Tralfaz

Author: geoffand

  • Things that make you go hmmmmm

    My wife has a touch of OCD.  When we are traveling, she will close the hotel door.  Then check to see it is locked. Then invariably, she will go back 5 seconds later to check it again.

    When shopping, after using the remote to lock the doors of the car, she will walk about 40 feet away, and then return to check the doors again (all the doors, not just one).

    Weird, compulsive and annoying.

    But in the online world, she uses weak passwords (about 4 of them) and repeats them everywhere.  Can’t remember anything really difficult, so they are rediculously predictable.

    I bought her 1Password, and have tried to teach her how to use it.  Can’t get it.  She must have 50 saved logins for her online banking site.  Sigh.

  • Disgusting Things

    I exercise by walking or running on public roads.  I do this everywhere I travel, and even at home.  In my “pounding the pavement” I have come across a lot of things, credit cards (returned), drivers licenses, cash (once I found a $50 bill.. It pays to watch the road…) and more than a few dead animals.

    But the one thing that I come across most often is the “spit bottle”.  For those unaware, folks who chew tobacco (or “snuff”) while driving need someplace to “spit” the juices.  Mostly, they use an old Water bottle, or a Gatorade bottle.  Better than just spitting on the road.  

    But, when it becomes full, do these people find a trashcan to deposit this brown ugly mess? No. They toss it out the window.  

    Hence I come across them very often.  

    Please, if you chew, and spit in a bottle, toss it in the trash.  It is unsightly, unsanitary, and doesn’t belong on the roadside.

  • A product management community – just starting

    It has been a poorly kept secret that I have had an alter ego, the snarky, White Russian drinking league bowler known as the PM Dude.  Created to be an outlet for some truly bad management from above, and with a high level of snark, it was cathartic.

    However, as I have in the past 5 months started a great new job with a kick-ass company, the need for the snarky persona has lessened considerably.  What to do with the PM Dude’s blog?

    First, I migrated the most insightful (hey, the Dude did make some good points in the midst of the snark) to my main page: http://tralfaz.org so that you can go back and read the archives.  Look in “The Dude’s Corner”.

    Second, I started playing with some forum software.  Actually, as part of a beta test for my hosting provider, I saw this thing called “Vanilla Forums”.  Dove in and love this framework.  Clean, relatively lightweight, and it seems pretty solid.  Spent about a week testing it, and creating a theme (it is STUPID easy to adjust the look and feel by messing with the CSS file(s)).

    Now I am ready to launch.  Come on over to http://thepmdude.com and register, start some conversations, and in general hang out and talk product management, product marketing, and anything that tickles the fancy.

     

  • What I miss

    About 5 months ago, I left my cushy job as Director of Product Management, for a gig as an ordinary old product marketing manager.  So far, I am exquisitely happy with the change.  Great products, great people, small org (in a huge company) so I can really make a difference.

    But I did give up a few things.  My office.  Where I am at now there are only cubes.  VP’s of production? Cube. Director Marketing? Cube.  VP/GM?  Cube (or, actually on an airplane for how much he travels.  The only negative so far is that I have to use headphones for my music.  I guess I can cope.

    I did give up direct reports.  I no longer manage people.  And I am super happy about that. I can do it, and my employees all are super satisfied with my management. But, truth be told, I am far happier as an individual contributor.  Hope that lasts.

    I miss the MSDN account.  Being able to get your hands on all of Microsoft’s products was pretty bitchen.

    I miss a non-managed laptop.  I had pretty much free reign on my laptop there. Here? Not quite as locked down as at a bank, but certainly more restrictive than anywhere I have ever been (PGP whole disk encryption is the devil). And for the love of god, don’t update Java until they tell you to, or you can no longer access Oracle.  

  • The first Supergroup – Emerson, Lake and Palmer

    This weekend, I completed my collection of ELP albums.  I started listening to them in the 70, and had worn out so many copies of Brain Salad Surgery (with the H. R. Geiger art on the cover), that I was glad to finally be able to buy it as a CD.

    Ah, great times, great tunes, and in awe of Keith Emerson’s keyboard prowess.  From the piano pieces, to the wailings of the Moog.  Just awesome.

  • Losing faith in my fellow geeks

    I have long thought that us “geeks” who spend a large fraction of our existence working with, and trying to improve technology were a cut above.  Both emotionally and mentally.

    This belief has been shattered.  Two threads on Slashdot recently showed me that the geek community is as susceptible and gullible to false claims, and just plain incorrect urban legends.

    First was the discussion around the Stanford study that showed Organic foods are not nutritionally better than conventional agribusiness farmed/raised products.  It was truly astounding how many people attacked the study, and waved their belief that Organic produce is grown without pesticides (not true, usually they use non-synthetic pesticides, that are often much more harmful than the synthetics).  They also weighed in that “organic” farming was more sustainable, and could feed the world’s population.  Both are dubious to completely wrong (reduced crop yeields, leads to more land under cultivation to produce the same food, and the energy expenditure is likewise increased.

    Not to be outdone, a couple days later, there is a thread about the hazards of High Frequency Trading (HFT).  In the middle of this thread a battle about how shorting stocks should be outlawed because it is fraudulent.  Alas, all attempts to dispell this with facts, and the reason why shorting is and should be allowed seemed to fall on deaf ears.

    Truth is, idiocy and ideology exists in all walks of life, geeks being no better at all.  Sigh.  I will not be diving into the next “Global Warming” thread on Slashdot.  That brings out the worst.

  • The GoDaddy outage

    Sigh, tough place to be today.  I manage a few websites, and one that is for a non-profit that I volunteer at.  My personal stuff is all hosted at MediaTemple, and they have been awesome.

    But, I “picked” GoDaddy for the big site.  It was pretty cheap, about 1/4 the cost monthly, and it seemed to have a good amount of capabilities.

    Can’t complain about the setup.  Real easy to get up and running.  I had a couple of support calls early on, but their support did a great job, and were very responsive to my queries.

    Of course, today they have been down hard.  First symptom was someone complaining about the site throwing MySQL errors, but not it is down hard.  For three hours.

    Grrrr.  I hate moving sites, but I suspect that for the greater good, I will move it all under my MEdiaTemple account.

     

  • Special ring of hell : PC manufacturers that do dumb things

    I have recently changed jobs, and as part of my standard kit when I joined was a brand new HP Elitebook 8460p.  Not a bad system, a pretty peppy Intel Core i5, and a Sandy Bridge chipset. 

    It came with 4G of Ram, and our standard Win 7 x64 image.  

    SHould be fine, right?  But from day one, the perfomance has been crappy.  Lots of weirdness, long lags, and losing responsiveness.  I was about to toss it into Support hell to complain, then I noticed an odd fact. 

    This laptop comes with 4G by default. But instead of it being two 2G SODIMMS, it is one 4G SODIMM. Anybody with half a brain knows that to effectively achieve system performance, you need both banks of memory populated.

    I can understand why they do this. Most people would just buy the second 4G SODIMM, and be done with it.  But, to save $20 (I paid $20.90 for a second SODIMM) it seems like a bad decision.  On a laptop that retails for $1500 (it is a business class system with support), this is really annoying.

    Geoff’s new rules:

    • Thou shalt not ship a computer without the SODIMMS to complete an interleaved memory bank.  Just don’t do it.
    • Thou shalt not ship an x64 OS without a minimum of 8G ram.  This really needs to become the standard.  Win 7 is MUCh happier with 8G (or even better 16G).

  • Hardware woes

    As a Product Manager for a scientific instrument, part of our system is a “controller”.  This is nothing more than asimple PC that can run our software and doesn’t have any conflicts with our system.

    Recently, the system we used went end of sales (Dell Precision T3500 workstation). I decided to look at the specs and see if there was anything I could change to meet our performance requirement, and, to possibly save a few bucks.  The Precision line is hardly inexpensive.

    Turns out that we are using Intel Xeon E5 series CPU’s.  A fine CPU, but then we hamstring it with 4G ram, and Win7 x86.  Me thinks we can go to a high end Core i5 (quad core), bump it to 8G ram, and run Win7 x64.  Yes that would work, but it only saves me $45.00.  Sigh, that is a lot of qualification headache for so little money.

    So, I will likely stick with the higher spec, the Xeon processor, up the memory (it is practically free) and drop Win7 x64 on it and move on.

    For the record, these systems are running ~ $1500.  A lot more than their Vostro consumer targeted system.  But there is a reason for it.  We build systems. We demand some stability. That means that the computer we buy next month, 6 months from now, and in a year are the same. You just can’t get that with the consumer grade systems.  There the life cycle are measured in the low single digits of months.

    But, I am in a good state with this instrument.  At least it isn’t like my other product that requires 2 full size PCI slots (not PCI-e, or PCI-x).  Groan.

  • Bad start to Monday

    I know that Windoes 7 can be ultra stable and reliable.  I have used it for mor than 2 years, and it was rock solid.

    Now I know that it can be made to be unreliable, unstable, and glitchy.

    Where I work, there are all kinds of additions. Full disk encryption, Symantec Endpoint Protection, a software lifecycle and inventory system, and some really bizarre policies that have the machine doing multiple command shell scripts at inopportune times.

    All this leads to weirdness in the install (note: I would never try to circumvent these things. I do live with it).

    THree times ( in three months ) the OST file has become corrupted.  Fortunately there is a utility that can fix it.  But it is a pain in the arse to run. I have to shut down several programs that “touch” the OST file, and I have to remember where they all are.  Groan.

    Twice now, it has done a forced full scan for malware and viruses. This happens on the first wednesday of the month.  Two of the three times it has run, there has been a bout a 2.5 hour delay as it barfs on a file (in an email cache in AppData). This leads the full scan to be about 9 hours. Painful, to say the least.

    This morning, I had all these issues come to a head.  An Acrobat update (forced restart), a corrupted OST (forced restart), and an update to my copy of 1Password (a third forced restart).  Here I am, roughly one hour into the day, and I finally can get some work done.  Sigh…