Things That Make You (Me) Go Hmmm

I saw a snippet of Captain Hindsight from South Park the other day, and it made me think of a couple things that have been rattling around in my brain lately. My initial college major was teaching history and political science; I changed after my freshman year to computer science. I still like teaching and history. Lately, I have been looking into challenging history as I was taught, looking to understand more of the complexity and unbiased events. For instance, I have been reading about the 1980 "October Surprise" story surrounding the release of the hostages from Iran. The timing of the release of the hostages was always a little suspicious, but not so much that I thought there was something else going on. In retrospect, there is much circumstantial evidence that it wasn't on the up and up. 

Hmmm. 

Where am I going with this? Hang with me.

You would have to live under a rock not to have heard unfavorable news about Boeing over the last few years—the 737-Max, 777 a whistleblower dying, and door plugs not being secured. Some people point to a more significant cultural change at Boeing that can be traced back to Harry Stonecipher, a protege of Jack Welch. For more on the Boeing story, see "Flying Blind" by Peter Robinson.

Hmmm.

I am getting to the point, really.

This got me thinking more about Jack Welch and how he made Six Sigma a pillar of his business strategy. As someone who has led medium-sized teams and big projects, I have always been cautious of Six Sigma. Like most things, it was started to meet a need and add value, but my experience has been that it's become something else. At GE, it was weaponized and became a "religion" to help with the culture. Want an example? Stack-rating employees, considering the bottom 5% of expendables, can be traced back to practices at GE. This practice has become common at most companies I have knowledge of. As a manager, I have had to use this practice on high-performing teams and replace the "bottom" person. The position stayed open for a long time because the person we managed out was very good and not easily replaced. Now imagine teams/organizations playing politics and/or pushing an agenda and how this can be used as a weapon.

Hmmm.

Funny how more information comes out over time, and it changes the narrative. Makes good fodder for someone who likes to learn.

Classic Tech Books I Still Have My Shelf

Relating some of the books I still have on my bookshelf. They are totally obsolete but found myself reminiscing around what they represented from my past and why they still took up space on my shelf.

One thing to know about me is that by default, I am a book collector. I once had a collection of over 200 technical books on my shelf. That was before the great purge where I donated most of the books and hung onto 30 or so. The great book purge is a story for another time. Suffice it to say that the books that survived were either timeless or ones that I had a fondness for. Here are a few of the fond ones.

The Pink Shirt Book. What would I have done without this book? If you were programming to the "IBM PC" at the time, this was a must have. I pulled it off the shelf and it flopped open the chapter on INT 21. This was the system services interrupt the keyboard, files, etc. I also found a dog-eared page for the INT 27 terminate and stay resident (TSR) details as well. TSRs were the services of the time. This was mostly assembler, then bumping up to C as soon as I could.

The Genie Book. I used this book in conjunction with the Norton Pink Shirt book. It came out after the Norton book, but had more details on writing TSRs, multitasking, and expanded memory. I pulled this book off the shelf and there is a page that was used so much that it was sticking out - having come off the binding. Now that is one well used page. When grabbing the image for this post, I found that this book was available on the Internet Archive (archive.org). E-versions of technical books is one reason I was comfortable getting rid of so many of my technical books (see future purge post).

The Microsoft C 5.0 Quick Reference Guide. This is an actual picture of my copy because I could not find a stock photo. Note the cup stains on the cover. It was a C reference, the page I used the most for C were the escape sequences for printf (e.g. \n, \r) and the language type ranges (e.g. difference between long and float). I still use this reference occasionally for the last table on ASCII codes - the decimal, hex, and character representation of 0 to 255. If you have seen The Martian, then you know.

The Intel 386 Microprocessor Hardware Reference Manual. Yikes, I am not sure why I am hanging onto this one, I have not used it since the time when I needed it. I have flipped through it a couple of time since and seen all the timing and logic diagrams and thought - we actually did this stuff. I primarily used this around interrupts (maskable vs. non-maskable) and for figuring out peripheral timings for external serial devices. We were doing some pretty hard-core stuff at the time. I recall a device we borrowed from one of the hardware manufacturers that sat in between the CPU and the socket. It allowed you to debug at the CPU level and single step through code. I remember we called it the skateboard because it resembled one but have not seen or heard of one since. Hardcore.

It's worth noting that many of the folks I worked with during this time are still friends. We were young and thought anything was possible. On top of that we had a leader who inspired us to live on the edge and accomplish amazing things.

Feed Tuna Fish Mayonnaise

You may not have heard this line from a movie before; but you certainly have heard of Michael Keaton, the actor who said it. Quickly, the context is that Michael Keaton plays a goofy character who carries a mini voice recorder with him all the time so that he can record his ideas and not forget them. He is an "idea man". One of his ideas is to feed tuna fish mayonnaise so that tuna fish salad sandwich is that much quicker to make. Not funny? Guess you had to be there.

I never carried a voice recorder around with me. I have tried Post-It notes, a journal, OneNote, and Notepad. But remembering my ideas isn't the hard part. It's the execution. For instance, I have been a part of starting up two companies. It was a lot of work, took considerable money, and came with considerable risk. But the biggest barrier was fear.

Reminds me of Elizabeth Gilbert's book Big Magic. I went to see her talk a few years back (pre-COVID) here in Seattle and she talked at length on working with the fear to ensure the ideas keep coming. I remember that fear. Losing my savings, quitting my job, and don't forget just failing. Failure, ugh. That is a biggie. I wish I had some wisdom or smart sounding to say about fear - I don't. We all just have to figure out our own way. Me? I'm a big thinker. I try to outsmart my fears. When that doesn't work I try ignoring them. Enter Dr. Phill - and how's that working for you?

I don't want to count the number of ideas I've had that I was too afraid to do something about. That didn't have to mean going all the way. Even if I just flushed them out a little more.