Things that were not immediately obvious to me

As a consequence of my little trip to Colombia, certain corners of the Internet Hive Mind are convinced that I’m a native Spanish speaker. While it’s more than a little creepy that we’re watched closely enough for such a mistake to be made, it has some amusing consequences. For instance, here’s an example of the sort of ad I see from time to time.

My Spanish is pretty dreadful, but even so, I got the gist of this quickly enough. Loosely translated, it reads:

Apply for benefits online, when you want.
EDD online.  Working for you.

EDD is California’s “Employment Development Department”, and, in true Orwellian fashion, is primarily concerned with people who are not working. (Front and center on its website are links to file claims for Unemployment, Disability Insurance, and Paid Family Leave.)

In a time of fiscal crisis, I must ask: Is it absolutely necessary to advertise the welfare state?

For some reason, as I watch the “debt ceiling” debate unfold, I find that the voice of Katy Jurado echos in my mind. From “High Noon“:

Kane will be a dead man in half an hour, and nobody’s going do anything about it — and when he dies, this town dies too. I can feel it. I am all alone in the world. I have to make a living. So I’m going someplace else. That’s all.

I recently was issued, and resolved, a “fix-it ticket” (equipment violation) for my car. I thought it might be worthwhile to share some of the things I discovered along the way. This is pretty CA-specific, of course.

Continue reading →

One of the darkly amusing features of the modern American bureaucracy is the way that it uselessly and reflexively reacts to freak occurrences. I saw my favorite example of this just after 9/11: Someone inside the commercial real-estate company that owned/managed the building where I worked decided to distribute a “What To Do In The Event Of An Emergency” poster/pamphlet/flyer thing. There were useless but vaguely sensible pages for what you’d expect: fires, earthquakes, etc. Then there was a page for “What To Do If An Airplane Hits The Building”.

Now, this is stupid on two levels. First of all, that never happens (for all practical purposes), so it’s a waste of time to plan for it. Second of all, if a plane were to hit that building, here’s a comprehensive list of things for the inhabitants to do: Die. It was a little 5-story steel-frame building directly under the (foul-weather) approach path to SJC; if a 737 slammed into it, that would’ve been it for anyone inside.

San Bruno

But, ok, whatever. This sort of reflexive barn-door closing is just what bureaucracies do. Sometimes, though, the behavior moves from the merely silly to the embarrassingly contradictory. Consider the San Bruno pipeline explosion.

The short version is that in September 2010 a natural gas pipeline blew up in San Bruno, CA, killing 8 people and destroying about 40 houses. It caused an 8-alarm fire and left a 40-foot crater in the street. As a result, any rumor of natural gas odor now causes near-panic around here; there are radio announcements whenever pipeline work is being done, and my building was evacuated a few weeks ago because someone claimed to have smelt something.

Pipelines

As a result of the aforesaid bureaucro-panic, I got a letter from PG&E last week. (Here’s a copy of the letter.) Note that this letter includes pointers to two very interesting websites:

• http://www.pge.com/pipelinelocations/
• http://www.npms.phmsa.dot.gov/PublicViewer/

These sites conveniently map out major pieces of our natural gas infrastructure; exactly the sort of thing you’d like to know if you were a terrorist looking for something to sabotage.

Now, is such terrorism a reasonable concern? Apparently not. But the modern bureaucracy specializes in unreasonable concerns, and the reason I started this piece with 9/11 was to show how those unreasonable concerns shift over time — and that we can therefore conclude that no one really takes them seriously, and that bureaucrats simply don’t want to be seen to be insouciant about a high-profile “danger” that could threaten their jobs if it were to materialize.

Costs

If there’s a larger point to all this, it’s simply that there are an endless number of low-probability events that can ruin your day, and that you can spend an infinite amount of effort attempting to forestall them all. A wise man would refrain from doing so. Unfortunately, too much of our lives is now shaped by sinecure-protecting bureaucrats, who are all-too-eager to be seen to do all that is possible in response to one-off mishaps. Over time, the results of their labors can accumulate into an impassible thicket of red tape. The overweening size and insupportable cost of the US Government might not be unrelated to this phenomenon.

life (noun)

1: A series of minor annoyances separating major problems that lead to the crisis that kills you.

I spent a lot of time interviewing in May, and as a result I saw the inside of a lot of companies. Specifically, I saw what sorts of computers the programmers had on their desks.

Macs. Macs, Macs, Macs. Sure, there was the occasional suit with a Windows laptop, and the occasional sad Linux holdout, but mostly it was those lovely, overpriced hunks of aluminum.

I think the explanation for this is pretty simple:

• Mac OS X is BSD UNIX (well, close enough, anyway) under the skin, offering programmers all the power and POSIX-compliance of that platform. And none of the Planet Microsoft one-off-ness.
• Apple’s market share is big enough that a decent software ecosystem exists for the Mac. And big enough that IT dept’s are willing to learn to support their stuff.
• Mac OS X offers a really nice desktop. Nicer than Gnome or KDE or whatever else you’re going to propose. Admit it. Apple gear is also physically beautiful.
• Amortized over years, the AAPL price premium isn’t so bad. The premium is even less of a problem for the developer if corporate purchasing is paying for it, and any half-way rational business will be happy to pay a few hundred bucks extra to keep those cost centers known as programmers typing a little longer each day.

So: More developer-friendly than Windows, more supportable than Linux, prettier than either, and not that expensive in practice. It’s not hard to see why developers are flocking to it.

I think that this small cadre of influential users is a real hidden strength of Apple’s. Developers produce the software that ultimately differentiates computers (or other devices) in the eyes of consumers. If you’re the little fish, you have to worry about them ignoring you. If, on the other hand, you can get them to like, use, and work on your platform:

• Lots of cool little ideas will be born there, and many will tend to stick.
• Developers will want to build stuff for your platform, so that they can use it.

I find that some new projects are monopolizing my time, and, as a result, this blog cannot receive the attention it is due. I’m therefore putting it on pseudo-hiatus, in which state it will be updated “when I feel like it”. I encourage you to subscribe to the RSS feed, by which such updates as there are will make their way to you. Thanks for reading.

Here’s a little content for you:

Little Things

Life’s little pleasures and satisfactions should not be overlooked. Today I was stuck in a small traffic jam on the freeway: one of those bizarre situations in which your lane is stopped, but the others are moving at 20-25 MPH. The sun was out, and the top was down, so it wasn’t particularly comfortable to sit stopped on the highway.

Fortunately, I had come to a stop directly under an overpass, and passed the time in cool shadow. That was sort of nice.

“Number Eighty-Six has a confession, that Number Two is unmutual!”

(From “A Change of Mind“.)