitchell, author of Team Player (Double Dragon Publishing, ISBN: 1-55404-314-X), a satire on the information technology (IT) industry. “I’ve seen it drive people nuts, smash families, crush dreams, and turn otherwise intelligent people into idiots. There are millions of stories about foolhardy projects, stupid management decisions, and situations that don’t fit into even the most inclusive definition of a sane world. I want to put as many of them together as I can in NotAPixelOfSanity.”

“I’m running the contest through the corporate web site for ErectSoft INC,” said Mitchell. “In Team Player, ErectSoft INC is the largest custom software company in the world, but it’s never actually produced a single product, or finished any project that it’s ever started. Nothing ever gets past the initial project definition and project planning stages.”

“This isn’t far off from the real world,” said Mitchell. “I know about a dozen former employees of the first big IT company in the area where I live. They were all thoroughly trained, met regularly with the clients, produced thousands of pages of project specifications, needs analyses, and other documentation, but after nearly three years, not a single project had actually been started, and not one of the employees had a chance to apply the training they’d received when they first started their jobs.”

According to Mitchell, companies like this blossomed throughout the IT industry prior to the Dot Com Bust. “I think the Bust was nature’s way of cleaning out the chaff,” said Mitchell. “But it didn’t clean out the absurdity. I’ve been handed Gantt charts that showed me three weeks behind schedule before the project even started. I remember a senior manager who was told he would be promoted to a VP position Friday afternoon and was laid off Monday morning. I summed up the nature of my job as an instructional designer once by saying: I’m almost caught up to where I was this morning.”

The home page for the ErectSoft INC web site (www.erectsofinc.com) is like most other corporate web sites … until the visitor realizes that none of the information under the headings for Our Products, Partners, and Media Release makes any sense. The About Us section starts off with the same meaningless corporate drivel and then lets the cat out of the bag by referring the visitor to Mitchell’s novel. “The product descriptions are taken word-for-word from Team Player,” said Mitchell. “And they’re not much different than the wording you’ll see on a lot of corporate web sites, especially for consulting companies.”

One of the menu bars at the top of the screen reads Absurd Contest. It opens a page with a silver-toned theme for the cover art for NotAPixelOfSanity, based on the cover art for Team Player by Brock Parks. “The contest is open to anyone even remotely connected to the IT industry,” said Mitchell. “That includes a lot of professions, such as programmers, graphic artists, interface designers, instructional designers, project managers, quality specialists, sales and marketing clones, HR managers, media specialists, documentation writers, technical writers, system architects, technical consultants, tech support staff, courseware authors, and knowledge engineers. And this list is just scratching the surface.”

The contest is free to enter and people can enter as many stories as they want. “I’m going to include every entry I receive,” said Mitchell. “But there may be some completely random editorial changes.”

“I’ve listed a few categories on the site,” said Mitchell. “Things like absurd projects and products, absurd management decisions and development processes, and a few others … but none of the entries I’ve received so far fits into any of these categories, so I’ve had to create new ones. I have a feeling there may be as many categories as there are stories.”

There will be ten prizes, awarded to the ten most absurd stories, of an autographed copy of Team Player. “All those whose stories are published will receive a free copy of the finished ebook version of NotAPixelOfSanity.”

Contest details are posted at http://www.erectsoftinc.com/Contest.html. In keeping with the occasion, no deadline for entries has been determined. Team Player is available in ebook format from Amazon.com and Fictionwise.com.

The Queen's Square Pool

Neither one of us had a stitch of clothing on. We'd been on our bikes. It was past midnight. It was 30 degrees and there wasn't a sliver of wind. We'd just left the town's biggest club, The Cosmopolitan (this was a few years ago) and we wanted to go swimmming.

So we headed to the Queens's Square Pool, an outdoor pool. There were sharp lengths of wire at the top that could do a number on our ability to procreate, but the heat was getting to us ... around the same time a big fat joint of Columbian Gold was getting to us.

We chucked our bikes on the grass, peeled down to our white asses, and climbed over the fence, prayers and all. The water was cool, still and quiet, the definitive definition of WET. We swam around for a while before we saw the lights flashing at the end of the street and made a mad dash for the fence.

We made it over without ripping our members off, and were sitting on the bench somewhat fully dressed when the officers reached us - a man and a woman.

They asked us if we'd been swimming. No, we said, dripping water from our hair, the smell of clorine all about us, me missing my socks, which were under the bench I was sitting on and well lighted by the female cop's flashlight.

We weren't too good at the not-getting-caught part of this thing. In the end, though, we were warned about the ten o'clock park curfew and given a few minutes to get our shit together before leaving as the cops strolled back to their cruiser.

To this day, I think that was the hardest assignment either of them ever had ... keeping straight faces while they were talking to us.

That was my first time ever in the Queen's Square outdoor swimming pool. It was years later when I returned with two children - a two year old daugher and a seven year old son. We spent almost every day there on the summer days I had my kids with me.

Later, Cassie took swimming lessons there and entered the swim team. She excelled at both. Because of those days, she's a few months away now from being a life guard.

More stories to follow on the Queen's Square pool and how it is so much a part of summer in the lives of so many.

(The picture shows the Queen Square pool in those days when the excitement is beginning to mount ... when it will open soon.)