j e s r u s h . c o m

NPR recently aired an incredible story of a NY man who was mugged on his way home from work.  Listening to the audio is the best way to hear it, but a teaser to get you started:

Julio Diaz has a daily routine. Every night, the 31-year-old social worker ends his hour-long subway commute to the Bronx one stop early, just so he can eat at his favorite diner.

But one night last month, as Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform, his evening took an unexpected turn.

He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.

“He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, ‘Here you go,’” Diaz says.

As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, “Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you’re going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”

Continue reading at NPR…  Wow.

This overlooked film comes out of nowhere and sucker punches you were it counts. Joan Allen plays a mother of four teenage daughters who is abandoned by her husband when he runs off to Sweden with his secretary. She and her children struggle to cope with the subsequent chaos while Allen becomes increasingly angry and slips into a deep depression. It’s a really well done study of the stranglehold which anger can put on human life and of the importance of perception. We saw this in the theatre and folks were so moved that they actually clapped out loud when the credits rolled. That doesn’t happen often. A must see!

For a long time, I would walk or drive by panhandlers or homeless folks and ignore them. Everyone else did it, so it seemed like an acceptable response. And there are so many great rationalizations: They must be lazy… why don’t they just get a job? There are organizations out there who would take care of this person if they would merely cooperate. These guys make hundreds of dollars a day. If I gave them money, they would just use it to get high! The list goes on and on…

But the more I studied the life of Christ, the more uncomfortable I became with my response. One day I had a breakthrough epiphany. It seems so simple and obvious in retrospect, but for some reason it had never actually materialized in my mind: If Jesus were walking or driving by, it’s simply impossible to imagine Him ignoring these people.

If Christ wouldn’t ignore them, then I couldn’t either. So I started carrying around little cards with the names, addresses, and phone numbers of local charities. Whenever I met somebody around DC who needed help, I gave them the cards and offered to pay cab fare to get them there. In my naivety, I was stunned by the response: Most of them had already been to these places and nobody wanted to return. Back to square one.

I still felt like I had to do something, so I started giving them money. Five bucks. Ten bucks. Whatever I had handy. One day back in college I was walking down 16th street with a friend when I gave some guy twenty bucks because I didn’t have any smaller bills. My friend looked at me like I was an alien, “Don’t you know he’s just going to spend it on cigarettes and alcohol!?!?” I thought about it for a moment, and said: “Well, so was I.” This was college after all, and I had recently become obsessed with cigars and apple pie shooters. But his comment nagged at me anyway, what if I was fueling some horrible addiction?

Time passed and I kept giving money and kept worrying about it. Then one day I had a Eureka moment. I reached into my wallet to help some guy and realized it was empty. In my embarrassment, I gave him the only thing I could think of: a Starbucks gift card I’d gotten for Christmas. It later occurred to me that the only thing he could really do with that card was get some coffee. It wasn’t worth enough ($7) to trade or manipulate. I connected the dots and realized that the fast food joints were starting to push gift cards. Everyone likes McDonalds, and McDonalds is everywhere.

So I bought ten $5 McDonalds gift cards and stuck them in my car, wallet, jeans… everywhere I could think of. I started handing them out to people. The look on their faces was all the confirmation I needed: They were thrilled. And I didn’t have to worry that the money was going towards some drug habit. Brillant. I found out later that some of the charities were giving out gift cards too, especially cards for supermarkets. Though I’ve never run into any person or organization giving out cards for a quick meal.

I realize that the problems of panhandling and homelessness are a lot bigger than the question of what someone is going to eat tonight, and serious resources must be dedicated to sorting out those issues. And it’s not just about money, these folks need human love and spiritual support as well. But when it comes to the hungry guy standing on your corner right now, I think Christ would address him, and I think gift cards are an elegant way to help do so. I encourage you to try it.

Bruce Schneier has got to be one of the smartest men alive. He runs a computer security company called Counterpane, but has outgrown his roots and become a kind of modern Cassandra, poking hole after hole in the systems and policies which we rely on to protect our world.

In his monthly newsletter–which is a must read–he writes about fraud, thievery, spying, scams, terrorists, war, bombs, forensics, airports, privacy, healthcare and just about everything else. But he’s not one of those paranoid crazies, in fact he’s frighteningly realistic. Awhile back he wrote this about the aftermath of 9/11 and Katrina:

Improving our disaster response was discussed in the months after
9/11. We were going to give money to local governments to fund first
responders. We established the Department of Homeland Security to
streamline the chains of command and facilitate efficient and
effective response.

The problem is that we all got caught up in “movie-plot threats,”
specific attack scenarios that capture the imagination and then the
dollars. Whether it’s terrorists with box cutters or bombs in their
shoes, we fear what we can imagine. We’re searching backpacks in the
subways of New York, because this year’s movie plot is based on a
terrorist bombing in the London subways.

Funding security based on movie plots looks good on television, and
gets people reelected. But there are millions of possible scenarios,
and we’re going to guess wrong. The billions spent defending airlines
are wasted if the terrorists bomb crowded shopping malls instead.

Our nation needs to spend its homeland security dollars on two things:
intelligence-gathering and emergency response. These two things will
help us regardless of what the terrorists are plotting, and the second
helps both against terrorist attacks and national disasters.

Katrina demonstrated that we haven’t invested enough in emergency
response. New Orleans police officers couldn’t talk with each other
after power outages shut down their primary communications system –
and there was no backup. The Department of Homeland Security, which
was established in order to centralize federal response in a situation
like this, couldn’t figure out who was in charge or what to do, and
actively obstructed aid by others. FEMA did no better, and thousands
died while turf battles were being fought.

Our government’s ineptitude in the aftermath of Katrina demonstrates
how little we’re getting for all our security spending. It’s
unconscionable that we’re wasting our money fingerprinting foreigners,
profiling airline passengers, and invading foreign countries while
emergency response at home goes underfunded.

Money spent on emergency response makes us safer, regardless of what
the next disaster is, whether terrorist-made or natural.

This includes good communications on the ground, good coordination up
the command chain, and resources — people and supplies — that can be
quickly deployed wherever they’re needed.

Similarly, money spent on intelligence-gathering makes us safer,
regardless of what the next disaster is. Against terrorism, that
includes the NSA and the CIA. Against natural disasters, that includes
the National Weather Service and the National Earthquake Information
Center.

Katrina deftly illustrated homeland security’s biggest challenge:
guessing correctly. The solution is to fund security that doesn’t rely
on guessing. Defending against movie plots doesn’t make us appreciably
safer. Emergency response does. It lessens the damage and suffering
caused by disasters, whether man-made, like 9/11, or nature-made, like
Katrina.

If that isn’t wisdom, then I don’t know what is. Checkout Bruce Schneier, you’ll be shocked by what you learn.

David Christiansen has a great post over at techdarkside entitled, “What IT Should Learn from GoDaddy.com“. In it, he argues that IT departments should offer pre-spec’d, preconfigured, “cafeteria style” offerings to their internal organization. A la:

• Standalone High-Speed-Production-Server: $16,000
• Standalone Medium-Speed-Production-Server: $11,000
• Virtual Medium-Speed-Development-Server: $6000
• Storage Space: $5000/TB

The idea is that your infrastructure team would go out and spec out these configurations for typical applications, add some overhead (say 15%) to cover cabinet space, UPS, etc., and then offer them to all departments for whatever applications they want to run.

Christiansen argues that departments will be more likely to use these configurations (rather than going through the trouble of spec’ing something custom) because they are readily available buffet style, like a cafeteria.

What I love about this approach is that it clearly places the onus for paying for the gear on the originating department (so the gear doesn’t somehow come out of IT’s budget!) and that it increases visibility into the inner costs and workings of the IT hairball. This is a great way to take your users to the next level in understanding their infrastructure needs.

(Continued from part 1)

You need to become familar with these tools, and use them (or have your prospective jeweler use them) as much as possible. At the very least, consider only diamonds that score well on the Holloway Cut Advisor, use it to “screen” prospective stones.

• The Brillancescope for measuring light return.

• The Firescope for measuring light leakage.

• The Isee2 for measuring contrast.

• The idealscope for measuring light leakage. If you’re going to buy from a jeweler who doesn’t have a firescope or idealscope, then you’ll probably want to buy one of these suckers for yourself.

• The Holloway Cut Advisor for approximating light leakage and determining spread.

• The Atlas Cut Grade system for an overall evaluation.

• The OctoNus Diamond Calculator for 3-D modeling. Folks on the pricescope forum have this software–post a request to have someone run it on a diamond you’re considering.

• Computer Method’s Diamond Cut Study for approximating scintillation.

To shop…
After learning about these tools (and even using some of them yourself), you won’t be comfortable buying a diamond without a great deal of testing and data. You’ll obviously want crown and pavillion angles (from a lab certificate, sarin machine, or megascope machine) so you can run a Holloway Cut Analaysis, and preferably firescope, idealscope, or brillancescope data so you can get a handle on light leakage and scintillation. There are a handful of retail brick & mortar jewelers who offer some of this information. Charleston Alexander, and sometimes–Kay Jewelers–come to mind. One trick to finding retailers is to use the brillance scope website and search their retailer database. Another is to seek out stones that have AGS lab certificates which will produce crown and pavillion angles.

If you can’t find much locally, consider buying online. Buying a diamond engagment ring online has two major advantages:

• Price. Three factors make internet diamonds less expensive than their brick & mortar counterparts. Firstly, buying from an out-of-state jeweler over the Internet means you avoid paying sales tax! Consider that 5.5% sales tax on a $3000 ring is $165.
• Secondly, the internet market is much more efficient in terms of information distribution. Popular websites such as Pricescope allow you to search for stones meeting a specific criteria (i.e. .90-.99ct-G-VS2) from multiple vendors. This encourages jeweler’s to out discount each other.
• Thirdly, many Internet jewelers either operate small storefronts, or have no storefront at all. These vendors have less overhead expense than their B&M competitors who operate ritzy storefronts.

Quality. Many online diamond retailers provide crown and pavillion angle data and some of them have various scope data. Here is a brief list of some favorites:

SuperbCert
Good Old Gold
Nice Ice
Whiteflash (I have some reservations about these folks…)
Dirt Cheap Diamonds

Diamond Ideals


A few tips…

• Beware of variance, angles on a diamond are never completely constant. If a crown angle is listed at say 34.1 degrees, understand that is merely an average, in reality the crown angle varies from maybe 33.6 to 34.9 as you rotate around the diamond. Ideally, you want the range to be tight and and entirely within ideal cut limits.

• The AGS ideal cut specifications can be manipulated a little. If a stone’s pavillion angles fall just below AGS ideal range, don’t automatically dismiss it. If it’s crown angles go just above AGS ideal range they may cancel each other out–this could be a great stone.

• Laser inscription is a gimmick. You can see the inscription with a 10x loupe until the stone has been washed a few times. Thereafter the black carbon dissapears and you need a 40x microscope to see the inscription. A better security option is to have the stone gemprinted.

• Invite the experts and appraisers on the Pricescope forum to weigh in on a stone you’re considering. Post as much data as possible. They can offer insights you might be unaware of.

• When choosing the setting, don’t bother with white gold. The rhodium coating will wear off and the ring will yellow. Ignore the claims of self-proclaimed experts about special white gold alloys that stay white. Even if such alloys exist, there’s no way to find them and no way to verify that they were actually used to make your setting.

• Don’t be afraid of slightly included (SI) stones, most of them are eye clean (who cares about imperfections which you can’t see?), and they’re easy to identify (with a loupe) after repairs\cleaning at the jewelers! Interestingly, even some I1’s are eye clean!

Cleaning a Diamond (and keeping it safe)…

Diamonds are grease magnets, hand soap, makeup, cooking oils–they attract it all. They need to be cleaned almost every day. Here is a simple writeup I put together on how to clean a diamond.

The End Result…

Here is the data on the diamond which I finally choose, yours should be approximately as excellent.

(Note: This post was actually on my old website but so many people were finding it via google that I decided to move it over here)

There are two kinds of guys who buy diamond engagement rings:

Guy #1 reads about the four C’s on the internet, walks into a jewelry store, and demands to see VS (or higher) clarity diamonds in the 1 carat range. He looks them over for a half hour (they all look striking), listens to the sales pitch, decides GIA diamonds are best, chooses one, picks a ring, and is done with it. He’s happy, she’s probably reasonably happy, end of story.

Guy #2 reads about the four C’s on the internet, browses a jewelry store, and thinks, “All these diamonds are beautiful and aside from size, I can hardly tell the difference. How do I choose?” Guy #2 goes back to the internet and spends some more time searching around. Maybe he stumbles on the book Engagement & Wedding Rings: The Definitive Buying Guide for People in Love or Fred Cuellar’s How to Buy a Diamond. Or maybe he finds the Pricescope diamond knowledge site, or ends up at the infamous Good Old Gold tutorial. Maybe he is cost-conscious and realizes there is no sales tax (hundreds of dollars!) on a diamond purchased over the internet. However it happens, he finds a source that lets him in on the big diamond buying secret:

The retail jewelry stores could make frozen spit look good with their high-powered halogen counter-top lights. Once you remove a diamond from that special environment, the CUT of the stone determines whether it still sings with brightnesss, fire, and scintillation or whether it darkens into a dud.

By cut, I mean not the shape (round, heart, etc.) but rather the particulars of the cut itself (crown angle, pavillion angle, minor facet size, etc.). If these terms are unfamiliar to you, then you’ve got a lot to learn.

But I should warn you, if you go down this road, your search for the perfect diamond is going to become exponentially more frustrating, complicated, and time consuming. The more you learn–the more discriminating you’ll be, and the pool of acceptable diamonds will quickly evaporate to a small handful. In my opinion it’s worth it, I took great pride in finally delivering one of the top 1% of diamonds to my girlfriend (now wife), but some guys just don’t have the time or interest.

If you want to see how far the rabbit hole goes, here is a brief guide to the things you need to see and experience…

To read…

• The book Engagement & Wedding Rings: The Definitive Buying Guide for People in Love. I suggest reading this all the way through, it’s a super introduction.

• The Good Old Gold tutorial. Go through all of the chapters, the information is excellent.

• The Nice Ice Expanded 4Cs. Ignore the irritating tone, the information is good.

• The Pricescope diamond tutorial and forum. Read some of the forum posts.

Once you’ve read all that and have your new understanding of the importance of cut, continue to part 2 where we look at tools.

Recently I sat for and passed the project management professional (PMP) exam on my first shot. Given that 40% of test takers fail, this was nothing to shake a stick at.

I got a lot of advice from people on how to pass the exam. Having been through the whole experience, I think some of that advice was actually flawed. There is a whole sea of people out there who are thinking about, studying for, or restudying for (after failing) the exam. So I wanted to share a few tips which worked well for me.

• Don’t memorize the ITTOs. Everyone kept telling me to memorize all of the ITTO’s (inputs, tools, techniques, and outputs). So about three months beforehand I dutifully starting making flashcards with the process on one side and all of the ITTOs on the other. About two weeks later, I decided this was ridiculous. Who can memorize 400 items? This was horrible advice–ignore it (and see next tip).

• Focus on EXPOSURE instead of memorization. The exam is multiple choice, so you don’t need to be able to completely reproduce the ITTOs on a blank sheet of paper from memory, you just need to be able recognize them by name and associate them with a process. The key to doing that is repeated exposure from multiple angles. Use multiple books, multiple techniques, and multiple mediums (audible, read the PMBOK glossary, play a match game, write them, type them, draw them, speak them). Basically just activate as many different parts of your brain in learning them as possible.

• Don’t buy Rita Mulcahy’s PMP Exam Prep Book. Everyone and their dog told me to buy this book. I did and it’s good. Huh? Then why would I say don’t buy it? Because it does everything well and nothing great. The layout is pretty good, the instruction is pretty good, and the practice questions are pretty good. If you work *really* hard, you can pass the exam with just this book! But why work harder than you have to when two other books are better? See the next two tips.

• DO Buy Andy Crowe’s How to Pass the PMP Exam on your First Try. This is probably the best organized study guide for any exam that I’ve ever read (SATs, GREs, MCSE, etc.). Within minutes of cracking the cover, your head is completely wrapped around the enormous task at hand. Crowe is the king of context, priority, and focus. Every section without fail asks the same questions over again: What is it? How important is this on the exam? When is it used? Reading this first saved me so much time which I would have wasted studying material of minimal importance. Unfortunately, the weakness of this book is that the teaching instruction is not especially good (for example the section on critical chain is a disaster), but Crowe is so darn good at putting the entire PMBOK into perspective, that I consider this indispensable for the exam.

• DO buy O’Reillys Head First PMP. This book is the polar opposite of Crowe’s book. The crazy format (”the latest in cognitive research!”) makes it seem utterly, completely unorganized. I constantly found myself wondering, where am I? What process is this? Am I dead? But its saving grace is the teaching instruction, which is insanely, magically, alarmingly good. These guys could teach a small child earned value. So if you pair this book with Crowe’s in a tag-team approach, then you get two books which do two things really, really well. Crowe gets your head around the exam and gives you laser-like focus on whats important. Head First teaches you everything you don’t know. Together, they’re better than Rita.

Continue to Lessons Learned Part 2…

Ever since college (and rowing), I’ve always been a runner. I used to run to get fast, later I ran to keep off weight. When you look at the charts, running burns an insane amount of calories compared to other exercises. But I’ve finally realized what the problem is with running: You can’t run at 50%. I can’t run lightly. There is something about the motion of running that just makes you go all out.

Running is great for weekends when you’re rested, but what about after work on a Thursday night when you’re dog tired? When it’s just not possible for me to run “lightly,” the sheer effort of it all (running at 100%) becomes a disincentive to actually doing it.

So I recently broke down and bought something I never thought I would buy: An exercise bike. The Schwinn 112. How is it? I love this thing! Yes, it doesn’t burn as many calories as if I were running (about 265 calories per half hour vs. 500 running), but the simple fact that I can bike when tired w/o giving myself a heart attack makes all the difference. There is no mental or effort barrier to working out.

The Schwin 112 costs a mere $300, has an electro-magnetic resistance wheel (the same kind of wheel you find in high end gyms bikes), is reasonably sturdy, and assembles in an hour. This thing is a great value…

A story: I was once a team member on a project to move an office from one location to another. Even though there wasn’t enough equipment and people to fill all of the available office space in the new location, the project manager insisted on taking advantage of management’s good will and the available resources to build out the unused space.

Several months after the move, employees began complaining about high noise levels. It was determined that the cubicles were too noisy because the ceiling was highly reflective, the cubicle walls were short, and the cubicles were too close together. All of the cubicles office wide—including all of the unused build out—had to be replaced with taller walls and moved farther apart. Fixing the unused build out added about 35% additional cost to the change.

This was a classic case of “overbuilding,” the tendency to buck rolling wave planning and build things now which aren’t needed until much later. You see this all the time in IT Infrastructure projects. A small business learns that a bigger competitor has a high-availability SAN. Because that little business might someday have hundreds or thousands of customers and because they want to “keep up” and look “big,” they spend big money on their own SAN.

Next thing you know, a tiny IT staff has to manage a super-complex system in which they are using 10% of the functionality. Three years later, when better, simpler, faster technology rolls out, they’re stuck with the existing system.

How do you avoid the overbuild mess? By taking the building-block-approach to infrastructure design. A topic for another post…

Cornelius Fitchner has an interesting story over at the always excellent project management podcast about his discovery of David Allen’s infamous book Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. Allen has basically turned a simple idea into a cult following. It works like this: Instead of filling your todo list with major tasks and projects, focus instead on defining the next step. So for example, instead of listing:

• Go to dentist.

You might break that down into “next steps”:

Go to Dentist

• NEXT STEP: Obtain access to my PPO website through HR.
• NEXT STEP: Use the online directory to lookup a local dentist.
• NEXT STEP: Book appointment and add to calendar.
• NEXT STEP: Alert boss: I’ll be out half-day

Does this sound trivial? It did to me the first time I heard it. But I kept hearing people talk about GTD, and ended up finally breaking down and trying it one day. Just as Cornelius described in his podcast, I was shocked by how effective it is. There is a strange psychological boost that comes from concretely defining your next step, it makes you more likely to actually do it.

And thanks to Backpack, the process of managing these steps (and my todo list) is infinitely easier. But that’s a story for another post…

Deep down in the poorest recesses of Washington DC is a remarkable little organization called, ‘A Simple House.’ It’s a volunteer-based ministry where the full time staff live in group houses, work without salary, and engage in what they call, a “ministry of friendship.”

Friendship ministry–in their view–consists primarily of serving the poor through acts of faith, love, and charity. If you’ve ever seen the movie Patch Adams, and remember the way Robin Williams lights up all those lives at the hospital, then you’ve got the right idea.

These folks are literally walking the streets of southeast dc. They’re doing good work and they’ve got some amazing staff. If you have a few extra prayers or dollars, you might send them their way. As part of their commitment to simplicity, they work with no more than three months operating expenses. Highly recommended!

Finding good new music has gotten really hard lately. Sometimes I feel like I’ve heard everything, like there is nothing new left to discover (or at least nothing I would actually like). Enter CD Baby. This site is different from iTunes and all the rest: it’s all brand new independent artists which you’ve never heard.

But it gets better. Anybody who has taken a dive into independent music knows what a mess it can be… you’ve got 10,000 bands and no idea what they sound like. There might be some stuff you would like, but how do you actually find it?!? CD Baby has finally solved this problem. On their main page, click the sounds like button, and you get a huge lists of known bands which in turn lead you to bands which sound like them. iTunes, Amazon, and everybody else have been doing “You might like” recommendations for years, but this is the first time I’ve seen it done with independents.

For example, I went down the ’sounds like U2′ road, and stumbled on this band Signal Goodbye with this track which you can listen to. And you get instant MP3 downloads. Brilliant.

In Steve McConnell’s classic, ‘Rapid Development,’ he talks about the benefits of versioned software development.

The basic idea is almost a kind of psychological trick: Instead of promising one version with five features, you promise five versions with one new additional feature in each. Either way, the customer expects they’ll end up with the same thing. But by doing this, you force the customer to ruthlessly prioritize the most important features into the early versions. Guess what happens next?

By the time you’re into version two or three, the customer realizes that what they planned for versions four and five is all wrong. They need something different. So plans can be adjusted and the new revised requirements can be met. Now imagine that we had originally built the entire application (all five features) in one version. At this point, the code for the original features four and five would have to be thrown out, and the new revised features would have to be built.

The benefits of versioned development are obvious. But after watching this process unfold a couple of times now, I’ll go a step further: Not only does versioned development bring the utility of rolling wave planning to bear on software and reduce wasted effort, it reduces work entirely. What do I mean? I mean that I’ve seen customers end the project early because they realized that the functionality in version one, two, or three meets their needs entirely. They certainly don’t need the features originally planned for versions four and five, but nor do they need a different set of features.

And as everyone knows, project size has a linear relationship to risk. If you can reduce the size of your project with the psychology of versioned development, then you can reduce your project risk. Your project is more likely to be successful. Beautiful…

I don’t pay much attention to children’s poetry, but I heard a segment on NPR about Calef Brown’s new collection, Flamingos on the Roof, and it was too good to pass up. I can’t really explain it, but I love this stuff. A sample:

10-Cent Haiku

I sat down to write a haiku
it seemed like the right thing to do
I wouldn’t need very much time
no need to bother with making it rhyme
I reached in my pocket and pulled out a dime
this is my 10 cent haiku:

shiny, silver friend
i will never let you go
Look!
An ice cream truck!

Listen to the story and several more poems at NPR, and hear what might be the best title for a poem *EVER*: “Biscuits in the Wind.”