It was a good day to stay inside and do things.

No matter whether you chose to believe Amazon, Apple, Ecobee, or Ambient Weather, the high temperature here today was somewhere around 105F. It’s 9:30pm and it’s still about 85F outside; the California ISO has declared a Stage 3 Power Emergency (rolling blackouts). We’re not helping much – our A/C has been running since about 10am (we did turn it off for a while very early this morning and brought in as much “cool” air as we could with our whole-house fan and I hope to do the same thing tomorrow).

Dinner tonight was another experiment. We made Sheet Pan Cilantro Chicken and Kale from the Mercury News in our small broiler/oven. I’d say it was in the spirit of power conservation for today, but it’s what we’d’ve used anyway. It was tasty and easy to make (the hardest part was remembering to marinate the chicken in advance). We’d run out of cilantro, but Italian parsley worked; next time, I’ll try to have cilantro and see if we can tell the difference.

I finally got back to working on photo culling and editing, starting with the 2005 RPI Reunion (boy, I took a lot of pictures of buildings with no people in the frame), and ending with the first day of a three-week trip to the UK. Let’s see if I can maintain the momentum.

Shabbat Shalom!

At IBM, I was lucky enough to work on a few projects with Mike Cowlishaw. For example, when I was writing the OS/2 Gopher client, Mike happened to be in San Jose and saw what I was doing; he got interested and quickly created GoServe, a Gopher server which let me put IBM into Gopherspace and later onto the Web.

Mike’s biggest contribution to programming is the REXX Language, probably my favorite programming language ever (even if I haven’t written a Rexx program in many years). Mike made many other contributions to IBM and the industry – one of them was the IBM Jargon Dictionary, a guide to the vocabulary of IBM. The published version is interesting and has a good deal of subtext – the source version was even more interesting and had an amazing amount of subtext hidden in the comments. Sadly, I no longer have a copy of the source version.

I was amused to find that the glossary on the IBM Archives page on ibm.com includes many entries from the final edition of the Jargon Dictionary. One of them is “non-concur”:

v. To formally state that one will not support the action (such as a product announcement) of another group. The ultimate threat. Grown men have been seen to cry when threatened with this.

I never was personally involved in a non-concurrence, but I knew people who had been on both sides of them, and it seemed like a thoroughly unpleasant process which made no one happy and never really ended.

When I was preparing to interview with Amazon, my friends told me about the Amazon alternative to non-concurrence: “disagree and commit“, where you can (and should) disagree and argue until a decision is made, but then you must commit to implementing it. It seemed like a much better way to handle problems.

Today, I had an opportunity to choose between the two strategies. I was asked to add some text to a page on d101tm.org that I thought made the page less clear than it had been; I couldn’t even come up with a way to rewrite it to make it useful. I couldn’t make any progress with the person requesting the change; I eventually had to ask my “boss” (it’s a volunteer organization, so there are no real bosses) to rule, and she ruled against me. I could have fumed; I could have non-concurred and gone to the District Director. But I decided that I’d disagreed and that it was time to commit, so I implemented the change and moved on.