New York Streets, or The Origin Names

I was in New York a few weeks ago and it made me think about names. I was walking down Broadway, for instance, which was originally a "broad way." You can imagine how that worked: "You turn left onto another street--well, really it's just a broad way" or "Turn left--you'll know it: It's quite a broad way" turns into "Turn left on the broad way" and, finally, "Turn left onto Broadway."

The same is true of Wall street--"It's the street with the wall" becomes "It's the wall street" and then "It's Wall street." Almost every English town I've visited not only has a High street but makes it easy to identify the next street added because every town has a street called New street.

The same process leads from "Make me one of those things that the Earl of Sandwich has...but with more mustard" to "Make me one of Sandwich's things" to "Make me one of those Sandwich things" to end with "Make we a sandwich."

I remember the kick I got out of staying at a hotel in England and walking to my client's site every morning. I went past the Royal Military Museum (or whatever it's called) which was once Bethlehem Hospital: Bedlam. It was very cool to see, every day, the visible expression of our language's growth.

Reading or read

• Five Fists Of Science by Matt Fraction and Steven Sanders 
• Moby-Dick in Pictures: One Drawing for Every Page by Matt Kish
• Supergods by Grant Morrison
• Devil Sent the Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America by Tom Piazza
• Top Ten: The Forty-Niners (Top 10) by Alan Moore and Gene Ha
• Joe Simon: My Life in Comics by Joe Simon
• The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
• Chardin: An Intimate Art by Helene Prigent
• St. Trinian's: The Entire Appalling Business by Ronald Searle
•  What is a Print? by Sarah J. S. Suzuki
• A Treasury of Tom Thomson by Joan Murray

Words for Christmas, or Merry Christmas, anyway

About this time of year, I see  articles and postings about how people are bravely (and defiantly!) going around saying "Merry Christmas." The only problem is that no one has ever suggested that they shouldn't wish everyone they meet "Merry Christmas." It reminds me of a Tom Lehrer bit where he talks about people getting up in coffeeshops to bravely sing folk songs about all those things that everyone else in the room is against...like peace, love, and brotherhood.

The closest anyone ever came to do suggesting that "Merry Christmas" wasn't always a good idea was various organizations (not individuals) that represent or deal with a diverse body of people (WalMart, your government). Those organizations, rather than respond to every one of their constituents, adopted a neutral greeting (typically, "Happy Holidays"). People who, by default, had always had their way before were now incensed because they weren't being treated as if they were the only people in the world.

It would seem obvious that you can't have the government collect tax dollars from citizens of diverse faiths and then use that money to enforce your faith. Nor does a commercial organization, with potential customers of diverse faiths, want to appeal to just one segment of those customers. In both cases, rather than represent all faiths, the organizations have decided to represent none--which is too bad but (I guess) a choice made from efficiency.

If I was a generous person with respect for others I would make an attempt to learn about the faith of the people I was interacting with and, at the appropriate time of the year, wish them "Happy Hanukkah", or "Joyous Id." Embarrassingly, I don't make that effort and assume that others are just like me. Refusing to recognize that other people may differ from you and insisting, instead, that they be just like you and serve your needs is, I think, the base of all rudeness.

As part of this discussion, we'll get people who, rather than present their statements or actions as rude, claim they are taking a stand against "political correctness": What they are about to say is something brave and they are, somehow, defying authority. In fact, it always turns out that they are about to say something that asserts their special position in society, serves them before others, and claims some special privilege that they should get and others should not.

However, none of those things are either (a) Christian or (b) appropriate at Christmas. So, as Christian celebrating Christmas--Merry Christmas. And for all my friends who are practicing their faith--Happy Holidays!

Reading or read

• Divine Justice (abridged) by David Baldacci
• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian Collector's Edition by Sherman Alexie
• Vets Might Fly by James Herriot 
• All Things Wise and Wonderful by James Herriot
  
• Lost & Found Sound and Beyond by The Kitchen Sisters
• Vacuum Diagrams by Stephen Baxter
• Lord Tyger by Philip Jose Farmer
• Hyper Real: The Passion of the Real in Painting and Photography by Brigitte Franzen and Susanne Neuburger
• The Real Charlotte by Martin Ross 
• Freedom: A Novel by Jonathan Franzen
• Comedy in a Minor Key: A Novel by Hans Keilson
• Four Corners on Main Street by Paul Ross
• Top Ten, Book 1 by Alan Moore and Gene Ha
• Criminal Vol. 2: Lawless by Ed Brubaker

Taking Suggestions, or Pretty things! Pretty things!

I sometimes wonder if I have any actual ideas of my own. Whenever I have a problem with, well, practically anything, but also with course development, I go around discussing it obsessively with everyone I can find. Of course, some of the people that I inflict my concerns on suggest solutions.

Most of those solutions I can't use. There may be logistical constraints (time, usually--the idea would devote more time to a topic than I think it's worth) or conceptual (for instance, incorporates material outside of the course's mandate). But, sooner or later, someone comes up with an idea that I can use and I (shamelessly) track it down and incorporate it into the course.

I do have ideas of my own (and about 25% of them work right away and another 25% work after significant rethinks). But looking back over my courses, I'm not sure that the best ideas didn't come from all the people around me.

Reading or read

• Running Away by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
• Paper Shadows : A Chinatown Childhood by Wayson Choy
• Jack Chambers: Light, Spirit, Time, Place and Life by various
• Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi 
• Miss Marple Investigates by Agatha Christie
• Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
• Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli
• The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin 
• Strung Out by Sara Paretsky
• Not Yet: A Memoir of Living and Almost Dying by Wayson Choy
• The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst

Working with SEO, or Sometimes virtue is rewarded

I've been doing some search engine optimization (SEO) work for a local law firm (our goal: Move the firm from the 31st position in a specific Google search list to the first position).


When I was first involved with SEO, it was all about programming tricks--using meta tags, building circles of self-referential sites, and so on. What's encouraging is that, this time, it appears that the current crop of search engines have improved to the point where they either ignore or discount those games (and, apparently, actively devalue sites that engage in them). Instead, the current crop of search engines actually reward great content that others value.

We have two advantages on this project. First, one member of the firm has the ability to turn out great content that's relevant to the site. We should be able, in a relatively short period of time, to build up an inventory of content that people will be able to find. On previous projects, I've been responsible for learning about the organization, figuring out what would be valuable to the audience, and then generating the content. This time, I may have an advisory role, but the firm can handle it all in-house.

The other advantage is that the firm, it turns out, has built their site using WordPress. I'm not getting much chance to use my programming skills but it means that it's reasonable for a firm member to become an expert in extending and maintaining the site (the disadvantage is that I'm having to educate myself in "the way of the WordPress"). Again, once I move on, the firm will be able to control it's own destiny.

Really, there's only one part of the project that's going to be challenging--we'd like to short-circuit the process of people finding the site by encouraging others to link to it. We have at least one member of the team that may be in a position to do that but we'll have to see how many members of the firm we can drag into this process.

Reading or read

• The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis
• Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry Volume II by William Carleton
• Gotham Central Book 3: On the Freak Beat by Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker
• Gotham Central Book 4: Corrigan by Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker
• Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
• Verses and Versions by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson by David P. Silcox

Building Trust, or You'd think that I'd know better

One of the interesting things that happens over a multi-day course is that a certain level of trust builds up between the instructor and the participants. It could just be an example of the Stockholm syndrome: The captives begin to identify with their captor.

One result of that effect is that, when participants evaluate the course and the instructor, it's very unusual for the instructor to get a lower score than the course. When the participants aren't happy, they blame the course rather than blame the instructor. This is obviously a good thing for the instructor.

What this also means, for the instructor, is that there are things you can do on the last day of the course that you can't do on the first day.

I got a measure of this effect, to my detriment, on the course I taught last week. The course I was teaching  incorporates several videos demonstrating bad practice. One video has two people (one of them a blonde woman) acting very badly. In debriefing this video, I'm fairly harsh about the behaviour of the two people. Because I don't expect class participants to catch the name of the characters in the video I refer to the woman as "the blonde."

I've never had a problem with this approach until my last teach. The course had been revised and this video was moved up to the first day from the last day. Not only did I lack the trust that three days together builds up but, exacerbating the situation, by day 3 the participants have had enough training to recognize most (or all) of what the characters to do wrong. I failed to recognize the looming problem and did the same debrief for the video on day 1 as I did when it ran on day 3.

Without the trust that gets built up over three days of class and without the training, I must have come across as a brutal madman. By referring to one of the characters as "the blonde" I must have came across as a sexist brutal madman.And, in fact, I discovered that I had deeply distressed at least one participant.

The only reason that I know this is that the participant came up to me at the end of the class to discuss how upset she'd been, which I appreciated. Without her specific feedback, I would never have figured out how I had put my foot in it.

And, thanks to her, I got a good measure of how much trust does get built up over a week of teaching.

Reading or read

• Inverted World  by Christopher Priest
• Kepler: A novel by John Banville
• The Newton Letter by John Banville
• Two Generals by Scott Chantler
• Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer's, My Mother, and Me by Sarah Leavitt
• The Road to God Knows... by Von Allan
• Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper
• Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 1: The Trial of Sherlock Holmes by Leah Moore, John Reppion and Aaron Campbell

Words, words, words, Or Does anyone think about these things?

Watching TV ads I often wonder if anyone stops to think about what words they use. I assume they must, but...

I have two favourites in this area. One is from a few years back and it was for a new bra from Victoria Secret. The tag line for the ad was "A bra so well designed, so well made, it could only be called....Vapris." Ok, I don't remember what the last word was--but my point is that it was a made-up word (a nonce word, for the initiated). Any combination of letters could have followed "only be called..." It could have been "Gork", or "xyzzy", or "Fred."

My latest fave is an add for KFC which begins "Other restaurants make chicken nuggets. What part of the chicken is the nugget?" It then goes on to say that "We make popcorn chicken." OK. And what part of the chicken is the 'popcorn'? A perfect example of moving the problem around but not actually solving it.

Reading or read:

• Gotham Central Book 2: Jokers and Madmen by Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark
• Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell
• Hicksville by Dylan Horrocks
• The View from Saturday by E. L. Konigsburg
• Messenger by Lois Lowry
• Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Broom of the System: A Novel by David Foster Wallace
• The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction by Gene Wolfe
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

Braincramps in Dealing with the Audience, or I know better than that....really

I've been beavering away at the Service Oriented Architecture course I'm working on for Learning Tree and just taught the latest version of the course in New York city. I think that this version is the best so far but, sadly, it provided a great example of how I commit blunders that I would spot in a second--in any one else's work.

For instance, the audience for this course is a combination of business people and developers (I know this). The course focuses on what matters to both groups: making sure that you're working on the right things (I know this also).

However, that didn't stop me from dropping in six slides of low-level technical detail that was only sporadically connected to something that the audience would find interesting. I probably spent as much time answering questions about "How do I use this material?" at the end of the section as I spent going through the section. But the worst part was watching everyone's eyes glaze over as I marched through the slides. That horrible thought: "I'm losing them."

Any way, I went back and restructured the material around what matters to the audience: How do I pick the right technology for me. I also replaced some of the low lever detail either with content that the audience would value or, better yet, with nothing. And I then discovered, now that the section made sense, that it formed the perfect introduction for the chapter that it's part of.

Life's like that. At least it was only six slides rather than the whole course (that was my first version of the course).

Reading or read

• Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
• Some Experiences Of An Irish R. M.  by Edith Somerville and Martin Ross
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume III: Century #2 1969 by Alan Moore 
• The Untilled Field and Other Stories by George Moore
• Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry, Volume I by Carleton, William
• The Best of Myles by Flann O'Brien 
• Claes Oldenburg: An Anthology by Marla Prather
• String Quartets of Beethoven by Professor Robert Greenbery
• Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook
• Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson
• Three Exemplary Novels by Miguel De Unamuno
• In Zanesville: A Novel by Jo Ann Beard
• Hiroshima by John Hersey
• The Collapsium by Wil McCarthy