Listening Skills

Microsoft needs to work on their listening skills. Although there have been some cracks in the story, Microsoft plans to discontinue selling Windows XP on 30 June 2008 and this is making many customers upset. According to the Save XP petition, 184,294 people as of 9am PT on April 28 have asked that Microsoft continue to sell it.

That seems like a lot of people to actually care enough to save a product to rethink things. I'm not a Vista hater, but I really don't see much benefit to it right now. I would have to manage the upgrade of 30 other people to a new OS, which doesn't sound like a lot of fun. So, I'll put it off as long as I can.

A Whole New Mind

I just finished reading A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink, a book about the emergence of the creative economy. In it, Mr. Pink describes the reasons that more and more work in the USA will be creative in nature due to "Abundance, Asia and Automation" and covers key skill areas of creative work.

Mr. Pink asserts that abundance drives us towards higher creativity because our basic needs are met and we crave a higher level on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Asia drives it by undercutting the market for non-creative labor in the West and driving down wages. Lastly, automation has a similar effect on tasks that can be routinized. He doesn't just limit this migration to manufacturing, but extends it to what we consider knowledge work today (e.g. lawyers, accountants, engineers).

Abundance is quite prevalent in our society, but this is not a new phenomenon. Although there are pockets of extreme poverty, the past three generations in the USA have experienced a period of abundance never before seen in the world. Most of the effects of this seem to be experienced in the form of more consumption and a move towards superior goods (e.g. pâté instead of potatoes). The move up Maslow's heirarchy has already happened for the most part and, as a society, we haven't worried about mere survival in decades.

Asia certainly changes the game. However, I believe he is falling victim to linear thinking here. Wages in Asia are rising very quickly and in a few years, it might not make that much sense to put a call center there. We may be close to a high water mark in the offshoring of knowledge work jobs. At a minimum, the easy stuff has already moved and changes in the composition of labor might be slower from here on out. I agree with his point that offshoring introduces many new skill requirements for our workforce, and they do have a creative component, but many of the skills required are technical in nature (e.g. project management, systems engineering, etc.)

Automation definitely contributes to changes in the workforce. Secretaries are now resevered for the top echelons and they are probably more of a status symbol and gatekeeper than anthing else at this point. As computing and communications get cheaper and cheaper, there will continue to be changes where automation takes over from people. This also has its limits, but certainly contributes to changes in the work we do.

Overall, I agree with Mr. Pink's assessment that creative work is more important now than it used to be and current knowledge work jobs have a stronger creative component, but he might overstate the case a bit. To really be creative in some fields, you have to understand the "why" so you can ask the creative "why not" questions sensibly. For example, if you don't know how the internal combustion engine works, it is hard to ask a "why not" question to improve fuel economy for that technology - you just don't have enough background knowledge to be creative in that area. To get to that point might take years of training and work as an engineer doing routine reivsions and incremental design changes.

There are some other minor points in the opening discussion where I would have liked to see a bit fuller treatment (e.g. the effect of a creative economy on income distribution, the importance of cultural impacts on the growth of the creative economy, etc.) However, those are a bit besides the point.

In any event, the book gets much stronger after the initial section. After describing why he believes that R-brained (e.g. creative) work will replace L-brained (e.g. knowledge) work in our society, he goes on to list six areas that are key to being successful at creative work: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play and Meaning. This is where the book really shines and he tells interesting tales about each of these facets and provides good examples and descriptions for each. He also includes a portfolio section at the end of each section to give some resources on how to work on each of those areas.

I'd read a review of this book a few years back and thought it sounded interesting, but my wife mentioned it a couple of weeks ago while relating a conversation she had with a local artist, which piqued my interest again. There are a few areas where I disagree with the opening chapters, but the sections describing the various areas of creative work are excellent. Overall, it is worth the time (247 pages) and certainly made me think about what I do and how I can get better at it.

If I Can Make It There

Sometimes persistence pays off. I've entered the lottery for the NYC Marathon for the past three years (2005, 2006 and 2007) and not gotten in. For this race, the fourth time is a charm and they let you in automatically. So, I'm in.

I'm a little bit taken aback by the $166 race entry fee, but that is probably going to be a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of flights. A quick check today had flights from our local airport at $455. Ouch.

Darth Vader Has Some Competition

This is Sir Topham Hatt armed with a Star Wars blaster and flanked by two Stormtroopers ready to take over the universe. Jack is starting to move on from Thomas and Friends, but they still show up occassionally (and heavily armed).

Spring Day

Everything is very green right now and getting more so with the nice, soft rain we have falling now. Here we are waiting for the school bus and trying to stay dry.

I try to take the dog for a walk after the bus comes, at lunch and then after dinner. I usually manage to get at least one walk a day in. She likes it and so do I. Some people don't seem to walk their dogs very often. The dogs just hang out in the yard. I don't think that is abusive or unkind to the dogs, but it is a missed opportunity.

For me, walking the dog is a great way to get out and see what is going on. This time of year, it is especially nice because you can see all of the changes - leaves and flowers coming out, birds coming back, grass growing green and lush. Even in the winter, it is interesting to see the sky and clouds pass overhead and feel the cold. With a dog, you stop now and again and it gives you a chance to really look around. It is quite a nice little break.

Smooth Sailing

I flew up to LaGuardia from Greensboro for a quick Thursday thru Saturday trip and the flights both ways were early. Flying generally sucks, but sometimes, it goes well and when it does, it is a very efficient way to travel.

The picture here is of one of the 4 Airbus A319s that used to belong to Airbus and are currently mothballed at Greensboro. They sure looked a lot nicer than the beat up Canadair CRJ that Delta flew us on.

Big Screen

We still haven't upgraded our TVs from the old CRT models, but I recently purchased a nice wide screen LCD monitor for the mancave my workspace. I've been mostly working at home and wanted something a bit bigger and brighter than my laptop display.

Having a big and bright monitor at the right height does make a big difference in my level of eye fatigue and neck strain. Having 1,764,000 pixels (1680 x 1050) allows me to have a ton of windows open at once. Very nice.

Plus, I can't believe how inexpensive monitors are. I purchased my Acer AL2016W for $189 with free shipping from NewEgg. That is about two full tanks of gas in the Silver Surfer.

Will Think For Food

My daughter showed me an interesting web site this weekedn: FreeRice. The idea is that they give rice to the UN World Food Program for every vocabulary word you identify correctly. The rice is paid for by the banner ad sponsors on the bottom of the page. It's a nice win-win: you get to learn some vocabulary words and the hungry get some food. Spend some time with it today.

Lacrosse Marathon

Our girl's lacrosse team had a game against Salem yesterday. It turned out to be a three hour lacrosse marathon. Because we have a lot of girls on our team and wanted to give them all a chance to play, we basically ended up playing three games back to back.

The first featured our first team of experienced players against Salem's team. We won that one by about 5 goals or so. Our first team pretty much all have a year or more of experience under their belts and everyone can throw, catch and scoop. They played very well on both sides of the ball and our goalie made some nice stops.

The second game was an intrasquad game where we mixed our team up and played them on a full field with an umpire (who did a fantastic job calling all of the games, by the way). I was impressed with the play of a lot of our younger and inexperienced players and they seemed to have a lot of fun. Salem helped us out in this by letting their goalie play for one of our sides where she did a nice job. I didn't keep a tally of this match, but does it really matter who won?

Lastly, we played a mixed team against Salem. They won that one by a couple of goals. They have a couple of players who were basically unstoppable except by our best defenders. Our goalie had to leave before this one and we had a girl volunteer to put on the pads and step in there (which is a brave thing to do). It was great to give everyone a chance to play in this one and I think some of the players actually improved over the course of the game.

It was a long day and we all got a little bit sunburned (#1 son is a pale blondie and has a nice red neck today), but it was loads of fun. A lot of parents thank me for coaching and I appreciate their thanks, but I have a great time doing it. I'm glad to have such a fun group of coaches, parents and players because it makes the time commitment absolutely worthwhile.

In The Clouds

When I was younger, I used to stay up until all hours of the night trying to figure out some obscure bit of C++ or COM. I find challenges like that fun. However, that doesn't happen very often any more.

But, I was up until 2AM last night with Amazon S3. The concept of S3 is simple: it is computer storage on the Internet. It is priced fairly low ($0.15 USD per GB) and has a lot of obvious applications as remote, reliable storage. I wanted to see how hard it would be to use S3 as a file share (turns out, not too hard).

It isn't just S3, but the whole concept of cloud computing that has me jazzed. As someone who manages systems for a small company and consults for larger ones, I know how much trouble it is to keep them going. I would love to turn all of the low value nuts-and-bolts stuff (e.g. backups, OS upgrades, etc.) over to someone else and just get on with the fun and challenging stuff.

This isn't a new concept. Sun has been saying "The Network Is The Computer" for a long time, but now it is becoming a reality. It isn't quite there yet, but it is coming fast and it will change my job dramatically.

Oh, Behave

If I'm going to rip TSA for their rediculous faux security, I should give them props when they do things that make some sense. This move to add more widespread behavior screening makes sense. There are still gaping holes in the system, but this is a step in the right direction. Frisking grandma makes no sense; stopping the 22-year old well dressed man who looks very nervous does.

Didn't Know Ya

I saw today that start-up airline Skybus is shutting down. They had a lot of flights out of Greensboro and I was thinking about trying them on a flight up to Connecticut later this month. The fact that the CEO quit to pursue a book authoring carreer shows how profitable the airline business is.

It's Official

After passing my test, I'm a certified girls lacrosse coach now. Since I'm attempting to coach my daughter's team, I figured I should learn something about the sport. I know the men's game well, but the girls follow much different rules.

The certification procedure was helpful to me in understanding at least the basics. I now know to call the attackman closest to the goal the "first home" and what the significance of the 8m and 12m arcs are. There are still a lot of things I don't understand, but this is a good start. At least, I'll be a lot better at faking it.