Come back Leo, all is forgiven!

You may remember that in February of last year, I did a bit of a post on SAP poster-boy, Leo Apotheker. Most notably, besides his name, I honed in on his speech where he essentially bitch-slapped SAP’s partners.

What I unfortunately didn’t know at the time, which would have made the post a little more titteringly delicious, was that this must have been one of Leo’s first speeches as SAP’s Biggest Wiggest. (I know, I know, it’s his name. It’s making me giddy.)

Well, The Register has now reported that Leo has left SAP. Key phrases include “surprise departure”, “leaving the top job, and the company board”, “immediate” resignation, and “contract not extended by mutual agreement”.

Wonder if the partners Leo slighted had anything to do with it? Hmmmmm.

(ADDITIONAL: ZDNet tells me that Leo had poor “internal staff ratings” , and Bloomberg adds that his “market changer” BusinessByDesign offering (a monthly subscription model that he must have pitched before being made CEO, judging by the timeline) will be implemented “three years later than planned”. I’d also like to think that dissing every partner out there in the marketplace didn’t help.)

If you’ve wandered over here on Wednesday morning, US Eastern time, you’ll also find a post from me up at Novel Spaces. I continue to be awed by the range of experience in the crew and can only manage some small, derivative prose in their presence.

And I’m finishing up the edits for Singapore Sizzle, my new short story to be released by Total-E-Bound in May as part of the “Cougars & Cubs” anthology. With any luck, I’ll have an excerpt up at my website soon.

The other side of the coin

So, last week I tackled the problem of Melbourne Transport as an example of how a lot of government departments take the easy way out of labyrinthine structures that have been patched, broken and re-patched over time. That’s not to say that only government departments face this. I’ve been confronted plenty times by private companies who, instead of using an opportunity to streamline their business, just push it to “the software” to implement.

But, of course, I’m not letting the software companies off the hook either. Going back to Friday’s example, the myki system is “almost three years late and $350 million over budget.”

There aren’t too many industries where you actually get paid MORE if you screw up. Consider a project. You bid for it at, say, $100million for one year’s work. You do the work, you get paid. That’s it, end of story.

BUT….

Consider a project. You bid for it. In the second month, the business decides they need Additional Features A, B and C. You say okay, for an additional $20 million. But, at the end of the year, not only aren’t Features A, B and C in the new system ready, but the new system itself — the core functionality — isn’t ready either. “It’s all your fault,” the software consultancy firm/company tells the customer. “If you didn’t want to shove in extra work (aka “scope creep”), this wouldn’t have happened.”

Now, the company has two choices. It can either tell Software Consulting Company to take a hike … with $120 million down the tube. Or it can grit its teeth and just tell Software Consulting Company to get on with it. And, three years and $350 million later, you still get a half-wonky system.

It’s also a problem of size. There are some very big consultancy companies out there. Are *you* going to tell them to piss off? No. And they know it. So it can actually pay for them to be as inefficient as possible as a way of gouging more money out of the customer. I do believe that’s where all these expensive consultancy “partners” show their true skill — not in technical stuff, but in knowing just how far they can push the customer, how much schmoozing they can do, how many honeyed lies they can tell, so they can squeeze more and more money out of a “fixed-price” contract right up until the moment when it’s about to go sour and — at that point — they deliver The System. Everybody breathes a sigh of relief, the press releases get announced, and the consultancy firm moves into the Maintenance phase of the project to “fix” all the problems they didn’t plan and design properly in the first place (billed on a time & materials’ basis, natch!).

Nice work if you can get it, and about a dozen companies worldwide have it completely sewn up, baby.

HOW do you structure your price plans?

I’ve been following the myki debacle in Melbourne recently via The Age newspaper. According to this article, the introduction of a public transport smart card is “almost three years late and $350 million over budget.” Ouch!

Admittedly, as an IT geek, I have a bias, but let’s take some general principles and see what we find.

Melbourne is divided into zones. Fair enough; most cities in the world with a public transport system have zones. Melbourne also has a system of buses, trains and trams. That’s not too onerous either. There is also a “NightRider” discount service offered only on weekend nights. O-kay. And there are two-hour tickets which are only valid from the next hour from the time you validated your ticket plus 2 hours. (So, it’s always better to validate your ticket at, say, 12:05 than at 11:55.)

Children three and under may travel for free but ONLY if accompanied by a parent or guardian. (How to tell without flashing the kid’s birth certificate, and your own bona fides, at every station booth and inspector along the way?) But, while children 16 years of age and under don’t need a concession card, they’re allowed to travel on a concession fare. If you’re the holder of a Health Care Card, you can travel on concession but your dependents can’t unless they’re 16 or younger. Pensioners can not only travel on a concession but get free travel across two zones but only on a Sunday. If you’re a student … well, let me just quote from the appropriate Metlink page:

16 years and under
If you are a student aged 16 and under (and don’t travel with a Student Pass) you can travel on concession fares. You do not need a concession card.

17 years and over
If you are a student aged 17 and over, you must carry a valid concession card.

Travelling with a student pass
If you are a primary or secondary student travelling with a Victorian Student Pass or Regional Transit Student Pass, you must also have a Victorian Public Transport Student Concession Card with your pass number endorsed on your concession card.  The pass and concession card must be carried at all times when travelling.

If you’re a senior in Victoria, you get a reduced fare for travel in two zones. BUT if you buy 5 Senior tickets in a bundle, you get an added discount. And you get the Sunday pass thing that the pensioners get AND you also get sent two off-peak travel vouchers in the mail each year. And War Veterans/Widows also get concessions but, by this time, I’m starting to get pooped.

Hullo! What’s that? Peak versus off-peak? Oh darn, you had to bring that up, didn’t you? Yes, there peak and off-peak fares, as well as weekly, monthly, and yearly options.

Now, and I’ve only hit the high points here, go code that.

If you get the impression, from reading all the PDFs and FAQs at the Metlink site that the fare structure began quite simply and then just grew like topsy, I don’t think you’d be far wrong.

So, when the opportunity comes up to completely revamp the public transport system of Melbourne, what is more likely to happen? A company gets asked to implement the fee structure as is? Or the business takes the opportunity to cut through all the dead wood, streamline the process and then ask developers to code a sleeker system?

Yep, you guessed it. Any option that involves public money and doesn’t require any business analysis is O-KAY for a government department. After all, it’s only Victorians’ money. We’ve had commuters docked hundreds of dollars and, in the article I link to at the beginning of this ramble, three lucky commuters found AU$167,000 on their smart card (dubbed myki). It’s an ongoing, slow-motion (forgive the pun) trainwreck.

Travelling by public transport is already a hassle. And, in Melbourne, it was quite expensive, considering the number of service cancellations commuters had to put up with. Why not keep the zones, have only two classes of fares (full and concession), say special deals on Sundays and get rid of the rest? Oh, and bring down the average price of a ticket from $10.60 (for a daily ticket across two zones) to, say, $6.00?

I can see transport operators going apoplectic as they read this but, then again, I don’t think public transport should ever be privatised. It really isn’t working that well in Singapore, contrary to the propaganda (more on that in another post). And it doesn’t work well anywhere where a company is forced to run services that run the gamut from sardine to deserted, is penalised for bad service, AND has to make a profit on top of that. Something has to give and it’s usually commuter satisfaction.

So, I’d love to see public transport move back to nationalisation. I consider it a basic and critical service that’s provided to citizens and an especially important one in these times of environmental consciousness. Public transport should be affordable for all, simple to understand and strategic in vision, which means thinking beyond the figures of an annual report. But I fear that would take some real thinking and I doubt most government departments are up to it.

Next week: Lest you think I’m blaming the customer for all ills, tune in on Monday for a walk on the other side.

or Give A Book To Your Romantic Interest Day

I’m a regular reader of Informed Comment, Juan Cole’s blog and, in a post on Monday, he suggested a variation on the Spanish George’s Day that falls on the 23rd of April each year. As Cole puts it:

There is a delightful custom in Barcelona. On April 23, St. George’s Day, men give their girlfriends or wives a rose. And the women give their male beloved a book. The gift of the book is said to have been initiated in 1926 as a commemoration of Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote.

…

Obviously the precise Catalonian custom, however quaint and colorful [sic], is pretty sexist and needs updating … I propose that whoever loves someone else romantically of any sex give the loved one both a book and a rose for George’s Day.

I think that’s a great idea. Already, I buy J books as un-birthday presents. Why not make it a bit more official by having a day dedicated to the giving of books? A kind of bibliophile Valentine? What do you think? In an ideal world, there should be occasions for the giving of both high-quality chocolate and lots and lots of books! If you like the idea, spread the word.

And don’t forget Yuri’s Night on 12 April. It all sounds far away but look! Yikes! February already!

Geeks for a geek industry

Sore point so it’s likely I’ve blogged about this before. Just as you wouldn’t take a person off the street to do surgery, you also shouldn’t take a person off the street to manage, maintain or control an IT project. I was getting used to all the people who wouldn’t know a pre-test loop from a post-test, but didn’t realise how prevalent the issue was till recently.

Picture the scene. A customer has logged an issue. It’s been assigned to an engineer in a different time-zone. Uh-oh, problem due to working hours. Let’s read up on the issue. Hmmmmm. Interesting. Wonder if I could talk the Tech Support Duty Manager into shifting to a local time-zone by appealing to her/his geek-sense?

Gary: Hi, this is Gary, the Duty Manager. (Not his real name.)
Me: Hey Gary. Say, I have a bit of an issue with one of my customers. They’re after a shift to a local engineer due to time-zone issues. I believe they called earlier with that request?
Gary: Yes, I’ve had a look at that but it isn’t a really serious issue. Priority is always given to production crash customers.
Me: Sure, but I think this could be resolved very quickly if we transfer it. See, I think the solution is already waiting and just has to be given to the customer. We could get the issue wrapped up today.
Gary: Really?
Me: Let me explain it to you and maybe you can also sanity-check my thinking?
Gary: Okay.
Me: I’ve been reading the internal notes on this issue and Engineering essentially provides a simple solution. First, they say the solution can come from Technical Support, and not necessarily them.
Gary: Yep, I read that bit too.
Me (going into greater detail but this is essentially the gist of it): Great. Then, they provide a script. If the script produces a particular result at the customer site (which it did last night), Engineering says to back-up the production system and apply that same script to Production. To me, that sounds like we are very close to a solution if only someone from this time-zone could call the customer and talk them through it. What do you think?
Gary: Well, everything you said sounds reasonable but, to be honest, I’m not a technical person so I wouldn’t know.

And BANG! my entire argument went straight out the window. No issue shift. Pissed off customer. Not very delighted customer tech team having to work back late every night. And a pretty incredulous Support liaison (that’s me). Has it fallen this far that a phone call to a decision-making representative of Technical Support — and let me say it again, just in case you didn’t get it the first time … decision-maker in TECHNICAL support — elicits the excuse that that senior decision-maker cannot make the decision because he’s “not technical”? I still, a couple of weeks later, can’t quite come to grips with the fact that making a technical argument to a technical manager on a technical issue won’t work because the manager Doesn’t Understand A Word That I’m Saying!!!!

And this is a technical field I’m supposedly working in? The mind boggles.

Don’t wrinkle your nose like that!

I know what you’re thinking. You’re imagining smooth frankfurter-looking things filled with fish paste. No no no. What I’m suggesting is something a lot more palatable and, according to Best Ever Recipes: Appetisers (published by Hermes House, 2008), is actually Hungarian in origin, so no strange mix of tastes (like sugar in the snag) here. Bear with me.

Fish sausages fall on the piscine food continuum somewhere between fish cakes and fish fingers. They are firmer than cakes but full of herby goodness, unlike fingers. First the recipe plus notes:

375g fish fillets, such as perch, pike, carp or cod, skinned (I used dory)
1 white bread rolling75ml milk
25ml chopped fresh flat leaf parsley (actually, I used a mix — parsley, rosemary, oregano and a bit of dill)
2 eggs, well beaten
50g plain flour
Fresh breadcrumbs (or panko, the delightfully spiky large crumbs from Japan)
Oil
Salt and pepper

1. Mince or process the fish coarsely in a food process or blender. (Just check first to make sure all the bones have been removed.) Soak the roll in the milk for about 10 minutes, then squeeze it out. Mix the fish and bread together before adding the chopped parsley (or herbs), one of the eggs and plenty of seasoning.

2. Using your fingers, shape the fish mixture into 10cm long sausages, making them about 2.5cm thick. (Be careful because they’re very fragile at this stage.) Carefully roll the fish “sausages” in the flour, then in the remaining (beaten) egg and finally in the breadcrumbs.

(Step 2A. Put on a tray and put in the fridge for 30 minutes to firm up the sausages.)

3. Heat the oil in a pan then slowly cook the sausages until golden brown all over. Drain well on crumpled kitchen paper. Garnish with the deep-fried parsley sprigs and lemon wedges dusted with paprika.

Here’s a pic:

You know, people are often a bit apprehensive about cooking fish. And it really isn’t helped by this cookbook. The editor of the book is Christine Ingram and she makes wonderfully affirming statements like:

* “Use this batter … whenever you feel brave enough to fry fish.” (Parmesan fish goujons) WHAT???!!! Brave enough to fry fish? Srsly?

* “If you can’t find Serrano ham, use Italian prosciutto or Portuguese presunto.” (Grilled asparagus with salt-cured ham) Sweetheart, if I can’t find Serrano ham (says Kaz from Johor), chances are I won’t be able to find prosciutto or presunto either, m’kay?

* “... this succulent tapas dish … tastes even better served with some home-made aioli.” (Chicken with lemon and garlic) Pity there’s no recipe for aioli in the entire cookbook then.

* “This is a well-known and much-enjoyed salad, even though its origins are a mystery.” (Caesar salad) A mystery … only if you don’t like food. (Hint: check out Julia Child.)

So, I like the cookbook, but am not too keen on Ms Ingram’s pearls of wisdom. Must be getting cranky in my old age but I hate it when people in authority either don’t do the proper research that is part and parcel of their bloody job or put off enthusiasts/students by making stupid statements. But the fish sausage? She is delicious!

Giving you a break

All I got at the moment are psychological or political analyses and, after Monday’s tasty morsel, that’s probably enough for this week. So, I’m blogging at Novel Spaces today but, because Novel Spaces runs  on American Eastern time, it means you won’t get to see it for hours and hours! 4:15am EST … ish.

Please do get along though because I’m talking about a short story that just got accepted into an anthology. Multicultural as well as something else. Hmmm…… Believe it or not, this is the first short story that I ever purpose-wrote for an anthology so I’m obviously very chuffed (after being obviously very nervous) about it being included, and I hope I’ve piqued your interest enough to make you go blog-hopping.

The link to Novel Spaces is here but remember that it won’t be live for a few hours. In the meantime, why not trawl through previous posts on the site? I’m proud to be part of the NS group. They are all entertaining, knowledgeable people who aren’t afraid to state their opinions up front, and you know how much I admire such people, even if I don’t necessarily agree with them. Long live strong opinions. Long live Novel Spaces. Go have a read and lose yourself in a few other genres at the same time.

Catch you Friday … with a recipe!

All we have to do….

J and I have wonderful breakfast conversations. In fact, we yearn for compatible days off just so we can spend our time yakking over several mugs of tea and coffee. We’ll spend the time before our first meal of the day quickly scouring the ‘tubes for juicy gossip just so we can try to top each other with the most audacious political happenings of the past 24 hours. And they happen far more frequently than you would believe. For my American readers, the two US stand-outs from recent times are Obama’s “war is peace” Nobel peace prize speech (I swear it should be framed. Alternatively, we could put it on infinite loop playback right next to George Orwell’s grave and power an entire town from the energy generated by that poor corpse spinning in his grave. Nyuk nyuk.) and Jimmy Carter’s morally bankrupt repudiation of international justice in his apology to Israel. (I could never figure out why everyone thought he is such a great man; after all, when all’s said and done, he’s nothing more than a politician. Oh well.)

But back to the matter at hand, stalwart reader. How aggressive are humans actually? That was a recent topic. Are we animals that will make war at the drop of a hat, or is there something else involved? How many conflicts have begun, or got a great boost, from a provocation?

Now, neither J nor I are historians by trade, so we don’t presume to have the definitive list, but what we dredged up from memory was still rather interesting.

Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin incident that announced the entry of the USA into the Vietnam War was a lie. The unprovoked torpedo attacks from the North Vietnamese that sparked American retaliation not only never occurred, but the US destroyer Maddox was playing silly buggers in order to provoke things in the first place.

Poland. On 31 August 1939, German SS soldiers set up an attack on one of their own radio stations at the Polish-German border and the Germans broadcast a message, in Polish, urging Poles to kill the Germans who resided in the Silesian region.

Modern Poland. In the 1980s, the government carried out covert actions that were ostensibly anti-Communist (fires, infrastructure vandalism) in order to provoke the Soviet Union into invading and quelling the rising Solidarity movement. Thankfully, this one failed.

Iraq. The US gave the green light to Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait, then used the invasion as the premise to start the first Gulf War.

Malaysia. There is now a book out that says that the infamous May 1969 race riots were actually engineered with the full cooperation of the incumbent government in order to further its own ends.

Indonesia. A different use of provocation, but still…. Military man (and wartime collaborator) Suharto turned a botched coup attempt by an opposing military faction into anti-communist propaganda, initiating a massacre that took the lives of more than half a million communists, sympathisers and (I’m sure) people who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Israel. David Ben-Gurion had a reputation for giving the go-ahead for numerous provocations carried out by Israeli intelligence services throughout Europe against Jews, in order to convince them that Europe was completely anti-Semitic and that the best bet for their future was the new state of Israel.

China. The Marco Polo incident can be seen as deliberate Japanese provocation that essentially began World War Two in Asia in earnest (after some smouldering since the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931). China was to Japan as Poland was to Germany … its liebensraum.

Germany. Hitler. Jews. ’nuff said.

Iran. The Straits of Hormuz incident (2008) was, especially if you view the videos, deliberate provocation on the part of the United States, and not the first either. Here‘s an article from Asia Times that explains the significance of “international waters”, “Iranian inspections”, and so on within the context of the Straits.

There are plenty more examples of both blatant provocation and use of covert action by a government (it doesn’t matter which one, black or white, communist or capitalist, they’re all the same) either against its own citizens or against another country’s citizens in order to further its own ends. In fact, there are so many other examples that you have to wonder if we would have even had the amount of carnage humanity has sustained throughout history if it wasn’t for one small group of people at that time (and they weren’t solely men, so don’t fall into that trap) using spin to advance their aims … and to hell with their fellow human beings.

On the one hand, it makes me feel a bit optimistic because it tells me that, left to our own devices, people have a tendency to just generally want to get along with each other. On the other, it depresses the hell out of me because it also tells me how easily we can be manipulated by people we trust to do what’s best for us.

Something that perked me right up

I just had to share this with you. It appears that a Corporal Willie Apiata was just awarded the Victoria Cross. No problem there. And he’s a member of the SAS. Okay, as much as I ponder the psychological make-up of Special Forces members, no problem there either. There’s even a photo of him, most probably tanked up on adrenalin (the photo was taken just after an urban gun-fight) in Kabul. Again, so what? The kicker comes when you realise he’s part of the Special Forces of … wait for it … New Zealand.

Ah, New Zealand. You were one of the first modern countries to give women the vote (1893). In contrast, Switzerland thought that women were on the level of animals till 1971. And Liechenstein probably considered them less useful than assorted pets till 1984! (Western leadership in human rights. Gotta love it.)

The plucky little country (New Zealand, not Switzerland or Liechenstein) also gave the finger to the United States, disallowing nuclear-powered USA ships from docking at New Zealand ports, causing the USA to suspend ANZUS Treaty obligations to that country around 1987, I think.

Small yet fiercely independent and freethinking, that’s how New Zealand is regarded by others politically, when it’s regarded at all.

How did New Zealand stand on the GWOT (Global War on Terror)? And that Iraq thing? Well, back in 2004, Prime Minister Helen Clark said, according to the official New Zealand government website:

“This government said from the start that New Zealand would be prepared to provide humanitarian and reconstruction assistance [my emphasis --ksa] in Iraq…,” said Helen Clark … [and] … no further deployments of this kind to Iraq were being considered, … [although] New Zealand would consider formal requests from the United Nations for assistance in its headquarters in Iraq.

I single out “humanitarian and reconstruction” because it’s a familiar refrain once we reach Afghanistan. From New Zealand’s Scoop of January 2005:

“Projects to be completed during … [the] … six-month rotation [of NZ Defence Force personnel] will range from engineering projects and school refurbishments, to conducting health programmes in surrounding villages.

Engineering! Schools! Health programmes! So, the whole idea of Kiwi Special Forces (I want to say “men” here but, having spoken to many [EDITED TO ADD: military] people about SAS guys and coming from a military family myself, the only word that comes to mind is “lunatics”) running loose in Afghanistan, all buzzed from killing armed Taliban militants (natch!) is, er, somewhat disconcerting. Actually, for me, rather depressing as well, because I’ve always admired NZ’s purported “independence”. Woe is me for being so damned idealistic. Again.

But, to be honest, this is a song we’ve heard before. Remember August 2002? Then German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder saying that “Germany was not ready for any foreign policy adventures” in Iraq (memory jog here)? Remember the news that subsequently broke about Germany providing intelligence support to the USA in the run-up to that “adventure”? (See Document 42 of the National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 80 here].)

And what about Germany and Afghanistan? I love these official government websites. There is so much ammunition there for the shooting of feet. According to Germany’s own government site:

We have already made great progress since the end of Taliban rule in 2001: more than six million boys and girls are attending a school again [big school --ksa], the economy is growing, and the markets are working; medical care has been vastly improved, and infant mortality has fallen.

Got that warm glow yet? But wait, Germany, what’s for the future?

We shall stay for as long as it takes to ensure that Afghanistan can no longer become a source of danger to us. [I mean, seriously, was Afghanistan -- I mean, frickin' Af-ghan-is-tan -- EVER a threat to Germany? Soccer hooliganism, and bad German wine (*), is more a threat to Germany than a country that is consistently ranked as one of the world's poorest --ksa] That is why the international community is supporting the civil reconstruction process … Germany is particularly heavily involved in the establishment of a civilian police force that works efficiently and enjoys the trust of the Afghan people.

Ah-ha. Got that? “Civil reconstruction process”? Sounds like road-building, doesn’t it? Buses for schools. New light poles. Repaired roads. I sincerely doubt that the “civil reconstruction process” covers raining down bombs on Afghan civilians around fuel trucks resulting in a tremendous firebomb that fried to a crisp one hundred men, women and children, but you’ve got to give the Germans that much. When they commit, they really commit. To his credit, though, German Colonel Georg Klein said he pleaded with the Americans to use “smaller bombs” (on fuel trucks, no less), but you know what those gung-ho ‘mericans are like once they get their gander up? Poor Georg.

And poor German government. How do you describe the flaming napalm-like murder of civilians on your website? “Future clear for two dozen Kunduz children”? “Two hazardous waste containers were neutralised in a joint German-American operation, with the participation of scores of local Afghanis”? “A lake was created in a joint German-American operation that will, in the future, be used for recreational purposes for the communities that live in Kunduz province”?

Germany and New Zealand. Shining lights of strong principles, unfaltering honesty and Western ethics. What would we do without you guys?

(*) I won’t forget a memoir of Mark Twain’s, wherein he remarks that he was grateful for bottle labels during his trip through Germany, because he could thus easily distinguish between their wine and their vinegar. Yes, I’ve drunk German wine. Two words. (The Australians among you will appreciate the reference.) Blue Nun.

I’m pooped.

Work has been intense and I’ve been meaning to turn Fridays into more or less steady recipe days. I have enough recipes — stalwart reader, believe me, I have enough recipes! — but what I don’t have are nice photos to go with said recipes.

So I think I’ll leave my more political posts for the beginning of the week, take a rest and wish all of you a good weekend. Go do something different! I’ll catch you Monday.