December 2006

Skepticim about employees persists

December 15, 2006

Recently I've discussed the December 2006 Harvard Business Review article The High Cost of Low Wages with several small business owners. The article's well supported thesis is "stingy pay and benefits don’t necessarily translate into lower costs in the long run".

Certainly when looking at a counter-intuitive suggestion like this it is comfortable to be dismissive out of hand. What is harder to put aside is that in case study after case study this model holds true. Many business owners, however, are convinced it doesn't apply to their industry. There is certainly support for the idea that pay and benefits are not the only thing that matters in many industries.

While employee pay is not a direct indicator of success, the Costco model certainly suggests it is a part of the puzzle. Further employee compensation plans say a great deal about management's attitudes towards employees. If I as a manager expect an employee will be stealing from me, a short timer and not worth investing in guess what I'll get?

Powerful Television

December 12, 2006

For those series I'm interested in I watch the DVD's when they come out. Since I am in a time-warp in this regard I'm just now getting to watch the last season of The West Wing. There were times in seasons five and six where the program struggled. Some suggested it jumped the shark. Having seen a great deal of the last season now I can definitively say it rivals Deadwood as the greatest show of all time.

Watching the show in a time-warp there was little doubt what would happen with John Spencer's character after he passed away during the production of the last season. Even knowing what was about to happen the show is so well put together that it seemed to reach up and grab the viewer and be completely realistic all at the same moment. It is hard to believe that it has been a year since Spencer's passing. That has more to do with how fast the arms on the clock are racing forward and is the topic of a different post.

Mystère continues to impress

December 10, 2006

We went to see Mystère last week. I'd seen the excellent show thirteen years ago when it was in its opening run at the tent theater outside the Treasure Island. Over the years the show has been moved into a custom-built theater but it has not lost the magic. Often people who have not seen a Cirque du Solei show ask what it is about. Truth be told it is a bit hard to explain. Cirque's website says the following:

Mystère is an overwhelming sensory experience. It is in constant motion and features high-energy acrobatics, evocative dances, colorful costumes and vivid lighting. It is a feast of colours and passions, of beauty and frailty which recalls a distant past and speaks to the future. It breathes rhythm and music.

In this day of marketing hype it would be easy to believe that "overwhelming sensory experience" is typical hyperbole. It is not. Each of the two times I have seen the show I have had the impression that it would take at least a dozen careful, planned, trips to become relatively sure one had caught most of what is going on.

Hiding things in plain sight is one of the trademarks of the great Cirque shows. The set changes and rigging are handled as much by the actors and actresses as they are the offstage magicians pulling strings and levers. Mystère remains a great show and if visitors to Las Vegas get to see just one this could easily be the one to see.

Banning blog leaches

December 7, 2006

On another website I recently noticed that another party was sucking in the RSS feed and publishing it to their site. Not a headline or two, not a snippet and a pointer, but the whole thing. They are doing it with dozens of sites. It's the RSS equivalent of framing sites.

Fortunately most of the folks who are doing this sort of thing have their own server and all the requests come from their server. If that's the case it's pretty easy to tell Apache to make the site dark for all their requests. By adding something like the following in httpd.conf the offending leach is cut off.

    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
    Deny from nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn

I'm curious to see how long it takes before the operator of the leach realizes they have gotten 403 errors for weeks now.

Playing sick

December 7, 2006

National Public Radio had a story yesterday on people calling in sick when they really aren't. They asked and the expert gave some of the most egregious instances of people who didn't need sick time but called in anyway. One of those was someone who called in because they were searching for their horse who had gotten out. While it may or may not strictly qualify for sick time it seems that the expert engaged has never been a horse owner or never come to realize that things like that happen. In the last half-decade I've used about 4 sick days. Two of them came after spending all night up with horses and being exhausted.

It is always amazing how much perspective colors what is viewed as reasonable or unreasonable.

Nevadans need to vote with their feet

December 5, 2006

A group of twenty businesses are trying to overthrow the will of the voters of the state of Nevada.

Whether the businesses are ultimately successful in their attempt to prevent clean breathable air, Nevadans need to vote with our feet. The facts do not support the business owner's claims. Business owners at a few, unscrupulous businesses are threatening their employees with loosing jobs because of the measure. Other localities that have passed similar measures find that restaurant business often goes up after enacting smoke-free laws.

These businesses, however, would rather prey on the fears of their employees instead of complying with a law that a majority of the state. Quite simply the time has come for Nevadans to tell these businesses we don't appreciate their antics. We need to take our business to establishments that respect all Nevadans not just those who smoke in restaurants.

iTunes Wishlist

December 4, 2006

Two shows that would have a great market on iTunes Music Store. The complete Tour de France and the complete National Finals Rodeo.

Drupal login problem with PHP 5.2

December 3, 2006

Having recently upgraded to PHP 5.2 on one of the servers I run I needed to throw a new Drupal site together this evening. All was well until you tried to navigate to any page after logging in. Access Denied was the response on every page. It turns out this is a known issue and is fixed in the latest development release of Drupal 4.7. If you're running PHP 5.2 make sure you download 4.7-dev instead of Drupal 4.7.4.

Five simple steps to kill your blog

December 3, 2006

Until recently I'd kept pace with several blogs that I'd come across for various reasons in the past. Many were former colleagues or people who I'd bumped into at one time or another. Some are interesting and good, some are more hair-shirts but enough curiosity about how people react to failure or success kept them interesting. In these traversals of the web I've come upon several sure-fire ways of making your blog fall off my RSS Reader's reading list.

Without further ado here are five surefire ways to make your blog worth less.

5. Profess knowledge of things you know little about. Just because you liked to cook mac & cheese in college and you have taken a class or two at the local chef's school doesn't mean you should start blogging a series of articles about cooking. If you must remember these are your experiences not anything related to well-researched or reasoned methods.

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