Ball pythons in trees

Have a look at Indy perform an upside-down prey catch. Ball pythons are not supposed to be arboreal at all, so I am real impressed that he hangs out in trees and that he catches prey happily from the plant. People say ball pythons are boring and just hang out on the ground, useless lumps, just starter snakes. Well, I've had two adults and I now have a third, a juvenile, and all of them had personalities and were interesting. This most recent, Indy, captive bred (I knew nothing about the other two), is even beginning to show interest in myself and my wife, wanting attention.

So, misconceptions about ball pythons being boring animals aside, can we move on? I think the problem is a snake is only as engaging as it is engaged. I've seen emerald tree boas–supposedly "ornamental only" animals–that freely wrapped themselves around their owners, exploring and allowing themselves to be handled freely. There are a lot of herp enthusiasts with forty animals. Of course you can't give your ball python handling every day. It's probably going to be a lump and may even snap at you when you feed it. But if you handle it every day, and let it swim in the bath tub, and let it climb a tree, maybe you'll find that the snake is a lot more interested in you and the world at large.

Not everyone gets to go to the moon

Almost without fail, people are of a singular concern when it comes to the team they work on. Whether it’s the customary Friday-after-margaritas or in complaints quietly murmured in the hallways, or developing into uglier things like layoffs: the under-performer.

Everyone, it seems, has worked on a team where one or more employees isn’t up to the skill level of the rest of the team. This can lead to catastrophic failure and it needn’t. There ware ways to take these under-performers and either turn them into the performers they can be, or to use them for purposes that don’t endanger a project’s – or a team’s – success or reputation.

First, it may be that all men are created equal. We are of course not all paid equally, and we do not all go to the same schools, and we don’t learn the same skills in our careers up to the point where we meet one-another on a team. But, for the most part, many of our differences are trivially small and can be overcome. Sadly, they often aren’t, for a number of reasons.

I will instead focus on how to take these disparities in performance or knowledge levels, and make them less of a detriment to a team and hopefully turn the under-performer into someone who is able to perform at the same level as everyone else, and even provide benefits not ordinarily considered the by-product of the under-performer.

Once a colleague of mine and I were discussing how difficult it was to navigate a simple surface street in San Diego. It seemed that, while the signals were clearly marked or placed, and that the lines were well-drawn and the roads well paved – it was a wealthy suburb after all – some people just didn’t seem capable of making left turns from the left lane, making right turns from the right lane – especially on red, especially when given the opportunity, it seemed – and what should have been orderly traffic became a sort of antagonistic chaos. It flowed, but it flowed in fits and starts, with obscenities yelled from windows and I am sure more than the occasional car accident.

I could say that this happened before I had reached some moment of Zen in my life after which I understood the world better, but it would be a bald-faced lie. Instead, I became just as angry as everyone else, and I began to swear and say things like, “it should be painful to be stupid!” This conversation, for such a base topic, continued long enough, and spilled from the roadway to discussions of our respective jobs and people we knew that my colleague stopped me. My colleague, it should be mentioned, works with a vast number of clients in a given year, orders of magnitude more than I do – and I work with a lot of people.

What she said to me struck me, literally, and sadly with a bit of a pun, dumb. “You know,” she said, “not everyone gets to go to the moon.” Now my colleague did not work in aerospace, but it was very clear what she was saying and I was so derailed from my path of ranting that it took some time to digest before we both rather burst out in laughing and changed the subject from the idiots in the street to other, more important, and immediate issues.

We don’t all get to go to the moon. It’s deceptively simple, and yet it says so very much. If you consider the early, and even contemporary or civilian space programs very, very few people are considered for the astronaut corps. At the time of writing, fewer than five hundred people have been to space. Far, far fewer have been more than once, and only a handful has ever been to the moon. And yet, this corps of men and women we choose from are the very best and brightest of every field we can assemble. They pass physical tests the vast majority of us could not even conceive of taking, let alone passing. Their vision is perfect. Their reflexes are as acute as those of the most successful Top Fuel drag racer. These men and women are absolutely the best, and yet, even among them, not everyone gets to go to the moon.

Perhaps it sounds as though this has little relevance to the project you’re working on. The reason you’re interested in reading this is it might give you some insight into how to use, abuse, get rid of, or otherwise turn around this twist of fate that’s given you a poor performer.

Pause for a moment, though, and consider this: you’re reading this right now at work instead of doing your own work, aren’t you? You, in a way, are not doing what you should be doing. Let us say, then, that the first step towards turning around an under-performer is to realize that we all under-perform from time to time, Nobody, and I do mean nobody, is always on, always productive, always making a sale or squashing a bug or finding your missing sandal all the time.

Let’s then expand this “under-performer” moniker to include ourselves then, because clearly, we, too, do not perform as expected all the time, despite the high opinion we all carry of ourselves.

But what about the guy at the office, that one guy, you started reading this article because of him: the one you want off the team, or you don’t want to work with him anymore because he’s just not the sharpest tool in the shed.

Well, we don’t all go to the moon.

Consider, in the task of sending men to the moon, how many moving parts there are in a Saturn V rocket. How many lives were at stake (believe me, not just the people in the tiny little capsule; von Braun is famous for commenting upon seeing a Saturn V on the launch pad that, were it to spontaneously explode, the force of the explosion would literally be in the kiloton- (that is to say, atomic-bomb) yield. That’s a pretty big bang.

In sending men to the moon, we have people who run hoses through holes in panels. We have people that screw one panel to another. We have people who apply hot air guns to heat shrink tubing to splices in wiring. Not everyone goes to the moon.

So what do you do? Your project, if you’re anything like the rest of the world, probably has somewhere between six and twenty-five people. You’ve hired this guy that seems to underperform, and yet there doesn’t seem to be a heat-shrink tubing position for him, nor does there seem to be a cable-puller position for him, either. But have you really thought hard enough about this?

Let me offer you two things.

Firstly, we all started somewhere. It sounds so trite to say because of course we can all look down and see a navel and know that somebody taught us to talk. But who taught you python, or program management, or how to use a hydraulic palette lift? Who taught you how to efficiently stack inventory? Somebody did. Teaching this person – there are people who are teach-proof; I’ve met them, but they are, let me be emphatic about this, the exception and not the rule – helps you. It helps you in more ways than you think. The first thing is, they might be missing some simple trick, and your walking through the procedure(s) with them may make them incrementally more helpful to the point that they are a valuable member of the team. The other thing is, by teaching this person, you are learning a new skill – you are learning to teach. Everyone is a little different, and so each new person you teach – believe me, seeking out the under-performers is a great way to learn how to teach people – helps you hone your teaching skill. You can subsequently list such fancy things as mentored junior employees on your resume. It’s really a valuable skill to have because every team you run across, almost without fail, will have an under-performer that you can probably reform.

The second thing that people forget socially, but especially in the workplace is, while it’s a really fantastic social place to meet people and you can and often do make lifetime friends at the office, it is still the place that pays you – and the under-performer. So while you might go home to your spouse tonight and complain about the under-performer and how your day was awful because the O-ring gasket was just not fitting the Solid Rocket Boosters in the cryogenics tests as it’s supposed to; you know it’s Jones in the O-ring group. We forget that Jones, too, has a family. Chances are, Jones wants that O-ring to work, and chances are, he’s going home to his spouse or his family, and saying, I really have no idea how to make these gaskets work any better!

Your work to get this person off your team, to get that contractor laid off, to “get that person fired” (do people really have conversations like that?), is going to have a huge impact on that person’s life. There is no question that it is easier to keep the same team and bring the overall skill level up, including Jones in the O-ring group, to the level where you succeed. Because then, everyone wins .

No, we don’t all get to go to the moon.  But the same effort we expend in trying to push somebody out of a team can be expended in enhancing our own careers and the effectiveness of our team.

More importantly, humans are social animals. While we guard our workplaces, often as jealously as children guard their corner of the sandbox in pre-school, not allowing interlopers in, or people who don’t fit the standard du jour, that same effort you spend harming or trying to extricate or even harm, be it verbally, psychologically , or otherwise, ,, ,,,,,  that person you could spend bringing them up to the same skill level you are, increasing your value to your employer, and your team’s value to your employer. Sure, your under-performer might not go to the moon, but you might not either. Even the best don’t, sometimes.

As far as the mentioned Zen: Zen is knowing that it is easier for you to take an employee who is difficult to work with and make them easier to work with than it is for your to make their life so difficult that they leave or to have the company take such drastic measures itself that the employee leaves. The under-performer, like you, is a person, and probably does want to go to the moon, just like you, just like the rest of your team, just like everyone does. It is far easier, in these cases, to do good, and indeed it is better for your career, than it is to interfere as a malcontent and conniver or conspirator.

---

New music

I've been listening to a new band that I like more every time I hear it: Land of Talk. Specifically the album Some are Lakes. Here's the whole deal. And, really, you should support them because they're on Saddle Creek Records, an independent label who brought us people like Rilo Kiley and The Faint. I'm not really one to whore out bands and I guess I get a nickel if you buy it with that link or something like that, but I'm not in it for the money and never will be. It's about the music. It's hard as shit to find good music these days, and I'm just trying to spread it around.

Cheers.

note to self

long character names: cool, but a pain in the ass to type over and over.

vectors in C

I found the XDR library for C which allows us to do this:

{
  xdrstdio_create ( &xdrs, file_pointer, XDR_ENCODE );

  seed = 123456789;

  for ( i = 1; i <= 10; i++ )
  {
    xdr_i = i4_uniform ( 0, 100000, &seed );
    xdr_int ( &xdrs, &xdr_i );
  }

  xdr_destroy ( &xdrs );

  fclose ( file_pointer );
}

But then I run into this:

typedef int v4si __attribute__ (( vector_size(4*sizeof(int)) ));

// which lets us do 

int foo[4] = {1,5,7,9};
int bar[4] = {2,3,4,5};
for(unsigned int i=0 ; i<4 ; i++)
{
     bar[i] += foo[i];
}

// and this, which i like a LOT

typedef int v4si __attribute__ ((vector_size (4*sizeof(int))));
v4si foo = {1,5,7,9};
v4si bar = {2,3,4,5};
bar += foo;

So this v4si stuff seems to be an extension of the gcc compiler suite, and i don't have a manpage for it on my mac (gcc? you've got xcode, man!) and i'm not sure if my mac supports it or how really to use it. The XDR stuff is more for moving things from one platform to another. I might as well create my own vector type based on an array at that point. Arrays of pointers to arrays as it were. It's not built for performance, it's built to be robust. What I need is performance. Halp!

The dicks are watching!

So I get a phone call and email from this guy, Greg Brantley who informs me that he's after me and he's a collection agent and private investigator threw [sic] the state of Texas. He also wanted to let me know he had read this weblog. I can't decide which is funnier, that a private dick thinks a weblog will help him find assets he is looking for or that he wasted the time doing it. I mean, a rant on wikipedia, talk of absinthe, various writing complaints, and pictures of my pet snake. I hope he was reallly, really, bored.

vote from the rooftops.

Bookus interruptus

I was reading River of Gods, and the author made a reference to Shakespeare's Lear, which I had not read. So my wife handed me her old iPhone (minus sim card, lest I get a phone call, eek...) and I read Lear. And then for my own edification, I read Hamlet. Wow, was Hamlet good. Totally blew me away. But it was also very long. And after Lear, I had spent I think ten days away from River of Gods, and I'm really grinding the gears getting back into it. I shouldn't have waited so long. I really like River of Gods, and I'm going to have to really work to get back into it.

In the meantime, my brain is taunting me with story arcs of fantasy, historical fiction, and wrapping stories into a threaded novel (which was my purpose at the time, but I was nowhere near as talented or ambitious a writer then as I am now). Historical fiction? seriously, wtf.

Tasting the forbidden... for education.

So for a story I'm working on (which I am getting to like more and more, and my editor already likes a lot), I needed to know the properties of specific liqueurs and spirits. Where to go but the liquor store? It's educational, I reason, no reason to get my knickers in a twist over that.

The problem is, the main liqueur I'd come to have a look at was crême de menthe. As it turns out, the distilled spirits of mint are in fact clear, and some distributors deign to leave it clear (notably, none of them were at the liquor store, but there are a few online–don't bother looking; it's a real pain in the ass because nobody is selling it to you, it's through their inventory that you find it, so you have to use some third-dan google-fu to find it), while the rest just add green dye to it. Really, would a grasshopper be such a lovely drink if it was a mottled brown and white color, even if it tasted the same as a green one?

As we looked around, we were very disappointed. I was looking for an opalescent green liquid, and because of the sentence structure and the mood being set by the sentence, I really wanted it to be a consumable, wanted it even more to be a liquor to add a little misbehavior to it, and Bailey's with Mint was not going to cut it. Liqueurs that can curdle under the influence of other liqueurs are not real high in my book (cement mixer: look it up).

As it happened, my wife pointed out that there was in fact absinthe for sale. Two thoughts ran through my head at the same time: Danger! and Perfect! The good news is the proper brand (the other didn't have wormwood [thujone] in it) came in a roughly 10 fluid oz bottle. A sort of try-it-if-you-dare size.

I dared.

So I mustered up what I knew about absinthe, and about all I could recall was Kevin Fry's spectacular vehicular hijinks after drinking near the LD50, and that Johnny Depp movie. So I read some on the web and begrudgingly came to the iKipedia because, well, most differences of opinion are put down by riot police there, and I figured it would be a lot easier to work with one opinion.

The old bastard left his ties and a suit, a brown box, mothballs and bowling shoes, and his opinions so you'd never have to choose ... You get smaller while the world gets big; the more you know, the more you know you don't know shit.

Ben Folds, Bastard (or, Ode to Wikipedia)

Turns out, when you only have one opinion or expert to consult with, things get easy, and I had this absinthe thing down pat real quick. I'll go over my own experience, and annotate as necessary. It is worth mentioning I lacked the appropriate hardware.

I started here. The absinthe is on the left in its little-jar-of-horrors size. I had 145ml of cold water ready for the sugar cube after I poured the absinthe into the glass.

 This file has been manipulated a little, but I think it reflects very accurately the color of the absinthe. All I did was dial up the exposure a bit (thank god for RAW photos... I'd have had to re-shoot everything once I'd figured out I needed more exposure).

And here lies our absinthe, in its glass (a whisky glass, as stand-in for a proper absinthe glass , and a loose-leaf tea filter standing in for a proper absinthe spoon.) With the sugar cube (who would have guessed there are official absinthe sugar cubes?) sitting above the absinthe in its filter, all that remained was to pour the water into the glass, dissolving the sugar cube in the process. For our experiment, we had 45ml of absinthe (again, with thujone) at 55% ABV and 145ml of cold water.

I believe the clickthrough on this image is pretty enormous. I wanted to show all the detail of the properly louched drink with the bits of sugar cube and so on.

I think this image is smaller than the previous image. It hasn't been altered.

So is this what I wanted? A cloudy green-yellow drink that looked rather like lemonade and reeked of anise? Not really. But for a reader who is trying to imagine a color and they hear "sugar-louched absinthe," they're going to go along with it, recalling something they've seen in movies or imagined, but have (probably in most cases) not actually tried.

If you've just read the story in particular, and I took some of the magic out of it, I apologize. Take as consolation what I did, as a writer, for you, the reader. I carefully purchased, prepared, and drank absinthe. For you.

And for the curious, I'm a not-small dude, about 235lbs, but I don't drink very much either. I will tell you that the first sip of this drink had a buzz on me. By the time I had half-finished it, I had a serious buzz, and I slowed down not to relish the drink so much but because I needed to, lest my mind wander or I fall asleep. It is powerful business. When the wife asked about it, and I told her about the buzz, I said, boy I'm sure not going to make a habit of that! But by the time the buzz had worn off, I was thinking of how simple it would be to make another. I should probably not have a bottle of the stuff in the house. And, really, I don't recommend anyone try it unless they're on a crusade to try every spirit out there. But even then, friend, use caution. It was a favorite of Hemingway's, but look where it got him.

After Indy molted most recently, I noticed his newest trick (one of my previous snakes was named Houdini): a new mark above and behind his left eye that looks a lot like... an eye. Seriously, it's a scale that's spherical and shiny, mostly separate from the rest of the scales and it looks almost like an eye. The thing is, it's not an eye. He looks kinda scruffy because he's still in mid-molt, but I think you can see the "second eye" behind the eye. I am going to be a very sad panda if this turns out to be some kind of malignant anti-snake thing.

High maintenance, low maintenance.

We'd like another ball python. One, Indy is young enough that we can introduce another snake without any undue stress on either snake. Two, we really like having Indy around, and I think we'd like to have another one to play with, and this time we have the chance to get a morph (when we got Indy, I had just my experience from years ago with ball pythons to draw on; I didn't know there were morphs today!). I really like Spider morphs:

And I am a huge fan of clown morphs:

(shamelessly stolen from Anthony Caponetto Reptiles)

But as we're looking around through the endless morphs at probreeders.com–who breed Gila monsters, too–out of Escondido, California (I seriously need to get back there to visit them), wifey finds the exotics and latches right on. She likes the Albinos–the higher contrast ones–but not the blue-eyed-lucies. She likes the Axanthics and some, but not all of the pastels. But the one she really wants is this half-leucistic "crystal ball" python:

Note that this animal is leucistic. It has blue eyes, not orange or red. It is likely the offspring of two platinums, which can sometimes lead to what's called a "blue-eyed-lucy" or a full leucistic snake: no pigmentation, blue eyes, totally white. Wife immediately latched onto this snake and wanted it. I am not sure what this morph is called because I think this is actually a failed attempt at a Lucy. But she's still a really pretty snake. So I'm wondering if somebody's willing at Pro Breeders to try to make another semi-Lucy for Sandy. Partly because I found out today that Clown morphs are really expensive, especially the pretty ones like Caramel Clown morphs. So, so pretty. The cost is probably pretty high for both, so it may be a toss-up. The silly but beautiful colors of a clown, or the regal and subtle colors of a crystal ball.

And then I get a Boa. :D