NJAS Online Coverage
No posts this week, since I’ll be in Des Moines, Iowa, covering the National Junior Angus Show. This is their version of Live Blogging an event, except with archaic tools and methods. 
Office Space Rears its Ugly Head
Hit the image for a full size view. Inside is an e-mail from the Director of Junior Activities, thanking the ones who helped out. How crass to send a reply e-mail (to all 48 people on the list, no less) with a correction of your name.
I had a hard time resisting the urge to reply, “OMG! Get over yourself!”
A Puzzle, A Lesson
If I can solve the fish problem, why can’t I seem to find a proper solution to this one?
The Photo Department
The Photo department has reached critical mass. After 10 years and 12 TB (yes, I do mean 12 terabytes) of photos, their Mac G5 finder windows will no longer search for photos with ease. Complaints of “spinny beach balls” and a noticeable lag in productivity this past busy season earned them an iMac loaded with Leopard with the idea of dedicating a single machine only to search. The trouble? The poor iMac can’t search photos as fast as their G5s on a bad day. While I predict a small boost in their productivity because their own machines are freed from search queries, it does not solve the problem. They need a long term solution.
Band aids on broken legs
The best possible solution would be a dedicated server with a custom database and a nice interface to spit out the results. Throw in intranet/internet capability and a shopping cart for good measure. Unfortunately, I suspect the budget is not available to address an enterprise-level problem with an enterprise-level solution.
Size that budget down some and I would suggest a contract to develop a Flickr clone built for commercial use. Keep all the perks of Flickr with a shopping cart added. Once the programmers were finished building it, they could sell it to other companies as a white label product where others could install it on their own local intranet or on their own servers. I understand the typical online business model is to sell the service and not the product but many companies would rather own the product than risk becoming dependent on a company that they perceive “could disappear into the night.”
I am resisting the urge to peg them as thinking in the traditional business model types who were burned when the tech bubble burst because it also makes sense from a convenience standpoint. If we simply bought the services we needed instead of buying the product to do the service, we would end up with Flickr to handle photos, Wufoo to build the Contact Us forms, Paypal’s shopping cart to sell our products and Issu to serve our magazine online. These separate services cobbled together would work great for a small business, just not the medium or large ones.
Cut the budget even more, and I would like to see a Mac Pro with 2 Quad Cores, serious RAM and Adobe Lightroom running. The same solution already in place, where a machine is dedicated to searches only, but bulked up beyond the iMac’s abilities.
The last on the list would be a revised work flow and Adobe Lightroom installed on the iMac. Even then, I doubt Lightroom will function. The minimum system requirements are lies. Adobe recommends running Lighroom with 1 GB of RAM, but the forums and my own testing suggest it takes a minimum of 2 GB for it to function on its most basic level without crashing.
I presented my solutions two weeks ago. During our weekly staff meeting it was announced that the Photo Department will be receiving a new Mac Pro with Lightroom to help ease their growing pains. I was unimpressed, since The Higher Ups only approved the minimal budget.
At 2.8 GHz/8 GB RAM on two sets of quad core processors, it’s the minimum specs I recommended just to run Lightroom. The downside is obvious. I predict they will out grow the memory on that computer quickly. The upside is the Mac Pro is configured to grow with them, so they can expand it in the future.
I learned a new lesson on office politics. If you really want to see them on a screaming machine, claim it as the minimum specs. Then declare that no less than a custom-programmed solution costing three times your minimum solution would truly solve the problem. After that, they won’t flinch at the original specs you set up. Too bad I learned it too late.
Jobs and Benefits Revisited
When I first started working here I was astounded by the range of benefits I received. Angus Productions Inc.’s benefits are getting restructured, bit by bit…not sure what the catalyst was for these changes, but the good news is, most of them are getting improvements. Wages might be mum around here, but everyone knows about the benefits, so I’ll share.
Paid time off in the U.S. is a rare commodity and one of the defining perks that keeps me here. Last year, between vacation time, personal time, holidays and free days (if we meet production goals often enough, we get a day off with pay, at random intervals) I took off 33 days during the year. Pretty nice, IMHO.
2 weeks paid vacation still applies. Once you hit your 5 year anniversary, you receive another paid vacation day (11 days off instead of just 10), and these add another vacation day until you reach 3 weeks of vacation.
2 weeks paid personal time off. This is a switch- we lost 3 days, from 13 days of ‘bonus time’ to 10 days of ‘personal time.’ It works better this way, though, because the bonus time was a use it or lose it- 4 hours of time off every two weeks, like clockwork. If you didn’t use it, you were paid for it. If you used more than 4 hours, you had to take docked pay.
Paid holidays. Now eight, instead of seven. The day after Thanksgiving was an unofficial holiday here for several years. It has finally become an official one.
Pension plan? It looks like it has disappeared. Sad, but not unexpected. While it was not formally announced that the pension plan is officially dead, not a word was spoken about it during our last benefits meeting. As far as I can tell, it is being phased out/replaced by a 401(k) with a 2% contribution from the company. Roth 401(k) is also offered. Despite the pension plan disappearing, at least the 401(k) options have opened up. We are now allowed to self-direct funds (still for a ridiculous fee, so I doubt I will choose that route) or choose a limited, pre-set portfolio. Now at least I can invest in an aggressive portfolio, instead of being stuck in with the rest of the conservative funds.
Health Insurance. Still 100% paid by my employer, no changes to it. I doubt they will ever take this benefit away, since it is usually the key benefit that draws people to work here.
Life Insurance. 100% paid by the employer. A $100,000 policy for your first year, until you have a W-2 statement. After that, you are covered 4 times the amount on your W-2 statement or $100,000, whichever is greater.
Dental & Vision Insurance. Still 100% paid by my employer, with a new feature tacked on: 20% discount on all vision-related services and products, through VSP.
Flex Spending Plan. New features- they switched companies, so now we have access to a Flex spending debit card and online account service. Very handy to have.
Casual Dress Code. [Funny but true: among us peons, the level of formality in which a person is dressed is inversely proportional to the money they make. Therefore: well dressed = low paid. It is not a direct relationship, but an interesting observation nonetheless.]
Weekends are free. In the past two years, I have only had to work one mandatory Saturday, and our manager was working right beside us. The nice part about the work weekends are the automatic overtime pay. Even if you didn’t work 40 hours during Monday through Friday, Saturday and Sunday are set at (hourly wage * 1.5) for my pay. Also, if I work more than 8 hours in a single day, it’s calculated as overtime too. So 10 hours on Monday means 2 hours are calculated at overtime rates.
Overtime is optional. It is available at all times, since we are still a nascent department. The best part of having an hourly wage is the ability to control one’s paycheck. I could easily have 80 hours a week, considering the projects we have in queue, but I do not feel the need to burn myself out. Sometimes I work it (I wanted the PS3 and new Ratchet & Clank game so bad!) and other times I don’t.
Something I would like to see in the future is a profit sharing plan, where we have the option to buy into the company. Although I am unsure it is feasible, since we are a for-profit owned by a non-profit. As other companies already know, it would be an indirect method to keeping employees motivated towards improving the business. I don’t claim any familiarity with tax laws, but as long as they are improving everything else, what does it hurt to ask?
Future Projects and the IS Team
As Sale season comes to an end, I’m looking forward to fewer updates and developing some new projects. Last week Web Services (that’s us) had a meeting with Information Services (think of the Apple commercial where PC meets Mac). It was funny, yet nerve-wracking. Here were the desktop programmers, neatly dressed to the nines, with a team of nine people. Here are the web programmers, sloppily dressed in jeans and tees, the motley crew of five. Okay, great, you say, but why was this meeting significant?
These are the keepers of the keys. They clearly outrank us: the technology team from the parent company, who makes the decisions on the hardware and software used on our web servers. To be dramatic: they can help end the suffering and pain we experience on a daily basis when trying to use the outdated administration section in the Angus Journal web site
I have waited two years to hear that bit of good news.
They listened politely, but none looked eager to help with this project. We are not asking them to clean up bad code or ‘unbreak’ the site. We are asking for a new build, from scratch. No easy task considering how much archived information lives in those databases. I can’t blame them for looking unhappy at the prospect, but I am certainly grateful to see we have help.
So many of the departments are fragmented, little factions unwilling to share their information across departments, despite all of them being owned by the same parent company. I hope our two departments can show others how to collaborate and play nice.
