Sheep Guarding Llama

Dominica’s migraine was so bad last night that we just skipped dinner entirely. She slept for a few hours with Oreo while I worked on the podcast. When she got up we took the opportunity to go down to the new healthclub in our building that semi-officially opened today and we took a quick tour of the portion that it operational. Technically we are allowed to be using it this evening but no one else is and we would feel weird. But our plan is to start using it tomorrow. At least I plan to do that. I am really just looking for a cardiovascular workout. Not trying to bulk up or anything. Just need to get a little bit closer to actually being somewhat sortof in shape. But boy will it be awesome to have a gym right in the building! I have never had that before and I am quite excited.

While we were out and about in the building we also took the opportunity to pick up our bowling shoes. Everyone in our building get a pair of bowling shoes so that they can use the bowling alley whenever they want.

Our big happy news today is that we made the final payment on Dominica’s 2002 Mazda PR5. It is the first time that we have ever paid off a new car and own it outright. I bought my yellow PR5 before she bought hers but mine was traded in on the Mazda 6 so we didn’t pay it off before it was gone. What a great feeling it is to never have to make another payment on the car. Pheww. I also made a payment on the Mazda 6 today. But that car won’t be paid off until August or September of 2008 so we still have a long haul with that one. The BMW has almost a full five years left to go but hopefully we will be able to shave some off of that.

I talked to John Stephens, the Surfing IT Wizard, this morning and he is taking the day off of work to come down to New Jersey for a Magic: The Gathering tournament this weekend. He might be able to make it out to Warren for lunch before continuing on down to Tom’s River in South Jersey where the tournament is this weekend.

As with most Friday morning, this morning was nice and slow. Fridays are very slow in the morning and busy in the evenings. Dominica decided that she is going to run to Target today during her lunch break to do some needed “we have a healthclub” shopping. Neither of us has been working out in so long that we don’t have any workout clothing and we want to get started today so that is a priority.

Before leaving for the office this morning I managed to upload all of Dominica and my wedding pictures to Flickr. That was a lot of uploading but now, finally, we are able to share all of our wedding pictures with everyone. I know that people have been anxious to see all of the guys in their kilts!

Okay, this one might be a little to techie for a lot my audience but Joel on Software had a great article today on how management consultants fake productivity tests to IT managers. And for those who can’t believe that things like what happen in this article really take place I am here to testify that yes, they really do. It is because IT workers find the obviousness of the ability to game the system and the completely counterproductive nature of the metric so great that we are constantly amazed that management knows so little about what they are managing that they can only serve as a threat to productivity or, at best, a pointless cost center. Just about everyone working in IT knows, it would seem, more about management than management graduates. How can this be? We have no idea. That is one thing we definitely cannot explain. The bottom line is that this would never (almost never) if managers were required to have greater competence than those people that they manage. People are never productive when they know that they are working for a person who has not managed to demonstrate the ability to do the jobs of the people that they manage. If they can’t do the job then they cannot understand the complexities of the tasks. Even Burger King knows this and expects every manager to be able to do every job in the place. Even if they aren’t the best burger flippers they have to have done it enough to appreciate the demands of the position.

Everyone loves cat web sites. This might be the best one yet: Cats That Look Like Hitler. What could be better?

I got home from work pretty late tonight – just a little before eight. But my last while at work was very slow and I managed to watch a ton of Rocketboom. I am rapidly catching up with all of the episodes that I have missed over the last several months.

I got home and tried on workout clothes that Dominica bought today and then we headed straight down to the building’s health club “Club 1180” for our first workouts in forever. I put in a full half an hour on the eliptical machines. I would have worked out longer but I got paged in to work and had to head back to the apartment to work. But really, I think that half an hour is probably enough for my first day working out. Dominica put in about twenty two minutes. So our plan is to be back in the gym tomorrow. But we will see if we manage to stick to that plan or not. It’s the second day that is hard. But we will sleep well tonight.

I am very excited about the statistics that I am seeing from podOmatic. In a bit less than twenty-four hours and on a weekday the show had sixty downloads from podOmatic and an additional fifteen or more from OurMedia! Not too shabby. PodOMatic reports that the SGL Podcast hosted there, even after months of inactivity, is still getting downloaded hundreds of times a week! Now that is encouraging and very, very cool. Now that I am back to doing the show maybe we can get those number up again.

For dinner we just stayed in and had salads and pb&j. We popped in Big Trouble in Little China which is totally classic ’80s Kurt Russell that I haven’t seen since, well, the ’80s.

Today is the third anniversary of my mother passing away.

Last night I got home and Dominica, Susan and I went out to IHOP by UMDNJ for dinner. After dinner we went to Wendy’s because the girls wanted some frosties for dessert. Dominica and I didn’t stay up for too long after getting back from dinner. I did end up having to take Oreo out to Military Park for a walk around eleven though.

It turned out to be a really beautiful night for a walk in the park. It was really bright and the rain all day had collected on the trees so that they all sparkled. The wine that blew all day had taken down most of the remaining autumn leaves leaving the ground a mat of yellow and the sky clearly visible. Oreo made me take him on several laps of the park so we were out for quite some time. But it was the best possible weather for a long walk. It was cool but not cold enough, even late at night, to warrant a jacket. We enjoyed our walk even if it was a long and unexpected one.

Today is my work from home day this week so I get to do a little relaxing and just wear jeans and a sweatshirt all day and hang out with Oreo. I decided today that I really love using Flickr and that for just under $25 per year it is totally worth it to me to have a professional account there so that I can put as many pictures there as I want, more or less (limit is 2GB per month – which is quite a few.) So I bought an account. Now my plan is to slowly copy all of my archival pictures up onto Flickr. I have been taking pictures pretty seriously since 1988 so there is a lot of stuff to post and it will take quite a long time to get it all up and with the proper tags, titles and descriptions but it will be really handy for people to actually get some use out of all of the pictures in the future. It will also serve as an important backup to my own picture archives. And now instead of manually processing each picture down to a small, manageable size I can just upload the pictures at their original quality which makes them more useful to everyone.

I lost my Internet access for a little while this afternoon when Cablevision was in the building. Perfect time to go to lunch. I met Susan at Subway in the building next door for a quick and healthy lunch. Luckily for me the local Subways all seem to have the veggie patty subs that are so uncommon back in New York. Dominica has found them before but I have never managed to get one before. I am not the biggest fan of Subway but the veggie patty sub finally gives me something halfway decent that I don’t mind getting every so often.

Dad discovered the MSN list of the ten worst video games of all time. At number eight on the all time awful list is “Make My Video – Marky Mark” which Dominica had for the Sega CD platform. But even worse, but just barely, was my “Smurfs: Rescue from Gargamel’s Castle” which came in at number six! Oh the games of our childhoods.

Susan had a gig in Allentown, PA today so she headed out that way this afternoon. Today is the first day that our in-building health club is open so we are excited to see how that is coming along.

Dominica got home and had a terrible headache so she took some aspirin and went right in to bed with Oreo to get a nap. I took the opportunity to catch up with her and finish the fifth season of That ’70s Show. It is amazing that they were able to keep the show so good through five seasons. I watched most of the first four seasons when the show was new. This past season I had only seen about one episode previously. I think there is one episode after the fifth season that I have ever seen. I have heard that the show mostly died after this season but I am interested to see what they did with it.

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…