/bill's House O Insomnia : Life in General

Chrome's EULA

William — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 15:32:30 GMT

Yah, I'm probably like the 10 trillionth person to post about it, but until now I hadn't really had a chance to look at it. This morning Gizmodo had a piece on it which definitely makes you shake your head thinking WTF. However like most things, I'm guessing that there's a huge gulf between 'reserving the right' to something and actually using that right. Additionally, I'm guessing a lot of this is just legal CYA. For instance, they could want access to information you post on a blog for efficiency purposes (being privy to it directly instead of having to crawl for it later) and just use language like this to avoid battles over the content. Then again, i'm just speculating as I'm not a lawyer and have no clue.

I decided to search around and see how much was written about this and as of the time of this post, the terms "Chrome EULA Controversy" returned over 7,430 hits if taken together and well over 15k if you leave out the quotes. And if you've been following this then you no doubt are aware that Google capitulated and is taking all the yucky stuff out. If you're trying to roll out a new product and have a big impact, then you definitely wouldn't want the type of press Google was getting over this.

Their quick capitulation is some food for thought though. the most likely answer is that they didn't really think they were doing anything bad b/c they weren't intending to use it, it's boilerplate etc etc. So it's no sweat off of their backs to just get rid of it. If you wanted to be conspiracy minded about it (I can only imagine for instance the Cow Alex Jones is going to have over it), it wouldn't be hard to imagine that they threw it out there, willing to take it back but more than willing to use and abuse it if public outcry wasn't too bad. I'm guessing there's a small shred to that theory but little more.

All in all though, I think Chrome's introduction is a good thing. Firefox kicked off a ferocious battle that led to IE becoming a much better browser. With another major player entering the market (and one that certainly has gotten under MS' skin when it comes to search), I'm guessing MS will pull some rabbits out of hats with IE 8 and when the dust settles, we'll see some awesome functionality. In the meantime, I like Chrome ok, but still sticking with IE for the foreseeable future.

And you thought I just some moron

William — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 03:37:36 GMT

Many folks north of Miami-Dade county have never heard of El Chupacabra. And if you try tipping them off to it, they laugh at you like your some kind of moron. At least that's what they did when I told them. I've been warning people of the dangers posed by the old Chupa and I typically got responses like "Yah Bill, well, next time I get a pet goat, I'll make really sure that I don't accidentally let it outside at night." Because of how I was often treated, I can truly sympathize with our former vice president who was horribly mistreated for trying to warn the world about ManBearPig . Well, for those of you that laughed at me, thought I was a moron, all of the above, Who is the moron now?

The downside to copy and paste

William — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 05:01:01 GMT

As much time as I spend on computers, it's really hard to imagine life without the Clipboard. Copy/Cut/Paste is such a handy feature I couldn't begin to calculate how much time and effort it's saved me. However, it's definitely caused me some problems. Mainly in cases where I've been filling in boilerplate information in templates, I've copied and pasted stuff I shouldn't, or forgotten to replace stuff. Two times in particular come to mind but personally, when it comes to client material or stuff that I'm going to publish, I've sworn off copy/paste completely. It's too easy to use a template from scratch (and ensuring beforehand the template is as empty as possible and uses consistent terms I can search for at the end to ensure I've removed them all). In one case, I had material on the clipboard that didnt' belong there. In the other, I was copying and pasting over an existing document and didn't replace everything correctly, after all it 'looked right'. I ended up with a lot of egg on my face in both cases and it made such an impression, I've fundamentally changed how I work with boilerplate stuff.

I was reading this today and just cringed because I've been there myself. The stuff I screwed up was not anywhere near this important and didn't cause as much damage as this does, but man, it's an easy thing to do until you get burned:

Anyone with a computer probably has cut and pasted sentences or paragraphs while using a word-processing program. The shortcut can save time and simplify a tedious project.

However, when a police officer uses the same technique on a report, it can get messy. Or worse, illegal.

Critics of the practice call cutting and pasting police reports "dangerous" and say it puts the integrity of law enforcement at risk. Others say the technique can be used effectively in certain situations, such as using one report as a template for another and maintaining accuracy.

The issue resurfaced in East Contra Costa earlier this month when a Pittsburg police officer testified in court that he cut and pasted one portion of a witness account onto another in a felony hit-and-run case.

The revelation came three years after two former Pittsburg police officers were convicted of intentionally falsifying drug arrest reports dozens of times in a similar manner. After their termination and six-month home detention, and an internal and independent review, the police chief instituted a new report-writing program that includes software preventing officers from using some cut-and-paste techniques.

"It's a shortcut and I shouldn't have done it," Officer Daniel Pratt said in his recent testimony, before apologizing on the stand.

Read the rest here

The site does require registration - so feel free to use the BugMeNot credentials: UserName: joemail@gmail.com Password: 4joemail

"I don't know" is an answer we should hear more often

William — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 07:25:01 GMT

We've all heard the adage "It's better to remain silent and be thought of as dumb than to speak and remove all doubt." While this is certainly good advice, I don't think it's entirely correct. Let me digress for a moment...

Tonight, I was doing some last minute Christmas shopping which was the perfect excuse to pick up another computer to use as a Windows Home Server. The sales people were particularly aggressive and every time I just stood there looking at stuff for more than a minute, someone would come by and ask "Can I help you find something?" Each time I said "I'm just looking" , they'd press me. It was honestly like they had a sales quota or contest going on. On three different instances, I had someone try to explain something to me in such clueless imbecilic terms that I doubt anyone would believe if I told them about it. I was 1/2 tempted to turn on my phone's voice recorder and go ask for clarification on a few things I had just been 'taught' just so I'd have proof that I wasn't making up what I heard. And in large part, it seemed to be inspired by one guy. He was the ideally stereotypical computer guy at a big box store. He would walk around and butt into conversations people were having and would then enlighten people with unsolicited advice. This in turn seemed to make the other guys feel compelled to not look stupid, which caused them to play buzzword bingo and talk about things they honestly had absolutely no clue about.

I could only think to myself "Some day, these guys are going to reflect back on their time here and when they realize how much BS they pulled out of their butts, they are going to cringe with shame". In each case, if they had simply answered "I don't know", I would never for a second have thought they were idiots. In each case, I had spent a few hours reading up on the stuff I was looking for and even then I had only a cursory knowledge of the stuff. So if some random guy at a big box retailer didn't have a clue, it wouldn't have surprised me in the least. Instead, I started to think "What a f_______ tool" Not just b/c they were kind of invading on my shopping experience, but b/c they talked with such an air of authority. And I started to think, 99% of the people that come in here are just looking for a good deal on X. They know they want a computer or router or flat screen and want to get one and not get ripped off. Instead, they get these longwinded lectures that invariably makes them feel a little small and in many cases, the guy doing the pontificating is just freestyling. And I started thinking "If you're going to force me to accept your help, can you please just stop insulting my intelligence quite so badly. I mean, being told that Windows Home Server is actually just Windows Vista Ultimate with a few Registry settings changed was bad enough. But when I asked if they had any Windows Media Center extenders and was told "there isn't really any product called a Media Center Extender per se, it's just a generic term used to describe routers that can stream media and then having him point to the router rack and say "All of these are essentially Media Center extenders" - that was too much.

I'll say this, unless you answer "I don't know" to something that you should unquestionably know as part of your job, it's really doubtful anyone will walk away and think you're a moron. Look around the internets and see what people often say about the Geek Squad or FireDogs or whatever. I only found a few examples where people complained that the sales person said "I don't know". But there are zillions of stories about some know-it-all feeding them a ridiculous line of BS. And the point is always "The guy was such an idiot he didn't even realize how utterly stupid what he was telling me was". A few people might be fooled by this routine, but do it enough and you're going to look like a fool in front of most people, and you're not just going to look a little foolish. You're going to look foolish and be thought of as a BS artist - a rep that's really hard to shake once you get pegged with it. In most cases, there's no shame in saying "I don't know" and there's always less shame than trying to play it off when you don't have a clue. If I ran one of those big box stores, honestly, I'd make new employees say "I don't know" 200 times just so they realized they could say it and the world wouldn't come crumbling down. And if done in each case that someone didn't know something, I bet very few people would walk out of my store talking about what idiots I had working for me. (Ok, I wouldn't actually make them say it 200 times, but you get the point).

The Bill of Rights in 2007

William — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 03:31:21 GMT

So often when I hear talking heads pontificate about constitutional issues, I hear two basic sides. The first is the strict constructionist interpretation where they claim the constitution is clear as day hence end of discussion. On the other side you have the 'living constitution' side that often acts like anything that is inconsistent with their agenda should just be interpreted away. Whichever side one buys in to, it's hard to argue that rapid technological advances don't really complicate many legal issues. Orrin Kerr examines the United States vs King.

In short, a contractor in Saudi Arabia was connected to a military network. While doing routine patrols of the network, an analyst found some porn and happened to notice a folder named Pedophilia. That prompted him to look further and as it turns out, the folder was accurately labeled. King was arrested and charged. His defense was that the search was illegal. Personally, all normal legal issues aside, i think he should be thrown in jail for being a sick SOB and stupid enough to plug a computer with highly illegal material on it into a military network. It's not like that's material you bring to work to show your buddies and you'd have to know that a military network is likely to be subject to a higher degree of scrutiny than your average office. I know, there are tons of examples of amazing security lapses and incompetence on govt networks, but counting on the fact security might currently be lax is really foolish b/c just b/c it's lax now, who's the say that the next network guy they hire won't be competent? Having experience on two military installations, from what I saw, security was very tight. So much so, that our standard operating policy was "Don't do anything on that network that you wouldn't be ok with if it showed up on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper." And for God's sake, if you're doing something illegal (as well as something that you can rest assured will seriously anger just about any sane human being on Earth), why would you use the naming conventions he did?

All that aside, the case is mighty interesting and such issues are only going to become more and more frequent.

Business Travel Sucks

William — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 06:09:32 GMT

I don't remember the details exactly, but at some point in my very early childhood, me and the folks were flying to Pittsburgh for the holidays. I remember pop being really adamant about "flying 1st class so we don't have to put up with all the B__S___". I had already flown a few times with my mom and didn't know the difference but it sounded cool. Until we got on the plane. I remember thinking "This is it?" and wondering what the big deal was. Business travel has been the same sort of anti-climactic event. Except unlike flying first class, business travel actually sucks.

I don't mean when you're 22 and out of college that it sucks. Going places and meeting different people is cool. Until you've done it 20000000 times. Then it sucks. Actually, by the time you hit 4 digits on your travels, business travel will have long been sucking. Jobs involving travel sound cool and important, but seriously, unless you're young and out of school, it sucks.

In case you doubt me, I'm going to explain why in terms I don't think *anyone* can argue with:

1- Airports suck. Going to them sucks. Leaving them sucks. Waiting around for your baggage sucks. Standing in line sucks. Going through security sucks. Airline personnel are largely union which for some reason, makes them hate everyone. Assuming the union doesn't make them bitter, dealing with unappreciative obnoxious a-holes all day does them in every time. Until they make kid|idiot|slow people|complainer free airports, they will continue to suck (trust me, if you're reading this you won't see the day that this will happen)

2- Business travel isn't the same as recreational travel. Unless you don't matter, your home office is going to want you back as soon as possible. So when you leave, you have to come back, quickly. B/c of the travel time, in the 300000 I've been to Seattle, I've only got to hang out with friends about 10 of them. Only twice, and that was when I was self-employed, did I get to go to Portland and hang out with my homie + his lovely better 1/2. You call up friends, say "Hey, I'll be in town" and quickly come to realize unless you can squeeze in lunch or something, chances are you won't get to see them. When you don't, you always look like a douche for not stopping by

3- The only people that drive worse than the people in your city, are those that drive in other cities. Growing up in Miami, it really took a lot to impress me here. Most people had little problem doing 8 lane changes on I-95 and using your turn signal will get you arrested or killed. But you don't sit in traffic all freaking day. In fact, you can't even drive slow in Miami. In Seattle, it's great as long as you don't battle rush hour or get lost downtown. If you do, you'll end up around a bunch of crazed Scientologists, tranvestite prostitutes, drug addicts, vegan homeless kids with laptops and cell phones. It's awful. Pittsburgh, you'll end up going through a tunnel and never seeing daylight until the next day. Boston, well, my good buddy Michael is from Boston so I can't really advocate blowing it up and starting over - but it's not an argument without merit. Minneapolis? Hmmm, I ended up in the hood (scary even by Miami and Atlanta standards) WITH a GPS in the car, got lost every time I tried to get to our office, and got to ride in a taxi with the guy who was voted "Most likely to wage jihad against infidels via his taxi cab". You know it's a bad trip whenever you ask the cabbie "So, you had any famous people in your cab" and he responds "Sure, Keith Ellison and Ibrahim Hooper". "Yah, I was thinking something more along the lines of actors, athletes, models, hot chicks..." and I could just tell by his look and silence that none of those were coversation topics he enjoyed engaging.

More than that though, you have to navigate places you probably haven't been and you're in a hurry. If you do know you're way around, you can't stay anywhere long enough to enjoy it. Ick!

4- Time zones. My family goes to sleep between 9-10:00. I dont' sleep unless it's chemically enhanced by Ambien CR. So getting out of work at 6:00 means it's bed time for the folks at home. 7 makes it late and after that it's getting rude. Well, by the time you get back to your hotel or whatever it's usually too late to call. To make up for it, your loved ones may try to call you first thing in the morning. Which is usually around 4:00 AM

5- Flight delays, cancellations etc are non-billable in most contracts and most companies consider those in the non-billable hour pool meaning you aren't getting much for it. So even in benevolent companies like mine, flight delays get balanced on your free time. I mean, they need me back Monday to be at the client. If my plane is a day late, the client still needs me there. On seasoned engagements, if you can find a way to be billable (usually called VPN + Broadband) than that mitigates it if the client is cool, but the problem still remains.

6- The more you pack the less likely you'll be to get caught without something important. But the more you pack, the more you lug around, the more you have to wait for at Baggage and the more likely something will be broken or damaged. So you'll make tradeoffs and if you're like me, they'll always be the wrong ones.

7- Kids. Ok, if you *have* to fly with your kid, I hereby, just like my Catholic forefathers did, offer you a Indulgence (except mine's free). I'm not talking about the people that fly here and there with their kids. I mean the regular road warriors. And everyone else, all the new age parents with kids with annoying names like "Dakota, Cody, Madison, Taylor" [why are they all lame throwbacks to the wild west or distilled of gender to the point they are completely androgonous?] yes, that's who I'm talking about. I want you to have happy kids. I want your kids to have self-esteem. I really want the best for all of you. But can you do it without your stupid kid yelling and throwing tantrums the whole time right? If not, how about an apology? I know you have to have some pretty powerful sedatives on you, so how about sharing? No, no such luck. Instead, Trevor will kick the back of the seat the whole time b/c of his ADD and mom can't tell him to stop b/c of his self-esteem.

8-Rental Cars - it's hit or miss here. But in the terminals like DFW or San Fran, where you have to drive to another state on a bus before you get to the rental car terminal - yuck.

9- Unhot stewardesses. Ok, the hot comment is childish and infantile but I'm old enough to remember those days. Anyway, they get crapped on. They deal with the world's biggest a-holes at their worst so obviously these people are almost saintly just to be able to make it through a shift. Except the ones that aren't so nice. The ones that are bitter. The ones that - well, like the ones on my flight last night.

10 - Expense reports. REmember to always ask for a receipt. Make sure you got Neat Receipts or you better be orgainzed. Make sure you rush right home and do your reports. Even at places that are fast, the turnaround time is usually at least one pay period. Go racking up 3800k every two weeks like I did, and you can't miss too many of those before people start wondering if you're developing a drug or gambling problem. But you'll forget reciepts. You'll lose them. You'll throw some out by accident. That's when the fun starts.

I'm already funning twice as long as I wanted and I just got started. So trust me on this, Business Travel sucks.

Calling People "Resources" doesn't make you cool

William — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:09:28 GMT

I know I huff and puff about this a lot, but it drives me insane. Recently, in the ADO.NET NG, a recruiter posted the following. As annoying as it is to have recruiters post in public newsgroups, do they have to talk like such tools? Moreover, I understand it's hard to run Spell and Grammar check these days, but if you're trying to recruit people, it might help to at least do a quick coherency check at the end.

Hi,
Please find the requirement below and answer ASAP with updated resume
and contact details....
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TPVS Consultant (Transportation Planning and Vehicle Scheduling)

Location: Colorado
Duration: 4 + Months
Rate: Open

********US Citizens only************

We need a very senior and experienced TPVS resource.
This resource would need to travel to Colorado and the engagement is
expected to last till 03/31/08.
TPVS stands for Transportation Planning and Vehicle Scheduling, a
module within the SCM suite of applications.
This is a niche skill set and hard to find.
The resource should preferably have upgrade experience if not
implementation experience in a custom environment would be a close
second qualifying option

Now, if you talk like this anywhere else, you'd sound like a complete tool and in fact, you sound like a complete tool talking like that in the office too. But people seem to forget this. They seem to think that not only don't they sound stupid, but they sound cool.

Let's try some simple substitution to bring home this point

"Honey, can you please call both of our Senior and Experienced Resources and tell them that we'll be spending Christmas in Atlanta this year but will be by their houses on Christmas eve and of course, will have the junior and inexperienced resource with us"

As opposed to "Honey, can you please call both of our parents and tell them that we'll be spending Christmas in Atlanta this year, but will be by their houses on Christmas eve and of course, we will have __________(insert Child's name) with us?"

Sounding stupid is one thing, but sounding really stupid b/c you're trying to sound edgy, hip and cool is another thing altogether. Someone needs to learn how to BullFight

Truer words have not been spoken

William — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 04:55:13 GMT

Raymond Lewallen posted the following on his Twitter page.

if i get one more vampire bite thingy whatever from facebook, i'm going to kick @CalebJenkins in the nuts! Its seems to have started there. about 8 hours ago from Witty

I know I'm out of the mainstream on this, but having signed up for Facebook a few months ago, I truly don't get it. A lot of times there's stuff I don't like but I can see what the allure is for other people. Facebook isn't one of these though. The little interaction I've had with it was mainly b/c I had no clue what the feature was and just wanted to see what it did. But overall, there's a lot of annoying stuff that doesn't seem to have much value. And unlike MySpace, most Faceboook pages aren't so tacky and laden with piss poor grammar that they provide a good laugh. All the cool kids love facebook so my disdain for it seems to be yet another indication of my unadulterated dorkiness. But a kick square in the nuts from a dork still hurts, so keep that in mind before sending out any more vampire bites.

Another major data breach

William — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 06:24:11 GMT

Although this time the incompetence and sloppiness wasn't the Veteran's Administration. In each of the stories of this sort that I remember, the data turns up a few weeks later, is blamed on some small and innocent mistake and all kinds of assurances are given that no one actually saw the data. That line of crap is a lot easier to pull when you're talking about a password protected laptop than an unencrypted, password free CD so they may have a little trouble trying to push the line that the data was never viewed by anyone.

This is going to be particularly bad b/c even if the original cd is recovered, who's to say it wasn't copied? Normally, I guess I'm cynical enough to really doubt assurances of the "No one saw anything sensitive" variety but in this case, I couldn't believe such an excuse no matter how hard I tried.

I've been told before that 'common sense' largely depends on where you sit. Certain things for instance might be 'common sense' to a doctor that would never dawn on someone in another profession. And that's pretty much the line of argument I'm hearing from various commenters - to a lay person, encrypting data and password protecting it isn't necessarily common sense. Not working for the English Govt I can't really say I know from personal experience, but my guess is that at some point in the day, when every one of the people involved came into work, they logged onto their computer. So it's hard to fathom them not at least appreciating the value of password protecting things. Even so, I don't think the 'layman' defense will work here. There have been too many high profile data breaches, hacks, screw ups etc to not know that personal data you're working with should be secured.

Again, I don't know what the English political climate is like right now, but if this were the US..... and it was a private company that did this... there'd be a bunch of crotchety old senators dragging the heads of the company up to Capital Hill and making them testify under oath as to what happened. There would be a lot of finger wagging and Monday morning quarterbacking. But when the govt screws up, well, mistakes happen, no one is perfect and no harm no foul. If English politicians are anywhere near the headline whores that their US Counterparts are, then they'd no doubt be flogging the daylights out of a private company if they were responsible. But won't have a lot to say other than the obligatory condemnations. Screw ups of this magnitude, affecting this many people, that could have been prevented so easily really shouldn't happen. You shouldn't have access to that sort of data unless you prove you know how to handle it and follow agreed upon headlines (we can argue about what 'know how to handle it means' all day, but at a minimum, I think we can all agree that it should be encrypted and password protected, that access to even export this information should be restricted to a small and accountable group of people, and that any packaging and delivery be recorded and tracked from start to finish).

Hopefully nothing comes of this and the CD turns up under a stack of papers in the mailroom or something. And hopefully the people responsible will be spending the holidays in the unemployment office.

Fighting the Bull

William — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 09:15:28 GMT

A few years ago, I read a truly excellent book called Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter's Guide . I really liked it b/c I was working at a place with a whole lot of people who were really into talking in business speak and thought they were really cool for doing it. Little by little, they all battled with each other to outdo the other ones. At the same time, they all started to think that talking ambiguously, meaning answering questions by not answering the question was some kind of holy virtue. Meetings were bad enough, but this idiocy makes them unbearable. Because talking in business speak is all about trying to convince people you're smart and hip, it turns into a pissing battle. You only need one of these people in a meeting to really make it so painful it hurts, but G*d help you if you get three or more b/c they will spend the whole time trying to outdo each other. And that's when they aren't battling to be the first to say 'That's a great point" every time a boss says something. They think it makes them sound important and I have yet to find anyone that seriously respects this style of communication. When i read the Bullfighter's Guide, it was really liberating in the same way it's always liberating to find out that not only aren't you alone, that there are many others that agree with you out there.

Purely for therapeutic value, I'd like to describe the phenomenon in a little more detail. The crux of this post is about a tool that's been around for a while and a book that's been around for a while. The book is mentioned above and is an in depth look at the annoying phenomenon known as Business Speak and how to avoid it. There is a Word Add-In that you can use to analyze documents and help you remove Bull as well as let you compute a Bull Index. Better yet, you can create your own lists and add your own words, so this tool can adapt to fight this evil phenomenon.

Here's what it looks like:

You can run the tool (the left hand icon) which works like Word's Spell Checker, or you can compute the Bull Index:

So why is this necessary? Well, because not only do many people think talking in Business Speak is cool, many people now it's stupid and pretentious, yet are uncomfortable saying so out loud b/c it will invariably anger at least a few coworkers. It's a classic case of the Emperor having no clothes. And today, at least in my experience, talking like this is the defacto standard. For example, a few years ago, I was talking with a few of my former coworkers (we all worked for the same Big X Consulting firm where talking like this was mandatory). A competitor of ours actually made Bullfighter. We'd run it on our documents (which were called Deliverables - can you ever imagine talking to your wife or kid and use Deliverable in a sentence? Can you imagine using the term Deliverables ANYWHERE other than work without causing confusion and laughter?) and try to remove all the bull we could find. We'd send it up the chain to the project manager and then to the managing partner, and what we got back was our document, except with Bull words added back in. Just to put it in perspective, this was back in the day when we were still called Resources. Again, imagine telling your wife "Honey, I'm going to be at work pretty late tonight, would you mind running by the school and picking up our resources and making sure our resources get their homework done?) I think the current word is Asset but I hear Resources still lingering around. Is Asset the most up to date one, or is there something newer?

In high school, you have the kids that are teacher's pets. They are the kids who love lecturing you about how 'immature' you are for laughing at potty humor. In a classroom discussion, they always figure out what the teacher's opinion is and spout it out as though it was their long held belief. Then they head off to college. The second week into school when few students know what they really want to do and are busy trying to get drunk and find easy freshman, you often hear these folks at the lunch table or on the sideline of the intramural fields raping people's ears. You hear some poor chap ask them "So what are you majoring in?" and it's all over. They haven't finished a single course or even taken their first test and you hear "Well, I'm going to double major in Poli-Sci and English. You know, 98% of lawyers at the nation's top firms were English majors. So I'm going to go to school on summers and take my LSAT's in my 3rd year. If I score over 190, then I'll be heading off to UVA or Princeton. If I score between 160 and 189, I'll shoot for Penn or Columbia. but i may take the dual MBA/JD program because there are so many MBAs and JDs, that you really need both to distinguish themselves." Then your senior year it turns into "Well, I'm going to work for a few years to get experience and find a company that will pay for my MBA. You know, you can't really get into a MBA program without work experience" They torture their first few sets of coworkers with this nonsense and say really smart sounding things like "You know, the market is going to close up today" every freaking day as though they were the only people in the world that know that the futures markets and market open often indicate the overall mood the traders that day. They start to see that no one likes their ideas and that they offer very little. Then they think "If only I was in management...." At that point, it fully takes over and what you get is a platitude generating Dilbertesque robot that induces vomit on a regular basis.

What happens usually is that someone in your office, usually a younger person on the verge of making management, starts it. These folks spot them and try to copy everything they do. All of a sudden you're in a meeting and they are asked a question and they reply "I'll be glad to take this off-line with you." At that point, you can see the eyes of all the kiss asses and management wannabes light up and you can almost hear them thinking "ooooh, impressive, I need to use that." Two days later, everyone is taking things offline instead of talking to you after the meeting. In another meeting you hear the trendoid say "Well, I have concerns that you may not have the bandwidth..." The same folks mentioned before perk up and take note. Bandwidth, oooh, now that sounds impressive. And then they discover the wonders of ambiguity. Next thing you know everyone is talking about bandwidth and everyone with some pathological agenda is talking about their concerns or telling you that so and so manager has concerns about something {something almost always directly related to their own agenda}. By using concerns, every petty tyrant in empowered to wreak havoc on their coworkers. You see, if you tell people "Well, John said Mr Whoever is pissed off about the network downtime" and John gets called on it, He'll just hide behind the ambiguity "Well, Mr Whoever did have concerns, hugh amounts of downtime is not good for business {all such people also love to slip in completely obvious truisms and state them like it's something profound}, but that's all I was saying. But when they said it in the meetings, they emphasized it in such a way that said "If this isn't fixed, heads are going to roll". The ambiguity is perfect for them because they can get people worked up or hide behind someone else's name and then have complete deniability if they get called out. In short order, they'll start using "We" all the time, so they can take credit if management agrees with their point, but pawn it off on others if management doesn't. This all starts creeping in, just like the business platitudes. These people then start freestyling with each of these techniques:

Bill: "Hey, John, the full database backup didn't run last night nor did the incrementals. I looked into it and the job wasn't enabled. Did someone disable it after you enabled it or did you not enable it before you left?"

John: "Well Bill, we have to do everything possible to take care of customer data. We might be staff here but we are customers at many places and we certainly want our data handled as carefully as possible. It's critical that we leverage each of our core competencies to strategically manage our client's data, even if we're running low on bandwidth or getting pushback about it"

Bill: "Uhh, ok, but I didn't have a chance to look at the error logs, I just want to know if it was left disabled for a reason, or it was an oversight, and if there was a reason, can we re-enable it now, it's been 8 hours since we've had a backup."

John: "Well, we look at our business model as the key to our success and you have to do what's best for the customer and do things that make sense. Right now, I don't have a comfort level with the backup strategy and we may need to have a meeting. I understand you have a concern about it and we totally share your concern. Maybe you could google it and see what comes up and then you can call a meeting and share your findings."

As stupid as this sounds, it's not far from a real conversation I've had and ones I've overheard. I know I'm really long on this rant which is slightly ironic b/c what I'm complaining about is poor communication, but it's because this nonsense is so prevalent that I often wish things were different. the thing is that if you talk to people individually, everyone will tell you they hate this sort of stuff. Depending on the guilt level, you'll typically hear some level of apologetics for their own sins. On the other hand, you just know that there are some people you could never even bring the subject up with, b/c for them, talking like this is absolutely critical to their existence. And if you look deep, you'll find that the more someone talks like this, the less technical skills they have. There are a few exceptions of talented people that speak like this, but the folks with talent are doing it b/c they think it's expected. For the rest, they literally depend on this sort of stuff.

Why do I mention all of this? because I'm going to bet that every single person that reads this works with someone like this. In fact, I bet they work with more than a few people that talk and behave like this, and have worked with many in the past. And these people have driven you nuts. And you've wanted to call Bullsh*t as loudly as possible. At one point, you actually fell for it, thinking that they speak so confidently and sounds so sophisticated that they have to really know what they are talking about. Then you realize that every morning on the ride into work, they hear about the futures markets and that alone is what dictates their daily market predictions. You realize taht without the fancy lingo, they have nothing to offer. And it drives you nuts. If you've felt this and want a good laugh, pull a sample of about 20 of their emails or memos. One day, in a meeting, bring in your notebook and just type in as many phrases as you can without attracting attention. Then run the Bullfighter (yes, it works on everything from Word 97 to 2007) and laugh at the results. Then look at their Bull Index. When you see their pathetic Bull Score, sit back and laugh to yourself knowing they are absolutely full of it as measured by a good objective standard. And run it on your own work just to make sure you never go over to the dark side (the lowest I've scored is a 5.5 and the highest is an 8. I usually score in the 7.0s. The more I use it, the more I 'get it' and hopefully I can improve that.

If you have any really good examples of Business speak (I know I've asked before but figured there are some new good ones based on what I"ve been hearing lately) or memos, Please please please post them or send them to me. I'll keep them confidential unless you tell me it's ok to mention it. For some reason, I find this quite amusing.

I can almost hear Jeff Foxworthy saying...If you write blog posts at 5:00 AM about how much you like running writing analyzers on office memos, you might be a DORK.

Impostors and phonies getting as bad as spammers

William — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 02:44:54 GMT

The community server panel , like all mainstream blog engines, has a feature that allows you to approve comments. You can create word lists to automatically filter comments in an effort to eliminate spam. You can search your comments marked spam and delete them. The major problem though is that the spam feature shows the results in a gridview which provides paging. But there is no 'Delete all Spam comments' or at least, there's not one I know of (if there is, I'd be mighty grateful to hear about it). Each time I've tried to clear out all of my spam comments, they accumulate faster than I can delete them. Since I don't have access to the source tables, I can't just delete all of them at once. Dealing with spam has been one of the most cumbersome aspects of being a blogger.

Until recently that is. In the past few weeks, I've been deluged with comments of a few different sorts but all of which appear to be part of a campaign to cause someone some serious problems. I've had a few comments where people attacked me fairly vigorously, only to find out that they weren't from the people they purported to be from. I've had a ton of comments that were somewhat unrelated to anything being discussed which really laid into people. There were comments, which appear to have been Me, agreeing with the comments being posted. In so doing, some of the people who's names were used contacted me and informed me that they were not the author of the comments, that someone is pretending to be them. Then I was told that the comments were in fact from at least one of the people and that they got cold feet and realized they didn't want to fight the battle they picked.

It got so bad that one person actually wrote me and said essentially that The comments there weren't from me. If I do post comments here, I'll write you an email and confirm that it was really me. If you care about the integrity of your comments, you'll delete them. Then within a few hours I got several emails from the same person, telling me off, calling me all sorts of names and unquestionably trying to provoke a fight. The tone was completely belligerent and 180 degrees away from the earlier email they sent. To put it in perspective, imagine getting some hostile comments from someone you've had some trouble with in the past but who you had pretty much forgotten about and had no problem with currently (and for the record, someone you no longer foster any animus toward and would just prefer to peacefully move on from). Imagine then that they contacted you via email and told you that the comments weren't authentic and were the result of someone pretending to be them. Imagine then that a few hours later, they wrote you back (after you took down the comments in question, essentially complying with their request) telling you off, insulting you, your friends and a few family members. Knowing that the person had suffered a horrific tragedy recently, you just assumed they flipped out and you decided to ignore the latter emails, even though they would otherwise warrant a response. Then you get a few more emails, each getting increasingly provocative. Then a few of the person's friends post comments on your blog getting all over your case (which was the same pattern that has happened before). Then you see a few more comments that are clearly fakes from the same people. I'm not sure what's going on but I suspect it's one of the following:

The person in question never wrote the comments. When they saw them, the tried to clear them up. The person who's attacking them has access to their personal email account and then sends out a few emails trying to provoke a fight.
The person in question wrote some of the comments. When they saw the fakes, they tried to clear it up. Afterward, they regretted extending the pleasantries and decided to make it clear that things are not ok

I have a strong suspicion that it's the former, I just have a feeling. Since my strong guess is that their email account has been breached by someone who clearly doesn't like them, I figured I'd post this. This way they can take the hint , change their password and start keeping an eye on things, without me having to write them an email which would tip the person off. On the other hand, if their email is breached, it's highly likely the person who's breached it is reading this.

Every now and then I start to feel old and long to be back in high school. But then I see crap like this and how lame it is and every bit of nostalgia just dries right up.

JesOS (TM) The First True Christian (TM) Operating System

William — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 02:09:03 GMT

I'm probably going to hell for even reading this, let alone posting a link to it. Atheists/Agnostics and Christians that can laugh at some of the less desirable aspects of their faith will get a good chuckle out of it. If you are of the persuasion that thinks that laughing at any aspect of religion == laughing at God, then you'll probably be somewhere between extremely and totally offended.

Man bites dog

William — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 17:16:59 GMT

A few of these clips are definitely NSFW b/c of the language. In fact, more than a few are. But if you look at some of Jimmy Justice's video, you'll probably laugh your butt off.

Basically, he's a citizen vigilante who goes around and photographs cops doing things they shouldn't be. In just about every one I've seen, he's a complete jerk but the arrogance of the cops defies words. If you have a few minutes and want a few laughs though, Jimmy Justice may be able to help

Free Silverlight Training

William — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 19:53:43 GMT

My friend Brian Madsen who owns CSharpZealot has teamed up with InnerWorkings to extend a really slick offer for Free Silverlight Training for CSharpZealot members.

In addition, Shawn Wildermuth has been way ahead of the crowd when it comes to Silverlight and has just created two more Silverlight Videos. His ADO Guy site has an entire Section dedicated to Silverlight and well, Shawn is gifted in many areas but when it comes to teaching, no one does it better.

On a similar note, my company recently sponsored an internal Silverlight contest where our different offices are competing to build the best game written in Silverlight. They put there money where their mouth is so the first place prize is pretty impressive. I've had my nose in the keyboard for the past few weeks trying to help my team win. If you're interested in learning Silverlight, one great place to get started is Here. Microsoft really did the right thing with Orcas (VS 2008) and even provides ready to run (almost anyway) VPC images.

Hopefully when I get some time I can start doing some more in depth Silverlight blogging but let me make a few recommendations.

Use the VPC images for Orcas. The reasons are the same for any other alpha or beta product you'd want to install but outside of isolation and reducing risk, the time factor is huge. Using the VPC images, you can be up and running in under 5 minutes once you have them downloaded. Benefits like this are really hard to quantify but I can tell you personally that at times, getting my environment set up without VPC images was frustrating to say the least.
Although it's often prudent to learn to code things without all the crutches that a powerful IDE provide, creating Silverlight with Intellisense and a designer is probably not a very effective way to start things. Unless you are really familiar with WPF already, the syntax takes a little getting used to and there's a lot of room to mess things up with typos.
In addition to Orcas, make sure you pull down Expression Blend and Design. Blend allows you to create Graphics with XAML. I've already had a few Paint.NET and Photoshop fanatics get all over me for plugging Blend, but I think they are off base. I'm not advocating replacing Photoshop or Paint.NET with Blend. Blend however, allows one to create images with XAML. You in turn can look at the XAML that is generated and use it to help understand and learn XAML. If you did much Office automation, you more than likely 'cheated' in the sense that you just ran a macro and saw the code that was generated and used this as a mechanism to learn VBA and get past sticking points. Blend allows you to do the same thing. Sure, hardcore 'real' developers do everything in Notepad but if you want to get up to speed, using a tool to help you draw the effects you want and then being able to disassemble the XAML that was generated will get you where you want to be a LOT faster.
Pull down each of the items in the Gallery and work through the QuickStarts. These encompass many common kick a55 effects and you can reverse engineer them to see learn how to do quite a bit.
I have some pretty strong opinions on the books out there but even if a book doesn't address Silverlight specifically (most of them however have updated versions which do include Silverlight), you can still learn quite a bit because you are ultimately going to need to really understand WPF and XAML. I really want to gather my thoughts a little better before making any more book recommendations because although all of the WPF books out there are pretty good, some are a lot more helpful than others when it comes to learning Silverlight
Read Shawn Wildermuth's Silverlight posts.

Personally, since I'm not a designer and very challenged when it comes to graphics, I had a pretty rough time at the beginning of my learning curve. Little by little though, I'm getting through it and hopefully I'll have some blogworthy material to post soon. As always, if you have any specific questions, please let me know and I'll be glad to answer what I can.

Passenger's bill of duties

William — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 09:39:00 GMT

Athough it's been relatively slow in the past few months, I typically have to engage in a good bit of air travel and it seems that many developers/consultants I know are in the same boat.. TSA and similar concerns have made air travel more frustrating over the years, but nothing, nothing compares to some of the obnoxious Pain in the a55e5 that have gotten much worse over the years. So when I read The Passenger's Bill of Duties , I got a real kick out of it. #s 1 & 5 should be passed into law immediately. I think one other one needs added - People who's chairs get kicked repeatedly by bratty kid should be given $10.00 a pop by the brat's parents and People who's kids cry for more than 15 minutes should reimburse everyone disturbed by the kids. None of this will ever happen but it's nice to dream.

Coding Arguments - aka How to Start Religious Wars

William — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 04:33:00 GMT

I am lucky enough to work for a company that really encourages us to get together and learn/hang out etc. One way this happens is by Tech Nights. Basically, we have in office meetings which are recorded via Live Meeting, where someone picks a topic and teaches about it. Afterward, folks go to dinner and the company picks up the tab. Two weeks ago I had done the presentation and we all went out afterward. Two of our new guys were with us, and the rest of the folks there had all worked together at a particular client. Both of our new guys are really sharp, can talk their share of smack when necessary and been here long enough to feel comfortable speaking their minds if they want to.

The first discussion was regarding Frameworks. One of us mentioned that he liked Frameworks and believes in them. Being the smart a55 that I am, I asked "What in the h3ll does that mean?" . He proceeded to explain that he believed in code reuse and has build reusable code at every opportunity. Trying to have a little fun and encourage discussion, I asked him "Who doesn't believe in code reuse? But if that's the only goal, then a function gets the job done. Above functions, the whole reason for OOP is to facilitate reuse and simply building a bunch of objects that can be used sounds a lot more like an API than a Framework". The guy in question is a top notch coder and certainly understands the difference, he just had a little trouble using 'official definitions'. But asking what differentiates a Framework from an API turned out to be a pretty decent question to ask b/c neither have absolutely conclusive definitions that make them mutually exclusive. As such, it's precisely the type of argument that a bunch of nerds can argue into the ground over dinner.

I mentioned before that the 'rest of us' all worked at a certain client together. Personally, I'm pretty fond of standardization when it comes to coding. So even if I think my way is better, I'll use the predominant methodology in most cases simply b/c I think that in general, any improvements that doing it 'my' way brings will be more than offset by complications resulting from differing coding styles. If nothing else, it will usually mean that every time someone looks at it, they are going to ask "Why is it like this instead of ...". It ends up causing you to explain it over and over and have pedantic discussions with each new person that joins the team. Similarly, if you differ from what's being done, it's a virtual certainty that the implication of it will be that 'the other way is wrong'. Most of the folks I work/worked with are humble enough to acknolwedge that any given way they chose to implement something could have been better (any *real* coder will always acknolwedge it could have been done better. Anyone that says it couldn't is either egotistical or clueless). However, just because people are ok with admitting they didn't chose an optimal design methodology, that doesn't mean it's cool to rub it in their face. After all, you'll be on that side of the equation unless you never have to design stuff. Not that I recommend doing things wrong just to save people's egos, but some times, it's too easy to get so carried away with saying "this is right" or "this is wrong' that you forget to remember "It needs done". Another problem with doing things differently is that opinions are like Carrolls, everyone has one. What seems obvious as day to one person may seem utterly silly to another. Design decisions are all about tradeoffs and since we all see the value of tradeoffs differently, well you know...

Since a few of us worked at the same client, I decided to provoke a little bit. We had worked there at different times, except for me - I was there throughout the time each of the other guys was there. So one of them had really strong opinions about how well code should be formatted. So on the one side we had the following:

Upper case for Keywords and reserved words
Commas at the beginning of the line
Each column on a different line
Lining up words in the center
UPDATE Whatever SET Whatever WHERE WHATEVER
Immediately getting rid of any objects that aren't used or that were just used for testing
Using Source Control to track versioning differences.
Death to Hungarian Notation
Names should be self documenting - no acronyms, developer initials or anything that might lead to confusion about what the method should do.
Only including update information in the procedure's/parameter's documentation and leaving big changes to the source control system.

Since we didn't have a Source control system at the client (their choice not ours), part of this reasoning was problematic and I'm probably leaving a few things out,but overall, this characterizes Argument 1.

Argument 2 on the other hand was

Document everything in the procedure.
Have a dated comment showing who made the change every single time anything was changed
Leave backups and test objects in the database because they may be needed later
Minimal attention to formatting (although each person that advocated this was very careful about how their code performed. So it would be totally unfair to imply their work was sloppy - they just had more of a don't sweat the small stuff but make really sure the big stuff is right approach
Use initials for personal utility procedures so they can be found and used easily.

Personally, I am a nut about formatting. I'm really fastidious about formatting and would clearly rather have NO comments than out of date comments or too many comments - but that's not to say that I am anti-comments in any sense. I also am pretty fussy about source control, if you are going to have any configuration management, I can't stand it being done in comments inline or at the top of the code - it needs to be in a version control system. So on this one, the people that were on the project who preferred Argument 1 were in the minority. However at the table, we were in the Majority. This immediately led to a small trash talking session among friends. Little did we know the new guys were so interested in the topic. One of them seemed to be pretty opinionated but it wasn't until a week later that we realized how much so.

The thing is that while I consider myself a Data guy, my theoretical understanding of Relational Database theory is much stronger than say my DBA skills are. And although I'm admittedly a little fussy about formatting and the like, I have to admit that many of the best DBA's I've worked with are much more relaxed about formatting and commenting than I am. Many of them not being AppDev guys don't depend on Source Control and prefer to handle versioning issues inline. It's difficult to argue against competency so in the end, my utimate belief is to defer to the best guy on the project.

Have you encountered any discussions like this that you didn't really think would get people talking much but ended up getting people really involved? Personally, I think that as long as you're dealing with mature professionals, these sorts of things are great b/c folks are passionate about them, so you have smart people putting forth their best arguments, and you can't help but gain perspective and knowledge. On the other hand, if you deal with people who get defensive easy, or who have trouble admitting they don't know everything (funny how the more defensive they are , the less they actually know in most cases), well, this stuff will do nothing but cause bad blood.

So which side do you fall on? I'm guessing it's not this black and white in many cases, for instance, the comma issue could fall in either group.

What sorts of things have you come across that have stirred discussion? Any specific coding arguments, and if so, what?

Pimpology Law 11 - Avoid Gorillas and Godzillas

William — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 21:12:00 GMT

I'm somewhat hesitant to write this because I really want people to buy this book. However I figured from all the freaking emails I'm getting asking if I'm serious, I probably ought to make it clear that Yes, I am totally serious about this. One of you seems to think this is my just trying to get a rise out of people, but well, if that's what I was doing i'd choose a different venue.

So now that I've read Pimpin Ken's seminal masterpiece - aka Pimpology - The 48 Laws of the Game , I can say honestly that if you changed the title, this book would look just like any other Business Book I read in grad school although this is a lot more interesting. I was thinking about it in relation to my personal job:

Law 11 - Avoid Gorillas and Godzillas

Although I thought I was hip to most lingo, I was clueless as to what a Gorilla or Godzilla was. He uses personal anecdotes, but essentially they are both basically folks that you work with that don't play by the rules and as such, put the whole game at risk. I once worked at a company that had a really lax policy about arriving and leaving - as long as you did your work, they didn't care. Then, one guy started missing meetings. He was never there yet recorded hours all the time. He'd do all of his work in one burst, but this caused problems because we often to had to wait for his stuff. So managment cracked the whip and we all had to start being there during business hours and all this others stuff that really made it suck. All because of one person. To quote Pimpin Ken "Gorillas and Godzillas are bad for the game. They are bad business and as such, they have to go" (Gotta love his writing style). So.... "this is one instance where the real pimps may work together to take care of the situation."

Law 11 goes hand in hand with Law 23 - A Ho Joines a Stable to Ruin it.

While I can't do it justice, the basic point here is that you need to throughly screen those that come to work for you. I've heard every excuse in the book for poor screening - "Reference checks don't matter, they just use their friends or people that will lie for them", "You can't get people to be honest about them or they risk getting sued", "What they did in the past doesn't mean anything about what they'll do in the future" blah blah blah. And while all that is true to some extent, the price of being wrong when employing someone is typically huge. How many times have you been stuck somewhere where some manipulative ahole causes all sorts of problems? He gets everyone all riled up about everything. He convinces people mgt is screwing them. He fosters this "us against them " attitude. He trashed people who dare disagree with him. Or he doesn't do any work or does crappy work. And you have to deal with this crap for months because "they need a paper trail" and the only way to get that is usually to let him screw up bad and have you clean it up? There's no excuse for not screening. We all have made a poor hiring decision, but you shouldn't have many of these in your career and if you ask enough questions, take some time and watch how they respond, look for consistency and the like.

However, you can tell people this over and over and folks never seem to realize beforehand that they are hiring a problem. I bet if every hiring manager read Pimpin Ken's book - such issues would be a thing of the past. I need to get off my butt and work on another book - "Everything you needed to know about consulting in the words of a Pimp".

The stupidity of this amazes me

William — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 20:27:00 GMT

I had to read a book called The Bell Curve about ten years ago. It was very controversial and I bought it, I just didn't buy the reasoning (don't think race was at the heart of the differences). He pointed out that smart people were having fewer kids and dumb people were having more (Think Bill Gates as compared to that asp guy who's on baby momma #3). Not only were the smarter people having fewer kids, but they tended to be wealthier - again, think of the previous example. So the smarter people had more resources to nurture their kids and could put more effort into their development since they had less of them. On the other end, poorer people had more kids, had less resources to dedicate to them etc. While individually things can vary dramatically (we all know of rags to riches stories, over conversely, Paris and Nicole) - but overall, he hypothesized that there was going to be a cognitive elite driven mainly by this phenomenon and technology. Being computer illiterate gets more and more costly each passing year. So perhaps it's totally coincidental and has nothing to do with this phenomenon, but at least as far as crooks go, seems to me they are clearly on the less desirable tail of the congitive elite curve . (For my more pedantic readers, I'm certainly aware of the fact that dumb crooks have always been and will always be, and that it's media access that makes it seem like there's an increase). But I'm tellin ya, at some level, when it comes to dumb, we aren't regressing toward the mean, instead, we're moving towards the tails. Spammers/Phishers et all show way more sophistication than crooks of old, then you see stuff like this . Heck, my hometown paper's Dave Barry fills his blog with humorous stories of dumb crooks. These guys may not be the dumbest I've heard of, but they sure are dumb. "Joe, what do you think that barking sound is at this abandoned Nursing home? Uhh, beats me Bill. Oh crap, it's a bunch of police dogs - you run left and I'll run right and maybe we can outrun them."

Pimpology vs Harry Potter

William — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 03:44:00 GMT

On Fridays, Kim and I typically go to P.F. Changs for dinner and then go to Barnes and Noble to and go book shopping. Tonight everything was going well, and after dinner we walked across the street to B & N. At some point, I started having flashbacks to the Elian Gonzalez drama that gripped Miami for so long and made many facets of life difficult.

By the time we walked to the parking lot, we saw news truck after news truck. Every major media network was represented. The whole complex was just packed and all the parking spaces by B & N were taken. At that point it dawned on me that this was Harry Potter release night. Actually, that last part isn't exactly true, that's how I wished it went down.

Right before we were finishing dinner, Kim mentioned that it was Harry Potter release night and that it might be crowded. I opened my big trap and said "Jeezzusss, how crowded to you think it can be?" After all, this is still Greenville. It's not uncommon for people to send letters to the editor talking about how Harry Potter == speed train to h*ll. I frequently overhear people in stores and restaurants talking about how awful Harry Potter is or how terrible so and so is b/c they let their kids watch/read Harry Potter stuff. So I couldn't possibly imagine that many people would be out waiting to pick up the book. Not surprisingly, I was wrong.

The store was packed. I mean Jammed packed. There were people walking around with "The end is near signs" everywhere. Everyone under 20 it seemed was dressed up in Harry Potter garb ranging from just wearing the glasses to going all the way. Few things irritate me more than crowds and to be honest, the last time I was in a book store that was this crowded, I was a Senior in high school in B Dalton trying to get a copy of the Satanic Verses before they pulled it from the shelf. Heck, they were pulling it from the shelf so it had to be cool. If I remember, it was really expensive (this was 1988 or 89), something like $50.00 - which back then, was pretty pricey for a book of that nature. Anyway,, I couldn't get into the computer books isle so I took a detour to try to go down the aisle from another direction. I walked back the Self Help aisle and was kind of chuckling at some of the folks there and the titles of books. I was almost expecting to see some unemployable dork reading Drive Yourself Sane or some equally lame garbage when, low and behold I saw this:

Pimpology - The 48 Laws of the Game

Never forget yo, the Hype is real.

Mind you, this was in Self Help/Self Improvement section. At first I figured it was humor just b/c of the title. Then I picked it up though and realized it was actually serious. It should have been in the Business Books section although I guess I can't argue that it's a self improvement book too.

It's a classic case of don't judge a book by the cover I guess, b/c it's apparently a very serious book,extremely serious from the parts I've skimmed, but well, as Pimpin' Ken says "Remember that if ifs and ands were pots and pans, the whole world would be a kitchen" So it caught my eye and I just had to flip through it. I said "Look honey, this is just what I need" and Kim just rolled her eyes at me and gave me that "there he goes again" look. Some guy next to me was reading something by some dude named James Bradshaw about healing your inner child or something. He glanced at the cover of my book and looked at my like I was buying a Harry Potter book for my kid or something. So I flip through the Table Of Contents:

Law 4 - Keep a Ho in Arrears

Law 8 - Pimp like you Ho-Less

Law 19 - Turn Ho ends into dividends

These were just a few of the valuable lessons contained in Pimpology - The 48 Laws of the Game. Kim disappeared at that point, I suspect b/c she realized how stupid I was going to look when I walked up the counter to buy this book. The lines were insane and as I tried to cut through the crowds to get over to the checkout line, all I could think was "It's hard out here for a Pimp". As I was in line, Kim found her way over to me. I started reading excerpts of the book and with each passing phrase from Pimpin' Ken, she seemed more and more convinced I'm a complete idiot. So I get to the counter and proceeded to check out. The girl behind the counter was a school teacher and stared at the cover , looked at me, looked really confused and then told me "Well, people buy all kinds of stuff. People come in and buy High Times magazine and books on how to grow pot. They always say it's for a class project and I know it's not b/c i'm a teacher." I assured her that my interest in the Pimp Game was purely academic, but I figured there was no way she was going to believe it was for a term paper. The fact that this book is actually serious, still kind of amazes me. Although it's sort of silly sounding, Pimpin' Ken is totally serious. Virtually every facet of pimpin is covered in depth and he brings a lot of real world experience to the table. If you'd have told me 20 years ago that 20 years from now, I'd be in a bookstore late on a Friday night, buying a self-improvement book on Pimpin, by a Pimp, well, I probably would have fallen over laughing.

But there I was. It seemed surreal b/c well, I just tried to imagine my picture on the cover instead of Pimpin' Ken and thought, "Nope, it would never work for me". I remember back when Self-Improvement was the same in most every store - Psycho-Cybernetics, Dianetics, all the Napoleon Hill series, Tony Robbins' stuff, M Scott Peck's books. On the less serious side there was also a whole bunch of stuff on inner children, families of choice and other silliness and "Recovery". Over the years, Self-Improvement has developed a whole lot of niche areas, but never did I think I'd see a book on the Rules of Pimping. There was all sorts of books there on how to get over crappy relationships, healing anger, assertiveness and the like - so I'm not sure how that crew would deal with Pimpin' Ken. As surreal as all this was, I guess it was the Harry Potter insanity was the perfect backdrop for it. Hey, if all these people can sit around dressed up like Wizards and whatever, carrying around "The end is near signs", some reclusive computer nerd like me has every right to try to keep it real with Pimpin' Ken (although something about that name isn't sitting well with me. I mean, the Pimpin' part is ok, but Ken just isn't working. I think a single consonant would at least sound a lot more real.

So at this point, I need to quit writing and get back to reading Ken Blanchard , Agatha Christie and Dale Cargnegie quotes framed in the context of a modern day Pimp. By tomorrow morning, I'll hopefully be able to Turn Ho Ends into Dividends or more practical stuff like "Be a leader". Once I get that down, I'm going to get busy reading "Law 36 - Be Internationally Known, Nationally Recognized and Locally Accepted". This is critical of course, because the streets are watching and I'm not sure I've done enough prepartion building my street cred. We'll see. All in all though, I'll take Pimpin' Ken over Harry Potter any day of the week.

I'm hoping by the way, to finally get my career as a gangsta rapper started. As i have mentioned before, I was thinking of starting a rap crew called "B Nice and tha Hoe Killaz". I of course would be B-Nice (B as in Bill for those of you that dont' keep it real). Finding the Hoe Killaz however, has proven to be illusive although I've found some possible leads during the two times I've ridden on the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority aka MARTA

Accordingly, following Pimpin' Ken's 33rd Law "Bring Your People with You to the Top", I'd like to offer any of my regular readers an opportunity to join the Hoe Killaz. I'd prefer people with some fresh Grillz , but in the spirit of keepin it real, lack of a fly Grill and bling, will not bar you from consideration to take it to the next level as a Hoe Killa. Use the contact me link for more information.

UPDATE: Since I first posted this on Friday, it's gotten the crap indexed out of it. If you Search Google for the phrase Pimpin Ken this post is # 11 . Since then, I started doing a little research and I found Pimpin Ken and got an Add from him. Also hooked up with Big Paper Chase aka Oil Can Harry and Hoetester. If you haven't figured it out - IMHO, Hoetester has to be one of the flyest rappers I've heard in years but for some reason, I never came across his work. As far as Paper Chase goes, he's already come up and proven his game is tops. I'm not a big MySpace fan and in general, am not a big social networking guys. But with Adds like this, Barbie Cummings and some of the other folks I've come across, I'm starting to see the light.

The coolest campaign ad ever

William — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 02:11:00 GMT

Ok, so it's probably not real and it's been done before. But it's still really *** cool...(read more)