Tales from the jar side: Audiobook adventures, Why bosses are bad, A chess swindle, and a coupon for jarheads
Includes a reference to a Paul McCartney song that is So Bad
Welcome, jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of July 4 - 11, 2021.
If you’re not one already, please consider becoming a jarhead by subscribing to Tales from the jar side using this link:
Lots going on this week, so let’s get to it.
Audiobook Adventures
The powers that be at The Pragmatic Bookshelf were kind enough to let me have the audiobook rights to Help Your Boss Help You. I made a dent in recording that this week.
Last week in preparation I read a book called Audiobook Recording: A Beginner’s Guide to Producing Audiobooks Using Audacity by Krystal Wascher. It’s a decent book, but it had two major advantages for me:
It was part of my Kindle Unlimited subscription, so I could “borrow” it at no cost.
It had advice about using the free, open source Audacity software.
I’ve known about Audacity for years, but never really used it. As with many open source programs, the documentation leaves much to be desired. Still, Audacity has a plugin called ACX Check, which allows you to verify that your recording satisfies the ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange) submission requirements. Amazon owns Audible, and they’re the primary market for audiobooks, so that matters.
As an aside, Audacity became the subject of some controversy this week. The parent company behind Audacity revised its privacy policies in a way that the community hated, claiming it could now be used as spyware. That appears to be a bit of an overreaction (on the Internet? Seriously? What are the odds?), but the open source community has a standard reaction to events like that: they route around it. Several developers have created forks of the Audacity code base and are creating their own versions. I don’t know yet how that will all play out, but I’m keeping an eye on it. The current version of the program doesn’t have the new license issues yet, so I can keep going without worrying about it, but hey, drama on the Internet.
If this all sounds familiar to you, you might recall the same thing happening to the open source Hudson continuous integration (CI) server back in 2011. Hudson was a project that had one developer making over 80% of the commits, and he worked for Oracle. He wanted to move the project to GitHub, which suddenly woke them up. Oracle claimed that because that developer worked for them when the project was founded, the product belonged to them as well. The team said no (in graphic terms), and forked the codebase to create the open source Jenkins server.
(Hudson and Jenkins are both supposed to remind you of English butlers. CI servers do work on your behalf, get it?)
Jenkins is now the dominant CI server in the industry, and nobody uses Hudson at all. Even Oracle eventually said, “well, we don’t care anyway,” and gave the Hudson project to a consortium, which also nobody cares about. See this page for some of the details.
So anyway, I’m still using Audacity on my Mac, even though it makes the fan run constantly and periodically gives me recording errors for no reason. I was seriously afraid I was going to have to set up some highly soundproofed studio, but it turns out that the Rode Podcaster microphone I have is so highly directional that I’m able to satisfy the background noise requirements without a problem.
I ran into several issues, but managed to record a few chapters anyway. If you want to see — I mean, hear — how it’s going, here is a sample. It’s about 90 seconds from the beginning of Chapter 3: Creating Constructive Loyalty.
Good enough, I think. I’m still a bit self-conscious about hearing myself, but not too bad. All I did is removed as many of the “taking a breath” sections as I could, and then used Audacity normalization and other effects to make the overall recording satisfy ACX submission requirements.
So far, so good, but that reminds me that I have a couple of other items about the book.
Bad Bosses, and a Release Date
I published another article on Medium this week, through the Pragmatic Programmers publication. This article is called Why Your Manager Is So Bad.
The idea is that we, as technical people, are normally dealing with the lowest rung of managers, because we’re not in the management hierarchy. That means we encounter managers who are
the least experienced, and/or
the least proficient
at their jobs. Good managers are rare, partly because really good managers either get promoted or are looking for other opportunities to expand their responsibilities. So if you have a good one, enjoy the situation, because it won’t last.
When you combine that the fact we so often deal with rookies or never-will-bes with the requirement that in order to survive managers have to act like they know what they’re doing even when they don’t, it’s no wonder we get a low opinion of management in general.
The article emphasizes understanding those facts, and building a constructive loyalty relationship that gives both sides what they need. See the article for details, as well as a nice side point about impostor syndrome.
The McCartney song I referenced is So Bad, from the 1983 album Pipes of Peace. That’s a seriously deep cut:
Paul singing falsetto is way high. It’s also nice to see him with Linda, and with Ringo on drums. It’s a typical McCartney song from that era — catchy, but almost complete fluff. I remember in those days all I ever really wanted from him each time he released an album was not to embarrass me for being a fan. This song rides the edge, but it’s good ear candy.
Didn’t You Say Something About A Release Date?
Oh, right! It’s tentative, like everything, but according to the printers the physical version of HYBHY will be available on July 21. Yay! Expect some kind of announcement from the Prags around that time. I’m still trying to figure out what to do about a release party, virtual or otherwise, but be sure I’ll mention it here first.
(I already asked my son if he could reunite his rock band, The Tension, for a possible party, but no such luck. Here’s a Spotify link to their awesome album The Rest Can Wait.
Given that the band broke up in 2010, I guess it’s not a big surprise they’re not available, but it was worth asking anyway. I still love that album, and I was there when it was recorded.)
If you go to the bottom of this newsletter, you see I now have a coupon code specifically for jarheads. :)
Chess Adventures
I wasn’t going to talk about this, but a few of my friends knew I was planning to do this, so I thought I’d add a section about it. Feel free to skip it if you like.
(Heck, feel free to skip anything in my newsletter. I still find it gratifying that anybody is reading a company newsletter for a one-person company, which simply talks about whatever I found interesting any given week. Again, thanks to all of you willing to be considered jarheads.)
I mentioned in last week’s newsletter that I’m scheduled to play in the Bradley Open chess tournament on July 16 - 18. At the last minute I also decided to jump into the CCA July Open, an online tournament that was held yesterday, July 10. It was a five-round Swiss System, meaning winners play winners and loser play losers, so hopefully by the end you’re playing others at about your same strength. Like a crazy person, I decided to join the Open division, which included 5 Grandmasters, each rated 2500 and above. In fact, there were 60 players in that division, and my poor 1479 rating put me the 5th lowest, not counting two unrated players at the bottom. The time control was G/40 + 10, which means each side got 40 minutes for the entire game, with a 10 second increment added to your clock after every move. That’s how they were able to fit all five rounds in a single day.
A quick word about chess ratings, for those who don’t know: the goal of the USCF (United States Chess Federation) is for the average of all rated players to be at 1500, which I held exactly back in the 1990s, before my last tournament, which was so bad I dropped to 1479. That was in 1998, and is the last time I played an actual rated game. According to the Wikipedia page on Elo Ratings, a 100 point difference means the higher rated player has a 64% chance of winning, and a 200 point difference gives them a 76% chance of winning. That meant I was likely to be a serious underdog in any game I played.
So why enter the Open division, especially when there was both an under 1900 division and even an under 1500 division? Two reasons:
To make progress I need to beat higher rated players. I feel I’m underrated, so I wanted to take a chance against some good people.
Since I was so much weaker than everyone else, losing every game was expected. If I won even one game, that would count as a win for the tournament.
The real goal was to see if I could handle all that losing, or as I said to my wife, being squished like a grape.
How did I do? Let me put it this way: the average rating of my first four opponents was 1937, which is about 450 points above me. Yikes. My best game was my first one, which I lost, but I was in it the whole time and had a pretty significant advantage for a while that I couldn’t manage to convert. Also, in the last round I played one of the unrated players, whose tentative rating was only about 1100 and shouldn’t have been in that division at all, and I managed to win that one.
In fact, I won one other game, against a player rated 1860, but I have mixed feelings about it. I was outplayed from the beginning, but just before I was ready to resign I saw an opportunity to set a trap for him, and he fell for it.
Here’s the relevant position:
I’m playing White, and I just moved my queen from d3 to e3, setting a trap. It looks like I forgot that my bishop could be taken by Black immediately. As you can see from the arrow, the computer (which I used later) suggests that Black should move the queen to d2 and I’m done for.
Instead, he played Rxe2 (note the ?? in the listing), taking the bishop. That meant I had a simple mate in 3: 27 Qh6+ Kg8, 28 Nxf6+ Kh8, 29 Qxh7 mate.
Here’s the computer analysis of the game, which ranges from -1 for Black winning to +1 for White:
The game was pretty even until the middlegame, at which point Black got a bigger and bigger advantage. Then it shifts completely at the end. That is what is known in chess as a swindle (seriously, that’s a technical term — see this Wikipedia page for details). It’s not unethical or illegal, but it’s hard to feel good about it. Still, a win is a win. I’ll take it.
My conclusions from this tournament:
Yes, I can handle losing, even though I still don’t like it. I managed to hang in there until the end in every game, and in one case that paid off.
I still think I’m underrated, but I’m not 500 freakin’ points underrated. Yeesh, what was I thinking? I just emailed the organizer at the Bradley Open and asked if he could move me from the under 2100 division in that tournament (the highest division I was allowed to enter and where I’m currently rated dead last) to the under 1800 division. I should be a lot more competitive there, as I’d be in about the 25th percentile at the moment.
The online tournament is considered a completely separate rating, so I’m still 1479 until next weekend. The only real danger is that playing chess all weekend is going to make it difficult to for me to get the newsletter out on time, but maybe if I get crushed quickly that won’t be an issue. Silver linings.
For jarheads Only
Subscribers to this newsletter are affectionately known as jarheads, at least until any real life Marine objects, at which point I’ll fold like a cheap suit. But until then, at long last you get a benefit for being a jarhead! I arranged with the people at the Pragmatic Library to create a discount coupon for my book specifically for newsletter subscribers.
If you decide to buy my book Help Your Boss Help You, use the coupon code 7bc968c446 at checkout for a 35% discount. The code is good until the end of September, 2021.
BTW, if you’re not a subscriber and you’re reading this anyway, that’s fine. You get to use the coupon too. :)
(And if you’re an actual Marine, oorah and thank you for your service. Here is a link to the Wounded Warrior Project for those who wish to support those service members who could use a little assistance.)
As a reminder, you can see all my upcoming training courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform here and all the upcoming NFJS Virtual Workshops here.
Last week:
Recording audiobook chapters for HYBHY
Published the Medium article, Why Your Manager Is So Bad.
Got (mostly) squished like a grape in an online chess tournament, but you don’t hear me whining (Ha! A wine pun! Because of the grapes!) about it.
This week:
Managing Your Manager, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform. If they’re nice, I’ll even share the coupon code with them.
Record more chapters for the audiobook version of HYBHY.
I’ll be a guest on the Pragmatic Hero’s Journey podcast. :)