joeware - never stop exploring... :)

I seem to have developed a following for my less than technical entries on this blog, it seems I tend to get more email and other responses when I rant or complain about something than when I am posting pure tech. I think possibly it is because pure tech may bore people and they either just mark it down to look at possibly later or just ignore it completely. Now the other stuff, the other stuff hits them in a different way and almost forces them to notice or respond or use my name in vain or hopefully, laugh and say that is an interesting opinion or observation.

I mention this because as of late I have gotten quite a few emails specifically asking why I haven’t been posting some of that way non-technical “rant” or “opinion” type stuff lately. Where is the “fire”? It seems the corporate trend lately is to stop your employees from blogging unless they are saying “My company is the greatest!” and so people, probably quite rightly, wanted to know, did someone shoot me down?

The answer quite simply no, no censoring going on, it is that I have been quite busy. Work has been quite time consuming lately where I even have spent more than 8 hours in a given day working on things (though I make sure I don’t exceed 80 hours in a 2 week period) and outside of work I have had just a ton of things happening including working on some joeware stuff, working on some other technical stuff I am not ready to fully divulge yet, working on figuring out how to do some backend stuff on the BSD servers hosting joeware.net, trying to do some stuff for my family, doing needed stuff around the house, and spending quality time with some brand new pets (two chinchillas and two ferrets) which may possibly end up being a blog entry on its own on how in the span of a very emotional two week period one middle aged chinchilla and one geriatric ferret turned into two chins too young to be away from their mom and two juvenile ferrets that are incredibly rambunctious and practically impossible to hold on to.

It isn’t just this blog that I have been slow with; it is everything, ActiveDir.Org, newsgroups, emails, joeware.net forums, etc. A processor running at 3800Mhz has about 3800Mhz to give and while it can give a little more for a while it can’t do it for long without getting a little too hot and needing to slow down.

So no, no one has clamped down on my posting of non-technical items; I just haven’t had much time and haven’t had anything inspire me to write one of those articles though it has been close because I am not on the American Family Association mailing list and every email I get from them makes me wonder how some people can be so disconnected from the real world.

I have to admit there are times when someone sees me in person and says “man… about your blog” and I wonder, ok did I piss this person off politically, religiously, or what and I think here it comes and then they say something nice or they rip on me. The saying of nice things always sort of surprises me. The ripping just makes me laugh. I even had a former manager of mine tell me at lunch a while back that he sent his wife to my blog to check it out, his words, basically were “you need to read joe’s blog, skip the technical stuff, read the general and rant categories”. I don’t know if it was good or bad nor if she did and what her opinion was about it and if it has changed either of their opinions when it comes to me but then I honestly wonder, does it matter? Certainly I care about my former manager’s opinion of me and his wife is a sweetheart from what I know of her and she is a cat person so she can’t possibly be all bad no matter what. But I am also a strong proponent against political correctness and molding yourself to fit someone else’s image of you.

If someone likes how you work, they shouldn’t care what you do at home or what opinions you have. That is why I think tenured Doctor and Educator positions are important, other companies should do similar things. It is like when I worked for the Credit Division of a large manufacturer, they kept telling me, we want to hire you full time but can’t because you don’t have a degree so got get any kind of degree just get one. My response was what does a degree really have to do with it? You already know you like me; you don’t need a degree to screen me. If you like me that much hire me, if you don’t stop saying it is because of this stupid make-work dependency. In the end, I left that company and when I announced I was leaving, all of a sudden the degree requirement was gone and I had a job offer on the table for about double what I was already making. How did that make me feel? Mostly just pissed because it could have been done any time in the three years prior and had it been, I would have never started looking for something else. In general, if I have gone through the mental break it takes for me to decide to leave a company, it isn’t likely I will be staying regardless of what is said or done. I don’t use quitting as a threat to make a company do what it should have done on its own previously. My thoughts are, the company should do what it thinks it needs to do to keep you all of the time, don’t wait until someone is walking out the door.

Everyone has opinions about things, maybe not everything, but most things but it seems most aren’t willing to put themselves out there and share their opinions as is. Maybe the put them out there piecemeal and see how people approach it or possibly they just sit back and listen and try to adapt their opinions to what they are hearing from others. I think in general that we as a people are stronger if people have and voice their own opinions. Sure you may be challenged on them, but you should have challenged your own opinions yourself so you should have some way to defend or exhort the reasoning behind it and should welcome challenges as it is a mechanism to grow and to learn and to possibly change your opinion or become more firmly entrenched with it.

I think political correctness is a great way to harm growth and stop thinking and prevent good answers from coming out. I mean how can it not if people are too afraid of the consequences of stating what they think? I don’t have this opinion because I am one who “gets” to state his opinion and everyone has to rally around it, I don’t think that is true at all though some may think they need to automatically assume my opinion for some things. I have this opinion despite that. I don’t feel other’s opinions even if they are about me and bad are in themselves bad, they are simply opinions, they can’t hurt me unless I choose to let them. One friend jokingly calls me a fat bastard. I could get all hurt by that because at some level he means some part of that or else he wouldn’t find it funny to say it. I am not offended by it, I certainly am not skinny but I also don’t consider myself to be incredibly overboard in size either or I would work more on correcting that.

I once even had a Microsoft Consultant basically tell me I could go “f**k” myself. Well actually he was politically correct with me and wasn’t intending to tell me, it all comes down to a booboo which resulted in his honest opinion becoming clear. There was an email chain that had gone back and forth between us with a bunch of questions on the design/plans of an Exchange deployment and how some specific thing worked in Exchange. This was prior to me knowing much about Exchange and I was trying to understand it because I saw something in the design I wasn’t thrilled about and I did what I always do when I don’t know and that is I ask endless questions and try to understand the concepts and implementation details.

I had obviously hit or surpassed the limit on what this consultant knew (I didn’t know him at all, never had met him in person) and pushed him over the edge so he took the last email I sent (which was quite nice actually) with some more questions and intended to forward that to one or more of his MCS friends who were also on the account. On that note he said and I quote “I am about to tell this guy to go “f**k” himself”. Why do I know he sent it? Because instead of hitting forward and typing in email addresses, he hit reply.

As you can imagine that was quite an odd position for the guy to find himself in. I at no point was ever mad; in fact I simply started laughing when I saw it. You can ask the guy who sat in the cube next to me as he actually asked why I was laughing so hard.

In the end his manager whom I knew pretty well then started lying to me and telling me that the consultant didn’t send it and that in fact he had left his PC unlocked when he left it for a moment and a coworker did it as a joke. Of course that was an outright lie and everyone who heard about it knew it immediately. I personally would have owned up to it and said yep, I sent that versus having my manager saying I was a complete idiot and clueless about security and walked away from a PC that was logged in with my ID and didn’t lock it. Anyway, the manager asked me if I was ok working with him and my response was along the lines “I don’t care if he spits on me or kicks me in the knee every time I he sees me, the only thing that is important to me is if he is great and knows what he is talking about. Does he know what he is talking about?”

Well of course the answer from the manager was yes. So he stayed on for a while. As I learned more and more about Exchange I realized the guy really wasn’t that good, he certainly wasn’t great, chalk up one more lie from the MCS Manager. He transitioned off the project a few months later along with a few other less than stellar MCS folks and we were left with a couple of good guys whose main points where that they were honest and said they didn’t know when they didn’t and talked straight to us when we asked questions. In my opinion, they are two of the best MCS has to offer. One of them may not be normal MCS anymore, he may be an Exchange Ranger or what not which would be the one good Ranger I have met too then. Unfortunately that bonehead who worked on the Exchange stuff that was too chicken to own up to his email he sent me is now back at that same place working on LCS and knows as little about how that really works as Exchange it seems. From what my friends say, LCS sounds like a complete pile of crap, being functionality stripped out of Exchange, I am not completely surprised. The Exchange Dev group is really weird on what it thinks the world needs for the most part in my opinion. Well at least the big corporate world.

So this post should be good for those who like to hear me rant… Rants include

1. Companies should take care of their employees all of the time and not wait until the employee has worked up the mental block to actually leave and has quit.

2. Political correctness is stupid. If someone asks for your opinion, give the real opinion, not something watered down to resemble some mushy thing sort of like what you think they are looking for. If you see something wrong, point it out. If you are the target of something being pointed out, it is entirely up to you how well you handle it. What is being said is in your eyes either accurate or not and something that bothers you or not. Regardless, don’t get your panties in a bunch about it, if it bothers you that much, correct yourself or whatever it is. Don’t whine because someone has the balls to say it out loud.

3. I hate it when people are being paid to help out and they pretend to know things they don’t and will make crap up versus saying I don’t know. Lots of people and companies do this but here I outline Microsoft for it because I have had a lot of issues with this with Microsoft in the past. When I don’t hit someone like that at MS it is a joy and stands out to me. It shouldn’t. But then on the flip side, a lot of folks think, hey these people are from Microsoft should know EVERYTHING about their products, they make them. Plain and simple, anyone who thinks that is a boob, do they know the full details of everything their company does? Is their company as large as MS and does it produce as much stuff? The answer to the do they know all of the details of everything their company does is no. They almost certainly don’t. Expecting every MS employee who walks through your door or you get on the phone to know everything about every product is ludicrous. Back on the flip side, those analysts need to not pretend that they do and if they are out of their class, they need to fess up and get someone else in to help them.

4. Live Communications Server seems to suck worse than even Exchange. I heard from my friends that it doesn’t support anything but global groups for some admin functions. What silly person came up with that requirement and why didn’t Microsoft go, “oh yeah, that is really stupid we need to fix that immediately”?

Yeah that is all over the map, tough. Deal with it; I didn’t make you read this, you chose to. 🙂