Frank Herbert was wrong

 Life  No Responses »
Nov 292010
 

Frank Herbert, in Dune, wrote:

Fear is the mind-killer
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

I used to really like this quote, but I’m starting to see that in real life, it’s not useful. Or rather, not as useful as it could be. With license, I think the following works much, much better:

Doubt is the mind-killer
Doubt is the little-death that brings total obliteration
I will face my doubt.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the doubt has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

To me “fear” is a subset of doubt. We can doubt without being afraid, but we can’t be afraid without doubting.

In particular I think it’s when we doubt ourselves that we come unstuck the most. Of course, that doesn’t mean people should have a license for arrogance; you might assume that arrogance is the absence of doubt, but I’d suggest it’s actually the narcissistic absence of doubt. Someone who is arrogant is considerably different to someone who can recognise when doubt (and self-doubt) is interfering.

I personally don’t think it’s possible to live without doubt – the same way that it’s not possible to live without happiness or without sorrow. These things are a natural part of what and who we are. The real challenge is being able to accept the doubt – let it teach and offer reserve and discretion when required, but not to let it rule, not to let it govern how we think.

Otherwise it really is the mind-killer, the little-death that brings total obliteration. With this, I think I speak from experience. In 2006 the company I was working for collapsed, and I’d invested so much of myself and my self image in the role I had that it left me depressed and struggling through a miasma for over two years. Ultimately the root of that was self-doubt. I’m not by any means saying I’m fully cured, but what allowed me to come out of the depression and start getting back to normal was recognising just how destructive the self-doubt was.

“I will face my doubt … I will permit it to pass over me and through me … only I will remain.”

 Posted by PMdG at 4:38 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

13 traits of a great consultant

 Life  2 Responses »
Nov 242010
 

There’s a misapprehension that in order to be a successful consultant (regardless of field), you have to be über-intelligent, certified to the hilt and trained to the nth degree. In fact, when I say “misapprehension”, what I actually mean is “nothing could be further from the truth”.

That’s not to say that a great consultant won’t exhibit one or more of the above – but they’re not the core traits of a successful consultant. In order to be a great consultant, you need the following 13 traits. Nothing more, nothing less:

  1. Self managed – You need to be independent, from a management perspective. You shouldn’t need micromanagement, and you should be able to stay on track of your progress in projects/engagements without direct involvement from a project manager.
  2. Passion – You don’t have to be the smartest in your field, you just have to have a passion for it. You also need a passion for the other things in your life, in order to maintain a work/life balance.
  3. Genuine Curiosity – You should be interested in, not scared of new things and new experiences.
  4. Willingness to learn – If you’re not willing to learn new things, you’ll never be a good consultant. Indeed, to consult, you don’t need to be certified, you just need to stay a chapter or two of “the manual” ahead of the person you’re consulting to.
  5. Ability to learn – It doesn’t matter how willing you are to learn if you don’t have the ability to learn. You must be able to acquire a learning focus when necessary, and develop new skills as required.
  6. Patience – Being self managed allows you to work to a deadline. Being patient allows you to work with changing deadlines and people who need your skills.
  7. Persistence – A close cousin of patience is persistence. That’s the ability to remain focused on something despite distractions, and be prepared to work towards a solution despite setbacks that you may encounter along the way. (One might also suggest that it’s about having the life experience to know that you’ll encounter setbacks, and to treat them as learning experiences.)
  8. Integrity – Something many people find most difficult is admitting they’re wrong. As a consultant, you don’t have that luxury. Lacking a personal sense of honour may give you short term gains, but in the long term it will garner you no respect and no repeat customers.
  9. Brilliant searching skills – A mediocre consultant knows some answers, whereas a great consultant knows how to find the answer. Ask yourself this question: “Am I a Google god?” If you answer yes, you have a core trait that a consultant needs.
  10. Extracting order from chaos – Consultants will often face a barrage of data. Up to 99% of it will be irrelevant to the matter at hand. Being able to extract that 1% – being able to pull the little bit of order out of a lot of chaos – is essential.
  11. Solve the problem, don’t answer the question – From an IT perspective, I use this example: an engineer, if asked a question by a customer, will do his or her utmost to answer the question as exactingly as possible. A consultant will look past the direct question and aim to solve the problem that led the customer to ask the question. Or in other words: if it doesn’t have a yes/no answer, no question is asked in isolation.
  12. Communication skills – You don’t need to have achieved the most senior rank in Toastmasters. You don’t need to have become an author. However, you do need to be able to stand up in front of people with minimum notice and talk about a topic you’re comfortable with, answering questions along the way. You equally need to be able to write accurate and readable documentation.
  13. Humility – As a consultant, it’s not your job to be the best; your job is to help others be their best.

There you have it. If you’ve got those skills – or you’re confident you can develop them, you’ll be a great consultant.

 Posted by PMdG at 6:12 pm  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A letter to Deborah O'Neill regarding same sex marriage

 Equal Rights, Life, Morality, Politics  1 Response »
Nov 222010
 

Federal politicians in Australia have been asked by Parliament to poll their electorates to find out the current opinion on same sex marriage. As you can imagine, I have an opinion on this, and here’s what I wrote to my local minister, Deborah O’Neill:

Dear Deborah,

I have been in a same-sex relationship for over 14 years, and I believe it’s well and truly time that the Australian government acted to close down the last of the discrimination between same sex couples and heterosexual couples. I am bitterly disappointed that Julia Gillard believes in maintaining a two tier society in Australia, where people such as myself are treated as second class citizens on the basis of who we fall in love with. The government may wish to claim that this isn’t their intent, but that’s the end result: my relationship is not, nor shall it ever be recognised as valid and equal to a heterosexual relationship until such time as it is named the same way as a heterosexual relationship.

After 14 years, I’m tired of saying that I have a “partner” (which results in people thinking I’m cold, or talking about a business associate), or my “boyfriend” (which results in people thinking I’m talking about someone I’ve known for 3 weeks). It’s a sad reflection on Australian society that we don’t recognise that love is love, regardless of the gender of the people involved in the relationship.

I’m not interested in forcing churches into allowing me to be married in their halls or by their representatives. As a committed atheist, it would be arch hypocrisy for me to want to tie the knot in a church. I want a civil ceremony, but I don’t want it to be called a civil union, or a de facto relationship, or any other weasel term to get around the real word: marriage.

Failing to treat same-sex relationships and name same-sex relationships using the same terms as heterosexual relationships kowtows to entrenched bigotry from a small portion of society, and encourages people to dismiss same-sex relationships as somehow less than the heterosexual versions. This happens not only at a personal level, but at all levels of our interaction in society. (It has only been in the last couple of years after all that Medicare law has been adjusted to recognise same sex relationships.) Companies use this entrenched bigotry to belittle same sex relationships in comparison to heterosexual relationships. Case in point: earlier this year a person I know applied for life insurance with CommInsure, and had been in a same-sex relationship for over 20 years. Their response? A vile, mean spirited blood test for HIV, and a survey to make sure that he hadn’t, for instance, had unprotected sex with prostitutes, been sharing needles with prostitutes, etc. This was disgusting in the extreme, and something that the insurance company would not have subjected a heterosexual couple to, even if they had been married for just a single day. (For photographic evidence of the despicable questions posed by CommInsure, refer to http://unsane.info/wordpress/?p=405).

The Central Coast has a religious fundamentalist presence, but I do not believe they actually represent a majority of opinion, just simply a vocal minority. I am certain they will indeed be very vocal in petitioning you to report that the Central Coast is adamantly opposed to such “immorality” as same sex relationships. I suggest however you listen to the quiet majority, those who believe that the real immorality occurring in Australia at the moment is a government sponsored two-tier society.

I am tired of living in a country where I’m treated as a second class citizen, denied equal rights and offered up to the bogans and the bigots as a sacrificial offering in terms of prejudice just to win a few marginal electorates. It’s time the politicians in Australia actually led, rather than pandering to vocal minorities who are lacking moral direction.

Yours faithfully,

Preston de Guise.

 Posted by PMdG at 6:32 pm  Tagged with: ,

Are blades worth it?

 Technical  4 Responses »
Nov 102010
 

I’d like to understand why companies feel that blade servers are worthwhile investments. I recognise the arguments for higher density computing within standard rack enclosures, and moving “profiles” between enclosures, etc. These arguments aren’t much different from those used to justify virtualisation – and for what it’s worth, I completely agree with those arguments.

Where I get puzzled with blades though is that I see it as being essentially virtualisation at the wrong layer – at a deeper hardware layer than VMware other hypervisor style virtualisation. Looking at say, ESX as an example, we virtualise on a host and then provide a very generic hardware profile to the guests, and the guests share the hardware resources available.

Blades are essentially the same – but rather the sharing to me seems subtly different. Or to be more precise, the sharing seems to be less isolated. A blade can cock up and cause issues with other blades or the blade chassis – NIC, FC. Within a virtualised environment, this is much more difficult, from my observation at least. I can’t remember the last time I saw a single VM encounter such a significant issue that it took out an entire ESX server in an uncontrolled way.

Have I seen blades and blade servers do that? Yes.

So here are my general questions:

(a) Are blade systems as “reliable” as virtualisation systems?

(b) Other than providing a higher compute density, do blade servers provide more functionality than virtualisation systems?

(c) For users of blade servers – would you consider them to be more or less reliable than server virtualisation?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not dissing blade servers, and I remain open-minded about them. But I need to understand them a little better than I currently do, and I’m open to having experts cite some “killer” examples of why my concerns are unfounded.

 Posted by PMdG at 7:18 pm  Tagged with: , , ,

Show me the coffee

 Life, Travel  No Responses »
Nov 082010
 

Periodically I need to travel for work – either in visiting head office in Auckland, or – more recently – to other cities for customer work. As time goes on and I push toward our goal of moving to Melbourne, travel is probably going to re-enter my work life as a more regular event.

Yet, as the old cliché goes, the more things change, the more they stay they same. So that means there’s a few ‘little’ things that are common for travel that I really notice – well, on top of the actual missing of loved ones.

Taken individually, you might think that any of these little things are completely trivial, and so it may seem like I’m griping, but what I’m trying to point out is that with a few creature comforts, travel could be much less of a hassle.

The Flying

Start with flights. There’s four things in particular I find wrong with flying.

Switching off electronic equipment prior to take off and landing

Having to switch off electronic equipment (that has been set to flight mode) for take off and landing is damn annoying. These days I tend not to travel with books or magazines – just my iPad. The damn thing has WiFi turned off, has no 3G, and there’s no way you can tell me that a plane can’t be engineered to be robust enough to sustain passengers using non-transmitting radio devices for take off and landing if they can handle them for actual travel. If it can’t be, I don’t want to fly any more. It’s like offices that have dinky little signs saying “please switch off your mobile phone before entering, your signal will interfere with our computers”. No, the real answer is that your IT staff are dickheads and should be fired for spreading that shit – or your procurement department are tightwads and deserve to be fired for choosing economy over functionality. A mobile phone – a bunch of mobile phones – should not affect a bunch of monitors, PCs or thin clients and keyboards. Similarly, a bunch of devices with “flight mode” enabled should not impact a plane’s functioning during take-off and landing.

So I usually spend the first 10 and last 20 minutes of a flight bored shitless. No Qantas, Air New Zealand, etc., I’m not interested in reading your shitty inflight magazine that’s little more than a collection of ads. I want to keep reading the book on my iPad, or playing the game on my iPad, or listening to my music.

Boarding Order

This isn’t rocket science. Start boarding from the back of the bloody plane, in groups of 10 rows, and if anyone tries to board out of order, make them stand to the side and wait their turn.

Leave your seat in the upright position

Don’t be a jerk. There’s someone travelling behind you in economy. Do you think they want the tray table jammed into their face mid-way through a meal just because you can snooze on a plane? You know what I do in those rare instances where I want to try to sleep on a plane? I actually turn around and warn the person behind me I’d like to put my seat back and give them the option to say no.

Cabin crew and on-board luggage

It’s bullshit that cabin crew and paying customers have to share on-board luggage space. It’s bullshit for the paying customers, and it’s equally bullshit for the cabin crew. Give them a separate area to stash their junk so that they feel they’re working in a good environment, and so that we, the paying customers, get what we’re paying for.

The Staying

Once you’ve arrived at your destination – and I mean your hotel, not just at the end airport – you have the next round of inconveniences.

Coffee

I thought I’d been really smart this time. I booked a room with a kitchenette, and was going to take my Briki and my Greek coffee, and I’d have been able to make myself decent coffee at the drop of a hat. Sadly, I booked the wrong sort of kitchenette, and didn’t end up with a hotplate – just a microwave.

Thankfully I worked this out in advance of arriving (I just couldn’t change the booking), so bought some “coffee bags” – they’re by Robert Timms; hardly stellar, but better than granulated faeces packaged as “instant coffee”.

Yes, I’m a coffee snob. Between an espresso machine and Greek coffee at home, I love my coffee. In fact, more than love it, I need my coffee of a morning.

Honestly, how hard could it be for hotels to provide better coffee facilities in guest rooms these days? Plunger coffee at least should be provided free and replenished daily. Even better, have an option to pay an extra $5 a day for one of those nasty little Nespresso machines for the room. Yeah, I know the espressos from those pods are at best “drinkable”, but they are for the most part real coffee.

Putting instant coffee in a guest room is like saying, “Hi there. We hate you. We hope you have a shit stay. Here, drink some swill.”

Or it’d be like giving someone a free Starbucks voucher. Either way it still shows a remarkable lack of respect to the person and the notion of coffee.

Ironing

At home I have an iron that I paid $120 for, 10 years ago. The average person scoffed at me when I spent that much on an iron, but then again, the average person has since gone through 5 or more $30 irons, so I think I’m doing pretty good, investment wise.

Hotels could learn from this. Honestly, I could get more wrinkles out of clothes using a warm coffee cup than I could with most hotel irons I’ve used. They’re cheap, they’re light, they’re nasty, and they leave you with more wrinkles than an octogenarian. And lately I’ve been striking a run of irons that just don’t even work. That’s just plain annoying.

Similarly, what is it with hotel ironing boards? I know they get used a lot, but goodness, buying decent ones or at least regularly replacing ones that will fall apart if a budgie sneezes on it won’t break the budget.

And don’t get me started on those half-size boards that you’re meant to sit on a table or a desk. I challenge anyone in a hotel amenities procurement job to iron a half dozen business shirts using one of those boards, then go out and buy real ironing boards for all the rooms.

Pay TV

Don’t bullshit me. You can’t offer Fox Sports 1, Fox Sports 2, Fox Sports 3 and Fox News and tell me that you provide Foxtel/Pay TV. That’s not Pay TV, that’s a little piece of torture rolled up into 4 channels. That’s why I travel with my own media these days.

Monitor

You know, a really good hotel would offer loan monitors for business users. Nothing big – maybe just 1440×900, or even a bit smaller; that way, people who usually have their laptops plugged into another screen for additional screen real estate could sit and work of an evening and not feel like their being squeezed into a really tiny little box…

 Posted by PMdG at 7:57 am  Tagged with: , , , , , ,
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