Author Archives: DMZ

Rise up

I’ll have a much longer account of this later, but I wanted to say this: I’m in Berlin, and I’ve been going through the layers of history: there’s a place I saw where Nazi basements were buried under the Berlin Wall, for instance.

Here’s my short point, though: I’ve read account after account about how the Nazis and then the Stasi harassed and tortured dissidents, and they’re things that the US currently employs. Against terrorism suspects, of course, but that was their justification too.

Germany, sixty years after the war, is still grappling with how to confront and acknowledge what happened during Nazi rule, and almost twenty years after East Germany essentially disintegrated, they’re openly stuggling with a set of much fresher wounds from a dictatorship of a different flavor.

We haven’t even stopped torturing people yet.

So, from Germany, I encourage everyone to go throw some money to stop this. Whatever your taste is: Amnesty International, Obama, whatever. This political season I’ve given until it hurts and every time I touch another memorial I feel like I didn’t give enough.

This is not about wheelbuilding

I’ve been building wheels. I tend to torque the hell out of my bikes. As much as I’ve tried, my friend Joel will tell you I cause him pain when I push a high gear hard, because riding behind he has to listen to the metal drivetrain complain. Wheels are delicately balanced things: a hub has 32 spokes to the wheel, 16 to each side, and if the tension is uneven from spoke to spoke, it’ll wobble from side to side, rubbing on the brake pads and wasting energy. If the tension is uneven from side, so that the hub is off-center within the rim itself, the wheel goes up and down as it turns, which causes all kinds of problems of its own.

When considerable force is applied unevenly, like through a pedal stroke, that force is applied more to certain spokes, turning the wheel, and over time, the tension of those spokes changes, sending it out of true.

A good wheel will remain true for years if you don’t run into anything. I not only don’t manage that, I run into things. A couple weeks ago, the person I was riding behind stopped unexpectedly, and I ran my spinning wheel into the back of his bike, driving my set of spinning-at-twenty-miles-an-hour spokes into his rear bracket, bending them badly. Which means my wheels need truing more often than they should.

Here’s the condensed version of almost every instruction manual on wheelbuilding:
-Get the right length of spokes
-Thread carefully in this pattern, or this other pattern
-Spin the wheel
-Adjust to fix the left-to-right wobble
-When that looks good, adjust to fix the up-and-down wobble
-Repeat those last two steps until the wheel is so nearly perfect that you strain your eyes to see the wobble

There are many problems with this. Wheels are shipped imperfect, however slightly. Picking the right length of spoke turns out to involve online calculators, or databases, and sometimes I stop and look at the wheel and wonder whether I just threaded in the right direction or not. The best way to replace a rim bent from hitting a pothole is to get exactly the same rim and then, spoke by spoke, swap the old rim out, maintaining the same lacing pattern and everything. That’s not really wheelbuilding though. It feels cheap, like I’m copying someone else’s work without learning anything. Fortunately, I’ve been building wheels with enough differences that there’s nothing to trace.

The worst thing for me is that I can come out of it with a perfectly well-adjusted wheel where the spokes are wildly unevenly tensed. One might be extremely tight, then a quite loose one, just barely past hand-tight, followed by another extremely tight. I’ll sigh, try to get a more uniform tension by doing a series of complicated small balancing adjustments, and it’s rare that that doesn’t create a different, equally obvious shortcoming somewhere else.

It’s extremely frustrating. I’ve been trying to build a new set for the last few weeks, following the collision. Sometimes I’ll watch a Mariners game with the truing stand on my desk and go through making large adjustments, twenty four spokes one full turn tighter each, and finally down to tiny, one-eighth turns.

A truly good wheel-builder can do a wheel with a speed that boggles my mind. They thread the wheel without looking at an example wheel or a chart on a monitor, but by putting the rim in their lap and quickly pushing thirty-two spokes in, lacing them correctly, and then they go through a series of quick adjustments on the truing stand, check whether the hub is off-center, which it isn’t, and set it aside to build the next one.

There’s a moment where the wheel comes together, where it snaps into place, becoming one thing instead of a rub connected to a rim by a network of metal rods. Even imperfect, it’s a wheel. Sometimes, in going through my endless truing, I would pick it out of the stand and see that it wasn’t working, and resign myself to restarting. Or I’d realize that without knowing it, my brainstorm to tighten all the crossing spokes half a turn had brought the whole thing together, and that I could ride it right that moment if I had to.

Tonight I finished the replacement front wheel for the one destroyed. I’ve been riding back and forth to work on a front wheel I took off my training Cannondale, built out parts so old they don’t show up in Google searches. The new wheels are beautiful, quite nice, costly, as good bike parts are. I may have built it with incorrectly sized spokes, which isn’t my fault because I bought it as a set. But it turns out that spoke length calculation isn’t quite an exact science, and there’s always the chance they thought I was going to do a different pattern.

It was ten, and I’d finished up my second restart build happily, using my own set of instructions, which essentially came down to:
-Thread spokes in a two-cross pattern
-Tighten the spokes enough that no spoke’s floppy
-Spin the wheel
-Adjust to fix the left-to-right wobble
-When that looks good, adjust to fix the up-and-down wobble
-Repeat those two steps
-Consider the wheel and how I feel about it
-Adjust the sections I don’t feel good about

I went through this while watching an interview and paying a lot more attention to the interview than my own inadequacies as a wheelbuilder. I spun it with the tolerance so tight that when the wheel rubbed left-to-right I couldn’t tell which side it was on without touching the calipers to feel the vibration when they touched the spinning rim.

I put it on the bike and in my bare feet rode it out on the street in front of my house in the full moon. New wheels sound notes that first time, stressed differently with an inflated tire around the circumference and a rider’s weight squishing them. They twang as they re-sort their positions at each junction in the lacing. It’s like metal strings being plucked, and it always makes me smile. As I pulled back in, walking the bike, I saw that the brake pads rubbed. The wheel would need a little more adjustment, so I pulled it off, deflated the tire, and headed back to the truing stand.

Tomorrow I’ll ride my new wheel to work, and I don’t know how it’ll go.

Coffee is weird

I made a clearly bad shot today, but before I tossed it in the sink before cleaning up to make a second, I tasted it. And for a second, I could taste all the subtle flavors culinary coffee people talk about: there was chocolate, a distinct berry taste, and a sweetness — then like I’d run into a wall, nothing but the most intense bitterness, enough that I spit into a sink and washed immediately.

My second shot was good, but I was thinking of that first taste of the first shot.

How eMusic rips everyone off for 1.4% but actually more

First, despite my complaining about their still-broken login page, I really do like eMusic. They’ve got a ton of stuff that I can’t find normally, and they way in front, selling DRM-free MP3s long before the big guys. But they really are acting badly here, and I want to call them out.

Here’s how this works: you sign up for a monthly plan.

Monthly, of course, means “calendar month” right? If I say “once a month” you know what that means. If I set up a monthly reminder — for something like, say, downloading my eMusic quota — that means once a month on, say, the 5th, I get a note to go make sure I get my music.

If you surveyed 100 people about what monthly means, all 100 would say a calendar month.


Not at eMusic.

Q: How does the eMusic subscription work?
A: Our subscription program is simple. For each 30 day period you receive a fixed number of downloads for one low price. Every 30 days your account is refreshed with the appropriate number of downloads. Downloads do not rollover from one period to the next.

30-day period. That’s… odd. Can that be right? It is:

Q: When will my downloads refresh?
A: Your downloads refresh every thirty days at the same time of day that you signed up. This means that your downloads may refresh on a different day each month. To find out when your downloads will refresh go to the Your Account page and look in the Download Summary area.

What happens here is that… say your subscription starts on Jan 1. You’ve got 30 days. Jan 31, your next period starts…. and expires in March. Through the course of the year, it’ll slip back and forth a little, and there’s no notification that your account’s refreshed its quota or that your downloads are about to expire.

eMusic profits in two ways: first and most obviously, instead of 12 monthly fees, they get thirteen in on a calendar year: 12 and the fractional. Or you can say they’re charging you overall for 5 days they shouldn’t — which amounts to a 1.4% hidden charge from the expectation they set in the signup and plan material and the actual implementation.

But moreover, by varying the dates, they get to catch late customers, like me, flat-footed and get a month of revenue where I don’t download anything because I logged in on the 5th to find out my 30d expired the month before. That’s 100% profit and one frustrated customer. That’s crazy! I wonder how many free months they manage to net over a year that way — it’s got to be substantial.

The obvious fix there is to either set up a recurring 30-day reminder, which is annoying and counter to the definition of the plan, or to make sure I check during the middle of the cycle, every cycle, to make sure the date variation doesn’t change up on me.

More than that, though, I’m really disappointed in them. Wasn’t there anyone there who said “hey, we’re setting customers up for frustration and confusion, we should really simplify this one way or the other” or “doesn’t monthly mean something different here?” It’s the revelation of a sudden disconnect between my like for eMusic, with editors I read and all the bands I like, and eMusic the business, which lifted a twenty off me because it could. That sucks.

But why would I want to work here?

There’s a corporate standard that entirely baffles me. I have an RSS feed set up for Craigslist for program manager jobs back from when I was unemployed way back, and I browse through it once in a while, because it’s interesting: job listings are just that. They’re things spit out of machines, that come out of an HR generation program or something, and they almost all read exactly the same:

Program Manager (IT)
Department: Information Technology
Reports To: Director of Systems and Technology
Location: Bellevue, WA

Primary Function

Exciting opportunity to be part of one of the most innovative companies of the new millennium!!! We offer a dynamic work environment that thrives on creativity, adaptability and passion.

This is what you get if you’re lucky. Many of them start directly with this:

Essential Job Function
• Work with business stakeholders to identify, define and prioritize enhancements
• Assist in defining scope
[…]
• Manage internal and external customer relationships and expectations.
• Prepare timely and appropriate communications for escalations, project status reports, decisions and risk mitigation plans.
• Complete key deliverables as the initiative plan dictates

And then into

Skills, Education and Experience
• 6-8 years experience managing cross-functional teams and software development projects for technology organizations.
• Good understanding of SDLC methodologies
• Experience managing custom “in-house” developed software projects and managing implementations of COTS applications required.
• Bachelors Degree in business or technical field required.

Easily 80% of listings look like some variation of that: requirements, duties.

“We’re hiring a program manager.”
“Here’s what program managers do.”
“Here’s what you need to be.”

This is a huge reason why most jobs are filled through word of mouth and recommendation. I wrote a listing pitch for a dev manager, and I tried to write as if I was personally trying to recruit someone to my team at Expedia. I said

– Here’s why this is a great dev job
– Here’s the kind of cool stuff you’d work on
– Here’s why it might be particularly attractive to some people with dev lead/manager aspirations
– Here’s how good the business customer and the teams you work with are

You never see that. When I’m paging through Google Reader, it’s always the same. “Hmmm, Amazon’s still trying to staff payments… boring, boring, boring, boring, $35k for a senior PgM? Heh. Amazon’s either re-opened that req or they lost the payment PM they hired a month ago…”

Maybe once a month I stop and look at a listing and say “wow, that’s really well-written and interesting.”

Companies spend so much money recruiting and training new employees, and yet the way they try to attract candidates is not to put people who already work there on it, or to even have their best employees help make the listings more attractive. It’s baffling, totally baffling.

True rewrite tales

“Azure” which really needs a rename. I love the story but it’s way long, which kills the tension and is generally bad news. So.

V1: 8500 words
V2, edited for length: 8900 words (that’s not a joke)
V3, immediate edit following crit yesterday: 8350
V4, yesterday: 7400

There’s at least another 500-700 words coming out of this thing.

McDonald’s vs. Starbucks — coffee fight!

Because I’m a total coffee nerd, I’ve been watching the McDonald’s-Starbucks coffee war with great interest. I’ve had the new McDonald’s drinks (road trip + wife likes the shakes) and they’re — erratic. One was good, the others ranged from passable to bad.

I realized, though, that Starbucks has really invited this. Their current espresso machines are entirely push-button: plus button, beep, extra-hot! minus button, beep, add a shot, beep beep — there’s almost nothing to do for the baristas. If they’ve reduced coffee to pushing buttons, well, McDonald’s employees can push buttons too. If it’s about the beans then, it’s tougher to match the Starbucks roast-and-deliver infrastructure, but heck, if they really wanted they could overnight roasted beans from someone good.

Then what? In terms of drip coffee, the Clover potentially gives them a sustainable competitive advantage over everyone else because they’ve got unique machines protected with a moat of patents. But I’d never really considered how much Starbucks’ long move towards machines with greater and greater amounts of automation has opened the door for other people to compete with them on their most central product.

Usurpers in Asimov’s

I just realized I didn’t post about it here — my short story “Usurpers” is in the current month’s Asimov’s, my first sale of a short story to a science fiction market. I love the story and I’m happy to see it in Asimov’s, which I’ve been reading for ages and am huge on.

I was thinking about writing an “author’s commentary” on it, but I don’t want to spoil it — and I’m not sure how much demand there’d be for that anyway.

But yeah, check it out.