Yes, I'm fine. My muse simply took a vacation this week.

Several of you have asked about work: has my new state of mind persisted, am I okay, etc. The answer is yes, more or less. I discovered, once the initial elation subsided, that at root this perspective was one that required a daily dose of will to maintain. I don't mean the one-finger-left-on-the-crumbling-cliff-but-must-hang-on kind of will, but rather seeing the connection between that overall perspective and the daily activities that either fuel or sap it, and making the right choices on a micro level.

I'm working on a particular database project at work, and I discover that another person, one level up from me in position and respect, is working on the same thing from a different angle. This is a faculty evaluation database -- where we can track folks' teaching over time. This data is of course used in hiring, development and retention decisions. Now, I'm working on it from the online perspective, which is complicated and requires a subtlety to the design of both the back end as well as the user interface. This other person is coming at it from the traditional face-to-face perspective, as we have multiple campuses with traditional classes.

You'd think that this person would approach me to talk about this before starting in. You'd be wrong, Gentle Reader.

So my initial reaction was of course bitter resent and anger. This person is known to be presumptive and condescending, and this is coupled with managerial incompetence. We aren't actually clear on what it is that the person really does. I sent my scope document to my boss, who told me that it was more or less identical to what Person X had done in scope. My document has more detail, however, and serves as a better framework for our IT guys to work with. So my boss says that I should contact Person X and we should work together to get this done. He then proceeds to send what I'd written to Person X.

I get an email from Person X, saying that my boss had sent the documents to them and that Person X looked forward to discussing them with me, and that Person X would be at such and such a location and that I should call to discuss them.

Now, I want to simply kick Person X's opinion to the curb, because I find Person X is amusingly unable to speak with authority about how to actually do anything around here. There's a danger that what I have done could be absorbed by Person X, and Person X gets the recognition for it.

Nevertheless, the fact is that at the end of the day, the project desperately needs doing, and that's where I'm choosing to put my focus. My life will be made better by the project completion.

I realized yesterday morning that I've fallen into the habit of believing the worst about colleagues without much evidence at all. It's as if my initial response is suspicion and cynicism. Not that cynicism is alien to me at all, but initial suspicion and distrust is. I didn't used to make snap judgements about people. Person X above is a case in point. Why do I think that person is incompetent and disingenuous? The fact is that all of my interactions with Person X have been fine, even pleasant.

I'm awakening to the need to have some faith in folks. It isn't native to the work environment I'm in, outside of ridiculous slogans and company mission statements. But it has been native to me. And it should be, again.

For the last of the free Audible downloads (and stuff to listen to on the way to and from work), I chose the first of Patrick O'Brien's series of Jack Aubrey novels, Master and Commander. Set in the Napoleonic era, they follow the naval career of a man from leftenant to Admiral. In this first book, Jack Aubrey -- your archetypal everyman of His Majesty's Navy -- assumes his first post as the captain of the Sophie, a sloop of war. Also introduced is the man who will serve as his intellectual companion and erstwhile foil, Stephen Maturin, a former Irish rebel who serves as the ship's doctor.

I must say that O'Brien nails the dialogue and overall ambience of the book -- as I've read a great deal of the period literature, I can recognize hack work when I see it, and O'Brien is nonesuch -- you can expect the genuine article. His characters think and express themselves in a manner wholly suited to their respective stations in life, whether they are Irish leftenants, Danish sailors, or British powder monkies. At no point is the veil of fiction lifted.

And such descriptions of the vessels -- as exact and neat as ever the heart of man could desire. O'Brien doesn't make it easy on the reader -- I spent several hours on Wikipedia working through the various nautical terms and phrases particular to the Age of Sail -- but the result is a surpassing richness of detail and immediacy to the descriptions that put you, Gentle Reader, right on the damned quarter-deck yourself, shouting "fire!" for all that you are worth.

If you choose to get the audiobook version, let me recommend that you insist on the unabridged version read by Patrick Tull. His voices are spot-on, his accents thick and salty, and you'd swear on your life that the man was himself reading the books while at sea.

I heartily recommend it. The only danger for me now is that I get carried away on the way to work, and my road rage gives vent to hoarse shouts to "bring her about and prepare to rake the stern" of this or that commuter vehicle.

Almost as soon as I posted the posting below, I began to feel a completely unexpected sensation: relief. As I tried to articulate for both Dr. C and Hambone yesterday, I'm not sure exactly whence it comes, but I feel better than I've felt in half a year.

I wrote my previous posting with my usual sardonic perspective, and fully expected to bear up under the added weight of the depressing realization that I work in a system.

As I sat in my boss's office Monday morning, though, I walked through my thinking on the subject with him, and in the course of conversation I discovered just how much of this company's operational direction and how many of the decisions of the previous three years seem to fit this model.

Instead of being enraged at managerial disingenuity, I found myself...well, feeling grounded again, or that I had finally gotten my bearings. I know why things happen here the way they do, even if -- and I think this is true -- very few others outside of executive management do. That doesn't excuse management from responsibility for not coming clean with us, of course. I attribute that to inept people managing, though, rather than the system itself.

So back to the point: three things seem to have occurred right around the same time as this shift in my perspective. What they fundamentally have to do with the positive change I can't yet determine with any measure of exactness, but here they are:

1. Brilliant training in Baltimore. It was, as I said elsewhere, perhaps the best training I've done these two or three years -- in the same class as some of the world-beater UNC sessions back in '03. It reminded me of my own strength and talent, and I demonstrated both to all present. It was a right fitting swan song.
   
   
2. Epiphany of career education company as engineered system, and as ongoing work of systems engineering. Suddenly, I do not feel that every disappointment is a personally marginalizing moment, that every choice to invest in new courses rather than faculty development is a statement of greed. It's that the company has chosen a certain tack. When it doesn't work out, they'll choose another. For some reason, I feel differentiated from my putative identity as the avatar of instructional quality, such that I can calmly observe such directional changes without blowing my top.
   
   
3. My performance review as confessional. My review was hardly surprising -- it was rather a statement and restatement in multiple ways of the obvious: that I've taken a lot of hits this year and am having trouble getting back on my feet. During one pivotal moment in the review conversation, I actually had the guts to say "I've never been so demoralized at any job I've ever had as I am here." To which my boss simply nodded his head and said, "I know."

Those are the pieces to which I can point as in some way formative of my present state of mind.

And what does that state of mind look like now? I woke up yesterday morning with my mind full of ideas, full of the prospect of accomplishing needful things, full of the sense that I could make them happen. In the past 24 hours I've done more planning and productive thinking about work projects than I did in the entire quarter previous.

I feel...present, again.

I trained a bunch of engineering faculty this weekend, as mentioned in a previous post. Four out of the six people in the group are systems engineers, and they are designing and developing systems engineering courses for the online environment.

One of the struggles their incoming students face, they tell me, is that they all come from very specific engineering backgrounds: there are mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, mathematicians, physicists, etc. Each student enters the program having already worked in his or her respective field for years. As a result, he or she is well-used to thinking in certain processes. Any problem is approached instinctively from the perspective of his or her own field.

Trouble is, a systems engineer has to look at things as an interrelated whole, rather than a collection of disparate parts. When trying to troubleshoot systemic problems, then, it is extremely difficult for a longtime engineer to break out of his or her habitual thinking patterns and to focus on the system health as a whole.

What's more, when faced with the prospect of designing a system, it is excruciating for them to let go of the goal of designing the best components (something they would do in their respective fields); for in SE, the goal is to devise the cheapest, fastest, producible solution that achieves the client-determined performance standard. Whereas in a focused area of engineering the goal is quality, in SE the three salient factors are time, cost, and performance.

Breaking out of that "Quality is Job #1" mindset is terrifying, liberating and probably somewhat depressing at moments. You no longer think of your work as scaling the next mountain, or trying to hit the very center of the bullseye; you now think of yourself as the high jumper who would be foolish to expend energy jumping any higher than just above the bar.

It occurs to me that I am an area-specific engineer, and I work in a company that approaches education from a systems engineering perspective. My frustration with quality and stupid management stems from my failure to realize the difference in overall management priorities.

Cost, time, and performance. I think that's what matters, regardless of the product here.

For those of you who recognize this post's title, though: Enjoy!

Tomorrow I go to deliver training (Friday and all day Saturday) in Baltimore for a partner institution, for the bazillionth time, despite empty promises to get us out of this stupid work. My boss is going with me, and he's pissed about going himself. Also, my performance review is due. Here's a snippet from a chat about it with Hambone.



Braaaaaaiiiiiiinss.....

Me, I like puppets. But then, so do all clowns.

Yesterday the Quote of the Day was from William Pickering, our ambassador to Russia. He said:

"In archaeology you uncover the unknown. In diplomacy you cover the known."

Now, in this context he's clearly using a very specific meaning for "cover" and "uncover." With respect to archaeology, his meaning is literal: archaeologists unearth artifacts. Concerning diplomacy, he still focuses on unearthing or burying something, but the something in question is conceptual (information) rather than physical (object).

I'd like to expand the idea somewhat, however, including the meaning we intend when we say that a runner "covered the miles to the finish line at a record-setting pace," or that a teacher "covered a great deal of material during this class session." That is, there's a sense of displacement involved: you end up somewhere other than where you began.

And that's of course a desired outcome in education. People are drawn out from where they started in their thinking, and led out into new thinking territory (that's where we get the word educate, in fact). You finish school with more skills than when you began, and (to extend the displacement motif further) you approach any new problem or situation from a different angle.

Now, here's the question: in terms of covering and uncovering, what is the teacher's approach to the known and unknown?

Consider Pickering's quote as laid out on a two-axis graph:



If the green dot represents diplomacy and the purple dot represents archaeology, where would you put a dot (or dots) for teaching?

Since LWB a) doesn't know the difference between blackmail and extortion, b) just published an email I sent privately to her, and c) apparently doesn't negotiate with blogging terrorists, I'd like to share with you now a little note from her:



Wasted.

Every once in a while, there's that wireless network that has so much panache to the name that you simply must try to connect. The above network was found nearby a coffee shop today.

I'm only posting this because my pathos-inspiring in-laws can't find a better way to save face than to change the name of the devsite we use to develop LWB's blog. Nobody ever sees that website, but I didn't feel that it was fair to so publicly pwn LWB (see her website Fashion Kitty) without receiving some kind of comeuppance.

Everyone, see how effectively I was wasted by LWB and Monkeyboy.



Don't worry if you hadn't previously seen it -- see, they posted this on a private testbed site. Before my post, here, only myself and LWB could even view it.

"But why," you may ask, Gentle Reader, "haven't they just changed LWB's profile settings to change her avatar picture, and thereby put a stop to the complete and total pwnage you laid on them Saturday, blakbuzzrd?"

Hmmm. That's a good question: say, why is that, LWB? Haven't you tried changing your pic yet?

Nyuk nyuk nyuk ... wasted...