Author: Daniel

Daniel https://turnings.phrasewise.com/ In the 4th grade Daniel was asked to step in into the hall because he was coaching fellow students on a similarity assignment he provided the class. Since then, Daniel’s passion for helping people has propelled him to be a creative developer of software and systems, and a team coach who excels at successfully delivering business value. Daniel founded QuietlyHelping in 2009 in order to have a direct hand in helping families with the struggles of debilitating disease. QuietlyHelping is an organization of compassion and empathy that brings ease, comfort, smiles, laughter, healing, and love to people battling cancer and other diseases. Spare time activities include cycling, occasional work as a musician, woodworking, photography, and reading books he never got around to in school. Unsurprisingly, Daniel is able to cook minute rice in just under thirty seconds.
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Santa Rosa, California with Andy Hampsten

Santa Rosa, California with Andy Hampsten:

Andy Hampsten will point out pot-holes and cattle grids. He will ride next to you, with his bars a perfect hand span away from yours and never try to smash you. He will descend smoother and safer and faster then you can imagine. If some food pops out of your pocket and you don’t realize, he will stop and pick it up and ride back to you and quietly hand it back without a fuss. He will smile a lot.

Here are some things he won’t do. Complain, moan, talk about himself or drop famous names.

[“There’s a lot of riding to be done.” Amen. Lots to learn as well. Allez!]

The myopic focus on IT and engineering has to stop.

The myopic focus on IT and engineering has to stop.

The truth is that there is absolutely critical telemetry coming from every facet of your organization. All of this telemetry is either directly related to providing better service to customers or directly related to providing better service to your organization itself which, in turn, stabilizes the platform on which you deliver products and services. Of this, I shouldn’t have to convince you and I find that no convincing of the general population is required. Yet, here we are with almost every organization I see standing blind to this vital information.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think technology isn’t a first-class component of today’s (and tomorrow’s) organizations. In fact, I think the technology group has been applying radically advanced techniques to telemetry data for years. It’s high time that these techniques and tools were applied to the organization unabridged.

There is a profound shift in data transparency and accountability coming to the organization to tomorrow. If you don’t buy in, you’ll simply fail to achieve the agility and efficiencies of your competition. I’m here, with Circonus, to make that happen.

[Nice rant Theo, no arg from me. But how about some examples about how you measure things at OmniTI? And how can I apply that to my company without jumping through ten hoops to do so? (I’m not being cynical here. I’ve got a busy group that would happily measure more things if it were easy to implement. Tell me how to do so.)]

Source: The Scriptures of Jesus

If You Think Obama’s First Term Was Bad, Imagine a Second – Bloomberg

If You Think Obama’s First Term Was Bad, Imagine a Second – Bloomberg:

In other words, after winning he will lecture Republicans about how their positions are insincere and adopted purely for political reasons; he will insist that his existing positions are already a compromise with them; and he will try to govern unilaterally. These tactics seem unlikely to produce the desired results. Obama has, after all, adopted all of them, and they haven’t worked.

If the public renders a split verdict — returning Obama to the presidency and giving Republicans more power in Congress — both parties will insist that it’s the other that needs to “listen to the American people.” The choice before those people is looking more and more like one between Romney and a unified Republican government, or Obama and four more years that look a lot like the last two.

[And this is the mess I referred to earlier.]

Survivorship

[Feel free to skip the Lance stuff, it just illustrates my point…]

Lance Armstrong | Ritte van Vlaanderen Bicycles:

Doping will undoubtedly make you a faster cyclist, no argument there. What doping won’t do though is make you win the Tour de France 7 times in a row. A higher hematocrit doesn’t instill in someone a maniacal drive to not just succeed but dominate. HGH doesn’t help you climb back from the edge of near certain death and come back to the sport you love to not just compete but win. Corticosteroids don’t lift you off the tarmac on Luz Ardiden and propel you to victory. All those things will make you faster, they don’t make you win. Cycling is not some magical sport where as soon as a red blood cell agitating needle touches your vein you’re vaulted into the ranks of legends. Cycling is like every other sport in existence, there are amateurs and professionals. The professionals are so much better than the amateurs that it is literally impossible for us to understand the scope of their competitive level. All of the pharmaceuticals in the world aren’t going to turn me into a professional bike racer let alone a multiple Tour champion. There is a reason there are so few dominant athletes across the sporting spectrum. They all share a insatiable ferocity that equates losing with failure. It is not enough to just win, they must destroy. Jordan, Federer, Woods, Schumacher and Merckx (who tested positive let’s remember) all athletes who relished the opportunity to exhibit the superiority of their talent. The list of sporting legends is short because becoming one is so damn impossible. Doping doesn’t make champions otherwise I would have been on the cover of Wheaties boxes years ago.

Lance not only did something which has never been done in cycling but he also was the reason so many of you probably even know what the sport is right now. And rather than fading into mild obscurity only to emerge selling half decent bikes with his name emblazoned across the down tube like so many other past champions he funneled his fame and efforts into a cause that affects nearly each and every one of us at some level. Does doping change the fact that he beat cancer? Does doping change the fact that he decided he wouldn’t die? Does cancer give a shit if he doped? And before you talk about how his inspiration was fueled by deception lets just remember that World War II was ended by an lifelong alcoholic and a rampant philanderer. They did know a thing or two about great quotes though.

So while it seems that so many of you are so happy with this decision and relieved that we can finally move forward I sit here (in a Hermes scarf and Dolce slippers of course) sad. Sad for the sport and sad for a great champion. Because this embarrassing USADA charade masked in “unbiased fairness” has done nothing to clean up cycling. It has sullied it further. It’s the frothing at the mouth, pitchfork wielding mob who upon finally burning down the subject of their ire are left standing around a smoldering pile of smoke and ashes that lies on the front steps of their own house. Nothing will change because of this and if so many of you are so happy to see this outcome then I suggest you quit watching professional cycling altogether. It’s not cleaner now than it was, the sport will always have cheats and the science will always be one step ahead of the piss cups. This is a black eye for cycling, let’s just hope there’s enough ice to stop the swelling.

[I’m rereading Laurence Gonzales’ incredible collection of books about the systems related to accidents and the mental mechanisms that apply to survival. Well worth (re)reading. He finds an eerie uniformity in the way people survive seemingly impossible circumstances. Decades and sometimes centuries apart, separated by culture, geography, race, language, and tradition, the most successful survivors–those who practice what he calls “deep survival”–go through the same patterns of thought and behavior, the same transformation and spiritual discovery, in the course of keeping themselves alive. Not only that but it doesn’t seem to matter whether they are surviving being lost in the wilderness or battling cancer, whether they’re struggling through divorce or facing a business catastrophe–the strategies remain the same. LG writes: “Survival should be thought of as a journey, a vision quest of the sort that Native Americans have had as a rite of passage for thousands of years. Once you’re past the precipitating event–you’re cast away at sea or told you have cancer–you have been enrolled in one of the oldest schools in history.” And so with any life altering event you trigger survival mechanisms. And as with all things extreme and not some do, some don’t. Everyone who does has something to teach. Possibly too, those who don’t Or at least their stories. Years ago, fascinated by the history and often tragic stories that take place in the White Mountains of New Hampshire (where I’ve enjoyed so much outdoors time) it was interesting to go back and look at some of these stories from Gonzales’ standpoint. And also from my own and what I’ve learned about surviving. So whether or not you care about what Lance did or didn’t do to win, he’s a survivor. And taking a look at his story as relates to the stuff in LG’s books makes that very clear. Don’t assume that this is the last chapter. He’s more than just a badass bike racer. And if in these recent times you’ve survived being bounced out of job and have landed on your feet… If you were in a car wreck that have left scars on you… If you made it away from an abusive spouse and are now in the arms of someone who loves you… you have something to teach and share. Please do so.]

Open infrastructure and the common good

Open infrastructure and the common good:

At this very moment you’re using a magnificent outcome of this kind of “common good” approach that I’m talking about—the Internet. Yes, yes, I’ll pause for you to crack an Al Gore joke here, but let’s not miss the point. The Internet exists the way it does because no private or state actor owns it, right? The reason no private or state actor owns it is because of explicit decisions made by both its creators and funders to treat it as a common good. From TCP/IP up to higher-level protocols like HTTP and electronic mail, no company or government agency has the power to declare “from this point in time forward, things using this protocol will be different.”

Those protocols are open infrastructure. Sometimes they have nominal owners but control has been relinquished to a standards body; sometimes they’re true public domain. Businesses can build on them, governments can try to spy on them, and of course vice-versa—but they’re public roads, not private ones. Everybody can use whatever web browser they want or email client they want or MP3 player they want. People can (and do) build businesses on top of those protocols, just like businesses in the physical world are built on top of physical infrastructure that those businesses only pay for indirectly.

[Interesting thinking. But spot on in the above.]

Source: Coyote Tracks

Voting matters

Voting matters:

I’m exhausted trying to keep up with everything. I want it all to be simple. Like when I was a kid and my father made all the decisions.

And a vote for Barack Obama means the same damned thing.

[And that’s the real problem. The system is so broken that neither candidate is meaningfully different. And the selection process? Incurably broken. And yet, it still matters if everyone gets involved.]

Source: Scripting News

Physical location in connection with data

Bruce Willis in “DRM Hard”:

But at second glance, this really does bring up some interesting questions, doesn’t it? Digital copies of all our media is already becoming the norm rather than the exception, and it’s my suspicion that in the future—probably sooner than we think—the notion of physical location in connection with data will all but vanish. And, as in so many other areas, our social mores and the legal system that nominally reflects them will lag a considerable distance behind.

Source: Coyote Tracks

The Hidden Truths about Calories

The Hidden Truths about Calories:

We now have too many calories and too many of those calories are of low quality. One in three Americans is now obese. Over the last thirty years the number of calories we eat has increased, but so has the number of those calories that come from highly processed foods. In this light, we would do well to eat fewer processed foods and more raw ones. This is not a novel insight (Such foods, after all, tend to have more nutrients such as B vitamins, phytonutrients and minerals and so are good for reasons having nothing to do with counting calories). But what might be novel is the realization that in eating such foods you could lose weight while keeping the precise tally of the calories you consume exactly the same. However, this realization comes hand in hand with another, namely that how much weight you lose depends on the biology of the plants and animals you choose to eat and who you and your microbes are in ways we are only beginning to understand.

[As a whole the article is interesting. It still comes down to you figuring out what works for you, and that whole foods (anything that still looks like it did when it grew) are better for you and processing food more than a bit is not a great idea.]