Thinking with your stomach

People say a way to a man's heart is through his stomach.  I whole heartedly agree.  Eating has a big affect on our mood and our thoughts.  Today I went out to lunch with a bunch of people from work.  It is a lot of fun getting out of the office, even if it is for just a little while.  The place we went to was nothing special but we ate tons of food.

Getting back to the office we are all moving like slugs.  It is to the point I feel like taking a nap.  My work is not exciting to begin with, but I can say for certain it usually does not put me to sleep this fast.  Doing some team bonding is important, my work place lacks any sense of camaraderie.  Any type of bonding is greatly appreciated in order to making working more bearable.

For future reference eating with co-workers, while being lots of fun, is hazardous ground.  Make sure that what you eat is not going to affect you the rest of the day.  However, if you are looking for a convenient excuse to go home it might just suite your needs.  Things do get interesting when the group of people going includes vegetarians, meat lovers, and vegans.  Let calamity ensue.  Maybe there is a reason why there are so many clashes on my team.

Can I be too BIG?

I had a talk earlier today with a new co-worker of mine.  It consisted of most company politics and how we were positioning ourselves in the market.  I will not go into it for obvious reasons, but there was something interesting that popped up.  Many of the solutions that my company uses work well for large companies.  The company I work for is huge.  Is there a point to when normal rules no longer apply?

I doubt many study lots of physics but everyone remembers the simple stuff from high school.  Force = mass X acceleration.  This equation works well for a lot of things.  In general is it an extremely good estimate.  If the mass is shrunk down to microscopic size this formula no longer works, it breaks down.  There is another equation to use because the problem is so small.  At the same time if mass were increased to something planet size neither formula would work.  A completely new way of dealing with things has to be used.

To make a story short when things get too small or big normal rules no longer apply.  This works for science, but does it hold true to business?  Cloud computing is supposed to be elastic.  It runs on top infrastructure giants like Amazon and Google.  Will cloud solutions for small companies still work for giants like mine?  There have been no large scale migrations to the Cloud yet so I do not think anyone can say for sure.

An interesting fact was given to me.  Due to flu season, people are staying home.  Not only that they are surfing the web, watching lots of streaming video.  If you do not know steaming video is very process intensive and uses large amount of data.  Someone said flu season might crash the internet.  

My reply was bullshit.  It got me thinking though if Cloud computing becomes common place the amount of information across the internet will greatly increase.  I know providers like Google and Amazon will adapt but will the hardware of the internet be able to handle it?  Is anyone thinking about this?  I guess time will tell.

Catch 22

This past weekend I went back to my school for Homecoming and Halloween.  Yes, they were both on the same day, completely bad-ass.  I am extremely fortunate with my job.  This is even more apparent when I go back to school.  Many of my fellow alumni are still looking for a job a year later out of college.  Some do have fluff degrees but, at the same time I do not have an engineering degree either.

As a small experiment I went around a few job sites in my area.  There are jobs out there, but not for anyone close to my experience level.  Most jobs require over 5 years of experience in a senior position.  Many of us have lots of practice doctoring our resumes but even this is a little out of reach.  When things go wrong blame the parents.

By blame the parents, I mean the baby boomers.  The positions that are becoming available are for a different generation.  To even think about applying to almost any job I need to wait several years.  I understand that because of everyone retiring that new people need to fill these jobs.  It seems that companies, rather than looking to promote people within their company are looking else where for personnel.

I, myself, know very little about corporate culture and the norms.  My only experience is my current job.  It seems that there are fewer and fewer senior people to fill positions while at the same time the market place has lots of entry level applicants.  Those high up keep getting more piled on their plate while lower level people keep getting less.

To get a job you need a good amount of experience.  Yet, if companies are only looking for senior positions where are workers going to get that experience?  Why are these companies not trying to promote internally when they have documentation on past performance?  Then hire more entry level people?  As I have said I do not know much about how business works but for what I have seen my recommendation is not a common practice.

Start the Wave

I do not know if anyone has had the opportunity to look a to Google Wave yet.  Last year at a the Google conference this future product was unveiled.  It was said rather than always trying to improve upon an old idea it was time to try something new.  Thus, Wave was born.  It is described as what collaboration and communication would be like if email was designed today rather than trying to emulate snail mail.

Most know me as an avid Google supporter.  I like the fact that Google will try new things and try to break the mold.  Many times I do not think Google is going to do things the best, but I can almost guarantee that they will be the first ones willing to try.

A big thing about this product is that it will be open source.  All us tech nerds will be able to get our hands on the code and customize the hell out of it.  If you watch the video about Wave there is a scene showing Wave run in DOS.  If that does not sell you on how much control you are going to have I do not know what will.  All this control means we can tie Wave into back end systems like SAP or Oracle, plus a company can put their own version of Wave behind their firewall.  

I do not believe that Wave will replace email.  But I think there are certain places where Wave will shine.  Working on large documents collaboratively that have a tight deadline.  With Wave everything is real time.  No version control is needed and editing can happen as soon as someone writes a sentence.  Some think this is mean but if there is a tight deadline no one cares, just get the work done.  That is where I think Wave will work the best.

Management a love-hate relationship

I am in the midst of training for the GSA, Google Search Appliance.  While training is usually fast and furious, it is nice meeting other people from different companies and seeing how everyone is viewing the same product.  The different perspectives are nice to have, sometimes great for new ideas.

I was conversing with a fellow trainee and we were talking about why we were at the training.  He comes from a company of about 50 people and me from 90,000+.  Both of us got onto the topic of pros and cons about company size.  Small companies are quick and agile with lots of collaborating, and there is usually little overhead.  Larger companies have lots of resources and influence but usually have lots of bureaucracy, aka. overhead. 

Many try to argue one is better than the other, but it is really what is suited to your tastes.  I work for a company that has a lot of overhead, but it makes sense.  Everyone has worked on a project where management does not step up and people start running in different directions.  Doing things slowly right, is faster than doing things wrong really quickly and having to redo the mess up. 

Personally, I am not a fan of people that are pure management.  I know it is a necessary evil and I am not going to get rid of it.  My major qualm is those people creating large amounts of unnecessary bureaucracy.  Some people are so high up they cannot see the ground.  The only information they receive is from other management. 

Governance is extremely important and not fun to implement.  I understand this, but if bureaucracy needs to be created it should be the job of those in charge to make sure that it runs as efficiently as possible.  Governance is there to protect the business so things do not go wrong.  If it gets to the point that it starts harming the business then I think there is a problem.  People of my level have no way of influencing high level business policies, those in charge should be constantly trying to improve company inner workings the same way developers improve and refract code. Business process and computer code are in the end both algorithms.

Search me

I've spent the last two days in GSA, Google Search Application, training.  While many may snicker about the name I think that this is important learn.  While we do rely on Google.com for searching just about any and all content, Google.com can only search public data.  Things behind a firewall or on a company intranet are not going to show up.  I am sure many of us use the "company" search and find it more than lacking.

I work for a rather small company of around 90,000 employees.  We have solutions in place for our company that work well for large companies.  Unfortunately the company I work for breaks most solutions through just sheer volume.  We are not large, we are freaking huge. 

I am learning about the GSA to implement for customers.  It would be nice to use this internally.  The cobbler's children are the only ones with broken shoes, fits where I work. 

A company can buy a GSA and throw it behind their firewall and let it run.  The basic configuration is to set boundaries for the machine then let run to its heart is content.  There is a lot more to worry about, but that is what happens at a high level.  You get the same algorithm that is on the Google.com site and the GSA returns searches in under a second.  It is set to never take longer than 3 seconds, other wise it just ignores the data that is taking too long.

It is nice that it uses such a trusted algorithm, now you will not get any porn from your co-workers in your intranet search . . . damn.  The licensing is not cheap but for medium to large companies this is a very good solution.  Google excels in unstructured collaboration and the GSA helps makes sense of vast amounts unorganized information.

Needs more . . . resources?

A co-worker asked me a very simple question the other day.  "Is there any way to automate or do a bulk upload for Google Apps calendar resources."  Off the top of my head I answered I did not remember there being anything within the admin console, but I was sure that was probably an API out there for it.  

If you are familiar with Google Apps then you know that the APIs use two different libraries, GDATA and ATOM.  GDATA is where all the Google specific APIs come from, but it requires the ATOM library to run.  I go browsing through the GDATA library, which is very well documented within the code, but after about 10 minutes I come up with nothing.

The code is very well documented and organized.  Finding things is almost never a problem.  I thought maybe I was just missing something so I start checking some forums.  Turns out I am not the only one to notice this hiccup.  The only solution I found was to use scripting, tools like Selenium or Curl.  While they do work, this is a very simple function and would be extremely useful to administrators.

I wonder if my pleas will be heard up in the cloud?  Google, honestly, I know you are working hard on Google Wave but help us out.