I have been getting a lot of comments, questions about my bicycle. Yes, that is an extention on the back. No, I didn’t build it myself.

It is a kit put together by the folks at Extracycle. They call it a Sport Utility Bicycle, but in my mind, it is more like a station wagon.

Back before mini-vans, there were those old nine-seater wagons. My folks had one. Summers it would fill with tents and sleeping bags as they took three boys car camping our way across the US. During the school year, we would drive to the A&P and I would look back in the tailgate over what seemed like acres of brown paper grocery bags. Bench front seat, a lucky one could sit between Mom and Dad. Or read as we drove, hidden away in the ‘way back.’

I started cycling when I moved back to town a couple of years ago. Living right on the bikepath, a mile or two from town, I figured I could make it to work and back, or to the store. But, I would always be needing to carry something - the briefcase for work, have to stop at the store for supper, swim suits for the beach … And so I would grab the car keys instead. I needed that old nine-seater, or at least something along the lines of the modern granola-head Vermont equivalent, my Subary Legacy wagon.

I tried trikes, I tried trailers. Then, down at the Old Spokes Home, I tried one of these. Hardly noticed it was there. Plenty of room. No hitches to deal with. So I had them put one on.

It is great. Now I can treat my bike my car, throw my junk in the back. Stopping at the store, the beach, whatever, no problem. I can toss it back there and haul it. And it can hold quite a bit. Like, for example; a week’s worth of groceries, buckets of carrots in from the farm field, watermelons to the beach picnic, the daughter home from school (although she did ask that I meet her round the corner) and a cinematographer from Toronto, filming our local run of the world naked bike ride. here this summer.

Now, I ride. The thing hauls. And, finally, I have a place on my bike for bumper stickers.

Happy Riding!

While this research does not really get at the connections between the “real world” and the blogsphere, it dose give us an interesting picture of the blogsphere. Here is one picture, from Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media

Here is a link to a more complete picture, in a blog entry pointing to an article that appeared in a recent issue of Discover magazine (See! Crossover!)

We can see that there are groups of blogs that are more well, that tend to “talk” amongst themselves. They tend to share the same blogging platform (live journal), or the same subject matter (political commentary, tech). But, this does not necessarily mean a homogeneous set of opinions, a lack of discourse.

There are, of course, great concentrations around the “A-List” bloggers, and a sort of sub-species that are good connectors. Then there is the riff-raff, or as they are more commonly referred to in this sort of network analysis, the “long tail”

A couple of things here. First of all, this pattern is not all that different from the patterns we tend to see in any sort of social network. We can say it all kinds of ways, but people tend to clump up. There is the heavy tailed “power law” distribution. You have the popular types, and the folks that go between groups - either viewed as genius cross-pollinators or social misfits, depending on your take.

So, it looks like you give ‘em this fancy technology, and layer even groovier web 2.0 on top of that, and people still tend to act like people.

Secondly, if this is like may other non-linear dynamic systems, we have a fractal pattern. And that would mean that if we were to repeat this analysis on the Vermont blogsphere, we would see much the same pattern.

Anyone got the time, inclination, or funding for this research?

So “QC” has been the big thing around the shop for a while now. There have been problems, and management is looking for a fix. Too much bad data going out the door, clients upset, and the local VPs get really tired of apologizing, especially when they feel like they are apologizing for the geeks.

We call them project managers, but they are as much sales as anything else. You can tell cause we don’t have a sales force, and their they get judged on the amount of business they bring in. They make promises and the geeks deliver.

There is the usual culture clash, and to everyone’s credit, we have been doing a lot of work around ‘understanding’ each other - How to work together, how not to blame each other, how to improve communication when we speak different languages. The whole “Men are from Mars …” thing. This was good but it did not go far enough, and we have been asked to come up with a “Plan” to “Make Sure this Doesn’t Happen Again.”

And somewhere one of the VPs remembered hearing “Total Quality” or ISO 9000 or something, so the plan has been dubbed a “Quality Control Plan.”

Some very smart people spent a great deal of time on this plan, which pays homage to Deming’s “PDAC” cycle. It talks a lot about specifications, which is good, and a first in our shop.

So far so good, but something started to seem a little off when most of the specifications are written in terms of what to do, not what is to be produced. Then it really fell apart when it turns out that most of the quality checks started with the word “Ensure … ”

This type of check sets up for blame, for a failure on an “Ensure” item can only be attributed on one thing - the person that was supposed to do something did not do it. This completely masks the process, or any underlying causes of process failure, and personalizes the situation.

And, we are to demonstrate that we performed the “QC Check” by checking a box on a form. Guess how many of us are ever NOT going to check that box … especially when “the director will take appropriate action” is part of the remedy for any error listed.

Deming’s philosophy of quality control, or “system of profound knowledge”, rested on fourteen points, the third of which is

“Cease dependence on inspection to achieve Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality. Eliminate the need for inspection on a mass basis by building quality into the product in the first place.”

I don’t get that is what is going on here. Nor do I find this plan following point number eight

“Drive Out Fear”