Sheep Guarding Llama

Winnie the Pooh would comment on a day like today. Heavy rain and very blowing wind. As I was waiting for my car to be brought around this morning I watched people walking up the sidewalk having their umbrellas turned inside out from the wind. This is the first heavy rain that I have seen in Newark.

Last night we went out to Mompou in the Ironbound as soon as Dominica and Susan arrived in Newark. We actually all arrived within a few minutes of each other with Dominica and Susan actually meeting on the street at the light in front of our building. We decided to drive down to the Ironbound as it was starting to rain and expected to rain all evening.

Dinner at Mompou was really good as always. That place is awesome.

We got back to the apartment and Dominica and I pretty much went straight to bed. Early night for us.

Today we all made it out fairly early. I was going to go get breakfast but it was raining so hard that I decided against it. Not worth getting all wet over.

Today an article was printed by the BBC where Christian Aid, a British non-profit, where the person choosing operating systems there claimed that Windows was cheaper than Linux because when you use Linux you have to purchase expensive support options. Now I don’t want to go into why this guy doesn’t have the technical expertise to make any such claim or how he doesn’t have the purchasing expertise to even know that this is totally untrue nor do I want to make any claims as to the total cost of ownership comparison between Linux and Windows but what I do want to do is talk about the actual problem here. The real problem is that non-profits are often guilty of hiring incompetent support staff that are not able to do their own jobs and often pay for other companies to do their own jobs. In this case a systems administrator needs his operating system company to hold his hand and is willing to spend donated dollars instead of taking the time to learn his own job. This is tantamount to theft of Church dollars! This is a person who is effectively stealing from British and Irish churches. He is giving money that are given in the hopes that they will help starving children to Microsoft or to other support companies because he doesn’t so the job himself or hire people who are qualified to do the job. And as we all know there are tons of out of work technology professionals who would love to save that non-profit hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But the problem with non-profits is that they are not driven by profits which in and of itself is fine. In fact it is awesome. People driven by the higher good of doing good things for others. Except that the individuals within non-profits are still paid and often driven by their pay. So now you have a bunch of people out to make as much money as possible from a business that is not designed to be efficient since that is not its driving force. The non-profit doesn’t pay outrageous salaries to top performers. So this administrator who is in questionable standing here won’t likely make a nice six figure salary even if he is worth millions to the business in cost savings. He will eek out the same meager living whether he is competent or not and the business just hopes that he will do the right thing because they are a non-profit. So, since his life can’t improve by being good at what he does (and likely he would not have taken that job if he was good at what he does) he can only improve his life by doing less for the same money. How does he do that? In this case by buying expensive software that does a lot of his job for him or by buying expensive and traditionally unnecessary support contracts so that there is someone else to do the hard work while he sits in the comfy office doing, well, less than he could be.

This is assuming that this person is simply lazy or less than competent but still, sort of, ethical. Is taking money that has been donated to feed starving children and passing it off to Microsoft or Red Hat or SUN ethical when you could feed children by doing the job entrusted to you? I will let you decide. But in many cases unethical non-profit workers will get kick backs by having a support organization do all of the work for them. Work that is often paid for too much for and covers a lot of redundant ground. I have seen this first hand – presumably. Non-profits turning down free professional services in order to pay outrageous fees to non-technical workers who “know the right people”. There is no cost justification needed. Non-profits don’t work that way. The whole concept of the non-profit is the buddy system.

Are their ethical people working hard in non-profits doing great things to help mankind? Of course there are. But the system is so dysfunctional that much of their hard work is lost. I am sure that many hard working Christian Aid volunteers would be pretty upset to discover that their “corporate office” was paying software companies huge sums of money while their were volunteering their time and lives. Is there an answer to this dilemma? I believe that there is.

The for-profit corporate world works very, very hard to be good and producing results fast, cheap and efficiently. This is what makes one company do better than another. They know how to motivate employees, how to get maximum results and how to be profitable. Non-profits needs to reinvent themselves to utilize this miracle of modern productivity. They might be able to do this, in some cases, by implementing standard business practices internally but often this is not possible given the nature of their “business”. So what to do? I believe that non-profits should farm out the bulk of their internal infrastructure to for-profit entities that can do the same work better and for less. Let’s look at an example.

Food4Kids is a fictitious international non-profit striving to feed children around the globe. They physically ship food to regions where they operate small kitchens that feed children that come in to get meals. They need a lot of infrastructure. No one would expect them to operate their own farms so that piece is obviously outsourced to existing farmers. But there is more. Their shipping and logistics operation getting food from farms and into the central warehouse shouldn’t be done internally but through a logistics outsourcer who is fast, efficient and can leverage scale with many other customers to lower cost and increase expertise. The human resources functions should be outsources. Food4Kids doesn’t want to be experts at HR, they want to feed kids. So people who are good at HR should do that. The information technology department is the obvious example. Outsource it to a professional IT firm that can provide exceptional value and a good price. A good IT partner can dramatically decrease the cost and increase the efficiency of almost any piece of a business. This is a critical piece to outsource. Food4Kids will need to operate their own carefully chosen and managed “outsource management” team who selects and interfaces with the outsourcers. These people will have to be very carefully chosen and meticulously managed but they should be very few in number. In theory a non-profit would require very few of their own employees. Perhaps Food4Kids should not outsource their “in the field” operations but this is a small number of specialty workers. This means that Food4Kids might be the expert in the area of “in the field” children’s food kitchens – something that they can strive to be good at. And the volunteers should be direct through Food4Kids as volunteers can really only be managed by non-profits.

What we end up with in the end is a lean, efficient non-profit that still drives the majority of its work force through traditional pay and career incentives which have always shown to be the most successful means of saving money. This means that people are motivated to do the wrong thing and rewarded for helping people instead of rewarding them for the most damage that they can cause without drawing too much attention to themselves.

Sorry that I had to go on that tirade but big media publishing articles like that really makes me upset when media is making money off of glorifying a person who is doing the wrong thing and hurting people. Or at least doing things for the wrong reasons. I have spoken to people who work at non-profits before and they have expressed their disgust with people who use high level non-profit jobs as a form of welfare since non-profits will seldom fire people who are incompetent (often because the people who would fire them know nothing about business and don’t know that they are losing money) and those people are motivated to do as little as possible to make up for the inability to get raises. It is really about a breach in the trust that those people have from the people who donate to those non-profits.

I got stuck in the office later tonight than I had hoped. I was half past six when I finally got to leave. But tomorrow I am working from home so I get a chance to work in my pajamas and maybe, just maybe, I will actually get a chance to make the fifty-first episode of the SGL Podcast. Hopefully…

Last night was all out cleaning night. We starting by attempting to assemble the new ninety-nine pound hall table that came from Target. But, as we were assembling it, we discovered that one of the pieces was broken. Dominica called Target and they are dealing with it but it will be at least a week before we have the replacement piece so now, instead of the having a hall table that will help to eliminate a lot of clutter in the apartment, we now have a very large unassembled table that we have to store all over the apartment in addition to all of the packing material that has to be dealt with. Dominica did the best that she could assembling what bits that she could and getting everything else packed away in the apartment. But what a pain.

We got the rest of the apartment stuff cleaned up including getting all of the servers stored away somewhere. It is a good thing that we have house guests from time to time or else we would never get everything put away from moving in. Dominica did the bulk of the cleaning but I did help. I also spent some time with Oreo and did some catching up on That ’70s Show since Dominica had secretly gone ahead and watched the last third of the series without me.

This morning I ended up working from home until almost noon. During that time I managed to take the Nikon and get some good pictures (I hope) of the apartment and then I took the Kodak and made a quick three and a half minute video of the apartment to share with everyone. That video I actually managed to get posted right away so a lot of you have probably all ready seen it. I also posted the first of Dominica and my wedding pictures since those were never posted online anywhere. Flickr is awesome.

I did some more cleaning this morning. The apartment is really looking good. I went to Food for Life and grabbed lunch and then headed into the office. Susan called before I even made it to work to let us know that she had arrived in Newark. I wasn’t expecting her this early. She has to work today, though, so she won’t just be sitting in the apartment all day waiting for us to get home – which is good or we would feel really had for not having gotten a television yet!

I did a search on Google today for Oreo and “Boston Terrier” and discovered a few pictures of our little boy showing up on the first page in Google images! How famous is he?

Today was another very slow day at the office. It is a good thing that I got in as late as I did. I had almost nothing to do today and managed to watch a lot of old Rocketboom episodes that I have missed over the passed several months. I also managed to finish reading “Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About” by Donald Knuth.

Our plan tonight is to head over to Mompou for some awesome Portuguese tapas. I have been wanting to get some tapas now for weeks and I never manage to get over there so I am really looking forward to going out tonight. While I was catching up on Rocketboom episodes that I have missed while living in New Jersey I came across the July 6th episode covering the Worldcup from Newark’s Ironbound where we will be getting dinner tonight!

Some days you just have to kick back and enjoy some Exploding Dog like “This Is How People Get Hurt“. Check out Exploding Dog for cool, eclectic cartoon art.

Things were so slow today that I was able to cut out on the early side which worked out really well. I am hoping to get to Newark before Susan needs to get into the apartment so that she is not stuck dealing with the city on her own. We left a key for her but it can be cumbersome getting into a strange building when you aren’t used to it.

Dad sent me a correction: He bought his Westinghoust 37″ LCD monitor through Crutchfield and not through Best Buy because the price was better through Crutchfield.

It is “back to the grind” day. I was well on track to getting into the office at a normal time today but every time that I made a serious attempt to leave the apartment the phone would ring and I would have to work for a little while and that just went on and on until almost ten! Then I was finally able to run down and order my car and to walk over to Subway and get myself an egg and cheese sub to get me through the morning.

This morning before escaping from Newark I got an email from Carrie Hooper (now Carrie Russo) whom I have not heard from in probably eleven or twelve years. She is back living in York after having been living in Connecticut for a while. The Internet is really amazing and I think one of the ways that it is going to really affect the lives of the generation following me is in the way that it allows people to stay connected with each other over time and distance. For people of my generation we are using the Internet as a great tool for “reconnecting” to people. Tools like MySpace, Classmates.com, etc. are designed around finding people that you have lost contact with and for people my age this is a new paradigm for rediscovering lost social connections.

But truly we are in a transitional age. To the generation older than mine the idea of social connections was rooted well in the mists of time. Social interaction was done in person or through “pre-arranged” media interactions like postal mail and telephone. Mediums that required a pretty significant knowledge of the person that you are looking to contact and up-to-date interactions with them to be sure that your address database was accurate. The older generation is getting some of the benefits of the Internet’s ability to bring people together in new ways but most of its benefits are lost to them as they had too much time between the time that they made social connections and when the Internet would have given them the ability to re-establish those connections.

For my generation we are able to, by the time that we are in our thirties, rediscover our childhood and adolescent social connections. We will grow old knowing that the email address of our friends will never again change even if they move, nor will their new, portable telephone number. Their websites will always exist in the same place with the same name giving us the latest details on their lives. We went through the disconnect the same as our parents and their parents did after moving, after school, after college, between jobs, etc. but we are putting those pieces back together and making our lives a continuing fabric of friendship and social knowledge.

What we have yet to see, however, is with the following generation. In these young adults and teenagers of today we are about to witness the first group of people who will, en masse, never lose touch with each other. The very concept of the social disconnect created by changing life phases will be unknown and foreign to them. What has been a key underpinning of the human experience since Noah and family departed the ark and went their separate ways to find farmland – the transient nature of most human sociological interactions – is gone. Imagine an entire population for whom every person that they have ever interacted with to any degree being available to them by phone, email, instant messenger, text messaging or whatever at anytime, anyplace.

How with this change in human interactions affect our society? One can only speculate. But the ramifications could be, will most likely be, significant. Mankind has always been driven by the desire to find long lost friends, through wondering what has become of so many of the people that they used to know, of needing to only manage current social connections with a small fraction of a lifetime’s worth of established connections. Children today need to handle the ability to continuously interact with an ever growing number of people for the rest of their lives. The human experience is changing! We are less alone and more a part of each other’s lives than ever before.

Work was surprisingly slow today. What a nice break this has been. All weekend I didn’t get a single call and so far this week looks like it is stacking up to be a nice, relaxing, “normal” week. And Saturday is Veterans’ Day which does not mean that I don’t have to work on Friday as it is not an actual bank holiday but it is a slow day with the Federal Reserve Bank being closed.

Our hall table that we ordered from Target online was delivered today. What perfect timing. Now we can get it assembled and set up and everything that is going to go into it put into place before Susan arrives tomorrow. Otherwise we would have been putting furniture together with Susan there to watch. We have been needing a hall table for a while. Now if we can just get the apartment building to get their butts into gear and to get the hall closet door fixed so that it will close all of the way we will be all set. The box arrived and is 51 inches tall and weighs in at 99 pounds! That is a big, heavy box.

I did some looking at the map today and discovered that Rye Harbor in New Hampshire where Andy and I love to go to get seafood. Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard are about the same distance away as well. There is a lot of good stuff not too far away. I have never done any amount of vacationing in Massachusetts. There is a lot there that I would like to see. I have been to Boston but only ever for a few minutes, literally, with Andy on our way to Rye Harbor one time. And I have never been to Plymouth (originally Plimoth) or Cape Code or the islands there or even Long Island. Some of the guys that I work with were telling me that this is the perfect time of year to head to Long Island’s north shore and to check out the wineries there.

The big task of the day is working on the wet rug. We decided that the rug is a loss and we need to dispose of it but doing so is going to be the real challenge. It is large and wet and heavy. This falls clearly into the “Scott’s Bad Idea Awards List”.

Dominica whipped up some breakfast this morning since we had gone grocery shopping last night. This is one of the very few meals that Dominica has cooked in our Newark kitchen. It is kind of weird to cook here. It almost doesn’t even occur to me to be a possibility since we have done it so little.

We had to forgo showers this morning since the wet rug is taking up the entire bathtub and there is no place to move it to. Quite the dilemma. We did some basic cleaning around the apartment and decided that it was going to be a total waste of effort if we didn’t go take care of the futon mattress issue. The old mattress is just a 4″ deal that isn’t holding up at all and is not comfortable and was super cheap. So we are getting something new to replace it with.

We drove out west to East Hanover to Futonland which was exactly like the futon store in Maryland that John used to shop at. I guess that there can only be so much variety in futon stores. We found an 8″ foam core mattress that we liked and a pink cover (guess who picked that out – it almost matches the former bathroom colour in Geneseo) and some pillows for the futon.

There was an Indian restaurant right down the plaza from Futonland so we decided that we hadn’t been able to get Indian food for weeks so we had to do that for lunch. It ended up being a really good Indian place. The food was awesome. So we are planning on going back there sometime as it isn’t really all that far from Newark.

We found a CompUSA right in the same area so we ran in there to get some silver thermal grease that I have been needing for a couple of projects and ended up finding So I Married an Axe Murder and Forty Year Old Virgin very cheap.

We came home and put the new futon mattress in place and got to work cleaning. I did more computer work than cleaning. Dominica did a crazy amount of cleaning around the house. She got tons done in addition to doing some reading for her Java class. She was uber-productive today.

The apartment is really starting to look good. I can’t believe how much we got done today. We took the old mattress that we don’t want anymore and we put the wet, nasty rug on top of it and had the porter take it all away. That worked out pretty well. Now we just have the nice hardwood floor that looks way better than it does with a carpet. Unfortunately Oreo really needs the carpeting because he slides all over the place and he needs someplace to roll around because that is how he scratches his back. He loves rolling around on a nice shag carpet.

Okay, of all the operas in the world that I will never see there is, of course, the Opera based on the real lives of Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan. Wow. The end of the world is at hand.

We found out that our building’s bowling alley opened last night. There is now a reason to head down to the basement. It is too bad that I have carpal tunnel syndrome of all the people in the world I am now in that very tiny percentage that live in a building with their own bowling alley. What an ironic twist of fate has befallen me.

I was determined to get a podcast done over the weekend but I just didn’t get any spare time at all. None. In fact we didn’t get nearly as much done as we had hoped that we would as it was. There was just a lot to be done.