Narcissism

I was reading the post on Narcissism over at the (always excellent) Coding Horror Blog and I was reminded of something that happened to me.

Many years ago, I was disappointed by my job. I was working at a small consulting company which had been mostly a software development outfit and was transitioning to being more of a general marketing consultancy. I didn’t mind that as much, I have a greater love (or tolerance, depending on your perspective) for marketing than the average developer. Actually, I was driven out by a top-down mandate to “improve our process” which was manifest around trying to adopt development methodologies that were state-of-the-art thirty years ago. It felt as if they were saying to me “all of those things you did to make the last project you ran a big success (tight feedback loops, close developer-to-customer collaboration, design for change, light up-front-documentation)… well, don’t do any of them again.”

So I quit.

In retrospect, I think it would have been possible to improve the situation, but I didn’t yet have a solid handle on why I was doing the things I was doing and how to help a software development team be more effective. I was still essentially “in the closet” –embarrassed that I didn’t want to write 200 page functional and technical spec documents before doing any actual coding. This was before the Agile/Scrum concepts were as mainstream as they are now.

When I was interviewing for another job, I found myself absolutely enthralled by one of the interviewers. He seemed like the single most brilliant developer I had ever met. I was so eager to work with this guy, that I let myself overlook a bunch of warning signs about the organization (legacy code base, previous-generation languages/tools, uninteresting problem domain, deplorable office space, disrespectful management, etc.). I wound up taking the job.

Many months later, as I was trying to figure out how I came to be in the horrible situation I was in, I came to the shameful realization that I thought this guy was brilliant because he reminded me of myself. It was narcissism, plain and simple. Ever since then, I’ve been cautious to think about why I think someone is so amazingly smart.

The same phenomenon came up again last summer, when I did a “Pragmatic TDD” seminar presentation for a handful of development companies. After one presentation, a guy came up to me and said “Your presentation was great. Just brilliant. This is exactly what I’ve been advocating we do for forever.”

Of course I brilliant, I was just like him.

Now, I’m trying to do a better job of being honest with myself, challenging myself, and listening intently to those I immediately disagree with.

(Relatively) Simple Party Photo Booth Project

One of coolest things about digital photography is the instant feedback loop of seeing what the picture looks like. One of the downsides is that your subjects know this, and often want to get the immediate “how did it turn out” feedback. When I was taking the party invitation pictures, Ethan kept tripping over the flash sync cable trying to get a peek at how the pictures looked. My wireless flash setup is arriving any day now, but that still solves only part of the problem.

Mostly inspired by John Harrington’s far cooler (and more expensive/elaborate) party photo booth rig, I set up a simple one for my Son’s 6th birthday party.

For the setup, I put the camera (Canon Digital Rebel XT) on a tripod with the video out (simple RCA plug) piped into my TV. I set the camera “preview display” mode to “hold” so the camera would send a video signal of the last picture taken until the next one was snapped. The video output is not great (my TV reported the signal as 480i), but it’s enough to give you a sense of the lighting and facial expressions.

For lighting, I setup the Vivitar 285HV with shoot-through umbrella camera right as my main lighting. I had a couple of Sunpak DS-20 cheap optical slave flashes floating around the room to give some extra light, which provided some really interesting medium-tone shadows and edge definition.

The backdrop is a combination blue/green screen that I got when I was working at PlayStream, making server-side software that would integrate with a video blogging app from SeriousMagic (now Adobe) which did the background subsitution in real-time. Other than making a few “this is Martin Cron, reporting live from the White House…” fake newscasts, I hadn’t used it much. It’s held to a ceiling beam with bungee cords hooked to a pair of 3M command clips, which mount easily and remove cleanly without having to use any tools.

This whole thing was triggered from the RC-1 remote control, which I set to a two-second delay which worked out well for a couple of reasons. One, the video output would go blank for those two seconds, which would get the kids to stop looking at themselves on the TV and instead look at the lens. Also, the delay insured that the flash (1/4 power) would have enough time to cycle. Most importantly, it gave enough time to get the remote control itself out of frame, as it has to be line-of-sight with the camera.

Lastly, I set up a simple “prop table” out of frame for the kids to pose with hats, safety goggles, sunglasses, etc.

The cool thing about this setup is that it could be replicated pretty cheaply. The video output cable comes with the camera. The RC-1 is around 30 bucks. While I used diffused off-camera flash, you could do it with available light or (perish the thought) on-camera flash. Instead of a fairly exotic backdrop (blue/green screen), you could just line the kids up against a blank wall.

The most important thing is, of course, that the kids (all around six years old) had a great time and I got some good pictures out of it. I’ll be able to send back prints of the best pictures with the thank you notes.

I, for one, welcome our new pediatric overlords

From January 2000 until a few weeks ago, I lived (and worked, when I was a freelance consultant) in a townhouse-style condo in Seattle in the Laurelon Terrace complex. I sold it to Children’s Hospital in January to allow them to tear it down and turn it into more condos. It was a good time for me to leave, our family had outgrown the small townhouse, and we had a guaranteed buyer in a down housing market.

This, of course, is why nothing gets done in Seattle. If you tear down a beloved institution (such as Ballard’s Sunset Bowl) to build more condos, people complain bitterly. If you tear down condos to build more beloved insitution (Children’s hospital), people complain bitterly. You think I’m joking about complaining bitterly. Check out the tone of the posts at childrensaction.com. Hell, people even complain bitterly about parking lots being turned into condos. Really.

I’m sad to leave (some parts) of the Laurelon community behind. There’s a lot to be said for shared-space medium density. Getting to know your neighbors, hanging out in the courtyard and and parking lots.

The other parts that I’m not as sad to leave behind? The constantly rising HOA dues brought on by years of neglecting upkeep. The HOA board, generally staffed by misanthropic busybodies whose default response to any idea is “no”. The neighbors who would blur the lines between personal and shared property. Hey, that’s MY bucket you’re using!

I looked into contemporary townhouses, but they are both antisocial and anti-family. Antisocial in that they all seem to be built with an ethic of minimizing shared property/interactions (why have one usable yard used by four families when you could have four unusably tiny yards each used by one family?) Anti-family in the ubiquitous “two bedrooms on the 3rd floor, one bedroom in the basement” floor-plan. You can’t put a small kid all the way down in the basement next to the garage, calling those rooms “bedrooms” isn’t particularly honest.

Note that the bedroom count inflation problem isn’t limited to townhouses. I toured a lot of 3BR houses that were actually “2BR + crappy basement closet”.  In fact, our 3BR home was listed as a 4BR even though it only has three usable bedrooms. Oh well, at least we have a space to store our boxes as we unpack.