Write your postmaster!

The USPS has this great service where they'll give you free boxes in which to mail your priority mail packages. In fact, it's SO cool, that you can go to their web site and order a bunch of boxes in your favorite size, and they'll deliver them right to your door.

For FREE!

How cool is that?! Of course, these aren't just "free boxes", they're "free boxes for sending things priority mail", and they're heavily marked as priority mail all over, and you can't send things using the cheaper first class or other lower rates -- that's part of the deal: if you want free boxes, they have to go with the more expensive priority postage. Ok, I've got no problem with that. And I understand how a lot of people have a problem where they think that "take one, free" means "take a bazillion of them, and ruin it for others", so the USPS has to go to some lengths to make sure that people don't take advantage of this great deal. I'm ok with that, too.

But here's the thing that really gets me: once the box has been used for priority mail, they're designed to NOT be recyclable! They make it so that it's very difficult to open the box without destroying it (they even provide a convenient pull-strip to tear the box in half, which is nice for opening, but not-nice for re-use), and they get REALLY grouchy if you try to re-use the box -- AFTER it's been paid for via priority-postage -- by turning it inside out and putting first-class postage on it.

Ok, again -- there are folks who would ruin this system by just using the box inside out the first time, and try to scam some free boxes, and that's bad. So I can understand the Post wanting to make sure that the boxes get used priority at least once. But I just can't imagine -- especially in this day and age of reduce-reuse-recycle -- why they'd go to such great lengths to make sure that these boxes end-up as landfill!

What I'd like to see is some sort of "this box has had its priority-mail postage price paid, and now it's just a plain-old cardboard box" sticker or something that would make it easy and convenient for the American public to waste less corregated cardboard. I'm not sure exactly how it would work, but certainly putting a small sticker on the box which allows the 2nd & subsequent users to send it 1st class, book-rate, overseas or whatever other non-priority way that they want should be OK.

Thing is, I've suggested this to two local postmasters, and they've both scoffed at the idea, citing the strong rules and big penalties for mis-use as their reasons.

Ok, I can understand that there are CURRENTLY strong rules and big penalties -- but there's no reason there HAS to be!

Another system would be: sell the boxes with priority postage already on them (but for the price of the postage, so the box, itself, is still "free.") Ok, that's a less-good solution, as it makes it difficult for the average Joe to free-order 50 boxes (@$4+ each), but at least that way the PO wouldn't have to worry about it!

As is stands, any time I use a regular brown box that's approximately the same size, I have to face a distrusting glare and minor interrogation from the clerk about whether or not I'm stealing from America. And, again, I understand that SOME people are thieves, and that's bad, so I appreciate them trying to stop THOSE people, but all I'M trying to do is pay my fair postage and then reduce the waste. You'd think that America, the USPS, Al Gore and everyone else would be ALL OVER this.

...But they're not.

And I don't quite understand why. It just doesn't make sense to me.

You should write to your postmaster with your suggestions for how to solve this. (Please don't write demanding free boxes as part of your entitlement, because you pay taxes, or some other silliness that will defeat this campaign -- I'm trying to suggest ways to allow re-use of the boxes AFTER they've had their "rent" paid by going through the priority postage system at least once.) Tell your friends, too. There ought to be a way that we can work this out to everyone's satisfaction, dammit!

Just today I tossed-away 20+ priority boxes (I won a pool that resulted in me getting them) that would've been perfect for re-use, except that most of my outgoing goes 1st class. That REALLY grates on my sense of ecology -- waste, waste, waste!

Btw, your postmaster's address is:

  Postmaster
  YourCity, YourState
              YourZip

Be polite & respectful, and try to suggest ideas that take into account the PO's point of view. That's how change will happen.

Thanks!

"History" turned book-review.

History is pretty neat stuff. I never really paid much attention to it in school -- probably because you couldn't "figure out" history, you couldn't memorize a few basic axioms and some formulas and then derive the rest of it using short cuts, you sort of had to pay attention -- I was much too lazy for that. Plus, I think, I got a lot of poor exposure to it in school, so history just seemed like a terribly boring subject. But, nowadays, I just can't seem to get enough of it -- I'm just fascinated by the history of everything.

I especially like histories of things about which I have a smattering of "popular American culture" knowledge but, when I learn more about it, I find out that I pretty much had it all wrong, and the few bits I did have right were the boring bits, and there's so much more interesting, rich stuff to know. The classic example that I typically give is the bit about how those savage American Indians were constantly beating the crap out of the poor, innocent settlers who wanted nothing more than to quietly go about their business.

Of course, their business was conquering the new world, and its kind of hard to do that quietly. Or innocently. But such was the initial history I was taught (maybe I wasn't paying attention during some important bits, but thats certainly what I got out of it, the first time around), and I pretty much swallowed it, as presented.

Vicki (my wife) and I are currently reading Ideas: A History Of Thought And Invention From Fire To Freud, and I'm totally digging it. We read to each other at night, before bed, so it's slow going as (a) reading aloud is slow (b) we stop a lot to talk about this or that which comes up in the book and (c) all this slow, interrupted reading happens late at night, in bed, so we're tired. So we only make a handful to a dozen pages a night, but it's fun & interesting and I really like he book.

One of the things that I like about it is that it has prompted me to consider a time when even the most mundane, "we take this for granted" things were not widely known, and what constituted a "revolutionary breakthrough", back in those days. One example of this is: there was a time in man's history when the connection between sex and babies wasn't widely known. Back then, the fact that women occasionally popped-out babies was seen as somewhat miraculous, which is why the earliest religions centered around women, motherhood & birth -- they were seen as goddesses, those who could create more humans! "Big whoop!", we say, nowadays, as everyone pretty-much understands the process but, back then, it was this complete god-like mystery. The other one I like is the "invention" of square houses. Early on, one's "house" was basically a fire-pit in the middle with then a rather crude structure extending around it to a radius of where the useful heat was. Think "tee-pee", only 10s of 1000s of years less-advanced. Then, as man started gathering into villages and communities and started hoarding food, firewood and whatnot, somebody figured out that they could store a lot more stuff in their house if they "filled out the corners", to square them against the space of their neighbor's houses. So, one day, everyone's trying to jam more & more food-for-Winter into their increasingly cramped round-houses when, the next day, the genius of the bunch figured out how to get a few extra square feet out of his area.

My friends think I'm nuts (or, really, just boring) to get so excited about this, but I think it's really cool to imagine all the other folks gathering around and saying "wow, Og! Nice one...!", and then rushing home to make their houses bigger, too.

I realize that history has a lot more interesting stuff to offer, but following along the REALLY ancient stuff, the sort of "pre-history history", is really neat, to me.

Learning more about the ancient Greeks is cool, too, as is learning a bit about the history of Palistine & Isreal from a different perspective, or the way that Europe, the Middle East and the Far East sort of did many things in parallel, but also diverged in many areas. But that's all stuff that I sort of knew a little about, and now I'm just learning more about it -- so that's nice and all, but getting a peek into the life of prehistoric man really gets my geek on.

(Tangent: Does that count as ending a sentence in a preposition? I think not, because "to get one's geek on" is a verb. Hmmm. But then I'd have to make the same exception for "gets my dander up", and that doesn't seem right...)

At any rate, we're really enjoying the book -- even though there are parts of it that make us say "hey, wait a minute! We need to double check that...", as it goes strongly against stuff that we both feel pretty strongly that we were taught "right" differently.

So I wonder if it's history that I like so much, or anthropology. Except that anthropology seems a lot like figuring out the history from other clues -- very cool stuff in its own right! -- but the thing that I've been more excited about, lately, is the actual "answer", the history, itself.

Of course, all of this means that my book-list just gets longer & longer every night -- "read-up on Homerian-era Greece", "learn more about pre-Ottoman Turkish empires", "learn more about Arthurian times, but from a non-English perspective", etc., my little notebook is practically bursting with "to read" items...

<sigh> Still, it's pretty fun stuff. If you have any interest in this kind of thing at all, I can recommend Ideas as a good kicking-off point. It's 800+ pages, so tough to hold up when you're laying down for long periods, but very approachable and, if you don't stop to gab about it ever third paragraph, or read it in longer than 20 min stretches, you'll probably breeze through it...

Heh, maybe I'll do a movie review, next.

Blogging at work and at home...

I keep getting caught by the trap of thinking that I have to think and plan a really good blog entry and that I have to research all my points and "do them up right" and that I don't have time to do any of that and, hence, my blog doesn't get written to when really the whole point is to just write whatever, but to get in the habit of writing multiple times a week. I hate that it seems that every blog entry starts with a little self-chastizing on this same theme, but it's driving me nuts that I continue to fall for the same "trick" every week -- gotta stop that!

I think I'm going to see if I can set up a machine at work to serve up both a blog and a better wiki. We have a wiki at work, but I think its cumbersome and, hence, we aren't getting full value out of it.

If I do that, I wonder how it'll impact my "public" blogging. Hmmm, I wonder how much I'd be able to blog about things that happen in the company publicly. I have this general idea that I'd like to do some software-philosophy blogging (heh, me and every other programmer with an opinion...) so, I suppose to the extent that my blogs are abstract, I can make them public, then perhaps reference them from the work-blog, perhaps adding "for example, in this situation..." type stuff.

So that could be pretty cool...

I can't believe that there are software shops in companies that depend on software development for their core livelihood (as opposed to just whatever company that happens to do some internal software, too) where there isn't a developer blog.

For that matter, I'm amazed at how hard it has been at my last two jobs to get a group together for weekly lunches out! When I suggest that it's a key communications tool, I often hear "hey, we communicate! Why, just last week, I was over asking Bob a question, and he gave me the answer!"

Folks, that is NOT communicating! I mean, yes, of course it's communicating, but it's not how one stays sharp, how one pushes computer science forward, how one drives one's company to huge successes which will be massively rewarded to those who were instrumental in catalyzing the changes!

Oh, sorry -- I got a little carried away, there.

But still! Don't people get excited about the idea of developing some new idea, new concept, new procedure or innovation that maybe -- just maybe -- no one's ever done before, and makes you and your team "smarter than everyone else"?! Surely I'm not the only developer on the planet who's that egotistical! Yet everywhere I turn I see/hear people who are "just trying to get through this latest fire drill" without any thought to, for example, how they might avoid having more fire drills just like this one in the future.

I suppose a lot of it comes from a sense of hopelessness, that there's nothing us grunts can do to make significant change. Come to think of it, that was the main reason for my leaving my previous company -- while my boss & boss's boss seemed pretty happy that I was making the right kinds of changes, it seemed to me that the big things, the important things, never really changed. It's a little like finally getting the correct measurements of flour and sugar into your bread recipe, but not being able to get anyone with budget-authority to allow correction of the fact that the mixing bowl is chipping lead-paint into every loaf. "Wow, kudos, Ted -- that's some of the best bread we've seen around here in years!" "Yeah, thanks. Uh... don't eat it, it'll kill you." And then I feel guilty for seeming ungrateful for my accolades... <sigh>

Ah well, I'm at a smaller company, now, and slightly higher on the food chain -- a slightly bigger fish in a substantially smaller pond, as it were -- so maybe I'll be able to effect "more important" changes, and feel a deeper sense of satisfaction around that. I certainly hope so -- I'd hate to go through the rest of my career being grumpy all the time...

(That's funnier if you know me; I have a tendency to enjoy pretending to be grumpy and/or bitching about things. I never quite grokked how some people don't understand that imagining how things could be better doesn't mean you're unhappy...)

So, I guess I'll work on starting a company blog. And I'll make sure to make the time to not ignore THIS blog. Maybe combining the two. But not next week -- my daughter's visiting from college, so I'm going to be goofing off with her.

But AFTER that!

[Edit July 25, 2009]

Now I work at home, so at least the conflict part is gone. Yet working at home leaves even LESS time for things like blogs. Maybe I'll get inspired and have something worthwhile to say. In the mean time, I'm growing a business for iPhone development, and have created a wiki to hep new clients through the process of getting their apps developed. It's at http://www.manyfriends.com/wiki/iphone/