Well, quite literally, in another 6 hours movers are coming to take me from Sunnyvale ( back ) to Austin ( I'm a UT grad ).
The SV may have depth, it may have great weather but here's a few quick points:
- No women
- See above
- No culture. Quick: Name the mayor of SJ. OK, you might because there's an election on this year, and a bit of kerfuffle about his corruptability, but you probably couldn't have done so a year ago. San Jose life is completely disposable
- The above helps people be very "deep" and work their asses off 24/7. Because god knows a tastelss chunk of gray meat from the Faultline doesn't offer much competition
- My girlfriend (imported from Southern CA) gets marriage proposals, phone numbers, and a horde of desperate raves every time she goes to the Arques Fry's. It's sad. Really sad. Humans aren't meant to do this.
- The apartments suck. I'm living at 101 and lawrence in the nicest place in S'vale, but it's 1700 for a two bedroom (fat chance paying that on a startup salary) and I've spent the preceeding 6 years living in overpriced pre-war 70's vintage linoleum rattraps (no, no literal rats)
Graham asks if SV could be repeated, but *should* it? After 6 years, I say no, thank God. Getting wealthy is great, but financial wealth is only one of the facets in the jewel of human experience.
Now, SF is all groovy and stuff, but it's 35 miles up the road and too far to drink in and drive home from (not that you should ever drink and drive).
SF also has decided "scenes" where the payoff is being a resident in the scene. If you live in S. Mission you tend to go out there, hav econnections there. If you live in the Marina (not a geek) you tend to stay there. By commuting the 1 hour in russian roulette traffic you come home exhausted and (if you're in a startup anyway) you're that anyway, so forget going out. All you've done is make yourself exhausted for dates / going out / etc.
So, really, you might as well live in Mountain View or PA.
This place is magical, and America needs the myth of its existence, but I'm glad to leave.
Besides: No Chick-Fil-A and the Mexican food in Austin is better (pace fiesta del mar).
I find it hard to believe that no/. ers or BoingBoingers mentioned the similarity between this polymer and Pynchon's legendary Imipolex-G - the erotic (as clothing and/or weaponry) polymerproduced in Gravity's Rainbow.
In Mountain View, CA's Dana Street Roasting Company the proprieters have the policy of free WiFi... as long as your battery can support you. This hits a good balance between letting you read Boingboing with your latte -- and getting your seat uncovered so they can stay profitable.
For a business to stay afloat they need to make a certain amount/per seat/per hour. If you order a water and sit for 10 hours, you're hurting their equation.
Back in the New Economy, people used to come and sit at the cafe for hours on end and basically turn the limited number of seats into a mobile office. Very negative proposition.
Nevertheless, customers should be able to work / chat on IM / etc. while enjoying the fine coffee-based beverages. Attracts more customers, attractive proposition.
If every customer were to adhere to a drink / 90 minutes then sitting there all day would be fine. Ultimately it's a lot like the open source community, if you respect the resources in "the commons" and respect the ownership / need to buy food of those involved, everyone can exist in harmony.
I've been trying to become King Cocoa for about a year now with various fits and starts. I've had a really hard time with it.
I don't think that my difficulty is unique or un-understandable either. Obj-C requires a fundamentally different conception of how to program.
I know a little C, a litttle java, and a lot of perl. In each of these languages within the first 5 pages of any of those books you're generally feeling good about things like print(), ++, and x= y+1. You see, you have a hold of some critical fundamentals, and you're ready to rock!
You go through the entirety of Davidson's (and don't get me wrong, i have emailed him personally and said i've learned a lot from his book) book and well, to be honest, I feel as though I have created a bunch of programs witchout having understood the fundamental theory of programming in Obj-C.
It's like recording in a log book a thousand events of a ball falling from the tower of Pisa -- you still ain't uncovered Gravitation to make all those incidents coherent (aristotelianism vs. platonic science, for those philo. of science fans at home).
I just started Garfinkel's book to see if it can help me get to that meta core -- but so far, no luck.
My company has the ORA bookshelf and v.1 of this book -- and i've found a few answers on it...
But i can't help feeling that all the Obj-C books are falling short of the mark --- they all seem to leave me fuzzy on how to actually do something.
This is further exacerbated by the fact that so much of Obj-C's core functions are things that you simply have to memorize (or better yet, have easy access to the reference docs). In Perl, it's just Do it (tm) - in Obj-C it's 'look up which methods you need to override and get the data there and we'll do it for you' -- it's well, frustrating, to someone who's used to getting actual work done quickly in code.
all that said, i like writing in Cocoa (mostly b/c i want Mac to do well) but the learning curve seems pretty whacked.
It's worth doing, but don't count on being able to implement Your Great Idea for OSX quickly.
That said, maybe I'm insuff. CompSci oriented....but i don't think it should be this hard -- heck xcode and IB were supposed to make development easier.
I mean, how many more sit-coms can we mine for movie concepts. I'm not trying to go Filthy Critic here, but what a bunch of lazy-ass grassfsckers.
The sit-coms are a particular beef o' mine. These things are so flimsy they can barely carry 28 minutes of story let alone 90 minutes.
It's like the aforementioned grassfsckers know this so they go all PoMo and "Charlie's Angel's" and mock the fact that they know they have to camp it up to make their shaky premise of a story carry.
The first line from the linked page (that does not seem to load in non glacial units of time measure) at miamiherald.com is that the article was picked up on the wire from a San Jose Mercury (arguably the best tech-sensitive newspaper around) story?
It's not like the Merc isn't used to getting a bazillion referred hits from/.
If you look at the IP telephone as a phone, your comments are correct, Cisco's phones may not be as feature.robust as those things that mature PBX products provide.
on the other hand... if you see an IP Phone as a platform for achieving certain network-based tasks or for streamlining the "phone experience" the IP phone ceases to be a phone and becomes something else that uses the now-intuitive 'phone interface' intuition.
Can a PBX help you navigate a phone tree (for example)? Well, with those soft-buttons on the Cisco IP Phones one can prenavigate a phone tree hierarchy. That beats the hell out of the wrangling "push one, push two" irritation (even if the tree designers follow the current "best practices" on depth and width of tree options).
It's the ability to provide this vision of a streamlined and more productive experience that gets the CEO / CIO / CTO handshake deal not the conversations of "true operator console" or "dense wave multiplexing".
I believe that Cisco as a leader in this technology is trying to sell the 'vision' to the world, i.e. it is teaching the world to demand this kind of experienc - because no one has had this experience to date!
Your two points about the security of the Call Manager server (point 1) and security integration are indeed areas that all vendors need to improve on, but you rightly identify IPT as needing a lot of advancement in this area.
I wonder how IBM's push of this is going to affect their sametime Intsant Messenger for Lotus Notes.
I won't argue that Jabber clients, by virtue of being OSS and infinitely customizable, offer a greater feature set than the SameTime client (the java version of which barely runs on *IX).
My question is, is this IBM conceding that SameTime sucks (likely) and that they are looking for their Open Source embracing design theory to force the demise of SameTime as an IM client?
(That said, I think that ST may be the best enterprise collaboration untility still -- a thouand VNC streams just don't cut it -- unless someone knows something better?).
Man, I've been waiting for screen to get adapted to Solaris for years.
I got used to it during my shell-term AT&T Unix(tm) days. It made true multilple-session work possible. I was absolutely astounded as my PPP session was running under Windows 3.1.
It was amazing to have this true multitasking capability back in 1992 -- and you didn't have to use a mouse!
Oftentimes the multitude of J. Randa are harvested as contractors with limited background checks, no measurements of skill etc.
The only way the corporation can be sure that they don't screw stuff up too badly is to confine their discourse within these scripts. So while you may be talking to a kernel hacker who has fallen on hard times and had to take the tech support job, his response is bound to "Click on the start button..." as he punches in new VM code to the emacs window
I fully agree with you. In every tech support job I have ever worked, people fell into these categories:
ambitious people with vision
pulling a check clockwatchers
morons who non-technical management hired with the learning capacity of anesthetized anchovies
Those that fell into the former category worked hard to get out of the repetitive work of support. They stuided and built the bridges to get out. Why? Because being a support person simply does not pay enough. If corporate america thought it important to keep their customers in contact with proficient people they would do things to help make sure they kept the best in those jobs!
Some Advice
Catapulting youself from Tech Support upwards is only possible within a corporate IT department.
If you are at a Big Ass Call center (IBM owns many in Colorado) and you don't want to be a sell-out service lever manager corporate dicksnot, your best strategy is to get into the highest level of technical support and then join another corporation.
At Big Ass Call Centers they focus on metrics and business jack-off garbage. In a corporate IT environment (generally) they care about quality solutions.
The fact of the matter is that driving, especially in most parts of the US is necessary to be a productive member of society.
The notion of privilege only applies when there are real alternatives (the basis for Kantian morality). When the non-auto infrastructure is so poor that a car is a necessity, then privilege does not enter the discussion.
When this is the case, the argument that due to this "privilege" we have the right to monitor you fails.
Case in point, I grew up in Houston, Texas. There are fewer pedestrian friendly places in the world. The mass availability of cheap land propelled the term sprawl to new heights. As a result, to get anywhere you needed.
Even in the slightly more pedestrian focused Austin, those without automobiles suffer and greatly.
The fact of the matter is that the US cities have done a horrible job of building pedestrian infrastructure.
Even now in "progressive" California, the bike lanes are narrow and abused, sidewalks lack efficient direction etc. The best city for non-auto-possessor is SF (of course) but it still isn't near the efficiency level of cities like Vienna or anywhere in The Netherlands.
The director would have been Leni Riefenstahl link.
While one can ask whether or not art can be made when done under the aegis of Naziism, this film cannot be denied as a landmark in the art form. Riefenstahl's work in "Triumph of the Will" rivals Welles' achievement in Citizen Kane.
She was one of the first to use the camera as a 2nd person observer of the action.
In Business school we always emphasized how the customer experinece is paramount in driving any endeavour. In the screwed up business model @home has purveyed, they grew too fast and forgot how to serve the customers.
Here in sunnyvale, my bandwidth is comprable to a 56k modem! Seriously. After I sent them traceroutes to al the DNS servers, all the gateways, and several big sites they still insisted that i unplug my linux box and run their little whack=ass tool...
Guess what the 3 tabs on that lame app were PING, NSLOOKUP and TRACEROUTE. Un frigging believeable.
Now did this, so they roll a truck out here and he says he can't see a problem. After 3 weeks of escalation guess what they're up to on this thursday?
SEnding another truck! That's right after WEEKS of documentation of problems I'm about to get a second guy out here telling me that he can't find something wrong.
ONly thing worse is Pac Bell.
In any case, their lack of customer service merely presaged their downfall.
Slashdot Mirror
A shiny new MacBook Pro.
When i read this essay I was reminded that "silicon valley" for PG begins at 280 and sand hill and ends at Il fornaio.
And in that expanse, yes the SV is pretty sweet, all the sweeter if you're already a millionaire.
Well, quite literally, in another 6 hours movers are coming to take me from Sunnyvale ( back ) to Austin ( I'm a UT grad ).
The SV may have depth, it may have great weather but here's a few quick points:
- No women
- See above
- No culture. Quick: Name the mayor of SJ. OK, you might because there's an election on this year, and a bit of kerfuffle about his corruptability, but you probably couldn't have done so a year ago. San Jose life is completely disposable
- The above helps people be very "deep" and work their asses off 24/7. Because god knows a tastelss chunk of gray meat from the Faultline doesn't offer much competition
- My girlfriend (imported from Southern CA) gets marriage proposals, phone numbers, and a horde of desperate raves every time she goes to the Arques Fry's. It's sad. Really sad. Humans aren't meant to do this.
- The apartments suck. I'm living at 101 and lawrence in the nicest place in S'vale, but it's 1700 for a two bedroom (fat chance paying that on a startup salary) and I've spent the preceeding 6 years living in overpriced pre-war 70's vintage linoleum rattraps (no, no literal rats)
Graham asks if SV could be repeated, but *should* it? After 6 years, I say no, thank God. Getting wealthy is great, but financial wealth is only one of the facets in the jewel of human experience.
Now, SF is all groovy and stuff, but it's 35 miles up the road and too far to drink in and drive home from (not that you should ever drink and drive).
SF also has decided "scenes" where the payoff is being a resident in the scene. If you live in S. Mission you tend to go out there, hav econnections there. If you live in the Marina (not a geek) you tend to stay there. By commuting the 1 hour in russian roulette traffic you come home exhausted and (if you're in a startup anyway) you're that anyway, so forget going out. All you've done is make yourself exhausted for dates / going out / etc.
So, really, you might as well live in Mountain View or PA.
This place is magical, and America needs the myth of its existence, but I'm glad to leave.
Besides: No Chick-Fil-A and the Mexican food in Austin is better (pace fiesta del mar).
I find it hard to believe that no /. ers or BoingBoingers mentioned the similarity between this polymer and Pynchon's legendary Imipolex-G - the erotic (as clothing and/or weaponry) polymerproduced in Gravity's Rainbow.
In Mountain View, CA's Dana Street Roasting Company the proprieters have the policy of free WiFi ... as long as your battery can support you. This hits a good balance between letting you read Boingboing with your latte -- and getting your seat uncovered so they can stay profitable.
For a business to stay afloat they need to make a certain amount/per seat/per hour. If you order a water and sit for 10 hours, you're hurting their equation.
Back in the New Economy, people used to come and sit at the cafe for hours on end and basically turn the limited number of seats into a mobile office. Very negative proposition.
Nevertheless, customers should be able to work / chat on IM / etc. while enjoying the fine coffee-based beverages. Attracts more customers, attractive proposition.
If every customer were to adhere to a drink / 90 minutes then sitting there all day would be fine. Ultimately it's a lot like the open source community, if you respect the resources in "the commons" and respect the ownership / need to buy food of those involved, everyone can exist in harmony.
Hippie-tastically-yours
steven
[Speaking for Mr. Newmark in Absentia]
You miss the point that people own businesses for a variety of reasons: amusement, distraction, get fabulously wealthy...
Mr. Newmark owns this business because he believes that the highly district-ized culture of the city, and the rest of the US, should be less so.
He started the site to give himself something to do after being successful at IBM - he's following his bliss, not following his cash trail.
Steven
Great post! Thanks!
Black,
I've been trying to become King Cocoa for about a year now with various fits and starts. I've had a really hard time with it.
I don't think that my difficulty is unique or un-understandable either. Obj-C requires a fundamentally different conception of how to program.
I know a little C, a litttle java, and a lot of perl. In each of these languages within the first 5 pages of any of those books you're generally feeling good about things like print(), ++, and x= y+1. You see, you have a hold of some critical fundamentals, and you're ready to rock!
You go through the entirety of Davidson's (and don't get me wrong, i have emailed him personally and said i've learned a lot from his book) book and well, to be honest, I feel as though I have created a bunch of programs witchout having understood the fundamental theory of programming in Obj-C.
It's like recording in a log book a thousand events of a ball falling from the tower of Pisa -- you still ain't uncovered Gravitation to make all those incidents coherent (aristotelianism vs. platonic science, for those philo. of science fans at home).
I just started Garfinkel's book to see if it can help me get to that meta core -- but so far, no luck.
My company has the ORA bookshelf and v.1 of this book -- and i've found a few answers on it...
But i can't help feeling that all the Obj-C books are falling short of the mark --- they all seem to leave me fuzzy on how to actually do something.
This is further exacerbated by the fact that so much of Obj-C's core functions are things that you simply have to memorize (or better yet, have easy access to the reference docs). In Perl, it's just Do it (tm) - in Obj-C it's 'look up which methods you need to override and get the data there and we'll do it for you' -- it's well, frustrating, to someone who's used to getting actual work done quickly in code.
all that said, i like writing in Cocoa (mostly b/c i want Mac to do well) but the learning curve seems pretty whacked.
It's worth doing, but don't count on being able to implement Your Great Idea for OSX quickly.
That said, maybe I'm insuff. CompSci oriented....but i don't think it should be this hard -- heck xcode and IB were supposed to make development easier.
*ahem* been done
Nothing new under the sun as Herodotus said..
I mean, how many more sit-coms can we mine for movie concepts. I'm not trying to go Filthy Critic here, but what a bunch of lazy-ass grassfsckers.
The sit-coms are a particular beef o' mine. These things are so flimsy they can barely carry 28 minutes of story let alone 90 minutes.
It's like the aforementioned grassfsckers know this so they go all PoMo and "Charlie's Angel's" and mock the fact that they know they have to camp it up to make their shaky premise of a story carry.
What poverty.
The first line from the linked page (that does not seem to load in non glacial units of time measure) at miamiherald.com is that the article was picked up on the wire from a San Jose Mercury (arguably the best tech-sensitive newspaper around) story?
/.
It's not like the Merc isn't used to getting a bazillion referred hits from
played from 5pm to 11pm
For most video games I play this would be from 5pm to 11pm the next day.
( already fearing the damage the next GTA will do to my social life )
If you look at the IP telephone as a phone, your comments are correct, Cisco's phones may not be as feature.robust as those things that mature PBX products provide.
on the other hand... if you see an IP Phone as a platform for achieving certain network-based tasks or for streamlining the "phone experience" the IP phone ceases to be a phone and becomes something else that uses the now-intuitive 'phone interface' intuition.
Can a PBX help you navigate a phone tree (for example)? Well, with those soft-buttons on the Cisco IP Phones one can prenavigate a phone tree hierarchy. That beats the hell out of the wrangling "push one, push two" irritation (even if the tree designers follow the current "best practices" on depth and width of tree options).
It's the ability to provide this vision of a streamlined and more productive experience that gets the CEO / CIO / CTO handshake deal not the conversations of "true operator console" or "dense wave multiplexing".
I believe that Cisco as a leader in this technology is trying to sell the 'vision' to the world, i.e. it is teaching the world to demand this kind of experienc - because no one has had this experience to date!
Your two points about the security of the Call Manager server (point 1) and security integration are indeed areas that all vendors need to improve on, but you rightly identify IPT as needing a lot of advancement in this area.
Good point -- it's odd that IBM sees it more profitable in the long term to cannibalize lotus.
I wonder how IBM's push of this is going to affect their sametime Intsant Messenger for Lotus Notes.
I won't argue that Jabber clients, by virtue of being OSS and infinitely customizable, offer a greater feature set than the SameTime client (the java version of which barely runs on *IX).
My question is, is this IBM conceding that SameTime sucks (likely) and that they are looking for their Open Source embracing design theory to force the demise of SameTime as an IM client?
(That said, I think that ST may be the best enterprise collaboration untility still -- a thouand VNC streams just don't cut it -- unless someone knows something better?).
So in the top tier of countries we hack PCs and Microsoft boxen to make them run linux.
So are people in india going to hack the simputer to run Win3.1.
Actually -- better yet DOS6x
Man, I've been waiting for screen to get adapted to Solaris for years.
I got used to it during my shell-term AT&T Unix(tm) days. It made true multilple-session work possible. I was absolutely astounded as my PPP session was running under Windows 3.1.
It was amazing to have this true multitasking capability back in 1992 -- and you didn't have to use a mouse!
A big white ball comes from out of nowhere and asphyxiates the victim until control has been re-asserted.
;)
I will not be cataloged, filed, or extinguished
In some senses it is not the fault of J. Random.
Oftentimes the multitude of J. Randa are harvested as contractors with limited background checks, no measurements of skill etc.
The only way the corporation can be sure that they don't screw stuff up too badly is to confine their discourse within these scripts. So while you may be talking to a kernel hacker who has fallen on hard times and had to take the tech support job, his response is bound to "Click on the start button..." as he punches in new VM code to the emacs window
steven
ambitious people with vision
pulling a check clockwatchers
morons who non-technical management hired with the learning capacity of anesthetized anchovies
Those that fell into the former category worked hard to get out of the repetitive work of support. They stuided and built the bridges to get out. Why? Because being a support person simply does not pay enough. If corporate america thought it important to keep their customers in contact with proficient people they would do things to help make sure they kept the best in those jobs!
Some Advice
Catapulting youself from Tech Support upwards is only possible within a corporate IT department.
If you are at a Big Ass Call center (IBM owns many in Colorado) and you don't want to be a sell-out service lever manager corporate dicksnot, your best strategy is to get into the highest level of technical support and then join another corporation.
At Big Ass Call Centers they focus on metrics and business jack-off garbage. In a corporate IT environment (generally) they care about quality solutions.
The fact of the matter is that driving, especially in most parts of the US is necessary to be a productive member of society.
The notion of privilege only applies when there are real alternatives (the basis for Kantian morality). When the non-auto infrastructure is so poor that a car is a necessity, then privilege does not enter the discussion.
When this is the case, the argument that due to this "privilege" we have the right to monitor you fails.
Case in point, I grew up in Houston, Texas. There are fewer pedestrian friendly places in the world. The mass availability of cheap land propelled the term sprawl to new heights. As a result, to get anywhere you needed.
Even in the slightly more pedestrian focused Austin, those without automobiles suffer and greatly.
The fact of the matter is that the US cities have done a horrible job of building pedestrian infrastructure.
Even now in "progressive" California, the bike lanes are narrow and abused, sidewalks lack efficient direction etc. The best city for non-auto-possessor is SF (of course) but it still isn't near the efficiency level of cities like Vienna or anywhere in The Netherlands.
The director would have been Leni Riefenstahl link .
While one can ask whether or not art can be made when done under the aegis of Naziism, this film cannot be denied as a landmark in the art form. Riefenstahl's work in "Triumph of the Will" rivals Welles' achievement in Citizen Kane.
She was one of the first to use the camera as a 2nd person observer of the action.
All that said, I don't like her.
In Business school we always emphasized how the customer experinece is paramount in driving any endeavour. In the screwed up business model @home has purveyed, they grew too fast and forgot how to serve the customers.
Here in sunnyvale, my bandwidth is comprable to a 56k modem! Seriously. After I sent them traceroutes to al the DNS servers, all the gateways, and several big sites they still insisted that i unplug my linux box and run their little whack=ass tool...
Guess what the 3 tabs on that lame app were PING, NSLOOKUP and TRACEROUTE. Un frigging believeable.
Now did this, so they roll a truck out here and he says he can't see a problem. After 3 weeks of escalation guess what they're up to on this thursday?
SEnding another truck! That's right after WEEKS of documentation of problems I'm about to get a second guy out here telling me that he can't find something wrong.
ONly thing worse is Pac Bell.
In any case, their lack of customer service merely presaged their downfall.