| Updated: 7/25/02; 2:34:37 PM. |
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gRadio on http all this and a cuppa... |
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 Friday, April 19, 2002
The wrath of Mom...
Another ugly lesson learned the hard way. I had installed Fink and a few other packages. I decided to upgrade them before heading home this evening. Stupid boy. I forgot to use the "-y" switch, so I had to babysit it while the entire process dragged on. When I had first installed everything, it was done in a little over an hour or so. Installing over existing stuff takes much longer... I willl now go home and face the wrath of SHE, who has had a long week already. 11:42:20 PM [] blah blah blah'd on this
Fallingwater not falling so much, anymore
I have visited Fallingwater, and it was truly a magical experience. It feels like no other house, flaws and all. The degree of detail throughout the home is spectacular. SHE particularly liked the upstairs bath, with the walls covered in cork (waterproof and sound deadening) and the showerhead the size of a dinner plate coming out of the ceiling, rather than the wall. It would be like standing in the rain in there... 04/19/02 20:42 CEST. startribune: fallingwater gets a boost. okay, i've got a dumb question. if it's an 'architectural masterpiece', and has been structurally unsound since built ... well then ... now, i don't argue it's eye candy. but my peeve with some architects is, often they build for plans and posterity, not for real-world usage. garrett may be forgetting that the best practices of using reinforced concrete were still rather crude at the time (or may not have been well known to that work crew in Western PA). There may be some problems with architects, but the folks building things may also have quite a bit of the blame to share. Any design can be wrecked by shoddy workers who don't care about the quality of their work. 3:10:52 PM [] blah blah blah'd on this [ blinked via dangerousmeta! ]
US$0.02 on quality and consultants... Cathy Frampton asked McGee "Why are workers averse to 'labels' on initiatives? They cringe at 'quality' or 'knowledge'." To which Jim responded" ... people hate labels because they've been victims of too many programs-du-jour foisted on them by consultants or others with an agenda to peddle. Almost all of these 'labelled' programs boil down to something being done to you because someone else thinks it's good for you. People on organizations are remarkably adept observers of what's really going on. They have Hemingway's crap-detectors working at full capacity the minute they hit the front door in the morning. Consultants are often brought in for a few reasons, because they:
The historical problem with most quality initiatives as attempted in the US has been a series of failures to see the systemic aspect of the initiative. Many US corporations tried a piecemeal approach to TQM, for instance, instituting only certain aspects or certain behaviors -- which is precisely why the efforts failed. TQM is a systematic, systemic constant process, not a procedure, and requires a severe shift in every aspect of the corporate culture and behaviors. At all levels of the company. ISO-900x as often practiced here in the US means that your work processes are well-documented, so that fingers can be quickly pointed. You can still be churning out the same old pieces of crap you did before you were so well documented, as the documentation doesn't necessarily improve the quality of the results. But at least you've got quite a few trees worth of of documents and work flow that explain how that piece of crap rolled out. Because many workers (and managers) were never well-trained in the underlying philosophies of the quality effort du jour, they often fail to see the gaps in the implementations, or lack the power to enact change to correct the gaps, and therefore the effort will usually fail. Having survived a series of these failed attempts, most workers see the next trendy initiative as some form of a make-work exercise, that must be endured until those driving the effort fail politically, and are replaced by the next crop of half-a**ed attempts. 11:27:19 AM [] blah blah blah'd on this [ blinked via Jim McGee: McGee's Musings - TEC924 ]
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