Friday, June 19, 2009

Back To Really, Really Working Out

I’m fat again. I did have two good workouts this week – a bike ride on Monday and a run last night. Still, calories in have been greater than calories out, and I am back up to 198. (And that’s a relief because I was up to 201 after Meaghan and I got back from our week-long cruise.)

Goal: 20 pounds in 12 weeks. You hear that, 170s, I’m comin’ back.

I can do this. I do not want to run a marathon in the fall carrying any extra weight.

My three miles last night was a little rough. I gave blood yesterday, so I’m blaming my poor performance on being down a pint. I did make sure to drink an extra liter of water before heading out. Today will be the new hottest day of the year in Indianapolis, with an expected high of 91 and enough humidity that breathing is nasty.

This afternoon, I plan on heading to the Avon track and doing some tempo work. I’ll probably ride my bike there, since that makes for a good warm up and cool down.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

You Can’t Design Out the Stupid

My bride is a smart woman, and that is definitely one of the reasons that I married her. Over the weekend, there was an accident at her facility. By “accident”, I mean that one of the employees decided to do something incredibly stupid.

Surprise! Restricted duty: 1; getting stuff done: 0.

(At least the employee still has to come in to work. No forced time at home.)

What did this employee do? Let’s suppose the employee is at point A and need to get to point B. The employee is smart, knowing the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. By the sound of this story, you’re probably like me, guessing that the employee must be some sort of latent mathematical savant at this point. But wait, there’s more.

A straight line is out of the question, because there is a piece of equipment in your way. Because of the nature of this facility, that piece of equipment might be in excess of 350°F. Still, even with this imminent danger, our savant quickly deduces that the path integral of the curve generated by a path over the piece of equipment is shorter than walking around the equipment.

Seriously, how smart is this guy? I couldn’t set up the parameters for this calculus in Mathematica as quickly as he’s able to do it all in his head. I am ashamed of myself.

For all of the mathematical genius that this employee is, a circus performer he is not. He falls on to the equipment, burns his foot, and is on a restricted duty until a doctor clears him to work again. If he’s lucky, there’s some good pain medication involved that would include advice to stay away from moving parts, but I don’t know if that’s the case or not.

One of the great things about OSHA is that the burden is now on the employer to prove that they trained the employee to not walk over the equipment. Common sense need not show up anywhere in this equation. This is where my liberal blue blood fails me. I love what OSHA does. It must exist. I believe that there are employers who maliciously put the lives of their employees in danger. I have seen things at production plants that should frighten the burliest of burly men. However, I also believe in some sort of libertarian balance to counter the checks.

Anyway, instead of firing the idiot who burned his foot, the problem has now been turned into an engineering project to find a way to prevent this from happening again. Now we have separated the responsibility from the accountability.

These are two very important words that don’t get nearly the press that they should, but if you want to really learn about business, then you must know them.

Responsibility: having some requirement to do something.

Accountability: feeling the pain if that something gets borked.

How often are you accountable for someone else’s mistakes, when you weren’t the person responsible for performing that task? If you’re in any type of management position, that accountability should go up considerably. If I’m writing a bad piece of software, my boss will feel the pain first. And then I will (if I’m still employed). In fact, we feel this in programming all the time. Ever have to fix a bug for something that needled you the first time you wrote it? It’s the “I don’t know quite how this works, but it seems to be working, so I’ll ship it” moment. And then it bites you in the ass. Fortunately, since I’m not writing commercial aircraft control software, no one dies. My penalty is that I get to drop whatever cool new thing I’m doing and go back to old yuckiness (yes, that’s a technical term) and fix it.

But this story is fundamentally different. This is not a database or software. I am the only one ultimately responsible for my own health and safety. In this moment, when I decide to risk any part or whole of life and limb, I make 100% of my choices. We all do. There is some mental calculation that takes place for the briefest of seconds when we decide to cuss out the cop or just bow our heads and take the speeding ticket. In some people, that calculator is broken. They are a risk to themselves and your company’s continued profitability (if there are any profitable companies in 2009-Q2).

It’s true in any company – software, production, legal, accounting, clerical – it doesn’t matter. You need people who make decisions at a certain level in a certain amount of time. Anyone who doesn’t meet those expectations is a risk. As a manager, you must weigh all factors, including potential for training, against those risks.

And anyone who would risk very serious burns to save a dozen steps isn’t worth the risk.

Friday, May 8, 2009

Upcoming Half Marathon

Meaghan and I have signed up for the Sunburst Half Marathon in South Bend on June 6th. We both just finished the Mini, and we wasted no time in getting another half under our feet.

Work's been busy, hence my being sparse on here as of late. Plus, I've been posting on my other blog: http://jarrettatwork.blogspot.com. That's my programming blog, and it takes a lot more effort to put together those posts.

I did want to let the internets know that my sister, Erin, gave birth yesterday to a little boy. His name is Ryan Mattew Fisher, and he came into this world just in time for Mother's Day. Congrats to my sister. Here's to having a healthy little baby and one of the most care free pregnancies of all time.

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Another Night at the Gym

Tuesday night found me at the gym once more. And this time did I ever pay for it. I started with 4.17 miles in 47 minutes on the treadmill, and I followed that up with an hour of boxing cardio. You hit bags, not people, so that did make it a little different from karate. It was, however, an incredibly intense workout. And I have the sore knuckles to prove it. Or maybe it just proves that I'm not so good at wrapping my hands. (Hint:it's the latter.)

Later!

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

The Gym. Yeah, I Went.

21 hours of work in two days.

And I still went to the gym this evening. A quick little run, if only to justify my existence. 2 miles in 21:04. Plus another 20 minutes of weights.

I also made it to the grocery store.

I rock. You may now continue with your regularly scheduled life.

Friday, April 3, 2009

So Many Things

I started up a Twitter account a few months back. If you want to follow me, you can find me @jarrettmeyer. (Yeah, really creative, huh?) I don’t really care if you follow me or now, but it is kinda the point of this little post. Yes, this will be a meta-post, or a post about posting.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m a software developer, and on the rare occasion that I want to talk about programming, I’ll post that stuff at jarrettatwork.blogspot.com. I don’t write there very often.

Apparently, the rest of the St. Christopher choir is catching up with 2006 and have started up Facebook accounts. I’ve had one for quite a while, but I never paid much attention to it until I started hanging out with people who asked, “Why don’t you update your status more often?”

Well, guess what? Facebook has an app for that! Now, my tweets are automatically posted onto my Facebook status.

Let’s recap: I here. I’m on a programming blog. I’m on Twitter. I’m on Facebook. For the blogs, multiple accounts made sense, but for Facebook and Twitter, that’s much less true.

Here’s the problem: I’ll usually Tweet while I’m work. And I’m a developer, so my Tweets will probably be more software oriented. And this leads us to what Twitter is really missing: groups. People are lots of different things. On Twitter, I follow other programmers, and friends, and even Rachel Maddow (@maddow) and Ana Marie Cox (@anamariecox). (PS: You stay classy, Ana. Also, can you see her tat? What is there not too love about a redheaded known for being a faux lesbian, sporting a tat, a beer in one hand, and a cocktail in the other? Total hotness!)

You stay classy, Ana

So I could possible risk scaring off the “regular people” by being too programming focused. Twitter really needs to implement some sort of grouping mechanism in your list, so certain updates only go to certain people. Alas, this is not my idea. It came from a podcast of… you guessed it… other software developers doing a podcast about Twitter at a Microsoft convention.

(Do you think we’re too connected? I’m meta-posting about Twitter and podcasts.)

I don’t know that this really brings us to any resolution on the issue, other than to say this: If you don’t like all the programming stuff, sorry in advance.

Oh, and thanks to @maddow for posting this video. It’s my new favorite thing today.