| Thursday, February 6, 2003 |  |
| Work |
 I'm tired of being a hard worker, rather than a smart operator. I don't know where I picked it up, but I've for years had the strategy of a workaholic in denial. If I just work harder, and put in more hours, and I try to keep up with everything that is thrown at me, I'll be alright. And that worked fine for a long time. At some jobs I've had, people were puzzled that I could get so much done. But my secret was sometimes not much more than that I worked 80 hours per week, and they only worked 50. They slept 7 hours per night, and I managed with 5.
But it is also the choice between whether you're the guy who does the work, or the guy who makes the work happen. I've been a supervisor, and led and managed teams of people, but I've somehow managed to always keep the attitude that I was the guy who'd do the work. Like, for one large programming project, I had five programmers, but it was still me who came in Saturdays, and who took the work home, and who ended up having written 90% of the code. Several times I've been given the choice on whether I'd be the manager or whether I'd be the techie, and I usually chose to be the chief techie. But where it goes wrong is in the knowledge work of knowing what exactly you're doing, why you're doing it, and what the best ways of doing things are, including who best to delegate it to. Just oneself working harder is often a pretty dumb approach. What has sometimes happened to me is that I've been so busy with my nose to the grindstone, that I didn't notice that everybody else around me got really busy jockeying for position, writing reports, making presentations, protecting their territories, covering their asses, gathering really good information about what they should or shouldn't be doing. And suddenly I realize I have 15 bosses telling me what to do, and I'm the only guy who actually works, and there aren't hours enough in the day to do what everybody wants. And I had spent zero time on maneuvering around and negotiating things, so I have no political leverage. Recently there was this one part of a bigger programming project I just couldn't seem to get around to. It was writing a very efficient SMTP mailing engine in C. Normally I do PHP programming nowadays. My C coding skills were extremely rusty, and I sort of needed to study up on what to do, and how to do a multi-threaded program. And I kept saying that I hoped to get to it next week. And they were very patient, but after about a year of that, they figured it wasn't going to happen, and instead of using my system they went out and spent 1/2 million dollars elsewhere, on another system doing roughly the same thing as what I had written for them, but which had solved that particular mailing problem. And the ridulous thing is that the piece I needed could have been coded in about a month by an experienced C programmer. And if I had told them that I needed another programmer, they would have said "Yes, of course". But I didn't. I just tried to work harder. Enough. Time for a different strategy. More with less. [ Diary | 2003-02-06 16:35 | 3 comments | PermaLink ] More > |
| Plagiarized Intelligence |
 On Monday the British government released a document: "Iraq - Its Infrastructure of Concealment Deception and Intimidation", which appeared to be an up-to-the-minute intelligence based analysis, timed to back up what Colin Powell told the U.N. the next day. And Powell made a point out of praising it. Unfortunately, or maybe humorously, it turns out to have been put together from older public articles that various people have written, and most of it has just been cut and pasted verbatim, including typos. Some of it is taken from a paper written by a California college student. Seems like the British government doesn't have the resources to make up convincing stories themselves, let alone actually doing the intelligence work.[ Politics | 2003-02-06 17:45 | 0 comments | PermaLink ] |
| Invisibility Cloak |
 It seems to be just a demo, but apparently Japanese scientists are working on ways of making camouflaged objects transparent. The principle is basically to record video images behind someone or something, and then projecting it or displaying it in front. Just like the U.S. military is planning to invent NanoPaint that can cover vehicles and make them invisible.[ Technology | 2003-02-06 17:45 | 0 comments | PermaLink ] |
| Dollars, Euros and Oil |
 Excellent article by Cóilín Nunan: "Oil, Currency and the War on Iraq". Fascinating explanation of some major economic mechanisms involving dollars and euros and oil. A very big reason that the United States is such an economically and militarily dominating country is apparently that U.S. dollar is the de facto world reserve currency. Lots of things are counted in dollars and some goods are only sold for dolars. That means that foreign governments and corporations and banks are keeping large dollar reserves. That essentially amounts to a huge loan the rest of the world is giving to the United States, which will subsidize the U.S. economy. In order to acquire those dollars, the rest of the world has to provide goods and services for those dollars. That allows the U.S. to have a huge import/export imbalance. Last November, 48% more imports than exports. It would be untennable for any other country to run such a deficit.
Next major point is that one of the reasons everybody has to have dollars is that the OPEC oil producting countries only accept dollars for oil. Well, not all of them. The only one that does something different is Iraq, which only accepts Euros for their oil, since 2000. And Iran is considering it as well. And the thing is that it might just as well be Euros that everybody used as a reserve currency. It would apparently be a better choice in many ways, because the European economies are more balanced, and the OPEC countries would end up getting more value for their oil. So, now, what would happen if Euros became the only choice for buying oil? Most likely the U.S. economy would plunge, because it would no longer be subsidized in that manner. And EU would probably be quite happy being subsidized in its place. Anybody thinks all this might have something to do with the great urgency to take over Iraq? And why would Britain support it? [ Politics | 2003-02-06 19:36 | 13 comments | PermaLink ] More > |