Walt-O-Matic

This morning Anti-Virus Guard,AVG (not the free version), decided that TRMSRV.DLL in the System32 directory was threat and copied it out of the directory.

The result was that Terminal Service no longer works. That means that software like Remote Desktop Connection 2 (RDC), can’t connect, although the machine responds to pings and Samba requests.

Placing a exception in AVG to not check that directory (sounds bad, eh?), and restoring the file from another machine seems to have temporarily address the problem.

I wonder if AVG knows about this.

We’re also seeing that Cygwin and the System Restore Point is also among the collateral damage.

UPDATE 11-Nov-2008: Looks like AVG is now flagging Windows as a virus.

Total speculation follows.

This weekend, I was at the Apple Store, and managed to get into a rather in depth conversation with someone, who, well, really knew their stuff. More so than other store employees I’ve chatted with, and some of them were pretty good.

I was passed the observation that an interesting “event” had occurred rather silently.

They ran out of iPhones.

This person explained to me that Apple does a really good job of keeping them stocked, since they were a major supplier for the area. However, they were clean out.

The only times that ever happened, was when Apple was about to change inventory on them. Killing the 4GB model was one. Going to the 16GB was the other.

A 32GB or 64GB iPhone seems likely, as iPhone customers want as much memory as an iTouch allows.

This would be a good time to add additional gestures, which, incidentally would help out with the lack of cut’n'paste.

But the real feature I’m looking for? The ability to push my contacts to other people with an iPhone. We’ve got the same device, the same applications, the same data, and bluetooth, there’s no technical reason I can’t give someone my ‘electronic business card’.

It’s been in the news that the ending to Battlestar Galactica has been rewritten.

Supposedly, it’s darker. Depressing. And, you might need a security blanket to get through it.

Here’s my speculation on what happens:

1. Adama finds Earth.
2. The Cylons find Earth.
3. The colonies are wiped out.
4. But, the Cylons finally figured out how to reproduce.
5. We, the viewers, are actually Cylons.
6. And to atone for their sins, the Cyclons made themselves forget they are Cylons.
7. The only remaining evidence is a population that is monotheistic, with legends of a polytheistic society.

Almost every manager I’ve known shakes their fist at project management tools. And while pretty Gantt charts, views of progress reports, and tasks lists appear in presentations, most of it is trickery. That is, all the real work is done by hand on paper or in a spreadsheet, and once figured out, is transcribed to a project tool to product the pretty charts.

What gives?

Project isn’t a drawing tool; it’s supposed to give and track useful information, not get in the way.

Isn’t project management software supposed to let you enter in your task list, assign resources, and produce an optimal schedule?

Well, yes. And, frankly, most people can get past that part. The problems kick in after that point.

Managers ditch project management tools when they start getting unexpected behaviors.

I’ve identified several problems that crop up frequently. Here’s some things to be aware of to help reign in the gremlins that like to scramble your projects.

Loss of Historical Information

If your project tool moves a completed task to a new point in the timeline, then it’s broken. You’ve found a bug. Completing a task anchors it in time.

Mysterious Chronological Task Reordering

When you list tasks, unless you explicitly state otherwise with a direct dependency, the software is allowed to reorder when a task begins. The software you’re using may have a different take on what makes sense.

I often see this problem happen when a time estimate is replaced with a more discrete breakdown of the task. For instance, deleting a 3 day task and replacing it with three 1 day tasks. Because project tools often assume you plan today and do tomorrow, you can sometimes end up with a hole in the schedule you want backfilled and that’s when the trouble starts.

In some cases, the software may decide to move one task from the end of the task list up to the front to fill in the hole; the justification is that it’s better to move one task than shuffle the whole schedule back. This may, or may not, be what you want.

More realistically, if you find tasks being shuffled out of order, the problem has more to do with when a task starts. Some software will force a task to start at a particular date in order to coerce the schedule; the problem is, if you’re unaware it’s done that, and you change some tasks, it might have imposed a schedule requirement upon you that isn’t real. You need to be diligent about such conditions.

Very intelligent schedulers will recognize the difference between a start constraint that you mandated, versus one that it derived.

Around the trouble spots, make sure that the tasks are set to be scheduled as soon as possible, depending on their assigned resources, and not an arbitrary date.

Never Trust Undo

While undo is supposed to put things back the way they were, it can be tricky to get right. Some operations may affect the properties of the tasks on your schedule. When you undo, it might undo what you’ve done, but keep the changes and constraints that it made.

A mature product will implement undo perfectly, but it never hurts to save a historical copy.

Put another way, just because the tasks return to their original positions after an undo, does not mean that new dependencies and criteria were properly cleared from the task properties.

Too Many User Supplied Dependencies

A dependency should only reflect inter-task dependencies, and that means you should use only the minimum required.

If you are using dependencies to force an ordered sequence to tasks that have no relationship, just to get them done in a certain order, you’re doing it wrong.

If you are using dependencies to coerce the software into producing a schedule ordering you want, you’re doing it wrong.

The problem with these two hack-it-til-it-works approaches is that when the schedule changes and you need to re-level it again, some dependencies are real and others are bogus. The software will account for all of them, and that will cause the scheduling algorithms to make bad decisions.

Today I was forwarded a review of OS X entitled: Leopard is the New Vista, and It’s Pissing Me Off.

I think it’s safe to say that I’m a fan of Apple, in general, as I find their hardware, environment, and tools far more productive for my development, office, and home needs than I ever did using Microsoft or its products.

I think it’s also fair to say that I’m willing to also point out when things don’t work:

• Duplication Menu Item Problems
• Having to rebuild Spotlight indexes, manually
• And, more recently, Four complaints of Leopard
• And very recently, Five Things I Can’t Do With OS X Mail RSS

Oliver Rist, raises some very good points in his treaty on Leopard’s recent similarities to Vista’s screw ups.

Here’s my take on his five points.

Vista Similarity 1: Wait for a Service Pack—Perpetually

Rist is right in saying that “[With Tiger] Everything. Just. Worked. Period.” I’m also quite in agreement that with Vista, even “a year after its shrink-wrapped release” it still has problems, driver issues, and “doesn’t work with 50 percent of new software.”

But I wonder how far back he’s actually recalling. Historically, I recall that each early version of Apple’s OS had serious kinks. Is comparing Tiger 10.4.9 with Leopard 10.5.1 actually a valid Apple to Apple comparison? (excuse the pun)

I’m with Rist if he thinks it should be, but accept the reality it isn’t. In my mind, Apple changed a number of things about the OS that they didn’t have to. Stability, size reduction, and additional hardware support will always earn high marks on my reviews. Unless the new glitz is functional, it doesn’t do much for me; but more on this in a moment.

At the moment, I’m tolerant because historically Apple has made right in reasonable time. By 10.4.3 and 10.4.4, I was quite happy. Given that I suspect Apple’s real purpose was not to make GUI fluff, but to pave the way for resolution independent graphics and new Core Animation, I’m surprised how well things held up.

Microsoft, Direct X improvements aside, gets no such pass, because as a whole, I still have problems with the OS, and it’s been around longer, and had more people working on it.

That said, I’m also aware that a good number of the Microsoft blue screens of death aren’t Microsoft’s fault — directly. When drivers do bad things, it can topple an OS. Of course, this leads me to wonder why Microsoft didn’t manage their kernel layers a bit better.

Knowing this actually provides some insight for Leopard as well. Everyone understood how Tiger worked. Too well, perhaps. There were quite a number of OS resource tweaks that delivered amazing integration and features. I was certainly one of the advanced users.

However, Apple assumes, and I think rightly so, that if you intend to do an upgrade in place, then if you’ve changed the operating system out from underneath them, you roll the dice. A number of people were bit by Unsanity’s Application Enhancer that didn’t upgrade at the last moment before installing Leopard.

Keeping up to date with OS X third-party applications is just as hard as it is on Windows. That’s why I eventually plopped down the money for Version Tracker Pro. Had I not, I would have been one of those that the new install would have taken out. Diligence is king.

Even so, my problems with an Upgrade was slightly broken features, like the password working after a screen save (despite the settings to the contrary), and performance. I later learned that the former was a permission problem on the preference, and the latter was a library extension that didn’t work with Leopard and just tried to keep reloading itself.

My solution was to do an Archive and Install. All of my options were preserved, just like an Upgrade in place, but because the OS was virgin fresh, my system behaved wonderfully.

I give Apple this round, simply because a “fresh install” with Microsoft is so destructive.

Oh, and yes, once you’ve touted something as a “new” feature, like 64 bit, you can’t do it again for the next release. That’s cheating.

Vista Similarity 2: Needless Graphics Glitz

I love eye candy as much as the next guy, and in my operating systems too.

However, I question the real value one gets out of it. As long as it doesn’t get in the way, that’s great. If it communicates more information subtly, that’s great too. Incidentally, what I mean by that is effects, like Genie, which show where your Window is going when you minimize it, is useful.

All these different preview modes, sliding covers, and non-sense, I could really care less about.

Though, I have to admit I’m a closet user of them. Sometimes it easier to quickly view an image to make sure I’ve got the right one, or scan the contents of a document because a poorly chosen filename was used. I’d like to think Apple could have done this without the big production.

What really gets my goat, however is that Tiger had transparent Windows. Then it went away! That really made me mad, because I was using them since I had a small desktop.

So, that made me go find Virtue, in order to have multiple desktops. My gosh, I loved that product. Where else could you have different backgrounds, on a 3D cube, and get to them by keystrokes, mouse maneuvers, or tilting or laptop or waving your hand over it and triggering the ambient light sensors!

But then Apple went and created Spaces. With no real future, Virtue is going away - - and killing off a fantastic sales tool for me. With no competition, I don’t see Apple adding these things back.

And, only now, are we starting to talk about the transparency I had before. Argh!!!

So, while Vista is pretty, and Apple is pretty, Apple got by for having slightly more than fluff for fluff’s sake. Apple gets to take this round, begrudgingly.

Vista Similarity 3: Pointless User Interface “Fixes”

I’ve got to say, again, I agree with Oliver. The new dock may look pretty, but Apple had an uncanny way of letting me know what was going on with those nice, readable from a distance, black, unobtrusive triangles.

Do I have a way to get them back?

Can I switch an put the dock on the side and get something more acceptable looking? Yes, but then again I don’t want it on the side.

It’s crappy decisions like this that cause people to write utilities to hack the operating system which cause the initial instability problems in the first place.

Using Vista as the example, just because something is pretty doesn’t mean it’s enjoyable to use.

Having said all of the above, I have to admit that many of the things I initially didn’t like, I quickly grew to use. They bother me less.

Let’s just say in this round, the bell rang, and there was no winner.

Vista Similarity 4: Nuked Networking

I groan when I see Microsoft operating systems splinter over stupid artificial limitations like how many network connections can be concurrently inbound or outbound. I shake my finger at any operating system which can’t handle jumbo packet sizes or let me switch between 10/100/1000 ethernet speeds.

But I do accept that Windows shares, using Samba, can be difficult with Microsoft deliberately sabotaging protocols to force a homogeneous network with them being the vendor. Embrace and Extend. Anti-Trust. Bogus interoperability. Halloween Memos. I just can’t take the message that Microsoft is out to help me seriously anymore; too much bad history; too little progress. DRM, WGA, poison pill updates, spying - that’s the reason I left Microsoft.

While I recognize that Apple and Microsoft are in a cat’n'mouse game for accessing Windows resources, I do have a complaint to put on Apple’s shoulders.

And that is: just because I have a network, doesn’t mean I want to network. Unless I’m trying to comb my network’s machines, don’t bring them all to my Finder. I don’t need that. I know what kind of network traffic Microsoft generates.

On the other side of the coin, VNC is now built in. And, well, wow. Apple, you did well there. It’s almost as if Apple knows I’m slowly expelling Microsoft and replacing it with Unix systems.

But that doesn’t change the fact that when I do need access to a Windows box, and I’m using my Mac, I want it to be just as seamless. Just the other day, I tried to copy a file from a Windows share to my local desktop to work with a local copy. Locally. (Sense a theme?)

The Windows box said “that file is in use” (because someone had the network Excel file open) and wanted to know if I wanted a read-only copy. The Mac, however, simply said Permission Error and never told me why.

Apple: I need error messages to not be so abstract. Give me a way to Option-Click on them or something and dump the error.h code; in short, if I’m smart enough to fend for myself, let me. Or, just make it work.

I assume people have already heard that if you Move (not copy) a file from one resource to the other, if the destination is full and aborts the copy, the source file still gets deleted (the other half of the move). I hope that’s fixed.

Now, the sheer fact that Microsoft has a horrible time with other OS’s (and depends on them playing by their rules), the final score for this one goes to Apple. Though Apple got lucky.

Vista Similarity 5: Bundled Apps as New Features That Suck

Oliver and I may start to part ways at this one, although not that far.

All the standard home and media applications Apple bundles with their OS are really top notch in my opinion. In fact, I buy iWork in addition to iLife. It’s Apple’s Pro applications that use a interface that I find very dated. And ugly.

But the feature we all seem to gripe on is Time Machine.

My first experiences with Time Machine were horrible. The system would seize up, and, well to be fair, I have to admit that this all went away after I did an Archive and Install, rather than the Upgrade in place over my existing patched OS Tiger.

And, while I applaud the concept of Time Machine, I don’t like that I can’t force it to kick off when I want. Or that I can’t easily point it at a common server. Or use it wirelessly.

But my biggest beef is why in the world Apple just didn’t hold off, wait until ZFS was working the way they wanted, and delivered something that managed things directly with the filesystem itself.

In addition to Time Machine, I find myself using SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner to make quick, efficient backups, that are also bootable.

What I think Oliver might have missed is a subtle difference.
- With Time Machine, everything is backed up.
- Not that Time Machine backs up everything.

Let’s cover that a little closer. Time Machine does do a full backup, but then everything from then on out is incremental. And intelligently so. In fact, you can even go wandering around the files on the backup disk directly, should you choose to.

The way I’m reading things is that the review gives the impression everything is always backed up. That’s just not so.

Would I like to be able to tell Time Machine to only back up what I want it to? Yes. Please.

Would I like to only delete the things I intend to? Of course. But, realistically, it’s when I delete an important system file, and Time Machine has a copy, that I’ll suddenly become more forgiving of why it does what it does.

All his GUI gripes with Time Machine are dead on. However, when you get Time Machine working (via a clean Archive and Install - which keeps your preferences, data, and applications, btw), it does work as advertised.

It’s close. Time Machine’s integration is trivial. But over all, I think Vista’s backup, is better in the long run. Vista wins this round.

Oliver, I think, in this case was guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. To be ticked off at the first version of a new application that could have been better, is justified. To extend that assessment to all bundled apps, as he does in his title, is not.

What the world hates is that after buying the OS, you still can’t do much with it. With Apple you can. And, with most Window machine purchases, you get a lot of crapware. Apple, you don’t.

In fact, I think Apple misses the mark. QuickTime Pro should be bundled with the OS, and if they were really on top of things, iWork as well. I’d gladly even pay the full retail price rolled into the cost of the machine. Why? Because can you image if everyone’s machine out of the box shipped with software that could do Office related stuff? You’d have a killer do-all platform from time the machine was powered up. There’s no way Microsoft could do that.

So, while Vista won this round, I’m gonna give Apple half-credit, since I think it was an unfair contests.

Walt’s Final Score

Apple 3.5 / 5; Vista 1 / 5.

I’d still rather use OS X Leopard than Vista any day of the week.

Walt gives OS X Leopard a thumbs up, even though it still needs some work.

Today I went to Target, and there in the DVD section was Battlestar Galactica: Razor.

I picked it up and held it in my hands. In fact, I did better than that. I went to the check out register.

That’s when the device beeped. I was quick to learn that the product could not be sold to me until December 4th.

I understand Target’s contractual obligations, and I respect that. But it’s also very unlikely that I will be in Target that day, having plenty of time to price compare. These kind of delayed releases actually cost stores sales, especially those impulse buys.

As a consumer, I’m not at all thrilled with waiting, whether it be for Harry Potter book seven or the latest movie release. When delay is introduced, I believe we all lose. The consumer learns they can live without the product, and to wait a little more causes no harm. The store is aware the consumer is willing to pay the most when they first see the product.

So, rather than groaning about the movie industry inflicting self-wounds and collateral damage, here’s what I read on the DVD.

First, it was the Extended Widescreen Unrated “What They Couldn’t Show You On Television” Edition.

It had Battlestar Galactica facts, and what looked to be a really neat directors commentary.

It was unclear if the unrated was for more brutality, sexuality explicit scenes, or just because the new content wasn’t passed by anyone who would take the time to rate it.

Based on what previewed on the SCIFI channel, I speculate that this DVD is gonna get a Thumbs Up.

For fun, let’s see of the sure fire headlines work.

Last night I went to the Apple Store in Tysons with a friend who bought his phone one week after me, putting him within the 14 day window. Apple credited him $200 on the spot.

I perhaps have one of the worse case situations, in that while early adopters have had their phone for a long time, I’m just outside of the 14 day window, meaning I don’t qualify for the price guarantee match, nor can I return my phone, nor did I get $200 of fanboy usage from the device.

Apple, however, was helpful and friendly. They looked up on my account and indicated that American Express was used to purchase the phone, and that I should call them. They even printed out a fresh copy of the invoice for me.

In the Jerry Seinfield and Superman commercial shorts by American Express, Jerry tells how, by using American Express, he’s protected from theft, damage, and so forth. Could it be true?

I looked at my American Express card, and found out I was a Platinum Member via Costco. Nice!

After looking up AMEX Best Value Guarantee with Google, seeing that a Gold Card Page mentioned BVG, and discovering Return Protection on Platinum Benefits, I felt it was worth a call to AMEX - given the Apple Store made the same suggestions as this newsworthy blog, this tech news article, and this tidbit.

I called 1-800-297-8019, and after a fairly long time on hold due to an enormous “unexpected” call volume, I reached a human who confirmed I had the right number. He explained that the Best Value Guarantee was discontinued in November 2006 (ah, the BVG article above was from 2003).

Turns out, the non-existent Best Value Guarantee would have meant AMEX would have had to pay $200. However, the “Apple won’t take my phone back [so I can purchase a new one at a cheaper rater] which is in affect puts them out $300 - though there’s the possibly you may have to send in your iPhone.

Follow along, cause this gets weird. Even if you paid $600 for the phone, a $300 credit from AMEX and a $100 from Jobs, gets you pretty darn close to the cost of getting a new phone (say if you’ve damaged yours dropping it or such); in fact, it might be just enough to make a point if you’re mad enough.

If you bought the cheaper phone, you very well could be beyond the break even point.

AMEX knows this, and they are well aware of the iPhone situation.

Because AMEX is getting hammered, they are looking for a compromise. Apparently there are enough people who are willing to return them iPhones that have been bricked in order to get $300 that AMEX doesn’t want to deal with that.

As such, they are looking at simply refunding the price difference (which is actually cheaper), especially if that means they don’t have to refund a larger amount and get stuck with a bunch of damaged phones with nothing in the file system and missing a SIMM card.

American Express took the date of purchase, the kind of iPhone, there price (with tax) of the iPhone, and the total cost of charges for the purchase and opened a case for me.

They claim they will review them individually, but the rep was fairly certain they’d be handled in bulk.

By bulk, I assume that means putting them in groups. Speculating here, I believe one group, will be the whining early adopters who will get nothing, another group will be those that are in the 14 day period and should be dealing with Apple, another group of questionable pro-rated matching, and a group that meets the intent of the policy (which is where I fall in), in that I’m just shy of being able to resolve it with Apple but haven’t had the long usage.

If AMEX comes though for me, then great, I will be using their card a lot more often.

If AMEX does anything, and I mean, anything at all, they come out looking like the heros, and have just secured themselves the holiday season as the card to purchase everything with.
Steve Jobs has one chance left to steal the thunder back, however. Tell people they are getting $100 back, but give a certain portion in the purchasing window $200 instead. Suddenly Apple looks beyond fair, but customer centric again.

I will note, however, that there were more people in line with iPhone receipts at Tysons than there were people buying the new iPods, while I was there. The early adopters are clearly gun shy.

To provide some context here, I actually ended up purchasing an iPhone. The SSH problem I had concerns with was resolved by the new set of software that’s come out by third parties. The iPhone legal rant was adequately rebutted by my friend, Phil.

But that’s not the big news. The big news is that Steve Jobs just announced the iPhone price was being dropped by $200. And, we knew in our heart of hearts that was going to happen sometime, but early adopters who wanted the iPhone to be a success, paid the expensive price.

Now that Apple’s benefited, the real question on the table is: Are the early adopters going to get screwed.

My take is no.

On the surface, I’m not too happy about having a 3-week old phone, which is less than a month old, yet one week past the return point.

Yes, I made the decision to buy it then, so I do take responsibility for that. But, on the other side, Apple also didn’t provide me with data that could have made me make a more discriminating purchase plan. (And, one can argue, why should they?)

Apple now has an interesting choice. Because of all these early adopters, their phone is a success. However, pissing them off would do some serious damage. One, those people are never going to buy into an early adopter program again and are going to spread negative comments. Two, non-early adopters are going to view this as a model of how Apple treats its customers.

THAT SAID, -twice- in the past, when I have purchased expensive software (about the same cost as the iPhone or more), Apple has dropped the price, and upon doing so, wrote me a Snail Mail telling me they appreciated my business and enclosed was a check for the difference. Unprompted.

I’d like to think that Apple will have the foresight to do that now, and the amount of good will this would result in would more than make it up.

At the moment, I have -one- iPhone. My wife is on the fence. If I get a refund from Apple, she’ll be having an iPhone too (and being realistic, if Apple produces a better version with more memory, I’ll be buying the higher end model for myself).

If I’m to eat the difference because of a single week, I don’t have the right to complain, but I’m going to take it out of Apple’s future sales by not upgrading, not early adopting, not evangelizing, and not buy multiple machines. And, let’s be honest, Apple knows this.

According to WebWare, Apple is releasing its browser, Safari, for the Windows platform.

The initial question from the community is: Why? (Though this may be the wrong question..!)

Clearly the region of the browser application space has been filled by Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and a handful of others.

Wouldn’t releasing Safari simply make the Windows environment more compelling to stay? This got me thinking…

What if multi-platform Safari wasn’t the point at all, but it was actually a proof of concept of something greater?

A while back, Apple made the stunning announcement that it had been secretly working on a way to take the same source code and produce a PowerPC version and a Intel (Mac) version, and have them look identical. Combined together, they make the Universal Binary, which is a program that can be run on either system architecture. This was no small feat of clever engineering.

What if the Top Secret feature is that they’ve added Windows as a target for the same source code? Already RealBASIC is doing it, but that’s BASIC, not the mixed language richness of XCode.

As a developer, if I can use Apple’s amazing environment to produce Windows code, I’m all for it.

As a business owner, if I can produce applications and have them work on Apple’s customers as well, I’m all for the additional marketspace.

And, …if I’m a home user… if I’m wanting to switch to Mac, but I’m tied to the Windows platform because of application lock-in, this is a breath of freedom if my applications and data work elsewhere.

Could it be that Apple has taken Safari and simply “recompiled” it? That this is merely the test run to give applications independence of Windows, allowing users to switch over to a kinder, friendlier environment?

I’d like to think so.

When one goes to a technical conference on Java, perhaps the last thing you’d expect the a speakers’ lunch conversation turn to is mathematical selection of a mate.

I suppose it started simply because we had been talking about change. The topic started with source code change, changes at the office, and moved into changes in people. I offered up the classic observation that women get frustrated at their men because they don’t change, but that men get frustrated at their women because they do.

One gentleman was lamenting on his situation and admiring the subtle manipulation by his wife prior to his flight:
“Honey, ” he relates she began, “you should probably lose some weight, though I’d still love you if you were fat as a house.” And, after a momentary pause, she inquires, “Do you think I need to lose weight?”

Apparently his response of “I always love you, too” wasn’t quite what she was looking for.

Another speaker spoke up and added, “Well, I don’t have that problem at all. We’ve come to an agreement. I can be either fat or bald, but not both.”

Absolutely curious, I asked how that arrangement was sought. That just isn’t the kind of thing that normally just comes up as the finer points of marital negotiation.

He pondered and explained it started by as an ultimatum by her — unfortunately for her, she was engaging with one of the brighter logical minds…

“Honey, I’ve thought about it, and you can’t grow up to be fat and bald.”
“Really? Well, I have no control over being bald.”
“Oh. Well then you can grow up to be bald, but not fat.”
“Well, if I can be bald and not fat, then it’s only fair that I can also be fat and not bald.”
“makes sense, that sounds fair.”
“Then it’s settled, I can either be bald, or fat, but not both.”
“Agreed.”

And at that point, he took another bite of cake, stroking his head of hair with the other hand.

But this started a fantastic digression about how one knows when you have the right person in your life. We’d all just come out of meetings pertaining to measuring, quantifying, trend analysis, and metrics.

Based on rough calculations, to calibrate the scale and distribution of a sample size population, to do the best you could do, in a short period of time, it was concluded that you really needed to examine at least seven samples. At that point, you have a reasonable approximation for making a reasonable judgment call, and it was just a matter of how many standard deviations you were discriminating for.

A simple example is called for.

You’re walking in the woods and you’ve been given the task to pick up the best walking stick you can find. But the rule is, once you set it down, you can’t pick it up again.

So, you pick up the first stick you come to. However, you don’t know if this is the largest, or smallest. You have nothing to compare it to. With no basis for comparison, you set it down.

So, you pick up the next stick you come to. And you start to note more attributes, such as weight, shape, type of wood, etc. And again, you drop it.

So, you pick up the next stick you come to. As the attributes that interest you start to prioritize, you find yourself become more aware of the quality. You start looking at things like balance, general utility, wear, and things that come along with the stick, such as moss or termites. Some things are alterable, others are not.

As your go from stick to stick, each time you’re refining your assessment abilities and have gained more knowledge about what you’re looking at, as well as determining what you want.

After your six stick, depending on the breadth of the distribution you’ve encountered, you’ve started to formulate an accurate picture of of what you can reasonably expect. At this point you simply decide what criteria must be met, and the next stick that meets that criteria, you take. Permanently.

Oh sure, there might be something else better out there, but the effort, cost, time, dangers, and availability will more than likely offset the value you’d currently have. Trading your walking stick for something new, only trades existing faults with new unforeseen ones.

The same mathematical application applies to the dating scene.

Young couples find themselves inexperienced for selecting long term candidates and determining personal discriminators: there are unforeseen personality clashes, other options suddenly look more attractive, and if one settles too prematurely, it usually means being treated like a doormat or being taken advantage of financially.

Who among us didn’t stumble upon infatuation and think it was true love at sixteen? Or, find an exciting girlfriend only to discover character flaws that were obvious to our friends, family, and even our own 20/20 hindsight? Or, have everything wonderful and stable only to have it all turned on its ear for not explicable reason just as she turned twenty.

Unfortunately, for many, desperation or loneliness causes some people to settle well before their calibration process is complete; these people usually learn the hard lesson that being trapped in a bad relationship is worse than being lonely.

Alternatively, there are those that spend too much time in the calibration phase, and totally miss out on the longer term joys that are more rewarding.

It’s also interesting to note that we see microcosms of discriminating selection occur around when context and locality are ignored and we forget the more global nature of the chase.

One example may be the cruise ship filled with old geezers, of which in that context, some middle-aged person who’d never catch your eye looks fairly darn attractive in light of the situation. Same goes for co-workers, people met in bars, or even at parties — the limited selection forces expectations to be lowered.

This is why online dating services that give the illusion of many candidates keeps people seeking for perfection, while speed dating narrows the options and forces a compromised choice or none at all.

Of course, one might also say that it’s the reasoning behind things being in the last place you look, for once you make the find, the search is over.

Seven, however, lets you home in on a very acceptable choice that you can be genuinely be happy with, rather than waiting forever. For you too have a shelf life, and by the time you find the ideal through an exhaustive search, you may be too old to do anything about it.

I ponder, though, if there’s something more special going on.

For example, we’ve all heard of six degrees to Kevin Bacon, at that point you’ve traversed enough paths to get where you want.

Additionally, and I think this was in a story by Wired Magazine, a number of years ago, there was a mathematician who was going on a long horseback cattle drive. To amuse himself, he brought along a deck of cards, and spent the time shuffling it. At the end of his trip, he had mathematically deduced that for a deck to be sufficiently randomized (that is any card could be assured to physically be in any position), it required the deck to be shuffled seven times.

In both cases, we see that seven got us a good sampling — and with a good sample, an intelligent choice can be made.