It's A Horsey

Once and a while, amid the loads and loads and loads of artwork your children bring home from school, you find something startling. This watercolor Lexie did of a horse, for example, still really enchants me. And she was only 5 at the time.

Ley Lines

I've pondered quite a bit these past few days about the Internet, social networking, and how there are some people who are rebelling against the stupidity that are things like the List of 25 Things About Me on Facebook, the useless futility of being one of a hundred million bloggers and our growing inability to separate civil discourse from snark.

Then I got to thinking: Ley lines.

Ley lines -- hypothetical alignments of a number of places of geographic or archaeologic interest -- were first postulated, at least in our day, by Englishman Alfred Watkins, who came up with all sorts of mystical alignments between archaeological sites in England in the early 1920s. He believed, and many do today, that these alignments were not of mere chance, but that Site A aligned with Sites B, C, and D because the ancients found, or believed to have found, a line of power that, if strung with beads of archaeological significance, would impart some of that power to the sites, and thus to humanity.

I don't know that I believe all of that. But using the concept of ley lines, I can look at the Internet in a different way. We're not all brilliant here by any measure of the word. But through our blogs, our social networks, our inane comments on YouTube and our useless attempts at convincing others to accept our world view on any number of message boards and comment sites, we're creating our own Internet ley line. We're trying to line up our artifacts to form some kind of mystical connection to a world that remains as large as it was when Columbus sailed the ocean in 1492. Sure, we can cross the Atlantic in seconds now, but only in the sense of spitting a few hundred thousand electrons that way.

Where am I going with all this? Nowheres in particular. I'm still here at home, reaching out to intersect with your ley line. Or are we not supposed to cross the streams?

Bad, Bad Reporting

It's a shame to see how some California bloggers and mainstream media outlets are twisting the latest filings made by supporters of Proposition 8, the successful measure meant to ban gay marriage in the state.

The Sacramento Bee, the San Francisco Chronicle and other sundry media outlets are falsely reporting that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints underreported by as much as a factor of 20 the money the church spent supporting the measure. Additionally, these outlets are also reporting that the church's filings of Jan. 31 are in response to an investigation prompted by opponents of the proposition into the church's financial dealings in the measure.

"Mormon church officials," writes the SF Chronicle, "facing an ongoing investigation by the state Fair Political Practices Commission, Friday reported nearly $190,000 in previously unlisted assistance to the successful campaign for Prop. 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California."

What the Chronicle and other outlets are not reporting is that the report is one of several the church filed, according to California election law, detailing the amount of money the church spent shortly before and after the Nov. 4 vote.

"The church has been filing required contribution reports throughout the campaign," a church spokesman says here. "Those earlier donations 'initially stated' were filed for specific time periods prior to this last reporting period."

In other words, the church has not underreported a thing. It has complied with California law that allows groups such as the church up until Jan. 31 to report the full amount spent. When these outlets say the church underreported what it spent on the proposition campaign, they're comparing the final tally to only a portion of the amount spent and previously reported.

In other words, what bonehead writers and editors made this dumb, elementary reporter's mistake of letting bias get in the way of fact?

Anyone who thinks the church would make such an elementary mistake as to underreport what was spent is foolish. Again, they are grabbing at straws to find a way to overturn the will of California voters. TIME magazine has gleefully described church heirarchy as "hard-nosed businessmen." As such, they're not likely to make such an elementary error.

The Associated Press has reported this information correctly here.

That the Chronicle and other outlets have grossly misreported this story shows their bias, and shows that the writers and editors of these pieces prefer to frame their stories in ways to please Proposition 8 opponents rather than in a way that states fact. That others are spreading their errors on the Internet is shameful. I'd like to see corrections made, but I'm not holding my breath.

Zaftig

Learning something new every day is, by all appearances, a good thing. But it's not without risk.

Today,l while reading a National Geographic article on a healthcare program in rural India, I cam across this sentence: "She is often accompanied by Babai Sathe, an exuberant woman of 47, a bit zaftig, with a toothy smile."

Zaftig. I had to look it up, anticipating it would mean something along the lines of loony, high-spirited, or exuberant (given that the author qualified this lady's zaftigness with the phrase "a bit").

Alas.

With the delicate, exacting gusto typical of most dictionaries, Houghton Mifflin's American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines zaftig thusly:

1. Full-bosomed. 2. Having a comfortably ample figure.

Using such a word is fraught with risk. One, you have to explain it. Two, given the two definitions, it's clear that the word is unisex, though a male described as zaftig might take offense at the primary definition. A zaftig followed by a zap or a zinger would not be pleasant.

Additionally, it's my experience that you're either zaftig or not, and that there ought not to be any qualifying statements to define one's state of zaftigness, so the author threw me on this. But I did indeed learn something. Now I just have to figure out how to use the word in polite conversation. Outside of a Scrabble game.

I Should Have Written It Down

Ooh how I love to see things written down.

First of all, I have a rotten memory. Check that. I have a great memory, but that memory is kind of like the hard drive on my computer – filled with current affairs mixed with memories mixed with bits of songs and commercial jingles with some really important stuff buried deeply but with other, non-important stuff channeled into E-Z Recall circuits for review any time my brain decides it wants to, like the time I was sitting at church and had to sneeze and then had to find the wad of gum I shot out of my mouth when I sneezed and how I had the ENTIRE bench shaking with my muffled laughter as I tried to find the gum I sneezed out. My brain loves to revisit moments like this. I did find the gum, by the way.

But I like Lips’ suggestion of writing out proposals and progress reports. Because, for me, when I see something like this written down, I get reminders of the things I need to do, I remember what I’ve forgotten and, in reviewing the written records, I have sudden flashes of intuition on where I need to go next to make the project even better. Most of the stuff that’s written down is stored in my brain somewhere, but re-reading it from the printed page (or, indeed, the glowing screen) helps my muddled brain pull things together sequentially and enables me to visualize the bigger picture.

Seeing things written down also helps me figure out where I have holes in my memory and helps me come up with questions to ask – and people to ask – to fill those holes. Writing things down forces me to think things through clearly and to recognize where my thinking or knowledge may be lacking. If I rely on memory too much, I’m more liable to filter out the gaps and believe, erroneously, that I have a complete picture of what’s needed.

But it’s more than writing things down. We have to have things written down, but put together in a way that makes it easy for anyone to pick up what’s written and get a clear picture of what’s going on. For instance, the communications and marketing team at Uncharted is fabulous at writing things down. But, here’s a bit of writing here, a bit of writing there, and it’s hard for a dim bulb like me to figure out how these bits of information fit together in the company’s communications and marketing plan – of which, I’m told, we have one, but it hasn’t been updated with new information and nobody has the time to do it because they’re too busy communicating and marketing to fix the plan. I’m no expert at communicating or marketing, but it makes me a little uneasy to know that I’m not on the same page as this team because I haven’t seen their plan as a whole, I’ve only seen pieces of it. (Maybe I have seen the whole plan, cut into various pieces. But it’s my perception that I have not.)

On a related note – I’m helping the business team at Uncharted write the business plan – which has existed in a few scattered documents here and there, but mostly as a philosophy inside heads more than anything else. It’ll be interesting to see how we can pull all this together in a way that helps us all land on the same page, businesswise.

What’s ironic here is that a lot of the stuff I’ve read for web design, publishing, texts, et cetera, leans toward getting people away from written documentation. It’s almost like they’re trying to reproduce that scene from “Spaceballs,” in which Dark Helmet makes fun of his adjutant, Col. Sanders, for always saying things like “Prepare to leave!” “Why are you always preparing,” Dark Helmet asks. “Just go!” So once, Sanders just goes without preparing, and Dark Helmet falls on his butt because he wasn’t prepared. (I haven’t really described this adequately. I’ll try to find a YouTube video.) The logic behind avoiding written documentation to a point, I suppose, is sound – they don’t want projects to get bound down by documentation, or be forced to eliminate innovation because it doesn’t fit in with the written plan. But nobody says (OK, the anal retentives say) you have to stick with the plan. You want these kinds of proposals to be living documents, than can be thought out, altered, changed, or just referred to. The spiral programming model, advice given by 37 Signals (the group behind Ruby on Rails) all want to avoid massive amounts of written documentation. I think it’s a mistake – and a misnomer, because they still rely on the written word (on whiteboards, e-mails, and such) to track progress and to pose and answer questions. A written proposal, a written update, doesn’t have to be a novel. Some of the best proposals and updates I’ve seen have been five pages or less, with pictures. But it all gives everyone in the group something they can easily refer to to know where the project is at a given point. That’s invaluable.

Writing things down and sharing what’s written with others is critical in making sure everyone involved in a project knows where the project is headed and what needs to be done to meet project goals. I have a higher degree of confidence of finishing a project to the satisfaction of everyone involved if things are written out beforehand, and if updates are written out as well. That means for fewer surprises, better planning if things are delayed and the opportunity to ask questions.

A few more things I found pertinent from the Lips chapters this week:

Responsiveness: My job hinges on how responsive others are to the questions I have. When texts I’m working on are in the “critical path,” meaning that they have to be done for work to continue, responsiveness is great. On other texts where the sense of upper-management urgency is missing, responsiveness for some reviewers disappears almost completely. And that I understand – these reviewers are incredibly busy with their own work duties, and with answering questions from all sorts of other people. I find I have to tailor my requests for information based on my perception of how busy they are, and how involved they want to be in certain document reviews. With some, a short e-mail is sufficient, allowing for a few weeks for them to get to their computers. For others – and when urgency is increased – phone calls work. But they can’t be off the cuff phone calls. I prepare a script beforehand, so I can quickly summarize my questions and needs concerning the texts, so they know what they need to know in a minimum amount of time.

Client involvement: Some clients want to be heavily involved. Others want to be involved only when they absolutely have to. This means a tailored approach to updates and such. For those who want to be involved heavily, they get lots of status reports, office visits, phone calls, et cetera. For those who want minimal involvement, they get contacted when their discipline is in the critical path. They don’t want to be bombarded with excess information.

Blogging On The Bus

Though I won't be able to post this until I get home because the Lost River Desert is a bit bereft of wi-fi hot spots, I can at least truthfully say that I am blogging from the bus, filling in this slack time with yet another inane posting, at least until the sun sets.

I will mention the deer. For the past week, we've had a herd of deer grazing on the lawn to the north of the bus depot at Central. Today, there were eight of them, but last week there was an even dozen. They don't seem fazed to be eating in such close proximity to a bunch of humans and lumbering yellow buses. It may be that they're hungry enough that they'll tolerate our presence because they have little choice. But they look pretty healthy, the lot of them with their thick coats and shiny eyes. A few of them were pawing the snow away to get at the grass underneath. They don't look skinny or weak. I'd like to think they tolerate us because our behavior -- watching from a discreet distance -- is tolerable. There are certainly no gins pout here outside those that belong to the security guards (or at least any guns people would own up to having out here, as wuch is ubiquitous but verboten). There are enough hunters out here ogling the herd, that's for sure. Me being the peacenik that I am, I just enjoy watching them. I tried for a walk down the sidewalk near them today, but the bus came earlier than I hoped. Still, it's fun to watch them. They keep a pretty close eye ok us, a few watching while the rest eat. They're pretty sure we mean no harm, but they're still wary. I might get all foolish and name them, but I know they're only transients who found an easy feed. I could easily be one of those commune with nature Thoreau/Hippie types if I had the time and could stand the cold for more than 30 minutes at a time. Ah well. Maybe when it's time for dogs and cars to live together, I'll get my chance.

Posted with LifeCast

To Mars

This thought struck me today, as I sat in my gray little cubicle in the dumpy little trailer way out in the middle of the Lost River Desert, buried in snow and hoping for a glimpse through the copier room window of the rabbits that live underneath our trailer:

I want to go to Mars.

I've been to Mars, of course, thanks to Ray Bradbury and a little thing he calls R is for Rocket. First read the book years ago and was most struck by "The Rocket," a story Bradbury wrote of another man's longing to walk on the surface of the Red Planet. Unable to afford tickets to Mars, (mankind first landed on the planet 70 years before) he builds is own rocket ship from a mockup rocket and takes his children on a trip:

"Listen, keep your ears clean [says the father, Fiorello Bodoni]. Smell the smells of a rocket. Feel. Remember. So when you return you will talk of it all the rest of your lives."

"Yes, Papa."

The ship was quiet as a stopped clock. The airlock hissed shut behind them. He strapped them all, like tiny mummies, into rubber hammocks. 'Ready?" he called.

"Ready!" all replied.

"Blast-off!" He jerked ten switches. The rocket thundered and leaped. The children danced in their hammocks, screaming. "We're moving! We're off! Look!"

"Here comes the Moon!"

The Moon dreamed by. Meteors broke into fireworks. Time flowed away in a serpentine of gas. The children shouted. Released from their hammocks, hours later, they peered from the ports. "There's Earth!" "There's Mars!"

The rocket dropped pink petals of fire while the hour dials spun; the child eyes dropped shut. At last they hung like drunken moths in their cocoon hammocks.

"Good," whispered Bodoni, alone.

He tiptoed from the control room to stand for a long moment, fearful, at the airlock door.

He pressed a button. The airlock door swung wide. He stepped out. Into space? Into inky tides of meteor and gaseous torch? Into swift mileages and infinite dimensions?

No. Bodoni smiled.

All about the quivering rocket lay the junkyard.

Rusting, unchanged, there stood the padlocked junkyard gate, the little silent house by the river, the kitchen window lighted, and the river going down to the same sea. And in the center of the junkyard, manufacturing a magic cream, lay the quivering, purring rocket. Shaking and roaring, bouncing the netted children like flies in a web.

Maria stood in the kitchen window.

He waved to her and smiled.

He could not see if she waved or not. A small wave, perhaps. A small smile.

The sun was rising.

Bodoni withdrew hastily into the rocket. Silence. All still slept. He breathed easily. Tying himself into a hammock, he closed his eyes. To himself he prayed, Oh, let nothing happen to the illusion of the next six days. Let all of space come and go, and red Mars some up under our ship, and the moons of Mars, and let there be no flaws in the color film. Let there be three dimensions; let nothing go wrong with the hidden mirrors and screens that mold the fine illusion. Let time pass without crisis.

He awoke.

Red Mars floated near the rocket.

"Papa!" The children thrashed to be free.

Bodoni looked and saw red Mars and it was good and there was no flaw in it and he was very happy.

At sunset on the seventh day the rocket stopped shuddering.

"We are home," said Bodoni.

They walked across the junkyard from the open door of the rocket, their blood singing, their faces glowing. Perhaps they knew what he had done. Perhaps they guessed his wonderful magic trick. But if they knew, fi they guessed, they never said. Now they only laughed and ran.

"I have ham and eggs for all of you," said Maria, at the kitchen door.

"Mama, Mama, you should have come, to see it, to see Mars, Mama, and meteors, and everything!"

"Yes," she said.

At bedtime, the children gathered before Bodoni. "We want to thank you, Papa."

"It was nothing."

"We will remember it for always, papa. We will never forget."

Very late in the night Bodoni opened his eyes. He sensed that his wife was lying beside him, watching him. She did not move for a very long time, and then suddenly she kissed his cheeks and his forehead. "What's this?" he cried.

"You're the best father in the world," she whispered.

"Why?"

"Now I see," she said. "Now I understand."

She lay back and closed her eyes, holding his hand. "Is it a very lovely journey?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Perhaps," she said, "perhaps, some night, you might take me on just a little trip, do you think?"

"Just a little one, perhaps," he said.

"Thank you," she said. "Good night."

"Good night," said Fiorello Bodoni.

Yes, a sham. But not a sham. The family of Fiorello Bodoni believed they flew to Mars. Thus, they flew to Mars.

I want to go to Mars. I want to walk on the surface of that distant red planet, crawl down into the bowl of a crater, pick up handfuls of Martian sand. The dream is not dead. The technology is not outside our grasp. There are those who wonder why bother sending a man to Mars, when robots can go and be safer, less expensive. I say, the Bodoni children went to Mars. I want to go, too.

Where can I take my children, how can I take them on trips they will never forget? They're growing up so quickly. I haven't taken them to Mars yet. We need to go. It's not too late. I need to build a rocket ship. And I need to take my wife, too.

Unintended Audiences and Odd Reading Habits

There are three things I believe about audience:

1) Texts have multiple audiences. Often, some are unintended.

2) Audiences will get what they want out of a text or decry the absence of what they want in a text, whether it’s written for them or not.

3) Once a text is published, we have little to no control over what audiences see it.

At work, for example, for most documents I write I have two intended audiences: The SMEs who review the document and the operators who use the document in the field. Once the document is published, however, other audiences creep in: Department of Energy, Nuclear Safety Defense Board, any number of independent auditing groups, groups and individuals placing FOIA requests, lawyers, and so forth. We had some of our documents show up in legal proceedings between the state and DOE that resulted last year in a new agreement on waste removal. This was not the original audience intended for our texts, but this is one of the many places they ended up.

So this brings us back to what Beth Swanson says in Lips’ book (p. 24): “You have to figure out what the real message is that you need to impart and how to do that most effectively. If you don’t know what your purpose is, you end up with a [text] that’s unusable. Know the kind of content your audience is looking for and what’s most helpful to them in terms of how to present it. Be specific about what action they need to take and why.”

Despite the fact that we don’t know who will be looking at our texts, the texts are structured help to address multiple audiences, including, ironically, some needs of the unintended audiences. This structure helps us follow Swanson’s admonition to know what content our audience is looking for want what’s most helpful in how it is presented.

We have the main section which is for the operators that guides them through the steps they have to take to perform their work safely. Though operators are the primary audience, we know that everyone will look at this section to see that safety regulations and other expectations are met. The section, however, is not written for the auditors – it’s written for the operators, who need clear, concise instructions that don’t overlap excessively into training or the whys and wherefores of the regulations they have to meet.

How it is used, however, is another matter. Seasoned operators are required by regulation to have a copy of the procedure with them as they do their work, but since they know their jobs well, they don’t cling to the texts as much as new operators do. Our best operators pay attention during training when procedure changes are introduced, and check their tasks and performance against what’s written in the procedure. If they find better ways of doing things, they let us know and we change the procedure, and they know enough not to deviate from what’s written until it’s properly approved. So we have multiple audiences using this portion of the text in different ways.

Another section is called the procedure basis. Operators rarely, if ever, look at or use this section. In this section, we break the procedure down line by line, showing which instruction in the procedure applies to implementing what regulation or requirement. The steps are cross referenced with the documents that contain the whys and wherefores of the regulations or requirements, thus showing to the audience of auditors, DOE, lawyers, et cetera, how those regulations have been implemented in the procedures.

These audiences will enter the texts differently. Operators are trained to treat these texts sequentially, starting from the beginning and going through by following the logic flow through the document. Other audiences may read only parts of the document that apply to their disciplines. Others my start at the end with the procedure basis, then track how requirements are met in the text.

I did the same thing with a Dave Barry book I just finished reading for the first time. I started with the table of contents and first read those chapters that I thought sounded the most interesting or entertaining. Then I went back to the beginning and read the text cover to cover. I’ll do this with Tolkein’s LOTR trilogy. Sometimes I read only what happens to Sam and Frodo. Other times, I’m all about Aragorn and company. Only sometimes I read the books all the way through.

These habits have only some to do with familiarity with the texts. With the Barry book, I read essentially what were lists first, then read the entire book. I could tell the book was set up in a way that parts of it could be read independently of the rest, without significant loss of meaning. Familiarity with the author’s style is, of course, implied here. Even though this was a first-time read, the structure and the style lent to this kind of reading. For Tolkien, the same kind of structure exists – the tales of Frodo/Sam and Aragorn/Company are separate and distinct in the last two volumes of the trilogy. But unlike the Barry book, I have had to have read the entire Tolkein trilogy to understand how the separate stories make for a whole. Now that I have that knowledge, I can go back at my leisure and read only the parts I want to read. That would be a lot harder for someone unfamiliar with Tolkein’s work.

Six More Weeks of Winter?!

So Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this morning, over there on Gobbler's Knob. I have only one thing to say about that:

Tax Time

Lewis Tully here. I'm excited it's tax time, because that means a lot of extra work and maybe a little extra money and I can throw parties and write them off as a promotional expense, which is why I invite clients instead of friends. You havin' a good time, Norm?

Anyway, my friend Mister Fweem here does his own taxes which you shouldn't do. He's a little confused this year of course because he thought he read somewhere that some tax papers were going to be late this year due to the economic crisis and all the buyouts and mergers and such. Probably because the guy who has to keep all those records got laid off and nobody knows where it all went after the offices merged and they're having to recreate it all from scratch which they can't do because they just figured out that the people kepeing the records kept them all in crayon on the backs of takeout menus from local Chinese restaurants and the wax ran and melted a bit because they slept on the records. That was a long sentence. And I've lost my train of thought on this so I'd better go take some salicyclic acid, which I buy in the generic, 500 a bottle, which is good financial sense.