Jumping off point

So I had this great plan to keep kind of a buffer of blog posts, and to post one every weekday. Figuring one day I might write say 7 and that would carry me through a week and a half.

Only blogspot puts your posts up from the original day you started writing one, not the day you published it. So for instance yesterday I posted one I had started on the 4th, and it doesn't show up yesterday, it shows up way way down on the 4th.

What rubbish. So anyway in the future they will appear on the day I post them, because I can copy, paste, post, delete, with the best of them.

So I may be dating myself by calling them cell phones instead of mobile phones.

But pretty soon people will just be calling them phones without the need of an adjetive. Ampd mobile (yes I spelled that correctly) has UNLIMITED nationwide plans starting at $99/month. Meanwhile most carriers cheapest plans start at $30/month.

See, what the carriers have been doing is keeping the lowest priced plan cheap, and every year to stay competitive have given you more minutes for the same money. But now there are no more minutes to give. So that $99/month price will get cheaper every year. As it gets cheaper it puts pressure on the entry plans to get cheaper too.

Then before you know it we have the same situation we have with internet access and long distance telephone. Cheap, unlimited monthly plans.

If you own any stock in a wireless company, today would be a good day to sell it.

Today the house defeated a bill to pass a net neutrality act. My personal take is this is a case where money has won out over common sense.

More coverage here

Many people who are fashion concious look at engineers and the way we dress, and think we are clueless. Don't we know that we will never get anywhere in our careers wearing jeans and a t-shirt?

Have you ever heard the term management hair? A weird thing happens with some engineers at a certain point in their career. They grow tired of constant challenge and decide to go into management. The way you can tell they made this decision is that they start wearing mangement clothes and get a mangement haircut.

But those who have decided to avoid management and stay in engineering have a delimma. They want to have a good haircut to look good, but it can't be too good a haircut or it will undermine their credibility as an engineer. People will think they have management aspirations on their minds, and have abandonded engineering. Same thing with clothes. If a guy gives a technical presentation in a suit and with gelled up hair nobody will think he actually knows what he is talking about. But if he wears cut off shorts, sandals, and a pony tail -- then people will figure he must know what he's talking about, because otherwise nobody would have let the guy near a microphone.

We engineers believe we got where we are on ability and hard work. Any display of carisma or social awareness undermines that belief. Furthermore we judge other engineers by the same standard. Good engineers got where they are by ability and hard work. So any trait other than ability and hard work are seen as phony, a cover up for stupidity and laziness. It's a statement about substance over style.

So next time you see an engineer and think he is dressed cluelessly, reexamine your frame of reference, and realize it is exactly the opposite.

Today 6/6/2006, some say the mark of the beast day, I have been at IBM 5 years. Going around talking to some of the people I've known and worked with for most of those 5 years I have gotten a lot of congratulations and condolances. It is truly a bittersweet moment.

I get to do technical work I find challenging and at times rewarding. I get paid fairly well to do so, and that money supports my family. The pressure, the constantly being under a thousand deadlines, the abrasive power hungry project managers, those things are not rewarding. Those things crush your spirit. Almost as much as watching your plans and dreams slip by while your toil goes to another's profit. I am mortal, and I have enough energy to work for two of my company, my family, and myself. For the last 5 years self has taken a backseat, a choice I've made conciously, but which is hard nonetheless.

Anyway, here are some lines from Joe vs the Volcano script I found appropriate:

I've been here for four and a
half years. The work I did I
probably could've done in
five, six months. That leaves
four years leftover.

Four years. If I had them
now. Like gold in my hand.

This life. Life? What a
joke. This situation This
room.

You look terrible, Mr. Waturi.
You look like a bag of shit
stuffed inna cheap suit. Not
that anyone would look good
under these zombie lights. I
can feel them sucking the
juice outta my eyeballs. Three
hundred bucks a week, that's
the news. For three hundred
bucks a week I've lived in
this sink. This used rubber.

I've gone all day, every
day, not doing, not saying,
not taking the chance for
three hundred bucks a week,

And why, I ask myself, why
have I put up with you? I
can't imagine but I know.
Fear. Yellow freakin' fear.
I've been too chicken shit
afraid to live my life so I
sold it to you for three
hundred freakin' dollars a
week! You're lucky I don't
kill you! You're lucky I don't
rip your freakin' throat out!
But I'm not going to and maybe
you're not so lucky at that.
'Cause I'm gonna leave you
here, Mister Wa-a-Waturi, and
what could be worse than that?

There has been a lot of talk on the web about fixing the patent system for software. And I think there is work to be done there. But a lot of the complaints people have could be fixed without changing anything.

Timliness. If you submit a patent now it takes a couple years to show up as published, and another couple years to be granted. Meanwhile the date it is valid to goes back to the date it was filed. Making it worse people can intentionally cause delays that keep a patent valid but unpublished for a lot longer. If we make this process reasonably fast at least we will be able to look at the patents before we infringe them.

Prior art. Slashdot mentions this over and over and over for some of the scarier patents out there, and their analysis it rubbish. But the fact remains that there is a whole lot of prior art that anybody in the field would be aware of that gets totally overlooked in granting many patents.

Non-Obviousness. It's really like this test isn't applied anymore to patent applications. Part of the reason is that with hindsight brilliant ideas often seem obvious. But if a person in the field says, "that's how I would have solved that, and here's why any college freshman would have solved it the same way" and the you give the problem to some college freshman and they indeed do solve it the same way, well throw that patent out.

How you solve all three of these is simply to pay your patent clerks more, so you get better ones, and to hire many more of them. Heck, activly recruit. Be at the college job fairs. If we had an adaquate number of well trained patent clerks the system would be 90% fixed.

What many people don't realize is that the line between Mexico and the US is not a distinct one. You can cross the "border" without too much trouble. Then there is a second 20 mile station that you really are supposed to have some paperwork to be able to cross. But US companies do business South of the border, and San Antonio is majority hispanic. So where does the US end and Mexico begin?

In Mexico there is a custom that you throw your used toilet paper in a wastebasket by the toilet. This wastebasket has no plastic bag, so the whole thing is entirely unsanitary. But throughout Mexico nobody flushes toilet paper and there is massive amout of human feces stuck to paper that has to be handled. This is probably caused by terrible plumbing and people often using regular paper that used to have news printed on it.

I've noticed that even back in the US side of Laredo at a Jack and the Box they have to have a trash can by the toilet. The plumbing is up to US commercial code, and the Jack N the Box provides the toilet paper. The trash can is full of paper that should have been flushed. But I've been to another establishment who didn't put a trashcan by the toilet and there is a pile of used toilet paper on the floor where the trash can would have been.

So, I consider that we have a trash can border. If you are in a place that either has a trash can by the toilet full of used toilet paper, or has used toilet paper in a pile on the floor without a trashcan, then you are in Mexico.