Ah, the holidays are upon us and gift shopping is consuming our days.
We’ve all seen the ads: a laptop with a lightning fast processor, cavernous hard drives, and staggering memory; and all can be had for $399.
Well, that ad got you to the vendor’s web page, didn’t it? But when you start to add options, you see that no one in the history of the Earth has walked away with that machine for $399. Oh, you wanted to work with the computer? You’ll need MS Office of course. Will you be fixing the machine yourself? No? Well, how about a three-year onsite maintenance plan? Oh, how are you at snooping around for viruses and spyware? Not so good? Well, we’ll give you a free trial of our preferred partner’s security software that you can elect to remove if you have the capacity for frustration normally associated with Sisyphus.

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I bought my current bicycle in Clearwater, Florida, a nice aluminum frame Cannondale. I hadn’t ever owned a cycling helmet before I got the bike, but I quickly made a discovery: elderly drivers and roads without shoulders are a bad combination. There is a running joke on Florida’s west coast: “all the old people in Florida live on the Atlantic side, but their parents live on the Gulf side.”

After three or four near-death encounters in the first five miles, I opted for a nice Giro helmet and began to wear it religiously. After moving from sea level in Clearwater to 6000 ft in Denver, I noticed the hills added some white-knuckle descents to many of my rides, and I became very thankful to have my Giro.

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I’m not in a good mood today. I expected a little more consideration from our Presidents, but apparently my two encounters with our chief executives this past week gave me the clear message they’ve forgotten about the taxes I’ve paid for so many years.

It started with President Bill Clinton. I met with him on July 14th, and I was more than a little hurt he didn’t recognize me. Maybe he was distracted, maybe he had other things on his mind, or maybe he doesn’t have the eyes of a Golden Eagle and couldn’t spot me amongst 7000 people at the Verizon Center in D.C.  Still, I was only twenty yards away, and the least he could have done was to shake off a few of his Secret Service detail to come over and chat.

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The first STARLIMS Microsoft Road Show is history, and after enduring a travel schedule that would make Madonna look like a homebody, it’s a good time to reflect on the messages delivered.

Our team started in Chicago amidst rain and wind, but I guess that’s redundant since I already mentioned Chicago. From there, we crisscrossed the United States, hitting San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, D.C., and Durham. So, powered by deep dish pizza, sourdough bread, baked beans, cheese steaks, and vinegar BBQ respectively, the Microsoft, Atrium Research, and STARLIMS teams presented a compelling message.

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I once sat in the lobby of the T-Water Beach Hotel in Negil, Jamaica reading a book when a woman came rushing in, and pounded her fist on the check-in counter, startling the Jamaican clerk.  In a heavy New York accent, she demanded, “There are no beach towels outside I need one, and I need it now!”

Before I resume the story, for those of you who haven’t traveled to Jamaica, life moves at a glacial pace in this beautiful island paradise.  Negril is particularly isolated at the western tip of the island, and is a place that I have adopted as a second home.  I dive off the cliffs at Rick’s Café at the south end of the town, and I know every restaurant in the area. I also am a respected negotiator when it comes to taxis.  Unaware tourists pay two to three times the going prices because they both don’t know that rates are negotiated, and they fumble with Jamaican currency.  When I flag a cab, basically anyone driving a car, I just tell the driver, “$400 J to the beach?”  (translation: I’ll give you $3.37 USD to take me to the beach).

The driver will either say, “ya mon”  or “that’s a $600 J ride.” With the latter, I turn away and look for another cab, which usually triggers an immediate capitulation from the taxi driver.

Respect gets respect in Jamaica, and a lack of respect gets you, well, let’s continue the story.

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Marketing is a strange beast to observe in the wild. If you think about it, many marketing campaigns are aimed at the undecided, not the jaded. Have you ever heard of a “Coke person” switching to Pepsi because of an informative and innovative marketing campaign? Not a chance; but in more ambiguous markets, such as technology, marketing can be an influence, but at the end of the day it is the product that must deliver.

One lesson we can learn from the Apple Corporation is that the only technological constant is change. Look no farther than the iPod and the iPhone. Why is it that Apple’s competition has yet to close the gap in sales or technological evolution to the point where people will abandon iPods or iPhones in favor of an upstart device? Part of the answer lies in Apple’s refusal to rest on their laurels, and their need to stay not one, but several steps ahead of their competition.

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Renaissance man
–noun
1.    A cultured man of the Renaissance who
was knowledgeable, educated, or proficient
in a wide range of fields.

2.    (Sometimes lowercase ) a present-day man who
has acquired profound knowledge or proficiency
in more than one field.

My old friend Peter touched base with me a few days ago, and he is one of what I call The Last of the True Characters. Peter is about 80 now, but hasn’t lost a step. A Harvard man, Peter came to be my orthodontist when I lived in Atlanta. Anyone who has gone through orthodontics treatment knows that you spend quite a bit of time with your doctor. Peter and I were kindred spirits, and immediately became friends. I think I liked Peter right after he put my braces on and I told him there was a bit of pain.

“That’s no problem. Here’s what you do; go home, grab two fingers of a fifteen-year-old scotch, and swirl it around your teeth.”

Each trip to his practice started with going back to his back office and shooting the breeze for 20-30 minutes. Each time, our conversation revealed yet another layer of this remarkable man.

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Flat light is a killer.

We’re speaking in the context of the menacing effect occurring when mountains occlude the sun from the ski slopes, or overcast skies homogenize the light in such a way as to wash out any contrast between bumps, texture, or pitch of the run.

Snowboarding with my sons over the holiday break, I came flying down a fairly steep run at about forty mph, and the combination of flat light, dark purple lenses in my goggles, and a chunk of ice, caused me to launch into the air, and as my ten-year-old described it: “your head kept bouncing on the ice as you rolled over and over.”

The human brain is geared to wipe out such events. I not only have no recollection of the crash (my son had to tell me of the chunk of ice), but also no memory of completing the run down to the lift, riding the lift up, having some spiced cider, and sitting in the lodge for an hour before my discombobulation ceased, and I was able to board back down to the car.

I was wearing a helmet, and the buckle of my ski goggles carved a trench into the side of the helmet as an indication of the force of the crash. Had I not had a helmet, my days as the Hice household Jeopardy champion would have been at risk.

Helmets are critical saftey devices, although some people still ignore them.

There is an analogy here in the approach the FDA takes towards drug and food safety in terms of process and computer systems validation. Any company who has spent a lot of time and money on the development of a consistent, defensible, validation approach; or has been on the receiving end of an extensive FDA audit, knows how much work is involved. But there is a method to the FDA’s madness. The FDA wants proof that all systems are in control.

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Before I forget, I have a Scientific Computing column available discussing the folly of “Meet-and-Greet” conferences, and why they’re a bad deal. (You may also learn something of the dangerous sport of snowboarding).

Several years back, during my Digital Equipment Corporation days, I was working at a large chicken processor who wanted to put in a LIMS to help track their product quality control. The project was enrobed in a cloud of doom from the start.
The terrible saga began when the salesman who sold the project was so severely abused by the customer’s Purchasing Agent that he agreed to sell them a LIMS on a too-small computer. He’d asked me a few weeks earlier about the bargain-basement configuration, and I told him it simply wouldn’t run on the system he was proposing. Not to be deterred by a mere engineer, he kept calling our corporate office until he got someone in marketing to say, “Well, theoretically it could work. Maybe.”
Of course, he ran with that bit of advice and sold the project.
(Sign of Doom number 1)

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Ah, the holiday spirit has arrived at my house; of course I’m talking about my annual Shock & Awe campaign of holiday decorations in an effort to win the Christmas lights arms race with my neighbor, the former center for the Denver Broncos. I’m reasonably sure I’ll prevail in this rapidly-escalating conflict as I have added a new secret weapon to my lighting arsenal: LED lights.
LED lights are to decorating warfare as Charlie Wilson’s Stinger missiles were to the mujahideen in the Afghanistan conflict. Of course, unlike the results of that conflict, I’m hoping my lights aren’t stolen and come back to be used against me in a future decorating conflict, but I digress.
LED lights have a technological advantage over incandescent lights in that their extremely low power consumption allows thousands of these lights to be strung together in a serial fashion as opposed to the 3-string limitation of the incandescent lights that, when exceeded, sends the cursing decorator back to the garage in a crazed search for that little plastic bag of fuses to fix the one you just fried. What this means in Christmas Lights Combat is that you can string many, many lights in a much shorter time because you don’t have to jury-rig additional cords to power subsequent strings of lights to beat the aforementioned constraint.
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