Empathy, Twitter and World Peace -- imagine that...

I've always believed that communication... especially the kind where you can't turn back once you've become dependent on it, would be the end of the Soviet Union. To compete with the rest of the world, I figured they'd have to go somewhere as a nation where their governance would be like a fish out of water... and therefore they'd most likely implode.

The more communication I see the better I like it... you just need to be willing to take the bad with the good. The narcissism is pretty bad right now because we're really ailing as a race that is recognizing that we're on the brink of some potentially scary stuff. So at least we're getting chatty and my prayer (or daily mantra) is that a marvelous side effect will be this world-rounded group hug that people eventually don't want to let go of... the "empathetic embrace" mentioned in the video.

This video by Jeremy Rifkin points out that there's good evidence that empathy is the evolving part of our brain's core competency. There's an incredibly exciting upside to that...

Watch out for increased worker productivity...

As it reports on the continuing Wall Street recovery, CNBC often cites the upbeat economic indicator of "increased worker productivity." It implies goodness, but is it? Is it in fact a short-term and potentially business-killing condition? Here are some of my concerns.

Product design and implementation will suffer because there's less time to simply think. New requirements, new designs and defining effective practices require time to step back, perform continuous research and get the attention of those around you to establish the support (and good critical thinking) you need.

Fewer people wearing more hats means less than 100% responsibility. How can you be in two or three roles at once and really feel like you are covering your territory? And what happens during crunch time, such as a product release, when all your responsibilities become #1? If you were once a person who took pride in your productivity, you find you are becoming an excuse-maker, not out of incompetence, but from feeling just plain overwhelmed.

Critical cross-training becomes an after-thought. Who has time to train people? Who has time to be trained? As essential as it may be, you feel like you're just ensuring that folks won't meet the deadlines they're already facing. Congratulations, that extra hat you've been wearing looks like it's found a permanent home.

Burn out will occur at a faster rate. It doesn't matter how much you love your work. When you're just keeping the ship afloat, there's not much time for the things that previously fueled your passion, such as vision-making or healthy research of new strategies and technologies.

Finally, there is no substitute for intuition or simply sensing that something isn't quite right. A few months later, you're kicking yourself for not having researched that gut feeling when you had it. Then you ask yourself, "why?" and all you can come up with is, "I was too busy being productive."

Still Cloudy, But Steadily Getting More Clear...

I've been using the Cloud as hosted by Amazon EC2. Unexpected value? Yes... as a staging and test deployment platform. The value comes from the ability to take a more deliberate path that puts off hardware purchase plans. Being able to feel like you can really think out the deployment is quite a luxury.

Right now I'm enjoying thinking of using the cloud as a type of DMZ... at least until it's production time. But who knows if I'll want to just keep it in that role through production deployment?

I also like it for the potential of having standardized test platform images. These are pre-configured operating environments that you clone out based on the environment that you've set up and refined. Beats starting over every time you want to create a 2nd, 3rd or 4th testing environment. The only downside to images that I've come up with is this: You often want to assign new developers the task of setting up these environments from relative scratch so that they get an deeper impression of what goes in to setting up the server applications that they've been hired to build, expand and maintain. Without that experience, months and years go by before they really realize how the application they work with is choreographed with respect to support bash scripts, file system layout, including the use of NFS, and other supporting processing, such as a messaging server. There are also the critical configuration property files they read from.

So, what do I think of cloud computing right now? Very cool. It's taught me a lot about firewall configuration, in particular. It's made me feel empowered to try stuff without being dependent on IT. And it simply gives me another arrow in my quiver when contemplating test and, maybe, production deployments. Now... I've got to figure out the contrasting values of going with a hosted cloud versus an in-house VMWare-style cloud... hmmm...

 

Why I love ABQ...

Albuquerque is just too cool... balloon-wise... This was taken at my daughter's day-before-balloon fiesta kick-off at her grade school next to the Rio Grande.

Gravity explained as a leak from another dimension

Gravity according to Lisa Randall -- Somebody's Leaking...

Lisa explains gravity with an angle on why the heck is gravity able to keep us inhabiting the planet, yet we can out-wrestle the Earth's pull in a tug of war using a magnet on a pin.

If you are familiar with the latest theory of everything using string theory as the context, then you may know that there are 11 theorized dimensions (10 physical, 1 time).

Where Lisa stirs the pot starts here: Imagine that maybe our four dimensional universe actually lacks gravity as a force. To be more specific, she has theorized that the force of gravity is actually just as strong as the other forces (weak, strong, electrical, nuclear) within the 11th dimension... and this 11th dimensional gravitational force is actually leaking into our 4th dimensional universe to the degree that it (as described by Einstein) supports our galaxies and solar systems. Somehow this explains how it can be so weak and have such a fundamental impact on who we are and why planets keep us tucked in our beds at night.

Wow.

-- Got this from watching "Parallel Universe" on the Science Channel, Sunday evening, 29 June 2009