Stormy's Corner

Doing business from a payphone

  IMG_2635 
  Originally uploaded by Storming

This is a picture of me negotiating a contract with a Global 2000 company and several attorneys over a pay phone.

Friday I had it all figured out. I had a five minute meeting in our home town at 8:00, then I'd drop the baby off at day care (20 minute drive), and then do my conference call in the car on my way to the 7 year old's school (another 20 minute drive) where I was helping out with the jogathon. The problem? I left my cell phone at home!

If you are ever looking for pay phones, try looking for liquor stores and convenience stores. And hope you are calling a 1-800 number because they cost 25 cents a minute!

Why $9.95 really works

From Scientific American, Why Things Cost $19.95:

if we see a $20 toaster, we might wonder whether it is worth $19 or $18 or $21; we are thinking in round numbers. But if the starting point is $19.95, the mental measuring stick would look different. We might still think it is wrongly priced, but in our minds we are thinking about nickels and dimes instead of dollars, so a fair comeback might be $19.75 or $19.50.

How to get rid of the hiccups ... in New Orleans

While at the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans, I got the hiccups. We happened to be passing a witchcraft/voodoo type shop and someone jokingly said, "You should see if they have something for hiccups!" So we went on in and met the rudest woman I've talked to in quite a long time. She said:

No, I don't have anything for hiccups. Lemon and bitters - everyone knows that!

So we went to the bar next door, asked for lemon and bitters. The bartender took a slice of lemon, added a few drops of bitters and some sugar and handed it to me. Five seconds later, the hiccups were gone!

Bitters are 45% alcohol so use with caution - it only took a splash on the lemon.

Eat breakfast, have boys

According to this study eating lots, eating varied foods and eating breakfast during pregnancy makes women more likely to have boys. No wonder I had a boy.

Bilingual people have to search for words more often

Anybody who knows me has probably heard me say "now, what's that word I'm looking for?" I seem to say that many times a day - there's a perfect word but I it takes me a few seconds to remember just what word it is. Turns out I do that more often than most because I'm bilingual. Or so says this study: Why you make the same mistake twice. They also say that every time I do that, I'm more likely to do that again as my brain learns to forget. Or something like that.

Meeting someone in jail: what a ridiculous process

The jail visitation process is obviously not made with the visitor's convenience in mind. And definitely not with the detainee's convenience in mind.

I have to meet with someone who's in jail. (Don't ask. It's not anyone I'm close to but I've got to talk to this person.) Actually, I'm not even sure if it's jail or detention center or holding or what. So here's how it works in Larimer County:

• You cannot call someone in jail. You can send them a snail mail letter or you can schedule a visit with them.
• Regardless of when the person is arrested, you can only call to schedule a visit on Tuesdays and Thursdays between 11am-1pm. This is not when you can visit, this is when you can call.
• Visits happen on Wednesdays and Thursdays (scheduled on Tuesday) and on Saturdays and Tuesdays (scheduled on Thursdays). The hours are not clear to me but I was given a choice of 8:30-10:30 on Wednesday morning or some time Thursday evening.
• Each person is allowed one visitor a day.
• It's first come, first serve. I got advice to start calling at two minutes to 11:00 and to keep hitting redial until I got through. I hit redial for 12 minutes and then was on hold for another 15 minutes or so.
• The detainee has no say. You don't have to prove any relationship or business either. So if you want to screw someone in jail, I suppose you could just go see them everyday so they could never see their friends or family.
• You can't carry in anything like paper or pen or pencil. I need a name and phone number so I guess I'll have to memorize it somehow!

So this person was arrested last week. Wednesday is the first time anyone can visit them and it's going to be a stranger. Obviously they must have some cause for the arrest but there's been no trial and no conviction. And yet, they have no freedom. (Note, they haven't posted bail which I believe is an option.)

Moral of the story: don't get arrested. It looks like you lose most of your rights in the process.

UPDATE: You have to go through a metal detector but they turned it off for my group because one of the women had a pace maker. They then took us upstairs in an elevator with no buttons. (The women walkie-talkied to someone who controlled it remotely.) They then dropped us off (and left us) in a room with four windows with stools in front and telephones. The windows faced the main detention center with all the prisoners walking around on the other side. You talk through the telephone to the prisoner on the other side - just like the movies. We were left there for 30 minutes. I finished my business in 30 seconds and I had a few minutes of "oh, no!" when I realized there was no way to call the elevator back or leave the room. After a few minutes of searching I found the intercom button and managed to get them to send the elevator back up for me.

Nobody would have noticed if I'd carried in a pen and paper.

Book review: All God's Children. A great book on street kids.

In college, I volunteered at the Covenant House. Every Thursday from 7-10pm we would drive around the worst parts of Houston handing out sandwiches and juice packs to the homeless and letting them know that any homeless kids were welcome back at the Covenant House.

What impressed me the most was how different the homeless adults were from the teenagers. The adults were what you would expect homeless to be like. Some depressed, some hungry, some listless, some drunk, some too embarrassed to tell their kids they were living on the streets, usually grateful for a sandwich or a clean pair of socks. The kids on the other hand were on an adventure. None of them ever came back to the Covenant House with us. They always had someone to stay with, or a car to ride in to Las Vegas, ... places to go, things to see. And they never seemed hungry. Full of hope. And then I would listen to them talk and be just horrified. I will always remember the conversation between two fifteen year old girls, with babies in their laps, talking about the job they had the night before at a strip club. The way they had been treated was inhumane. (I tried  - unsuccessfully - to get all my friends to avoid strip clubs in Houston forever.) Yet these girls just took it in stride. At the time, I thought it was because they were kids and kids had more hope and maybe more strength and flexibility. After reading Rene Denfeld's book All God's Children: Inside the Dark and Violent World of Street Families, I now think it's because they live in an alternate reality, a completely different culture, than the rest of us. Rene Denfeld describes the completely alien culture of street kids in a way that not only made sense but completely matched what I saw. It was fascinating and terrifying.

As a side note, Rene blames many of the agencies that help street kids for promoting the street kid culture. By providing them food and resources they enable the street life - large groups of kids with nothing to do except hang out and create their own rules. Very harsh and violent rules.

Do you know what you would love most to do?

Finding your dream job is more than just identifying what you love most and finding a job where you do that. I love doing puzzles, would I want to do them eight hours a day, everyday? No way.

Last night at a party I met a woman who loves what she does. (She collects money for charities.) She'd heard a quote that said that 80% of Americans hated their jobs so she was on a mission to have us all identify what we loved to do and figure out a job doing that.

I think you need to:

• Figure out what types of things you love doing.
• Find a job that has meaning to you: a mission, purpose, ... (I suspect this woman didn't used to love asking people for money - but she loves helping out the people that need the money.)
• Make sure you are good at the things you love. This will probably just happen as you get good at anything you work at but you won't be happy if you find a job that you love and adds meaning but you are terrible at.

Would you do it again for free? My LinuxConf Australia keynote

A number of people have asked about my "Would you do it again for free?" presentation. It's a talk about why open source developers started working on open source software and how money and companies have changed that. 

One of the things about the open source community that continues to baffle those non-open source people is, "why do you do it?" Open source developers work on open source software for a number of reasons from scratching an itch to gaining a reputation to building a resume to contributing to a good cause.  The interesting problem comes when money enters into the equation. Research shows that when someone works on something for free (for internal rewards) if you start paying them you replace those internal rewards. Then if you stop paying them, they will stop working on it. Does that hold true for open source software?  Are commercial companies killing open source by paying people to work on it?

You can find the talk in ogg format. (Note the file is about 100MB!) You can also get the audio and the slides. If you know how to convert from ogg to something I can embed in a blog post, please let me know!

I gave this talk again at SCALE and there I added more of "here's why developers work on open source software and here's what they can do to help companies work with them effectively."

As an FYI, I normally post about open source topics on my OpenLogic blog.

Family tree social networking

This family tree application looks really intriguing - you get to enter in your family tree and as your relatives sign up, they can add to it. Not only can you see all the relationships, you can contact them.

While I don't usually worry too much about privacy on the web, this one actually seems a bit scary. All my relatives and their birth places on the web. And anyone can add the info. I could add it for my whole family without them even knowing. Note that you can keep the information private - it's not necessarily published for the whole world.

A good travel story

We were flying home from New Orleans to Denver ... via Washington DC. No amount of begging, pleading or whining could get United to put us on the direct New Orleans to Denver flight. At one point they said for $200 they would put us on the waitlist. So we showed up at the airport and asked to fly standby. They said no, because the direct flight to Denver was 30 minutes after the DC flight. Argh.  But then, while we are sitting at the gate waiting for the DC flight, they page us, and give us vouchers for free roundtrip tickets and confirmed seats on the direct Denver flight! Turns out the Washington DC flight was overbooked and up until then nobody had realized that we would have been happy to help them out with that problem. We would have done it for free but we're delighted with the free ticket vouchers.

Home four hours early with free tickets for our next vacation.

Let people talk about you.

Let people talk about you. It's free advertising.

I saw some cool art in the French Quarter yesterday. I would have posted a picture so that you could see it and maybe decide to buy it. But the artist wouldn't let me take a picture of her art.

Did she think I could copy it? Did she think I could get a good enough picture to frame the picture instead of buying the painting?

Let's just build condos in the airport

Today's USA Today says there are now medical clinics and pharmacies in airports for travelers. Because they spend so much time in the airport and they aren't allowed to carry syringes and the like. While we are at it, why don't we just build some condos, daycares, grocery stores, ... Then we could just go through security once, when we're born - well actually if you're born in the airport hospital, you've already passed security - anyways, we'd live in a security zone. We'd eat with plastic knives and forks, go to the doctor for routine shots because you can't own your own syringes, knit with plastic needles, buy all cosmetics in 2 ounce sizes (no need to store the bigger sizes from Sam's), buy your vegetables precut, no cars because I'm sure you could build a bomb out of one (think of all that money you'd save in gas!), ... but you'd be safe!

Why do working moms always feel guilty?

I am supposed to be excited that I'm going to the French Quarter Festival in New Orleans this weekend. But I'm not. Because right now I'm sitting in a hotel room for the 3rd week in a row and I have another business trip next week. So instead of being excited, I'm feeling guilty that I will only see the kids on Thursday this week. It's a good thing we had a good weekend together last week!

I read this article in the Washington Post today about moms who go back 60% or 80% in order to spend more time with their kids. After a Baby, Full Time or Part?

It all makes me wonder how you even measure it. I suppose what I'm really measuring is how much enjoyment I'm missing. Because I'm sure Caleb is ok and happy. He loves day care and he loves Daddy. And while I'm sure he misses me, when I get home, we always have to reiterate that we don't have cookies for breakfast. (Frank says they never have cookies for breakfast but Caleb lets me know that's what he expects!)

And do Dads feel guilty? Because 99% of them go back full time! (I actually think women are lucky that it's more acceptable for them to work part-time or stay at home.)

Luckily for me, I don't usually travel this much and my normal work/life balance - work Mon-Thurs with an occasional business trip - is one I enjoy and Frank and the kids seem to do alright with.

Studying babies is hard

Life with Caleb, my 19 month old, can be really frustrating these days. We spent 15 minutes listening to babbling screams last night before we figured out he wanted a straw! A straw.

Well, researchers have the same trouble. These researchers were trying to figure out if babies younger than 9 months have the concept of "object permanence" or is it really "out of sight, out of mind." They were stumped because if they put an object under a cloth, if when the removed the cloth, the object was gone, babies would stare longer than if the object was there. Implying that they knew something should still be there. The researchers concluded, very inconclusively, that babies do know the object should be there. They just don't reach for it because then they'd have to figure out that removing the cloth would show the object. Huh? I think researchers know as little about communicating with babies as the rest of us.

Give kids their freedom back

Kids have been losing their freedom - because we're afraid. I'm proud of this woman for letting her nine year old find his own way home on the New York subway. She knew he was ready, he knew he was ready, and she "took the risk". Although judging from the fact that she blogged about it not only did she think everyone else would think it was a big deal, she thought it was a big deal.

iPhone is replacing laptops, not phones

I've been waiting for my cell phone and my laptop to merge. I want something much more powerful than my cell phone but much smaller than my laptop. Devices like the Nokia n80 and the iPhone are coming close. So I found this curious: a new study says that the iPhone is replacing more laptops than cell phones. A third of iPhone owners carry a cell phone too! Many of them Blackberry owners who like the Blackberry keyboard to send email with. The study implied that those iPhone users read the mail on the iPhone and answer it on their Blackberry. That sounds a bit crazy to me - definitely an opportunity for either the iPhone or the Blackberry.

Most importantly for seeing where the iPhone could go - a quarter of iPhone users no longer carry their laptop with them.