My Back Yard Last Night

So last night we had a horrendous hail storm. No roof damage, but both of our cars, which were in the driveway, look like Captain Caveman paid me a visit.

Lessons learned:

• Finish cleaning garage
• Keep monitor plugged into battery backup with actual PC
• Hail hurts

As you've noticed, this site is going through some changes. I've dropped wpremix because of its extreme bugginess and antiquated customization. By that, I mean WordPress themes should be future-proof.  You should be able to make custom changes, like font or color, without having to redo them every time the theme is updated.

Per @willsansbury and @ramdac, I moved to Thesis, which is already much better. As usual, customization takes more unpaid time than I'd like so it will look barren and neglected until I catch up on side projects.

In the meantime, I have several draft articles on tap I'll complete and post as soon as I can.

I've added a few excellent plugins:

• Last.fm Sidebar
• Twitter Widget Pro
• Google Analytics for WordPress

These are great plugins because they are simple and work very well. I highly recommend them.

I know some people do full integration with Twitter where blog posts get sent to Twitter and tweets come back as blog posts. I like to keep things simple. I really hope people read the blog without me shamelessly self tweeting about it.

My Delicious integration is from Delicious itself. I created a user account here to accept a single posting a day with a summary of links over the past 24 hours. You can find that in Delicious' settings; click a link there labeled "Blog Posting". You will need XML-RPC turned on in your WordPress settings.

Now back to real work for a while.

For example, I didn't realize until this morning that pingbacks don't display properly. This will be easily fixed once I find the proper PHP to put in the functions.php file. So I started reading up on WordPress. After about 30 minutes, I stopped and realized that I paid for something, so it should work. Why am I researching this? I bought it because the default wpremix actually looked almost exactly like what I was going to build myself. Apparently, I'm not saving time by going commercial. I wouldn't mind so much if the documentation was complete, but it's not. Unfortunately, it doesn't explain much.

So irregularities on this site you see are not intentional. I'll have to fix them by customizing another theme I think. I'm just not familiar enough with WordPress to start willy nilly replacing PHP code. Yet.

Things I want my site to do:

• Individual articles to display the associated tags along with the categories
• I'd like to have three columns front page and other pages to have two for an expanded story view
• I want to produce PDFs on the fly as I did with PostNuke
• I'd like top navigation to be automatically generated
• Integration of Twitter, last.fm, and Living Social Books (these won't be hard)

Some of these are no-brainers, some are handled with plug-ins, and some will require me taking more than 5 minutes here and there. However, I am kicking myself for not moving to WordPress much sooner.

• Old content brought over — check
• New template brought online and rebranded — check
• New content to be generated — writing it now
• Old site links converted to new links using htaccess — I'll get back to you on that one
• Integration with my social networking sites just to make sure we all get along.
• RSS redirection (must Feedburner be use for everything?)

Now I will be adding content and tweaking the site in such a way you'll think it's a "Can you see the differences?" game from Highlights.

There are many sites regarding human trafficking already, but I will have opinion and I have also started seeking out co-writers for that blog.

Please bookmark the site and visit there often for discussion related to human trafficking: www.humantraffickingwatch.com

P.S.

Technorati claim link: Technorati Profile

Multiple Explosions and Fire at Welding Supply Company near Downtown Dallas

Update (10:33 am): The company is Southwest Industrial Gases, Inc. There were multiple explosions from propane tanks. The local news has some impressive video of the explosions. From what is being reported, emergency crews have quarantined the area and are just letting the fire burn itself out because it's too hot to get close.

Update (12:00 pm): I've received several calls and instant messages from people theorizing this is some sort of test for terrorists. It's possible. With all of the more recent news of terrorist probing security areas. The first thing is to determine if today's explosions were deliberate, but also keep in mind the world is full of people who destroy property for various reasons like insurance fraud. I wouldn't jump to conclusions until the facts are published or there are more incidents.

Update (4:00 pm): So far the explanation for the explosions is blamed on a faulty connection between gas cannisters.

The fire was caused by a malfunction in a device called a "pigtail" that created so much pressure in an acetylene cannister that it auto-ignited, Lavender said. Then that cannister heated up those next to it. He said he didn’t know how many cannisters were ignited.

“It’s almost like a sprinkler system," Lavender said. "One pigtail goes into the top of one acetylene tank and it goes into the next and just fills them up in a relay type of situation. But once you have one failure, then everything’s at risk.

"That’s what started the explosions. One right after the other.”

In 2009, Clarian will begin charging workers up to $30 every two weeks for insurance if they let health risks such as smoking or high cholesterol go unchecked.

Clarian is not the only employer to use money as a motivator for employees to shape up.

More employers are zeroing in on obesity and smoking as the primary culprits for the ever-rising cost of health care. And that means companies increasingly are tracking not only their employees' productivity but also personal information such as their waistlines, blood pressure and cholesterol levels.

Some companies already have been monitoring employee health habits and sometimes charging premiums accordingly. But some programs, such as Clarian's, are moving beyond the honor system to mandatory health questionnaires and screenings.

This is the other side of government intervention in the medical industry. Companies exist to make a profit, and if the government won't let them, they will have to pass bill to the patients. There is so much regulation in medicine and insurance that insurance companies are now going to become the health police. I predict that within 10 years, your grocery receipts will be examined along with proof that you work out regularly. Welcome to the future.

Okay, Family Guy is about to jump the shark, but there are a still a few good gems here and there.

Anyway, I'm still working on finishing up the CSS and I will have fixes in this week.

When I'm done and if you're interested, I'll publish my upgrade steps.

Things I don't miss about Chicago winters:

• Shoveling my driveway
• Head-numbing cold squeezing my temples like a vice-grip
• Shoveling my driveway
• Having to make sure there is at least half a tank in my car at all times to prevent ice in the gas tank
• Shoveling my driveway
• The dirty, salty snow that tracks everywhere and stains everything
• Getting stuck behind a snow plow on the Eisenhower
• Did I mention shoveling my driveway?

Yes, this is a PostNuke site. I like PostNuke for the most part. Now there is a part of me that wanted to convert to a real blogging application like WordPress. However, my site is optimized for search engine indexing and most of my visitors get here via Google. I can't find a clean way to convert to WordPress without hosing my Google placement and I've also been reading that PostNuke-to-WordPress conversion is not simple.

I have customized a lot of code on my site to make it behave like I want. As a result, moving to the latest version of PostNuke may not be that easy for me, but that's the path I've chosen. I've started working on the new, improved site, but it's the lowest of my life priorities. When it launches, you'll know.

Gartner analyst Linda Cohen started off her presentation at Symposium ITxpo with a command for the audience of 6,000 attendees: "You have to stop outsourcing now." She said that the chaos created by compulsive outsourcing is making it harder to produce results. Her point is that too many companies have taken outsourcing to an extreme, heading offshore because it's faddish, juggling multiple contracts with incompetence and lacking sufficient governance discipline.

The linked article above also includes a list of eight myths related to outsourcing. I'm not going to get in to how the article reads like a press release for the book itself, ZD News will have to live with itself for that. However, back when so-called "journalists" were publishing articles about the horrible human tragedy known as outsourcing, I thought there were more compelling reasons not to outsource (see Outsourcing Heart Strings).

I haven't read Cohen's book and I probably will. The high-level points made in the quote above are valid. However, the point is not about not outsourcing nor is it about "multisourcing". To make those decisions, business management must first decide on a solid business model and then determine how to make that model run like a finely-tuned instrument; this is not a new concept.

I'm just wondering if most company decision-makers need to be spoon-fed a diet of buzzwords and repackaged fundamentals, or if these types of books are created to make the old seem new to keep the business book market active. Granted, I'm sure there is a lot of compelling new research from Gartner included. I will reserve judgement until I read it. But if I saw that there were valid business reasons for not outsourcing more than a year ago, then why is the business press only covering it now? Maybe because instead of researching back then, journalists just wanted crocodile tears. Now that Cohen has done the leg work for the media, the real story can be told.

Naturally, that kind of answer is considered poor form socially. It's like truthfully answering when asked "how are you today?" You are not supposed to honestly answer that question unless you are over 70 years old.

I think I'm going to stop asking people how they are. I want break out of this horrible social prison we have created where people ask questions when they don't want the truthful answers. Instead, I'm going to ask questions that have more real-world meaning. When somebody starts to bitch about being busy, I'm going to ask "Do you mean you were gettin' busy?" followed by "Cuz if you weren't, then I really don't want to hear." That will stop the gripe-fest but will leave open the opportunity to live vicariously through their experiences.

"How does this look?" and all of its variations like "Does this make my butt look big?" and "Does this make me look fat?" etc. are examples of questions never meant to be asked, but should especially be avoided at all costs. I also think that "What are you doing?" is a loaded question, especially when asked of someone who is home alone on the phone. When you ask somebody that on the phone, do you really want to know what that person is doing? I thought not.

I'm particularly fascinated with the process by which movies are made. The line producer is the movie's project manager. The line producer knows everything about the mechanics of day-to-day production. The fifth episode aired last night and the line producer, Ben Ormand, has emerged as the hero of the story. There was a scene last night where Ormand, after a day of shooting, calculated how much money was wasted that day. It was $5,000 wasted on actors who were not used because of a number of factors.

I think project management in other industries can learn a lot from Hollywood. For example, being that I'm in software development, I think I could learn a lot from Ben Ormand on managing complex projects. I'm a very strategically minded person. I can look at large development projects and know that, for example, in six months, I can produce a complete, custom software solution for a large company. However, the day-to-day stuff is not planned out in advance. There are many reasons for this. One of the reasons is there is no formula for how many lines of code should be produced within a certain amount of time. I noticed on Project Greenlight that every day was mapped out by the line producer and crew prior to shooting. Obviously, film costs money, people are paid by time, and none of this is cheap.

Is it possible to apply the filmmaking process to software development? I don't know. My philosophy has always been that each industry seems to remain isolated in its own bubble. People who move from one industry to the other always have something valuable to share.

I will keep this in mind as I start the project plan for my next project. Already I'm thinking I can have more tangible milestones and I can break development costs down to a smaller level to tell if I'm on track. I'd love to be able to know if money is getting wasted sooner and stop the financial bleeding like the line producer did on Project Greenlight. Most of the work I do is based on the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). It's an old model and I'm thinking it's too old.

Watch Project Greenlight, it's good television and it really shows how the business of filmmaking is not unlike other projects.

A new study found that male monkeys will give up their juice rewards in order to ogle pictures of female monkey's bottoms. The way the experiment was set up, the act is akin to paying for the images, the researchers say.

The rhesus macaque monkeys also splurged on photos of top-dog counterparts, the high-ranking primates. Maybe that's like you or me buying People magazine.

Many studies in the past have shown where human sexuality is not much different across cultural boundaries and is even similar to primates. For instance, the other day I couldn't resist a trip into the newsstand where I buy my favorite magazine, Buttcracked. The price has gone up to nearly three banannas, but I'm too embarrassed to have it delivered to my home address. I'm thinking also of upgrading DirecTV to include BooTV just to catch my favorite show "Junk in the Trunk". It only increases my subscription to 45 Capri Sun pouches a month, but hey, it's good TV.

I'm waiting for the comparisons between human behavior and apes as a result of this study. The media loves to make humans inferior and primitive, like the animals of the world know better how to live than we do. Well, the real news today is not that we are like animals in our behavior, but it is that through scientific research, we have taught a whole mess of monkeys capitalism. They value their juice, but they will gladly give it up for some booty.

Hat tip: milamor

Without getting into a serious rant, the votes were what they were. No amount of polling, projections, analysis, or speculation changes reality. Too many people place too much faith in statistics and not enough in reality. I recommend reading How to Lie with Statistics by by Darrell Huff and Irving Geis to get a handle on how statistics are not always what they seem. The exit poll fiasco demonstrates there are too many people with nothing better to do than analyze the crap out of stuff like polls, making much out of nothing. They freaked when the polls were wrong. Polls are not perfect. I don't need to tell anybody intelligent that.

Thanks to user, milamor, for the guest post yesterday.

If you have them, take your kids with you. Explain how the process works and why we do it. Explain why YOU are doing it. Admit that yes, there are problems with our election process and in some ways, it seems rather absurd, but that is no reason to slack off and keep your vote to yourself. If people stop using a system because they have no faith in it, the system will never get fixed.

My sons have accompanied me to elections ever since they were born. They are finally old enough to talk with me about how I view the different sides, what comforts me and what concerns me, and who I prefer. They ask questions, and I give answers. They know the Election Day drill – where they will stand and wait for me, quietly, respectfully. They will ask if they can put my ballot in the scanner, and I will say no, it is my vote. Then they will ask who I voted for, and I will tell them it is none of their business. When we get in the car, they will ask again and receive the same answer. Bottom line – they know the decision of who receives my vote is between me and the nifty scanning machine. They know that the beauty of the American vote is that it is mine to give and that one day, they will be able to cast their own.

At the ages of seven and ten, my children see both mystery and power in the act of voting, and they are anxious to do what hundreds of thousands of Americans can do but don’t. They have heard on the news and at school that THIS is an important election year, but they have always known that EVERY election is important. They know that voting is a right and a privilege and a responsibility.

You know it, too. Go vote.