Millarian

What a long day! We traveled by RV from Phoenix, AZ to Austin, TX in just about 19 hours. Not record time by any means, but we had a blast. Josh provided the RV and both he and Derek drove.

Highlights of the trip include stopping to discover the mysteries of ‘The Thing’, talking politics and religion with Jade and Erica, Curtis hacking on a new side project and me hacking on a side project (details soon).

It was really nice to spend some quality time with some of my co-workers outside of work and the pressures and demands of customers. Looking forward to participating in SxSW!

Recently, several people told me it was unprofessional to reveal your pay rate. Doesn’t this seem like antiquated thinking? Maybe this goes back to the open, honest communication thing…

I believe that jealousy, resentment, anger, etc. about differences in pay are a direct result of keeping them secret. When they’re secret there’s no need for an employer to justify why you make less than someone else. In the case of a staffing firm it may be even more insidious – they don’t want you to know how much they’re taking out of each paycheck.

Before I started contracting, I was told by several people, and read about it on many forums and blogs, that staffing firms are out for a single purpose and don’t care about contractors at all. They will take advantage of you at every opportunity and use underhanded and sometimes even dishonest methods to get what they want. I refused to believe that because the ones I was talking to seemed very nice.

Sad to say, I’m quickly becoming a believer…

I’m not exactly the best resource for tips on negotiating. I tend to give in pretty easily because I am generally a non-confrontational person. Instead, check out this post from Lifehacker about negotiating your work contract.

I think my biggest mistake is second guessing myself. This is espoused in tip #4:

Never Be the First to Name a Figure – An expert negotiator will inevitably try to get you to name a number first. Asking you what you expect to earn is a high-pressure question, and it’s easy to respond by blurting out a figure that’s lower than what you really want. If asked, simply respond with the following question: “What’s the budget for this contract?”

When I am asked first what my price is for contracting, I tend to go lower than I told myself I would. This is especially true if I really want the position. I guess I am not good at playing hard to get…

Well, I got the job. Actually, I got more than one job and had a tough decision, but I can only work one full-time job at a time. I decided to go with a company that is developing a large-scale health application using Ruby on Rails. It seems like the perfect opportunity for me to interact with other Ruby on Rails developers and test my skills in a traditional workplace.

Today was my second day and I’m finding the environment is about as opposite as you can be from my previous place of employment, Raytheon. Raytheon was very structured (CMMI level 5 process) and since it was very large (>80,000 employees) it could be overwhelming at times.

The project I am working on is, of course, temporary, but they have rented office space away from their main offices and are trying to treat the situation as if we were our own company. This is a good strategy and I have read of this before. In implementation, however, it is resulting in a little chaos. I see a lot of word-of-mouth knowledge transfer, which can be dangerous when you are composed of over 50% contractors. I am also finding that I feel the urge to structure things like Raytheon brainwashed educated me to do. Not that I have anything against Raytheon… they have convinced themselves and their customers that the processes in place are what they need. I was just looking for something a little more agile for my next job.

What I found though is… different. It has elements of Raytheon, like checklists, coding standards, processes, and paperwork. It also has elements of… chaos. Not that I am the greatest coder of all time, but I’m not very impressed with what I have seen so far. They have been working on this for over 6 months and have about as much done as I did in far less time. The difference here is I was prototyping. I went back and scrapped that prototype in favor of taking what I learned to build something entirely new. They decided to keep pressing onward with what looks and feels like a prototype. Instead of system functionality, they seem to be concentrating on the flashy web 2.0 functionality that is made so easy in Ruby on Rails using things like link_to_remote, link_to_function, RJS, etc. Maybe it was telling that on my first day I was shown a website that had a large bubbly pop-up when mousing over a menu item and asked, “Can you do this?” I should have said, “Sure, but shouldn’t the flashy UI elements come later? Let’s nail down the functionality first.” Maybe it’s not too late to speak up. Whatever the case, I get the feeling there’s a lot of work to do…

Update: One of my co-workers is as excited and passionate about Ruby and Ruby on Rails as I am. This is exactly what I was looking for when coming to a team environment using Ruby on Rails. He and I have had some great discussions about Agile practices, Ruby, and Ruby on Rails. I think that we have taught each other a lot and I feel very fortunate that he is there cause if he wasn’t I think I would be forced to leave. The remainder of the team is rooted in traditional development methodologies and the developers don’t have as much passion for it as we do.

Update: We have made some amazing headway on the project since I started three months ago. Still, we find that people are just not willing to change their way of thinking. Many of our attempts to push the Rails way and Agile methodologies have been thwarted. To the higher-ups, Agile means adding new functionality two weeks before an iteration when we’re already drowning in what we have because of scope creep and poor understanding of the user’s needs. The current environment is not as effective as it could be. Like I said before, the team is very rooted in the methodologies they’re used to. The approaches that we have taken thus far have not produced the results we were hoping for. How do we successfully convince other team members (developers, QA, graphic designer, project managers, business analysts, and IT director) about the benefits that we have already discovered (and continue to discover)? There seem to be too many hands in the mix – we want them to get out and just let us do our job to the best of our ability! Don’t even get me started about all the freaking meetings we attend… arrgghhhh!

The Democrats take the House. The Senate is split, but several independent senators have pledged to side with the Democrats, giving them control. A majority of Democratic governors. Donald Rumsfeld resigns.

Lots of changes happening.

Despite all of that, I feel like the euphoria brought on by these changes will be quickly forgotten as we once again realize that there are still too many politicians in politics. No party impresses me; lots of talk and little action. But, still, I hope they prove me wrong.

What is the most important issue facing our country today? Is it terrorism? The wars we’re fighting? The economy?

I encourage everyone to read this letter by a man who was very involved in protesting the way our government has conducted itself lately.

The author, Malachi Ritscher, immolated himself recently during rush-hour in Chicago, in protest of the things he states in his letter.

Here is a reminder of what he was protesting.

The trial and sentencing of Saddam Hussein are over. The Iraqi judicial system has seen fit to punish Saddam and several other individuals. Several were sentenced to fifteen years in prison, while several others, including Saddam, were sentenced to death by hanging. Saddam insisted his death sentence should be carried out by firing squad, but this was refused. An automatic appeal now begins since he was sentenced to death.

I can’t help but think that this can only end badly for Iraq and US soldiers. Iraq seems to be on the verge of civil war as it is. If the sentence is carried out, it may plunge the region further into chaos.

Just saw this post on Boing Boing. Here is the intro from the original site:

An editorial scheduled to appear on Monday in Army Times, Air Force Times, Navy Times and Marine Corps Times, calls for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The publications this will appear in will no doubt be read by many of our servicemen and women. I wonder what kind of effect this will have on their morale. Will this article bolster morale because most of them feel exactly the same way, but have been unable to voice their concerns?

I doubt that most Americans realize that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 has already been signed into law. I, for one, did not until I listened to Keith Olbermann’s special commentary on the subject, which I posted earlier. I decided to look more into what has happened and what follows is some of what I found. I am not a lawyer, but here’s the way I see things.

In 2004 a case was brought before the US Supreme Court, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. The case involved a US citizen who was captured in Afghanistan and was being held as an enemy combatant in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The Supreme Court’s decision on June 28, 2004 stated

We hold that although Congress authorized the detention of combatants in the narrow circumstances alleged here, due process demands that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decisionmaker.

That sounds good, right? Any US citizen held as an enemy combatant may still use habeas corpus as a legal means of challenging the legitimacy of their custody.

In June 2006, another ruling was handed down in a case before the US Supreme Court, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. Hamdan was a driver for an Afghanistan agricultural project created by Osama Bin Laden, captured in Afghanistan, and held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. This time the Supreme Court concluded

that the military commission convened to try Hamdan lacks power to proceed because its structure and procedures violate both the UCMJ and the Geneva Conventions.

In essence, the Supreme Court maintained that they had jurisdiction over detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba and that the military commissions created by the Bush administration were not legitimate. They also cite the Geneva Conventions in support of their ruling. Interesting… On a side note, the lawyer assigned to the case, Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, was passed over for promotion and forced into retirement according to the “up or out” rule.

The Military Commissions Act passed in both the Senate (Sep 28, 2006) and the House of Representatives (Sep 29, 2006) and signed by George W. Bush on October 17, 2006. So, where does that leave us today? Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director for the ACLU states

With his signature, President Bush enacts a law that is both unconstitutional and un-American. This president will be remembered as the one who undercut the hallmark of habeas in the name of the war on terror. Nothing separates America more from our enemies than our commitment to fairness and the rule of law, but the bill signed today is an historic break because it turns Guantánamo Bay and other U.S. facilities into legal no-man’s-lands.

The president can now – with the approval of Congress – indefinitely hold people without charge, take away protections against horrific abuse, put people on trial based on hearsay evidence, authorize trials that can sentence people to death based on testimony literally beaten out of witnesses, and slam shut the courthouse door for habeas petitions. Nothing could be further from the American values we all hold in our hearts than the Military Commissions Act.

Additionally, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont states

Passing laws that remove the few checks against mistreatment of prisoners will not help us win the battle for the hearts and minds of the generation of young people around the world being recruited by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Authorizing indefinite detention of anybody the Government designates, without any proceeding and without any recourse—is what our worst critics claim the United States would do, not what American values, traditions and our rule of law would have us do.

This is not just a bad bill, this is a dangerous bill.

Bush is quoted as saying that in the future, the questions asked about this time and of Americans who lived through it will be “narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously? And did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?”

I do not feel that the erosion of our morals and freedoms is worth the illusion of security offered by this administration, or any future administration. I can’t believe that there is a single American out there who believes that we are truly safe, despite all of the indignities and reductions in freedom that we have endured. In everything that we do, in every law that we pass, we present to the world a representation of what democracy and freedom stand for. Do we really want to stand for rights given solely to Americans and refused to others? Are we so arrogant to think that we’re that special?

One of the commentators on Keith Olbermann described the reaction by the people of the US to the Military Commissions Act of 2006 as “a collective yawn.” I worry that our complacency with weakening the freedoms expressly outlined in the Constitution of the United States of America (Article I, Section 9) and the Bill of Rights (Amendment VIII) will require future generations not to ask the questions Bush states, but instead for them to ask “How could you let this happen?”

Perhaps this event and the ones that follow will be a wake-up call to American patriots for, as Tyler Durden said, “Only after disaster can we be resurrected.”

• Letter from General John Vessey
• Letter from General Charles C. Krulak
• Letter from General H. Hugh Shelton
• Letter from General Colin Powell
• Letter from retired military

I don’t own a TV, but I am a big fan of Keith Olbermann, anchor of ‘Countdown’ on MSNBC. Here is a transcript of the Keith Olbermann video below, if you would rather read than listen.

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

- Benjamin Franklin

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

- James Madison

Last week I watched a talk given by Danah Boyd at UNC. She is a PhD candidate at the UC Berkeley School of Information and a social media researcher at Yahoo!

I found her talk to be very insightful and after watching, I promptly added her blog to my list of daily reading. I would also like to read some of her research papers, but have not yet had time. I would strongly encourage anyone interested in social networking to subscribe to her blog and hear what she has to say.

Now she has a very long, truthful post about her cynicism. So many of the frustrations and realizations she talks about resonate with my own views and experiences. She ends by asking everyone to please register to vote and I agree with her. Nothing will change if people don’t care enough to work toward changing it.

I have been apathetic when it comes to voting. It’s easy to think “my vote won’t matter” and therefore do nothing. As I get older, I realize that it is important to vote, especially for younger voters. Our vote now will shape the way the country is headed in the future – our future. So please, register to vote and take action.

Rock the vote!