TED Talks are almost always engaging, and Daniel Goldman’s 13-minute talk on compassion where he ponders why aren’t we emphatic more often, is no exception.
I got a divorce almost four years ago. Recently my ex-wife contacted me via IM and mentioned that she was moving to Panamá. A few years ago she had mentioned in passing that she had a spot of trouble getting a civil status certification – I didn’t think of it at the time, but now my spider-sense started tingling. What if she moved to Panamá and I needed to start sending documents back and forth via DHL?
Being a paranoid with a nice strong distrust of other people’s ability to do their jobs properly, I decided to verify. I sent Harold, my bike messenger, over to the Registro Civil to get me a certification of marital status. After standing in line for 1/2 an hour to pay 50 colones worth of stamps, plus 2 hours on the main line for certifications, a civil servant told him that he couldn’t issue it, because my status was in process. He wouldn’t disclose any information, since Harold wasn’t me.
We were both rather surprised at this, since I’ve been divorced for three years, and have the Registro-stamped paperwork. Harold himself delivered it back then, and requested a certification just to make sure. I call my attorney to ask him if he knows anything about it, and now it’s three of us who are confused.
Cue Ricardo standing in line for over two hours to talk to someone, while reading The Machinery of Freedom, which I had brought along as a prank from my subconscious. When I get to a human, he insists my status is “in process”. He checks a lot of personal information to make sure I’m me, and then repeats himself.
I leave, since I’m not only about to shoot somebody but have a meeting that I’m late for, and return two days later carrying a Call of Cthulhu book this time. Visions of a shoggoth gurgling through the throngs of people dance in my head. After a long wait, the gentleman at the second line is more helpful. Sitting behind some thick plate glass, he insists the other guy’s system is wrong and shows me the screen: there, in big bold letters, it states I’m DIVORCED. I already knew this, I say, and I have the paperwork to prove it. He suggests I go back to the other line and talk to the first guy again.
I try to strangle him through the glass.
Seeing that I’m serious about this, he takes the piece of paper and disappears for 20 or so minutes. When he returns, the piece of paper with the number in it has a lot more information, all unintelligible by laymen.
“Take this”, he says, “and go to Document Delivery.” Seeing me reaching through the small window again, he is quick to mollify me. “It’ll be quick, there is never anyone there. Tell them you have a ticket stuck in 2A but I can’t see what it is from our system. He should explain.”
Lacking any other recourse I go to Document Delivery, where surprisingly there is no line – only a public official speaking to his wife on the phone. He promptly hangs up (promptly in this case being anything under two weeks), and checks on the third system yet what my status is.
He says something after but I don’t really hear it, with all the voices in my head screaming at the same time. I manage to beat the reptilian brain into submission and ask him to repeat.
He proceeds to explain that the system throws up these little garbages all the time, so they’ll just clean it up. Not right now, of course, but until after they’ve done a proper study to see if it’s truly a basura, and not just that I remarried three years ago, within days of my divorce, and forgot to file the documentation.
You know, since I was too giddy in the second honeymoon.
And so I run through the gauntlet again. I had to send my bike messenger several times to check out on the status of the clean up – he started asking people whom he spoke to for their name and ID, because the issue wasn’t being fixed – but I’m finally back to divorced.
For now, of course, until the Registro’s system decides to change my mind for me.
Great speech by Clay Shirky about how much people love doing something is an indicator of if it will succeed.
Originally found via BoingBoing.
Last week I got a job offer.
Ever since we started Arquetipos I’ve focused a significant portion of my time on looking for projects, and one appeared last week. A local nearshoring operation wanted to hire a project manager for one of their main clients. The group would start at 15 people and grow from there into an estimated 45, making it the largest group I have lead – a very exciting opportunity. The local company liked me, the client liked me, and I liked them.
The only kink? It required occasional traveling to the United States.
I’ve said enough about the US-VISIT program and its immigration fingerprinting requirements, and how these little invasions of privacy help get people used to the bigger ones. While I’ve stopped myself from traveling there ever since they began the program – they’re free to put whatever immigration controls they want, and I’m free not to visit – this is the first time it clashed with something I actually wanted. I felt this opportunity calling me, even though it was more like a regular job than a project. I wanted to see what I could learn by working with such a large group of people. The end client was an appealing company with interesting projects and customers all over the globe.
But I turned it down.
After all I’ve said about not compromising, I couldn’t bring myself to throw it all out the window just because there was a very appealing carrot dangling in front of my eyes. I would have felt like a hypocrite, like I was just chuckling and saying Oh, that stuff about not going there? Hell, that was before there was money involved!.
And I’ve got to confess, I felt really bad about it for a few days after. Until right about last night. It was then that I realized why I felt so glum about turning it down: this opportunity had a lot of things that appealed to me. If I want to recover that feeling, I just have to look for those qualities in another venture, while removing the dealbreaker that traveling to the U.S. was.
It dawned on me that it’s not that different to what happens in relationships. Sometimes you are seeing someone who has a lot of appealing qualities, but there are important things that are just wrong. In those cases, it’s best to learn from the experience and move on, looking for someone with those things you love but without those you hate. I kept looking, and I lucked out in finding Vero, with whom I’m madly in love and after more than two years together, the relationship feels just as fresh as when we started.
On enterprises, I just need to pass on the ones that are merely attractive, and move on to the ones with which I can fall in love.
Consistent pictures of what 200 calories look like, for those on a diet and thinking what to eat. Found on the same search: snacks under 200 calories.
Yes, that’s way little butter.
Even though I have almost no spare time whatsoever, and I shouldn’t be researching better and improved ways of wasting more time, I went and got myself a Nintendo Wii.
While Microsoft and Sony are fighting over whose processor is bigger, Blu-Ray over HD-DVD, or if Playstation 3 or the Xbox 360 have better HD support, Nintendo chose step outside the graphics competition altogether. It’s not their game. They’re smart, too – they probably realize that they can be outspent by either company, and they would be bled dry if they make the mistake of even getting in that race. With the Wii Nintendo chose instead to focus on being usable and fun, and boy did they succeed.
Unless you’ve been living in a cave you probably know about the Wii’s motion sensing controller, so I won’t go into details here. If you want to read more about it, Wikipedia has tons of material for you. Have you seen those funny ads where the two japanese guys come into a family’s house and promptly start flailing around, hitting invisible tennis balls with a short white stick? It’s just like that.
What I will say is that the console delivers. Its controller is intuitive to use, feels very natural and the response is exactly what you would expect. Moreover, it feels absolutely non-threatening for someone who isn’t used to playing games, or who might have an actual bias against the multitude of buttons and triggers found on a regular Xbox control. Wii Sports is a great showcase for people to learn about the interactions with the Wii, while playing games they intuitively know about like baseball or bowling.
Let me tell you, I never thought the day would come when my dad would not only feel completely at ease with a console, but also kick my ass in the process.
For me the kicker was Rayman Raving Rabbids, however. Vero and I were just hooked by this fun collection of 75 mini games starring Rayman and a host of psychotic rabid bunnies, which often had us just laughing out loud at its blatant silliness. Graphics are relatively simple, but when the gameplay consists of brilliant bits like having to hold the controller to your ear so that you can listen to a piglet’s squeals as a warning sign to avoid burrowed rabbids who jump up with a blowtorch and burn it to a crisp, you really don’t give a crap if the PS3 could kick Skynet’s ass.
Now, if I only could find some more controllers online…
PS: Those product features they mention in Amazon about taming sharks and a huge free-roaming environment? No clue where that’s from – probably the original plans for the game.
The transcript of Richard Hamming’s 1986 conference You and Your Research is very much worth reading, if nothing else for the following quote:
And I started asking, “What are the important problems of your field?” And after a week or so, “What important problems are you working on?” And after some more time I came in one day and said, “If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you at Bell Labs working on it?”
Paul Graham evaluates it in his essay Good and Bad Procrastination, where he says:
Perhaps not everyone can make an equally dramatic mark on the world; I don’t know; but whatever your capacities, there are projects that stretch them. So Hamming’s exercise can be generalized to:
What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?
PS: Coincidentally I found both links on an older post on Marginal Revolution, which was posted exactly a year ago.
I’ve been very lucky these past few years, both personally and professionally. On my current project I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some great people, and work with two of the best and more dedicated developers I’ve met. Still, I’ve known my share of companies driven only by politics in the past, which is why Pete Wright’s tale of why he has left Microsoft technologies behind is so familiar:
I dreamed of working at Microsoft. When Microsoft joined up with Accenture to form Avanade the word Consultant sounded so wonderfully romantic to me and I wondered if ever I’d make it there as one of the elite band of Avanade consultants, spreading the Microsoft message all over the world. I dreamed of systems that would change lives, help people, and do cool new things never seen before.
Somewhere along the way though, things changed. I don’t know exactly when or how, but the world I loved got torn to shreds, set fire to, then mooshed into a pile of horse manure.
I found myself working with ‘day coders’, people with no passion, people that knew how to program and had learned how to do so simply because the money looked good. I found myself working with Project Managers with little or no experience of the field they were working in, habitually making appalling decisions day in and day out and kicking their teams of programmers when things went horribly wrong.
[...]
So, today I resigned my job, and completely ended my Microsoft career. I have taken a role as Director with a company at the leading edge of the “Web 2.0â€? curve. My team and I will write Ruby on Rails code, use Macintosh computers to do so, shun Microsoft technology completely, go to work in shorts and sandals and blast each other with nerf guns. My team is devoted to being the best it can be, to learning, to improving, to pushing boundaries. And it’s not Microsoft.
I’ve never met you, but Go Pete! I’ve found myself in a similar situation, slowly growing more and more bored of the Microsoft world and their old British man of a toolset, and spending more and more time working on other technologies from my MacBook Pro, the Bond girl of laptops. An eventual jump now seems a matter of when, not if, and the when seems to be drawing ever closer.
Long time no see.
It’s all my fault, I know – I’ve been too bloody busy with offline concerns, and just completely let the blog slide. In the interim I got robbed at gunpoint, managed to release not one but two huge upgrades to our main project, started exercising regularly, moved to Mac, lost several kilos, and started a personal project with two friends. More on that later, since it’s currently on what web 2.0 snobs call stealth mode.
But hell, I like blogging. It works as a strange combination of relaxation and discipline, and after a few months away I realized that I missed it.
Expect to hear from me more often this time.