I’ve been hunting the perfect PDA for a while now. I generally carry a phone and a PDA, and worry about dropping one or the other. Women don’t tend to wear the Bat-belt setup that guys do, with a pager, PDA, and phone all strapped to them like either techno bombs or Batman’s equipment belt. We just don’t tend to draw attention to our waist, particularly not with things that stick out from it. And it doesn’t matter if we’re geeks who’re just as excited about the newest toy as the guy in the next office: we’re not going to strap that thing to us and have someone pay close attention to whether we’re quite as tight in the abs as we want to be. The woman thing of wanting to look thin beats out the geek excitement any day. For guys, that whole thin waist thing doesn’t seem to apply for any but the very few. Given the “street cred” a cool geek toy gives to a techie, women need to find an appropriate way to wear their PDA. PDA armcuffs? A mini purse? (A real purse is generally too bulky to pick up and lug into meetings.) More thought required… both on the case and that perfect PDA.

Seen referenced in some Florida government contracting guidelines and documentation:
“Cone of Silence” requirements.

Seems specific to Florida, given my brief check via Google. So, if you’re at a purchasing conference and you see someone wandering around with a shoe to their ear, you can pretty well assume they’re from Florida.

Was amused to discover, as I deleted the latest comment hawking the opportunity to buy generic Viagra, that this particular comment was posted to my rant on comments that hawk products. Brashly obnoxious, rather than merely obnoxious.

I spent a lot of time working with Microsoft Project 2000 this week. I’d count myself as an intermediate user, which means I can deal with resources, tasks, Gantt charts, durations, constraints, and the like, but I don’t yet do much with PERT analysis, cost tracking, earned value analysis, or tracking against a project baseline. After spending literally days working on a project plan for a project that has a defined start date and end date, with an extreme (impossible?) amount of stuff to get done in the middle, here’s my take on how Project could have been more useful.
* more than one undo operation – what other Microsoft app only allows one level of undo????
* better help in figuring out circular dependency relationships
* spell-check that highlights the spelling error, rather than pushing me to a task number – showing me a dialog box that lists a task number does me no good. Take me to the offending task and show me the “error”.
* warnings when data gets truncated in text fields: we overloaded the text1 field to include a description of the task so that we could export a WBS dictionary. Project happily and quietly chopped our text.
* show me what’s going to change down the line, in terms of time lines: given that our end date is fixed, I spent a lot of time trying to get things to line up precisely to end on May 28. I didn’t appreciate it when making a change in March for a task that wasn’t critical path pushed out my schedule in May. Wish I could tell Project – hold the beginning _and_ the end constant.
* a how-do-we-fit-all-these-tasks-in template: My wish – I give the beginning and end date, and you make up a story as to how it will all fit in nicely. Options could include lengthening the work day, adding more people, shortening tasks, hiring nuns to offer prayers on our behalf…

Timeline today:
1:53 – Boss sends an e-mail, saying that the proposal I’ve been working on in the evenings needs to be out, not tomorrow as previously promised to client, but by COB today, as the client will be out of town tomorrow. I don’t get the email until later because…
2:00 – get the toddler finally down for a nap, after 45 minutes (at least) of valiant attempts by the toddler to sleep in her “big girl bed”. ‘Big Girl Bed’ has been the challenge du jour for the past two weeks. Each nap time starts with chants of ‘Big Girl Bed!’, but she’s as yet too excited to actually _sleep_ in the thing. Finally mommy informs toddler that BGB will have to wait until tomorrow, and plops toddler into her crib…
2:15 – get the email from the boss. Clock’s now ticking – toddler will sleep for two hours or less…. email the boss that I’ll have it to him in two hours or less.
2:30 – infant wakes up. Wants to eat. Wants held. Doesn’t want mommy to have two hands on a keyboard.
3:15 – having one-handed typed for a while, finally get infant to snooze in her swing. Finish editing/formatting/recosting proposal. Wrangle with Microsoft Word to get it to stop monkeying with my formatting.
4:00 – talk with boss on phone, explaining why proposal’s cost estimate is as fuzzy as it is. Basically, it’s an R&D project – a more tight cost estimate isn’t possible! Hear baby snoring lightly in swing behind me. Pray she doesn’t wake up during call.
4:15 – get off phone with boss, after letting him know can’t commit to working anymore, due to toddler naptime soon expiring… Doesn’t seem professional to state it that way, but, figure I’m working on my maternity leave time, and reality says that I have to let him know that more progress today will need somebody else’s efforts. Else, my daughter will add text of the following variety to our proposal – “asfwrouasdf;asl1 Big Girl Bed!”.

Breathe sigh of relief that toddler slept through whole thing, and that infant could be coaxed back to sleep. Otherwise, the afternoon would have been even hairier than it already was.

Check here in our photogallery for the view of Tina doing the Mommy/work meld thing.

I’m always excited to see someone put up a comment on a blog entry, but I’ve now been disappointed to see that there’s a new form of spam: comment spam. Rather than send me an e-mail trying to get me to click some link, the spammer puts up a comment on a post. Their comment is full of ridiculous text, seemingly generated to put in as many links to various other commercial sites as possible. Bleah. I can of course delete the comments, but still, yuck. I wonder who they think is el stupido enough to go through those links? Or is it actually some other scheme to try to get those sites up higher in hit counts for search engines due to them being mentioned across various pages? I wonder how sites are targetted for this kind of thing – is there some web crawler out there that just randomly picks blogs and somehow submits comments? Or is some human being paid some amount of money to be web scum and troll the Net for sites to, essentially, graffiti?

If you’ve got some insight, I’m interested. I’d love to somehow turn the scheme around on these folks – become a pain in their electronic neck in the same way that they’re a pain in mine.

Ran across an odd “holiday” called ‘Take Back Your Time Day’. The idea behind it is that on that day (October 24 this year), Americans will already have worked as many hours this year as our Western European colleagues will for the whole year. That’s through a combination of the American proclivity for overtime, as well as the European policy of a month’s worth of vacation time. The site describing the day lists it as just one step in a fight against ‘time famine’ and a struggle to better handle the work/life balance. Americans aren’t balanced in anything, work/life or otherwise. We eat too much. We spend too much. And now, as demonstrated by ‘Take Back Your Time Day’, we whine too much. Want to work European hours? Move to Europe! Or scale back your spending and ambition so that you don’t need to be on the bleeding edge of overtime, whether that requires you to change jobs, companies, or even careers. The idea behind ‘balance’ is that you can’t have it all – to get more of A, then you need to give up some of B. Want the big American salary to live in the big American dream home with the big SUV and the fancy vacations? Then to fit that into your balance, you’re going to have to work a bit more.

I had intended to get some work done this evening… writing a document or two explaining the benefits of doing this or that. But I discovered that I can’t get to my email from work, that the system seems to be down. And I imagine I can only thank the Blaster virus we’re hearing so much about of late. So, thank you, Blaster. You’ve allowed me to enjoy a James Bond movie this evening, rather than sneaking in a few hours of work on a Friday evening. Rather than “Die Another Day”, I’ll “Work Another Day”.

Performance evaluation time has rolled around at my company. Time to take stock of what it is I’ve done well, what it is I’ve done not so well, and how to convince management that the done well was done so well that payroll should hand a little extra money my way. That’s the basic part of the performance evaluation… the harder part is figuring out my goals for next year. They impact both my chances of getting reviewed well next year (and thus keeping my job/getting a chance at another bump up the payscale) and how I actually spend my time in my career. The economy being what it is (lousy for those of us in software development that don’t have some X level of security clearance), the career path weighs more heavily, as it affects marketability both within my company and outside of it. How do my needs/abilities/interests mesh with the market? What can I highlight of my talents that someone will then be willing to hire me for? How do I make myself indispensable to someone, anyone, with signing authority for employment contracts and paychecks? I’m not willing to sell myself out and do something like go back to writing Cobol, but I am interested in at least putting my finger up to the wind to see which way things are blowing.

Dave Thomas (of The Pragmatic Programmer’s and one of the authors of ‘The Pragmatic Programmer’, rather than the deceased founder of Wendy’s) has put together a talk called ‘How to Keep Your Job’. The talk addresses some of the excuses (my word for it, not his) developers give for why they can’t find jobs or get laid off – H1B visas, companies hiring “fresh-outs” and laying off more expensive “graying” developers – and basically says, hey, you need to manage the stuff companies pay you for (your knowledge) in the same way as you would an investment portfolio. Balance risk and reward. Invest regularly. Monitor your investment to determine if you’re still balanced in risk and reward, and if your payback is getting you where you want to go.

All seems to make sense by me. So now I’m weighing what “value” I bring to the market, overall, and I can do to increase my knowledge worth. BEA training? .NET certification? Java Certified Programmer? Begin an MBA (probably not until next fall at the earliest, so not applicable to this eval cycle)? How far am I willing to go geographically within my current company to get exposure to other sides of the biz? How hard am I willing to work?

I’ve got about a week to get those thoughts down, or whatever slice I’m willing to reveal to my employer, on that performance evaluation piece of paper.

Just to give a non-career slant on the whole thing, here’s Po Bronson’s What Should I Do With My Life?. I don’t own a copy of it, but I’ve been drooling over it for a while, based on an interview I heard with him on NPR and a Fast Company article. (There’s apparently an audio segment, as well, but I haven’t listened to it yet.)

I’m cleaning up my computer area, which also serves as the finance center for our household. All receipts go through this area, to get entered into Quicken so that we can reconcile them against our credit card statements. I had a very large of receipts that had been filed, but hadn’t yet been discarded, so I set to work. You can’t just throw out receipts, particularly credit card receipts. As I’m discovering, too many companies put your full credit card number on the receipt. That makes that slip of paper a handy way for someone to snag your credit card number and charge whatever they’d like to your account. (Folks worry about electronic credit card fraud, but the fraud caused by folks just snagging credit card numbers is much greater!)

Why is it that they need my whole credit card number to be printed on the receipt? I don’t need it. I much prefer the receipts that show the last four digits – gives me enough to verify the charge account, without giving anyone else enough to buy themselves a nice stack of stuff at Amazon. Restaurants seem to be the worst offenders here, even though they run credit cards through the same Point of Sale (POS) system as someone at Walmart. Maybe the deal is that that POS system isn’t integrated into their records, so they don’t have a way to cross-reference against any reports they get from the credit card company. So buy a better system! Stop exposing me to the risk of fraud to balance out your protection against fraud/mistakes/communication failure with the credit card company. Someone’s got to have a cost-effective solution out there for businesses. And if there isn’t one, I say let’s create a market for such a solution by lobbying somebody to make it illegal to print out that whole credit card number on a receipt.

(Done my rant… ripping up the rest of my receipts.)