League Of Red-Headed Gentlemen

Well. I'd planned to be more prolific, but ah, well. Anyway, here's an update.

So my boss dropped by my office to encourage me to get more proactive about picking up tickets and working incidents.

Which is fine, and I've been eagle-eyeing the pager and ticket queues for the past two days, waiting for something to pop.


Only, nothing ever does.

I mean, I get all kinds of pages, but that's only because my team is cc'd on all ticket creation messages created by another team for incidents relating strictly to their area of responsibility.

Yestreday afternoon, I asked one of my teammates if I was missing any mailing lists, and there's stuff going on that I'm not aware of. She says, no, not really.

It's just usually pretty quiet.

Meanwhile, my boss also encouraged me to get involved with what my other teammates are working on, and what our peer-teams are working on. Which, again, is fine.

Except that our peer-teams don't communicate for shit. I've been pinging these other teams for two days, in a polite, friendly, way: "Hey, we're really interested in seeing how you guys are using tool foo, which we're thinking of implementing ourselves; when can we get together and chat?" Nothing.

And whenever I go to my teammates to get in on whatever projects are allegedly keeping them busy 25/8 (seriously, supposedly my team is incredibly overworked and understaffed), they always reply that I should focus on the one thing [a particular brand of appserver] and not get all confused by having three or four different things I'm trying to learn. Do one thing quickly and well, rather than four things slowly and poorlly.

Which is fine, except that like I said, there's no WebSphere action right now. I've already done practice installs and configs. I've already read the manuals. And the pager just refuses to blow up with incidents I could troubleshoot and resolve.

Not only that, but I come from a pretty solid generalist background, you know? Environments where I'm expected to have three or four different things going on at the same time. Two or three different operating systems. Multiple hardware platforms. Several different customers each with their own requirements and specifications. A variety of application server platforms.

And incidents every day. Not like this, where it's one customer type, one application server platform, no hardware, no OS, and no incidents to speak of for days at a time.

I'm beginning to wonder if my teammates have some sort of cultural bias against me. Maybe they see me as a "big dumb lazy American, who eats cheeseburgers and watches American Idol all day". Like, they can't trust me with more than one thing at time, and they're trying to gently ease me into the greater challenges of this job.
Which is fine. Seriously. I'm getting paid to learn how to be a better coder. Even if my team is made up of crypto-racists, they're very polite about it. It's more funny than anything, really.

In Brief

It seems to me that one way to understand marriage is as a commitment to solve a particular class of problems.

Perversely, most of these problems don't arise if you don't commit to marriage.

On the other hand, the rewards for solving these problems can be pretty amazing, and you'll never see any of them if you don't commit to marriage.

I may return to this later.

What is your favorite kind of shipping container?

My sister asked me this today.

Here's my answer:

The thing about shipping containers is that they're standardized. They all have to be pretty much identical, in order to take advantage of the infrastructure. The cranes, the railroad cars, the truck trailer chassis, the bays in the container ships, the locking bolts... these all assume containers of specific standard dimensions.

That said, there is some variation in length. There's the current standard 40-foot shipping container. This is the most common type, easily identified by the heavy corner posts with the slots in them for the locking bolts. They are just about exactly as long as the truck trailer chassis they ride on.

Then there's the original standard 20-foot container, dating back to the 70s, when the industry finally settled on the current standards. Most railway cars, trailer chassis, etc. can be adapted to lock onto these shorter boxes.

Then there's the new extended containers. There's actually a lot of these around. These range from 50 to 53 feet or so in length, and are characterized by extensions beyond the 40-foot corner posts. So they're longer than the standard 40-footers, but because their posts are still in the same place, they can lock onto any platform built for 40-foot containers. They can even stack on top of 40-foot containers, which you might see sometimes on a train: A 40-footer on the bed of the car, and then a 50-footer on top of it.

As far as I know, you can't put two 20-footers end-to-end, and pretend they're a 40-footer for the purposes of transportation or stacking. At least, I've never seen it done.

Anyway, since all containers are pretty much the same, my favoritism tends more towards the liveries and provenances of the various shipping companies.

Pacer Stacktrain uses a lot of extended (50+ foot) containers, and they have a striking dark blue color scheme, with bright orange corner posts. Also, their name evokes the early days of containerization--stacking pre-loaded boxes on flatbeds, instead of paying stevodores union wages to move your cargo in and out of boxcars.

Then there's Matson. White containers, with the name in blue. Matson was founded by the guy who came up with the whole container idea, back in the 50s, and still bears his name. Maersk, with the seven-pointed star logo, is another old name, the first shipping company to invest big in containerization on the west coast. Their contribution to west coast shipping infrastructure paved the way for the big asian shipping companies that dominate the industry today.

There's Evergreen (green containers, natch), a big shipper out of Taiwan. China Shipping (teal containers with their name in white), headquartered in Shanghai. Hyundai (red, white, and blue colors) is the shipping subsidiary of the giant Korean conglomerate.

Then there's the European companies, whose names evoke their old-world commercial legacy: Hapag-Lloyd, Florens, Hamburg Sud. I almost expect to see a British East India Compay container on the road one of these days.

Then there's the upstarts, like J.B. Hunt. This is a north-american trucking company that specializes in less-than-truckload shipping. Historically they'd use regular trailers to transport a bunch of different shipments to a bunch of different recipients in the same area. But in recent years, they started investing in what I call "fake-tainers". These are container-style boxes, that can fit onto chassis and train cars. But since J.B. Hunt isn't planning on stacking them six high on a container ship bound for another continent they've economized on the materials. Their fake-tainers have lighter sidewalls, and can only be stacked two or three high, rather than the standard six. This allows Hunt to easily transfer a trailer to a containerized train for cheap cross-country transport, and then back to a truck chassis for local delivery. And lighter weight means the boxes are cheaper to build and take less gas to haul down the road.

Very recently I've seen Dole fruit company containers. Apparently they're commissioning their own boxes, rigged with refrigeration gear (this is actually a common thing, supported by the standard infrastructure; train cars and ships will have power hookups for refrigerated containers), to make their fruit-distribution operation more efficient.

And twice now, I've seen a container co-branded with the Hub Group (a major North American shipping company--orange with their Hexagon-H logo in white) and the Burlington-NorthernSanta Fe railroad logos. Co-branded containers are very rare, in my experience.

Um. I guess I should say I don't really have a "favorite". But that's not quite true.

Of all the liveries, the shipping company I like best is MOL. Their color is grey, and their logo is a cheerful alligator carrying an MOL shipping container on his shoulder. He has an anchor tattoo on his other shoulder. They're also one of the only Japanese shipping companies I know of. You might be interested (or disturbed) to know that their alligator logo has a substantial cult following. I did not know about this until I poked around on the web to see if they sold t-shirts. I am not the first to have done so, by far. Unfortunately they're in the process of updating their image, switching to a white-and-blue color scheme, and dropping the alligator. So, if you ever see an old-school MOL container on the road, enjoy it while it lasts!

Other things to look for: One company's container on another company's chassis (or a chassis owned by a company that just leases chassis to container companies).

Irrational Exuberance

I know, I know. I was supposed to make an entry yestreday. Ah, well.

Anyway, S and I were thinking about buying a couple big-ticket items. I mean, we keep hearing about how bad the economy is, but so far the downturn doesn't seem to have affected us. Her employer is doing quite well, and I had no trouble at all finding a new job in November. We have money in the bank. We're getting a nice tax return from the feds. We live within our means. So why not buy something nice?

Then I got to thinking.

The other day, our local NPR station did a report on the "rainy day" funds of the various cities in our county. Some cities were down to almost nothing. Some had a healthy reserve. One city had an entire year's operating expenses salted away.

The part of the report that interested me the most was the city council that started preparing for this economic downturn two years ago. At that time, their analysts became concerned about the trends of some early economic indicators. They brought their concerns to the city council, and the council requested a study of the implications. The study recommended that certain steps be taken--mainly, strengthening the city's rainy day fund--to prepare for the possibility of an economic crisis.

And--here's the good part--the city council actually followed the recommendations of their analysts. So now that the crisis is upon them, they have the resources on hand to survive it.

So all that got me thinking. I figure, there's about three things that city council (and their analysts) did right: They saw the early warning signs, they took a good look at what those signs meant, and they responded promptly and responsibly to what they saw.

Now, like I said, the economic downturn hasn't really hurt us.

Yet.

See, I'm thinking there's going to be at least a couple more waves of contraction, before things really start to get better. I see cell phone sales are down, and cell phone manufacturers are reporting losses. This means companies like Qualcomm, that sell goods and services to cell phone manufacturers, are probably going to start reporting losses soon as well. Things like that strike me as warning signs. We could be affected by the next wave, or the wave after that.

Like that city council, I'm thinking maybe now is a good time to take certain steps. Before the crisis hits us. So we'll probably end up postponing any major purchases for a while; build up our rainy day fund instead.

Meanwhile, we'll continue to spend money on the important stuff: family, health, etc. But that new TV? It can wait. The HD cut-over has been postponed until June anyway.

I'll put up a picture to go with this post a little later today.

Container Spotting

Here's the deal: One post a day, with a picture, every day, for the rest of the month. After that, we'll see.

I had planned to make a much bigger introductory post, but like the man says, "life is what happens while you're making other plans". So let me just kick things off by saying containers, right?

And no blog about containers would be complete without that book right there.

The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger

More tomorrow!