“It was a favorite theme of C. S. Lewis that only lazy people work hard. By lazily abdicating the essential work of deciding and directing, establishing values and setting goals, other people do it for us; then we find ourselves frantically, at the last minute, trying to satisfy a half dozen demands on our time, none of which is essential to our vocation, to stave off the disaster of disappointing someone.” — Eugene Peterson
From operations research professor Michael Carter on The Science of Better:
If I went into a company, a private company, and said “I can save you a million dollars day,” the CEO would implement it tomorrow. If I went into a hospital and said “I can save you a million dollars a day,” they’d they have to think about it, because the CEO would have to convince people this was a good idea. It would have to be good for the doctors, good for the nurses, good for the bean counters, good for the patients, good for patient quality, good for media. … All problems become multi-criteria problems. The good new is that things are so bad in health care we can always do that.
That matches my experience from when I used to work for a hospital.
Carter’s last line may not be clear in the excerpt above. In context, he’s saying that health care is so inefficient that an operations research consultant can always find ways to improve things, even though decisions have to satisfy numerous constituencies.
Nicholas Carr said something similar in his book Does IT Matter? Carr argues for most of the book that although information technology is important, it has become a given, like electricity. Then near the end of his book, he says that because health care IT is so far behind, his remarks don’t apply there.
Here’s a quick update for those who might be interested in what I’m up to.
These days I’m primarily working on two large projects, one that’s mathematical modeling and other that’s data exploration. I also have a couple smaller projects going on, one in software process improvement and another mathematical modeling project.
I really enjoy what I’m doing. I’ve worked on variety of interesting projects, and that’s important to me. And I’m spending less time now looking for work and more time doing work. (You can never stop looking for work, but for now I can afford to spend less time doing so than I did at first.)
Several people have asked me what kind of work I’ve been doing since I went out on my own earlier this year. So far I’ve done a lot of fairly small projects, though I have one large project that’s just getting started. (The larger the project and client, the longer it takes to get rolling.)
Here are some particular things I’ve been doing.
If something on this list sounds like something you’d like for me to do with your company, please let me know.
The name of my business is Singular Value Consulting, LLC.
Math people may catch the allusion to singular value decomposition (SVD). I hope that non-math folks will interpret “singular value” to mean something like “singularly valuable.”
One way to think of an SVD is a pair of coordinate systems that give a linear transformation the simplest representation. So metaphorically, SVD is getting to the core of a problem and producing a simple solution.
For some less serious mathematical company names, see this list.
See this page for some ideas of the kinds of things Singular Value Consulting could do for your company.
I’m looking for small consulting projects to fill the gaps between larger projects. I’m available for projects that would take up to a few days.
I can’t take on another large project right now. However, if your company takes several weeks to initiate a project, we could start the process now and I may be available by the time the paperwork is done.
If you have a project you’d like to discuss, please let me know.
I’m in Durham, North Carolina this morning, part of Research Triangle. Last night I spoke at a Research Triangle Analysts meeting and this morning I’m giving at talk at RTI.
Just like Austin and Salt Lake City, Research Triangle wants to be another Silicon Valley, only with lower taxes and a lower cost of living.
It appears the Silicon Valley wannabes are doing well. I don’t know whether they are drawing companies away from Silicon Valley, but they’re growing.
Silicon Vally’s sales pitch is that geography matters at lot. You need to be where the venture capitalists, other tech companies, and lots of potential employees are.
Areas like Research Triangle make a more moderate argument. They also want to say that geography matters. If geography doesn’t matter, then why move to Durham? But they also want to argue that geography doesn’t matter so much that you need to pay California taxes and rent.
I think the future is on their side. Geography matters, and always will, though not as much as it used to. It’s not necessary (or even possible) to have everyone you work with in one area. I expect Silicon Valley will continue to thrive, but more affordable alternatives may grow faster.
Eric Jonas once asked me on Twitter whether I was an Abelian consultant. The pun is an allusion to Abelian groups, groups in which the group operation commutes.
No, I’m not an Abelian consultant. I don’t have a regular commute. I’m more of a Lévy consultant. A Lévy distribution has heavy tails. That is, it is often near the origin, but occasionally takes very long excursions.
I vaguely remember a couple papers about the Lévy distribution, one saying that whale migration follows such a distribution, and another saying that human movements do too.
I spoke with Sacha Chua last week. We talked about entrepreneurship, Emacs, having eclectic interests, delegation, and more.
J: I ran into you by searching on Emacs topics. When I look at your blog, I see that you do a lot of interesting things, but it’s a little hard to get a handle on exactly what you do.
S: Oh, the dreaded networking quirky question. What exactly do you do?
J: Yeah, people have said the same thing to me. Not to put you in a box, but I was curious. I see from your site that you do graphic art—sketching and such—and it doesn’t create the impression that you’re someone who would spend a lot of time in front of Emacs. So I’m curious how these things fit together, how you got started using Emacs and how you use it now.
S: So my background is actually fairly technical. I’ve been doing computer programming for ages and ages. In high school I came across a book Unix Power Tools, which is how I got interested in Emacs. And because I was interested in programming, in open source, a little bit of wearable computing as well, I got to know Emacs and all these different modules it had. For example, Emacspeak is amazing! It’s been around since the 1990s and it’s a great way to use the computer while you’re walking around. Because I love programming and because I wanted to find a way to help out, I ended up maintaining PlannerMode and later EmacsWiki mode as well.
When I went to university, I took up computer science. After I finished, I taught. Then I took my masters in Toronto, where I am now. Emacs was super helpful;—being able to do everything in one place. After I finished my masters, I did a lot of software consulting with IBM. I did business consulting as well. Then in 2012, after saving up, I decided to go on pretty much the same adventure you’re on. I’m completely unhirable for the next five years! Most businesses struggle for the first five years, so I saved up enough to not worry too much about my expenses for the next five years. I’m one year in, four years to go, and that’s where I am.
At networking events, I like to shake people up a bit by telling them I’m semi-retired. I’m in this five-year experiment to see how awesome life can be and what I can do to make things better. I’ve done technical consulting, business consulting, sketching, illustration, writing, all sorts of things. Basically, my job description is context-dependent.
J: I understand that.
S: I use Emacs across all the things I do. When I’m doing technical and business consulting, I use Emacs to edit code, to draft documents, even to outline comic strips. And when I’m doing illustration, Emacs—especially Org Mode—helps me keep track of clients and deliverables, things to do, agenda, calendar, deadlines.
J: I’m basically running my life through Org Mode right now. When you say you use Emacs to draft documents, are you using LaTeX?
S: I used LaTeX when I was working on my master’s thesis and other papers, I think. Now I mostly use org mode and export from there.
J: Are you using Emacs for email?
S: I used to. But I’m stuck on Windows to use drawing programs like Sketchbook Pro on my Tablet PC. So it’s harder to set up my email like I had it set up when I used Ubuntu. Back when I used Ubuntu, I was very happy with Gnus.
J: Do you work entirely on Windows, or do you go back and forth between operating systems?
S: I have a private server that runs Linux. On Windows I run Cygwin, but I miss some of the conveniences I had when I had a nicely set-up Linux installation.
J: When you’re running Emacs on Windows, I’m sure you run into things that don’t quite work. What do you do about that?
S: Most things work OK if they’re just Emacs Lisp, but some things call a shell command or use some library that hasn’t been ported over yet. Then I basically wail and gnash my teeth. Sometimes I get things working by using Cygwin, but sometimes it’s a bit of a mess. I don’t use Emacs under Cygwin because I prefer how it works natively. I don’t run into much that doesn’t work.
J: So what programming languages do you use when you’re writing code?
S: I do a lot of quick-and-dirty things in Emacs Lisp. When I need to do some XML parsing or web development, I’ll use Ruby because a lot of people can read it and there are a lot of useful gems. Sometimes I’ll do some miscellaneous things in Perl.
I love doing programming and putting together tools. And I quite enjoy drawing, helping people with presentation and design. So this is left brain plus right brain.
It does boggle people that you can have more than one passion, but others are, like, “Yeah, I know, I’m like that too.”
J: I think having an interest in multiple things is a healthier lifestyle, but it’s a little harder to market.
S: Actually, no. I finally figured out a name for my company, ExperiVis, after a year of playing with it. People reach out to me and we figure out whether it’s a good fit. I don’t need to necessarily guide people to just this aspect or another of my work. I like the fact that people bump into these different things.
J: When we scheduled this call, I went through your virtual assistant. How do you use a virtual assistant?
S: One of the things I don’t like to do is scheduling. I used to get stressed out about scheduling when I did it myself. I’ve always been interested in delegating and taking advantage of what other people enjoy and are good at. I work with an assistant—Criselda. She lives in the Philippines. I found her on oDesk. She works one to four hours a week, more or less, and keeps track of her time.
J: What else might you ask a VA to do?
S: I’ve asked people to do web research. I’ve had someone do a little bit of illustration for me. I’ve had someone do a little bit of programming for me because I want to learn how to delegate technical tasks. He does some Rails prototyping for me. I have someone doing data entry and transcription. It’s fascinating to see how you can swap money for time, especially for things that stress me out, or bore me, or things I can’t do.
Every week I go over my task list with my VA to see which of the tasks I should have delegated. Still working on it!
* * *
Later on in the conversation Sacha asked about my new career and had this gem of advice:
Treating this as a grand experiment makes it much easier for me to try different approaches and not be so scared, to not treat it as a personal rejection if something doesn’t work.
Related post: People I’ve interviewed and people who have interviewed me
Be careful about saying that something isn’t a fit for your personality. Maybe it’s just outside of your experience. Several times I’ve mistaken the latter for the former.
There’s a story that when someone asked George Burns whether he could play violin, he replied “I don’t know. I haven’t tried.”
