Ben Buckman.net

My last post pissed off a lot of people that I didn't necessarily want to piss off. I revised it but the damage had been done. So not being able to unwrite it, and with the benefit of some hindsight (and honest feedback), I'll try to add some belated balance.

The first point I neglected to mention was that this job I just left was obviously a good jumping board. It was on that job that I developed much of the skillset which let me get this new job. I realize now what I didn't then, that management actually sees the launchpad potential of the company as a positive (or at least unavoidable) element. The lack of staying power seemed only a strong negative while I was there; in hindsight, wanting to leave made me open my eyes to the greener pastures.

The other obvious factor I should have taken much more into account was the simple laws of physics governing the whole operation. There was only so much money, only so much that could be done at one time. While I was there, it just seemed a big circular mess: motion was too slow to be perceived, and everything caused everything else, so being frustrated at the end result was reasonable. It was to a degree, but I could have climbed off my horse a few days earlier.

The simple truth is that if I thought I had the ability to run a small business like that myself, I would be. So until I'm doing it myself and doing it better, I should probably keep a tighter lid.

Which brings me to a broader question that I've been thinking about for a while, the balance between openness and constructiveness in these situations. For example, I've long thought the policy (culturally enshrined in the U.S.) of hiding salary information from employees and co-workers mostly benefited employers and hurt employees by preventing upward pressure on wages. Some people don't want to know what their colleagues earn because it'll make them jealous or angry for no good reason. But what if everyone assumes management makes more than they do - wouldn't disclosure actually reduce pressure on wages? A hypothetical employee asking for a raise might not be bitter when it's refused if he or she knows his boss makes less than he's asking for. When that information is hidden, however, it's reasonable to assume the motive is a desire to prevent everyone asking for a raise, so paradoxically, it seems fair to do just that.

Another example of openness hurting, closer to home, is any scenario with someone criticizing their current state (involving other people) in an open forum. The fact is, we can't have open conversations where we air our minds about everything, because we'd hurt too many people. There were times where I saw a glaring problem and possible solution but had nowhere to go with it; I couldn't write anything on this blog because of possible retribution; there were no open channels with the powers-that-be in which airing them could have any positive impact; so it went nowhere. For me, that just caused a lot of pent-up frustration that escaped when there was no longer a risk of retribution. A more "present" person would be able to channel all that positively, I need to get a lot better at that.

[This is an abridged version of the original post.]

Today was my last day at the company I've worked at for the last 13 months.

I was looking the other day at a photo from the company retreat in November '08, two months after I started. Of the 17 people around the table, eight are no longer with the company. That picture speaks a thousand words.

I'd like to write all the reasons why I left (and initially wrote some of them, without naming any names), but I'd like to have some timbers of past bridges still standing in my life, so I'll allow myself to be censored. The truth has consequences which is why it's so often hidden, spun, bullshitted.

The simple version is that I was ready to leave a while ago. This was a consulting shop that billed clients hourly, for work that (as a developer) was usually technically boring and repetitive, that couldn't break out of the short-sighted system in which an hour saved in efficiency was an hour lost in revenue. It was an environment that couldn't financially support out-of-the-box ideas, cutting-edge innovation, long-term value creation. The egos and opacity of management decision making proved the myth that small companies are necessarily flatter and more nimble than large ones. Change was too slow for my patience; lists of action items made months ago were reviewed bi-weekly but never implemented; and I didn't have the political knack or patience to wait for the tide to turn.

In the last weeks, after I told management I was leaving for a better offer (which they didn't try to counter-offer, on the philosophy that unhappy employees are better let go), I was stabbed in the back by a colleague with the support of management, so that poisoned the departure.

In the end, it came down to money. This wasn't a bad place to work, but it wasn't particularly good either. It was just a job, like any other. In business, employees are valued financially at the end of the day, so with an offer from another company for significantly more money, there wasn't much contest. Even if the other job has the same BS as the last one, it's a much better deal. And all indicators suggest it'll be much, much better: it's a big company but half the people I met worked there for a decade or more; management of the department seems highly competent and creative despite, or maybe (imagine!) because of creativity- and innovation-encouraging management from higher up the corporate ladder.

I start on the 12th. I'll have a week to unwind a lot of bad energy that's built up these last few months, and I plan to use it well. I'll be thinking a lot about the best book I've read recently, David Whyte's The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. The world needs more companies that engage people's creative souls, that don't prioritize branded messaging above the truth, that look beyond tomorrow.

I bought T an airbrush for her birthday, and we finally tried it out. My first attempt involved a lot of blue.

I watched the new Star Trek movie the other night. I was a huge trekkie in elementary and middle school (knowing most TNG episode names by heart), didn't like Enterprise much at all, and can barely stand watching the old series on tv now: they're so linear, predictable, simplistic. There's little of the human complexity or thought-provoking plots like that of Battlestar Galactica. The villains are always too cliched, humanity too utopian. The last few movies (Insurrection, Nemesis) failed at the box office, probably because their plot and character styles, true to TNG's late 80s/early 90s roots, only appeals to old-timer fans.

But the new movie promised a break: a scifi film fit for 2009, with the Star Trek spirit but a new style. Bring Star Trek to a Battlestar Galactica fan base. Make the people real enough to make the world they inhabit plausible. A prequel offers so much freedom to work with to make something great.

I was disappointed. The plot was mostly incoherent. Something to do with an alternate timeline, but it was never clear if that alternate was truly alternate or supposed to be the prequel story to the original series. (I guess in the trekkie timeline it fits in between Enterprise and TOS, but that's not really important.) There was some kind of time travel but only half-assed; they went through black holes, time changed, explanation ceased there. Young Spock meets old Spock - Leonard Nimoy, his acting horrible (maybe it always was), their rendezvous more purposeful to old-time sentiment than any plot value. Chris Pine, the actor who played James Kirk, was the only memorable actor, playing the only truly human role.

About halfway through the movie, Kirk lands on an ice planet, walks a little, gets chased by a dinosaur into a cave, where - whaddya know! - he finds Spock, who tells him (and the audience) what the hell is going on in a minute of super-condensed catchup narration. It's like they made half a movie and realized they needed a story.

In another scene in the engine room - a comical factory of tubes and bubbles, the design of which only makes sense for that scene - Scottie gets sucked into one of the tubes, is about to go through a meat grinder (big metal water-grinding blades are required for warp speed, clearly) - and is rescued at the nick of time by an opened hatch which he falls through, wet but unharmed, engines still running. Uh huh.

I think it's fair to say we won't be seeing any new, rethought Star Trek tv series anytime soon.

 My sister recently took this photo of the family dog, Fudgie.

The weather was too cold Wednesday night to be walking outside, so Tristyn and I took the car to find the perfect spot in Boston to watch the fireworks. They were set to launch from the harbor at midnight. We drove around for a while trying to find a good vantage point. Finally at 11:57 or so we drove into a park right on the harbor, with a perfect view, and parked at the gate on the water's edge. On the radio they did the countdown - 5,4,3,2,1 - and we look at the harbor and wait... and wait... and a few minutes later a cop pulls by and tells us on his megaphone, "sorry folks, the fireworks were canceled." Presumably due to the weather. So we came back home.

Yesterday we drove to NY for a family New Years party, and from there to NJ, for a few days with T's family.

After months of working on an overhaul of BenBuck.net in my spare time, it's finally here. Welcome to BenBuckman.net 2.0 Beta.

I've totally rebuilt the site with Drupal. My Twitter feed is now integrated into my blog. The site is no longer hosted on my home server (Vista with a crazy Apache/IIS reverse-proxy patchwork), but is now on a proper Linux virtual machine hosted by SliceHost. (A toast to the hundreds of hours I've spent becoming a de facto sysadmin to get that working!)

There are still kinks to work out in the new site, content to migrate from the old site, and old URL paths to redirect. There is also a whole bunch of additional functionality and content that I want to put here. That's why I'm calling this a beta for now. But waiting for everything to be perfect before launch would have lasted forever, so here it is!

Among the technical challenges involved in the transition was the migration of my blog content from Blogger to Drupal. It proved to be very difficult, and I ended up coding a module, aptly titled Crazy Blogger Migrator, to do it. (I've posted the module here in my new Projects section for public consumption, and will put it on drupal.org soon.)

To my loyal readers asking why I've neglected my blog lately, I promise I'll get back to a regular blogging routine (albeit not as obsessively as during the election campaign, thankfully).

Please send any feedback, comments, suggestions, bug reports, etc to me, ben at benbuck dot net. I hope you enjoy the new format.

The Global Zero website officially launched today. (News at Twitter, MarketWatch, Politico.) EchoDitto developed the site, and I joined the development team about halfway through the project (my first there). The site is built in Drupal, and the technical challenges included translating the whole site across six languages, no small feat. It's pretty awesome to work for a company that's involved in projects like this one. I'm working on another awesome site that'll be launching in the next few months, stay tuned...

A candle dripped onto a little decorative rug I have by the fireplace/liquor cabinet some time ago, and today I finally got around to getting it out. Scraping at it didn't work very well. Instead I used an iron (the clothes-pressing kind) and paper towel. With the iron set to the wool setting so it wouldn't burn the rug, I put a piece of paper towel over the wax and ran the iron over that. The wax quickly melted into the paper towel. Move the paper towel around a little, lift, and voila! the wax is gone from the rug. It takes several applications (each with a different corner of the paper) but after a few minutes there was no wax or mark left at all.