Lance Armstrong: Victim?

Lance Armstrong: Victim?:

But it’s not the what of this case that bothers me, it’s the how. Ends do not always justify means, and sometimes, in order to preserve higher values, you have to let guilty parties walk. In this instance, I’m less concerned about proving that Lance’s yellow jerseys are smudged than with the fact that USADA keeps mutating into what looks like a law-enforcement body, which it isn’t.

USADA, which participated in the federal investigation, isn’t part of the U.S. government and isn’t a judicial body. Newspaper stories tend to shorthand it as a “quasi-governmental” entity, but that’s not accurate. USADA is a private non-profit corporation hired to manage the anti-doping program for American athletes who hope to participate in the Olympics as well as various local, regional, national, and international competitions. And it’s gotten out of control.

[Worse yet, there’s nothing in this for anyone (outside the folks with the vendetta). It’s all ancient history from a sporting sense, and if you care about who winds up being listed as the winner of the races, there probably isn’t anyone in the top ten that I think was clean in those days. This simply seems predatory. Just when they thought Lance was gonna have to deal with the same sort of stuff Barry Bonds etc. did, there was no case. Now this smack of anger and retribution. Stop wasting everyone’s time and money. It’s over.]

[and…]

Think about that for a moment. The current anti-doping superstructure started out as an effort to prevent cheating in privately run games. Now we’re talking about Interpol and international treaties and fudging American legal principles.

That’s why, if experts are correct—and Armstrong’s lawyers are setting up an attack on USADA’s methods and authority—we could be in for a big and very important battle. Even if you are a Lance hater, and it pains you to think that he doped and might get away with it, you might want to pull for him this time.

[This reeks. And it has nothing to do with Armstrong. It’s fundamentally wrong.]

World Champion Water-Bottle Fetcher

Leg-Breaking Climbs, Crashing for Shoe Covers, and World Champion Water-Bottle Fetcher:

But one of the things that marked me the most today was Mark Cavendish. At one point on the first climb I think, I saw him fading back. At first I was like, “Oh, is he getting dropped?”

Then a few minutes later I saw him coming back up with his world championship jersey just stuffed with water bottles and I was like, “How cool is that?” It is not every day that the world champion is working for the common cause. But it also scares me because if the world champion is a domestique, just how good is the team?

By the looks of Sky’s performance today, very, very, very good.

[David: “Don’t let your company culture become one where certain people are too good to do the jobs that need doing. Making shit work is everyone’s job.” Clearly the case on this team. Allez!]

Source: Hardly Serious with Jens Voigt

Thinking Clearly About Piece-Work

Thinking Clearly About Piece-Work:

Now according to classic economic theory, these changes wouldn’t just be details of style, but would increase the size of the overall pie. And, on the squishy side, they’d provide much greater scope for human freedom. Assuming I was guaranteed a decent wage either way, I’d far rather be able to stay up late working one night in exchange for blowing off work the next. Not to mention getting to work the hours I want, from the place I want, in the way I want, etc.

[I’ve nothing to add. Just a fairly explanation of the possibilities.]

Source: Aaron Swartz: The Weblog

Rands In Repose: Someone is Coming to Eat You

Rands In Repose: Someone is Coming to Eat You:

The reward for winning is the perception that you’ve won. In your celebration of your awesomeness, you are no longer focused on the finish line, you now lack a clear next goal, and while you sit there comfortably monetizing eyeballs, you’re becoming strategically dull. You’ve forgotten that someone is coming to eat you and if you wait until you can see them coming, you’re too late. Just ask Nokia or RIM.

The Devil in the Details

Apple’s current biggest competitor is itself, and I think Steve Jobs learned this the hard way – from the sidelines. When he returned, one of his first hires was a gentlemen named Tim Cook, and while Tim Cook holds a degree in industrial engineering, he is not an engineer, a designer, or a poet. Tim Cook is an execution machine and he exists at Apple to enable them to pull off one thing – the iPod Mini moment.

By initially focusing on getting Apple out of manufacturing and streamlining the supply chain, yes, he dramatically improved margins and it’s a lot easer to kill a bestseller under the warm blanket of an attractive balance sheet. But Cook’s larger contribution is an operations team that enables them to build and ship new products with increasingly ferocious regularity.

The reason you’ll see new iPhone hardware in the fall and yet another iPad come spring is because Steve Jobs knew that he didn’t just need to out-design his competition, he needed to out-execute them. Apple is an ambidextrous organization that is equally adept at designing products as they are at making sure millions of them are ready the moment you want them.

If you think nothing revolutionary was announced at the recent WWDC event, if you think you’ve heard it all, I ask you to think about what they’re not talking about. I was thinking about the iPod Mini as I watched the announcement of the MacBook Pro. While it is certainly one of the sexiest pieces of metal on the planet, it also represents painfully consistent execution by Apple.

Yes, you’ve heard it all before – Retina display, thinner, faster, and more, but I trust Apple when they say they re-imagined everything in the design. I fully expect there is design work in the MacBook Pro that you’ve never heard of that will give the next iPhone or iPad a competitive edge and I believe the experience they’ve gained executing this design will allow them to not only maintain, but increase momentum.

How long can they keep it up? I don’t know, but I do know that Apple believes the future is invented by the people who don’t give a shit about the past.

[One of the keys here is to have a next goal prepped and ready for after you’ve achieved success. And possibly a different one if you fail.]

Timing issues

ICANN follow-up:

I just don’t understand how the world works, obviously. People are lying when they say they’ll take stories from anywhere. This story is very easy, no leaks necessary, the only digging needed is to click a link and spend five minutes reading.

[I’ll bet this is a timing issue. Namely, that folks are working on a bunch of things and it’s hard to stop and take a look at something else with any real attention, even from folks you respect. Or maybe it was break time. Who knows. But I do know that timing has a lot to focus, attention, and quality of service. It’s hard to maintain a high QoS if you also do all the work. It leads to all sorts of management strategies from the simplest “no phone, no email” policies I see amongst craft people all the time, where contacting them means physically moving yourself to where they are and praying that they’re there when you are… anyway. Timing is of the essence, and finding simple ways to manage timing is hard. Personally, I started with a metronome.]

Source: Scripting News

Two case studies in feeds

Two case studies in feeds:

We all have to recognize that we don’t do everything. Even the huge companies, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook eventually learn to specialize. But the individual developers, have no choice but to work with each other. It also means you have to work with chaos — throw your feeds out there not knowing who will pick them up. That’s the magic of the web. Trust it, and it’ll work for you.

[It’s actually larger than that. Trust it, and it’ll work for you.]

Source: Scripting News

ICANN is wrong

ICANN is wrong:

This may have been an interesting experiment in the abstract, worth doing so we could find out what the problems are. We owe our thanks to the potential registrants for showing us so clearly. Now the answer should be an emphatic No. The TLDs we have are fine. There is no shortage of names that this is needed to address. Let’s work on solving problems, not creating new ones.

[I agree that this is quagmire in the making…]

Source: Scripting News