It began as a covert guerrilla action that spread virally and eventually became a revolution.

What is it?

At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical -- if risky -- experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours.

They are going to do this not only at corporate, but also at the retail outlets.

Every so often I see articles on changing work environments like this come up. I am very happy to see experiments like this happening in the corporate workplace.

Reading this made me think of the place where Decius and I worked "before all hell broke lose"... We both managed trans-continental teams. Our direct reports were in the states, but all the people we had to coordinate projects with were sprinkled across several Asian countries. Every country's management handled it's own staff, but we drove most project goals. It was all stress, frequent flier miles, and a clock that never stopped.

In the states, the engineering staff showed up around 10am-11am. We'd show up at the office, address any immediate concerns for a few hours, and do lunch. Lunch was a strategy session with food. Most of my average day in the states was working with the product development group. The phone conferences with the Asian offices started around 6:30pm. Getting out of the office was always hard, and we always aimed to get out around 9pm, because food became hard to come by in SF after 10pm. At that point, work quasi-resumed at home in the form of phone calls and poking at laptops. Decius had this worse than I did. His phone rang off the hook with technical problems overseas that couldn't wait. I tended to just sit on the couch poking out lists and responding to emails. The workday didn't really end, it just phased itself out slowly.

Overseas, my average day started at 8am. I'd roll out of bed, as my prearranged breakfast arrived, and start parsing in and hammering out emails. Almost all my collaboration with the US would happen before I left the hotel. Sometime around 10pm, I'd shower and head off to the office with the day's objectives lined out. The overseas offices shut off like a switch around 6pm. Completely different work culture. After 6pm, most of our time was spent with sales and professional services folks. Half social, half work. I'd get back to the hotel, late, and start on the morning email barrage for about an hour or two before passing out. I liked my wake-up period to be spent proof reading, eating, and hitting numerous send buttons.

In short, the vast... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Smashing The Clock

There are a few nuggets of amusement here..

The Dallas "Conspiracy Museam" is temporarly shutting down..

"Basically," says Tom Bowden, the museum's president, "they're putting a Quizno's here."

Hardly the skepticism expected from a man who's made The Conspiracy Museum a tourist landmark since opening in 1993 two blocks from where Kennedy was killed.

This man is not doing his job! There is _obviously_ some conspiracy behind this. If I'm right about the basic tenets of conspiracy theory, and I'm sure I am.. There is a conspiracy behind _everything_.

Bowden plans to reopen the museum in a new building closer to Dealey Plaza on April 4, which, not coincidentally, is the 39th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

He said the new space will double the size of the museum to almost 3,600 square feet and include a bookstore and Internet cafe. The museum also plans to add exhibits on the September 11, 2001, attacks to its slate of theories on the assassinations of Kennedy, King and Abraham Lincoln.

A conspiracy Internet cafe... Perfect! I just got a new location on my list of places to spend an afternoon.

And now, the best part..

He's made up the difference by lending his time and research to Kennedy documentaries and other films, like one on the idea of cloning Jesus from the Shroud of Turin.

Cloning Jesus from the Shroud of Turin. I _completely_ support any effort to do this. There is no possible outcome that would not somehow amuse the hell out of me.

"People have called us lunatics," Bowden said. "That's all right. I get more turnout because of that."

I'm getting a real pro-conspiracy vibe here. Being a part of the great conspiracy, I approve. Two thumbs up!

The Quizno's Conspiracy

Mary Cheney, the openly gay daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, is pregnant.

Mary Cheney, 37, and her partner of 15 years, Heather Poe, 45, are expecting a baby, said Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for the vice president. The baby is due in late spring.

McBride declined to elaborate on the circumstances of Mary Cheney's pregnancy. Mary Cheney and Poe moved from Colorado to Virginia a year ago to be closer to the Cheney family.

Between this and the Iraq study group, uber right-wingers must be blowing their tops all over the place..

Vice president's lesbian daughter pregnant - CNN.com

Hackers attacked the computer network at the Naval War College in Newport, taking down the school's network for more than two weeks, including some e-mail services and the college's Web site.

The Navy Cyber Defense Operations Command in Norfolk, Virginia, detected the intrusion around November 16 and took the system offline, spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Doug Gabos said. He said the unclassified network was used by students.

Investigators were trying to determine the extent of the intrusion, Gabos said. They planned to upgrade firewalls and make other unspecified improvements.

"Once that is complete, the network will be restored," Gabos said.

Gabos would not comment on who is suspected of attacking the network.

Hackers hit Naval War College computer network

The FBI faces a $56.7 million funding gap as it builds a new computer system to replace a problem-riddled database of investigation files, Justice Department auditors said Monday.

With careful oversight, the Sentinel program still could be successful, auditors from the department's inspector general's office concluded. Even so, the Bush administration's funding request for this year's share of the $425 million system, set for completion in 2009, falls short of what the bureau said it needs keep it on track.

The FBI asked for an estimated $150 million in the fiscal year that began October 1; the White House approved spending $100 million. Congress is not expected to approve the FBI's funding until next year.

Although the FBI expects to have about $50 million left over from earlier work on Sentinel and other bureau projects, auditors warned that pulling money from other programs "may have an adverse affect on the FBI's mission capabilities," the auditors said.

The funding concerns over Sentinel follow the FBI's decision last year to scrap a botched $170 million project to build a paperless case management system. FBI Director Robert Mueller abandoned the project, called Virtual Case File, after consultants said it was obsolete and riddled with problems.

Incoming Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont., questioning whether the funding gap would bring cuts to the FBI's counter-terrorism programs, said "mismanagement of this project seems to know no bounds."

"I remain seriously concerned about the handling of this project," Leahy said. "The American people cannot afford another fiasco."

It's often said that when it comes to technical issues, the FBI couldn't hack it's own ass. It appears, this continues to be the case.

I've covered this debacle before. Last time around, they were letting SAIC and their own inability to scope their needs drag them through the dirt. This time around, mismanagement continues to appear to be the root cause of the problem.

I'd sure love to hear an insider's perspective on this...

FBI still can't hack it's own ass

The User Weblogs page has been updated to include pictures and more information. There is a link to hide details that gives the old view of the page.

The session tracking has been updated to only see users and guests as present on the site if they have viewed a page in the last 15 minutes. Online status is noted underneath user pictures if users are online.

"A local family's nativity is defaced with a pagan symbol. They found a pentagram on their baby Jesus figure Thursday morning. The words cult of the dead cow were left on a Merry Christmas sign. The phrase is usually tied to a group of Internet hackers."

So I guess that's what the cDc is up to these days..

cDc Tags Baby Jesus

When he was hired by the DIA, he told me recently, his mind boggled at the futuristic, secret spy technology he would get to play with ... If the everyday Internet was so awesome, just imagine how much better the spy tools would be.

But when he got to his cubicle, his high-tech dreams collapsed. "The reality," he later wrote ruefully, "was a colossal letdown."

In this essay for the NYT Sunday magazine, Clive Thompson refers to the white paper by Calvin Andrus, The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community, which was recommended here back in July. (Also at CSI. Slides here.)

Following the threads from this article ...

Next up: the ouster of neocon Zalmay Khalilzad, the manipulative pro-consul in Baghdad, and his replacement by Ryan Crocker, a long-time Arabist who recently served as U.S. ambassador to Syria.

Thomas Fingar [2] "manages the production of the President's Daily Brief." He's an SES and an old China hand. He spoke in August, giving a talk entitled Intelink and Beyond: Dare to Share.

"I think in the future you'll press a button and this will be the NIE," said Michael Wertheimer, assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analysis.

In 2004 Wertheimer wrote in the Washington Post:

To succeed we must demand far less near-term intelligence product from the Signals Intelligence community, give it control of its resources and allow it to plan for a disruptive future, a future that is presaged by videos that show an Afghan warlord exhorting his terrorist followers not to use satellite phones for fear of American capture.

He spoke recently at InfoTech 2006; his presentation, Technology Transformation for Analysis: Year One Report, isn't really online, but others at the conference are here.

According to Michael Wertheimer, who held the most senior technical position at th... [ Read More (0.7k in body) ]

Open-Source Spying

Further tweaks to the picture system have been made. Any pictures posted from this point forward will be higher quality. We may go through the existing posted picture and improve their quality as well..

Improvements have been made to searching. The search box on the upper right side of the screen is now contextual. Searches will be preformed on the content you are currently viewing. If you search from a user's blog, the search results will be from that user's blog. If you search in the agent, you will search the current group of users being viewed. Searches can be widened to the entire system at any time by clicking the "Search MemeStreams" button.

More performance tweaks to search are on the way... As are more picture capabilities. Sometime in the next few days, pictures will also start to appear in other pages on the system.

Enjoy!

I am going to have to look into this in some depth. I like the idea. Creating a P3P version of the MemeStreams Privacy Policy is something I will put on my TODO list.

P3P: Privacy Primer