Sleepless

QOTD:

I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless
Sleepless....

"Sleepless", Soul Coughing

That time is how I feel, not the time it really is; not only is it Easter but it's Standard time, not DST, which means that the change caught me off guard this morning. I woke up my roommate thinking it was time for us to shift our asses, but no such luck. Oh well.

(Turns out that alarm clocks these days, at least of the sort that were developed for the DOD and have been provided under NDAs to major hotel chains, have a switch on the bottom for DST adjustments with three settings: On +1, Off, and Auto. That is one of the best ideas ever.)

8:35am and registration is good; I've got a cool IPv6 sticker and a copy of all the training material on a USB stick I'm going to try hard not to lose.

First day's training is an all-day course called "Management Skills, or Don't Panic!". It's not the sort of thing I'd usually sign up for -- soft skills, avoidance thereof -- but I figure it's probably a Good Thing for me to do, like exercise and eating right. It's interesting; there are some good anecdotes and quotes in there:

"How do you deal with a visionary-type manager? How do you get him to support your project?" Audience: "Tell him you read it in a Neal Stephenson book."

At the end of the course I had a question: I'd taken this course defensively, in order to pick up some skills that I lack -- but I enjoy the technical side of my job very much. I enjoy learning new things, but the problems involved in management seem best, to me, enjoyed in the abstract and at a distance. You give up your techie skills and joys; what compensating joys are there?

She had two answers. The first joy was seeing, and helping, people develop skills and at best exceed their teacher. The second was the fun of finding the problems that lay in organizations' way, no matter how many disparate groups or layers they might span (techies, mgt, suppliers, finance, cultural), and talking with those different groups/layers in order to solve those problems.

As I said, it was interesting. I'm still not entirely sold on management...but then there's the example of a friend of mine who's been doing this since '92. In a lot of ways, when it comes to technical problems he's been there and done that...so management is a (possible) way to keep it interesting for him.

On another topic: Lunch time I got into a very interesting discussion with a woman who figures that MS will lose majority market share on June 30, 2011. Her reasons:

First off, it was a two-year prediction made at a conference in June; had to come up with some kind of date. But also, MS only has majority market share in web browsers, PC OS and office suites. Of those, she figures the stats for web browsers are cooked for marketing purpose, and says that there is very little actual independent, large-scale data; however, data from W3 Schools shows increasing FF share. PC OS: less and less important as people move to Google docs and Gmail, which let's face it are plenty good enough for most home use. And the increasing ability of OpenOffice and other tools means that the domination of office suites is on the way down to.

Check out (her own? not sure) website at http://www.whatwillweuse.com.

After the course I met up with Matt and finally got to put a face to the face. He was there on Official Usenix Bizness(tm), as he's blogging for LISA and wanted to interview the instructor. Very friendly guy who's doing a lot to spread his knowledge around. And as it turns out he also got bit by DST, though worse than me. Poor bastard...