A brief Affair: Part One

After my wife and I moved from the country place back to the burbs ( The Egg and Us ) I found that I had a lot of time on my hands since I no longer had the upkeep of the 10-acre property and 1-1/2 acre garden to keep me busy.  So I decided that I needed to get a job.  After a false start or two I ran across an ad in the paper from a small software startup (let's call it Nestling Inc which, hopefully, isn't the name of a real company) that was looking for a chief programmer.  Since I had only worked for large companies in the past, I thought it might be fun to work at a startup. 

So I called the number in the ad and made an appointment for a telephone interview with the Chief Technical Officer.  The phone interview went well and the CTO said that he would like to take things to the next step. Even though I was interviewing for a high-level position, the CTO asked if I would be willing to take the same programming test that the software developers were required to pass.  He justified that by explaining that I would be the programmers' boss and they would want to know that I understood the technologies they were using.  He told me that normally they would ask me to come in to take the test, but given that I was interviewing for the chief programmer position, they would be happy to email it to me and let me take it at home and then send it back, if I would rather do that.  I told them that that would work better for me, since I was in the process of moving into a new house and had a lot of balls in the air at the moment.  So the CTO sent me a copy of the test.  His asked me to take it without using any reference material.  As soon as I looked at the test I knew I couldn't do that, however, so I just researched what I needed off the Internet and used that info to take the test.  Then I sent it back.  That might seem a little dishonest, but I had 30 years of high tech experience under my belt by that point and I was used to coming up to speed quickly on technology with which I was unfamiliar, so it was just business as usual for me.

The folks at Nestling Inc must have been happy with the test results because they invited me to come in the next week for a face-to-face interview with the officers and a meeting with the software engineers.  I wasn't surprised at the interview with the company officers but I was curious about the meeting with the programmers.  The CTO explained that, since the firm was small, they had to be sure to hire someone who would fit in well with the other employees.  I could only guess what the other members of Nestling Inc would be like, but I used the time between the phone call and the face-to-face interview to brush up on the technology they were using so I could carry on an intelligent conversation about it.

Meeting the staff of Nestling Inc was quite an experience.  The founders were all younger than my kids.  In fact, I have clothes older than most of the people that worked there.  We met for lunch at an iconic local restaurant.  I let the programmers lead the conversation and we mostly chatted about the latest developments in the high tech industry.  After lunch we drove to Nestling Inc's office.  I drove myself so that the company officers and staff could discuss whether I would fit in without the need to do that in front of me. 

When we reached the office I huddled with the CTO and the other two founders.  They told me that the programmers approved of me and that they wanted to hire me as Chief Programmer.  Now here's where working for a small startup is different from working for a large high tech company.  I told the founders that I would rather be Director of Development than Chief Programmer and, without a moment's hesitation, they agreed.  We talked a bit more about salary and duties.  They couldn't afford to pay the salary that I wanted so they sweetened the deal by offering more stock options than we had originally agreed upon.  I asked what they thought my duties should be and they told me that they weren't sure about that and the CTO and I would have to work that out as we went along.  That wasn't a problem for me because the first item in the performance plan for most of the jobs I had had for the previous twenty years was “Figure out what your duties should be”.  So I was pretty comfortable with that.  All of this was done verbally, by the way.  The only paperwork I filled out that day was the form necessary to get the third party payroll company to cut a check for me twice a month.  I left the office after filling out the paperwork and started work the next morning.

Working at Nestling Inc was a continual source of amazement to me because it was so different from working for a large, long-established high tech company.  For starters, there were fewer people in the whole company than I had had in first-level development departments that I had managed at the large company where I had previously worked.  So everyone in the company  knew everyone else and the atmosphere was much more informal and egalitarian than I was used to.  This had pluses and minuses.  On the one hand, if you needed someone to help with a technical problem, you just asked them.  On the other hand, a programmer might quit working on a critical component of the production system to help another employee resolve a trivial and non-critical problem.  It could also happen (and did) that the programmers would get tired of working heads down to meet a critical deadline and they would all decide to take a break for several hours for an impromptu foosball tournament or to drive across town for pork chile rellenos at their favorite Tex-Mex restaurant.  It wasn't that the programmers didn't work hard and smart.  They did.  They just didn't think about the timing of breaks or whether one person taking some time off on the spur of the moment might cause a critical component to be late that would set off a chain reaction and cause a major checkpoint to be missed.  There
was also a lot design on the fly by committee with little or no documentation, which made it hard to regress if the new design had flaws.  So one of the first things that the CTO and I talked about was putting a little more rigor and formality into the development process.  Surprisingly the programmers were in favor of it.  They just didn't want to take time away from product development to work out the processes.  So I got that job.

That was the way it went for the whole time I was with Nestling Inc.  I would see problems that were more procedural than technical and the CTO and I would agree that I would address them while he resolved the technical problems.  That's how we determined the split between what he did and what I did.  It worked out really well for me and I was a happy camper.  Yeah, I was making less money than before I retired from a large company, but I had a bigger impact and I enjoyed the small company atmosphere.  I was able to mentor the programmers and I also learned a lot from them and on my own about the technologies they were using and the advantages of development in a small company with a close-knit staff.  I felt like this was what a retirement job should be. 

Of course, in the dynamic world of high-tech startups things can change rapidly.  Stay tuned for the next installment to find out what happened next.

More Whisking Away

This is the fall festival season in Texas.  The weather is finally cool enough to enjoy being outside for long periods of time without either immersing yourself in a lake or downing a bucket of margaritas.  So my wife and I expanded the whisking away game that I mentioned in an earlier post to include trips to local (well, at least within a day trip) fairs and festivals.

One of the things that we like about festivals is that they often don't charge an entrance fee, or if they do, it is pretty small.  One that we went to recently in Austin was the Gypsy Picnic which celebrated Austin's trailer food trend.  The mobile food vendor thing has caught on pretty big in Texas, at least in the Austin area.  We aren't talking about “roach coaches” here, but basically entrepreneurs who sell a variety of food from trailers or motor coaches that either move around to where the customers are or hang out in parking lots and other places where they can put out some picnic tables and sell their wares.  For the Gypsy Picnic about 30 or 40 vendors set up shop at a local outdoor events venue.  Each of them had at least one sample of one their food specialties for $3 so you could try samples from a variety of vendors for a small amount of money.  There was no charge for the festival itself and it included free live music all day.  My wife and I went to the Gypsy Picnic partly to sample goodies from some food trailers that we had never been to, partly to hear free live music and partly just to watch people, because that's one of the things we enjoy and festivals are a great place to do that.  In our area, at least, festivals bring out a cast of colorful characters who are interesting to watch and to talk with.  That's half the fun for us.  We had a great time at the Gypsy Picnic, ate some good food, heard some live music and met some interesting folks and the whole thing, including parking downtown, probably cost us less than $40.

Recently I whisked my old girl away to the Texas Renaissance Festival near Plantersville, Texas.  The Texas Renaissance Festival is sort of an ongoing medieval fair that is held at a permanent festival ground and runs weekends from early October through the end of November.  The general theme, as the name implies, is the renaissance period but each weekend has sort of a mini-theme.  There is an Oktoberfest weekend, a Pirate Adventure weekend and a Highland Fling weekend to name a few.  The festival staff, vendors and performers all dress in medieval or fantasy garb and role-play characters from that era or from the mini-theme of that particular weekend.  My wife and I have been to somewhat similar venues where the attraction consists mostly of jousting and a meal and costs about $65 per person.  The Texas Renaissance Festival tickets are much less expensive (advance tickets are only $16 per person) and you get much more for the money. 

The festival includes the jousting and horseback games you might expect to find but also there are between 15 and 20 stages where shows are constantly playing and all of them that we attended were included in the ticket price.  There are musicians, dancers, puppeteers, comedians, a birds of prey show and many more.  The festival grounds are huge and include a couple of hundred shops and eating and drinking establishments.  These all cost extra, of course, and frankly the prices are pretty high, but the variety is mind-boggling.

As I mentioned above, my wife and I love to people-watch and I can't think of a better place to do it than at the Texas Renaissance Festival.  Not only do the staff, vendors and performers dress the part, but many, if not most, of the patrons do as well.    We had some interesting and usually tasty food at the festival, heard some live music, saw some shows and lots of characters.  This was a little more expensive than the Gypsy Picnic, but well worth the money.  I know that there are similar venues throughout the country, perhaps not quite as colorful as the Texas Renaissance Festival, but they are great places to have a fun day for a reasonable price.

Some other places we have whisked each other away to this fall have included the state and county fairs.  The state fair, at least here in Texas, is a bit pricey and while we enjoyed it, we like the little county fairs better.  They tend to have relatively inexpensive entrance and parking fees and you can usually park fairly close to an entrance.  We enjoy seeing the animals, produce, canned goods and craft items, often produced by 4H kids.  There are usually some shows at fairs as well and, of course, lots of fair food.  OK, a deep fried Twinkie or chicken-fried bacon isn't on a heart-healthy diet, but it's all balance, right?

Some of our friends consider these kinds of events to be intended for younger people and they don't like to attend them, but my old girl and I feel as though you will never feel better than you do today so there is no time better than now to get out and enjoy life.  You don't have to spend a lot of money to do it either.

Phone Me

Technology is supposed to make our lives better and simpler, but sometimes it seems like it makes them more complicated.  Take phones for instance.  It used to be that you got your phone from the phone company.  It was always a land line, because that's all they had.  About the only thing you had to worry about was whether you had to use a rotary dial phone or one of them new-fangled push button deals.  Then somebody got the bright idea of creating a cordless phone.  It still used the land line but it had one part attached to the wall and the other part used the land line via a wireless connection from the handset to the part that plugged into the wall.  Then they changed the laws and let you buy your phones from Wal~mart or wherever instead of the phone company and all hell broke loose.  The first thing we knew we could get totally wireless mobile phones, first just in cars and then to carry around in our pockets.  It wasn't long before voice over IP (VOIP) came along and let us talk over our Internet connections and do away with the land line completely.  As devices and functions merge together things just keep getting more complex.  Now there are so many options that it almost takes an electronic engineer to decide which is the best one to choose.  Of course, there is no best choice that works for everyone because the right choice for you depends upon what you want to do with your phone and how much you want to pay to do it. 

Let's ignore the need to make calls away from home for a moment and just look at the options you have for home phone service.  Probably the first major decision to make is whether to keep that land line or not.  If you are currently getting your home phone service over a land line from the phone company you are probably getting inundated with advertising urging you to get additional services over that line.  That's because the phone companies are upgrading their networks so that they can deliver not only phone service but also TV and high speed Internet service over the connection to your home.  By bundling those services together you save some money and can pay for all of them via a single bill.  If you currently get your TV service over cable, you are probably getting similar advertising from your cable provider urging you to get your phone and high speed Internet service from them, all over the cable.  Again, you save some money by bundling and pay for all of these services via a single bill.  The cable company provides the phone service using technology that is really part of your Internet service.   So, like the high speed Internet service, it travels over the cable and doesn't need the land line.  With that exception it looks to you just like your traditional phone service.  So the phones you are currently using and the phone wiring inside your house should work just fine.  It is basically a matter of whether the network of phone wires in your house is attached to the traditional land line or to the cable.  There will be relatively minor differences in the details of the service (e.g., whether you get free long distance, call waiting, etc.) but other than that it is pretty much the same.  If you don't have cable and still want to get rid of the land line, you can always use your cell phone for all of your calls.  There are so many good cell phone plans available today that you should be able to get one that will give you free long distance, an answering service and all of the other things that you can get over a land line or cable. 

One factor that you might consider if you are trying to decide whether to go with a bundle from the phone company over a land line or with one from the cable company is whether you will use a home burglar alarm or not.  The burglar alarm needs to call the monitoring office if the alarm is tripped.  So whatever home phone service you use has to be able to support that function.  Land lines certainly do support it, but the burglar alarm can be connected to phone service over the cable as well.  You just need to be sure that the quality of service is such that the phone service will be there when the alarm  needs to make the call.  So, if your land line or cable are frequently down, that would influence your decision. However, there is another option for burglar alarms which requires neither a land line nor a phone connection over the cable.  That is a burglar alarm that can make the call via a wireless device that works just like your cell phone.  In fact, there are burglar alarms that use wireless communication between the sensors and the base unit.  There are no wires involved at all.  So from the burglar alarm perspective, you don't need a land line or a cable.  You can use your cell phone for all of your calls and still have a working burglar alarm. 

Another option for the phone that you use at home is VOIP using your computer and your existing Internet service, whether it is connected over a land line or a cable.  You just use your computer's microphone and speakers to talk and hear.  One such service is provided by a company called Skype , which enables you to use your computer to make calls to any phone number.  In general Skype charges for this service but it lets you make free computer to computer calls to any other Skype user.  In addition, Skype lets you make video calls for free to other Skype users.  So you are talking computer to computer, in video.  Beam me up Scotty, the brave new world is here.

Of course, there is even more complexity to this phone and connection technology decision than what we've discussed so far.  For example, let's consider the phones in your house that you use to talk to your friends when you aren't using a cell phone.  They're all pushbutton now of course, and if you're like most people they are probably wireless phones that you can take into another room and pretend like you are concentrating on the conversation while you are really watching football on mute with closed captioning.  Ah, but are your wireless phones using DECT technology?  If they aren't, they should be.  DECT technology  is a vastly improved home wireless technology that lets you take the remote much farther from the base station than the old wireless remote phone technology allows.  Now you can pretend to concentrate on that call from your kids while you are watching the game on your neighbor's gigundous home theater screen.  Even better, there is only one base station needed with DECT phones.  Any additional remote receivers just have to sit in battery chargers.  In case you missed the significance of that, you can now keep a wireless remote phone in rooms that don't have a phone connection in them.  The only thing that needs a phone line attached to it is the base station, and you can't talk through it anyway.  You do all your talking through the wireless remotes.  That's also how you control the base station, including the built-in answering machine.  Even cooler, the remotes all have their own identification number so you can use the one you took over to your neighbor's house to call one of the remotes back at your house to ask your wife to bring over a couple of beers so you don't miss any of the game.  It doesn't get any better than that. 

So much for the phone at your house.  Let's talk about cell phones, specifically smart phones, because this is where device convergence is really happening.  My simplistic definition is that a smart phone is one that combines traditional phone functions with a variety of other applications, most of which require you to be connected to the Internet or at least the phone network.  I'm not talking about offline games or calculator programs or anything like that, although things like that may be available for and/or included with smart phones.  Regardless of the phone manufacturer or the phone service provider, most smart phones are running either Apple's Iphone operating system or Google's Android operating system, although Microsoft has recently released an operating system for smart phones as well.  At the moment its market share is small and some pundits claim it is too little too late, but they said that about Windows on the PC at one time, so for now the jury is out on that one.  So for all practical purposes, if you buy a smart phone today it will probably either be an Iphone or a phone that runs on Android.  Apple's Iphone is a lot like other Apple devices, including their personal computers.  It has a nice user interface and Apple exercises a great deal of control over the applications available for it.  Android has been positioned as an open operating system so there is less control exercised over the applications that run on it.  Android phones are gaining market share and several industry pundits have asserted that they will dominate the market in the not too distant future but both the Iphone and Android phones have a large number of applications available today and at this point the choice is pretty much a matter of preference.

So what can you do with a smart phone that you can't do with previous cell phone technology?  The answer is lots of stuff.  Smart phones combine cell phone technology, wireless Internet access and GPS technology.  So, for example, you can use your phone to send and receive email and access the Internet to use Twitter, Facebook or other social network applications.  You can watch movies and TV, including sports events, on your smart phone.  You can use a GPS application on an Android phone that is integrated with Google Maps.  It allows you to use your phone to find out how to get from where you are to where you want to go and, unlike most dedicated GPS devices, you never have to update the maps because you are really using Google's mapping tool, which automatically updates them.  There is an Iphone application that will allow you to use the built-in GPS function to find movie theaters which are close to you.  Not only can you find their locations, but you can find a list of the movies that are playing and see the trailer for any that you are interested in.  How's that for device convergence?  In a similar fashion you can use your smart phone to find nearby restaurants, check out their menus on their web sites and then use the phone to call the one you are interested in to make a reservation.  These are only a few of the things you can do with a smart phone.

Of course, in order to support all this neat converged function you have to buy a fairly expensive smart phone and sign a contract for a relatively expensive data plan to support it.  Depending upon the things  you want to do with your phone, however, a smart phone and data plan may the cheapest alternative.  For example, it might be cheaper than the combined cost of buying a normal cell phone and plan in combination with buying a dedicated GPS and paying to update the maps periodically.

A smart phone may provide more function than you need however, so it is still possible to buy a phone with less function and to use it simply for phone calls.  If you have multiple phones in the family you might want to buy one smart phone and a minimum data plan to support it and just use normal cell phones for the rest of the family members.  You should look closely at the service plan regardless of what kind of phone you use.  These days most of them provide free long distance and no roaming charges, so you should find out whether the plan you are considering will support that.  Also, if you tend to do a lot of texting, you should make sure that your plan allows you to send and receive the number of text messages you anticipate for a flat rate without paying an exorbitant charge for each text sent or received over some low limit.

So here's the bottom line as I (admittedly not an expert on the subject) see it:

1. If you're not already bundling TV, phone and Internet support, it would be a good idea to do that, assuming you use all those things.  As far as whether to get those services from the phone company or the cable company, that pretty much is a matter of preference, quality of service and pricing details.  The last two will vary from place to place.
2. I would not pay for long distance service.  You should be able to find a plan for both your home phones and your cell phones that won't charge you for long distance.
3. If you are going to replace your home phone(s), get something that is based on the DECT standard.  They are far and away better than the old technology, and you can add handsets as you need them.
4. Before you spend the big bucks for a smart phone and the data plan to support it, decide what you are going to use it for and factor in the cost of any devices that it might replace to get the real bottom line cost.  If you are about to spend $125 on a GPS and $50 per year to keep your maps up to date, maybe it would be to your advantage to get a smart phone and a minimum cost data plan.  Or not.  Do the math before making the decision.
5. Before you sign up for a new cell phone contract, make sure that the plan will support all of the things you are going to want to do with your phone over the life of the contract.  Don't sign up for one that charges you a separate fee for every text after the first 25 if you plan to buy a new full keyboard phone 6 months from now so you can text the kids several times a day.

Life was a lot simpler before all of this new technology hit the streets, but we can use it to communicate much better than we could in days gone by,  In today's world where families are spread all over the planet, that's a good thing.