snellspace

The new domain appears to be up and running (for the most part). If you subscribe to my RSS feed, you'll need to resubscribe using the new URL: http://www.snellspace.com/blog/rss.xml. There may be some DNS servers that haven't replicated completely yet and don't have the new domain.. be patient, it'll get there eventually. :-)

Coming soon.... www.snellspace.com. Moving the blog to it's own domain.

The IBM glass engine. Now this is a cool user interface.

Workbench: "...who both presume that most doctors are clean-living, non-smoking teetotalers. " I make no such assumption. I just find it incredulous that doctors would literally at one second tell a patient that smoking will kill them and at the next moment light up as if their years of education on the subject meant nothing. I mean, think about it, how much confidence would you have in an IT manager who at one moment tells you not to open emails with attachments and at the next moment, opens an email and infects the network with a worm. It's the same thing -- there are some folks who should know better and need to act accordingly. It's all about integrity.

Trust me, I've known my fair share of doctors and the vast majority of 'em have not been clean-living, non-smoking teetotalers.

CNN.com: "If you went to a baseball game tonight, and looked around, you would see about 25,000 other fans. If you were living in Israel, one of you would likely be killed in a terrorist attack in the next six months. One of every 26,392 Israelis has been killed in a terrorist attack since January. Per capita, that is more than three times the number of people killed in the attacks on September 11. For Israelis, living with terror has become a part of daily life."

Scripting News: "Just guessing that most doctors never smoked, or if they did they didn't do it for very long, so don't really understand, at a personal level, how hard this drug is to say goodbye to. It just doesn't want to let up. The doctors say "You have to just quit." I worked for a doctor a few years back on a medical billing app. One day when I was outside taking a break I overhead a doctor talking to a patient telling him that he had to quit smoking or his lungs were going to get worse and that his heart condition would kill him. The man looked pretty shaken up and left ... got in his car and drove away. Then the most incredible thing happened. The doctor, after he was sure the patient was gone out of sight (he actually stood there and watched him leave for a minute), pulled out a cigarette and lit up, enjoying a few drags before he went back to work.

Scripting News: "About doctors and cigarettes. Just guessing that most doctors never smoked, or if they did they didn't do it for very long, so don't really understand, at a personal level, how hard this drug is to say goodbye to. It just doesn't want to let up. The doctors say "You have to just quit." But what are the best strategies. Should you use the patch if you've already got a week of cold turkey under your belt. Interested in what other people think. " Personally, I've never had a problem with this type of stuff. I've never smoked, I've never had any alcohol, never really been addicted to anything really. But many folks in my family have. My dad used to go through at least one or two packs a day. Then, one day, he ran out of cigarettes and decided he wasn't going to the store to buy any more (even though the store was right next door to his work, less than 50 feet away). It took us more than a month to notice he had quit smoking (he never told us). My mom went to empty out his ashtray and noticed it was already empty. He hasn't had a cigarette since and says once he decided not to go buy anymore, he never even had the craving. That's after smoking since he was 12 years old or so. Same basic story with my grandmother. She had smoked for many many years and was out mowing her lawn and couldn't catch her breath after only a few minutes. She decided it was time to quit smoking so she did. Threw her cigarettes away and never had a problem since. Then again, my family is filled with a long line of extremely hard headed and stubborn folk. Good luck Dave, you'll get through it, just make up your mind to stick to it and don't give in.

Parrot Cellular Automata: Looks like Wolfram scored a hit on the internet time waster scale ;-) ...

CNN.com - Australian scientists claim teleporting success - June 17, 2002 Cool. This could get one's imagination going a dozen different ways.

Watched Harry Potter last night. Decent movie. Think I'll actually go back and read the book(s).

Sam Ruby: "Are your goals different than your co-workers? Do you have a limited attention span for items that are not related to your goals?" Sam responds to my comments on working remote with different but good advice. His is backed by far more experience with the company and the environment.

gnat's Journal: "A beautiful program, spoiled by the real world." Aren't they all?

(btw, gnat has a wonderful unique gift for words. while often times they may be shocking to a purified christian soul such as myself ;-), you have to give gnat credit for his ability to express just the right emotion with a single creative well-placed expletive)

Well, let's see, it's been a little over a year since I started with IBM as a remote employee (my management team is in Raleigh, I'm in California). In that time I've learned at least one extremely important fact: working remote is a total $%@!@ but it beats the alternative. The upside is the amount of time I get to have with my family. I'd rather have more face-time with my wife and 2yr old than with my manager and VP. The hours are flexible and the work enjoyable. The downside is the complete lack of a direct connection with your coworkers. Face-to-face builds trust. Never underestimate the power of being able to walk into someone's office and having a chat.

There is a special strain on the relationship between the manager and the remote employee. The managers job is to keep the team focused, on track, moving towards a target that the team may not necessarily see or understand. In doing so, the manager must connect directly with the team. It's extremely hard to directly connect when 2,646 miles of continent separate you and when the only real way to communicate is via email and a weekly half hour call. Both the manager and the employee have to go through a sharp learning curve.

There is a second thing I've learned. It is very, very easy to underestimate the level of politics (both necessary and unnecessary) that goes on in a large organization. Prior to joining IBM, all of the company's I worked for were small, no more than a few hundred people at most. In fact, the employer I left to come to IBM had only 5 developers and a smaller number of staff -- less than 10 people altogether. To vastly understate the fact: coming into IBM has been a bit of a culture shock.

All in all, I'd have to say that it's been a bit of a rocky start. I've pissed off more than my fair share of people while trying to balance my overly cut-the-crap-and-get-to-the-solution method of dealing with issues with a new and unfamiliar political environment and working conditions but have scored some significant successes at the same time. It has been, in a very realy sense, a prototypical first-year-on-the-job. The new kid at school trying to figure out the social order of the new playground. It'll be interesting to see how the next year plays out.

If I had any advice to give to remote employees it would be this:

Open as many channels of communication with as many people as possible. Connect with people however you can. Make efficient use of the phone, email, instant messaging.
When you're talking with someone you don't see on a regular basis, make an attempt to connect personally with them. It's not just about getting business done, it's about building a friendship. As a remote employee, you cannot have enough friends on the inside.
Disagreements magnify over email. Be extremely careful of your word choice. Don't assume that everyone on the copy to list will understand the context of a statement or an objection. Keep the copy to list small. Realize that email while email is essential to the remote employees existence, for regular employees it tends to be a distraction so they read it as little as possible. I've found that email is an extremely inefficient tool to accomplish anything. Pick up the phone.

Simon Fell: "I'm on an insane number of mailing lists at this point, but I run most of them through the mail 2 news gateway built into Mailtraq, and read them with Agent. It works much better than any other approach I've tried." My approach is far more efficient I would think. It's called the rapid-delete-and-down-arrow scan. Making the assumption that roughly 98% of the email I get from various mailing lists is a) simple wirthless chatter, b) only of transient relevance, or c) spam, A quick scan of 1) who the sender is and 2) the subject line gives me everything I need to know to decide whether to delete a note without reading it. The relatively important lists that I belong to all have archives so it's a safe bet that if I delete something worth reading, I can go back and recover it. Takes me roughly about 60 seconds to get through the couple hundred or so messages I get every morning and about another 5 to respond to the ones worth responding to.