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As the Washington Post reports that McCain’s chief of vetting only interviewed Sarah Palin the day before she was tapped as vice president, I wonder whether McCain’s maverick nature has bit him too hard.  The disadvantage to being a maverick is you forge your own path – the one that others haven’t seen, or if they’ve seen it, have viewed it as too hard, too dangerous, or just unwise.  I happen to view this choice as just plain unwise, as spur of the moment, as foolhardy.  I’m female, I’m Christian, I’m what some would argue as middle class (hey, we make less than $5 mil a year, anyway), and I was an undecided voter.  Until he picked Palin, that is.  He had multiple women on his advisory team who would have made better picks (Whitman being my preference over Fiorino).  There are multiple women senators, other women governors, current women Cabinet officers: any of which I’d have looked at more seriously than Palin.  A relatively rookie governor from Alaska, which could hardly be described as a state wrestling with most of the same issues as others, whose previous experience was as a mayor of a 9000 person town.  My university has a bigger population than her town did, and as much as I respected Dr. Hrabowski as a leader, my veep choice he wouldn’t be.

McCain’s choice demonstrates his inability to do several things: listen to his vetting team, select people appropriate to accomplish his vision, and convince the rest of us of his choice.  All of those I see as key markers of him, not just of her.   I’ve seen various comments that suggest the Dems put their inexperienced candidate at the top of the ticket, and the Republicans at the bottom.  But what I’m seeing indicates that the Dems seem to have made a wiser pick for veep, which makes me much comfortable with their TOP of the ticket than does the Republican pick.

And by the way, for those in the Christian right who are applauding their issues coming front and center: when the candidate is only there to front those issues, and not any others that the American people cares about, it just yet again separates Christians from the concerns of the rest of America.  I agree that (some of the) Christian right concerns deserve far more discussion and focus;  I just don’t think they are the exclusive issues for the American populace, and I’m concerned to see Christians cast yet again as way outside of the fray.  We are called to do God’s work in the world.  That only works if we’re involved IN the world, as was Paul and the apostles, not trying to stand completely outside of it.

I don’t see McCain recovering from this, in my personal selection process.  I had been undecided: both candidates had their plusses and minuses.  But now I see myself needing to vote against McCain, against what I see as a pandering selection, trying to please both women and the conservative Christian right with one candidate who covers all the check boxes.  Except for the ones that would cause me to see her as viable to fill the role of Vice President, to have some ability to step into the highest office in the land should that become necessary.  And that is a horrible mark against the man who would like me to check his name in the ballot in November.

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I just asked Cameron to put his Daddy’s shoes away.  He did – he’s a good little helper.  And then I stopped to think about what he’d just had to understand and figure out, and just how amazing it is that our brains put these pieces together.

First, you need to know that Daddy’s shoes were in amongst several other pairs of shoes in a group near the front door.  Our family tends to do a good job of taking shoes off when we come in; we’re not as good about putting those shoes away, so there were at least four pairs collected there.  So Cameron had to sort out a few things: one, which items in the room were shoes, which were Daddy’s shoes, and then grab just those two.  (He did, and then commented ‘Heavy’.)

Then I realized he had to figure out where to put them.  I hadn’t told him where Daddy’s shoes were to go, just “away”.  He parsed that to mean, take them down the hall, and put them in Daddy’s room.  Taking a quick peek, he not only put them in Daddy’s room, he put them in Daddy’s closet, and even on Daddy’s side of the closet.

I got into computer programming because I wanted to teach computers how to think.  I’ve now spent some 15 or so years in the profession, and no program I’ve ever written intuited nearly as much as my not-yet two year old putting his Daddy’s shoes away for his Mommy.  “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made” – Psalm 139:14

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Sitting here, waiting for laundry, packing for camping.  Discovered an amazing food/beer pairing this evening: Fordham‘s Summer Forecast seasonal beer (“sunny, hazy, with a chance of raspberry”) and a pink snowball cupcake (discussion of the delights of pink snowball cupcakes here, though mine were Walmart knock-offs).  Grownup bed-time snack delight.

Confession: I had another pink snowball after the first one, so delicious when paired with the beer.  It didn’t taste as good on its own tonight, though I think that’s just a statement of how good that pairing was, as I’ve enjoyed the beer on its own before.

Second confession: I would love to go to the Great Grapes Festival in Annapolis next weekend.  Taste a little wine, check out a few food demonstrations, listen to some music.  I haven’t disclosed that confession to my husband, which means this is something of an unfair check to see whether he reads my blog.

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Yesterday was our ten year anniversary.  My mother-in-law graciously offered to watch the kids so that we could go out for dinner, which was both a wonderful meal and a wonderful date.  (Knew there were a lot of reasons I married him: marrying into his family was actually one of the things I thought was pretty cool at the time, and have only been convinced more and more of over the years.)  I know some folks make a HUGE deal about ten years, but I was pretty torn about how to handle it.

See, the thing is, we love each other each and every day.  I love the life we’ve built.  I got to see Jason really enjoying bouncing around the church on Thursday night, leading the kids in the VBS parents’ night.  I get to wake up next to him, or see him rock our little guy, or dance around with our girls, or enjoy him geek out about which Linux flavor to install on our home systems.  (MY answer: whichever one has a UI which lets me find the ‘Switch User’ button quickly, and whichever one doesn’t barf on Samba or connecting to our home printer.)  We’ve been through thinking we couldn’t have kids, to having 3 kids (!), through two bouts with cancer, each with two associated surgeries.  We’ve gone places, and done things, and still have lots of places to go and things to do.

So, the upshot is, I look at ten as, interesting.  Not wow.  Not amazing.  Just, interesting – hey, we’re ten years older than when this all got started.  But it’s not monumental, in the same way that getting to something you didn’t think could happen is monumental, or working through something hard and then getting there is monumental.  This, this is just – hey, it’s been ten years already!  Boy, hope we’ve got lots more than that left, because it’s sure been good so far.

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We’re in the midst of a home renovation project.  Essentially, we decided that it made more sense to add a little bit more elbow room to our current house than to increase and reset our mortgage payment.  We’re pretty happy with the crew that we chose to do the work – they’re folks we knew already through church who happen to have a home renovation company.  But we’re now slightly over our original schedule’s end-date, with likely another couple of weeks of work left to go.  We’ve been without a kitchen for weeks now and have subsisted on whatever we can cook in the microwave or on a hot plate or on the grill.  Consider your life without an oven, a stove, or a dishwasher.  I’m dreaming of baked goods, and Jason swears that the first week where the oven’s in play, we’re going to roast a different cut of meat every night.   Ham, chicken, duck, …  heck, if there’s a way to roast tofu, I think it’ll be in our oven that week.

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Kudos to Monica Hesse for structuring her article on using Google Trends (about link here) to investigate community values such that she got to end with the closer:

“Using Google Trends to ascertain community standards? Well, that’s just comparing apples and orgies.”

Delicious.

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An article link dropped in my in-bin reads “Should Remote Workers Earn More?“.  First reaction: h*** no!  (Note: I haven’t yet read the article yet – will give my reaction/thinking, and then see if the article offers any insights I hadn’t considered.)

Argument 1: Remote workers don’t have the same commuting expenses as do local workers.  Thus their compensation package doesn’t need to cover that cost of going to work.  (Counter argument: but you need to set up a home office, which does cost more.  Some of that may be covered by tax breaks for home offices, I imagine, though I’m no tax expert.)  Still come down on: no, don’t pay remote workers more.

Argument 2: Remote workers don’t have the same office distractions as do local workers, and thus are more productive.  Hmmm….  if that’s true, then that better performance would be rewarded by greater pay, regardless of the locale.  But no ipso facto relationship: if it is an effect, then better pay should be granted, but until said effect is indicated, no better pay.

Argument 3: The local office doesn’t have to pay for the cost of the office space of the worker, and thus that worker is cheaper, in terms of overhead expenses.  Ergo, the company can pay more for the remote worker.  One, that logic only works if a significant portion of your labor force works from home: no one can shift their expense structure that much for one worker being in or out of the office.  Two, so what?  If it costs me less as a company to utilize you, that doesn’t mean that you get the money.  It may mean you get more opportunities to work, because my profit rate for you is higher, but that doesn’t mean I have to share it with you.

Argument 4:  Hey, working from home is less burdensome for the employee…  It’s a perk (no commute, no dress code, flexibility in hours), that ought to be considered as part of the total compensation package.  By that logic, the remote worker should actually get paid _less_.  If one perk goes up, and that employee is comparable to other employees, the pay package ought to go down.

All arguments, before reading the article, still lead me to the “employees might be willing to take a pay cut to work from home” rather than “employees should get a pay raise to work from home”.  (Note: I could only intermittently work from home, as I have 3 kids at home: productivity with a 2 year old running around just isn’t high on any sustained basis.)

Aha: the article uses the term “remote worker” to mean the guy who works a regular day job, and then is expected to bring work home at night.  The argument against paying these folks more is that “Show me one employee who doesn’t waste time at work,” the Colorado-based author said. “I see so much abuse of working hours by employees—personal phone calls, socializing, checking eBay listings, booking personal travel, etc.—that I don’t believe it’s unreasonable for an employer to want a bit of work on personal hours.“.  Hmmmm….  isn’t that more of a cultural/management issue, that unwanted behaviors are occurring on the clock?  That doesn’t mean you get to change the clock, particularly without specific evidence on an individual basis: ok, you took away 2 hours of “my” time, I’m going to take away 2 of yours.  (Sounds like a parenting punishment I’ve used before, actually.) Particularly since in reality it’s more like, OK, you may have taken away some amount of hours of”my” time, so I now have carte blanche to require additional hours of yours.

Note that I’m one of those sick twisted individuals who has a need to keep abreast of the field, checks her email constantly, and would probably be very addicted to a Crackberry, were I to have one.  So I’m a remote worker, just by nature.  But I do it for me, for my own twisted personality deficiencies.  I feel very strongly that I don’t “owe” that to my employer, and were an employer to ever indicate that I owed it to them in any large measure, I’d indicate that there is no compensation package large enough to cover such an agreement.  Folks quibble over vacation time in compensation packages, but allow employment overage to eat into just plain ol’ life time.

So to bring it full circle, using their definition of “remote worker”, yes, remote workers should EITHER be paid more, or work less at work.  Either way to solve the equation works for me.  But if remote workers are required to work more, over and above, just at home rather than at work, then they should definitely be paid more.  They should assess the likely hours burden over the year, and use that times their approximate hourly rate to determine what they should be compensated.

These kinds of opinions make me unpopular with services companies.  One day, when I have my own company, this post may come back to bite me when I’m older/wiser/burdened by realities of business, rather than just the philosophies of business.  I hope I hold true to my statements.

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Very nice post on Brazen Careerist entitled ‘Seven Reasons why graduate school is outdated‘.  I’d like to add to her comments with a few items as to why I believe grad school isn’t as useful as I once thought.  These thoughts are shaped by both my own experiences in an MBA program (either on hold or abandoned, based on the time demands of it versus family life) and discussions with folks in Masters programs in Computer Science:

* Those who rise to the top seem to do so based on leadership and communication skills, neither of which seem to be to be readily teachable in a classroom setting.  These both seem to be shaped through use, and by watching others who succeed in those skills, rather than reading about Laslow’s hierarchy of needs.

* Reading and experimentation sticks much more when done on your own time, own interests, and in line with where it’d be useful in your day-to-day life.

* Masters programs are just too darned long!  Multiple hours in a single evening in a classroom session, learning something that may or may not stick well (see bullets 1 and 2, above), plus homework, to get the credentials.

* Masters programs have lots of classes that cover things that are “basics” that you may not get to use practically for years, if ever.  I think of accounting classes: the principles are useful, but pragmatically, I’m going to pay an expert in the field to do any serious accounting, rather than spend more hours than necessary on it and likely muck it up based on a change in GAAP or in the tax policy.  I think of compiler design: I’m never going to write a compiler, but somehow this kind of class shows up regularly in masters programs for computer science.

* The classes that are useful, you’re already doing!  If it’s really useful, you’ve likely already had a taste of it, but are forced to spend hours in class hearing lectures on things you’re already at least basically familiar with.  Sure, you’re likely to learn something in the class, particularly by the end of it, to broaden or deepen your understanding, but in the meantime you’re to spend quite a few hours in a chair.  (I think here of OO classes, or database design for comp sci programs, or classes on ethics/social responsibility, or leadership, or marketing for business.)

I’ve come to believe that these credentials do show a certain commitment to improvement and education on the part of the person who possesses them, but they may not show a respect for their own time.  (And if they don’t have a respect for their own time/life, I worry about their respect for anyone else’s time/life!)  I respect the personalmba site, questions asked/answered via LinkedIn, and generally asking questions/watching folks to see who’s succeeding, and just as importantly, what things you believe you shouldn’t copy.

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My sister’s getting married in a few months, so in typical sibling fashion, I want to show up in a stunning dress that’s, oh, a size or two smaller than I am now, with abs of steel to show off in the hotel pool.  That’s probably a bit too lofty a goal, but hey, I’ve been professionally trained on “being the best by any measure” and “bold and audacious goals”.  These are definitely bold and audacious.

In pursuit of those goals, I grabbed a copy of the South Beach Diet and spent two weeks in the first Phase of the diet.  No bread, cereal, rice, etc.  No fruits.  Eat reasonable portions, and multiple snacks.  Outcome listed in the book: up to 8-12 pounds in that first two weeks.  Outcome of mine: 1-2 pounds.  Not very inspiring.  One of my snack breaks, I ate pistachios (up to 30 is a snack serving) and roasted pumpkin seeds.  Closest to eating like a bird I’ve ever done, and end result was 1-2 pounds??!

Beyond South Beach, I’ve also started taking a class at the gym called Group Power twice a week.  It’s an hour of continual weight training to your basic cardio-pumping music.  The class is probably broken up into 6 or so segments, with maybe a minute or so break between them.  You take a bar and then add weight, depending on the basic body area you’re working on (biceps, triceps, back/shoulders, legs, abs, warmup, cooldown).  I always know that I’ve done the class afterwards, and the first time or two I did it, I knew it for up to 3 days afterwards.   I’m also adding some running back into my routine, with hopes of doing the Baltimore half-marathon in October, and then a trail marathon in November.

Becky’s wedding is in September: I’m hoping a few months of watching my diet (more gently than formally), lifting weights in class, and running regularly will give me some noticeable results.  Nothing like a little motivation to kick me up a gear.