Rand Wacker

I’m taking a Business Law class right now at Haas and its…interesting. The Professor is excellent (a Deputy Attorney General for the State of California), but from the content and the book and many other sources its obvious that “the law” in general is very wishy-washy and there are no “Bright Lines” (his quotes).

There’s a hell of a lot of material though, and a lot of work done, at very high expense, and so when walking to dinner the other night I had what may be an interesting idea, outsourcing Legal work (likely to India). Makes sense, highly highly educated people, strong English skills, round-the-clock timezone support, and good IP protection. So good of an idea that it appears its already happening (here, here), but Google results are somewhat limited, so I would guess that its probably not as wide-spread as the full market might support. Not surprising, seeing as the legal profession is one of the most rabid defenders of its own structure, from political lobbying to personnel management.

I’m still mourning the end of Deadwood. While I like Timothy Olyphant (good-guy sheriff Seth Bullock), by the end of the show it was Ian McShane’s Al Swearengen (and his band of band-guys) that totally made the series. Strong characters all around, and a well-evolved plot. But alas, some things are not meant to last forever.

And the Tivo is barren. I mean absolutely nothing new (that we haven’t seen) is recorded. Day-to-day the most entertaining items are old Fraiser’s that I either haven’t seen or at some point forgot. Hell, the other day I was excited when they finished up the last season of Friends and started from the beginning again. THERE’S NOTHING ON. (Except new Venture Brothers, which is of course fantastic, but not enough to keep the voices in my head quite for most of the week).

So I’ve started digging into the back catalog on Netflix/Torrent, and found that I easily get sucked into well-written, well-acted short run series:

• Rome - Good writing and acting, but too compressed into one season. I’m sure the production costs were too high to continue indefinitely, but I’m sure they could have come up with some more source material from one of the longest ruling empires in history. But alas, I think one season is all we get.
• The Wire - I’ve been moving through this series slowly, and I think its better than The Sopranos. Superbly written and acted, its great at showing two angles, and each season brings a new big case while still maintaining contact with the old. Slow for release and I don’t see a lot of talk about it, so I’m not sure how long its legs are, but its good while it lasts.
• Entourage - I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel here, but HBO’s barrel is head-and-shoulders above anything else, and when watched back-to-back these really aren’t that bad. My sister-in-common-law recommended them as “brainless little 30 minute brain candies” and she’s right. Anything to avoid another reality show on broadcast.

There are possibly a couple of new shows that might bring hope to the new season (Studio 60 for one, but even after seeing the pilot I’m not completely sold). Most of all I’m looking forward to the return of my hard-core favorites: Lost, Big Love, and of course, Battlestar Galactica.

(Parental warning: TV will rot your brain and should only be taken in small doses after you’ve put in a 16 hour day and no longer have the capacity to think creatively in any way, shape, or form…its like the Tantalus device on Star Trek)

I came across another excellent article from Joel Splosky talking about what motivates developers, and having spent a significant portion of my career on the business end of a compiler I found myself agreeing to every one of his points. (Joel is one of those guys who I subscribe to then drop off of but always get dragged back for some new piece of wisdom).

Of particular interest was “Use cool new technologies unnecessarily”, or as it might also be phrased, “Time to play”. The amount of time that I’ve spent futzing around on different things because they were shiny or new or interesting has declined linearly since my initial working life back in college. However, my “time to play” has dropped off considerably since I switched out of hard-core engineering and into Product Management. I think this is a major blow to both my overall job satisfaction as well as my job effectiveness.

The reasons are vast and varied: more demanding work deadlines, more mature personal commitments, part-time school, home ownership, etc; but the result is the same, I’m not as abreast of interesting/useful innovations and I’m losing competitiveness for both myself and my company.

Whether your a developer looking for new tools or a business person looking for new ideas, having adequate time to do unstructured exploration of new technology is critical I think. You get new ideas for your own projects based on minor features you might see in unrelated products, you develop new ideas for how to deal with your customers based on what you see in unrelated services, and you give your mind the breathing room to step back and actually be creative, instead of just grinding out the next deliverable.

The good news is that “free time” doesn’t have to be scheduled or rigorous or detract from daily output. In fact, its better if its none of those. You should take free time when you feel you can be most useful with it (like I am right now). You should avoid extending it unduly (as this Guinness here will help with) so as to not go down totally wasteful rabbit holes, and more often than not it should be done when there are no pressing deadlines/after hours/when there’s absolutely nothing else to do. Boredom can actually be the harbinger of great ideas.

I think I need to build some free time into my week a little bit more. <insert obligatory smiley>

We were down in LA this weekend for a wedding where there was a 5 hour “break” between the ceremony in the morning and the reception in the evening. We all wanted to go see a movie (in our formal wear), and someone threw out “The Black Dahlia” as a possibility. We tangentially know the original author (who also wrote LA Confidential, a fantastic film), and someone in the group had read the original book and said it was quite good. However, because all of us ignored the fact that we materially dislike every single actor with a lead role, I should have been wary.

Awful. Awful, awful, awful. “I haven’t seen a movie that bad since Matrix Revolution.” Halfway through I wanted to get up and go see another film (I don’t know why I didn’t say anything, so did everyone else). There was maybe one decent scene in the whole film, but the other 115 minutes were unwatchable. You’ve been warned.

On a tangential note, another film were were considering was Hollywoodland. Someone complained “ick, its got Ben Affleck”, to which I responded, “yeah, but he gets killed!” (This is unfair actually as I like Affleck’s movies usually). When leaving the first travesty of a film someone mentioned, “well, I’ve heard that Hollywoodland is even worse.” The masochist in me for two seconds considered going to see Hollywoodland then because I just can’t imagine a movie being much worse.

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I deal with a lot of email in a day, and I’ve always been a huge believer in using the power of a computer to make life easier by automating the prioritization and triage of material to my attention. Surprisingly to most people though, I don’t have that many mail client rules that automatically folder messages based on the subject or what not. I proactively make sure that I’m only subscribed to lists that actively deliver information I’m interested in and that are time-sensitive. If a message is of low-enough importance that I can automatically file out of my inbox then its low-importance enough to ignore completely.

The one type of mail filter I do use actively is the (I believe) little-used capability in most mail clients to automatically apply colors/labels to messages matching certain criteria. Receiving well north of a hundred or more real emails a day, automatically highlighting messages that are specifically to me is a very effective way to triage things that probably need a more urgent response than the latest “There’s a car with its lights on” message.

I use Green to symbolize messages where I’m in the To: field, Blue for messages where I’m Cc’d, and Purple (a new one) for messages to mail aliases where I am the primary responder. Anything in black was to a group list and is (likely) of lower priority.

Enabling this feature is different on each mail client, but I know its easy to do on OSX Mail.app and Entourage, and I even originally learned this trick on Unix Pine (actually using a + and a - next to messages to annotate if I was on the To: or Cc: list.

(Two posts in one day! I’m feeling somewhat motivated/inspired by the promise of a long weekend)

In the midst of doing something like 37 hours of presentations for our worldwide sales team this week at work (OK, it was only 8, but that’s still a long time to talk), I also began my second year at UC Berkeley’s Evening MBA program. Getting back on campus I was pleasantly surprised by three things:

• I’m very excited to be back in an environment where I’m constantly learning/doing something new.
• I was very excited to see all the people I had made friends with last year, as well as my battlefield brethren that I slogged through Finland and Russia with.
• I felt predictably superior to the first year students that had already been slogging away for almost a month of classes before we started our electives.

I hear that the second and third year are a lot less stressful, with classes being stretched out over 15 weeks instead of the insane 2-classes-for-9-weeks-twice-a-semester first year, and the material is looking very interesting so I’m in a very good mood right now:

Business Law is a review course meant to orient managers to “dealing with legal issues and productive use of their lawyers”. This is being taught by a Deputy Attorney General for the State of California and for the first class he basically gave us umpteen examples of his disdain for the legal profession. I asked, “so what are lawyer’s good for?” and his response was simply, “by the end of this class you’ll really be asking that question.” This is gonna be fun.

Services Strategy is a case-oriented and guest-lecture heavy introduction to the challenges involved in operating a business where the primary capital is people and not boxed product. This is a bit of an off-beat course but based on the previous reviews (and the fact that there are 20+ people on the wait list) I have high hopes. The material here I think is very key for me as I haven’t been involved in true services businesses in the past, and moving forward I know that these will make up a bigger and bigger portion of the economic output of the US.

With the summer work I did this year, and by taking some one-unit seminars here and there, I’m actually on track to graduate a year early (end of ‘07) or perhaps spread out my last couple of semesters to one class at a time. Right now we have not particular leaning, but one thing I will say is that if we decide to stay in Berkeley through the end of 2008 then being a student has a lot of nice benefits such as gym membership and campus parking privileges.

I posted a selection of pictures I took last month on my school trip to Finland (Helsinki and Tempere) and Russia (St Petersburg and Moscow). This was an international business course where we met usually twice a day with local businesses and attended some very interesting seminars actually. I didn’t know what to expect when I was leaving, but the trip ended up being completely different than anything I could imagine.

Russia was a pretty tough place to travel in. Interesting sites and crazy business environment. People in Finland referred to it as “The WIld West” and as I was plowing through Season 3 of Deadwood during the trip I have to say, Russia is even more insane. Finland was a great contrast, and due to several factors — historical, political, and social — is I think an interesting model for what the US may be facing 20 or 30 years down the line.

Educationally I learned a ton on the trip, and had a very good time working with a lot of the third year students (I was one of four second years lucky enough to get on), plus the summer course has gotten me that much closer to graduation. So now that I’m home I’m happy I went; even though there were times on the expedition that I wasn’t very thrilled.

I’ve posted a selection of the best pictures, all annotated with comments. My recommendation is to use the Slideshow feature of Gallery to go through them to get the full story.

Glad to be home now and after finishing an insane week of worldwide field meetings at the office, looking forward to some sanity and predictability.