America believes in education:
the average professor earns more money in a year
than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.
Evan Esar
Position Shift on Two Topics: National Right to Work
and the Balanced Budget Amendment
I generally don't like to resort to trumping state prerogatives but hhis is unfinished business since Taft-Hartley. I feel it iia necessary to reform labor law, especially after seeing tough battles to restore a measure of economic liberty in Rust Belt states like Michigan. Union special interests use special legal-conferred privileges to obstruct competition by workers whom may prefer to work independent of a union. I have also been alarmed by Obama's illegal recess appointments packing the NLRB with crony union surrogates.
On the balanced budget amendment, I'm by nature reluctant to change the Constitution but Obama has used every trick in the book to push today's spending on the backs of future taxpayers, which I consider an immoral form of generational theft.
I appreciate Sen. Paul's leadership on these issues, and he has my full support.
Political Cartoon
I blasted Obama on this issue in yesterday's blog post. I've had to adjust to the weak Bush/Obama economy sometimes having to bid for subcontract work paying up to 40% less than I was charging in 1999 (plus expenses--which itself was a deep discount from what Oracle Consulting was billing clients for my services). Now, granted, the Internet era of the late 90's was in an unsustainable bubble, but still for a decade more experience... It amazes me how some IT managers will scrimp on rates; databases are valuable resources--if you had to undergo serious surgery, would you pick a surgeon because he is offering a time-limited Groupon coupon?
I personally had to deal with a project DBA on a Chicago city department project (I've mentioned this guy in past posts; the project manager hired him because he claimed having worked for Oracle 18 years. I knew immediately this guy was bluffing his experience when he discussed applying an Oracle cloning process not available for our version of Oracle EBS (ERP product suite)).. (I had devised proven custom cloning procedures, but he wasn't willing to use my clones, only his own.) One day the city department had a training session on our Vision Demo database, and doing a routine status check, I found the application processes were down--and wouldn't restart. This usually happens when a DBA brings down a database without first shutting down application processes. I cleaned up the corrupt process statuses and verified processes had restarted. I asked CB (knowing the answer but not the rationale) if he knew about the database being shut down. He affirmed that he had brought the database down, explaining that he had added a datafile to the project database's all-important SYSTEM tablespace; he subsequently decided he could have simply extended an existing datafile and deleted his new datafile, causing the database to crash. He couldn't get the database to come up (the reasons are beyond the scope of this post, but it was a conceptual error). He called Oracle Tech Support, which allegedly suggested that he find another database with a system04.dbf file. My Vision Demo database had a system04.dbf, so he shut down the database to copy that system04.dbf (suffice it to say you can't mix and match datafiles from different databases--that's Oracle 101). CB looked up at me and asked in a bewildered voice, "Ron, would you believe it didn't work?". It's a good thing I wasn't drinking milk at the time, or milk would have squirted out my nose; it took self-restraint not to openly laugh at his incompetence. Unfortunately, he had rejected my advice on database logs and backups; he had failed to ensure Oracle services on Windows were down in doing cold backups, another rookie mistake, which basically meant the backups were unusable. Which meant any and all project progress over the past 4 weeks was lost and we were back to my recreating a fresh clone.
I have tons of other war stories of dealing with problem DBA's, but I'll end with a client, now a Boeing subsidiary near LAX. The client was on version 11.0.2 on an EBS using Oracle Projects. They had an issue and Oracle Tech Support insisted they had to first upgrade to 11.0.3 and see if the problem was addressed by the upgrade. I think there was an Oracle Consulting DBA, probably a principal vs. senior principal as I had been 2 years earlier (above that are management levels like practice managers and directors). The mentioned DBA had dotted-line authority over a team of about 6 subcontractor DBA's, to shift 24x7 during the week the client had designated for doing the upgrade. We went through a couple of dry runs before go-live; this titular lead DBA had not participated in any of the dry runs. There was one process that took about 12-20 hours; one of my colleagues had written code to track progress on the process. I was the second shift on the leadoff; I think my shift ended at 2 AM, and the lead guy was to succeed me until about 8 AM. The clients finished their backups just before the first shift ended. I made up for lost time, and the long process had been kicked off. I completely briefed him that this process would run during his entire shift; I left him contact information for my lodging. When I returned around 8 AM, I found out that he had convinced himself (not based on any process or database information, just his gut) that the upgrade was "stuck" and we had to restart, a grossly incompetent error. The person who carried out the order to stop/restart the upgrade? The guy who wrote the code to check on the process. I was very angry; I know I had fully briefed the lead, no one had contacted me about stopping the upgrade, and I asked my colleague why he had not pushed back at the directive knowing the long process. He shrugged his shoulders and said the Oracle consultant was boss: he was just following orders. Basically now we had to wait a while for the database backup to be restored to disk. We lost one day on the schedule because of the lead's boneheaded mistake. I was working through an agency and sarcastically told my project liaison that this guy was probably going to bill the client for his screw-up. Word leaked back to the lead, whom was not happy with me. Luckily we still completed the upgrade ahead of schedule. There was supposedly some post-project billable work, but I had signaled I didn't want to stay on.
I'm not arguing humans are perfect. The first day on the above-cited Chicago gig I got a 10 PM call about a problem that took 5 minutes to fix, but remote access was not available by IT policy. I had to drive about 40 minutes each way into downtown Chicago. No overtime; I was limited to 8 hours billing per day. It was a learning experience; I never had to make another overnight trip into Chicago for the duration of the assignment.
But in a buyer's market, I have to compete. Every client has a differing mix of technology, business model, etc. If and when the initial contract ends, they have every reason to offer me a better rate or offer me a commensurate perm position. Mark Perry in the below cited post points out few jobs, especially for the head of household, pay minimum wage. You can consider the minimum wage as a barrier of entry to getting job experience; artificial shortages of experienced workers may result in higher wages for those whom win the minimum wage game of musical chairs.
 |
| Courtesy of Henry Payne HT: Granite Grok |
 |
| Courtesy of Henry Payne HT: Carpe Diem |
Cato Institute, SOTU Review: Thumbs UP!
Very well done; the interspersed comments are spot on.
Rubio's SOTU Response Hits the Wrong Note
First, it seems as though Marco Rubio, given the plum opportunity of responding to the SOTU, seems to have bungled his opportunity, not unlike Bobby Jindal, another potential 2016 GOP Presidential contender. It's not the water bottle kerfuffle. I thought Rubio came across as too defensive--i.e., my mom depends on Medicare, and I will not do anything to put that in jeopardy.
I understand why Rubio is defensive; the Dems have been bashing the GOP on the issue for decades. But I would have been more assertive--no, the federal government shouldn't be setting below-market prices for medical services, we need to pay down unfunded liabilities, to make the system more sustainable through some combination of state/local empowerment, means-tested deductible contributions, premiums and/or benefits. An end to deceptive accounting, e.g., double-counting. Obama's other initiatives, e.g., ObamaCare, have compromised Medicare funding. We should indict the Democrats for creating and failing to properly fund Medicare for decade: Medicare has blown past cost projections from the start.
There are other things: I would have hit Obama's ill-focused foreign policy, declining individual liberties, his lack of leadership on fiscal and entitlement reform, his refusal to engage in bipartisan compromise, his failure to back Simpson-Bowles, etc.
Political Humor
This is a real break with tradition. When the president walked into the chamber, instead of "Hail to the Chief," they played “Hey, Big Spender.” - Jay Leno
The tax man cometh.
I have to hand it to President Obama. He is full of confidence, really kind of cocky and full of himself. At the end of his State of the Union address he showed America his Kenyan birth certificate. - David Letterman
[Not to mention being introduced by Bill Ayers and the invocation by Jeremiah Wright...]
With the Pope retiring, more than 100 cardinals will sequester themselves in the Sistine Chapel to choose the next Pope. They’ll send out white smoke if they've chosen somebody, black smoke if they haven't chosen somebody, and a text message when they find out that it's 2013. - Jimmy Fallon
[And the runner-up, Cardinal Sore Loserman, will complain about the butterfly ballots and appeal to the Heavenly Court....]
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said on Fox News Sunday that it's a false argument to say that we have a spending problem. You know something? I think she may be right. I think what we actually have is a "You don't have a clue" problem. - Jimmy Fallon
[The House Minority leader finds her efforts taxing, spending all that time out of power.]
Tomorrow is the first day of Lent, when Catholics begin fasting for 40 days. Some Catholics will give up chocolate, some Catholics will give up alcohol, and one Catholic is giving up “being Pope.” - Jimmy Fallon
[Speaker Boehner is also Catholic. He's given up trying to reason with Barack Obama.]
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Groups
The Supremes, " Love is Like an Itching in My Heart"
