PhoneBoy Says...

The (D)evolution of the 40 Hour Work Week

2012-03-22T03:42:00.000-07:00

From Bring back the 40-hour work week - AlterNet - Salon.com:

After WWII, as the GI Bill sent more workers into white-collar jobs, employers at first assumed that the limits that applied to industrial workers probably didn’t apply to knowledge workers. Everybody knew that eight hours a day was pretty much the limit for a guy swinging a hammer or a shovel; but those grey-flannel guys are just sitting at desks. We’re paying them more; shouldn’t we be able to ask more of them?
The short answer is: no. In fact, research shows that knowledge workers actually have fewer good hours in a day than manual laborers do — on average, about six hours, as opposed to eight. It sounds strange, but if you’re a knowledge worker, the truth of this may become clear if you think about your own typical work day. Odds are good that you probably turn out five or six good, productive hours of hard mental work; and then spend the other two or three hours on the job in meetings, answering e-mail, making phone calls and so on. You can stay longer if your boss asks; but after six hours, all he’s really got left is a butt in a chair. Your brain has already clocked out and gone home.
The other thing about knowledge workers is that they’re exquisitely sensitive to even minor sleep loss. Research by the US military has shown that losing just one hour of sleep per night for a week will cause a level of cognitive degradation equivalent to a .10 blood alcohol level. Worse: most people who’ve fallen into this state typically have no idea of just how impaired they are. It’s only when you look at the dramatically lower quality of their output that it shows up. Robinson writes: “If they came to work that drunk, we’d fire them — we’d rightly see them as a manifest risk to our enterprise, our data, our capital equipment, us and themselves. But we don’t think twice about making an equivalent level of sleep deprivation a condition of continued employment.”

Perhaps because I grew up in the Silicon Valley mindset and worked in high-tech (never, say, a retail job or a physical labor job), I never really experienced what a proper 40 hour work week was like. I rarely ever put in what could be construed as "9 to 5" type hours. Or if I did, it was never in a continuous block.

These days, the hours I put in are, quite literally, all over the map: in terms of when I have to do things (some late night and early morning calls/emails) and where I have to do things (regular trips to Israel and other locations). I know that I am by no means unique in this regard, either inside Check Point or outside Check Point.

To be clear, I'm not complaining about my job. I love what I do. But I put in a lot of hours. And I can't deny I'm probably paying a price for that.

Working smarter clearly does not mean working longer. That said, the traditional 40 hour work week isn't the solution either, at least for me. I deal with people half-way around the world who work Sunday thru Thursday rather than the more common Monday thru Friday.

Is there hope? I think the answer is being a bit more flexible about when those 40 hours of work occur. It will take employers accepting that people will need to work non-standard hours. It will take employees making sure that, when they are working, they give work their full focus. Likewise, when employees are "not working," they give "not working" their full focus.

We may never go back to the traditional 40 hour work week, but at least we can bring back some sanity to our lives.

Interacting with a Woman Can Leave Men "Cognitively Impaired"

2012-03-18T21:43:00.001-07:00

In "I can't believe they paid someone to research this" news:

Why Interacting with a Woman Can Leave Men "Cognitively Impaired": Scientific American:

Movies and television shows are full of scenes where a man tries unsuccessfully to interact with a pretty woman. In many cases, the potential suitor ends up acting foolishly despite his best attempts to impress. It seems like his brain isn’t working quite properly and according to new findings, it may not be.

Researchers have begun to explore the cognitive impairment that men experience before and after interacting with women. A 2009 study demonstrated that after a short interaction with an attractive woman, men experienced a decline in mental performance. A more recent study suggests that this cognitive impairment takes hold even when men simply anticipate interacting with a woman who they know very little about.

And of course, the study doesn't really break any new ground here. The article doesn't offer any theory for this beyond the stereotypical "men want to sleep with women" answer.

Why do they bother? Oh yeah, because they know we'll read this crap. And they know idiots like me will bother to write a response to it. sigh

Are things as bad at Foxconn as we've been led to believe?

2012-03-18T21:28:00.000-07:00

From Retraction | This American Life:

We've discovered that one of our most popular episodes contained numerous fabrications. This week, we detail the errors in Mike Daisey's story about visiting Foxconn, which makes iPads and other products for Apple in China. Marketplace'sChina correspondent Rob Schmitz discovered the fabrications.

I have no doubt that, by American standards, what is going on at Foxconn would be considered "appalling" by many. Even if the real story is better than what was portrayed by Mike Daisey or the New York Times.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is typical of what the media does. Take a sensational story that "sounds" believable and run it without completely fact checking it. Surely it brought in ratings for NPR and massive page views for the New York Times. Any fallout from "bad journalism," which, let's face it, is pretty rampant these days,would be overshadowed by the massive ratings and page views they get.

Bad media aside, I have a more philosophical question that comes up often for me, especially when I hear about American activities abroad: who are we to say our standards are better than the Chinese, or anyone else's for that matter? Why do so many people feel compelled to force our standards on other countries? What if the shoe were on the other foot? How would we feel if someone forced their standards on Americans?

I'm all for improving the lot of everyone in the world, but at what point do those activities become coercive in a negative way?

Dameon Unplugged Experiment

2012-03-14T13:14:00.002-07:00

Several months ago, I tried an experiment--one that I hosted on Posterous called "Dameon Unplugged." The idea was simple: make a series of short "tweets" that were basically handwritten notes.

GJCAG (referred to below) above now goes by WhatTheBit on Twitter. He was the inspiration for this idea since he was doing something similar at 76square.tumblr.com, but he ended up dropping the idea too.

So why share this now? Because I want to delete the blog on Posterous, but keep track of the fact I actually tried this in July of 2011.

Photos from RSA 2012

2012-03-13T14:18:00.002-07:00

I was at the RSA Conference a couple weeks ago working the Check Point booth. I also managed to snag a few photos.

Not at RSA, but at the BSides conference next door.

This was our booth. There were many like it, but this one was ours.

This was the station I was supposedly manning during my booth duty. The reality was, I was everywhere.

This is our 2012 line of appliances. Nice stuff.

This booth won the Gaudiest Booth award. Surely.

An actual Enigma machine from World War II.

We had a nice banner for the conference.

We served coffee and fresh baked cookies.

Two of our big stars: Tomer Teller (l) and Brian Linder (r)

Another Kellman sighting! This time he was presenting a version of his BSides presentation at the booth. It was quite a crowd pleaser!

Blame the Color TV

2012-03-13T00:32:00.000-07:00

Does anyone remember watching a black and white TV? I do. My dad had this TV that quite literally took a minute to warm up before it showed its black and white view of the world.

I remember seeing the old Spiderman cartoons. You know, the one that started airing in the late 1960s but probably reran infinitum during the 1970s. I remember when I saw it on TV. A Color TV.

The show opens with the phrase "In Color." Naive me, I thought when I saw it on my dad's Black and White TV, it would say "In Black and White" instead. That seemed perfectly rational to my little mind.

Needless to say I found it a bit disconcerting that it said "In Color" but showed it in Black and White.

My kids, of course, have never watched a black and white TV. Since we've gone all digital, they won't ever see one. They might see something in Black and White if they watch a really old movie. Or some more recent television program that goes Black and White for effect.

There is something to be said for watching a program in black and white on a crappy-ass 14 inch TV with a mono speaker on an antenna. You got some sort of picture, if you were lucky, but your mind had to fill in a lot of the details. Certainly with the animation of the day, you had to.

These days, programs are in full 1080p with Dolby 5.1 digital surround sound. You can see every pimple and wrinkle on the actors face--and let's face it, they're all actors. Even the newscasters. Especially the newscasters. It leaves little to the imagination.

And, quite honestly, I think we're worse off for it.

RIP Posterous: Restarting the Personal Blog

2012-03-12T23:01:00.001-07:00

That's the general consensus after it was announced that Posterous was purchased by Twitter. Twitter doesn't exactly have a great track record of continuing services and applications it acquired. The Posterous Acquisition FAQ makes it pretty clear that, at some point, Posterous as we know it will go away.

Meanwhile, I figured I'd better establish a secondary outpost somewhere else. I could easily host my own blog just as I do for phoneboy.com but I don't have the time/energy/desire to set up and maintain yet another Wordpress instance.

I thought about using Tumblr, but it doesn't really suit my needs. And it's not like I want to be on yet another standalone blog provider that's going to be acquired like Posterous was.

Google's clearly not going anywhere. They are still evolving the Blogger product, having rolled out a new interface in the past several months, and tying it into Google+. I can even post via email, just like with Posterous. Or SMS even.

In any case, I'll use Blogger for now to host my "non techie" blog. At least for the moment. Hopefully I'll be able to easily import my Posterous blog here, but for now, I'm starting fresh.

What Native Americans Think of Daylight Saving Time

2012-03-10T23:27:00.000-08:00

You Know You've Been Traveling Too Much When...

2012-03-05T23:39:00.000-08:00

Notice my last Foursquare Checkin at Sea-Tac.

Are Emotions Prophetic?

2012-03-05T06:16:00.000-08:00

Here’s where emotions come in handy. Every feeling is like a summary of data, a quick encapsulation of all the information processing that we don’t have access to. (As Pham puts it, emotions are like a “privileged window” into the subterranean mind.) When it comes to making predictions about complex events, this extra information is often essential. It represents the difference between an informed guess and random chance.

via wired.com

I remember using my gut to solve a lot of support cases back in the day. Too much information to try and rationally sort through, yet I somehow could tell you what was going on... :)