What's it all about, Alfie?

The Second War is getting heated and I'm trying to step out of it as best I can. I don't believe that anyone wins a war - there's only the victor and the vanquished, and neither really wins. One has to continue the opression or be faced with an uprising and the other must continue the fight or else loose everything. The shooting may stop, but the hostilities don't.

Of late, the battles drawn have been both overt and subtle. I've been trying to keep things professional, but it seems that the other combatants are not as interested in taking that same tac. Unfortunate. I have tried to not get too ugly, but being passionate about the outcome places a burden on me to do my level best to ensure success. This means fighting with like-minded tools and techniques. So if they sling mud, I'm picking up mud.

Until yesterday afternoon.

I've decided that there's more hard done to my cause by acting like them than acting like I want to act, and setting myself up as an "easy target". The simple fact is that I am up-front and fairly transparent, so I am an easy target for those looking at taking shots at me. But that says a lot about both of us. And I'm happy about what it says - about both of us.

So, when my impulses rise up to strike back at slanderous and inflammatory remarks, I'm going to do my best to remain calm and professional. I hope that simple fact will help draw a distinction between the people and their plans. I could be hopelessly romantic about this and get blind-sided, but then that says a lot about the management. If they play that way, then it's best I find it out sooner than later.

Even if I'm a silly fool and get blown out of the water, I'm going to try to act like the person that I want my kids to grow up to be. If we all can't act that way, then how can we possibly expect our kids to be any
different?

The bad thing about revolutions brought about by the death of The King is that there's a second battleground that has to be fought - the War of The Winners.

What I mean is best seen in an example: within the last week the higher ups at my workplace have decided that the existing infrastructure for moving data around is not going to cut it anymore. In fact, they haven't liked it for quite a while, but it had a guardian angel that has since left for greener pastures (at the point of a gun), and so the infrastructure he championed is also going out the door.

But what to replace it with?

There's the second war.

There are at least three camps now fighting it out for the technical vision of the replacement technology/system. One I'll call the Plan Big camp, the other No Plan, and the final Right Fit. I'm in the Right Fit camp, and believe that since we can't get the users to plan 3 months out, there's no reason to plan and build three months out as it's all too likely to change. Also, we don't have a pressing need for any new technology, we just need to execute better on the current technology.

The Plan Big camp is big into technologists leading the users. They believe that they know what we'll need 3-, 6-, 9-months down the road and want to create a grand plan that will enable everything to be done easier by investing 3, 6, or 9 months in heads-down development on new technologies so that we don't get left behind.

The No Plan is just as it sounds - make no plans further away than right now, maybe two days out, and assume that things will just work out. Interestingly enough, the commanders of the No Plan and Plan Big are both convinced that they are the smartest person they know and the other commander is a complete dolt.

So as the next few months pass it'll be interesting to see which, if any, of the camps really wins, and what happens as a result. Depending on who wins, there's certain to be a good bit of sabotage and glee in partial failure.

And I thought dealing with my kids was difficult at times...

I should write in this journal more often. Hard to believe that I'd have enough stuff to put into it each day to fill a few pages. Now work and such is slower and there seems less and less to write about. But I'll try to bring things up to date.

I got a windfall and purchased a 17-inch Powerbook. It's everything that all the reviewers are saying: awesome display, excellent keyboard, fast and a lot of fun. I ended up moving everything from my iBook to the new Powerbook so I didn't loose anything and it took a lot less time than I had thought. The Transfer Mode in OS X is exceptionally nice and makes the one machine look like a firewire drive to the other. I slaved my iBook to my Powerbook and simply copied things over. Very nice.

I've added several things to BKit, most notably is the inclusion of the VantagePoint graphing from Visualize Inc. to enable quick and easy graphing of data sets that I run into from time to time. The licensing for VantagePoint is excessively expensive (starts at $25,000), but for large corporations, I can see it being a reasonable payoff.

I've started work on a new version of the potential/electric field simulator for OS X - nothing fancy, but it's nice to be working on something like that again. I'm taking a new approach on the class structure as well as the simulation/solver code. I already like the way the changes have made things easier and cleaner, I hope they also make things quite a bit faster. I'm also banking on the AltiVec and the math libraries compiled into OS X to help on the speed issue.

Work has been somewhat interesting in that recently the powers that be have decided to thin things out a little more. This round of cuts comes to a group that's consistently been the most arrogant, unlikable group of people that I've ever met in one place. Lead, of course, by the two singularly most unlikable folks I've ever met. Now, to put a little bit of perspective on this, I haven't met any serial killers, or national politicians - yet. But up to now, these two are at the top of the list and by a wide margin. So now they get theirs. Karma... excellent.

It's getting close to Summer and that's nice, but it's still Spring, and that means school, activities, and work around the house. Lots of work around the house.

I'm guessing that's what's kept me from writing more in this journal than I have lately - not a lot of fun things I felt like sharing. Sure, life is generally good for me and I shouldn't complain. But there's a big difference between "not bad" and "good". I guess it takes more "good" things to happen for me to take the time to write them down.