Good Enough is NOT Good Enough

Since the dawn of mankind, the popular perception of the status quo for almost every single "technological" thing was "it works fine, why change it?"  They said that about the chariot, the map of the heavens/planets/sun, the catapult, the bow and arrow, the wagon, the castle and moat, the front-loading single-shot pistol and rifle, Sulpha drugs, leeches, slavery, battleships, Model T cars, steam engines.  Remember Roger Bannister?  Yeah, EVERY single "expert" and physician of his time swore on a truckload of Bibles that any human who broke the 4 minute mile would die.  The human body simply couldn't achieve that goal.


Then someone stuck their neck out and said "fuck that!".  I'm sorry if that offends you, but that's essentially what they said/did.  And for doing that they were ridiculed, shunned, banished, jailed and even killed.  They dared to disagree with the Status Quo; the masses; the majority.  Nearly every single one of the people the broke those de facto "rules" or "limits" endured mockery throughout their efforts to break the barrier they set out to overcome.  Some never saw recognition, as they died before the "masses" woke up and realized that they had indeed done something incredibly helpful or history-changing for mankind.

Remember the story of Thomas Watson Sr. and Thomas Watson Jr.?  The infamous head of IBM who insisted a "personal computer" was a dumb idea and would never be practical.  Junior waited until his turn came up and then he seized upon the moment to introduce the "IBM personal computer".  Same thing for HP and Atari and Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.  


So, when I look around at the stupid crap we just "live with" and pay little attention to, saying things like "it's worked for years/decades, why change it?" I want to shake my head in disbelief that we've given up.  A bar of soap?  A toothbrush.  Deoderant.  Frying pans.  Toasters (have they ever been improved?  it's long overdue), Roofing Technology, Door ways.  A coffee cup.  Software.  Computers.  Aircraft. Surgical Procedures. Medicine.  Cancer Treatments.  Education systems. Weapons technology. Network routing and throughput.  Movies.  Music. Art.  Food. The list goes on and on.


Never say "good enough"!  Anything you point at can be improved upon.  Anything.  Maybe not in our lifetime.  Maybe not until future discoveries lead to secondary potentials to be realized.  But they will happen.  The longer we stand still, point and say "it's fine as-is" the longer it will take to make it better.


Most people look at Cancer treatment and say "wow, look how far they've come.", until their 5 year old child is diagnosed with Cancer.  Then it quickly becomes "when will it be cured?" and "why can't we make faster progress?"  Aircraft are just fine until the next crash investigation reveals a design flaw.  Music is just fine until you hear that one new song that grabs your attention and makes you ask "who is that?!"  Same for art, movies and food by the way.  And software?  In 2004 there was no Facebook.  There was no Twitter, FourSquare, Yelp or UrbanSpoon either.  In 2000 there wasn't any Google either.  No VMware.  All the "smart" phones were bulky, limited and boring.  Are you old enough to remember the first laptops?  The first microwave ovens?  The first video tape recorders?  The first tablet prototypes in the 1990s?  Today those things seem like steam engines.  Remember when car companies swore air bags, even seat belts, were a complete waste of time?   Remember when they thought stomach ulcers were just bad luck and you had to live with them?


Good enough is NOT good enough.  Ever.

Reminding Yourself That Not Every Problem has a Solution

Every so often, it does the mind good to learn about, or experience a situation which demonstrates unsolvable problems.  I think this is important in that it reminds us that we are not all-powerful.  There are problems that the smartest humans on this planet, past and present, have not been able to make a dent in.  Some are sad, some are curious, some are tragic.  Ask anyone who's experience combat firsthand.  Ask anyone who works in law enforcement or the fire department.  Ask an ER doctor.  Logic oftens runs for the nearest door before anyone notices it's gone.

Two documentaries I've watched in the past few months that have brought this home to me are:

Restrepo

Which Way Home

I highly recommend both of these.  Grab a box of tissues and tell all your macho guy friends that you're sick and can't come out to play.  I would caution you not to watch them both back-to-back.  I would suggest you watch something funny in between, and probably afterwards as well.

Correcting Myself. Again.

I ran my mouth about the comparisons between the movie "The Social Network" and the Ben Mezrich book "The Accidental Billionaires" from which the screenplay was based.  Ok, I still stand behind my mini-rant about the irritating hand-job sucking up the author spewed out in the early part of the book (the part where he calls Zuck a "god" and saying he has "god-like powers" and so on). 

But aside from that, the rest of the book does in fact get better as you move on towards the end.  So, where I originally gave it a thumbs-down, I would now give it a thumbs-up.  If you're at all, even marginally, interested in this subject matter, this is worth reading.  Ok, I said it.  I'm sorry I crapped on the book.  Are you happy now?  Here's some bonus perspectives from yours truly…

 

Some interesting deviations between the screenplay and book:

• Sean Parker didn't suggest dropping "The" from "TheFaceBook" until an entirely different "scene" much later on.
• Sean Parker didn't knock on Mark's door when he first moved into the party house in Palo Alto.  Sean was moving furniture for his girlfriend when Mark and his friends walked up from down the street.  Their houses weren't directly opposite of each others, they were down the street but very close.
• The movie makes no mention of project WireHog.
• In the movie, Mark forgets to pick up Eduardo from the airport and he has to get a taxi in the rain.  In the book, Mark picks Eduardo up at the airport in a junker car and they talk on the way to the house, but it was mostly Eduardo talking and Mark nodding.
• The movie skips over the period when all the VC's and potential buyers came around to hound them and wine and dine them in order to get them to sell Facebook.
• The movie doesn't make much mention of Dustin and Andrew.
• In the movie, Eduardo's psycho girlfriend Kelly burns her scarf while Eduardo is on the phone with Mark.  In the book he gets a call while he's in transit from California where Kelly is "sobbing" and explaining how she set fire to the coat he bought her and it almost burned the house down and the Fire Dept had to put it out.

The Social Network vs. the Book

I saw the Social Network a few months ago, and I liked it very much.  I found it to be very entertaining.  The pace is just right.  The dialog is assembled well.  The scenes don't leave you snoring for the most part.  But then again: That's just my stupid opinion.

Then I read the book from which it was derived: "The Accidental Billionaires".  It too is entertaining. But some of the hyperbole and anecdotal comments the author tosses around made my eyes roll.  For example, there are some sentences in the beginning, when he describes the process by which Zuck pilfers the photo libraries of each of the campus house servers. 

As he hits each one, he lays it on thick as though Zuck is some uber-God that possesses magical superior powers unknown to mortal men.  Um, hello?  wget and grep have been around for decades and I've known literally dozens of genius hackers that could have accomplished that basic feat with less effort.  Come to think of it: Mitnick would have probably figured out a way to get the houses to send it to him without having to write any code at all.  Of course, Mitnick possesses "social engineering" skills, rather than "social networking programming" skills, but whatever.  That part of the book almost made me stop reading, but I persevered and somehow made it through.

Could I have done what Zuck did back in the era mentioned in the book?  Probably not.  I had left college (and UNIX) life behind when I graduated in 1999.  My life since 2000 was (and still is) mostly Microsoft oriented.  But if I had stayed immersed in the world of vi, emacs, pico, grep, regex, wget and apache/php, who knows.  I do know this: there were hundreds of people around at that time that could have easily done what the author paints to be a picture of God-like powers.

But what really matters is timing and luck.  Mark was at the right place, at the right time and struck while the iron was hot.  That's all that matters in the business world.  The more you read books like Myths of Innovation and What Technology Wants, the more you'll realize that few ideas are truly unique.  Most every "innovation" can be traced to many simultaneous discoveries, but only one was lucky or persistent enough to follow through with it.

So, if I had to provide a comparative rating to the book versus the movie, I would have to score a win for the movie in this case.  Usually the screenplay trims out the best details of whatever book it comes from, but in this case it cleaned it up.

What I've Accomplished This Week

• Packaged Office 2010 using OCT and Config.XML modification to deploy with SCCM
• Wrote scripts to customize MED-V client deployments via SCCM
• Wrote scripts to customize MED-V client workspace management features
• Worked on integrating SCCM with a web interface and SQL
• Installed and testing IE9 RC, Chrome 11, and Firefox 4
• Testing the IE9 Developer Tool (F12) Network Trace toolset (very nice!)
• Updated my Google Chromebook CR-48 to the Dev Channel (0.10.x)
• Finished reading a few books:
• Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol"
• Laura Hilldebrand's "Unbroken" (very good!)
• Started reading "The Accidental Billionaires"
• Reading samples of several books to decide on which to buy next:
• Don Rumsfeld: "Known and Unknown"
• Dan Brown: "Digital Fortress"
• a few others
• Watched "The Town"
• Ironed four shirts
• Polished one pair of brown shoes
• Ran my first full mile, without a break, since I was in my 20's - just last night!

Documentaries

I love movies.  Probably as much as I love music.  My tastes are varied on both sides as well.  But one of my favorite categories or genres of movies is the Documentary.  I love a good documentary.  And it's actually difficult to find a bad documentary.  You might disagree with the message being conveyed, or the manner by which a rationale is constructed, but even so, in most cases, the quality of the filming itself is usually worth watching.  More than I can say about a lot of over-priced shit at the box office these days.

My favorite documentaries right now are (envelope please?…):

• Restrepo
• God Grew Tired of Us
• Blood Into Wine
• Encounters At The End Of The World
• The Smartest Guys in the Room
• Waiting for Superman
• Supersize Me
• Bigger, Stronger, Faster

Greetings

This Should Cheer You Up for a While

I'll be immersed in a few projects over the next week or so, so my posts may become few until I get past that hurdle.  Enjoy!

Contrasts and Dichotomies

Everyone knows we're still in the depths of a Recession.  Some indicators show improvement, some show worsening, some show no change at all.  The aggregate indicators seem to converge on nothing really changing for anyone but a few small segments of our population (mostly the wealthiest and the poorest).  Here's some interesting juxtaposed figures to make you scratch your head:

Video Game Sales	Way Up	source: Reuters
Movie Box Office Revenue	Way Up	source: IMdB
Housing Prices	Continue to Fall	source: IRS
Commercial Real Estate Leases	Continue to Fall	source: Reuters
Mortgage Rates	Continue to Fall	source: Reuters
Employment	Steady at 10 percent	source: US BLS www.bls.gov
Number of Uninsured Americans	Continues to Rise	source: US CDC
U.S. Military Casualties Rate resulting from major limb damage	Relatively unchanged (since Vietnam conflict)	source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18176164
U.S. Highway Vehicle Fatalities	Down	source: NHTSA/FARS
Tourism Inbound to U.S	UP	source: US DOC

Doing the numbers so you don't have to.

Zuckered?

I just saw “The Social Network”.  Great movie, even if a bit biased against Mark.  He’s got to be feeling a little awkward, unless of course, he really is as OCD and schizophrenic as they make him to be in the movie.  I also thought Shawn’s part (played by Justin Timberlake) was going to be a more light-hearted character.  He was. At first anyway.  Say what you want, but Justin has acting chops.  Not a DeNiro, but he still has talent.  It’s funny how some people’s PR gets in the way of evaluating them on their true merits.

I’ve dropped off of Facebook once, for a year in 2007, after almost two years of failing to convince any of my friends, coworkers or family to take their eyes off of Friendster and MySpace  Then something happened in 2008, and all of a sudden everyone I knew was flipped over Facebook and started hitting me up like I had never seen it before.  It was like coming back to Earth in Planet of the Apes (ok, ok, planet of the in-laws is more apropos).  I still have a few friends who refuse to even look at Facebook, much less join up.  I can understand their rationale, even though I’m kind of tied in with family now.  I really wish there were better alternatives at this point, but so far none have lived up to their promises.  Right now they have the most gravity.  If you tune into the right channels you can pick up traces of how they’re affecting the big players like Google, Microsoft, Apple and so on.  I’m still amazed Twitter has managed to carve out it’s space without being consumed or drowned by Facebook.

If you see the movie, or have already seen it, and don’t even once question why you still use Facebook, I would wonder why.

Movies

Gran Torino - pretty good

Yes Man - pretty good

Benjamin Button - really good, but similar to Forest Gump

5 Movies Every Guy Should See at Least Once

1.  Fight Club

2. Super Troopers

3. Animal House

4. Beerfest

5. Pulp Fiction

Honorable Mentions:

6.  Patton

7.  Raging Bull

8.  American History X

9.  Twelve Monkeys

10.  Rambo IV

Movie: Seven pounds

I just saw Seven Pounds.  It's a very good movie.  A little confusing at first, sort of how Michael Clayton begins, with the sudden chronological jumps.  The ending is pretty intense and pulls everything together.  Even the spoiler posted on IMdB won't ruin that for you.

Jaded by CG

I've noticed a very significant change between my generation and my kids regarding movies.  When we were kids, and a scene showed something like a cloud of alien insects devouring an entire sports stadium in less than ten seconds (no titles to spoil anyone's movie plans, sorry), we would be as pumped as if you'd fed us a six-pack of Red Bull drinks and box of caffeine pills.  Now kids just look at it with about as much interest as watching someone mow their lawn.

No matter how over the top animators and special effects people try to push things, it's having zero effect on today's kids.  They're jaded.  They subconciously recognize those as computer graphics and pay it no mind at all.

I think it boils down to the insertion of ever-improved technology into what we see and hear.  We didn't have that, so effects like that had an impact on us.

Today, kids just don't put their trust into what they see and hear as much as we used to.  Maybe that's good.  Mabye not.  Just an observation.

Keanu Is Still Spaced Out

I just saw "The Day the Earth Stood Still".  Eh.  Not bad, but it could have been better I think.  The part Keanu Reeves plays is about as spacey as when he played in Little Buddha.  Sometimes I think when Hollyweird tries to avoid formulaic scripts they end up ruining things.  They should have gone with a formula this time.