How Can I Help?

This evening an acquaintance ask me to come over and help with the installation of some artificial grass. I had on many occasions provided a fix for some predicament they got into.

It did not go well.

I arrived late after working late and spending a brief time at home getting a meal. I was confronted with a demand to lay the artificial material on the dirt after leveling everything using some sand piled in bags in the corner of the area.

The area had been worked by someone to level the hard ground. It was, for the most part, very smooth and level. I explained that putting sand down would not provide a stable underlayment.

The demand was for more flatness and no holes. That had been already realized by the previous work. I began to take the material out to size up the issues with how the seams would line up and what would be needed to join the sections to make a one-piece artificial grass area.

At that point criticism was made that they could have done that already and why had I not put any sand down. The rant went on for some time. I sat down on a chair and thought of what I would have to do.

There was not lighting in this area so I was working in the dark. I was pondering what I would have to do to further level the span and how would I firm up the ground with loose sand; and not nearly enough of it.

To help, the acquaintance turned on the cell phone flashlight to attempt to illuminate the area. It was shined directly into my face as a litany of the shortcomings about my efforts spewed forth. I had enough!

At that point I yelled to turn the F%$#)!* light off. I yelled at them about how I cannot understand what is being said without seeing their face and watching them speak; my hearing is damaged and that had been explained many times.

At this point I was told I needed to take a rest….I must be tired. They were right. I was tired of trying to explain the correct way to do this and that being ignored. I was tired of being called at the last minute because others had been run off of the project by the same condescension and abuse.

I could not see a quick fix for this. The suggestions as to how much and how long it would take were being dismissed.

The hot seaming required of the segments was unknown and the raising of the issue generated even more abuse.

I picked up my tools and announced that I was done. I came home angry. I had been called at the last minute. My understanding of what needed to be done was disregarded. My respect for the individual has ebbed.

How can I help such an individual?

Undefined Expectations

The process of building IT infrastructure is particularly difficult when the managers you’re working for do not express specifications or expectations. To exacerbate this the method of tasking one to perform work and then roundly chastising them for not fulfilling the manager’s every expectation is somewhat of a manic behavior.

This behavior is common in the middle management of organizations today.The managers are ill-trained and ill-prepared to deliver the demands of their superiors. The demands or expectations exceed reason in that they do not have adequate specification nor do they contain the fundamental information necessary to produce the outcomes desired and expected by those managers and their superiors. This is largely caused by their ignorance of the technology.

The worst offenders in this case are those that once had their hands and minds in the work but now, in order to make the better paycheck, have been promoted to oversight and do not maintain a daily “hands-on” knowledge. They will spew things like “it must be perfect” without expressing any specifications whatsoever.

This all begs the question of how does one work in an environment like that? You would have to be able to take a beating on a regular basis without complaining nor being bothered by the fact that you are not appreciated. You would have to accept the fact that your skills would be deemed inadequate in the eyes of those managers. Lastly, your future paycheck is at risk.

Does this seem to be a reasonable observation?

Testing Without Touching

PSYCHIC SHOE REPAIR

That is a real sign on Thomas Road in Phoenix Arizona.  It is also the summary of what some enterprise managers want in terms of obtaining telemetry for performance measurement in data networks.

One cannot use the network to measure the network.  One cannot have access to capture data packets.  Existing enterprise tools, that they provide, do not have any capacity to give one critical performance data.  How then is one to do performance engineering?

The answer was there on the sign all the time!

Core Competency?

I was engaged recently in a project to identify the traffic on a global network to solve slowdowns in the work being performed by engineers on high performance workstations.

The most difficult part of the work was the total lack of tools.  The second most difficult thing was the failure of the management to be concerned about that.

The mission was to gather requirements to be submitted to enterprise network plan, build, and run teams so that the slowdown problems could be remediated.

As I began, the requests went in for basic information like a global network map, monitoring tools, and access to machines in order to place probes.

Network maps, either physical or logical, were non- existent or badly outdated.

The monitoring tool was a well known more than adequate management and performance monitoring system that I had used for many years.  It was not set up properly, it could not retain much information for analysis, and custom reporting access was refused.  It was installed in three regions without any joining together of the database backends.

Requests to get access to the machines to place probes was refused.

While this is going on I learn that the purchase of undersized, out of specification, equipment for a remediation of a site that was a decade overdue was being done so that a schedule was met and the money spent before the end of a fiscal cycle. The kind of work to be done on the site had no bearing on the decision.

One other interesting thing was that all datacenters were to be consolidated by collapsing them into fewer and fewer sites all colocated off-site from existing corporate sites.

Everyone in every technical discipline was concerned that the plan was inadequate and that given past practices the future was not going to be good.

The corporation was grown by acquisition.  It was not grown by innovation.  Decades old talent that had worked at the acquired organizations left in droves.  Those that remained were waiting for their retirement.

When asked about why the organization would place their data centers into another organization’s hands the reply was “It is not our core competency”.

Given the experience one wonders what is their core competency?  I know! Pass the buck.

 

 

Education in Arizona: Republican or TEA Party Punishment

It seems that Diane Douglas, a TEA partyer, and her entourage, have decided to finally disclose the travesty of their chief financial controller’s misspending of Title 1 federal dollars.  The blame is being cast upon staff that is gone from the agency.  It is also being blamed on previous administrations.  This is all transference or simplly put; buck passing!

The tab is 62 million dollars.  The Fed wants it back.  The incompetents at the Department of Education have decided to punish the schools for the agency’s transgressions.  They handed it out wrongly and want to take it back by reducing what gets paid to the schools.  The idea of the State paying the bill and not the schools has completely escaped their thinking.

How this all came about is the result of the federal governments Title One monies being dispersed incorrectly and allowably by the main money man at the agency all during the administrative changes resulting from elections.  Yes the same guy with different bosses did this.  Now his missteps, or outright illegal activity, are going to cost the children of Arizona 62 million dollars before they every get a high school diploma.

In an effort to cover up the malpractices the head of the agency’s Title One was dismissed after 28 years.  All during that time she was against the funding practices of the agency, but powerless to control it.  Title One was the “slush fund” for the agency’s pet projects or a backstop for overspending in other areas of the administration.  Regardless of the elected bosses who came to the forth floor of the Department of Education, basic fund accounting was not being done correctly and the federal governments auditors caught them.

Now what is common in Arizona politics is to transfer the responsibility to someone down the chain of command or organizational hierarchy.  Yeah…buck passing!  Somewhere in the convoluted thinking of the leadership of these state agencies the idea that passing blame is sufficient to exhonerate the bossman or bosswoman.  Yes modern ethics do not require the simplest test of responsibility nor even a hint of cupability.  I think even the humblest of us looks at that as dishonest, deceitful, disengenuine, and an action with premeditated distain for the public expectation of “honesty in public service”.

So who is hurt and what are the consequences?  It seems no one can know what the state agencies will give for funding in education until the money arrives and some clear explanation is made for how the money is to be spent.  They may return long after dispensing the Fed’s money and take it back and hand you a bill for what they come up needing.  Yes they give money to the schools and take it back….often!  Our children are beaten repeatedly without explanation or reason.

The lastest scheme the Department of Education has cooked up involves taking dollars from other Federal program sources, let’s say Title Two, and consuming them in the secretive processes in the agency so that the shortages caused by the governor’s corporation favoring tax policies and the Arizona State educational revenue shortfall can appear to be working to further educations interests; ostensibly the children.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The children are still being punished and now even more severely.

It is time for the public to take note of this and begin to push for a cleanup of the Arizona legislatures arrogant abuse of the taxpayers and their children.  Voting will not be enough.  Money will have to be formed in PACs and the funding of foundations like the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest should flourish.  It will take years and generations of activism to dismantle the disfunctional legislative and executive branches of the State of Arizona.  Teach your children well.  The governor, the legislature, and the Department of Education have not and will not.

 

What Our National Security Did Not Do

I just finished watching this documentary called “A Good American”, a film by Friedrich Moser.  The story is about Bill Binney who once worked as an analyst for the NSA.  Oliver Stone is the Executive Producer.  What it offers in pretty clear language and evidence is how badly misappropriation of public monies, corrupt Washington insider activity, political appointments, and gross incompetence lead up to the losses of 9/11 and subsequent years.

Bill and others employed at the NSA developed a program called thinthread which, when placed in the communications streams being monitored by the NSA, traced communications packets from source to destination and saved the data about the data (called metadata) into a large database.  Then, using techniques Bill developed in previous decades, reports could be made showing the interconnections between hundreds of millions of telephone and internet users worlwide.

It was so successful that it could find threats developing well before anything would happen and allow for a substantial advanced warning on threats about to happen.  Bill’s earliest use of the analytical techniques told of the impending Tet Offensive in Hue in Vietnam.  He perfected the automation of the techniques with the introduction of the personal computer.

At the NSA he was given charge of a small team of individuals to automate analysis of the data being collected.  The team quietly did that and demonstrated it’s efficacy at several “research” operations the NSA ran around the world.  It was discovering things that no other individuals or systems were able to discover.

As the world threat levels loomed and Osama Bin Laden began financing the terrorism, Bill’s thinthread was detecting those activities in advance.  The problem was that the appointed head of the agency, the director in charge of analysis automation, the assistant director in charge of analysis automation, and the newly hired systems vendor had a vested interest in making sure Bill’s thinthread did not get to play throughout the agency.  They made millions burying it and touting their nonworking, expensive, protected system offered by the vendor SAIC.

As a good American Bill then pursued notifying the Defense Department of the missteps by the bosses.  What he did not anticipate was the fallout.  The NSA had pulled the plug on thinthread and buried all information about it at the direction of the bosses who were enriching themselves pushing the nonworking system SAIC had produced.  They even went after him, his team members, his Congressional liason, et al as enemies of the state.  Later the FBI’s case was dismissed due to falsified charges.

There was another feature Bill and team worked into the code that prevented anyone in the United States from being spied upon without the proper court authority.  Those same bosses stripped it off.  The NSA is not to spy on U.S. citizens by law.  The bosses were also law breakers.

In subsequent years Bill and team tried selling this technology to other government agencies and were stymied by the NSA at every turn.  Well into the post 9/11 era the NSA still did not have or use the thinthread or any equivalent of it but instead continued to push the SAIC vendor solution.

Bill and the team members are retired now.  They had to “retire”.  Our country is at greater risk without them.  Our government agencies are accelling at their incompetency and trouncing our civil rights to privacy all at the same time.

 

A Veteran’s Story

Less than a decade after the Vietnam War I met a man who was delivering my mail. In the ensuing years we became fast friends. In those years he often would deliver the mail in the blisteringly hot July afternoons while on foot. He enjoyed being outside and the heat was just a consequence of doing his work.

On one such occasion he stopped to talk. I offered him water which he gladly took in. The conversation got around to what his experience was in the Army. We had spent time together and talked some about his experience but on this day he went into great detail.

At first he confessed that he had never told anyone this story. It was too painful a memory. He had to get this load off his chest.

He began by talking about how as an infantryman in the Army in Vietnam it was quite a grueling slog. It was punishing and it drained you. His company was often called upon to traverse the jungles, find the enemy, and engage them. It was not uncommon for them to “party it up” a bit at night at the end of one of those kind of days.

It was on one of these occasions that something terrible and life-altering occurred. As he awoke in the morning he discovered that every other member of his team had been slain during the night in their sleep. Their heads were cut off and placed on their chest. As he looked down the row of his fellow soldiers he could see a severed head on every other body.

Certainly that was an emotionally and physically traumatic experience. What troubled him most was the fact that how did he get chosen to live. This is one of the most profound emotional issues with veterans. The question is why did I survive? The answers are seldom forthcoming.

As it happened on this hot July day under the shade of the big tree in front of the house, he told the story for the first time. He nearly collapsed as he told the story and came to the realization that once again he did not know why he was spared and that he had just confessed for the first time to the pain and the suffering he had been carrying around.

Through the tears and embraces we consoled each other. What was irreconcilable was why was he chosen to live. It was never resolved at that time. What would take place years later would finally give him solace.

As with many men and women they work hard to take care of their families, to do their job well, and to make life be purposeful. This veteran performed in that manner in a stellar way. He was very good with his family. They often traveled and met together at various homesteads throughout the state. On this one occasion near Casa Grande Arizona, his question would be answered.

The family gathered together and barbecued at one of the homesteads. It was a trailer on a lot in the open desert. It was nothing fancy. They lit up the grill and cooked hot dogs and hamburgers… maybe some steaks. Everyone ate well. Lots of potluck was brought along. It was a wonderful day and as evening descended upon them they retired to their beds and their cars and the grill was placed next to the trailer. There was no wind and the charcoals were nearly out.

In the night screams awoke the veteran. The winds had come up and the grass was caught afire. The flames had begun to consume the trailer. All of the children were in the trailer. Nieces, nephews, sons, and daughters were all about to be consumed by the flames. He threw the door open and ran to the back of the trailer. He broke out a small window and began to hand the children out one at a time. The flames were burning his flesh. He was in anguish but he was determined to get those children out. The other parents gathered those kids up as quickly as they could and got them away from the trailer. By then the flames had the entire rest of the trailer involved. The window was too small for him to get out. It was obvious he was not going to make it. It was at that point that he stood up and looked out the window and waved goodbye. He had saved all the children.

It was not until some time later I heard of his demise. It was then that I remembered the confession under the shade tree in the front yard. I knew that now he would be at peace.

If you believe in the soul and the spirit and the value of life it’s difficult for anyone to go into war and to come back whole. It is our responsibility to take care of those individuals. The government and the politicians cannot do it.

I would hope that on that day under the shade tree I had given some solace to a heroic veteran. I am sure that now he is in a good place.

June 9, 2017

Bernard Lambert

Arizona Politics

In an effort to enlighten the public on issues of poorly funded educational systems, corporate control of the legislature, rampant dark money influence, efforts to block voter initiatives, and republican control of the vote and legislature, this topic will be added to the Categories listing.