I’ve stopped using the closet in our room for the most part. Most of my work shirts are in a corner of the downstairs front hall closet, because the bedroom closet is full of Terri’s stuff. But we’re on a cleaning binge, and Terri is throwing a bunch of stuff out, so I might be able to get my side of the bedroom closet back. And I’m going through my stuff too, putting things I know I’ll realistically never wear again into the Goodwill pile, and putting the rest back in the closet.

And it occurs to me that I’ve very deeply internalized what my 8th grade home economics teacher taught us: always put your shirts in the closet with the open side of the hangers facing the same direction: inwards. That way, if there’s ever a fire, you can remove all your shirts all at once.

Now, I’ve never revisited this particular bit of wisdom that the taxpayers of Elizabeth and Forward townships paid someone to put in my head, but it seems like highly questionable advice: saving your shirts is probably the last thing you should be doing in a fire. But I’m going to keep doing it. You’ve got to hang your shirts one way or the other, right? So you might as well do it the same way, and it’s one of those things where it costs as much to be organized as disorganized, and why not fight entropy as much as possible?

Also, thinking about this made me realize I had something blogworthy, and writing this down for posterity is infinitely more important than cleaning out my closet, right? This I can do in my living room with all the windows open on a beautiful May day, after all the Tufts undergraduates have gone home for the summer.

Terri’s still not home yet? Hm. I thought Rainer was stirring, but he’s still asleep. I’m running out of things to say. …

…

*sigh* OK, back to the closet.

I had few meetings scheduled. I had a lot of work that required focus. Everybody else in the office was in a chatty mood.

I put on the headphones, cranked up iTunes, set up a smart list that included only songs longer than 10 minutes.

I got:

Sister Ray — Velvet Underground
Pass the Hatchet, I’m Goodkind — Yo La Tengo
Stone Free (Live, Albert Hall) — Jimi Hendrix
Jenny Ondioline — Stereolab
A Very Cellular Song — The Incredible String Band
Cosmia — Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band
Let Us Go Into the House of the Lord — Pharoah Sanders
I Dream A Highway — Gillian Welch
Desolation Row — Bob Dylan

… and many others showed up that I didn’t actualy listen to.

Luckily, I have a spare cheapo Linksys home router at work, so I figured that I’d grab it first thing this morning because I’d already hatched a plan to go out early and get some Valentines’ day flowers for Terri. So, Rainey woke up at 7, I changed him, we played a little, read a few books, and then I bundled him up and we trekked into town to my office. Thanks to your tax dollars and mine, the Big Dig has made this a 10 minute drive on a weekend morning when there’s no traffic. There was no parking on Pearl St, where I usually park when I make these quick jaunts. I remembered that there’s an alley behind the building, so I looped around the block and turned down it. A homeless guy who lives in the neighborhood was dumpster diving in the alley, and there were maybe two dozen huge seagulls, all squacking and waddling toward him. They were thrilled that he’d opened the lid on the dumpsters. Of course, when I turned down the alley, neither the seagulls nor the guy seemed too thriled that I turned down their alley.  I wasn’t exactly happy to be disturbing them either, and all for naught, as it turned out; the loading dock where I’d hoped to park is full with two pickup trucks. So I found a place on the street not too far off. The jaunt up to the office and retrieve the router was quick and uneventful, as was the drive back to Somerville. We stopped at Whole Foods and got some black velvetty looking roses that I figured (correctly) that Terri would like, and we came back and I helped Rainey make his mom a valentine (which Terri also indeed liked).

Once Terri woke up and found her valentines treats and we got our act together, we walked into Davis Square to the Burren for what has become our Sunday morning — er, afternoon— ritual of reading the NY Times and nursing a few Guinness and letting Rainer flirt outrageously with women 20 – 40 times his age. We had the same waitress as last week. She remembered Rainer’s name (last time we discussed Rainer Maria Rilke (and how he was only one of many factors which led us to Rainey’s name)). This time we discussed how one of the great things about the Burren is that there are no TVs.

Seriously, you can’t go into a place and have it actually be that place anymore. There have to be at least 2 TVs playing at least 2 different channels. Part of the wonderful conversation that Terri and I had during our 5 hours (!) there this afternoon concerned how we’ve really appreciated going to the Burren because it’s somewhere where there are no distractions. This in contrast to our home, which has become a bit overmediated. I definitely feel like we spend a ton of time physically there without really being there. And we have the dirty kitchen of a heavy traveller to prove it. And I realize that driving 5 miles into Boston and 5 miles back before 8am just so that I can get a router that lets me blog is precisely part of the problem. But I am also giving myself some slack; blogging is at least requiring me to sustain some thoughts for more than 140 characters. Blogging is realtime like Twitter, but in high-definition!

There were two side effects. First, I ended up with dozens of items in my RSS reader, as you may have too. Not sure why. The other side effect is that I got the hankerin’ to write in it again.

Actually, there’s probably another reason for that hankerin’, as I have been incapacitated to the point of boredom by a really awful stomach bug the last two days. I’m on the road to recovery now, but for the first day or so I didn’t really even have the gumption to force myself to sit up and use a computer.  I did watch a lot of movies on TCM. Well, I watched the part of Roberta with Fred Astaire and Irene Dunne that I’d seen before and slept through the ending which I hadn’t seen. I also watched the part of Seahawk with Errol Flynn that I’d seen before and also slept through the part that I hadn’t.

Comment #1: I had an epiphany as a young programmer that the best programmers were people who had liberal arts degrees rather than computer science or software engineering degrees. Programmers are supposed to make useful models of the world, and the hardest part turns out not to be the modeling part, but the understanding the world part. When I transitioned into management, I learned the same was true of MBAs.

That said, just like you can get in way over your head in software development if you don’t get some pure engineering training, there really is something to be said for management as an abstract discipline. My gripe with the literature is not so much that it’s all complete hooey, but the books have a very low ratio of valuable insights to hooey, and are very repetitive and information-sparse.

Comment #2: (when I said “the hard part turns out not to be the modeling part” what I mean is that the tools of modeling, the computer languages, the hardware, the infrastructure– those things have reached a state of maturity such that you really don’t have to spend years studying computer science to be able to use them properly).

There’s also one of those great New Yorker reviews-that-is-almost-as-meaty-as-the-book-reviewed here. Which is a pretty interesting history of management consulting going wayyy back to the 19th century.

* * * * *
It’s just a hunch, but historically, I think the rise of the PHB stereotype coincided with the rise of the post WWII military industrial complex. Friends and relatives who have worked in engineering for defense contractors have had a far more Dilbertian experience than I have programming in the purely private sector. If you think about the Manhattan Project or the space race, the engineers in question were more pure scientists– even farther down the spectrum from the PHB stereotype than a typical engineer. And yet the bureaucrats and generals who commissioned their work didn’t understand the science itself. As much of this became privatized, this division of labor continued.

This is mostly conjecture, but it sounds plausible to me.

And I suppose my mileage has varied from the typical programmer here, but I came fairly early in my career to not only believe that good management exists, but to value it. Perhaps it’s because the manager in question was truly a foreman, by your definition, but he understood enough about the work itself to fight for the time and resources to do it properly, but to also keep the team grounded enough to actually *ship*. Maybe it makes me an odd duck, but I find the most satisfaction in finding the simplest solution to a problem– and actually getting my work in front of users. I’ve always felt my fellow programmers if left to their own devices would rather write beautiful or clever code that impressed each other rather than shipping something real.

That’s another reason I too feel little for Dilbert– on one hand the strip seems to suggest that if only the world could be rid of PHBs, workers would magically organize themselves to… to do what exactly? Dilbert gives lip service to wanting to do useful work, but he rarely demostrates much love of craft, certainly not enough to pick up and move to a company where he could exercise it– they do exist. I think it’s in this fatalism where Adams shows his true colors: if Dilbert were a real engineer, he’d figure out that this is a problem to be solved and get himself out of the situation rather than suffer the PHBs idiocy merely to collect a paycheck.

Someone recommended the Baby Einstein Baby Mozart CD to us. I played it for the kid yesterday. It was basically a bunch of Mozart piano concertos played on a cheesy synth. It wasn’t terrible, and the kid seemed to like it insofar as he realized it existed (which is to say, not that much). But wouldn’t he have liked a version with piano and traditional instrumentation just as much? Was this just to keep from paying royalties or hiring real musicians? Or was there some developmental psychological research that showed that xylophone and bonky drum sounds stimulate babies brains more than pianos and violins?

Later yesterday we took a walk and ended up at Stellabella Toys in Cambridge. They were playing some kind of kid’s CD that featured “What Goes On” by the Velvet Underground as performed by a woman with a sunny voice and an acoustic guitar. Now, I don’t personally see why you’d need to re-record this song to make it palatable to kids, it’s pretty basic, catchy, stripped-down. But maybe some parents with more delicate sensibilities would flip if the same band that recorded “Sister Ray” or “Heroin” was on their kids CD. I don’t know. What makes me think that something else is going on is the version of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” we heard there– it sounded exactly like the original, just a different singer.

A kid doesn’t have the cultural context to know the difference between John Lennon and a random studio signer, why even bother? It’s obviously for the parents’ sake. Why would parents choose the studio singer over John Lennon? Maybe hearing his voice conjures up his assasination, his embarassing and ultimately-not-world-changing protests involving hair and bed and Yoko, and “Double Fantasy”.

So, my hypothesis is that kid covers are a slightly self-delusional way to make parents feel like they’re protecting their kids. I will revise this opinion when, if I play both versions side by side, my kid prefers the dumbed-down kid version of a song. Until then, he gets the real deal.

But come on, even at the time in question (2003), I have to admit, I had an eyebrow raised. The Sox offense was explosive, you had several capable players suddenly having superstar-quality years (Mueller, Varitek, Ortiz, Damon), and a couple of established superstars having great years, too (Garciaparra, Ramirez). Maybe at the time, the all-pervasive sense of being the perennial bridesmaid made people not even let that thought bubble into consciousness. But I gotta figure I can’t be the only one who had that thought, but quickly filed it away in the back of my mind in the bin labelled “don’t ask, don’t tell”.

A slightly cynical thought I’ve played with for some years now is that there should be two MLBs. One that allows steroids, and one that is “clean”. I don’t know. These dudes are highly paid, and if they’re willing to trade years of their life for cash and glory, so be it: it’s not cheating if everybody’s doing it. Also, my strong hunch is that the league with steroids allowed and out in the open would be vastly more popular, full of lots of home runs and lots of game twists (ala the Red Sox circa 2003 and 2004, where you could never count out the offense, even if they were down a couple of runs and it was 2 outs in the 9th inning). Those were years which have since been unmatched for sheer entertainment value.

Still, I do wish that the only juicing that had been going on was the slug of Jack Daniels that Kevin Millar claimed was part of the team pregame ritual.

PS: Lesson learned on schadenfreude. However, I will allow myself a slight bit of glee if that sanctimonious twit Curt Schilling gets implicated too, since he has clucked loudly at every name that comes to light.

PPS: As I’m writing this and watching NESN, Boston Mayor Tom Mennino and David Ortiz are urging the young people of the city to make good decisions this summer.