The High Wood

I’ve been trying to understand the Iraq situation recently. Well, me and the pentagon both, but the main question I’ve been thinking about is:

Given that the forces who have liberated your country will leave when the country is peaceful, why are you fighting to get rid of them?

Surely what you need to do is stop fighting them. They will then leave, you have achieved your aims and nobody dies. Simple really.

Except that’s not what happens. I think what we have is a version of the prisoner’s dilemma. I’m sure you are familiar with it but just to recap:

Two people are arrested for a crime in which they were partners. If they both say nothing they have a reasonable chance of getting off but risk a heavy sentence. If one of them elects to give evidence against the other, they will both be convicted but the one giving the evidence will get a light sentence.

So, although they have the most to gain by saying nothing they are taking two big risks of a heavy sentence: the first that they will be convicted anyway and the second that the other person will dump them in it. So, quite often, one of them will crack and turn on the other. And the police know this.

How does this relate to Iraq? Well, the point is not when the liberators leave – they are bound to go sooner or later. The point is that you should be seen to be the one to get rid of them.

Thus, while the best option overall is for both Iraqi factions (I am simplifying here and am also excluding the Kurds who have no interest in Iraq per se and are busily fortifying their little corner of the future country of Kurdistan) is to do nothing, neither side can risk the other attacking the liberators and being seen to be the saviours of their country. So they are forced to fight.

There is no easy solution to this. Perhaps we should all just leave. We’re going to leave anyway. What was the expression – peace with honour?

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Currently, I am employed as a commuter programmer. Which is to say, I go into the office every day rather than telecommuting – mainly because I like to keep home and work as separate entities. So every day, I catch the train. Well, two trains actually due to a quirk of the Sydney timetable.

Sydney’s train service tends to get bagged. It’s not that bad. Trains quite often arrive on time and there is usually room for you to squash in somewhere. My second train goes against the main commuter flow so I tend to get a seat on that one. Luxury compared to say, India or London.

Some days, however, it all goes bad at once. Let me count the ways.

1. Some dork with his walkman turned up to literally deafening levels sits next to you. The irritating sound of marching ants fills your ears

2. In front of you, two women are discussing their lack of sex life at the top of their voices. You learn more than you ever wanted to know about erectile disfunction

3. Some bastard, may he burn in hell, has stuck chewing gum on the seat in front and it is now stuck to your knee

4. Behind you, some man with a nose full of snot and no handkerchief snorts the stuff back up his nose sickeningly. Moreover he waits until you think he might just have stopped before doing it again

5. We won’t even talk about the smells made by the blind man’s guide dog

I begin to understand #1. Even if it doesn’t cope with #3 and #5 it must help. The trouble is, I prefer life without a soundtrack.

At least I don’t have to catch a bus.

Buses! Don’t get me started…

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Every so often something happens to give you a deep philosophical insight.

I keep some cashews at work for the occasional energy boost. For convenience, I keep a subset in an old honey jar on my desk.

This morning, my desk was covered with ants. God alone know where they came from. This is a not-too-ancient office block and I have never seen an ant in it before.

I soon tracked them down to the cashew jar which, I discovered, had a sub-optimal seal on the lid. They didn’t seem too interested in the cashews but they were gleefully at work. I must have failed to wash out the honey jar completely.

As I said, every so often something happens to give you a deep philosophical insight.

This was not one of those times.

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I currently work for a large Telco as a programmer. We are due to do a major software release at the end of the month. We are now in UAT (User Acceptance Testing), the final step before release into the real world.

We have one tester we love. He is intelligent, he knows the software inside out and he is never rude to us. A paragon really. He has just one small problem – he is a contractor.

The project manager decided that he was too expensive. A couple of weeks ago they hired about ten people to test the software. They were given a test regime by a consultant who then promptly disappeared.

Since then I have had to deal with:

1. None of the testers know the software

2. The test plan is testing a large number of things which are not due to be released yet

3. The test plan required a lot of test data unrelated to what is about to be released

4. and so forth

Roughly two weeks of my time have been wasted trying to deal with these people. I don’t think are stupid but they are woefully ignorant.

Finally, today, we got our contractor back. Since then, the flood of emails asking for help has completely dried up. Nary a phone call. Not a carrier pigeon. Nothing.
I spoke to him briefly as we waited for the lift. After a conversation of approximately 45 seconds I knew that he understood the problems, knew what needed to be tested and could sort out the rest of the team.

If we had had him on board two weeks ago we would not have had the expense of ten testers wasting their time and mine. The testing would be done, any bugs found and fixed and the programming team would be down at the pub playing pool.

It should be axiomatic that one competent expert is worth literally any number of people who don’t know what they are doing. And I mean ‘literally’ literally. Piling on extra incompetence does not move you forward even infinitessimally.

Competence may seem to be expensive. Actually it is priceless.

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One of the more agreeable tasks with a new blog is choosing the theme.

In a fit of hubris, I took the WordPress Classic and tried to modify it to be what I wanted. I would recommend this exercise to anyone who wants to know just how limited their knowledge of stylesheets really is.

Friend Scott Westerfeld (New York Times bestselling author) has a very nifty theme which you can see at scottwesterfeld.com/blog. It is very Scott and not really suitable for me but it pointed me at the ‘Kubrick’ family of themes.

Seaside, by Taylor Pullen, rather appealed to me. Perhaps a little on the pastel side but releaxing and peaceful. Nice one, Taylor.

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Back in the Cretaceous period there were no blogs. Then, sometime in the late Quaternary the first blog crawled out of the MUD and developed legs.

Evolution was rapid. Blogs bred and mutated to occupy every environmental niche on the web. Some acquired wings, some acquired fur, some even acquired stupidity. There was a niche for everyone.

But there were two clouds on the horizon.

First, the population expanded exponentially. More and more blogs were being forced to share the same ideas. Intellectual space became limited, forcing out the less aggressive blogs.

Second, and far more serious, was Febrile Warming. As more and more TLAs were released into the iconosphere ideas became trapped and a positive feedback mechanism started to heat brains all over the planet. Cold certainties began to melt into the Oceans of Ignorance. The Intellectual Gulf stream was pushed south and warm fuzzy thoughts were diverted away from Europe and back towards the New World.

And still more and more blogs poured out, choking thought in a deluge of persiflage.

Just like this one, really.

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