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It is a good thing to step outside of one’s ordinary activities and get a different perception of the world. This slideshow is to remind that there are other ways to see, and that life is a beautiful precious gift and we are all a part of it. Peace
At Portland Barcamp this weekend, I caught the tail end of a session on patents. I didn’t know that Google has put all patents online. Sheesh! I gotta get out of my tracks and explore more. If you want to search for patents you go to Google and then hit the even more>> menu option at the bottom of the more menu. At the left you can see a light bulb icon beside “Patent Search” OK… so you just type “Colleen Dick” in the simple search bar and voila,
MY PATENT!
How do I happen to hold a patent? A long time ago I implemented cascading bandpass filters for speech on an embedded Texas Instruments speech chip –the same chip that powered the Speak ‘n’ Spell toy. We had to listen to this mechanical voice over and over to test it and we noted that it really messed up certain foreign-derived words that were not in its Exceptions Dictionary, particularly names. Particularly, the name of the founder of our company….. NOT good for demos!
We were laughing at the way the thing pronounced our founder’s name one day at lunch. See the patent and use your imagination and you can figure out for yourself what the joke was. I said to my team, “we need to allow the user to add stuff to the exceptions dictionary.” So we kicked around a few ideas. I thought about how you would architect it, and that afternoon I spec’d out a rough requirements document for it. It was almost a joke, because we knew our boss would never approve of building anything useful, and certainly nothing proposed by an engineer. We weren’t in marketing. All product ideas have to come from marketing. That’s the way corporations work. And marketing could not wrap their heads around this one.
That specs document languished on the file server for nearly a year. Meanwhile I was off on maternity leave and had not been to work for two or three weeks. What I didn’t expect was a Saturday morning phone call at home from one of the company patent attorneys. When a lawyer phones YOU before you’ve even sucked down your first Joe of the day your first thought is I deny everything! But he was all about the audio editor specification. He informed me that the company was seeking a patent on it, and as per my conditions of employment all monetary benefits from it would be assigned to my employer, but as the original inventor/designer I would get the honor of having my name on the patent, I remembered having written it, had no trouble digging up the theory of operation (because to me it was obvious) and thinking it might be a good idea. He asked permission to drive over to my house immediately and interview me. Sheesh maybe he thought somebody else was trying to patent the same thing to do it that quickly on a Saturday! It must have been about a 60 mile trip for him, but there he was about an hour later. There in my humble dining room with my little baby, he asked me a number of more detailed questions about how the program worked etc. Based on that he wrote up and submitted the patent in legalese as you see it now.
Well of course I asked someone from my team what was going on. My work mates informed me that this new manager had come onboard and started poking around and found my spec. Furthermore, this manager was championing my audio dictionary editor, had found someone in marketing to determine that there was a need for this functionality, and had already allocated several members of his team to work to productize it. I thought great, cool. Why does everyone seem to dislike this guy?
I soon found out. Apparently this ambitious new manager had initiated the patent process on my phonemic editor. He had proposed himself listed as the inventor but the attorney had smelled a rat. I’m guessing the manager was not answering the questions like the real inventor would. My buds told me the lawyer had been snooping around in the cubes and asking people questions about it. They just produced my original document for him. The name on the document and the time stamp clinched it.
It took months, but when the patent finally came through, the patent attorney took great pleasure in visiting Cubeville and hand delivering a copy to that manager’s desk. Nobody told him that his name had been rubbed out and replaced by mine (hehehehe) I wish I’d seen the look on his face when he opened that! Not another word was ever said about it; I received no recognition for it in the company (monetary or other,) but it certainly dresses up my resume!
I am, with great sadness, going to turn over one of my 2.25 year old Lab/Griffons to a family with 10 acres tomorrow morning. Blue (AKA Bloopie) was the one targeted for relocation. There were quite a few people who wanted her. But 10 acres and close to me with a stay at home adult was the clear choice. One of the other people who wanted her is going to be severely disappointed. The others — I think they will be fine. I keep telling myself it’s for the best. It’s impossible to train two dogs at once, and it takes a serious time to train them one at a time. Two littermates who have never been separated exponentiate the doggie craziness around here, and it’s upsetting to some family members who don’t deal with craziness as well as I do. I’ve held half a dozen jobs in corporate America, and no mere dog could even come close to the level of corporate idiocy and craziness you find there.
There I am drowning my sorrow on my last evening with Bloopie. Bloopie is the sweetest dog in the world, but she is needy, and she is vocal if her needs aren’t being met. That just doesn’t fly with the neighbors if you live on a town lot. I work at home; I’m home a lot but the problems are when I’m not here. I can’t always be home at bark and call to meet her needs. Bloopie has a sister who is named Violet, but is known as Vipey. Vipey is more high-spirited, independent, aloof, and stubborn than Bloopie, also smarter, faster, and stronger. Vipey is the alpha dog. Bloopie lacks confidence in her status that’s why she whines. I think Bloopie deserves a human or humans of her very own. Without a sister around to dominate her at every turn Bloopie will gain confidence and have no need to vocalize so much. Besides, even if she does, on ten acres, who would care?
Her destination has deer to chase and horses not to chase and chickens (in a coop I’m told) and a SAHD and three youngsters and lots of tennis balls. It’s not all bad. They don’t live too far from here. We have agreed on a mutual dog care swap whenever possible, since the dogs already know each other; and I intend to organize a few weekend play dates where I take my dog Vipey, go pick up little sis and take them for a run. If this new family likes Bloopie, after thirty days we will arrange to have her chip transferred to them. I’m sure they will like her. She will be sad for a while; she will miss Vipey and me, but she will get into having the run of 10 acres and she is 50% Lab, and with Labs its all about food.
Good bye Bloopie, I will be sad too; but I will devote it all to your sister in honor of you.
Eventually I’ll be OK without you, especially if I know that you’re happy and healthy in your new home, and if I can come visit you from time to time.
UPDATE: I’m told Bloopie is doing very well in her new home. They are amazed how fast she can eat her FOOD! I can’t wait to go visit her. Vipey has been very sad and mopey and now she seems needy. Both Vipey and I will go visit Bloopie on Saturday.
I’ve had my big birthday bash shots on Webshots for a while — so long, in fact, that my friends are starting to hint that maybe I should throw another party and try to outdo the 2005 one. That would take some doing! The 2005 party was spearheaded by Kathryn Ronnenberg (decorations) Ruth deMaio (activities), Vere McCarty (food and beverage meister), and Connor Dick & Kit Andrews (live music maestros). I’ve been to many parties, including some that cost thousands, and none can compare in my mind to the absolute perfection of my 2005 birthday bash. By comparison with some parties we didn’t spend a lot, but by golly we had it engineered to a T! We had 70 people there and no one got hurt or obnoxiously drunk or had any unpleasantness. Pretty much all the trash got put where it belonged; and Eamon and crew made sure that the tables were cleaned off, the tiki torches stayed fueled and lit, and that the surroundings stayed pleasing–just like at Disneyland. The evening was a warm and beautiful high summer night, there was an excellent pickup band that played jazz standards, (one of the few times in life that it pays to have a lot of friends who are musicians) and the mood was festive, and spontaneous dancing did break out on more than a few occasions. I may have set an age record for losing my piñata virginity. My whole life I had wanted a piñata ever since age 4, but it just wasn’t done in our culture. Then I grew up and piñatas are for kids….. Well DANG! it was my frickin’ party and I was in charge so I just made it happen. Of course by 2005 I didn’t give a rip about the candy but I got a kick out of watching all those little kids go after MY piñata! And now it’s out of my system. Been there. done that.
OK, OK, the cops did visit, but even they were impressed by the lights and the overall karma of the whole thing and there were no harsh exchanges. The point of this post, however, is to give kudos (with reservations) to webshots.com because they’ve done some Web 2.0-ing. I enjoyed their little zoom like effect but I’m not sure how they were deciding whether to zoom in or out. They did both. And it’s not like I haven’t brought you slideshows before or that the technology is original. Ultimately I had to delete the embedded slideshow from the blog post because it was making my blog load too slow, and my hordes and hordes of eager readers were complaining about it. 
Furthermore, it was only showing some of the shots, and it was only showing part of the frame. So clearly they need a little more work on their JIT (just in time) strategy — I suspect they were pushing all the bits before the reader even indicated an interest in seeing the show. If you want to see it in its natural habitat (full frame, all pictures) click here. Still it’s nice that Webshots allow you to embed slideshows, because a lot of people have albums there they can now blog their albums with virtually no work. It is yet another way to blow bits around the internet on the back end. And if you enjoy Kathryn’s dazzling light display or get a warm fuzzy from seeing all those people smiling and having a great time… well that’s just bonus!
And as for the blog post picture, (you might have noticed I like to have a picture in each blog post) — the one I was pointing to on webshots wasn’t displaying reliably. So I just downloaded it and uploaded it directly to blogger. As long as I don’t exceed my quota, the page will load faster that way anyhow.
I got a new nickname. The Business Enterprise Center is trying to get me to become a member. Bill Ford was waxing eloquent about how it will grow my business. I am not arguing. I think the BEC is very cool, and a lot of my biz buds are out there. Anyway I said, “So Bill, if I get your brand of peanut butter and spread it on … “, (on what? Looks around…. There were my knees right down there where they always are. They were the first thing that I saw.) “uh…. my knees, what exactly will happen next?” Bill’s eyes popped. I think it floored him
momentarily with how off the wall that it was. But he recovered quickly and came back with “crunchy smooth or natural?” Bill will never let me hear the end of that.
It’s OK. Business is more fun with laughter and shared stories.
Dilbert is so right on so often I’d cry if it weren’t so damn funny. People who do not work in companies do not realize that Dilbert is only a tiny bit exaggerated. It doesn’t even have to be a very big company before the Dilbert Principle kicks in. The instant you have a person in an organization who puts some personal agenda ahead of the company’s agenda, it’s all over. It is well-known that people are one of the biggest expenses of any company, yet it never ceases to amaze me how companies squander their human resources by creating an environment where employees believe that bringing issues to management’s attention is futile at best, or a punishable offense at worst.
Case in point: If you hire a perfectly good employee and then set them in front of a flickering old CRT monitor that gives them a headache by 10:00 and turns them into a quivering idiot by 13:00 what do you expect? Every minute you don’t replace that monitor you are flushing money down the toilet; and it just adds fuel to the fire if that employee knows you are already aware of the sucky monitor. (Yes that happened to me!) Here’s another one: You have a bogged down server and it’s been determined that insufficient RAM is the bottleneck. You are so chintzy you won’t spend $200 for a new stick of memory. Yet you are paying between $30 and $60 an hour for your people to fight fires on that server. While they are fighting fires they don’t get their other work done. Sounds like Dilbert to me!
This is one reason I own my own enterprise. When I found myself spending more time protecting my back, working around stupid workflows that I had no power to change, and trying to second-guess office politics than I did actually working, it was time to GET OUT.
My ex-business partner Deb Weitzman was of the opinion that I needed a flashier image, since both front and back operations for Tix•R•Us are now me. And what woman doesn’t want to look her best? Given our commitment to shop local wherever we can, we selected some new shoes, a couple of tops, and some really excellent jeans from Shoetini’s in Corvallis. The people there are friendly and great and they will even hem your pants for you, a service which I nearly always need. As an aside, they are also e-tailing neighbors (see my etailing neighbors post.) I also really like their website. They are very smart powering it with OSCommerce, and they did a great job customizing it. OSCommerce is free ecommerce software, so you know you’re not paying high markup for some overpriced website that spins and flashes but is otherwise useless. Argh…. it’s very easy for me to digress onto business or webby stuff, but this post is supposed to be about my makeover.
OK, back on track… We continued by updating a few wardrobe basics — a classy trenchcoat will take care of most Oregon chill just fine; a black cowl-neck sweater that fits well is just pure understated elegance, and the black and white short jacket is just right. We were surprisingly unsuccessful at locating any suitable khaki slacks but that will just give me an excuse to go shopping again. I got my first ever eyebrow waxing and it wasn’t nearly as painful as they portrayed it on The 40-year old Virgin. Georgia Kahl at Studio 953 in Albany completed the makeover with a haircut to die for. Obviously this salon is highly thought of when they don’t even need to create a website. Their customers rave about them in review sites all over the web and that’s better marketing than they could ever do themselves. They are not cheap, but a good hairdo is like good quality clothing — worth every penny. Just google Studio 953 and you’ll see what I mean. The link I provided was just a link to their location.