Not so Nucelar Free any more

When my family moved from California to MD in 1989 and we took up residence in Rogers Forge, there was a sign that always seemed to grab my eye. It was not very big or imposing, just a simple black and white 8x10 metal sign riveted to a stop sign post that also happened to be the border between Baltimore County and Baltimore City. It was at the the corner of Charles St and Gittings Ave, and said "Baltimore, A Nuclear Free Zone."

The sign was there for years, with no real explanation of what it meant. It was still there when I moved to PA in 2005 - perhaps a relic of a bygone era. But I do remember that people in Baltimore and Baltimore County did not like nuclear power in the late 80s and early 90s.

It is interesting how the views on nuclear energy have changed over the past 21 years. During President Obama's speech in Lanham MD last week, he hinted that Maryland would be getting fed backed loans to build a new nuke plant in the very near future. It should seem that Maryland is slated to have one of the the first a dozen new nuclear reactors built on US soil since Three Mile Island in 1979. According to the press this morning, the Baltimore buzz has been very positive.

It has been a week....

Ever have one of those weeks where things just don't seem to go right? I'm guessing that a few of us had them last week while we dealt with the aftermath of the snow.

Baltimore was paralyzed all week, with major arteries into the city being restricted to single lanes as late as Thursday. Accidents amplified due to the fact that there was often no way around them if you got caught near one. There were several days last week where I spent 4 hours commuting to work my 8 hour day.

And then, of course, the catch up work. "Hey, Zach, I was supposed to give this to you last week, but we were closed. This two week project needs to be done by Friday." "Hey, we need 2 more site visits scheduled this week for action by the end of the month." "Can you come visit us at the remote campuses? We can't get some tech working, IT is too busy, and you can usually get it working faster anyhow. Plan to spend a full day out in the Columbia AND Timonium campuses."

So, it all got done somehow. Friday arrives, and I kiss my wife goodbye while she takes an extended weekend at OC with her girl friends. An estrogen filled outlet shopping bonanza; I am happy to be left behind to hold down the fort with my son.

Until I checked my email while the little guy was napping...

"Hey, Zach. Those trips you planned, we need to reschedule them. I know I said to do it by the end of this month, but now we want them scheduled for mid next month so we have more time to prep. Get it worked out this weekend and call me Monday with our schedule."

"Happy Monday, commuters. For those of you on the inbound Harrisburg and JFX, there are multiple accidents at Mt Carmel and 28th. Best call the office, as you are getting nowhere fast."

And thats why I'm bloging at 11 AM Monday rather then over the weekend like I had planned.

The joys of being hacked

I'll admit it. I've been hacked. Well, not me personally, I'm not yet Borg, but a server that I used to administrate. Here is the surprising part, it ended up being a really good thing.

When I started working my current job, back in the dark ages of pre-1.0 web, my job title was "Web Administrator." These days a Web Admin tends to be nearer to the bottom of the food chain, but back in the mid to late 90s, we were hot stuff. I was working for an office that the campus IS team viewed as having gone rogue. When we launched our first website, we had beaten nearly every other department on campus to the punch, and we were doing it via our own server outside the IS cluster. Records had hired two webmasters before me, but they each left after one or two years as the web industry was quickly ramping up salaries more then the College could pay.

I inherited an old Sun Spark station that was used as the primary server. At the time I was a Mac guy - primarily a graphic artist with an interest in learning new stuff, so Solaris was a fun and interesting challenge. Turns out, though, that keeping an old Spark secure took more then making sure it was patched and Solaris kept up to date. We got hacked, root was compromised, and my little old spark was used as a relay to get into NASA. NASA was none to pleased, and threatened the College with legal action. It was not a fun week. The server (excepting the web ports)was locked down from outside the Loyola IP range, and the hacker had used an open machine on campus to get into ours and used ours to get out to NASA.

There was a big silver lining though. This forced the Loyola IS crew to rethink their stance on "rogue" offices using technology. We were the first but by the time we got hacked, there were several other departments that had been forced to get their own servers in order to have a web presence. Not only web servers, either. several departments (including mine) had application servers running apps that IS had refused to take on. It was a less then ideal situation all around, and had left the campus very open to attack. None of my application servers ever got hacked, but others on campus did. The campus's very conservative IT policies began to shift to encompass the rapidly evolving reality that the College would advance IT, whether or not the IT department was on board.

It has been almost a decade since I got hacked, and policies have changed considerably, if slowly. Some individual offices still have their own web and application servers, but they are all now housed within the IT server room, and given the same security policies and maintenance structure as IT servers. Flexibility and security have both been enhanced, and the College is a much more secure environment because of it.

Communication through the Blogoshpere

Since starting this class, and this blog, I have become interested in what other bloggers might have to say. After all, I (and everyone else not living under a rock for the past decade) have been being told by the press, from Fox to NPR, that the bloggers are starting to shape policy in both politics and business.

Having now begun to look into other meaningful blogs for the first time, I hope the above statement is untrue.

The first issue I had was trying to find blogs that I was interested in reading. There are a million of these things floating around the web, and the vast majority are horrible. Trying to separate the wheat from the chaff seemed to be more work then it was worth. Then, when you have found a blogger that can cogently string words together to actually get his or her thoughts across, you have the comments.

I am pretty much assured that the average blog commenter is a mouth breather. While I get it that folks are more vocal when they disagree, but the utter vapidity with which most commenters spew their bile through a keyboard... If your response to something that you don't like makes whatever you don't like look great, why try? I'd kind of expect this response with political bloggers, as if there is one thing that Americans like to fight online about, its politics; but I found it across the board.

I started with the political blogs, but had to stop with them after I realized they were causing my brain to start dripping out of my ears.

Then I went to tech blogs. These tended to be better on average, until you got to the commenters. Engadget, a popular tech blog that is verging towards being an e-zine, recently had to kill comments for a few days due to profanity, threats, and other garbage being offered up by its readers.

Business blogs? I tried. Talk about snoozers. Some of the investing blogs were interesting, but in the end, I really just don't trust most of the bloggers enough to invest in their top picks. The amusing part to this is that I do read Fool.com. I'm not often sure that they are better then a *good* blog a lot of the time.

Car blogs? Just... don't ever go there. I'm am a guy that tends to obsess over old cars. I have more then I can drive, in states from show ready to rusty stasis (waiting for the end of grad school). I thought I'd get a kick out of car blogs. After all, I spend several hours each week on BBS boards related to my current projects. I was _so_ wrong. I forgot how dumb kids are between the ages of 15 and 21. Who populates car blogs? Kids aged 15 to 21. After sifting through various mouth breathing trolls for an hour or so... I'm OUT!

I remembered that a friend of mine used to write for a foodie blog, so I searched that up. I was impressed. I did not feel dumber for having read it. Most of the bloggers there seemed to have a clue, and the commenters actually seemed intelligent. I found out about some places in the DC area that I'd like to try out, then next time I get the insane urge to drive 140 miles just for dinner. Stranger things have happened.

I also found blogs by a few friends. Some of them even had more then one posting. These were nice. A view into people's lives that I am simply too busy now to keep up with otherwise.

There is an issue, though. I kinda doubt that blogs pertaining to foodies and old friends are the stuff the media tells us is shaping public policy. Its the over the top political blogs and WAG investing blogs that are getting the press. If policy is being created by online idiots e-screaming at each other, then I weep for our future.

26 inches? Ho hum.

Like many of the Mid Atlantic residents this weekend, I got a little snow. It has been a good year for snow, with two big storms, a few small storms, and (supposedly) another moderate storm on the horizon for early next week.

We got 26 inches up here in York, and I understand that Baltimore got over 30. After digging out this morning, I was kind of amazed on how little the storm affected my life. Other then a little exercise, the 26 inches of snow could have been 5.

Back in 2003, Baltimore got crushed by a measly 28 inches of snow in late February, and it brought the city to a standstill for a full week. 6 years later, I am doubting that a similar amount of snow is going to have Loyola even opening late come Monday. What has changed?

Everyone has better communications now. Even my 90 year old grandparents have cell phones, and were able to call to let the power and land line people know when service failed. Clean up and emergency crews are able to respond faster to events taking place in a very dynamic environment. Heavy snow, hills and valleys no longer block the older radio equipment that require a LOS in order to function well.

Also, snow removal and road clearing has been GREATLY aided by GIS and computer mapping technologies. The planners are able to send out the plow trucks in a much more efficient pattern now then thy have been able to do in the past. Even with the county being out of salt and cinders from the previous big storm, my road has had black top showing since the first flakes fell. Considering that where I live the road is not a primary (or even a major secondary, more just a farm maintenance road) that is pretty impressive.

Why X Y?

The X and Y Theory of management was postulated by Douglas McGregor in the 1960s. In short, it says that the X theory of management is not as effective as the Y theory for a modern workforce. The X theory revolves around the notion that employees will not work without reward or punishment, and need to be directed at all times in order to be effective. The Y theory maintains that the workforce may be intrinsically motivated, and will perform better if the management is supportive rather than coercive. In theory, the X staff will not perform as well as the Y staff, due to the higher moral and personal involvement that Y staff has invested in their work.

When McGregor did his study, 50 years ago, the Theory X managers and Theory Y managers were split 50/50. While my personal experience is far from scientific, I have had twice as many Theory X Managers as I have had Theory Y. Given that the X/Y typology has become accepted in management training, why are there still so many Theory X managers?

My thought is that Theory X management is the cultural heritage of our nation. And I mean more than simply in the work place. Many (all?) of us were brought up under Theory X parenting. “If you clean your room you will get your allowance, if not you will be grounded” is not very Theory Y. Also, school from K-College is traditionally very Theory X; while some educators do follow a Theory Y approach, they are a minority. Even at the Graduate School level, in an MBA program, the majority of the classes are run in a Theory X style.

So, going from school into the workplace, most incoming managers have nearly all of their work experience in a relatively Theory X environment. Even if they understand the importance of a Theory Y manager, being that manager is a major cultural shift.