Category: Personal

Being Punk

I came of age in the mid-1970s, and at that time, punk rock was just starting, with bands like The Ramones in the US and The Damned in the UK. In those pre-Spotify days, most of the music you listened to was on the radio, and radio was dominated by record companies pushing their artists, and the big trends at the time were disco and arena rock. Unless you could get a college radio station, these over-produced songs were pretty much all that you could listen to.

Punk arose as a reaction to this stifling control of music. The original idea was DIY – do it yourself! Who cared if you couldn’t play guitar very well, or sing like an angel? Who cared if you didn’t have access to a studio with the latest recording equipment? It was the feeling and energy that mattered above all. Several punk bands started out very raw, but in time learned more about music, recording, and songwriting. They started experimenting with different styles in their songs, and some of the fans would have none of that. The most memorable example of that was when The Clash released their epic album London Calling: there were songs with horns, for crissake! This wasn’t punk! Punk can only have…

And this is where punks fell into their own trap. As a reaction to having to slavishly follow an established musical style, some were now insisting that their favorite bands adhere to this new musical style! They forgot the DIY part, and only thought about the fast, simple chord structures and relentless drumming. They wouldn’t allow these bands to grow and change.

Which brings me to my actual topic: Agile software development. I’ll have more to say in a follow-up post, but I’m sure most can already see the connection.

Fanatical Support

“Fanatical Support®” – that’s the slogan for my former employer, Rackspace. It meant that they would do whatever it took to make their customers successful. From their own website:

Fanatical Support® Happens Anytime, Anywhere, and Any Way Imaginable at Rackspace

It’s the no excuses, no exceptions, can-do way of thinking that Rackers (our employees) bring to work every day. Your complete satisfaction is our sole ambition. Anything less is unacceptable.

Sounds great, right? This sort of approach to customer service is something I have always believed in. And it was my philosophy when I ran my own companies, too. Conversely, nothing annoys me more than a company that won’t give good service to their customers. So when I joined Rackspace, I felt right at home.

Back in 2012 I was asked to create an SDK in Python for the Rackspace Cloud, which was based on OpenStack. This would allow our customers to more easily develop applications that used the cloud, as the SDK would handle the minutiae of dealing with the API, and allow developers to focus on the tasks they needed to carry out. This SDK, called pyrax, was very popular, and when I eventually left Rackspace in 2014, it was quite stable, with maybe a few outstanding small bugs.

Our team at Rackspace promoted pyrax, as well as our SDKs for other languages, as “officially supported” products. Prior to the development of official SDKs, some people within the company had developed some quick and dirty toolkits in their spare time that customers began using, only to find out some time later when they had an issue that the original developer had moved on, and no one knew how to correct problems. So we told developers to use these official SDKs, and they would always be supported.

However, a few years later there was a movement within the OpenStack community to build a brand-new SDK for Python, so being good community citizens, we planned on supporting that tool, and helping our customers transition from pyrax to the OpenStackSDK for Python. That was in January of 2014. Three and a half years later, this has still not been done. The OpenStackSDK has still not reached a 1.0 release, which in itself is not that big a deal to me. What is a big deal is that the promise for transitioning customers from pyrax to this new tool was never kept. A few years ago the maintainers began replying to issues and pull requests stating that pyrax was deprecated in favor of the OpenStackSDK, but no tools or documentation to help move to the new tool have been released.

What’s worse, is that Rackspace now actively refuses to make even the smallest of fixes to pyrax, even though they would require no significant developer time to verify. At this point, I take this personally. For years I went to conference after conference promoting this tool, and personally promising people that we would always support it. I fought internally at Rackspace to have upper management commit to supporting these tools with guaranteed headcount backing them before we would publish them as officially supported tools. And now I’m extremely sad to see Rackspace abandon these people who trusted my words.

So here’s what I will do: I have a fork of pyax on my GitHub account. While my current job doesn’t afford me the time to actively contribute much to pyrax, I will review and accept pull requests, and try to answer support questions.

Rackspace may have broken its promises and abandoned its customers, but I cannot do that. These may not be my customers, but they are my community.

Inevitable

It’s about the time of year that I should be posting something about my spring long-distance ride, as I did in 2015 and 2016. Unfortunately, though, I won’t be able to do the ride this year, and may not be doing distance rides for some time; perhaps never again.

Last October I rode in the 2016 Valero Ride to the River, which was a full century (100 miles) on Saturday, and then a “short” 38-mile ride on Sunday. I was surprised at how strong I felt that weekend – it seemed that all my training had paid off! However, I was even more surprised a few weeks later when I woke up and couldn’t bend my left thumb easily. When I did bend it, there was a very noticeable clicking I felt in the muscles and/or tendons. A quick search on Google showed that I had a case of “Trigger Thumb” (also called “Trigger Finger”). I saw my orthopaedist about it, as well as a hand specialist, and after several treatments (and several months of exercise and naproxen) the clicking finally subsided, and I regained normal use of my thumb. But unfortunately, the consensus of the doctors was that bike riding was the culprit, since it involves a pressure on that part of my hand in the normal riding position, and is especially bad on rough roads that I frequently had to deal with. Yeah, I know all about recumbent bikes, but that just seems too sad to contemplate now. And hey, if anyone knows a good metal worker who might be able to build a custom set of handlebars, I have some ideas on how to change them to reduce the pressure on the hands.

So why did I title this post “Inevitable”? Because of the underlying cause of the condition: osteoarthritis. I had been first diagnosed with arthritis about 20 years ago, and with each subsequent joint problem, my doctors have pretty much told me to resign myself to it, as I seem to have a natural tendency for my joints to get arthritic. When I was examined for my trigger thumb, the x-rays showed a great deal of underlying arthritis in my thumb joint, which probably made the irritation to the tendons worse. And this wasn’t the first time I got such a diagnosis.

Back in my 20s and 30s, I played a lot of tennis. I was pretty good, too, playing at a solid 4.5 rating. However, I noticed soreness in my shoulder when serving or hitting overheads. As many of my fellow tennis players had rotator cuff injuries that seemed to match my symptoms, I assumed that it was something fixable. But after visiting the doctor, he said my rotator cuff was just fine; rather, I had arthritis in my shoulder. There was no treatment except anti-inflammatory drugs and rest (i.e., not playing tennis). I tried to adjust, but even after some time off it didn’t get better. So I gave up tennis.

Right about that time, my sons had progressed in the soccer world so that they were much better than my ability to coach them. I loved being in the game, so I got my referee badge and did several games a week to keep in shape. I figured that if I could keep up on the pitch with 17-year-olds, I wasn’t too far over the hill!

I had had surgery back in 1992 to repair a torn meniscus in my knee (tennis injury, of course!), but after a couple of years of reffing, I had to have 2 more surgeries, one on each knee. When my left knee started bothering me a couple of years ago, I assumed that I needed yet another surgery to clean it up, but my doctor said that there was no more cartilage left there, and that the pain I was feeling was arthritis. Again, I could take anti-inflammatories to relieve some of the pain, but there was nothing I could do to “fix” this. He advised reducing impact to my knees, so that’s when I started cycling seriously. Now that I have to greatly reduce my cycling, I don’t have a lot of options left. I go to the gym and use the elliptical machine, but that’s not even close to doing some real activity. I did go hiking in Big Bend National Park last weekend, and was pleasantly surprised that my knees and hip didn’t complain very much. Oh, didn’t I mention that I also have arthritis in my hip?

So I don’t know where I’ll turn next. I do know that sitting on my butt is not an option. Maybe knee replacement? And/or hip replacement? Geez, I’m a few months shy of 60, and that seems awfully young to be trading out body parts. So I guess it’s off to work on modified handlebar designs for my bike…

Hertz and the Great Tollway Ripoff

Last Thanksgiving we went on a wonderful holiday in the Florida Keys. We flew to Miami, picked up a rental car from Hertz, and drove away. There are a couple of toll roads along the way, but we had Hertz’s PlatePass, which would work on those toll sensors. I’ve used similar things with other rental companies, where a few weeks later I receive a bill for the accumulated tolls.

Not with PlatePass, however. Not only did I get a bill for the tolls (about $11), but a $25 service charge on top of that! Turns out that Hertz charges $5 a day (up to $25), even on days when you don’t run up any tolls! I’m stuck paying this, but you can be sure that I will avoid using and recommending Hertz in the future. Yeah, I found out that it’s documented on the website, but it wasn’t documented when I got in the car, nor was I given an option to disable it. So yeah, Hertz and/or PlatePass made an extra $25 off of me on that trip, but they will lose so much more than that in the future. This is what happens when businesses are short-sighted and go after the quick buck instead of developing long-term relationships with their customers.

Presidential Prediction

With less than 24 hours until Donald Trump is sworn in as President of the United States of America, I’ve been thinking about how this is all going to play out. So here’s my prediction: he will last in office for a few months – no more than a year – and then resign. Mike Pence will finish the term.

Why? Because Trump has no interest in running a country. His only interest is himself, and he sees being President as an opportunity to have two things: for people kiss up to him, and for him to line his pockets. The problem is that since the Republicans control the House and Senate too, they have their own expectations, and they don’t necessarily overlap with Trump’s. As a result, he’ll start to veto things the Republicans want, just because he can, or because he feels that someone has unfairly criticized him. He’s shown his vindictive side again and again, and that matters more to hin than any party loyalty. Pence, on the other hand, would be more than happy to play ball, since he’s firmly on the side of the Republicans. So in the days following inauguration, Trump will continue to appoint unqualified people, and propose and say outrageous things. At some point, “something” will surface that will force the House to consider impeachment, most likely a business conflict, and rather than face that embarrassing option, Trump will resign and storm off, like a little brat taking his ball and going home when he doesn’t win. He’ll have proven he can beat everyone, and will have become richer as a result. Then Pence will take over, and the real damage will begin.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t like Trump one bit. But I believe that he is going to be so over-the-top that when he leaves, people will sigh with relief, because things will no longer seem so outrageous as “normalcy” returns. People will not even notice that the Republicans are taking away their health care, Social Security, Medicare, financial protections, environmental protections, etc. – all the things that the Republicans have told us they would do for so many years. And since Republicans know that they will likely lose their majorities in the mid-term elections after the Trump debacle, so they will want to get Trump out of the way sooner rather than later so that they have time to get all of this done before they lose the House and/or Senate.