The video makes some interesting observations about human-computer interactions (HCI):

• mice excel at pointing on the screen without obstructing the screen
• multi-touch should be extended to use all digits on the hand, not just 1 or 2 – but all 5.
• both hands can create touch combinations that are interesting ( see 6:42 mark in the video )
• New windows are overlaid on top of old windows in a rather cluttered manner.

Clayton Miller’s proposal involves a medium-size touch surface placed in front of the keyboard. All ten fingers are used to interact with the UI. Different combinations and number of fingers mean different operations.

Clayton Miller’s basic premise that HCI should no longer be confined to 2D interactions is quite correct. However, the proposal does not recognize the full extent of the mouse/keyboard limitations. As a result the proposal is at best an incremental improvement over what Apple offers currently. Furthermore, Clayton’s proposal assumes a desktop computer configuration. Mobile, tablet, and laptop compute configurations are ignored.

Additional limitations that Clayton must bring into the picture and address in order to be truly revolutionary:

• extensive mouse movement causes carpal tunnel syndrome
• mouse/trackpad movement requires a dedicated surface
• mouse is not useful for mobile devices
• mobile devices use a touch screen with the downside that Clayton points out in his video.
• physical handicaps of users:
  • lost digits,
  • diseases that impact muscle control
  • mouse and trackpad are still 2D surfaces and operations

Clayton needs to update this video to consider these technologies:

• Microsoft Kinect‘s motion capture eliminates the need for direct device
  manipulation
• Kinect and the Wii introduced acceleration, 3D motion and movement into the HCI arena.
• Users’ physical limitations
• Eye motion and tracking to make computers more accessible to users.
• Mobile devices in particular field use
• Non-Desktop interactions

Google was the only large company to participate. For all others, paying taxes is their only participation in the community.

That meeting was the first step. This post is how Google can take the next step.

Being missed

A recent post from Seth Godin asked about being missed:

Expanding the circle of ‘missed’
Would they miss you if you didn’t show up? Would they miss your brand or your writing or your leadership?

If you work at the local fast food joint or the local library and you don’t show up for work, do they consider shutting the place down?

If you’re on the team at the ER and you have a bad day, would someone die?

Everyone is capable of being missed. Most of us would be missed by our family if we secretly moved to Perth in the middle of the night. The question, then, is not whether or not you’re capable of being missed. The question is whether you will choose to be missed by a wider circle of people.

It’s a risk, of course. You have to extend yourself. You must make promises (and then keep them.) More pressure than it might be worth.

Except when it is.

Would Google be missed if it was to leave Mountain View?

Google’s buildings are former SGI buildings. Did anyone miss SGI when it went out of business? The property taxes would be paid on the empty buildings, the traffic would be lighter, existing businesses would find office space cheaper and more abundant.

Challenges for Google

Google has a hard challenge if it truly wants to be part of the whole community. Because it is large, well-funded, and powerful, it can do enormous harm without meaning to.

Challenge #1: Bringing back to zero, creating a positive impact or cure worse than the disease?

Google employees a number of charter buses with which Google brings their employees in from all over the Bay Area. This saves the air pollution and traffic congestion that would otherwise be caused by each employee driving to Google’s location.
Clearly the negative aspect of all of the Google employees driving has been reduced with the buses. However, the buses are still there and the Google parking lot is still full. If Google was to move out – the traffic situation would be even better.
Is the private shuttle bus service similar to that offered by Apple as good as Google can do?
Does this private shuttle service actually worsen things for the Mountain View residents?

Challenge #2: How can Google make a lasting impact on the quality of life that will outlast Google?

Google is doing wonderful things with energy efficiency, renewable energy and sustainability. For example, Google invested in residential solar with a $280 million dollar fund run by SolarCity.
Google has driven improvements in data center energy efficiency.

• Can Google continue this investment in a way that Mountain View and surrounding cities gains direct visible benefits ?
• How come 2 miles from Google’s campus I can’t get quality internet?

Challenge #3: How can Google do charitable works in a sustainable way with greater impact?

Recently, Google contributed money, computers and helped clean up Stevenson School. ( ). GoogleServe is a good way to build team spirit within Google. Many companies have such community work days because they recognize the team building aspect of these days.

In 2009,

Over the past couple of weeks about 5,000 Googlers from 60 of our offices took a break from their regular jobs to participate in volunteer opportunities. We’ve found that community service helps to revitalize and deepen our connections with the communities where we live and work, as well as bring us closer together as a team.

And in 2011,

Over the last month, more than 7,700 Googlers helped serve their communities across 400 different projects as part of GoogleServe, an employee-driven initiative organized almost entirely by volunteers.

GoogleServe results in a lot of Google employees feeling good. However, these massive push days have a dark side for the non-profits involved.

• The organization being “helped” is given a temporary burst of labor. Its like drinking a bunch of caffeine – there is a burst of energy and followed by a crash.
• The volunteers are not self-directed. For example, the volunteers do not know where the paint is or the brushes.
• Only projects that can be completed in a day are possible.
• The labor is “dumb” – it can’t figure out what needs to be done, it needs to be told.
• The organization must supply the leaders.
• Only “big” projects are possible ( paint an entire school )
• The organization assumes the burden of planning.
• The organization must “entertain” the labor – heaven help the organization that can find enough brass-polishing projects to keep everyone busy.
• The organization is not better off in a sustainable manner.

• Can Google move beyond massive single day events to focused sustainable efforts?
• Are these massive team efforts the best help to the community?
• Do these massive work days have a meaningful and sustainable impact?
• Are these work days the best use of time and resources?
• Do these work days have the best impact?

Challenge #4: Is Google aware of the true needs of the community?

Google employees are well-educated, financially secure, and technologically literate. They have access to quality health care, sick days, and quality child care. Google employees are not personally experiencing the needs of community members that are not like them. These invisible people cut hair, serve food, wash cars, clean toilets.

These invisible poor survive on $35K/year (or less) for 4 people. They work just as hard as Google employees. They have no access to healthcare. Many are transit-dependent, they use bikes and buses. The services they depend on are the first to be cut. “Small” changes have devastating impacts on them. Walk along California Ave between Showers Dr. and Shoreline. Look at the community between California Ave and El Camino Real. Did you know that Mountain View has had gang killings? I remember the flowers.

Consider this article and read how the poor pay extra for everything.

• Can Google do good in a way that makes good business sense?
• How is Google finding out the true needs of the community members who are not like Google employees?

Challenge #5: Is Google casually harming the community?

In 2006, another Mountain View company, Intuit, made life worse for the needy :

November 2nd, 2006: A few years ago, the Franchise Tax Board, California’s tax collector, pioneered a free on-line tax program called “Ready Return.” State Controller Steve Westly championed this program. The program enabled taxpayers with the simplest forms (single, no itemized deductions, and no tax schedules to fill out) to go to a secure website, obtain their tax information from the state, fill out a tax form and, if the taxpayer desired, calculate the amount of tax owed or refund due. Taxpayers had the option of doing the calculation themselves.
The program eliminated tax filing headaches for thousands of Californians, allowed low income taxpayers to more easily collect earned income tax credits, and increased compliance with state tax filing requirements.

Intuit lobbied hard to kill the free state program. It introduced “do no math” legislation to stop the free state software from performing calculations, thus rendering the program useless for taxpayers. It lobbied successfully this year to strip the funding needed to keep the free tax filing program alive.

Part of the fallout of Intuit’s actions was the closing of several battered spousal shelters.

Businesses have this maniacal focus on making money that leads to this indifferent damage. It shows up in many ways. Intuit will claim otherwise but how many people’s lives were negatively affected. Did someone not get a refund that would have helped pay for another semester at college because of Intuit’s actions? Did a woman die because the shelter was closed? The invisible poor are not organized. They exist in the shadows. But you walk by them every day they are part of your life even if you do not recognize it.

Does Google casually harm the poor the way Intuit does? The recent expansion, Google’s real-estate developer’s “our way or the highway” attitude, as relayed by another member of the breakout session, is believable because it is the norm.

How can Google listen, get Google’s needs met, and make life better for all?

Possible responses to the challenges

My suggestion and thoughts on the challenges posed.

Response #1: Bringing back to zero, creating a positive impact or cure worse than the disease?

A private shuttle bus that serves only Google employees is harmful to the community. This VTA map shows how limited the public transit options are to reach the Google campus. The options are a single bus (line 40) that does not connect with downtown Mountain View. There is no public transit between downtown Mountain View, Shoreline Park, the Amphitheatre, the Computer History Museum or Google.

The Dumbarton Rail project is a project that would enable Caltrain to connect with the East Bay and BART. This project would also enable Altamont Commuter Express to run trains up the Peninsula from Redwood City to San Francisco and down the peninsula to Palo Alto and Mountain View. This single project would connect the East Bay with the Peninsula would change the face of rail transit in the Bay Area in a way that no other project would.

Currently this project is languishing because it is the favorite of no one — except the people that need it the most. Google’s shuttle buses enable Google to also be indifferent to this project.

Because Google employees can successfully avoid public transit, they are less familiar with it, they are less invested in helping it improve. Google is denying VTA and other public transit systems ridership, participation, and awareness that they desperately need. Google employees are “above the fray” that the rest of the community faces. In the Bay Area often times transit is built by well-meaning people who don’t actually use the transit.

Verdict: Private bus system: Better than cars but still a net negative.

What could Google do:

Work with public transit agencies with grants to enable public transit routes to replace selected Google’s shuttles.

• For example, VTA’s line 40 and line 51’s frequency could be increased in part with a subsidy by Google.
• Reach to other businesses, Intuit, Microsoft in the Shoreline Business Area to create a sustainable, funded plan that is built in to the tax structure for the Shoreline Business Park that is dedicate to providing a quality public transit option for the all employees.
• If Google has to go it alone,
  • attach a covenent to the Google property that obligates the next owner to subsidize the transit.
  • negotiate the VTA buses subsidized in this manner are ad-wrapped with a Google ad: “Google cares – it is time you joined a company that gets you where you want to go http://google.com/jobs”

Work to make Dumbarton Rail project get built.
No two ways about it – do the outreach and the marketing to help persuade businesses that private shuttle buses are a hack. Do the persuasion in the business community that a better solution is a world-class transit system.

Create tools with Google Maps to help with trip planning with unbuilt projects
The public is promised wonderful benefits from transit projects. Yet in many cases the projects are poorly built in ways that are only obvious after the project has been completed.

For example, the BART to SFO extension replace a bus shuttle service between Caltrain and SFO. The bus was faster and better than BART. The BART to SFO proponents dreamed that everyone would transfer from Caltrain to BART. The reality is that doing the transfer is costly and slower.

Similarly BART is being built toward downtown San Jose. Once again, this project will not deliver quality, fast, world class transit.

The Google Maps team could extend their code to help with building quality transit:

1. enable users to draw proposed transit lines on maps
2. define the simplistic characteristics of the transit vehicles ( acceleration, station dwell times, speed )
3. For surface running, use existing information available for calculating car travel.
4. Enable existing transit options to be incorporated so that a total hypothetical trip time and cost could be calculated.

Response #2: How can Google make a lasting impact on the quality of life that will outlast Google?

As outlined in Response#1, helping get the transit situation permanently and sustainably helps enormously.

Google’s investment in renewable energy should also be leveraged.

How come Mountain View does not have solar panels on more residential buildings and downtown? Unemployment for non-software developers is very high. There are also a large number of people who are not computer people, who are not interested in working with computers. Some of these people are the least “desirable” members of society: parolees, ex-convicts.

Google should built an ecosystem of solar installers and insulator contractors by investing in area to create a high density of solar installations. Scattered installations do not create an ecosystem. Obviously, I would like Mountain View to be one such place but how about out in Stockton and Tracy? Google could help reduce the operating costs for cash-strapped cities in the Central Valley.

I challenge Google to make it a goal that every public building in the state would have a solar installation. Every library, city hall, police station and fire hall would have a SolarCity installation.

Internet access

How come 2 miles from Google’s campus I cannot get an internet connection better than DSL or Comcast? A developer that works for me in Siberia ( Irkutsk ), has fiber to his house. Why is it that Google, Intuit, Microsoft are not bringing that same benefit to Mountain View residents?

I challenge Google to make it a goal that every library in California has fiber access to the internet.

Response #3: How can Google do charitable works in a sustainable way with greater impact?

I have seen lots of “technology days” where the technology companies drop a bunch of computers, wire up a non-profit and then leave.

In about a month something goes wrong and the non-profit “beneficiary” does not know how to fix the problem. A windows upgrade goes bad, the linksys box gets misconfigured, a system file gets accidentally deleted, the computer get stolen, or a piece of software needs a non-trivial upgrade.

Google can do better with GoogleServe.

First, spend the time to learn the non-profit.
Some times technology is the poorest solution to a problem. For example, is an Android phone the best way to gather data or is a scanable piece of paper that can be scanned better? The paper won’t get damaged by water, not likely to get stolen, and getting lost is not that big a deal.

Second, be there for the long run. Rather than massive labor for a day how about being there with 1/24th as many people every 2 weeks? When the computers have problems GoogleServe can be there to fix the problems and make sure the donation is truly useful. Or to discover a better solution for the community’s need. GoogleServe in this sustained manner would allow relationships to the community to be established. A one day work day doesn’t build relationships.

Response #4: Is Google aware of the true needs of the community?

Google needs to embed themselves in the community. Open an office at Food Street Restaurant (Dana and Castro) and get to know the community. Talk to the business owners.

Talk to the Hispanic community.

Learn from the gang members.

They will not know how Google could help because they do not know what Google can do. But together the community and Google could help figure that out.

Response #5: Is Google casually harming the community?

Unfortunately yes. The rents are going up Mountain View is being gentrified. But Google can help in a way that does not turn Google into a charity.

First, the Community Health Center is ideally located to help low income people. It is on transit and is centrally located.

Second, The North County Social Services is also being impacted.

The Pacific Euro Hotel home to many low-income people between permanent residences is also impacted.

Google could provide a 99-year lease in one of their new buildings that is close to transit for both the Mayview center and the Social Services Center. A single floor would mean a lot. Contract with the mayview center to also provide health services for Google employees as well, so the low-income of mountain view gets some of the benefits of Google employees.

If Google is really daring they will make it so that the low-income people that they aid mix with Google employees. Make the invisible poor less invisible.

When Google considers building employee housing, make room for teachers to have an apartment as well. Give room for the janitors and haircutters to live. Practice economic desegregation.

The Future Challenges

Many of these thoughts and suggestions are relatively inexpensive. But they require that Google actually care to do them.

Can Google move from “Don’t no evil” to “Achieve greatness in good”?

Can Google create an impact that is self-sustaining and permanent. What will Google’s legacy be in 100 years? Paint will have long since peeled off. Google should do more than coat a surface.

Google took the first step. Can it take the second?

Trust Me

Seriously, why doubt?

Sam Antar, convicted white collar criminal, says trusting is stupid clearly and explicitly:

President Ronald Reagan said:

“Trust, but verify.”

As a convicted felon, I say:

“Don’t trust, just verify.”

“Verify, verify, verify.”

As a criminal, I considered people’s humanity as a weakness to be exploited.

The inclination to trust first and then verify, gave me the upper hand.

The criminal always has the initiative.

While you initially trust us, we work on ways to solidify your trust before you verify.

Hopefully, you will never verify.

However, if you do verify, we will have corroded your skepticism to a large degree.

A word of advice from this convicted felon to the capital markets, securities analysts, journalists, the accounting profession, investors, and others:

The word “trust” is a professional hazard you can leave at home before you go to work.

A criminal says “Don’t trust”. Yet computer security experts talk about a “trust” model. When are we going to move beyond trust to verify? A google search finds endless examples of sites reassuring users that they are “trustworthy”. It should not be a surprise then that computer users are used to just entering their password or clicking o.k. when a security dialog comes up. Users are asked to always trust without any understanding. What does it mean when a certificate cannot be authenticated?

Furthermore, we now have “trusted” applications getting computer owners into trouble.

For example:

• Andre Vrignaud is a such a victim.
  

  Comcast cut off broadband access to Andre Vrignaud. A month earlier, Vrignaud said he had a “polite but irritated” conversation with Comcast’s Customer Security Department about how much data he was using. He told them he had no idea how he used so much and wondered if his roommates may have hit the limit because they watched Netflix HD streaming movies and listened to Pandora’s internet-streamed music radio.

  Why can’t Vrignaud limit easily on his end?
  Once again, a google search reveals how important being able to control and manage at the application level.

• How about the case of Matthew Brady? He is an innocent victim, like many others, framed by a poor computer security model.
  

  Until recently [story dated Tuesday, January 16, 2007], the 16-year-old Arizona boy faced life imprisonment for possessing child pornography; each of the nine images on his computer carried a possible 10-year sentence.

  The caution: Your computer could be storing and distributing child pornography without your knowledge. It could be what is called “a zombie.” A virus, worm or “bot” may have almost invisibly infected your operating system, perhaps when you opened an email attachment or clicked on the “wrong” (not necessarily adult) website.
  The “infection” allows another person to remotely access your hard drive. Often, the third party tries to capture financial information such as bank account numbers. Often, he stores data on the hard drive and uses your computer to distribute spam, including pornography.

  Benjamin Edelman, a computer security expert, indicates how quickly a computer can become infected. “I recently tested a WindowsMedia video file…On a fresh test computer, I pressed Yes once to allow the installation. My computer quickly became contaminated…All told, the infection added 58 folders, 786 files, and an incredible 11,915 registry entries to my test computer. Not one of these programs had showed me any license agreement, nor had I consented to their installation on my computer.”

  The Bandy’s two-year nightmare might be winding down, but the family has been financially ruined by over $250,000 in legal costs.

Instead of trust, as Sam suggests: “Don’t trust, verify, verify, verify”. No application should be given a blanket “trust” but rather a conditional trust. An application should not even be allowed to ask for a blanket trust.

Instead the application must ask for permission and indicate why it is asking for the permission:

• write to a specific directory
• send data to an internet site
• receive data from an internet site
• All data sent or received is logged
• Any data the application wants to send or receive needs explicit permission from the user.

The user must be able to selectively deny or condition a granted permission at any time (not just when an application is starting) :

• Granted for 10minutes
• Data sent/received is logged
• Data transmission rate is no more than 1mb/sec
• Data transmission rate is no more than 10megabytes/month
• Data stored for only 10 days
• Data is stored is no more than 10megabytes
• CPU usage is capped as a percentage.

It is up to the application to behave well if the permission is or it is denied permission. And if it doesn’t like the permissions then well – don’t run.

The application is a guest and needs to respect the rules as a guest.

Trust. is. stupid.

I left because of a general lack of interest in doing anything substantial to improve the Triage process on BMO outside the QA community and a few others. Triage as we know it today is NOT ready to handle the Rapid Release process.

Tyler then points out that:

In Spring 2010, we hit roughly 13,000 UNCO bugs in the Firefox product on BMO. 13,000!!! We currently have 5934. This is several thousand contributors that we have told “Thank you for filing a bug report with us. We don’t really care about it, and we are going to let it sit for 6 months and just ask you to retest when you know it isn’t fixed, but thank you anyway. Oh, and Mozilla is run by the community.” Even though nobody means this, that is what we tell an end-user who just submitted their first bug and is ignored.[italics mine]

Mozilla behavior toward this ancient feature request is illustrative:

• The request was filed in 1999 (12 years ago)!
• Numerous offered patches,
• A plugin to workaround this issue,
• Accounts that offered patches are labeled as “Please Ignore This Troll (Account Disabled)”

Wow nothing says Go Away quite so effectively as being labeled a troll or being ignored.

Questions

1. How many reported issues are latent security problems?
2. How can Mozilla bug fixing keep up with the community’s bug reporting? The community is vastly larger than the Mozilla development team.
3. How can Mozilla truly leverage the community? And avoid having responsive, assertive community members being labeled as trolls?
4. How can anyone feel good about closing 1 bug out of 13000, especially if the incoming rate is greater than the fix rate?

Thoughts

This is something that every company or open-source project hopes to have: a community that overwhelms the product with love. Mozilla is doing the wrong thing if the love is unrequited.

With so many bugs churning in, developers are faced with a sisyphean task. The bugs represent community love, the developers have to view the love as not burdensome.

These thoughts really apply to every company, product and project:

Developer Bug Tool

A developer-facing bug database must only hold bugs (broken code that must be fixed),

1. NO Feature Requests
2. NO Project Plans
3. NO “technical debt removal” wishes,
4. NO minor bugs

Developers like all humans need to feel the progress, and accomplishment. Fixing one bug out of 13000 does nothing, fixing one bug out of 100 feels meaningful.

Feature requests and refactoring or changes for the future belong in a project planning tool.

Any bug, that cannot or will not be fixed immediately, must be documented in the code:

• TODO flag
• Date ( a TODO that is 10 years old not that useful – with a few exceptions )
• Person who added this comment (not necessarily a full-time developer)
• HACK flag if the code should not be an example of “how to do” things. This tells future developers to not use this bad code as a template to create more bad code.
• Discussions can happen in the code same as they would in a separate bug database

Documenting in the code not the bug database gives these benefits:

• Developers tracing a different bugs or adding new features are proactively notified without searching that:
  • the code is questionable
  • the code may be the source of the bug he is tracing
  • he may be able to immediately fix the bug documented in the issue
• If the questionable code is deleted as part of a later refactoring feature change, the bug report is also deleted.
• The bug database is not polluted with minor items that bury the truly critical issues.

Use Git

Get away from the Open-source Cathedral where only a few are blessed committers.

Avoid frustrating people who want to patch the product. Let them patch the product and share their patch. If the main official release doesn’t include the patch, at least the person reporting the problem can fix the problem for themselves and move on.

Prefilter bug reports

• Incorrectly formatted html: IE choose to format it one way, Firefox made a different guess. Just because FF made a different choice doesn’t make FF wrong, but that will not stop a bug report. FF should have a clear indicator that:
  

  The page in question has bad html and that it may not be displayed correctly. Click here to send a note to the webmaster about this page.

  Point the finger of blame at the webmaster so that FF does not get blamed (and avoiding the bogus resultant bug reports).

• Bad scripts: If the javascript is not functioning correctly announce it. Its not FF’s problem that the script sucks, don’t let Firefox get the blame.

Make it easy to report issues

• Built-in feedback tool
• Built-in screen capture (with redaction ability)
• Do not require registration in a bug database
• Do the bug reporting within Firefox don’t make people navigate.
• Ask if the last report by this person is related.
• Do the bug database duplication search for the user and ask if any of the other reports look similar.

Final Question

How can your product or service empower the community to self-help?

• http://css-tricks.com/
• http://quirksmode.org
• http://www.css3.info/
• Css3 tutorial

via Css Tricks:

• CSS3Please.com
• Border-Radius.com
• HTML-Ipsum.com
• Button Maker

Update ( 28 July 2011 ) :

Now for some excellent tools:

• Sass (http://sass-lang.com )
• Compass (http://compass-style.org ) Compass builds off of Sass to provide cross browser frameworks.
• Css3Pie Provides Css3 support (of a sort) for IE 6-8. Compass integration is available.

This is in Germany which has a better record than the US with regards to infrastructure maintenance. Naturally, in the US, we just wait for the inevitable.

What started this post was the humorous note in the IRJ June 2011:

The reopening of the 107m-high Müngstener bridge over the River Wupper, which has been closed for renovation, has been delayed because of a miscalculation. German Rail (DB) had forgotten to include the weight of passengers in the train weight.

The larger story makes it a little less funny.

For Men

If you are a sell-side analyst, you will be wearing a suit everyday. That means you need to invest in good-quality suits in a variety of colors. When building your suit wardrobe, start with a solid gray and a solid navy and then add a gray or navy muted pinstripe, said Jessica Cadmus, a former Goldman Sachs employee who founded Wardrobe Whisperer, a personal shopping/stylist consultancy.

She recommends a two-button suit with double vent, notched lapel and straight but tailored leg. Don’t worry about buying an Armani suit — you’ll be fine with something from JCrew or Banana Republic if that’s what you can afford in the beginning.

“Worry about buying an Armani”? Why should I ever waste my money?

Plain-front pants are ideal. “For God’s sake, don’t be the guy who shows up with pleated pants,” said an associate at a hedge fund.

OMG! the world will end with pleated pants!

When choosing a shirt, make sure to pick out dress shirts, that is, shirts without buttons on the collars. Shirts with buttons on the collar are called sport shirts and are considerably less formal.

The solution? Buy cheap sport shirts and remove the buttons. I bet this saves $$.

You should steer clear of French cuff shirts, cuff links and monograms, which are best left to vice presidents and above, said the hedge fund associate.

After you’ve chosen a shirt, make sure your tie and collar are proportional. Big tie knots like the Windsor should be worn with spread collars, and smaller knots like the Half-Windsor or Four-in-Hand should be worn with point collars. Bigger knots are preferred, said a first-year hedge fund analyst in New York City.

Seriously, people look at the size of tie knot?

When you’re low on the food chain, your goal is to blend in. That means choosing a basic blue, red or gold tie. Avoid the novelty ties until you advance, said Ron Ferguson, a concierge at Brooks Brothers. Once you do, you can wear ties with a golf-club or yacht-pattern, depending on your interests.

See the nice people at ComputerGear.com

Apparently brown goes with everything. As an added bonus, shit looks nicer with brown.

A pair of lace-up oxfords in brown and black, as well as pair of loafers in brown and black, will work. Make sure to match the belt to the shoes.

Its nice to know that uncomfortable shoes are the key.

Pireneo Exotic Moccasin ($2300)

At a firm like Goldman, Ferragamo shoes are a sign of “arriving,” so don’t pick up a pair until you’re at least a managing director, a source told Business Insider.

An anonymous source for dress code in Goldman Sachs?

Peon place if you will

You may be tempted to dress casually on Fridays when you see some of the senior executives stroll in wearing polo shirts and khakis. Don’t do it, said an associate at a hedge fund: “They are making a magnitude more than you are, and are headed to their summer home after work Friday where such attire is appropriate. You are going back to Murray Hill“.

Now this is important. Be sure to get your little hovel in Murray Hill, not Curry Hill. While Curry Hill is a little closer to work, Curry Hill residents have that odor of curry to their clothes which as we know, is a definite no-no.

The so-called “gunners,” or competitive, overly-ambitious coworkers, may try to pull it off, but it makes them look foolish, the associate said.

Because we all know that relaxed and comfortable is foolish.

Finally, choose your accessories wisely. A good watch is a status symbol, so

Associates

Vice Presidents

MDs

TAG Heuer 'Carrera' Automatic Tachymeter Watch ($4100). (Wait for the sale!)

EXTRA-FLAT Baloon bleu de Cartier WATCH, EXTRA-LARGE MODEL ($32,550)

Patek Star Caliber 2000G ($More than you can afford)

As a sidenote, what is with the high-watch websites with crappy last millennium web design fashion sense. Flash-sites yech!

“Wear a good-looking and professional watch, but nothing too nice or you risk having a nicer watch than your boss or client,” said a first-year hedge fund analyst. “You’d think this wouldn’t be an issue, but you would be amazed how many guys show up on the first day of their internship wearing a $5,0000 [sic] Cartier or Montblanc watch.”

For Women

Women will require the same basic suiting options: a skirt, jacket, pants and if you’re a lucky, a matching dress.

Burka with optional accessories ($2000)

Hmmm…. what are the vegas odds here? Or does this mean that most women will look like shit and only the lucky ones will be able to find something that actual matches and looks good?

When choosing a skirt, make sure it’s not too short — even brands that claim to be for professionals can offer skirts that just don’t provide enough coverage.

too much leg!

I suggest the always fashionable burka?

It may not be the most flattering look, but keep the skirt slightly above your knees to avoid any Hilton/Lohan/insert-starlet-here wardrobe malfunctions. Don’t think about rocking a red suit or dress until you’re at the MD level.

An important thing to keep in mind is caring for the suit. It sounds counterintuitive, but you should avoid dry cleaning, Ferguson said. He recommends dry cleaning only once or twice a year because too many chemicals will damage the material and wear the suit out faster. Instead, hang up the suit carefully so as to allow it to air out, which is really all it needs, Ferguson said.

When you do dry clean, make sure to send both pieces together so as to maintain the consistency of the color.

Just be sure to get your proper dose of PERC (Tetrachloroethylene) dry cleaning agent and stay away from the new “wet cleaning” methods coming from those hippies on the West Coast.

If you’re not sure whether to wear pantyhose, look at the women around you. Some ultra-conservative firms will implicitly require hose, so even if it’s a hot, sweaty summer day, you should stock up if the women who work there are wearing them.

Now this is important as well. Do not “sock” the other women. “stock up”. Some suggestions from 3wishes:

Heels sold separately!

Fishnet works best to bring some warmth to the holidays!

Shoes can lead to your downfall if you don’t pick them well. You’ll naturally want to avoid stilettos, but you should also invest in very comfortable heels.

Ok must be slightly less than 5 inches.

“You’re going to be literally running around the firm and through the streets,” said one analyst at a bulge-bracket bank. “You’re going to need to keep up with the men, and they don’t want you to complain. Get yourself a pair of heels you can stand in all day.”

To do that, you might consider some brands that partner with sneaker technology to result in shoes that are more comfortable than the average heel. Those could be a worthy investment, the analyst said (she purchased Cole Haan’s Nike air heel in six different colors).

David Yurman Cable-wrapped ($4300)

When choosing jewelry, you can’t go wrong with a pearl necklace. Diamonds are generally considered more fashionable, Cadmus said. Just as Ferragamo marks the arrival for men, so too does David Yurman jewelry for women, so don’t wear that ubiquitous ring until you can afford it.

List $1795 - yours for only $702!

You should also think carefully before choosing a handbag. Do not walk in with a Louis Vuitton or Birkin bag. Instead, stick to a nondescript, minimalist yet good-quality leather purse like a Furla.

Now listen up, that high-powered brain needs to spend significant time contemplating… handbags. World hunger, make room for world handbags!

For Everyone

Must be at least a MD before they come out of the closet!

The top yearly earners only should wear this, otherwise it looks "gunner"

The bottom line is to blend in with your surroundings and realize you’ll have a chance to purchase flashier items as you move up the ranks.

Bling, bling, bling.

“You have to know your place,” said a second-year associate at an investment bank. “You do not want to be ostentatious or call attention to yourself. Do not upstage your boss.”

Be sure that the prenup was never signed!

Because goodness knows, high school ain’t over until they say it is over!

Could not find gem ‘pgw’ ( >= 0, runtime)’ in any of the gem sources listed in your Gemfile

I tried Ole Morten Amundsen’s method, but it didn’t ( quite ) work (see below)

Magic directory method

1. mkdir -p vendor/cache
2. bundle update
3. git add -A
4. git commit -m"whatever"
5. git push heroku master

All the gems public or private are installed into the vendor/cache directory.

Pros:

1. Simple.
2. It works.
3. Also allows for a locked down deployment (? not completely certain on this because heroku does report “Installing …” for all the gems including the private gem)

Cons:

1. All the gems used are installed, not just the single gem that is not available on rubyforge.
2. Magicalness feels like a possible bug. (Note: I am using bundler 1.0.13) so it may not work in future
3. git bloat – all the external gems and dependencies are now part of your repo.
4. Possible issues with machine specific deployments with other gems? ( not certain about this – but flagging it as a possibility )

Ole Morten Amundsen variant

1. gem unpack pgw --target vendor/gems
2. edit Gemfile to explicitly list the gem version and supply the path
   gem "pgw", "0.0.3", :path =>"{#File.expand_path(__FILE__)}/../vendor/gems/"
3. bundle install --local
4. git add -A
5. git commit -m"whatever"
6. git push heroku master

The resulting Gemfile.lock will have this:

PATH
  remote: vendor/gems
  specs:
    pgw (0.0.3)

GEM
...(everything else ) ...

Pros:

1. Feels more like the intended process
2. Only extra code is the private gem ‘pgw’ – none of the standard ruby gems are added to the project.

Cons:

1. More typing
2. Have to include specific version number in the Gemfile – so harder to ensure against an accidental release with old version of gem.
3. “unpacking” seems lame. Is there a way to keep the ‘pgw’ gem as a .gem file?

Questions

1. Is there an easy way to move the gems to my master project other than gem unpack?
2. should the gem be put in vendor/bundle since that is the default BUNDLE_PATH?

Here are five facts that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner offered in a speech in New York Tuesday (May 17 2011) as “context for the [fiscal] choices we must make now to preserve room for important investments in our future.”

• In the U.S. today , 40% of children born each year are covered by Medicaid. If you are born today in hard-pressed communities in many American cities, like St. Louis or Baltimore, you are more likely to die before your first birthday than if you were born in Sri Lanka or Belarus.
• In education, we’re losing ground…. In Los Angeles, only about half the kids graduate from high school.
• Over the next 25 years, the number of Americans eligible for Medicare and Social Security will nearly double, while the number of working age Americans will only increase by about 10%, putting substantial new burdens on working Americans.
• We spend $700 billion a year on national security… about two-thirds of what we spent as a share of our economy during the Cold War.
• The effective income tax rate for the wealthiest Americans—those earning more than $250,000 a year—is at its lowest level in 50 years. And the effective rate for the very rich—those earning over $10 million per year— has declined much further and is now around 21%.

Of course the only proper solution is to increase the taxes on the poor and lower the taxes on the comfortable.

A year ago, everything was going right for a woman we’ll call Sandy. But then the world came crashing down around the 39-year-old. She lost her job. She lost her house. And she and her son moved into her truck. Police found her and DCFS threatened to take away her son if she didn’t find a safe place to stay.

She moved into a hotel with the help of a social worker who paid for a few nights stay with her own money. That’s when Sandy’s knight in shining armor showed up. And he’s kept showing up, every day, paying her hotel bill, so she and her son can stay off the streets.

But Sandy’s Good Samaritan isn’t a Chicago big shot. He isn’t living in a Loop highrise. He doesn’t even have a job.

Sandy’s Good Samaritan is Curtis Jackson, who’s been homeless since 2004. He pays for Sandy’s hotel room because she used to treat him with dignity and kindness when she did have a house — and he pays for it by panhandling and giving the money to her.

Where are the comfortable who live in those Loop highrises? Only the homeless and the social worker will aid those in need. The comfortable are content in their Calvinist beliefs.

On the other side of the world, Money Troubles Take Personal Toll in Greece:

Anargyros D. recounted how he had lost everything in the aftermath of the Greek economic collapse — the food-processing factory founded by his father 30 years ago, his house, his car, his Rolex, his pride and now, he said, his will to live.

Economists are predicting a 4 percent contraction in gross domestic product this year, and the data support the pessimism. Cement production is down 60 percent since 2006. Steel production has fallen, in some cases more than 80 percent in the last two years. Analysts say that close to 250,000 private sector jobs will have been lost by the end of the year, pushing the unemployment rate above 15 percent.

But Greece is to be punished, in the best Calvinist tradition:

On the table will be whether Greece, which is now projected to miss its deficit target by as much as two percentage points of G.D.P. this year, will be granted another round of loans totaling as much as 60 billion euros, and what further budget cuts would be required in return.

But there is serious debate about whether this kind of prescription — subjecting Greece to more cuts and sacrifice in order to justify a second installment of funds from a reluctant Europe — is the right one.

“Serious” debate? Only the comfortable find a serious debate in asking the destitute to sacrifice for the comfortable.

This form of remedy violates two basic economic principles, according to Yanis Varoufakis, an economics professor and blogger at the University of Athens. “You do not lend money at high interest rates to the insolvent and you do not introduce austerity into a recession,” he said. “It’s pretty simple: the debt is going up and G.D.P. is going down. Have we not learned the lesson of 1929?”

No. Apparently not. Hopefully another round of dictatorships does not arise.

Social workers and municipal officials in Athens report that there has been a 25 percent increase in homelessness. At the main food kitchen in Athens, 3,500 people a day come seeking food and clothing, up from about 100 people a day when it first opened 10 years ago.

And we discover the limits of private charity,

While aid workers refer to these people as a new generation of homeless, the Greek government does not officially recognize the homeless as a social category in need of assistance,… as a result there are no government-supported homeless shelters.

Apparently, private industry sees little profit in helping their fellow human beings.

“Everything was coming up roses,” Anargyros D said, mashing a cigarette into the ashtray before him. “And then the banks took it all away from us.”

Yves Smith adds to the points:

One week ago, I put up a post on the plight of a family that was at the end of its rope financially due to a lack of savings prior to the firing of the main income provider at the start of 2009.

Two surprising things happened. First, one reader offered to send the family $1000 if other readers would contribute. I said I would and encouraged others who were interested to ping me.

Second, that act of generosity seemed to particularly incense those inclined to take a dim view of those in debt, and some responded with vitriol, their comments having no grounding in anything more than prejudice, on why this family was having trouble making ends meet.

Quite a few of the comments also reflected a considerable lack of understanding as to how the bottom half, income-wise, lives (for instance, saying that the couple “should” have several hundred thousand in savings plus that much in their home equity). A different theme was the couple should be on food stamps and the adult children and their kids should be on Medicare. One reader who rebutted that in comments, pointing out that the thresholds for assets and income were very low, was ignored.

Thanks for all you help and the offer, but there are folks who have already defaulted on their cards and loans and have lost their homes and jobs. At least my husband did finally get a job last week after 10 1/2 months of looking from Baltimore to Berkeley, but the damage has already been done. Someone, somewhere must listen to the people because we are all going down, friends, neighbors, relatives, you name ‘em, we know ‘em….

Yves Smith concludes in way better than I could:

I think quite a few readers owe her an apology. But I am also sure those readers are so locked into their Calvinist mindset that they will find some basis for criticizing this family. Some people seem constitutionally unable to admit that success and prosperity are not the result of hard work alone. I know plenty of people who are hardworking and talented. Some are making a fraction (and I mean less than 1/10) than people I know who strike me as less talented, often less natively intelligent, and certainly worked less hard. I know others who took considerable reversals through no fault of their own (including one in particular, a former high flier who has had to move back to his parent’s home, with the reasons including that he gave a lot of money to struggling relatives). Luck also plays a big role, what family you were born into, what breaks you got along the way, what landmines you avoided. It is part of the human condition that we lack foresight. Things that look like a logical choice can turn out badly for reasons beyond one’s control, and many people lack the luxury of choices to begin with.

So very true. How much of our success was dependent on those before us?

• Someone else paid for the hospital you were born in.
• Someone had to build the school and educate your teachers.
• Someone else had to decide to sacrifice to be the teacher of another’s child,
• Someone else decided to fight for rights, in wars, in court rooms, in hardship,
• Someone else fought for the 40-hour work week,
• Clean water for you to drink as a child

No one is self-made man ( or woman ). No man is an island. We all owe a debt to the dead, we can only repay to the unborn.

Yves concludes with a quote from a reader:

I am astonished at how many readers you have who have no idea whatever how the financial bottom fourth or fifth of America lives. When I was a kid in western Kentucky I had a few classmates who lived in unpainted old clapboard houses out in the country, in some cases former slave quarters and so a century old. I remember one such house that even had a dirt floor. When I was little my mom’s parents lived in a tiny mountainside house in Appalachia that had no indoor plumbing. They hand pumped water from a well and heated it on a coal stove, and for a toilet across the dirt road there was an outhouse that hung out over and dumped onto the weeds on the descending slope. Stunk to high heaven, of course, and there were lots of bugs. At eight years of age, having to go in the middle of the night armed only with a flashlight was a character-building experience.

Things are a little better in the rural south now, but they sure aren’t good, now that the small farms are gone. In my adult life I’ve seen one relative living in a broken-down trailer with a caved-in roof and a goat tied up in the yard. And I’ve seen my cousin, with a small-college degree in math no less, getting by for a good while in the middle of nowhere, south Carolina on $9,000 a year from intermittent and part-time jobs. We can be all snooty about the poor not working hard enough, but I’ve also seen a sister quit a job pulling visibly diseased tissue off of Tyson chickens on a production line rather than get campylobacter one more time. We demand they live and act all middle class, but as a society we honestly don’t give them half a chance.

These guys who talk about saving hundreds of $thousands in small-town rural America are particularly irritating. How do you do that on $9K/year or $12K/year exactly? The US Census Bureau says in 2007 the bottom 20% of US households earned less than $19,178, so these are not trivial numbers of people. We never won our war on poverty really. We just forgot about it when the conservatives become obsessed with the hordes of welfare queens (and drag queens) that they imagined were filling our cities.

One of my big shocks when I started traveling more was to discover that compared to a lot of places a large part of the central and southern US (including parts of the upper Midwest) was actually what used to be called a third-world country, with way more poverty, illness, and and borderline illiteracy than Europe et al. Re literacy I remember in Turkey seeing Chekov plays for sale at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere. My Turkish friends thought it odd that I’d find that odd. To them it was perfectly reasonable that a truck driver might want something interesting to read.

One of the big lies about the poor or the struggling lower middle class is “surely they could have made something of themselves.” If you local school is lousy, how are you going to do that? I hate to say it, but from the time I have spent in Alabama, the level of education among average people (and I don’t mean poor, I mean average) is not hot at all. Multiply that across quite a few lower-income states.

The Calvinists have forgotten, as they always do, what Jesus taught in Matthew 25:34-45 :

“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world.

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in,

I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?

When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?

When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’

“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,

I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

“He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did NOT do for one of the least of these, you did NOT do for me.’

Jesus also taught, Luke 12:48:

But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.

For those who have been given much, much more will be asked. Yet people and corporations refuse to provide for society.

Does Jesus allow selective Christianity?

Jesus taught how we treat the least of our brothers defines our humanity. Now in the time of humanity’s greatest need when it matters the most is when we discover who sits at the right hand … and who sits on the left hand.

I work every day on improving myself as a human being wishing to be humane. But I know that I will be found wanting. I don’t think I am better than others but I grieve for humanity because people who can change society for the better do nothing. And those who would do evil are successful.