Schnarch's Writings Applied to the Age of Social Networking

It's been a while since I've made mention of Schnarch in this space. I saw a post over at the New York Times blog Schott's Vocab that reminded me of his writings on two-choice dilemmas.

The term being discussed was e-ttenuation, which is attributed to Raymond Tallis. The post quotes an essay by Madeleine Bunting published in the Guardian:

... faced with such an abundance of interesting choices, there is a reluctance to commit and a provisionalism which promotes grazing, keeping options open. Above all, there is a paradigm of contractualism: relationships are measured by the question “what’s in it for me?”

When I read this, I heard echoes of Passionate Marriage (p.298):

None of us wants to face our dilemma(s) and choose one option over the other. Manic attempts to "do it all" maintain our secret fantasy that we can have it all -- and never have to face our anxiety. The 1960s free-love ethic that "it's unrealistic to expect one person to meet all your needs" subtly reassures us that we can have everything we want (all we have to do is spread our needs around several people). But decisions, commitments, friendship, and integrity only become meaningful in a world of finite options.

In Constructing the Sexual Crucible, Schnarch quotes Tristam Engelhardt:

(Friendship) is also a sacrifice. Since humans are not gods or goddesses, friendship entails the abandonment of other possibilities. Humans have limited resources of energy and time. The person who has a hundred friends has none, or is a god.

Perhaps once the craze over social networking websites has subsided, we will interpret it as a period where society was seduced by the connectivity of the web into believing that friendship could be as free as love was thought to be back in the 60s.

I sense that the seeds of disillusionment with social networking sites are beginning to take root.

In late December, the New York Times published an article about high schoolers making a pact to reduce Facebook dependency.

Then word broke out about a parody site called the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. The virality of the site is a hint that there are good number people who are ready to unplug.

Finally, Bunting's own remarks point to another issue with social networking:

It is not technology per se at fault, but how it is used, and in particular how it combines with another equally powerful phenomenon – commercialisation; the assessment that everyone and everything has a price. It is the two combined which I would argue are so corrosive to our capabilities to create and sustain relationships of depth and durability.

It's not just person-to-person relationships that are commercialized. The site itself commercializes on a relationship of its own, just as Danah Boyd writes in her blog apophenia:

Let's take this scenario for a moment. Bob trust Alice. Bob tells Alice something that he doesn't want anyone else to know and he tells her not to tell anyone. Alice tells everyone at school because she believes she can gain social stature from it. Bob is hurt and embarrassed. His trust in Alice diminishes. Bob now has two choices. He can break up with Alice, tell the world that Alice is evil, and be perpetually horribly hurt. Or he can take what he learned and manipulate Alice. Next time something bugs him, he'll tell Alice precisely because he wants everyone to know. And if he wants to guarantee that it'll spread, he'll tell her not to tell anyone.

Facebook isn't in the business of protecting Bob. Facebook is in the business of becoming Alice. Facebook is perfectly content to break Bob's trust because it knows that Bob can't totally run away from it. They're still stuck in the same school together. But, more importantly, Facebook *WANTS* Bob to twist Facebook around and tell it stuff that it'll spread to everyone. And it's fine if Bob stops telling Facebook the most intimate stuff, as long as Bob keeps telling Facebook stuff that it can use to gain social stature.

Why? No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of "free." It's in Facebook's economic interest to force people into being public, even if a few people break up with Facebook in the process.

Perhaps this exploitation of relationships will be what drags the collective consciousness into the crucible.

The shrinking number of active bloggers that once were counted among my unspoken social graph is also evidence of this fatigue. It's hard at times for me to imagine just how many posts I read and wrote during 2006 and 2007. Now I can go for days and weeks without corresponding with these erstwhile net friends, perhaps validating just how easily friendships can dissolve online.

Still, I don't think the friends I made writing here could be discarded purely as shallow. Indeed, the conversations we had online were deeper than what is usually found on a Facebook wall. We were struggling with big questions on our relationships, perhaps things that we weren't ready to share with friends in our real lives. As for me, it was more of a testament about the lack of depth in my real-life friendships, which I let subside horribly during the deterioration of my marriage.

What matters now is that I continue to work on building real life friendships where I can be my authentic self, finally accepting that by living in the real, I must let go of the promise of many for the rewards of deeper, and fewer, friendships.

Late Night Listening XXXVII: Darker Days

One of the things I love about my Friday and Saturday night radio shows is that they introduce me to so many new things. I heard this gem from Widespread Panic on WTTS-FM's Groove Show.

This song does a good job of capturing the mood I've been in since I went back to work. Somber, drained, yet hopeful that lighter days will return.

Dark day program – pen to page
Nothing’s broken – show our age
Feed the flame – tears enrage
Wait till morning to face the day

Now we’re toiling over
Thoughts and mixed emotions
Hard to really see
What’s lying underneath
Like a roller coaster
Up and down just floating
Touch the grass and leaves
Faces in the trees

Kick ‘em over – the darkened days
Tip ‘em over – the darkened days
Door is open – light the way

So what's got me in this funk? I think it's a culmination of many things, some of it is valid concern, part of it is just the pain of going through changes.

The snow and bitter cold has been a drain on my energy, and that's just the start.

In the wee hours of Sunday, Jan 3, we had an outage caused by a runaway process on a key server, which caused a cascade of server failures. My systems engineer, support engineer, and I spent two and a half hours on IM and phone trying to untangle the mess.

I started of the week by working at home. I had my daughters over the weekend, and as Sunday was drawing to a close, my older daughter was starting to look tired and droopy. By the time they got into the tub for bath, she said, "I don't know if I'm going to puke," which is her way of saying, "Get met to the toilet. STAT!" She got sick two or three times before the night was over.

STBX's first day at her new job was on Monday, and she had no place for the kids to stay with the older daughter being sick, so upon learning the the older daughter had gotten sick, she asked me whether I would be able to work from home. Since the meetings I had on my plate could be done by phone, I agreed to do so. The girls stayed an extra night, and they enjoyed having an extra dash of daddy time before they went back to school.

STBX's schedule is going to be variable these first couple of weeks because she's still in training, but once things settle down, she will be working three days a week with 12-shifts. One of those days will be on the weekend, which will coincide with when I will have the girls.

I came back to work having to deal with the president in a tizzy similar to that meltdown back in November. She was bent out of shape by problems that were being encountered by the three biggest customers, and she had a list of things in mind that she wanted fixed.

She tried to blunt the criticism that this was falling back into the trap of wasting development resources to mollify complaints of a few customers by making the hand-waving argument that if these customers are running into it, then other customers are, which isn't really the case.

There was a meeting of with members of the client services on these issues. Prior to the meeting, I asked for the raw data upon which the complaints had been based along with some narratives on the genesis of the problems. What emerged was a picture of scattered data points and bad analysis.

The more I work with the president, the more I am reminded of Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, who had the unique capacity for drawing the least reasonable conclusions given a set of facts (c.f. Master Shake's analytical capabilities in Bus of the Undead).

My team wasn't happy because the technical solutions were being formulated and presented to us without our input, which was different from what we had done in the past, where we were given a description of what problems we were trying to solve, and then our team determined the technology to address the needs.

During the meeting, I worked to point out in places where the customer's complaints were caused by the inability to properly set up and manage customer expectations. When we brought on these larger customers, there was no agreement with the clients on what metrics would be used to determine success, and so we had fallen into a trap where our good standing with the client was imperiled by whatever measure they chose to focus on for the moment, an that was definitely happening in each case.

We managed to eliminate many of the proposed solutions, but the president was adamant that we didn't have enough time to do an analytic approach, modifying individual parameters and waiting to see if they had the expected effect. She wanted to make all the changes and right away. My counterargument to that was that by making all of the changes, we stood to gain little knowledge regardless of success or failure. She refused to budge. We have a project planning meeting Monday afternoon where we're supposed to start drawing up the to-do list for the next few weeks. I suspect this will be a doozy as well.

If there is any hope in all of this, it's that the VP we hired at the beginning of December has been gathering hard data and is starting to see the processes, or lack thereof, that wind up hurting us. Our department has been very open to providing him with cost data on our production environment and advocating areas where we saw opportunities for improvement through automation. From his preliminary findings, it looks like he could succeed in making the president aware of the true costs of perpetual fire fighting.

Some other things that have been going on... Been working my way through another round of resumes submitted via online ads and a posting the CEO put on a business networking site. We've also got a big management strategic planning meeting coming up that will take up the time of all department heads for two full days.

Changes on the personal front with respect to STBX's new job include me getting up really early one day a week to get the daughters ready for the school bus and preschool. My nights out remain unchanged, but on Wednesdays I have to pick up the kids from SBTX's friend, whom we're paying to watch the kids. The cost of that has been something of a stressor for me, but STBX's insurance is much cheaper than mine, so she will be putting the kids on her plan. All in all, I suspect it will balance itself out, but there's a part of me that's worried about making all the ends meet.

2am... Back from Fountain Square

Made it home from the music venue safe and sound. Last alcohol was consumed at 10 pm, so I was not even so much as buzzing after the Born Again Floozies finished up their last number.

All in all, it was quite a night. For a mere $15 + small convenience fee, I saw four local acts made up of some of the city's most talented and creative musicians. I wound up buying some CDs from the merchandise table. I'm glad I pushed myself into going, and I think this will motivate me to get out and see some other local music performances in the year to come.

My only regrets... First was showing up at 8:30ish. I figured that there wouldn't be many people there, but many of the good tables were taken. I wound up sitting towards the back. Second, although I had a great time with the music, the New Year celebration was hard going alone. I felt like the grade school playground again, where I was the odd kid out who didn't really relate to others.

Loneliness anxiety is painful for me. Very painful. I need to dig up my readings on this topic because I am far from transcendence in this area.

By the way, I am logged on Yahoo via login name behavior_unspecified if anyone is on IM.

Late Night Listening XXXVI: I Went out Tonight Edition

The year, and arguably a decade, now come to a close. Three and a half years have passed since the events leading to this blog took place. I can't see myself ever wanting to return to that life. Yet, the last year or so has felt like a wandering in the wilderness, a time to shake out the remains of an life before moving on to Canaan.

I have visions of what a life after marriage looks like, but I have struggled with the inertia of making it a reality. Maybe there is a part of me that feels guilty for wanting these things. Or perhaps it is fear that some unexpected negative karmatic event will visit itself upon my life, making it impossible to get where I hope to go.

Indeed I have seen shades of such things in the past year or so. STBX's extended unemployment. The major breakdown of her van. My dad's hospitalization and his further deterioration of health.

I have not come to terms with Loss. This is an awareness that I have gained in recent days. I reflect on past experiences... unreliable parents, untimely deaths of relatives during times of celebration. I think the message I have submliminally garnered from these things is that there is no joy in life that could be so utterly destroyed by an indifferent, or even sadistic, divinity.

I keep the feelings of hurt buried well, but sometimes they come back to haunt me. Sometimes it is late at night when I am alone. Sometimes it happens when I see narratives of others' losses, even in cartoons like Up and The Pricess and the Frog. My daughters must think I'm nuts for bursting out in tears.

It's during these dark moments when I realize that my attachment to this world is tenuous, driven not by love for this world, but rather the sobering awareness that I have commitments to fulfill before my time here is through.

And so I bide my time here, ensuring that my children do not do without a father in their lives. Getting lost in the Flow of work helps me to escape this sorrow temporarily. Indeed the lost self awareness is the closest I can come to resolving the Absurdist Dilemma.

I cannot work through this stagnation alone. I need to reconnect with a greater community, someplace I can feel welcome. I don't know where that is, but I know that I cannot find it by staying at home. I need to accept that Loss will come again, and that the avoiding the pain by avoiding life will mean that I have no life.

To this end, I am forcing myself to go out tonight to a music venue I have never been to. To the best of my knowledge, I will know no one. The self consciousness has been weighing on me. Can I be happy in being alone in a crowd of many? Can I open myself to the possibility of meeting someone new, without indifference to the possibility of rejection? Can I be brave enough to be who I am regardless? It is a raw test of differentiation, self soothing in the face of projected exclusion.

I will go, and I will be.

Late Night Listening XXXV: First Day of Winter Edition

I don't think there has been a time in my life where this song has been more relevant than now.



The past month has been rough for me. Shorter days and colder weather usually don't help my spirits, but this year I couldn't even bring myself to listen to anything remotely Christmas themed until today, when I finally tuned in to the XM Pops channel to listen to chorales.

I don't think I'm turning into a Scrooge. I make a distinction between that spirit which is pure and good and rightly represents the season and the commercialism and the compulsion that drives peoples to misery in the quest of doing things that are believed to keep others happy.

I was generous with gifts to my employees, and I took them out for lunch on the day of the final release. I have been active in selecting and purchasing gifts for the kids. I have donated freely to charities, and I've even tried to set a good example for my daughters, teaching them to put money in the bell ringers' kettles.

I know that workaholism has been a recurring theme in posts here, but my funk isn't really a work/life balance problem. It's more like an everything else/me balance issue. I've been spending way too much time handling requests from others that I've neglected to tend to my own needs.

The condition of my house had deteriorated into an embarrassing mess over the past month. The family room had been cluttered with the girls' toys and art supplies. My kitchen table once again reached critical mass with bills and junk mail. I was behind on laundry, and nary a dish was clean. I hit rock bottom this past weekend and finally rolled up my sleeves, getting the house straightened up. The bathroom could use some work, and I still have an unruly pile of note pads from work, but the day-to-day stuff is caught up once again.

On the work front, we had a development cycle that ran between Thanksgiving and the middle of last week. As sometimes happens, some items required way more work than what was anticipated. There were even a couple of things that we hadn't anticipated working on. There was a lot of client side work, too, so I had to step up and code some JavaScript. There were even a couple of Bozo items that came up from some of our high maintenance clients.

The last two releases involved going into overtime with test completion times in the late evening. Just about four hours before the first release, our hosting provider had a power issue that wound up taking out 3/8 of our server capacity for a couple hours. The other release had to be delayed by a day to make sure that must have features were implemented.

On top of this, I was busy trying to find a new developer. After revisiting the resume pile, I picked out five candidates for consideration. One of the interviews lasted a mere six minutes because they weren't aware we were a Linux shop and they had no desire to learn that. The other four made it to the point where they got the mini project assignment. One of them didn't submit a response. The other three had problems serious enough that I sent them rejection letters.

On the personal front, my daughters and I attended the wedding and reception for my cousin whose mother is the aunt with whom I've had issues in the past. I really didn't want to go because it was back in my hometown, and I feared that I'd have to face and talk to people about my situation. In a small town like that, there isn't much respect for boundaries. Fortunately, most of the people there I didn't know, so I was able to remain in obscurity.

STBX asked me to work from home on the 11th because our younger daughter had a fever, so she couldn't go to her sitter. STBX had a full calendar that day, complete with a test for the secretary training course she had been taking and driving her mother up to a clinic to see a doctor. The doctor's visit ran way over, and her mom got sick on some medicine that she had taken, so I wound up staying late with the kids, missing the company Christmas party.

Then on the 16th, she asked me to take the day off to take the younger daughter to the pre-school co-op for her last day of school there. After about a month of elevated drama, STBX decided she couldn't take it anymore. The school's finances are a mess, and the executive director has been trying to pin the blame on STBX's close friend, who served as the co-op president the previous year and as treasurer the year before. They submitted complaints to the county prosecutor, who looked at the claims and decided there wasn't enough evidence to file charges.

When STBX found out what all had been going on, she was livid, so much so that she stopped taking our younger daughter to class. On some days, the younger daughter didn't go at all. On others, she was taken by the sitter.

It suffices to say that my day at the co-op was awkward. One of the mothers asked me whether there was anything they could do to change our minds. I said that I wasn't sure about the circumstances of the withdrawal and that I only wrote the tuition checks. My younger daughter volunteered during circle time that she was going to a different school after this.

The irony of all of this is that the co-op had been a social underpinning for STBX. For the past four years, she had been on the board, chaired fund raising efforts, had served as president, and had baked countless items. One of the things that had weighed on my reluctance to push forward with the divorce was that I didn't want her to have to pull the younger daughter out of school because she would have a full-time job. But now, it is a moot point.

I am still struggling with isolation. There's a part of me that wants to get out and connect with others, yet there is inertia. There are feelings of guilt that I can't quite explain other than I feel like it's wrong for me to have fun before I'm fully divorced, so I am stuck in limbo.

I have been listening to some local programs that promote local music acts, and I caught word of a parody lounge act that was going to be backed by a big band orchestra for a Christmas show at a popular jazz venue. I wanted to go badly, but I couldn't bring myself to go alone.

I ran a "strictly platonic" ad on CL a week prior to the show to see if anyone wanted to go along. I got one reply from a woman from the northern part of the state whose life I would find was rife with drama and lacking in reliable transportation. Another was from someone who planned to go to the show and said I should go alone regardless. On Friday, when I had resigned myself to going alone, I found that all seats were sold out for both shows.

If there is any consolation from this experience, it is that I will get another chance to see the lounge act, sans big band, on New Year's Eve at a great place on my side of town. So I've committed to that night by purchasing a ticket up front. At least I can take comfort in knowing that I won't be spending my New Year's Eve in isolation.

Three years ago, I used the phoenix as a metaphor for the self dissolution that I was undergoing in the big job search of 2006-7 and the collapse of my marriage. The phoenix certainly rose from the ashes on the career front, but my social life still lies dormant. The hiatus is taking a toll on my spirit, and I fear that if I don't take decisive action to break through this year, I may not be able to recover. My gut is that I'm going to have to build a social graph from scratch.

Just as a Scrabble player whose current set of tiles allows no useful word combination, I must cast them back and draw anew if I am to make progress.

Thoughts on Thanksgiving 2009

Saw this e-card in referenced in an e-mail newsletter today. I couldn't help but laugh and share the sentiment.



Before I descend into the navel gazing stuff, I want to offer up a list of things for which I am thankful this year:

• My older daughter has had a good transition to grade school and finds joy in learning from a teacher she loves.


• Both of my daughters find so much joy in being creative.


• My dog of eight years is still as healthy and happy as ever.


• I received a promotion that has given me a chance to grow and provide better for my daughters.


• My department has continued to do so well in getting projects done on time with high quality code.


• I have public transportation nearby that can get me to work.


• The DJs of WTTS-FM have helped me keep my sanity, especially Todd Berryman and Brad Holtz.


• Amazon MP3, for making it so easy to locate and purchase music that I hear on my satellite radio.


• The Mozilla Foundation, Yahoo, and Google, for providing tools that make web development fun.


• Web comics like Basic Instructions, xkcd, and Dinosaur Comics, for giving me reasons to smile.


• For a number of friends, who shall remain anonymous, who have helped put smiles on my face.

As I did last year, I took a trip up to the north burbs to visit with my brother and his family. I wasn't all that enthusiastic about going.

I can't seem to get past this mental energy barrier that makes the thought of any family gathering extremely painful. It's not that I dislike my relatives, but there are some things about their behavior patterns that make interaction as grating as it is predictable, especially my mother and my aunt. Add to that the continuing cloud of my marital breakdown, and there's not a lot to get excited about.

Fortunately, so much of the conversation centered around my cousin's wedding next weekend that some of the old patterns were disrupted for this year. My aunt didn't seem to be as ready to rehash the old stories about my behavior as a two year-old for the umpteenth time. My mom wasn't ranting about how biased the Peacock Network's commentators are against the collegiate football team of Universitas Dominae Nostrae a Lacu and whether they should fire the coach.

Still, after everyone had left, my sister-in-law tried to get me to talk about the divorce, wondering where things stood. I gave some basic information... we were still technically married... we'd be filing in the new year... STBX is taking a unit secretary class... we were still civil.

She asked me if I had done any dating and whether anyone had tried to fix me up with someone. I told her that I hadn't and that I had intentionally stayed off of the social networks because I am not ready to reconnect with old acquaintances. I'm pretty sure that if I did have a profile, it would show my status as "It's Complicated". Moreover, I don't think I would respond well to one of those retrosexual, "You know, I had a thing for you way back when... but I never said anything about it."

I think she's still very curious about why the marriage broke down. I have been very quiet on the events leading up to it. Last year she told me that my mother had speculated about the sexual orientation of STBX, so I can only imagine what sorts of narratives that they have constructed since then.

My daughters are staying with me tonight because I have the day off tomorrow, and STBX has to get up early for her class. I'm not sure what we'll do. I've thought about taking them to the light ceremony show downtown tomorrow evening, but it's supposed to be cold and yucky, and for the most part they would be cooped up in my office until it was time for the lights to be switched on, so we might have a movie night instead. Once they are a bit bigger, I'd love to take them to see that show.

There has been less tension with my team than there was a few weeks ago. We managed to get commitments worked out for the "clean up" development cycle, and out of that came the fulfillment of all but the dumbest requests. Still, there are times when my employees express concern about where the company is headed. One thing that left the team rankled was that in lieu of our standard company meeting, where there is a recap of goals and how we met them, the President decided to make it a form of a quiz show, with questions created by managers based on things that their departments did for the month of October.

My boss has assured me that we as a company will dig deeper into that question at the beginning of the year when we do a strategic planning session. The CEO is very interested in opening up the architecture so that third parties can develop widgets and apps that integrate with the application. The President is fixated on totally revamping the system that is used to adjust the look and feel of content pages.

Nov. 17 was an awful day for the systems engineer and I as we had the worst outage that we've ever seen in our collective experiences. He was careless with the management of directories checked out under revision control. Instead of using the appropriate deletion command and committing the change, he used a standard file system command to delete the files. When he updated with the repository, the obsolete files were restored and pushed into production, causing a failure in our caching and bringing the application to a cascading failure. After getting things fixed, we had a long post mortem and worked on some systems and code level changes to keep that component from being a single point of failure.

The past couple of weeks have included budgeting meetings, and I have seen some tension between the CEO and the President there as well. The CEO, noting that we are getting a total of a million in funding from a state-sponsored fund, said we should aim for the fences and try to grow aggressively. The President is fixated on the goal of being in the black, which was a goal that we missed in November. I don't know all the details of why we missed that, but I suspect that it was because we hired on some new people in the customer service end of things.

At this time, my department will likely get everything I requested, which included big increases for professional development and reference materials. But I've also heard that some departments will get much less than what they requested because they asked for some pretty ungodly increases in their budgets.

The President floated an idea suggested by the company's advisory board -- eliminating salary increases for the entire year, replacing it with a company wide collective bonus based on whether the company met its targets, to be awarded at the end of the year. Given that none of the other departments meet their targets, or do so in a way that is laden with asterisks, I wasn't about to buy into this. I told them that moving the goalposts out from under my team when they have been working under a different compensation reward system would most likely motivate them to look for employment elsewhere.

On the recruiting front, we interviewed someone on site a couple weeks ago, and decided that there were enough red flags to not extend him an offer. I phone interviewed a couple of others who have proved to be promising, but one of them gave up on the sample code exercise when he couldn't get the software working on his computer. The other submitted a good result, so we will probably bring him in either next week or the week thereafter.

Another amusing item from the marketing end of things... Our marketing team decided it wanted to revive dead leads for whom we had offered a price quote. The package essentially offered twice the amount of priced units for the original price quote. All I could think of was some annoying informercial guy screaming, "Check this out! Well give you more of what you didn't want at the price you weren't willing to pay!"

Word came to me late last week that upper management was in the process of putting together an offer to a guy for a VP of Ops. According to the President, he was working for another start up in town that was crumbling because of a bad funding plan, and they saw a real opportunity by "scooping him up."

Never mind that they bypassed the rest of the company's managers in vetting him through a formal interview process. My guess is that this guy is connected in some sense and had the job handed to him. As someone who had to interview and earn jobs without the convenience of connections, I can't imagine just getting a job handed to me, much less feeling good about getting a job like that. Since this role currently doesn't exist within our organization, it's not clear what the org chart will look like this. I did some Google stalking and found out he was not technical, so I hope he won't have jurisdiction over our department.

On a completely unrelated note, I got a promotion from my cell phone carrier for an early upgrade, and being a fan of Do-No-Evil, I am falling prey to the siren song of getting a Droid.

Late Night Listening XXXIV: Of Boiling Points and Breakdowns

Before I do the big information dump, let's pull out something out of the ordinary. I heard this unlikely cover on WTTS-FM's Over Easy a month or so ago. I was reminded of it last week while listening to a WICR-FM's Have You Heard?, where they had Sean Baker, a local jazz musician talking about vocal groups, and he brought up his soft spot for the Andrews Sisters.

Heart Of Glass - The Puppini S...

Yeah, I'm a sucker for those harmonies, too. :-)

The last few weeks haven't been very easy on me.

On the work front, my team and I spent most of October working furiously on the last phase of a larger project that has consumed most of our development time since I took over the helm of my department.

It all started last summer when one of our sales reps got in touch with the purveyor of aftermarket vehicle accessories. This guy had a vision for using our application in ways we hadn't envisioned, and scale of some of the usage requirements would tax both the user interface and the back end so heavily that it would surely break both.

The development roadmap was rapidly shifted toward meeting these goals. What we envisioned at the beginning wound up being much of what we implemented, save for one administrative interface and one standard user interface item. We swapped those out for a couple of additional changes requested by the customer, so things balanced out.

The good news is that we met the letter of our commitments to upper management, so we were able to collect on a bonus funded out of money that had been budgeted originally for the employee we let go in early Sept. That money will be coming our way later this month.

The bad news is that one of the changes we made removed a feature that we warned management would go away, and it was explicitly listed in our work items, but the client management person who is the point person with our demanding customer didn't communicate this to him, so he wasn't happy.

Moreover, despite my advice to the President that she needed to communicate this change to Sales in advance, she chose not to follow through with this, so the sales team continued to plug this feature in their demos right up through the day of its removal.

Pile on top of that various observations and complaints for customers to a dysfunctional client management team that doesn't know how to manage such situations effectively, and all of the sudden our department was under pressure from upper management to restore the old feature.

It suffices to say that my team was not happy with this. I pushed back and negotiated a compromise. The old feature would remain dead, but we would extend an existing feature, currently available only to administrator roles, to regular roles but limited to viewing things rather than having the ability to make changes that administrators could.

Of itself, that exchange wasn't awful, but a number of other events started to strain my relationship with the President. We have a standing brief 1:1 status meeting in the afternoon. Normally it's small administrative items that can be taken care of in short order. A new pattern started to emerge last week, where she started to ask me about changes to the application and whether we could fit them in before taking on the next big project.

For about a year and a half, our department has used a project management style that has proven to be very effective. We let management set strategic priorities from an ongoing wish list, and we gradually work down that list developing concrete lists of work items and time commitments. We also have a shorter term planning process that lets us respond to tactical issues, like bugs.

For the most part, we hit our targets, and the execution is the envy of other departments in the organization. Some of the departments have established "cargo cult" style practices that emulate what we're doing but they lack some key ingredients -- one is they don't make actionable commitments, and the second is that there is no accountability for failure to meet them.

Anyway, the nature of the requests from the President started to look like ways to circumvent that process because they asked for specific things rather than asking us to solve classes of problems. Almost all of the requests were specific to either a single customer or a small group of customers. At least two of them were driven either by personal connections between the President and the client. She also seemed to be pushing for commitments to resolve them without me discussing the details with my team.

After about five days of this, my team was starting to wonder what the deal was with upper management. Were they abandoning longer term roadmap items for revenue chasing one-offs? Two of my three charges were seriously concerned about the future of the company because they had seen similar patterns in prior jobs and weren't happy about it.

On Wednesday this past week, I met with the President and had a long talk about what I was seeing, offering a willingness to work with her to meet company goals but needing a better sense that these smaller items were going to be addressed through our usual procedures, which ensure accountability on both sides. It was a useful discussion, and I got in writing a concrete plan for dealing with both the short term issues that had been occupying her as well as the need for longer term vision.

The week ended with a timetable for getting these things straightened out, which left both my team and I in a better emotional state.

Another recurring battle I have been dealing with is the influence of consultants who claim to know how to get search engine rankings. This is field that is rife with poseurs, hacks, and quacks. Advice is dispensed with handwaving and minimal statistical backing, sometimes justified by claims that they got high rankings for their clients. Most of these people have no background in computer science, let alone understanding of network protocols and indexing algorithms.

My employer has been very concerned with how consultants view our application, be it as something that is of no use to them or as a direct competitor. Nonetheless, local and national consultants both have weighed in and given bad advice with authoritative voices. As a result, I've spent more time than what I would have liked researching claims and determining their credibility.

It's gotten to the point where I think we need to invest resources on our own independent research using controlled experiments. Much of the more exotic advice we have received would require major application modifications, and if the techniques were later ruled as disreputable by the search engines, all that work would have been for naught.

I've also decided that my next dream job would be to go work for the spam detection folks at Do No Evil and work to ferret out the shady tactics these guys ply and destroy them, but that's just my Aspiness showing through.

Job applications have started to come in over the past month, and I've been doing phone interviews. The quality of developers around here is really hit-and-miss. Out of four candidates, there has been only one which has been worth bringing in on site. (side note to Drunken Housewife: I suspect that I might be just as picky as Sober Husband about screening, which could make this painful)

STBX started a six-week Unit Secretary training class with a local hospital a couple weeks ago. The hope is that this will help her get hired on there, but there is no guarantee of employment, and the cost of the training is being paid entirely by her.

On the kids front, our older daughter is doing well in school. Some days she has problems with some homework items if the task is unfamiliar, but once she gets familiar she does really well. She is really into writing. This weekend, she has been working a composition about what Thanksgiving foods she likes.

I took off early on the Friday before Halloween to attend both kids' Halloween parties. Their trick-or-treat choices for the older and younger daughter were Batgirl and Daphne from Scooby Doo respectively.

This morning, I took the girls up to a dinner theater on the northwest side of town for a children's performance of Jack and the Beanstalk. One of the preschool moms works at the theater and arranged for a good discount on admission. They both loved the watching the show, and they got to get the cast's autographs afterward.

Had a bit of a scare earlier this past week with my car. I drove out on Monday evening to get something from the grocery, and my car started running really rough, so badly I feared that I wouldn't make it home. I took it to the mechanic, and it turned out to be ignition issues. I needed a new coil and new plugs. I also had them fix a slow coolant leak I had been deferring for several months. It turned out to be a bad hose. Set me back about $480, but the car is really running well now.

To speak to Anais' recurring question on my sex life. I'm still keeping a low profile on such things until we get the divorce taken care of, modulo a few encounters of the type described by ChelseaGirl, which happened back in early February (blushes).

I've been dealing the lack of touch by getting massages, which have become much more affordable with my increased income. That's been especially helpful in dealing with the stress, but it doesn't entirely address the loneliness anxiety that crops up from time to time.

I also wanted to thank everyone who commented on my post about the "I would be honored to be your first" woman. It was good to get some other perspectives and finally get that whole story out there. It's a secret I had carried around in my mind for some time. Bonus points go to Desmond for pointing out that the song is a cover.

Speaking of secrets, I was amused by a post from Tech Crunch a few weeks back. There is now a microblogging site for people to post about their relationships. The site's tag line pretty much sums up the nature of the Diggersphere -- "It stays between us (and the web)." :-)