I'm a replicating pod. The cats often seem startled as a result.

I have a voice lesson scheduled tonight, and last week's was a good one, but what with all the coughing I'm not sure I shouldn't go ahead and cancel this one. Except I've only had about a half dozen lessons since the start of November, and backsliding can occur as a side effect of infrequency. Bleh.

I disagree with the assessment that the Super Bowl was boring, but I'll say that it was a football geek kind of game and not a shootout, which seems to be the only kind of game the average consumer likes. I was muttering under my breath how I didn't think either quarterback was Super Bowl caliber right before the first interception. Both quarterbacks sucked, but even if Collins hadn't made it that much easier for the Ravens I think their defense still would have dismantled the Giants offense. Their defense was that good.

Ads: e*trade wins for the "Invest Wisely" one. The VW GTI caught in the tree was good for a snort, the monster.com ads were okay but not terribly inspired, and Anheuser-Busch batted about .500 (the "What are you doing?" ad being the best of the lot, followed by "It's not that bad"). Pepsi should just Go The Hell Away, Cingular should hire a different ad agency (they get credit for using the word "gimp," but that ad teetered on the edge of An Inspiration to Us All, and the rest of them were pointless), I'm not exactly sure what Accenture was trying to accomplish, and I'm disappointed that IBM reused an ad instead of bringing out a new one. Oh, and despite the hubbub surrounding the running of the squirrels (and the continued discussion of last year's visually clever but unoriginal cat herders -- the joke was long stale), I will never, ever believe that EDS is capable of anything original, when they're known for requiring their male employees to wear coats and ties. Anybody who'll work under those conditions isn't the sort of person I want solving my computer problems.

The real winners of the night were the Eyevision folks. Those wraparound replays kicked ass.

Anyway, I should figure out if I'm going to work or staying home to cough in comfort.

link (29 jan)

I'm amused by this. Nielsen is pretty tactful, but he does point out that the site could have been created by one person in a few days - so it's pretty galling that there were errors.

I agree with the analysis that the site must have been an afterthought.

link (21:18 EST, Friday, 26 January 2001.)

I plead alignment to the flakes of the untitled snakes of a merry cow, and to the Republicans for which they scam, one nacho, underpants, with licorice and jugs of wine for owls.

I'm a little disturbed that somebody feels they need to require the pledge in schools. I'm not against saying the pledge, and we did it every day in elementary school, but I do have a problem with putting the requirement into state law.

It's also weird to go to any public event where the pledge is recited, since so many grown adults seem to blurt it out in syllables like they learned it back in first grade:

I pledge a legiance
To the flag
Of the United States of America
And to the republic
For which it stands
One nation
Under God
With liberty
And justice
For all.

It's one sentence. Have you ever heard anybody speak it in a way that actually sounded like they knew what it meant?

link (14:02 EST, Thursday, 25 January 2001.)

It's been a particularly busy week and will continue to be at least through tomorrow, so here's what's in store:

• Something on the California power crisis
• Something on urban planning, or the lack of it
• Something on why I probably won't be living in Washington in a year, for real (I think it's serious this time)
• Something on the visit to Canada
• A followup on other things that happened over Christmas in Holland, that I meant to write when I got home but was out of commission with the flu instead
• A site reorg, which will probably involve moving things like the California power crisis piece and some of the earlier rants from here over to fedward.org (there's content there now, for those of you who didn't notice that the button caption changed), and may possibly include retiring this diary, as this is a year old and I'm starting to feel that I'm repeating myself

The desire not to repeat myself is pushing me in the no-diary direction, or at least in the no-diaryland direction, as it's not like I can't do diary things on my domain. Duh.

Anyway, look for more content here touching on the above topics once I get the chance.

link (24 jan)

Hoo hah. That both rocks and is terribly frightening.

link (16:52 EST, Wednesday, 24 January 2001.)

Bruce Sterling lists thirteen ways to look at the blackouts in California. I've got a rant bubbling up about that myself, but I haven't had the time to put it together.

link (13:39 EST, Wednesday, 24 January 2001.)

I see I'm not the only one who felt it was appropriate to leave the country during the, uh, somehow inauguration doesn't seem the right word. Instatement? Installation?

I at least have the further complication that I live in the city whose streets are being closed, whose police are girding for riots, whose bars and restaurants are being overrun by gleeful -- and zealous -- republicans. So I got the hell out of Dodge, as it were.

There was a note in the Post about how Shrub is having the "TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION" plates removed from the Presidential auto fleet. He also stated in an interview that he was totally against Home Rule -- without, apparently, knowing what Home Rule was. These are not going to be a good four years for the District.

I wasn't a Clinton fan either, but at least he was sympathetic, and when he said he felt your pain, it was a convincing performance (although I'm not ruling out the idea that he was cynical and opportunistic, and would feel anybody's pain if he thought it would be politically beneficial to do so).

Shrub is a moron, a lightweight, and can't be bothered to think about anything that doesn't immediately affect him, and I also think he's thickheaded enough not to understand when he actually needs to care. I think when he finally comprehends that something is important enough to address, he'll have somebody get right on that, but I don't see him taking a personal interest in anything.

But enough complaining. I left the country for a reason. Time to go be entertaining and entertained.

link (20 jan)

So Tino has a complaint about natural light in offices, and while he's right about the need for it he's a little incomplete on the cause of the lack of it. So here I am to fill in a gap or two.

It all starts with the adoption of two technologies in the 30s - air conditioning and fluorescent light. They go rather hand in hand, as they both were necessary in order for buildings to reach the large sorts of floorplans made desirable by high real estate costs. The combination of cause and effect is such that if you want air conditioning, then you probably want to keep your windows closed to keep that expensive cool air in, and you also want to minimize window exposure because more window surface area means more heat to eliminate. Glass, as it turns out, allows radiation in but reflects heat back. So with sunlight, you get a big solar oven -- you're probably familiar with the phenomenon if you've ever opened up a car door on a summer afternoon.

So. You're going to minimize your window exposure (after the advent of air conditioning average window heights relative to floor to ceiling heights were halved), and then you've got to come up with a way to compensate for the missing light. Voila, the fluorescent tube appears to save the day and make large floorplans possible without equivalently high ceilings and tall windows. Add the elevator and you've got the modern skyscraper; without it you have the modern factory. (Emphasis on modern -- early skyscrapers still had to deal with cooling and light the old fashioned ways).

So, prior to these two technologies, buildings had high ceilings, windows that opened, and floorplans that maximized window exposure, in order to get light and air into every occupied space. Add the modern wonders, and you suddenly can fill in all that space that used to be open, maximizing an entire city block. The first skyscrapers also predated (and brought about) setback restrictions, mandating that buildings have a restricted combination of height and width in order to allow sunlight to reach the streets below.

All of these factors combined to produce buildings that were as large at ground level as possible, with ceilings lower than in traditional structures, with windows large enough to allow nice views, but shorter than before as a way to reduce related energy costs. And these buildings begat the idea of the window office, or -- luxury of luxuries -- the corner office, as indicator of and reward for status.

All of this had developed before 1940, really. We've now had 60 years of using architecture as reinforcement of hierarchy. It continues to this day, and rather needlessly.

In an extremely tall building, you don't want the windows to open at all. It's a bad idea for wind load reasons alone, not to mention energy costs or cleaning costs related to air pollution. And in an urban core, you're necessarily going to have large floorplans simply due to the cost of real estate. But Tino and I don't work in an urban core. We work in a suburb where the mid-rise office building reigns supreme. In a suburb it's possible, and not terribly expensive, to build a building where every office is a corner office. It's also possible in a mid-rise in a suburb to have windows that open, as wind pressures aren't enough to cause problems. It's more expensive, though, than a big plain rectangular parallelepiped. And companies don't buy offices where everybody gets a corner office, because then where's the status symbol? Where's the reinforcement of the management hierarchy? And why should they spend any extra money (even if it's not all that much) for extra window (or corner) offices they don't have employees of the rank to fill?

The increased hostility towards the workers who populate these buildings comes not from the architects, but from the management of the companies that buy or lease the space, and from the "office space designers" (cube layout technicians) they hire to maximize their floor space.

The old/new building Tino moved out of has, really, a single advantage over the one into which he moved: high ceilings. It's a big rectangular parallelepiped, about 200 feet long and 100 feet wide, and it was designed to be very functional in an open floor plan, which, conveniently, it now has. The advantage the office space (distinct from the building) has over the new/old building is that the cubes have been laid out in order to take advantage of the windows, status be damned. If the hierarchy had been enforced (as I'm sure some people tried to do), the aisles would be not along the inside walls surrounding the core, but along the windows, as most employees don't rate window cubes. Instead, somebody realized that with the same square footage you could make the space much more habitable merely by putting the outside row of cubes along the windows, and keeping the cube wall height down. The disadvantage to shorter cube walls is that the office will be noisier, but given the advantage of natural light, it's a fair tradeoff.

The old/new building into which Tino moved has less window exposure to begin with, and then the cube orientation problem he mentions. The aisles are along the windows, not because it's a good place for them, but because the people on those floors weren't expected to rate window exposure. But that's not the architect's fault. It's bad, but it's a malicious imposition of hierarchy and not there for any given architectural reason.

Why? Because for 60 years, having a window has been an indicator of status, a reinforcement of rank. In a densely populated urban core, that still holds true and always will. In a mid-rise, in a suburb, it doesn't have to be true at all, but management wants it that way. I have a friend who works at SAS in Cary, NC. Every employee at SAS has not just an office with a door, but a window office. SAS had a billion dollars in revenue last year. Cube farms aren't monetarily necessary, they're a result of a corporate culture that believes that windows are a sign of status and not a feature that might help an employee get his or her work done.

link (18 jan)

I'd been wanting a Xootr ever since I found out they existed (which was a while ago) but I wasn't about to pay as much money as they were charging. I did, however, sign up for the free t-shirt offer, which got me on their marketing mailing list.

As I suspected, things worked out pretty well. Seems I'm not the only person interested but unwilling to shell out that kind of dough. What's interesting to me is that they're selling "factory second" units for 40-something percent off. If you can give a 40% discount and still make a profit, might that not mean that your original prices were a bit, um, steep?

I ordered a refurbished front-brake Street model. Not like I'm not gonna scratch it up anyway, and 30 bucks is 30 bucks.

link ( 9:32 EST, Thursday, 18 January 2001.)

Wash Tech salary survey. Fill it out. Prove to me I'm underpaid.

link (12:52 EST, Wednesday, 17 January 2001.)