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I’ve been in Dublin since Monday at the request of one of our clients. At first I thought it this was just one of those things where people just don’t like our software because too much of the configuration is left up to them. How wrong I was.

It turns out we’ve sent people over to the client multiple times, yet little or none of the business requirements were relayed to people like me who deploy their software. We just didn’t send the right people to do the job.

It’s amazing the difference a few days with a client can do to fill in the whole picture.  If we’re going to customize our software I really prefer getting to meet the client myself and really hash out the issues myself. It’s way better than getting a non-technical person to guess what the software would look like if it really fulfilled the client’s needs.

I think that’s really the thrust of it. Software development, certainly when you’re doing application services like I do, is more than coding, it’s really business fulfilment. I think that’s what we lose track of, or never get to realize when we’re so insulated from the client.

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My holiday coffee session started off well enough, pressing random-play on my Zen turned up Bob Dylan’s things were good right up until Knocking on Heavens Door.

Listening to this track for probably the 200th time, I finally heard something different about it. Something, horribly wrong… There’s a tape loop embedded in this song. Put your headphones on and cue up track #10. About every 3-4 seconds you’ll hear somebody whistling in your right ear… over and over and over. Not realizing it was a loop, I thought this was just beginning-of-the-song- exuberance you hear often in live recordings. After two minutes I was having my doubts about the sanity of this random whistler. By three minutes I was wondering why nobody else in the audience hadn’t punched Whistler out completely. By four minutes in I figured they were too busy constantly clapping to punch anybody out. By minute five the song was totally spoiled. They put a tape loop in an otherwise decent performance… corrupting it really. You actually realize its a decent performance only for the last 45 seconds of the track when the idiot produces stopped the tape loop… What a bunch of jerks.

Maybe you won’t know what I’m talking about. I bought this CD in the UK at least 12 years ago. Some album mixes can vary from one market to the other, and from one year to the other. Maybe they didn’t foul up the U.S. version. I’m going to have to look into that. And I’d like an explanation on why any producer would think constant whistling would actually enhance a song. I bet they didn’t really like Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door in the first place so they felt like screwing around with it.

Tags: music, bob dylan, tape loop

I’m about halfway through this book now and I am starting to get the idea that Les Miz is a collection of unfinished stories woven together into one completed story. Not criticizing at all here… being incapable of finishing a novel (or starting one) of my own I’m always interested in how great books get written.

So far I can see at least two: a historical telling of the Battle of Waterloo and the convent at Petit-Picpus. Both of these were extremely long diversions from the main thread of the novel. In fact, both episodes stall and stall and stall until the very last pages of their stories before getting “tied in” to the main story. I think if these were intended to be integral parts of the original store of Jean Valjean, they would have been made shorter like the episode for Monsieur Gabaillard(?) Gillenormand and probably been linked to the main story by more than one tenuous fact.

I think what we see in this book is Victor Hugo’s ambition to create and entire suite of novels about France’s history and the city of Paris. His multiple references to Voltaire (who was responsible for a canon of some 2,000 books) suggests to me he was a kind of hero, or at least someone Hugo strived to equal in some ways. When these stories didn’t pan out into complete novels on their own, rather than throwing them on the fire he made use of them in his main work—maybe he got paid by the word or he really thought these plot-diversions were too good not to see the light of day.

Whatever the motivation, he made good use of this extra material. There’s is no doubt in my mind that people call this a great book in part because these many episodes drift away from the main story only to bring you back once you’d forgotten where you were. Most writers would bore you to death using this tactic (even if they used it less often) but when Hugo finishes you definitely feel like you're involved in a much richer story.

Tags: writing classics reading novels

I’m doing my best to distract myself from being sick and it’s not working. Baseball playoffs, sitcoms, surfing… I’m not enjoying any of them being ill. So I might as well try blogging for a bit since nothing else worked.

Nothing like ending a crummy week with Broken Social Scene—They can dislodge whatever mood you’re in… good or bad so wait until you’re in a bad mood first.

Another attempt at distraction this evening was downloading and installing Zune Media Player. It’s sure pretty to look at. A nice bonus is the “Find Album Info” works much better than the same function in Windows Media Player. WMP would often wreck the titles on the songs—It actually fouled up the tracks for Abbey Road… Abbey Road! I don’t think there’s a track variation for that album anywhere on the planet, except for Microsoft’s CD database. Sheesh. ZMP is a little more cautious and asks you to confirm your choices if it didn’t find a perfect match to the original filename. I’m not surprised they put more work on this feature—Find Album Info actually disappeared from WMP for a while, probably from complaints.

I wish they’d hurry up and do a 32-gig flash Zune. The Zune’s features look great but I need more than 16Gb and there is no way I’m going back to hard-disk players because I keep breaking them… actually I don’t break them it’s the impact on cement sidewalks that tend to wreck the poor little devils.

I wonder if ZMP will sync with my Creative Zen player. Doubt it but I think I’ll try it anyway. Maybe tomorrow.

Well the music seems to be doing the trick, the crap mood is wearing off a little. No, that’s the Nyquil. But the music’s still good… It’s all good.

Tags: flu, broken social scene, zune, nyquil