OK, so we weren’t solvent. Apparently farming out every single manufacturing job in the country to mainland China has come with some cost, chiefly a $245 Billion trade defecit.

And we can’t expect the government to fix issues like these anytime soon because they’re embroiled in their own fruitless efforts to fix our national balance sheet. Kinda like everyone else, the nation has racked up some hefty credit card bills. And, you know when a family has money problems, it causes fights. Congress can’t pass anything bipartisan anymore, so it gestures and threatens and filibusters. About the only thing they were able to work together on in the past 10 years is blowing all the cash that helped drive up our debt in the first place.

So we can’t expect to leave High School and make a living on an assembly line any more. America needs to train for tomorrow’s jobs, right? Except, if you take just a passing look, you’ll notice our public Education system is up sh-t’s creek also. Any number of documentaries (see Waiting for Superman – it made me cry) will show you that we don’t produce Engineers and Architects like we used to. But, those are what tomorrow’s economy demands. If we can’t even improve on dropout rates from the nation’s high schools, we don’t stand a chance when 30 years down the road the demand for high tech employees doubles or triples.

Overall, if you look at how the US is doing versus other countries that we’ve traditionally look at condescendingly in the past, we’re not doing so hot. We put the space race on hold – no more Nasa flights to the moon, and a mission to Mars is now left to Science Fiction writers. Since we’ve shipped all the factory jobs overseas, Engineering shops are slowly following, and if you continue the trend, next to go are the corporate offices. Like it or not, we’re a take hike away from accelerating that trend.

Silver Lining

All this to say, it feels like our prospects in the US aren’t looking great for the next fifty years. So if the economy is feeling hollow with no great future, I think the one thing we can always turn to – which continues to be true through good times and bad – is that America is still the cool kid on the block.

Half of China’s wealthiest would rather live in the US. We’re an open society; Jersey Shore proves this fact. Where else in the world would something so hideous have a chance to exist? Sure, Finland has great students, but I’ll bet they all want XBoxes and iPhones. And I bet you if I played Black-Eyed Peas in Brazil, people would recognize the song from a commercial and have the same response as we do in America (shameful, mild enjoyment). You know how suburban kids either look like Justin Bieber or Jay-Z wannabes? Same goes for German kids.

You may not have great odds at equipping your family with a great education or jobs in the US, but if they make it out of college, we’ve oodles of venture capitalists to fund all of their hair-brained schemes. Part of why we mourned so much for Steve Jobs is because we treasure his sort of ballsy, driven creativity that builds American empires like Apple. America takes risks and sometimes wins big.

If we can find away to fix our balance sheets, economy, educational system, retirement system and government – or at least delay the pain and let our children deal with our mess – America’s fabric makes it an awesome place for influence to start from. We may not always find a way to profit from it, but the US is still a global center for “cool”. Hopefully its value holds up.

Part of this makes sense because of how kids work; You can’t expect a child (or even teenager) to share equal attention among 5-10 toys for any length of time. The other part is that some toys are junk from the get-go. They were junk when they were designed. And if it weren’t for the box and their commercials, the toy would be a complete waste of injection-molded Chinese plastic.

This is where I have to pay homage to the toys that got it right, and were a lasting member of our kids’ arsenal. MVP goes to the Apple Alphabet toy we got our 1 yr-old son two Christmases ago. It was the simplest toy, but it taught both the alphabet, letter sounds, and even provided animals that start with those letters, including a guessing game that asks to identify the described animal.

My son picked up all the letter sounds really quickly from the toy – I want to say he was a little over a year old. He played with this toy on road trips, on the go, alone in his room, and of course with myself and my wife as well. Best $15 we spent that Christmas.

Legos are of course the next best toy you’ll ever get a child. Our kids are finally old enough for the normal-sized bricks, so we got them a starter set, and they’ve been steadily gravitating to them all week. I was hooked on Legos for years – probably from 5 through 11. My friend and I would spend hours building competing spaceships, race cars, fortresses, and anything else we could come up with. The big thing to do back then was also trade the good pieces – joints, swivels, doors and other rare Lego goods. I just hope our kids get into them as much as I was growing up. It’s a lot of quality, creative time.

Sticking with the classics, Play-Doh has been a great past-time for the kids this year, though they have no respect for fresh doh or clean colors. If I give them green and pink, we’re likely have have a marbled clump of pink and green dough sitting out on the table when they’re done, containers left scattered open. Still, give them a plastic knife and some colored clay, and they’re hooked.

Finally, Pop-It Beads were a huge hit with my 5 year-old daughter. Recently she received these for her fifth birthday, and she spend probably spent a combined 20 hours so far just coming up with endless configurations of bracelets, jewelry, and odd knick-knacks. They’re like Legos with a twist for girls, and frankly they’re awesome. I could tell Elena right now we’re going to start building necklaces with the “pop beads” and she’ll respond with excitement almost every time.

Outside of books, that seems to be it. Everything else gets fair play, like my son’s Hot Wheels cars he carries with him wherever he goes, but the rest of the toys get passing interest. Which I’m fine with. Would definitely prefer to draw their attention to writing and reading at this age then spending hours on Mommy’s Android tablet. Don’t get me wrong, that happens, just prefer to reserve it for really crappy weather days.

Here’s hoping your toy picks work out. Odds are, they didn’t, but if they do, spread the word. Good toys are hard to find.

Remember Google Wave? I barely do – never really followed it, just recall the month or so of anticipatory hype. Then nothing. But if you look back at some of the press it got during it’s time, you’d think it was going to change everything. Of course it ended up not lasting long enough to really educate most folks on what it was supposed to be.

I’m not going to say Google+ is Google Wave redux, but the hype factor is quite similar, so I’ll choose to discount it’s coverage as an indicator of future success. Let’s remember, it’s Google. They could release a new web service centered around colon health, and it’d have 50 million users in it’s first week. I’m not surprised “Google’s take on Facebook” gets 10 million users it’s first week, especially when wrapped by a super-secret-limited-share release that only amps the interest.

Looking at the service itself and the environment it enters, it’s looking to take away from Facebook’s 750 million users. Facebook was clever how it found and fit a niche: making the act of sharing personal information fun, and reaping massive profits from it’s surrounding targeted advertising network. Of course, this is a sore spot for Google – that’s their racket too, only Google doesn’t make it as fun, and they’re a whole lot sneakier about it.

So why will an exodus of Facebook’s 750 million flock to Google+?

Privacy Concern: I would really hope not. Comparing Facebook and Google on respect for user privacy is like comparing which handgun is safest for toddlers. I read a guy claiming Google’s terms of use are friendlier than those of Zuckerberg, and maybe so. But come on. I almost prefer a Facebook’s brazen “I will exploit every life detail you share” policy versus the more discreet Google approach, which only your imagination can expand on.

Minimalist Design: OK, this one actually draws users, but probably not the droves you’d expect. Geek chic loves pretty interfaces, fewer buttons, smooth transitions, and everything that feels new. If geek chic were a cultural group, Apple would be their religion, and Google Chrome would be the window they view the world through. It’s a strong, vibrant base in the computer user market.

It’s also a minority. Apple computers makes up about 11% of the market, and Chrome users are around the same. Problem is, Facebook became Facebook because you could find anyone on it, not just the guys you knew at the Coffee Shop or in Art class. Which leads into…

Users: If you want to beat Facebook, you better start sprouting users (and I don’t mean Google users, but Google+ users – look at Google Buzz to understand the difference). Yes, Google is ubiquitous and yes, it stands to benefit from nagging every user with your little icon at the top of every authenticated Google product user experience. But if you don’t have high school friends and fantasy football league buddies waiting on the other end of that icon, it ends up just another forum to broadcast what you ate for breakfast and hope it sparks a conversation.

Features: This one I don’t buy too much either. Circles are nice, granted. Frankly creating a “work” circle effectively is all I needed to completely replace my LinkedIn account (some manner to separate my drunken ravings from my professional drunken ravings). But, I’d argue features are too subjective and more vulnerable to competition and one-ups manship. One could argue Bing has fresher features than Google’s standard search, but that ain’t helping them much on market share.

The bottom line as far as I’m concerned is Google+ will not replace Facebook, but if it’s successful in the next 3 months, could stand to compete. Maybe it’ll live as a “geek’s choice” social network, just as its incomplete browser product serves the same base. But if it ever plans to take over Facebook and succeed in world domination, it’s too late to just do Facebook “but better.” Facebook did it at the exact right time. Google will have to do something different. Something that doesn’t feel like a smart guy’s take on an online property that’s thrived over the last several years. They’ve got the mental horsepower and resources to do it.

Otherwise, Google will have to go back to what it’s sublime at: filling niches that no one has dominated yet with clever solutions and harvesting massive amounts of behavioral user data for its advertising empire.

Frequently, while we’re watching Anna gets into berating the contestants about falling back on the same ideas every episode. “I’d totally be grabbing bacon right now.” “Just crumble it! Use it as a topping!!” And so on. So I finally said on a lark, “OK, we’re doing Chopped here at home.” She’s all into cooking and baking, so the idea intrigued her.

Yesterday I swung by Publix to pick up the mystery ingredients, trying to keep it somewhat mixed but not crazy difficult for a first go. And so, here goes the first Anna Chopped:

Appetizer

I grabbed by basket of ingredients, debated the groupings, and settled on the 4 I’d give her:

• Peaches, fairly ripe
• Provolone cheese, “smoke flavored” (I use the quotes gingerly)
• Sour cream and onion Pringles
• Pepperoni

It ain’t exactly a softball lob, but doesn’t require too much imagination to use these together.

Flatbread with provolone, pepperoni and peaches

First thing we quickly realized is the time element really makes the show hard. I took it easy on Anna and gave her 40 minutes for the appetizer (think the show gives 20) to account for kid interruptions I can’t intercept and to make sure she doesn’t cut her fingers off in the mad rush. After 40 minutes, she needed another 5 minutes to let the flat bread fully cook.

The second thing we realized is you need some chef training to come up with good names. I asked, “so what is this?” Anna replied “Flatbread” with a smile. OK, flatbread annndd…? We’re still not settled on a decent name.

To help the dish, she added prosciutto (we didn’t have bacon) and some basil from the garden. After eating it, I really liked everything together, and actually would have liked more peaches, oddly enough. But, I’m a sucker for pizza, so this was a winner on flavor front. The only thing I could criticize was the originality – flat bread seems like the go-to idea. Sounds harsh, but Ted Allen would agree.

Flavor, 5/5, presentation 3/5, creativity 2.5/5

Dessert

The flatbread was really filling, so we skipped to dessert. I modified the second group and came up with:

• Corn chips
• Dates (my aha!!)
• Cream cheese
• Honey

Again, not too hard really, and Anna can make anything given cream cheese. The result:

Custard with date pudding and cream cheese sauce in corn shell

Again, Anna wasn’t thrilled with her presentation aspect. I told her she needs to squirt green stuff on a blank white dish to surround anything she’s plating. It what I see constantly on those artsy cooking shows.

The only failing of the dish was the abundant sweetness. She added sugar to the custard part, and with the honey in the corn shell + brown sugar and the powerful sweetness of the dates in the pudding really made the dish way sweet. I ate it, it was delicious. Anna and Babcia got through a little, but not too far before stopping to avoid sugar coma.

I was feeling jaunty about the dates – I don’t really know dates well, and Anna really didn’t know what to expect with dates. But, they really made a nice topping to the whole dish. I really liked the pudding – almost like a sweet plum pudding. I suspect Anna has a predilection toward these creme-brulet cups, so it’ll be interesting to see if she is able to incorporate new containers for her future desserts.

Flavor 4.5/5, creativity 3.5/5, presentation 3.5/5

Outcome

It was damn fun, actually, and I got a dinner out of it. Anna was feeling like I was treating her by helping her cook for me. That’s a rare win / win scenario any husband would endorse. We’ll see where this goes, but it’s feeling like a good way to get Anna more acquainted with new ingredients and cooking methods.

I’m already preparing our next round. Wonder how long before I can incorporate oddball fruits from the international farmer’s market?

What, you need more? OK, eat fruits, avoid excess starches and fats, and do aerobic exercise 3 times a week for 30 minutes or more.

If we keep going further, we could get into a variety of prescriptive systems for achieving a balanced diet and exercise routine. Assuming you find a winner among the proposed systems and you have detailed advice on how to achieve an ideal eating and active routine, at best what you have is a blanket set of guidelines.

And truthfully, the guidelines will most times not be far from what’s common knowledge on the subjects of eating and exercise. People don’t hire personal trainers and pay for dietary meal plans because they haven’t figured that fast food and sedentary habits lead to double chins. They pay for these things because they need help with practicing within guidelines. They know and have likely tried to practice within commonly accepted guidelines, but for a number of reasons it’s usually difficult, and the status quo wins. Guidelines are often hard.

This pretty much sums up my biggest issue with the discipline of Agile development (I’m not really even sure if the term “discipline” is entirely appropriate, but need to fix on some nomenclature).

Agile software development has been a fairly strong trend in IT for 10 years or so (possibly longer), emphasizing iterative development and strong communication between clients and developers. With iterative development, you theoretically have a working – albeit possibly limited – product throughout the course of development. Each development cycle aims to build complete features on to the working product in order of customer priority.

If you’re not already hip to Agile, Wikipedia can fill in more details, while the Agile Manifesto can do the rest.

The Problem with Practice

Out of Agile, there have been several frameworks for agile development that have taken off. Extreme Programming and Scrum are frankly the only two I’m personally familiar with, and hardly even personally. I suppose I’ve not lived an long or an exotic enough of an IT career yet to claim more. What I do know is XP promotes peer development – like pilot / co-pilot programmers – and scrum is all about creating teams, holding quick touch-point sessions, and planning everything generally in 2-week “sprints”. The later is the framework I’m more familiar with, previously from my period as a Project Manager and more recently in my current Developer-ish role.

Both are detailed systems that guide developers on how to structure work, interact with clients and measure goals. Both require significant investment to fully implement, and are lauded for their tremendous efficacy when performed well.

Just as eating right and working out isn’t enough to turn most folks around, neither are these sets of guidelines and structures by themselves enough to vastly transform most teams into a well oiled machine. You can preach the merits of daily meetings and pacing feature releases out two weeks at a time, but these idea alone won’t stop your business from transforming this into daily hour-long calls and continuously squeezing every whim conceived into the current two week work “sprint”.

Sure, there are good ideas in these methodologies, but in the end, its just as hard for developers to warmly accept Agile advice as it is to accept a health tip on how avoiding red meat can improve colon health. The reason is our environment and realities these methodologies do not address alone. As one could say to the vegan health nut, “I just like a burger every now and then.”

So what realities make iterative development and agile practices difficult? Speaking largely to issues with Scrum:

Organizations are notoriously poor at prioritizing work across groups

In traditional development, all goals are laid out on the table and baked into the project plan. Developers have an opportunity (if fortunate) to give feedback on feasibility of delivering scope within time and resource constraints, negotiation ensues, and work persists through completion of agreed goals.

In iterative development, all product features need to be itemized and ranked by priority, and the customer must accept that given time and resource constraints, not all features will be addressed, creating an uncertain bubble or cutoff on features that can be delivered.

First, this requires trust from the client; developers can do poorly and cut off many desirable features if conditions are unfavorable. Then the act of prioritizing the list of features knowing some likely will get cut off from first release requires discipline many organizations lack. Often, businesses are comprised of separate leads that vie for influence and say, sometimes even competing for attention. These situations require strong leadership to prioritize goals for a product release.

In a nutshell, getting a prioritized product feature list requires strong business cohesion. If it’s not present, it’ll take some work to ensure everyone is coming to the same table and agreeing on the relative importance of product features.

Business and PMs are often the champions of Agile development

When I was a Project Coordinator (I’ll say “PM” since a Project Coordinator is just the junior form of Project Manager), waterfall was so 1970′s, and Agile was hip. “Ooh, you’re doing scrum with your team?” It had all the appeal of saying you’re a “Six Sigma Blackbelt” (which in itself is such a laughably terrible title). Part of this I suspect is because Project Management is really dry stuff, generally speaking, and it’s pretty hard from the outside to distinguish a good project manager from a not-so-good project manager. Since folks aren’t always wow’ed over by requirements documents and gantt charts, adopting a fad methodology is as hip as “slap bracelets” were.

The big problem with PMs and businesses promoting a faddishly popular development methodology is that neither parties are the true audience and target of agile development. Ultimately it’s perceived as a way for folks to squeeze more work out of developers, especially when organizational change isn’t addressed to accommodate these systems. It’s hard to embrace agile practices when almost all changes target how developers work, especially in organizations where developers already handle much of the scope negotiation.

Bottomline, the Agile Manifesto wasn’t created by a group of business analysts who felt the need to create untenable work structures and make lucrative careers from coaching organizations on how to chase their resulting hypothetical efficiency. It was driven by developers, and unfortunately, it largely needs the support in organizations.

Not all IT development is software development

For starters, I’ve always felt Web Development – my discipline, so to speak – is very hard to compare with Software development. First, I think Use Cases are garbage when it comes to anything but web applications. For everything outside of rich user interactivity, designing and planning a website is hard to compare with developing software. In web development:

• interactions are primarily done through a web browser, and largely using mechanics and conventions already established by web browsers
• it’s generally harder to iteratively build web pages, since features are mostly visually anchored in web pages; leaving out features leaves holes in web page structure and content, and web page layout is not always forgiving enough to adjust around missing structural areas
• web development generally falls in quicker life cycles and is generally less long term growth
• web development generally requires smaller teams than software development, and expects developers to cover more diverse roles

You can argue these points, but the nature of web development is still different than software development. To boot, web development teams are often required to serve as operational support for existing work as well, adding to the complexity of building teams. In our current real world example, our team at work is constantly fragmented across multiple projects, though small enough to fit within a “scrum team”. Conversations aren’t lively because typically when one person is talking, their topics are generally only relevant to one or two others on the team.

Also, the business is strongly built around the security of design mockups. When designers work with advertising, marketing, product managers and business owners to craft the perfect balance of all needs into a fully encompassing mockup, the stakeholders involved are in no position to watch developers break the page up and laying down pieces of the page, one at a time. All parties are expecting the full package, and an incomplete web package is much more visually different than an incomplete software package, which shows or hides features through user interactions over time.

Groups with a habit for meetings can increase meeting overhead in agile, working contrary to the tenets of Agile Software Development

You ever hear someone say they do “scrums”, but what they really mean is they conduct 20+ minute status updates and use the time to drill into issues with the development team?

I confess I’m entirely guilty of committing this gross misinterpretation as well. And it’s bad, specifically for all the people not speaking beyond the 11th or 12th minute of the meeting. Folks like a turn to talk about their issues, and despise hearing too much from those of others. Who can blame them?

I’ve also worked in enough teams to recognize those that function well with normal communication lines and those that require meetings from every small decision or discussion. And for any team that loves it’s meetings, agile just gives more reasons to add new invites to the calendar. So feedback reviews turn into follow up meetings that bleed into the scrums which slowly transform into normal, daily meetings. Before long, you’ve added 3 hours more of meetings to every developers plate, with the naive expectation of more productivity.

Poor understanding of Lean and Agile, especially team philosophies that drive both

One thing I think that’s a huge part of Agile methodologies is their influences from Lean manufacturing, which derives from the Toyota Production System. If you trace it back to TPS, you’ll see it all comes from a place of respecting employees, encouraging participation at all levels for improvements and discouraging overburdening workers. It a philosophy of constant self-assessment and reassessment, chasing improvements and transparency.

So, to chase the goals and fruits of Agile development without committing to true teamwork across roles and bring the business in sync with the development team is like expecting lasting weight loss from a fad diet. Boxing prioritized work into two week windows alone will not make products fly off the shelf or web pages pile up on to web servers. To truly adhere to iterative development and frequent client feedback cycles requires discipline and collaboration between all parties involved in making a product.

What it boils down to

That last sentence for me sums up all that’s right about Agile development. If you expect to get “Agile”, it requires development, operational and execution teams to be on the same page as business and planning teams. Strong, frequent and constructive communications are necessary to tie everyone together on this same page, and holding frequent, short touchpoints between parties involved in building a product help focused individuals escalate issues quickly.

And that, in my mind is everything that’s right with Agile – all the conditions necessary for making it work, which I also find are the reasons that books, seminars, lectures and training on the subject invariably fall drastically flat. I’m not convinced agile methodologies do anything spectacular. What I am convinced is that if you work to change your organization into an open, collaborative environment that communicates well in order to adopt agile practices, it can only stand to benefit.

And if you have all these things in order, in my mind, the whole “Agile” part becomes unnecessary.

Going back to the diet and exercise thing, which would you rather have: a set of instructions on how to eat well and perform good workouts, or the right environment conditions, time and discipline to eat well and exercise regularly?

Of course nothing comes magically, and sometimes you need an impetus or system to get there, but the real value is the change. The Agile Manifesto says individuals and interactions before processes and tools. And as ironic as it may seem, Agile methodologies, at the end of the day, are simply processes and tools.

This isn’t the first time, and in the past, I’ve had canned responses to the issue. Basically, I’d run a lot. 4-5 times a week. And I’d skip lunch most days. It wasn’t so much a starvation technique as it’s been almost my daily cycle, recovering from dinners where I’d gorge on food. It’d go snack, skip, gorge. Yes, that’s the title of my next health-centric book. “Snack – skip – gorge, you fat bastard.” I expect readers will be even more disgusted with themselves after a thorough reading.

Anyways, recently I discovered I was mortal. Apparently this happens to a lot of 30-somethings.

Normally, I could break a 2 month exercise fast with a 6 mile run, no stretching, no problems. The next 4 days I’d be sore, but functional. This had been true back through my Marine Corps days through the worst of my training – if I was sober, I could perform. Sometimes even sobriety was optional.

Then, last week, my knee started acting up. Not cool, first off. I mean, why wait until I’m 32 to give me crap. But then it wouldn’t go away; my knee was a consistent nuisance for almost 2 weeks. I’d had a few points during this period when I woke up early to jog / run, only to give up until my joint was fully healed.

This morning was the final straw. I woke up, laced up, got outside and started one of my usual routes… only to crash to a halt before the first stop sign. That friggin’ knee.  I’d been feeling the effects of excessive laziness and consumption already, and a morning of no exercise would only exacerbate the mood. After a day of not “feeling it”, I came upon a lark. Why not commit to 90 days of exercise? Put my 24 hour turn-key gym to work!

Generally I despise discussing physical fitness progress, technique, or pretty much any other aspect of my well-being (this post is part of a brief departure). But for some reason I feel like there’s merit in committing to a “90 day challenge”. I think that’s likely the largest appeal of P90X, which I’ve had passing interest in so far. Folks cling on to personal challenges, so I’m going to try to do the same; commit to an harsh goal and add it as a blog post for some shred of commitment. It worked briefly with A Blue Screen (which was my previous webcomic that I’ve since lost all data and access to…. because Mochahost has terrible security).

So anyway, for the next 90 days, I will use the local gym for at least 30 minutes each day. Not exactly a mission to Mars, but more a modest proposal for consistent effort toward some physical betterment. Today was the first day. I’ve got a sheet of where I’m at on my various exercises, so it’s hopefully onward and upward from here. The next biggest hurdle is tomorrow.

At 13, I coerced my parents into buying me a computer. Then, it was the PC. A string of Japanese gray boxes became a string of 3.5″ floppy disks. When I wasn’t drawing or making crude QuickBasic programs, I was playing some Microprose title or some virus-laden game passed through twenty other friends.

Suffice it to say, I’ve been playing video games for a while. Likely tens of thousands of hours that could have been devoted to reading, sports, homework, and various social fair, spent instead on poorly translated cut scenes and briefly satisfying boss fights.

And I know I’m not alone when I say I still have a video game system which I still play. It saddens me when I do the math. 32 years old, 2 children, 1 wife, 1 mortgage, still playing video games. Granted, video games are more an evening past time when the kids are in bed or a weekend vice when I should be doing chores, but the thought of a “man” playing video games seems really odd to me, considering our generation knew only kids to play with control pads and joysticks.

Clearly, the demographic has shifted. Think almost half of video gamers fall between 18 and 49 years old. That’s a whole lot of man-children.

I’m not sure what to think of the figures, and what folks a generation back would have been doing during these hours wasted nowadays on pixelated violence and simulated social interaction. What did video games replace? TV? Appreciation of the arts? Domestic violence? I don’t know, but I imagine it had to be more worthy than the Madden Football franchise.

All I know is, when I saw this Gamefly commercial recently featuring customer testimonials, most of the people looked like “men”. Sad, broken, 30-something men. Sure their hair was spiked and shirts pressed, but they had the look of basement living, mom’s cooking and night-shift jobs at Blockbuster.

I know I’ve devoted a lot of years to navigating fictional, digital characters, but at 32 are video games a retardant to maturity? Is casual gaming OK, and if so, where do you draw the line? Is it OK to play the games, just so long as you don’t own video game-inspired figurines? Are T-shirts with video game themes the final straw?

I’m not casting my XBox aside just yet, but I will say it doesn’t sit right with me. Not entirely.

“Baristas” at Starbucks are an example I will not tip. Ever. Their coffee only has a 2000% markup – they’ve got serious rocks to ask for extra money. And not even the cutest of tip-related adages on the tip jar is gonna change my mind on the matter.

Waiters and waitresses are a given; unless they take two hours to refill your drink because they’re playing Risk out back with the kitchen staff, they’re getting something. Wait staff are the front lines of customer service. Every angry, bitter, damaged human being that enters an Applebees unloads on their waiter in some degree, and in return the waiters get a solid $1.50 an hour for their troubles. It’s a raw deal. You gotta show them some decency.

At the absolute bottom of my list of people I’m willing to lend a buck to is my college. It has nothing to do with my college – every college has serious gall to ask their alumni for more money.

Let’s begin with the fact that every college is first and foremost as business. You don’t see Exxon or Motorola asking their customers for extra money after their products are purchased. No, they know to gouge their customers on the price upfront, and leave them on their merry way. Colleges seem to do both: charge top dollar up front, and then ask for donations once you think your transaction is complete. I was at Penn State for about 4 years, and every year it seemed another building was being erected in University Park to be dedicated to every new executive secretary and plumber. I’m pretty sure they weren’t just scraping by during those years.

If you accept that colleges may ask their alumni for donations, then you have question their targeting. If, say, Dick Cheney graduated from your school, I can understand if they come back around and say, “Hey Dick, I think we set you right – you mind throwing a few thousand in our coffers?” But how the hell can they target 25 year olds who’ve just graduated, first job (if they’re lucky), and starting their first of many years in student loan debt? That just seems ballsy – you’re not even done paying off your original transaction before the business starts asking for more money.

So as soon as an employer greets me, marvels at my degree from Penn State and hands me a cushy VP of beer and Xbox position in their executive ranks, I’ll be the first one signing a check back to my Alumni with a big, sloppy red lip stick kiss on the envelope. But until then, if I see a college logo on anything in my mailbox, it goes straight to the trash.

I just downloaded Half Life 2 for my laptop (because that’s how I roll with my computer hardware – cheap and 5 years behind), and on a lark I started looking around for Mods to download. In searching, I came across this post:

http://www.moddb.com/mods/age-of-chivalry – see lower on this page, “Reflection on Age of Chivalry“.

This case isn’t an abject failure, but clearly the author is reflecting on a less than successful close to his work. The honesty and lessons interest me in these situations.

This is also why I like Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares (thank you BBC America). The yelling Scott barges into a failing restaurant – always a situation of people, practices and resources not striking the right note – dramatizes the low points, and holds a brutal mirror to the staff. Almost always, the people `fess up and acknowledge what they are or aren’t doing. But here’s where the British show trumps the later Americanized series: a lot of times, after a week of coaching, the business still fails.

I don’t know why, but these examples always are more striking to me than the ones that just take a nudge and steer in the right direction, calamity averted. Just like those disastrous military campaigns they feature lazy Sundays on the History Channel. I was watching a 2 hour piece on the Knights Templar, which walks through 200 years of their history, up through their last major battle in the Holy Land. The forces comprised of Christians from all over Europe were starting to dissent into factions, and their captain was a dim, hot tempered idiot. They’re a day away from an larger army, and in the dry desert everyone agrees the right thing to do is dig in and let the enemy come to them.

And that’s when the egotist captain, determined to assert authority over dissenting factions, orders a march through parched dessert with no water. Everyone marches for a day until every man nearly collapses from dehydration and exhaustion, and then the enemy army surrounds them and picks off the lot of them within an hour. Apparently the shmuck captian takes off – a taboo action for Knights of any order, let alone Templars – and lives another year until he loses his head during a later battle.

Fascinating stuff. OK, maybe not fascinating, but it sticks with you.

This changes a little during Elections, but then it’s back to just a part of an employees morning routine at the office. Check the headlines, read a few articles, and move on.

Poly-Sci folks might follow it up at the Cato institute, further online reading, books and other stuff.

But news and TV don’t mix much anymore. Maybe they never mixed. Really, do folks view the TV as a forum for thought provocation? Is it an opportunity for critical thinking? Nah. It’s your time to be entertained.

Fox News jumped from “Fox what?” to top news channel in 10 years. How? It has a hook. It’s found an unrelenting patronage, a demographic, and sculpted it’s reporting around this base. There’s a lot of room in between pure video journalism and pure editorial, and Fox is defining that spectrum.

I used to find myself perplexed by Fox’s success, and as a left-leaning moderate, found it almost offensive. But I know it’s really a gimmick. That’s not an attack, that’s a compliment to any TV production. If you have something that works, ride it out. Drive that gravy train home.

But it ain’t news. Cause if it was, a hell of a lot less folks would watch it. That stuff doesn’t lead you to any conclusions.