Safety in numbers

A friend of mine, troubled by trespass on one of her accounts, asked me how I kept things secure online.  I started to explain--how I use different formulae to generate different passwords for different classes of account--but it got too complicated too quickly, so I offered to write down some notes.  Before doing so, I ran into this, and realized I'd been doing it all wrong anyway.

It won't be easy, but I do plan to retrain myself.  First, though, I'll have to choose my new favorite nonsense sentence and accompanying image.  That will take some inspiration.  And as for telling my friend what to do, well, there it is: correct horse battery staple.

A final word, and in honor of my eldest brother, passed a year ago today: watch out at the borders.

New job, part 2: My New Employer

So, what is this Autodesk of which you speak?  Let's start with that, and in explaining it, let's start with this:



This gorgeous piece of film making is 100% CGI, that is to say, computer-generated imagery, and the main piece of software that was used to make it (not to mention Avatar and the like) is an Autodesk product.  And if the wondrous buildings depicted in this film were ever to be built, they would almost certainly be designed, from facade to plumbing, with others of our products.  So:  Autodesk is a thirty-year-old software house specializing in design and animation.  It sold about two billion dollars of software last year, which is about half of Adobe's sales for the same period and perhaps 3% of Microsoft's, just to give you a sense of scale.

It appears we're great to work for, or so says Fortune, which ranks us #52 on their list of best employers in the US.  (And if I understand the underlying data correctly, they--as for me "they" were at the time--filled 121 jobs in 2011 by selecting from a pool of 38k applicants, allowing each applicant a 0.32% average chance of success.  You have to wonder about the sources and the accuracy of these figures, but they are surely good enough to serve as yet another reminder that trying to get a job via normal channels is a game for only the very most sincere optimist.)  So says Fortune and so says me, albeit only a month into this new gig.  It's difficult to overstate the differences between my current work life and my former job as a consultant working for huge non-US-based (thus foreign to me) corporations in what I think we can all agree is one of the more dysunctional sectors of the global economy, and it's quite impossible to list them all, but, certain exceptional colleagues aside, I have yet to find a single aspect of my new work that is not wholly preferable to my old.  Take, by way of trite but telling example, coffee.  Here is how you got coffee (and still get; this photo was taken yesterday at Gustav Mahlerlaan) in the Netherlands:

I rarely used this awful device, and never without thinking of Douglas Adams's Nutri-Matic:

He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic examination of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

 Unlike, and simply terrible.  Autodesk?  We pipe in Peet's:

That's Major Dickinson's on the right there, a favorite of mine for over a decade now.  And for those with the necessary skills (not me, not yet), there's Mr. Espresso:

And yes, there is an automat:

I've tried it--that's my mug there--and won't pretend it's a real cappuccino, but it is infinitely better than the almost-but-not-quite-entirely-unlike that's standard in Dutch offices.  Classy display, too.

There are little kitchens equipped with some or all of this equipment scattered around the various buildings, and there is often a view worth viewing should the urge strike you to sip contemplatively.

Another difference, telling, and I think not so trite, is the presence in the office of dogs.  This one, Dolly by name, works, or rather sleeps, in the cubicle across from mine.  Seeing, and occasionally petting, a dog while at work may not be to everyone's liking but it surely is to mine.  They go to meetings, too, which I, no fan of meetings here or anywhere, find comforting.

But enough about the office environment, what is it I do there?  I could tell you what I have done--it has been a busy month and, I think, a productive one--but I'm not sure I or anyone else is yet in a position to tell you what it is I do.  Bear with me, reader:  time will tell and then I will tell you.

New job, part 1: My New Commute

How's the new job, you ask?  Like most jobs, you have to get there first, and that's what this entry is about:  the commute.  So how's the commute, you ask?  Great.  I bought a new bike, my first in quite some years, and my first electric bike ever.  Technical details here, but the key point is that it's fast and does most of the hill-climbing for me.  Indeed, it reminds me of a motorcycle and, like a motorcycle, the main challenge is staying warm.  I deal with this by donning a fair bit of gear (picture credit:  Felix):

Felix, ever alert, requested some warmer cycling kit himself, and we obliged (photo credit: me):

Geared up, it's off we go, sometimes together (I drop Felix at school on Fridays), but more often apart. Below, a typical ride:

Loved my Amsterdam commute, but this is as good or maybe even better. Still, early days yet, and tomorrow I face my first rain...

Steuben

It's the end of an era for me, and of an era and then some for Steuben. I've admired the lead crystal produced by Steuben artisans for years, from a time even before I started my Corning research.  As a teenager I encountered one of their masterpieces ("Innerland," by Eric Hilton, shown above) in the National Gallery on some now-otherwise-forgotten visit to D.C., and, somewhat later, stumbled across their wonderful store in Manhattan.  For years that space, a cool, gray gallery on 5th at 56th Street, filled with beautiful objects I would never own, was an obligatory stop whenever I happened to be in the city.

Then came my time with Corning.  In the course of many trips to their corporate archives and offices I made excuses to visit the source itself, the Steuben workshop and, best of all, the furnace from whence came all of the glass used to make their crystal.  On the day I viewed it the furnace was near the end of its functional life (or, in the parlance, "campaign") which, for a glass furnace, is a pretty exciting time.  Pardon me if I get technical here, but it's one of the most interesting industrial processes I know of.  A glass furnace is itself constructed out of glass blocks.  Why?  Because molten glass is highly corrosive and will therefore eat its way through any material whatsoever and using anything other than glass--metal, ceramic, what have you--will result in contaminating each batch with non-glass ingredients.  Build the furnace out of glass (or at any rate something very close to it) and the only thing that gets added to the mix of materials is more of the same.  This does not solve all problems, however:  no matter how thick the refractory bricks used to build the furnace, eventually they will wear thin, signaling the end of that campaign.  This, in turn, means you are facing a total shutdown, dismantling, and reconstruction of the furnace before more glass can be made.  This is a very expensive operation and the glassmaker accordingly seeks to delay it as long as possible by using a special technique to prolong the life of the furnace.  And what is this technique?  As I witnessed it at Steuben, it consisted of a guy with a garden hose, occasionally spraying the bottom of the furnace with cold water so as to slow the increasing number of drip-throughs.  So in viewing Steuben's furnace at the end of its life what I saw was a glass ceiling through which occasional slow streams of red-hot molten glass began to drip, only to be met by a blast from the hose, after which the guy would go back to reading his paper.

We wrote the Corning book, Meg and I, in anticipation of (and part of) Corning's 150th anniversary.  It was a wonderful project, and in addition to the experience and pay (both of which I badly needed), Meg and I (as well as several hundred other luminaries) each received a piece of Steuben glass unique to the occasion.  And so I got to own a piece of my own after all.  I would show it if I could, but for now it's packed away somewhere; look for an update in, say, 2013.

As for Steuben's history, there's enough online, but the salient facts for this story are as follows:  having been founded in 1903, it was purchased by Corning in 1918, run not so much for profit as for pride for nearly a century, and then, in 2008, sold for @80% to a private equity group presumably eager to add it to its stable of luxury brands.  Ah, but this horse never ran as part of a team, so here we find ourselves, three years later, watching the old girl being put down.  It is a real shame, a loss to Corning and, dare I say, the nation.  Also to me.

But before it goes Steuben is selling off its stock, and so I did something I never expected to do:  I bought some.  Or rather, one.  And here it is:

I don't know that Talia ever wanted a piece of Steuben herself, but given her patience these past couple of years she has certainly earned it.  This one is for you, darling.

Job hunt, concluded

What a long road it has been since my last posting on this.  Long, and yet the road went where it was supposed to go, and got me there in time, albeit just in the nick of.  More than that:  the road ran just about as I thought it would, with mile markers about where I'd expected them, and nary a decreasing-radius turn (my father's most detested of highway design miscegenations; mine, too, having ridden a motorcycle for some years).  I did not crash, I did not miss my exit, I did not run out of gas...though the warning light had quite unambiguously flared on.

I think of myself as a planner, but in truth most of the "big" things I have done were executed with very little forethought, and most of the "big" decisions made on the basis of embarrassingly trivial factors.  Abandon a career in historiography:  no plan.  Spend a decade as an independent consultant:  no plan.  Amsterdam: no plan. This time, though, I had a plan, and on top of the great relief at exiting this period of relative penury and excessive parenting, enhancing the genuine excitement at the prospect of new intellectual challenges, there is a certain feeling of exultation at having seen my plan succeed.

I guess the real reason I think of myself as a planner is that planning successfully is what I most admire in others.  I think here most immediately of my mother-in-law who has on more than one occasion produced an artifact, stored for years or even decades, at exactly the right moment, and transferred it to someone (typically one of her children, of course) who is just as grateful as she imagined they would be when archiving the item all that time ago.  There is something to it of Roger Staubach's perfectly executed Hail Mary pass in the 1975 NFC Divisional Playoff (he says, displaying nothing but his ability to click on a highly ranked item in Google's search), that is to say a wonderful mix of daring, preparation, and luck.

But given the title of this post I suppose I really should be talking about the job and about how, in the end, I got it.  The story is simply told, especially if one is willing to simplify:  the company I had in my sights had provided any number (well, nine actually) of "informational interviews" (plus two more after I had applied for the job, and that's not including communications with recruiters), and while most of those had concluded with mutual agreement that the company would be well served in employing me, none of them had actually led to that end.  Along the way, though, a job opening was posted for which I was well suited and to which I applied.  In addition to submitting the resume and cover letter I marshaled my forces, who started bombarding the hiring manager for this position with recommendations.  Impressed by my network (which included, among others, her boss) she agreed to interview me, and the rest is history.

As if.  You may recall (I know you don't, and yet it seems the right thing to say) my comments about how tortuous and dysfunctional the "hiring" process has become, and indeed it proved true here, too.  I submitted my resume and cover letter, and had I left it at that I never would have heard another thing:  the recruiting intermediary, for reasons I will not speculate on here, did not act on my resume until specifically ordered to do so by members of my Hiring Team.  There have been and will prove to be yet more benefits of having infiltrated this organization, but the most immediate one was that it saved me at this critical juncture from falling between the cracks.

I am to start my job on the third of January.  I will assume the role of Senior Analyst, which is to say I will help the business understand itself, and will translate its desires as needed into plans and designs. Flatteringly, people seem excited at the prospect.  We are rearranging our child care, shopping for a commuter's dream bike (30 minutes each way, 20 if I really lean on the electric assist), and trying to get Gideon to sleep through the night.  Come January I will spend a good deal less time walking these village streets, but I will do so free of the haunting sense that I am living here on borrowed time.