Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

I’ve decided very late in the game to update my “Web 2.0″ credentials by giving Facebook a second chance, and start micro-blogging on Twitter (blogging here will continue as usual).

For those not familiar with Twitter, it is simply a service where you regularly have to answer the question “What are you doing right now?” in less than 140 characters. In other words, an effective way for the voyeurs out there to keep track of what I’m doing.

You can follow me here: http://twitter.com/wfaler

I think it is common knowledge that Windows Vista is the most useless pile of shit that Microsoft has crammed out of its nether regions since Windows ME.

But for every day I am forced to use it (at work on my laptop), it dawns on me even more:

Last October, Vista automagically deleted everything in my home folder that was created prior to a specific date. I did not delete anything myself, the files just vanished from the face of my hard drive.

In the last few days I have come across a new problem: I have a bunch of folder in my users home folder that are locked to read-only. No amount of changing permissions changes this. I can’t edit the files, I can’t delete the folders, I can’t add to the folders. The folders are simply locked and completely uneditable.

Tonight when I get home, I’ll take my chances with Ubuntu’s disk trashing bug and install it. Nothing could possibly be more crappy than Vista, hence I will risk burning my HD rather than continue using Vista.

I am currently lamenting my lack of time, for anything. Besides my 9-5 engagements, I have so much I want to do:

• Develop and improve Wicket RAD (where most of my time outside regular working hours is spent currently).
• Learn Objective-C and Cocoa (I have a few ideas for Mac and iPhone apps that I’d love to implement).
• Work on my Amazon EC2 and S3 API’s and features (not much, if any time spent there currently).
• Continue reading up on Bayesian classifiers and other data filtering and selection algorithms and tools.
• ..actually have a social life from time to time (with the “todo’s” mentioned above and the drain on energy it means, it’s hardly surprising that I am single again since a few weeks back).

For now though, the priority remains Wicket RAD, although I’m hoping that I will soon have one or two more people contributing to it, so I won’t be the lone developer working on it anymore.

Ever since I got my current laptop, I have had endless frustration with Windows Vista. I tried switching to Linux for a while, but when I found a few concerns about it cooking the harddrive on laptops, I duly uninstalled it (a problem that has still not been addressed by anything else but fingerpointing by the Linux community, btw).

At around about that time, 8 months ago, I started eyeing Mac’s, but I was unhappy about the fact that Java 6 was not fully supported. Now that has been addressed officially, and for Java 7, it seems the open source community is taking over the torch to ensure a future roadmap. Problem solved!

So, today, after weeks of back-and-fro, I finally took the plunge and ordered a 24″ iMac, with 2.8ghz Intel Core Duo 2 processor, 4gb of ram and 500gb hard drive! I’m quite looking forward to using an OS that for the most part should actually work, rather than be in the way.

I’m not particularly happy about the range that Apple has: I think an iMac “without the screen” would be in order (I already have a 24″ screen, but I guess I’ll have to live with using dual 24″ screens, sob..). The Macbook Pro’s have woefully substandard low-res screens for that price, and the Macbook Air doesn’t have any storage or ram to speak of. But all in all, I felt the 24″ iMac was the best fit for me, with a future more powerful Macbook Air being earmarked for an “on-the-road” computer.

I think in the grand scheme of things, my choice to go for a Mac after over a decade of Windows PC’s was more a case of Windows Vista being so terrible that I was driven away, rather than me being seduced by the shininess of Apple-gadgets. The reason for not going for Linux was that after the above mentioned harddrive escapades, it’s been proven to me, in my opinion that Linux still isn’t mature enough for widespread consumer adoption, even if it has taken steps forward in leaps and bounds in recent years (I’d prefer it over Windows anyday).
But most of all, this is less about Apple’s brilliance, and more about just the sheer awfulness of Windows Vista.

I try to keep this blog somewhat politics free, but this is too big to leave alone: the swedish surveillance law I mentioned yesterday has now been passed in parliament.

It gives the government the right to snoop and listen in on, in real-time, on every e-mail sent, every web page visited, every phone call made and every SMS/text message sent. Always sifted through by new shiny supercomputers, sometimes read and listened by government bureaucrats. The thing is, the next time you make a phone call to Sweden, you won’t know for certain if there is a third person listening in on your conversation.

Privacy, protection of journalistic sources, privacy of any correspondance are now well and truly dead.

And what is more worrying is that the main “client” of this surveillance is not the intelligence community, it’s not the military, but officials of whatever government is currently in power. That means that effectively a sitting government can listen in on their political opponents to find dirt and secrets (they’ll probably get a gentle slap on the fingers if ever publicly caught doing so, but nothing more). That will surely have a positive effect for free and fair elections in the long run, or not.

This is a sad day, the country I was born in and grew up in has taken a turn for the worse. It has now chosen its company among the more totalitarian of countries.
George Orwell’s dystopian vision of “1984″ is now well and truly realised, and the capital of “Oceania” is Stockholm.

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

Over the years, I’ve taken part of a number of projects, some that I’ve been proud of being part of, some that have been forgettable to say the least. But even knowing the impressive returns some of my projects have reaped for my end clients, the thing I am most proud of is something completely different from something as simple as successful project deliveries.

The things I am most proud of is when I have seen real, tangible improvement in the skills, thinking, discipline and general standard of people around me, and I have known that I have at least played some part in their personal development. I guess not having kids, seeing the penny drop for colleagues, and having played some part in getting that penny to drop is the closest thing you can get to seeing your firstborn riding a bike without trainer wheels for the first time.

I believe that in the long term, being able to help develop the talent of people around you is perhaps even more important than short term deliverables: the ripple effect of others improving their level of proficiency is them in turn passing it on to future colleagues, with a cascading effect in terms of successful project deliveries elsewhere.

Learning from others, and in turn letting what you know rub off on others truly is one of the most satisfying parts of working in an industry that is demanding on your grey matter - and it is definitely a plus sum game if there ever was one.

I went to my bank this morning to explore how large a mortgage I could get from them (to know my potential budget), and what they require in terms of documentation. In preparation, I had compiled a comprehensive folder of documentation, with client contracts, personal and business bank statements dating back two years, company accounts, breakdowns of income and spending based on said bank statements, balance sheets of assets and liabilities for both me as a person, and my company (of which I own 100%).
You could say that the documentation gave a picture that is beyond transparent as glas, for both my financial past, present and future. Anyone who would have taken a look at the documentation would probably have gotten a better view of my financial situation than what is possible to extrapolate from the information available from large publicly traded companies.

Problem was, the lady I met was completely uninterested in looking at my documentation, all she wanted was to try to fit me into her model of how to measure someones finances, a model someone who is not in salaried employment, and who gains most of his income through dividends and other investments does not fit particularly well into. It also transpires that despite all of my documentation, I cannot possibly provide them with the exact documentation they want. Why? Because they want to see my income from P60 forms (yearly salary statements) and nothing else. Considering I take a very small salary, I wouldn’t be able to loan enough money for a used bicycle off of them.
What she was saying was that I would better be able to “prove” my income according to their models if I decided to pay 50% more tax and lower my net income by over 20%.

“Brain dead” is just the beginning of it. If she would have just taken an interest in looking at the ample documentation I could show her, and been able to use her better judgement, both me and the bank would have been better served. Instead she tried to push square pegs into round holes.

I don’t think she realized her own stupidity, as she asked me to call her back when I could provide her with the exact documentation and wanted to go through with a full application. Yeah, I might call her. In the year 2525 when hell freezes over.

What is my point, apart from letting off some steam, with this story? Well, it is my regular rant about how credit checking and scoring is completely outdated - it is more or less based on the notion of salaried and lifelong employment, not on entrepreneurial work in a fluid marketplace. 1960 called, it wants its technology and methods back. Reasonably, a person who creates his own luck and consistently makes good money doing so should be a safer bet than someone whose skills are growing stale and outdated, and who is relying on having a lifelong job in a market where no such thing exists.. Not so in the world of personal credit and mortgages.
I stand by earlier prediction that credit checking and scoring will get a massive overhaul in the coming years.
As for my personal circumstances, I might just go for a self-certification mortgage should I opt to buy something, the interest rates are slightly higher (maybe 0.2-0.4%), but it will save me the headache of dealing with the aforementioned stupidity..

As a person I have two great gifts - I’m extremely lazy, and I have a very short attention span (which makes me very intolerant of long, drudging meetings and politicking).

I consider these two traits a gift and a big asset, and I’ll tell you why:

Laziness is a virtue
Being lazy in a rational way, with the long term in mind means a couple of things: I go to great lengths to avoid duplicating work and I try to automate mundane and boring tasks wherever possible. Doing things that can be automated is a waste of time, and so is doing the same thing over and over, or even worse, fixing things that went wrong the first time around. It may sounds counterintuitive, but being lazy actually makes me more efficient and thorough the first time around as I try to find the shortest, most elegant path from A to B. Being hasty and rushing things will almost inevitably end up meaning you will have to do twice the work to fix the things that didn’t work out.
Lastly, being lazy means I do not exert a lot of effort trying to predict things in the future that I cannot realistically predict: I am aware that there are big unknowns in front of me that need to be mitigated and dealt with, but I won’t waste time (or more preciously: energy) trying to exhaust every option and avenue when I know 90-95% of them will be for nothing.

A short attention span is a blessing
If a meeting is longer than 15 minutes, chances are my mind will start wandering of in the direction of day dreams, if a document is longer than five pages of dense text, my eyes will probably start glazing over by page six. Having a short attention span means that I am pretty good at cutting to the chase and finding the core of a matter: I know I don’t want or have the time to read an essay when a paragraph will do, I like problem definitions that are short, solutions that are simple and explanations that are brief, devoid of excuses and chit-chat, but call to action.
I’d rather spend my time solving problems and creating solutions, than reading about them or engage in debate about them. Don’t take me wrong, I like small talk as much as the next guy (probably even more), but small talk is small talk, business is business.

This evening, I have been e-mailing back and forth with two friends in separate e-mail conversations. One is in New Zealand and his friday was just starting. Another one is in San Francisco, she’s getting ready for her thursday lunch. I’m soon about to go to bed and it’s thursday evening.

Three people, different sides of the planet, different lives, times and even days, two of them don’t even know of each others existence (prior to this blog post). Yet I know them both well and communicate with them with the same ease as if they where in the next room.

The world is certainly getting smaller. The sense of proximity to someone is no longer about geographics, it’s about communication.