Blogiversary
I usually reference my blogiversary (a week ago this past Monday) every year. I have it set in my online calendars, so I have no excuse other than to admit I was preoccupied and overlooked it. I probably realized it a couple of days later.So 11 years of blogging and averaging over a post a day. I've gone into a readership slump lately where only an occasional post hits double-digits, and most of those are my specialty (e.g., social media edition) posts. But I will go on, just like when I taught data structures back at UTEP, where students started at about 20-odd and quickly dropped to a handful. No, I wasn't that bad--but the problem was a popular lecturer taught the same course in name but not in content. Data structures requires a lot of programming assignments, and this other guy not only didn't require any, but had a reputation as an easy grade. I went to my "mentor" colleague and said, "Why didn't you warn me about this?" He laughed and said the same thing happened to him. Similarly, in writing a blog, I'll probably piss off every reader sooner or later.
Usability and e-QIP
I have published a major article and book chapter on the construct of usability or basically the fitness of some fitness of some thing to the user to achieve some goal. There are objective and subjective aspects to usability. For example, how long does a user take to achieve his task objective? Is using the product or interface make a productive use of the user's time, making it easier, more efficient use of the user's time and effort, or does the user find it adds to the task of getting things done or annoying to use? Is it adjustable to user experience or preferences? For example, many tall people complain about hotel or other people's shower heads are below their height, meaning they have to crouch to shampoo their hair or wash their face, etc. This is a Procrustean design (see below). Another example is Oracle's earlier migration from "green screen" menu interfaces to GUI. Through some key combination in green screen they could get a desired form, while in GUI mode, they might have to go through a handful of pop-up prompts. Oracle had desupported green screen, meaning the users had to use GUI to get tech support, and I as the Apps DBA ended up being the target of their frustration. There are a number of tactics you can include to accommodate more expert users, like favorite links in an application or adaptable templates.I may have mentioned this example in a past post: In my early programming career, I was tasked with writing an interface to generate a 4-color HP plot, at that time, it was a novel thing, for graphs and charts you can routinely generate today in many PC applications. We could sell $25 plots all day long. But I had to work through an interface for my APL programming language, which meant you had to set up to 78 variables to generate a plot--you know, like the size, number, and type of tic marks on the axes, lengths of axes, labels, fonts, etc. It was an exhaustive list of things that made each plot an annoying kit. I basically set some defaults and vastly simplified things to a handful of inputs. And the proof was in the pudding: colleagues were using my code to generate plots around the clock.
As mentioned above, I sometimes make reference to Procrustean design. This is a reference to ancient mythology. Procrustes had a one-bed-fits-all lodging. If you were too short for the bed, he would stretch you into size; if you were too tall, he could amputate limbs to fit.
Donald Norman, a cognitive scientist, wrote a compelling book more recently called "The Design of Everyday Things". You basically design human error out of the interface. In one telling design, a word processor (not to be confused with today's software, like Microsoft Word) put a delete document key near the enter key. Norman expected a lot of admin support people were unintentionally deleting documents they were working on. The vendor was in a state of denial, and so Norman and they went to talk to a sample user, and Norman asked if she ever deleted a document by accident. "Sure: all the time." The vendor said, "Why haven't you said anything?" "Because I was trained not to hit that key. So it's my fault." No, typos are predictable; even able typists make them, even though at a lower rate.You have to make a destructive action hard to do; this is why Microsoft will respond, if you write erase *,* , "Are you sure? (Y/N)"
In practice, I always note when something doesn't work by expectation: why did I push a door out instead of pull in? More recently I tried to use my common 6-digit vs. 4-digit code to open a door. I started using a Dove men's bodywash product. The opening is at the BOTTOM of the bottle, which means among other things, the sticky solution can seal the lid to the point I have to pry the lid loose, rather annoying given the fact of gravity.
e-QIP is a sadistic fact of life for anyone who has had a background investigation for doing work with a federal agency or department. For some investigations, you also have to go through a multi-hour interview going through its details (and my most recent one is at least 64 pages long), and you have to go back additional years (up to 7 to 10 years or more). Everything has to be specified into exacting detail; for more recent years and residences (and I've moved 4 times since 2013) you have to identify people who knew you in detail (address, phone numbers, even their middle names!) at each place. Plus, if you haven't had a continuous work record (say, worked for multiple employers or agencies and had gaps of unemployment between jobs), you even have to identify sources who can verify your unemployment.
I'm sure that I discussed aspects of a clearance that dragged on for several months bridging 2014 and 2015. I had a contingent offer for a Department of Energy contractor in the Pittsburgh area. I recall this investigator found out, probably from my WV landlady that my first week in WV (over 200 miles from my Baltimore area apartment) I stayed, at my own expense, at an area hotel. She all but accused me of omitting something material from the investigation, grumbling that she would have to come back to town just to interview the hotel manager. Are you freaking kidding me? They checked me in and checked me out. End of story. Then there was the time she came back to me with an investigator who claimed a 2009-2010 employer's address was vacated. So much for investigator due diligence; I googled my way into discovering the federal contractor, highly dependent on a long contract with USPTO, had lost its recompete; I then found the CEO's resume on LinkedIn and discovered they had shuttered operations in late 2012.
Of course, I'm not earning a penny on this contingency contract (I've heard from others these can take a year or longer), and I basically moved for only 6 months of guaranteed work with a South Carolina employer (the move at my expense).
There was an earlier incident (probably around 2012-2013) for a USPS contractor working through an agency. First, they required me to submit a paper e-QIP (basically at least 50 pages of paperwork) and then said they wanted a reformatted contractor preferred resume, in e-QIP level of detail, even for employers between 1993 to 2000--something they tried to pass off as 90 minutes of work. I mean I've worked for 3-4 employers that were no longer in business or merged, others that have moved, etc. I tried to negotiate--say, the most recent 5 years, but these assholes were all or nothing: they refused to present me to the client. They had not discussed this stipulation until the last minute; if they had mentioned it at the beginning, I would have told them I wasn't interested. Screw that! Lost--all that time and effort in doing the manual e-QIP.
So recently I was told told I effectively had to do a 5-year e-QIP update; at least this one in electronic form. But this isn't exactly a scenario where you can simply update your most recent jobs and residences and resubmit (a key usability objective). I believe the term is "magic questions" but a brief Google search didn't get a hit, so don't quote me. But in essence each new submission flips flags for questions not relevant to your edits. Some of these questions that are flipped requires you to go through a handful of prior information pop-ups serial. Take, for example, my nuclear family (I'm the oldest of 7). So for 8 people, including my late Dad, I have to go through pages of birth information, current address and contact information, etc., just to access a vacated response to whether the family member is deceased. Each and every time. A similar thing for education and each prior residence, job, and individual contacts. Do I have education to add to my list of 4 college degrees over 10 years ago? Do I have anything to add to (say) terminations or warnings in past positions? And it's not like you go directly to the question, but might have to click through a dozen popups to get there..
And each and every time you have to go through dozens of the same questions on financial issues, gambling, marital or significant others, mental health, alcohol, illicit drugs, foreign contacts, investments, criminal or civil proceedings, links to terrorism, any dual citizenship, etc. And I'm not talking single questions but maybe up to 5 or 6 detailed questions per item. And at the end of it, you have to authorize 3 or 4 investigations (e.g., credit investigations, health records, etc.) (each requiring a separate login) in addition to releasing the investigation (which means freezing it; you are locked out from making any changes).
It turns out you aren't directly releasing your e-QIP to the government, but to your company's FSO, who can screen it before releasing it to the government. Now my current FSO is a nice guy, but... I had gotten the company's address from Google, but it turns out they recently moved and Google results were stale. (You might have thought they had communicated this to me in advance. Nope.) So I didn't precisely measure the time it took me to redo it but it felt like it took 2-3 hours, all to make an update on one screen. And, by the way, a colleague interrupted me during this process, and e-QIP timed out on me, which meant I had to start from the beginning, not the screen where I had timed out.
So I finally reauthorize all the releases and release the e-QIP to the FSO. This time he realizes he had a brain fart writing out the company's street address, giving the wrong street number. So now I had to do it all again, just to edit one item on a 60-odd page e-QIP.. Hopefully this time I'm out of e-QIP hell.
Oh, and I had to engage in another pet peeve: fingerprints. I don't know if in aging my sweat glands in my fingertips have dried up, but at least 2 or 3 investigations I had to supply a new set of prints when the investigators couldn't use the first set. And you have to submit them for CAC's/renewals. In West Virginia, they had to resort to a manual override after being unable to get usable prints over a half hour. I thought my most recent CAC they had finally deployed more accurate interfaces, because it didn't take 6 or more times, applying lotion to my fingers, etc.
But this time I had to go to a company vendor, in this case the local UPS Store. At first I had to go through a kerfuffle where I needed to give them a reservation id (which it turns out they had texted to my phone). But then it must have taken a solid half hour to process the 4 fingerprints for each hand, thumbprints, and then 8 rolling fingerprints. To say it was annoying is an understatement. I think I had to make at least a half dozen tries for each print, and the majority of times it was complaining to the attendant to clean the glass.
BEB Update
There are things about Susan, Bruce's wife, that have annoyed me, and I've had to hold my tongue because I didn't want Bruce to get caught in the middle (and rightly he would have to stand by the love of his life, even at the expense of our friendship). And Bruce is a private person; Susan will mention through her blog posts he won't respond to what he regards are stupid or pointless questions. My late Uncle Roger was similar; he never wanted to repeat himself or respond to a question, knowing it was a pointless conversation.Now Susan is a cancer survivor. (and I don't think I heard about it in the early stages. Bruce had an email address at his business website, but he wasn't one to email. I wasn't sure if he ever saw or read the emails or maybe he had an indifferent attitude to the email and didn't think it merited a response. I think I couldn't find him on Facebook, but I found Susan. Only 1 of my 6 siblings is on Facebook; my brothers aren't on, and 3 of my sisters share my brother-in-law's accounts (maybe not my baby sister). In a lot of cases I hear more often from the in-law than my own relative. So in a similar situation, I was more likely to hear from Susan than Bruce himself. I used to be on their Christmas card list, but I haven't heard from them in years; of course, both of us have moved multiple times over the past decade. The last time I remember reaching out to Bruce was that I had listed him as a reference on e-QIP, and an investigator was saying that he couldn't get in touch with Bruce. At the time they were living in the Atlanta area.
So communicating on Facebook with Susan is a case of "be really careful of what you wish for". I remember in making conversation with Susan, I had raised the top of chemotherapy, knowing it was controversial. I started hearing almost incessant rants against me, and she is/was similarly obsessed with essential oils. The main reason I was reaching out to hear was for news about Bruce. Today I would have simply un-followed her. At some point, I de-friended her, hoping Bruce wouldn't be offended, but it was getting to the point I was afraid of writing something which would offend Susan.
That's why I wasn't aware of Bruce's strokes at the start of June. My third brother-in-law and my sister had met the Breeding's in Plano, TX because he was heavily involved in Scouts (and all 5 of my nephews made Eagle Scout, like my brother-in-law. I'm dying to know what Bruce would make of the recent Scout controversies, which I'm sure violate his religious principles. So my brother-in-law told me about Bruce, and I immediately re-friended Susan.
So a few weeks back I had sent an unacknowledged question about why Bruce had left academia from his first/only faculty appointment at Murray State over 20 years ago. Bruce had admitted to me he was frustrated by the lack of preparation of his students. But he had spent more time as a doctoral student than me, overlapping my start and finish. Was he running into publish or perish? Had he been turned down for tenure? In hindsight the number doesn't fit. I was in Irving in 1992-3, the year after year 5 as a professor, and Bruce graduated 1-2 years after me.
Keep in mind I didn't have Susan's email address. So sometime later I went to message her and couldn't find the option. Long story short, I ended up concluding Susan (or maybe one of her relatives) had blocked me from messaging her. Now maybe it was an inappropriate question at a time Bruce was laid up in the hospital. But it's not clear why such a Draconian response to a question. All she had to do is say, "Ron, I don't want to discuss this."
I have a pet peeve against being censored. I de-friended a niece and a nephew over deleting my comments to posts. I don't mind people disagreeing with me. What to do with Susan? Part of me wants to say, give her a break. Her husband is in the hospital, and she's under a lot of stress. Maybe she didn't do it; maybe one of her kids did it. On the other hand, I have to be consistent; my niece and nephew didn't block me. I wanted to give her a break; maybe she would unblock me after a while. So I gave it some time, not wanting to make a snap decision out of anger. But I'll probably end up dropping her in the near future.
So most recently the most pressing issue is not so much physical but financial. Their insurance company (Blue Cross) balked on paying this past week at the therapy clinic, leaving her to come up with the money. (Apparently they reversed their decision for this week.) At some point they will have to send Bruce to a different therapy facility in Round Rock or San Antonio, basically an hour's drive for Susan north or south in bad traffic. In essence, she's noted this type of issue may lead them to place Bruce in a nursing home with rehabilitation to get to the point of making it to said remote locations. And that would take a toll on their finances.
On the brighter side, Bruce was able to handle ice cream (after getting to the point of tubal feeding that finally agrees with him), he's capable of short conversations, holding hands with his grandkids, and he's able to stand up assisted for almost 5 minutes, multiple past attempts. His swallowing reflexes are almost to the point of eating soft or regular food.
