kaiyen: pepper

kaiyen: pepper

the life and times of Allan Chen

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teach me how to fish

Mere moments ago, I was meeting with some of the administration at the business school where I am pursuing my MBA, and found myself stunned by a statement.  For the most part, I am very happy with my education here.  Most of the faculty I’ve had have been very solid to great most of the time, with only a few duds.  However, I was shocked when I was given the “you’re grad students, you should be able to take care of/figure out X yourself” speech when meeting with one of the academic administrative leaders.  I was seeking advice on how to handle something, and was essentially told to handle part of it myself (not all – I’m trying to be accurate in my depiction so that I am not unfair to the person with whom I was meeting)

Don’t get me wrong – I am 100% behind the “teach someone to fish” model of learning.  I want to learn how to do something – management, finance, whatever – so that I can go out and do it myself.  It can be theoretical, but even then I should be able to come away from that with an ability to apply those theories in a meaningful way.  I would never advocate for someone just handing me or any student a finished or nearly-finished idea.  I want to be stimulated, intellectually, and I want my opinions and positions to be questioned, challenged, and refined.

However, there are people that should be helping me along the way – teaching me how to fish.  Those people are the faculty and, in a broader but perhaps even more important sense, the heads of the various academic departments that help define the direction and goals of that set of faculty.  It is their job to challenge me, to make me, as an adult with presumably some degree of intelligence (a sound presumption since I got into the program), support my positions, etc.

Faculty should also care about whether their students are learning.  They should provide counsel and guidance.  Not hand-holding.  Not provision of answers.  But providing guidance is part of their job.  It doesn’t matter how old I am or that I’m a grad student rather than an undergrad (and I think undergrads should be taught to fish, too, for what it’s worth) – it is a terrible, terrible thing to feel that there are faculty and/or academic administrators out there that feel that there are questions we shouldn’t ask because we should already know the answers.  To have our concerns – even the poorly formed ones – be dismissed as part of “something we should already know.”

After all, when do we know when we are asking one of those questions?  How shall we know if we’re pushing back in the right way, to our benefit, if it is suggested that, as an adult, there are some things that we should not question or should just figure out ourselves?

October 21, 2009 Biz School, Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts 0 Read more >

preaching to the choir, making us not want to go to church

I am taking a class right now about developing sustainable products and methods in business.  This goes from management to organizational design.  On the face, it is an extremely interesting topic and I applaud the SCU Business School for having a course dedicated just to this topic.

Unfortunately, it’s a terribly-designed course.

First, while it is a 1 unit course and many students take a few of these just to get an extra unit here or there rather than a full 3 unit class with all the work that entails, I would venture that most students in this class have a pre-existing interest in sustainability.  We were drawn to the course by its title, but the concept of thinking about this topic as we move forward with our careers, etc.  The students in this class are there because we are interested in this topic.

Of course, any course that one takes as an elective is, to some extent, preaching to the choir.  We elect to take the course because the topic interests us, and therefore the professor is telling us stuff we want to hear and with which we largely agree.  Maybe we want to be stimulated about the topic and will put up a bit of an instinctive fight, but I would be shocked if someone took an elective and he or she flat out hated the topic.

However, in this case all the preaching to this particular choir has many of us not wanting to go to church anymore.  It’s not that all the issues about the environment and how companies and organizations and even just people in general aren’t important – of course they are.  And nothing will shake my own personal beliefs about the importance of change today.  But for a 1 unit course, this is making being interested in the environment off-putting, to be honest, and that’s a terrible shame.  I know that there are a billion reasons to care about the environment, and thousands of ways of analyzing a person’s or company’s environmental “footprint.”  But if one tried to assimilate all of those reasons at once, and is then given an assignment that could easily become a dissertation in terms of research and detail, it can kill motivation.  Simply saying “but don’t go into more depth than you have to for the topic” doesn’t counter “contact your vendor, find out what process they use, from where they get their supplies, then contact those suppliers and…”  You get the idea.

There are other aspects of the course that really discourage me, but those are about the professor and I will get to that in one of my reviews later.  But the point is that we’re there to have discussions about what we can do, as humans, as employees at companies, and as ambitious students who are pursuing an MBA and hope to move up in our careers, to develop sustainable methods.  I think we’re there to look at things we can do.  Talking about what a CEO did to change his entire company and then saying that we have to go that deep on our own projects, when most of us are middle-management at best, is ludicrous in my opinion.  It’s like asking a line-level worker to implement Six Sigma.  There has to be buy-in from all levels.

My point, to be clear, is that to basically assault students with this much information, to ask them to analyze everything from 300 different perspectives, to give examples of what we “could” do that potentially involves weeks and weeks of research, for 1 unit and 9 total hours of class time is simply overwhelming.

And one of the last topics about which one should become overwhelmed and perhaps frustrated to this point is the environment.  We are dangerously close to thinking of trying to develop sustainable practices as too hard.

October 17, 2009 Biz School, , 0 Read more >

Starbucks’ Pavlovian training

I recently bought a new coffee mug for use here at work. My other ones, which are great for keeping things piping hot for hours, are all stainless steel on the inside and susceptible to staining. I was therefore hoping for something ceramic which would keep the coffee hot enough for at least a bit longer than Starbucks’ paper cup.

So I bought a mug at Starbucks that looks like…a Starbucks cup. White body, little check boxes on the side for types of coffee, milk, etc, and a cap that even looks just right.

The weird part is that, even though I know this mug sitting on my desk is a travel mug, bought to be reused (obviously), I have this instinct to toss it into the trash. Somehow. Starbucks, through its commoditization of just about every possible coffee & espresso drink and the proliferation of these cups, I have been trained to want to throw this thing away.

It’s kind of sad, really…

October 12, 2009 Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts, 0 Read more >

tree monster




tree monster

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

There is a certain set of developers out there based on the agent pyrogallol – more commonly called “pyro” developers. No, they do not catch fire as a way of creating the image :-).

Along with being incredibly toxic (and absorbed directly through the skin – wear gloves!), they are also staining developers. The idea is that it gives excellent sharpness including sharp grain, but the stain then “fills in” the gaps between the grain. This means a very sharp image, with relatively low grain.

I took this image while walking through Stevens Creek County Park. Tri-X film is especially susceptible to the stain, and I decided to leave the brownish color in the scan.

What impresses me is that there really is a great amount of detail in this image – I think the “tree monster” still shows up quite well despite all the grass, branches, and moss. The tint is possibly a bit gimmicky – I’m not sure yet. It’s more than just doing sepia-toning.

I really do enjoy doing photography while hiking, and taking along a medium format camera, shooting basically with guesswork (sunny-16), is very satisfying even if some of the results aren’t great.

October 10, 2009 Uncategorized 0 Read more >

communicating and miscommunicating

One professional skill that I both value and work hard at improving is effectively communicating with others.  Effective communication skills is one of the most important attributes one must have in order to be an effective manager and leader.  And it is absolutely required should one have ambitions about moving upward through an organization, in my opinion.  Not that being a good communicator is easy, of course.

I work in a tech field, heading up a tech department, but one of my responsibilities, explicitly, is to develop a strategy about providing the tools to help my overall organization do its job more effectively while not overwhelming others with jargon, too much information, or causing general confusion.

This is not an easy task – many times the benefits of some new technology or equipment are the direct result of what that stuff does, yet what it does is complicated or perhaps out of the ordinary for many folks.  I’m not by any means saying that people aren’t able to comprehend these things, it’s just that they aren’t part of their everyday vocabulary.

Sometimes it’s conceptual, too.  For instance, I remember a conversation with my mother quite a few years ago where I talked about how we used a server to do something at work.  Now, technically, any computer running a service of any kind is a server.  So if you take the computer with which you are reading this post right now – desktop, laptop, whatever – and install the right thing on there, it could be a server.  This might be something that turns the computer into an e-mail gateway (what actually sends out e-mails, and to which your client, like Outlook or Thunderbird, connects to get mail), or perhaps something that tracks the statistics for this or that.  If it’s a service, the box is a server.

To my mother, however, a server was a big, loud, heavy duty machine with lots of blinking lights that the “IT people” kept in a secret, separate room.  Of course, there is a reason why she had that perception – services should be run on enterprise-grade hardware, the kind of stuff my mother was accustomed to seeing.  But the point is that she could not separate the two.  It was a paradigm that was already cemented in place.

Well, it’s my job to help translate that.  To find a way to explain the difference to, in this example, my mother, so that she could understand the benefit she received.

At work, that means that I tell others that we’re looking at getting a “big storage system” instead of a SAN or that we’re working on “a way for all of us to take our Word documents, share them, keep them up to date, and get them off of our personal desktops which might break down” rather than “a collaboration suite with document management tools that is network-based for greater and more effective central management.”  The latter example is far less extreme than the first, but there is still a difference.

I like to think that I do a pretty good job at this, but I have run into a couple of recent surprises.

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October 8, 2009 Musings, Rants, and Random Thoughts 0 Read more >

helicopter trails




helicopter trails

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

One of the wonderful things about film photography that I really enjoy is the kind of mystery about the results. You literally have no idea how it’ll turn out until you not just get home but develop the results. Unfortunately, that means that sometimes you missed the shot that you wanted.

Last night, even though I was shooting digital, I got the mystery, but sadly also got the disappointment.

Getting star trails – where the stars turn into lines streaking across the sky – via “stacking” is done by taking a series of photographs of a shorter duration, each with a little tiny streak. Then you put them all together and all those small streaks become long ones.

Once you get your initial exposure settings down, you just start shooting. Sometimes it’s 12 one minute exposures, sometimes it’s 60 one minute ones. Both are for an hour of time and star trails, but done very differently.

You don’t know the results until you get home, though, and use the software to stack everything together. Unfortunately, I did sometime wrong, I guess, and the trails aren’t that prominent. In this one, only Jupiter, which is far brighter than other heavenly bodies, came out and it’s a small streak at that.

The helicopter that was flying around looking for a wanted man (what a night) made for some interesting results, but the star trails bit didn’t work…oh well.

September 28, 2009 Uncategorized 0 Read more >

Oregon Coast Days 6 & 7 – Pacific City and the Three Capes

I am extremely late in getting this last post out about our trip to Oregon.  This was in June, for gosh sake’s.  But I owe it to the trip (which was so great) to send out this last little bit, with a few more photos.  My hope is that I show off what can be done as one moves up and down the coast.  Yes, there were parts we liked more than others, and there are parts we wish we had explored more.  But we did

Cape Meares Light infrared no. 2

Cape Meares Light

all of this and the previous posts in just 7 days, including driving to and from home in Santa Clara.

We spent 2 nights in the Three Capes area, which is to the west of Tilamook and includes Cape Kiwanda, Cape Lookout, and Cape Meares.  These are all accessed via the “Three Capes Scenic Route” which splits off from 101 at Tilamook in the north and reconnects just before Lincoln City to the south.  It’s not a fast drive, but it’s not a winding one, either, so it’s quite a feasible detour.

Over the two days, we saw all three capes, drove by Netarts Spit (but didn’t quite make it out there), saw Three Arches Rocks and crawled through a sea cave et still never saw all three arches, was by the Haystack Rock at Cape Kiwanda, and did an amazing hike down Cape Lookout.  We also went to Sandlake Beach, which is quite nice and secluded.

To be honest, I’m not sure this area is worth 2 days – I would have probably preferred more time in Yachats and some time in Florence, and still done the 2 days in Bandan.  But it’s worth it to go to the Three Capes and find out for one’s self whether it’s the right place or not.

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September 19, 2009 Travels, , , , , , 0 Read more >

BBC NEWS | Americas | US objects to Google book deal

BBC NEWS | Americas | US objects to Google book deal .

I’m not sure why I’m linking to a BBC article on this considering it’s a super-heated topic here in the states but…I just go with the flow, I guess.

I’ll add links soon, but there is so much discussion about whether this is good or bad, different groups taking different sides, official statements from universities (ie – not just publishers on one side, but institutions on the other facing off).

Some interesting stuff:

From Feral Librarian:

More to come, hopefully, for more context

September 19, 2009 Articles from the Web 0 Read more >

A Chevrolet Camaro for the MBA set – BusinessWeek

A Chevrolet Camaro for the MBA set – BusinessWeek.

My little secret, just for announcement on my open blog…I would love to get one of these new Camaros (Camaroes?).  29mpg on the freeway with a powerful V6, and talk about passing power.  And it looks sporty, powerful, and just…yeah, manly.

Hybrid this, hyrbid that (actually, I relish in the fact that hybrids are not the most “green” cars out there, with the large carbon footprint of their batteries).  304 horsepower at 29mpg on the freeway?

Oh yeah.

September 18, 2009 Articles from the Web 0 Read more >

For Airlines, Fees Become Lifelines – BusinessWeek

For Airlines, Fees Become Lifelines – BusinessWeek.

What strikes me about this article is the percentages that revenue from fees for ancillary items – luggage surcharges, paying for blankets, etc – account for some airline’s total income.  It’s quite amazing.  Rynnair is 20%, and it outpaced overall revenue growth by a huge margin (35% revenue growth in ancillary items revenue, compared to 21% for overall).

I see paying for these things as just part of doing business now.  If I looked at them any other way I’d probably go insane from frustration.

September 18, 2009 Articles from the Web 0 Read more >