What's it all about, Alfie?

Gruber was poking fun at the MoviePass folks not being able to buy tickets for it's users, and brought up this fantastic faux commercial that aired on Saturday Night Live years ago, and it just made me laugh. It's the "Volume" at the end that really got me - still does.

One problem with changing an organization is that the Old Guard will do just that - Guard the old ways, and make it increasingly more difficult to make the changes that are part of the overall transformation of the organization. Change isn't easy, change can be annoying, horrible, scary, and painful. But an organization is similar to a living thing, in that it has to adapt (change) with the times, or it's going to face extinction.

This commercial is all about failure on an epic scale. It's something we've all seen in comics, stories, movies, and most of us - real life. It can be hard to see what you are doing when you are doing it - because the motivations are often set long before it comes around to execution. But it's there. If you can step back for just a second to take a look.

Like so many other folks, Netflix and Hulu are bringing a lot of really interesting shows to my attention that I can't imagine I would have ever seen, and that's a very nice thing, but at the same time, many of the series I see on both the streaming platforms are already cancelled - without a word in the description that this is the case. At least then, I'm emotionally prepared to have this be the complete story I'll see.

One of the shows I finished recently was Jo on Hulu. And it was really very good. But in the description on Wikipedia, it was cancelled in 2013. It just showed up on Hulu. But 2013... folks... this isn't on the bubble... this is a 5 year old TV corpse.

I mean it's still really good, but there were questions that were left dangling. And I, for one, wanted to know. But I guess I'll have to make them up myself.

In truth, it was nice that it appeared at all, and I need to count the roses and not complain about it - but I do think it'd be nice to have something about the production of these series in the information on Netflix and Hulu.

At work we are in the process of generating the technical architecture docs for all aspects of the platform - from data and cloud deployment to applications and integrations. It is meant to be a complete picture of what we need to really be able to take the current products globally, and not crush us with costs. As a part of that, things are understandably moving a little slowly, as this impacts how people view themselves, and their contributions to the business.

If and emergency room doctor sees what they do as the number of patients patched up, then telling them to take a part-time position in Administration, then they might likely feel like that which makes them uniquely them is being questioned. They like the testing of new cases - you never know what could walk through the doors any second, and to many - that's a rush.

I was talking to my Boss about this as I was getting a little antsy about this as I wasn't really doing a lot - other than writing a few short docs about different parts of the architecture. It's needed, yes, but I'm used to being far more productive, and so just writing docs is not really on the same scale as delivering systems and having users react to them.

His statement to me was that this disconnect was normal. Perfectly normal. Yes, it can be frustrating, but it's a sign that things are starting to change. Patience is important, but not just sitting around. That there was a playbook that was being run, and it was just as expected.

Just like the 76ers - Trust the Process.

I felt a little silly. More than a little silly. I didn't really trust that someone saw all this, and was working on other things that had to be in place for the next set of changes.

Patience can also mean to trust that just because you don't see it - doesn't mean it's not happening. And that's hard... because it is indistinguishable from nothing happening. In both cases you can't see anything being done. It's tough.

But I'm going to trust the process.

Today I finally broke down and got the Sonos Playbase and Sub, and I have to say it's as easy to set up as I had hoped. I was a little concerned - because it was going to be using the optical audio out of the TV into the Playbase, but I really shouldn't have worried about it. It's nothing special these days - a simple (but very thin) cable came with the Playbase, and there was no way to put it in wrong. With a nice click it was in and the rest was easy.

Creating the 5.1 surround sound was very simple in the Songs app on my iPhone, and in a few minutes I was sampling the room and checking the balance, and it was just up and going. Very nice. Very simple.

I will say that my TV was doing about what I expected for a 4+ yr old set, and it was a lot harder to figure out how to turn off the internal speakers than I expected. But hey... I know where it is in the settings now, so it's not impossible, but it required scanning every menu on the TV to find it.

Now it's easy to watch TV, and then listen to music. Really nice sound for the living room.

The Shop is out of Diet Coke, and I can respect that they don't owe me a free Diet Coke, but it's still a little sad to see all the other drinks in the fridge, and not my favorite. So... assuming this was a Teachable Moment - I decided to try Coke Zero.

I can respect that people like this - I believe that it's the new Coke formulation in a zero-calorie formulation, but I could be wrong about that. I know I worked with a guy that preferred Coke Zero to Diet Coke, so I thought How bad can this really be? and gave it a try.

It's not horrible, but I'd rather drink water. It's something about the taste - but that completely explains why Coke has the two zero-calorie formulations. There's a real difference, and some don't really like the one. Go figure. In any case, I drank it - can't waste something like that, and then decided against having another.

Experiment done. Results obtained.