The insanity of “shareholder value”

December 29, 2011
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I’ve been saying this for years. Many times those with “MBAs” have told me I’m wrong. Yet, deep down, I knew something was remiss. Something was just absolutely, 100% wrong. Why? Because it made no sense to have a company focus on guessing what their balance sheet was going to look like a year from now when every person I know would not be able to hit a personal target within 1% if they tried. Life just has too many variables. And the total focus on guessing is detrimental, as I’ve personally experienced in certain large firms where senior executives run around “managing expectations” as opposed to pleasing the customer. The irony is that there’s this insane hire/fire mentality that goes with it, removing talent and thus impacting long-term viability. It’s simply maddening. One of the things I liked about Steve Jobs was his total disregard for Wall Street. He focused on pleasing his customers and proved that an insane focus on the consumer was all that really mattered. The pity is that so few have comprehended this fact even while they try to “replicate” Jobs’ success. I’m hoping well abandon the “dumbest idea in the world”, as Welch puts

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Stupid found between chair and keyboard

December 21, 2011
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It seems there’s a lot of “stupid” going about nowadays. No idea if it’s the internet that’s just giving people more voice or if stupid is just becoming more common. Like many people I get a lot of my news online. Thus, I get to read it at my computer and, if something is interesting, save it. I read from various sources, conservative, liberal and neutral alike. It’s best to stay as best informed as possible so as to minimize the likelihood of exacerbating any given bias. But it seems some people are just incapable of doing that. They cling to sites that expound their personal biases. Some of the beliefs are mistaken but harmless, but others are harmful. And the problem is that people with a similar attitude then read the associated articles, sometimes purported to be “news”, thus reinforcing their prejudices or non-scientific beliefs. And because of some of these misguided beliefs people have died — such as those unwilling to take common vaccines, for example. Again, I don’t know the cause — poor education, the long-standing glorification of the idiot, the hate for anyone intelligent, … who knows. But what I do see is that these idiots

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I Wonder…

December 12, 2011
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If the cost associated with complaining is eliminated does that mean that negative reviews become worthless?

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Red Fife and Loaves

December 12, 2011
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My wife has had a persistent skin condition that no amount of attention by dermatologists seems to have helped. After reading Wheat Belly I wondered if the problem wasn’t modern wheat. In way of experimentation, and because our family loves bread so much, I decided to try to create a loaf with a heritage variety of wheat and see what happens. It took a bit of trying, about a month, to get a perfect loaf, but I can now create loaves using Red Fife flour that closely mimic the taste and texture of white loaves, albeit with more nuanced flavours courtesy of the Red Fife. Everyone agrees the Red Fife loaves are, in fact, superior to plain white loaves and also are more filling. A slice or two fills you up nicely. I’ve never found that to be true with white flour based loaves, like baguettes. And my wife’s skin condition? After a month of not eating modern wheat it cleared up. Perhaps Dr. Davis has a point. For the curious, here’s the recipe. The trick is using beer and spelt to morph the loaf into something that has the right taste and a beautiful crumb. Note that the loaf

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Stupidity Truly Knows No Bounds

December 5, 2011
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I’ve been reading about the Chevrolet Volt fire risk the last few days. It seems to me to be the perfect arbiter of intelligence. If you figure the Volt’s risk is high and you’re utterly panicked by the potential of the battery catching fire, you’re an utter moron. The rest of you can continue on with your day. Why do I claim those worrying about the battery are morons? Simple, really. Each test done wherein a fire, sparking or smoke emerged from the battery pack happened many hours, days or even weeks after the crash. The most recent tests performed by the NHTSA and GM have been done on the battery packs by themselves, wherein they have done some very serious damage to them and then waited to see if something amiss happens. It took months of testing before they could replicate a scenario wherein hours, days or weeks later the pack would ignite. To appreciate the type of damage that is being applied to the packs you must read the original NHTSA report wherein they say the car must suffer a serious side impact followed by an impact into a low diameter object, like a rigid pole, followed by

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Thoughts… on plans

November 30, 2011
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I’ve been having discussion regarding plans with some folks recently. It got me thinking and I’ve come to the conclusion that you should keep Eisenhower and Powell’s Axioms in mind, namely: Eisenhower’s Axiom: “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Powell’s Axiom: “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” To this I’d like to add my own: Eugen’s Axiom: “The foundation of a good plan is to rely on those you trust.” It makes the planning quite useful if you know that when the plan becomes obsolete you can move forward with conviction.

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Lasagna Code: Redux

November 25, 2011
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I write here as sort of a pressure release valve. It seems that my little rant on Lasagna Code got some attention. I read through the comments. It seems most get what I’m on about. But I figure I might as well be a bit clearer, in case any of those posters revisit. Yes, I’m against object oriented programming. I’ve been against it for years. I find it an obtuse and bloated way to code. And beyond Smalltalk, I’ve really not found another decent object-oriented language within which to code. This obsession language designers have of wedging an object system into a language “just because” is rather stupid. After all, all objects are is formalized data structures. It’s really that simple. For those that are about to jump up and down and scream they aren’t, I won’t argue because it’s pointless. I’ve used OO since the early 80s, initially in Smalltalk. Later, much to my horror, C++, and then for a brief period with Java — but I refuse to ever touch Java again. Too horrible and, happily, I’m sufficiently old enough to not have to do what I don’t want to do. Python, as I said, is a very

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Baking Adventures: Lemon Tart Cheesecake

November 22, 2011
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Everyone has their own way of relaxing. Some fish, some golf, some play hockey and I, well, I bake. Recently I baked a cheesecake for friends. It seems to have gone over well. They want the recipe. I figure someone else might be interested in it as well, so here it is. It’s actually a combination of two of my favourite desserts: cheesecake and lemon tart. Enjoy.   Lemon Tart Cheesecake Ingredients Crust 250g     Arrowroot cookies (no gluten is fine)1/3 cup    melted, unsalted butter Lemon Custard 7                egg yolks2                whole eggs1 cup         sugar2/3 cup    freshly squeezed lemon juice (use no substitute)1/4 cup    freshly grated lemon zestpinch       salt1/4 cup    unsalted butter (cut into pieces)1/4 cup    heavy cream Filling 1/4 cup    lemon zest750g        softened cream cheese1/2 cup   sugar3              eggs1 tsp        vanilla extract Method Preheat oven to 325F. Prepare a 12″ springform cheesecake pan (preferably non-stick, if not then grease well). Crust In the bowl of a food processor process the cookies until they become crumbs. Place into a bowl and mix with the melted butter. Press into bottom of 12″ cheesecake pan

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Lasagna Code

November 1, 2011
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Anyone who claims to be even remotely versed in computer science knows what “spaghetti code” is. That type of code still sadly exists. But today we also have, for lack of a better term — and sticking to the pasta metaphor — “lasagna code”. Lasagna Code is layer upon layer of abstractions, objects and other meaningless misdirections that result in bloated, hard to maintain code all in the name of “clarity”. It drives me nuts to see how badly some code today is. And then you come across how small Turbo Pascal v3 was, and after comprehending it was a full-blown Pascal compiler, one wonders why applications and compilers today are all so massive. Turbo Pascal v3 was less than 40k. That’s right, 40 thousand bytes. Try to get anything useful today in that small a footprint. Most people can’t even compile “Hello World” in less than a few megabytes courtesy of our object-oriented obsessed programming styles which seem to demand “lines of code” over clarity and “abstractions and objects” over simplicity and elegance. Back when I was starting out in computer science I thought by today we’d be writing a few lines of code to accomplish much. Instead, we

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RIP John McCarthy

October 24, 2011
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The creator of my favourite programming language passed away yesterday. Lisp is, in my view, the best language ever devised. Sadly, too few in the computer industry realize or comprehend this fact. Lisp, and its descendants such as Scheme, are beautifully consistent programming languages wherein the programs and the data are defined identically and as such can be manipulated similarly. This allows one to generate code easily that can then be executed. Most people stare at Lisp-like languages and can’t get past the parentheses. Ironically, most every language uses parentheses of one sort or another. If one does a quick comparison with C, for example, one will quickly realize that Lisp doesn’t have that many more parentheses than does C. And with C, you can’t work in a fully interactive environment wherein you develop your code and test it all in a fully integrated way. Instead, you’re still stuck with the stupid edit-compile-run-debug cycle that made sense when we used punch cards but doesn’t today. Even “modern” languages such as Java are really only prettied up C, though truth be told, I’d rather code in C because it’s powerful and puts the onus on the programmer to do things right

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Musings

A blog of my musings. Some folks find it interesting and so I continue. Hopefully it will remain fairly interesting. At worst, it'll keep me writing orthogonally to my day job.

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