Your dad says: “Time to take a shower.”

You say: “Customer service will be with you in a few minutes. Please hold.” Start humming a song . . .

“Take a shower!”

“Please hold!”

The candidate [John Kerry] offered his guests peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, a daily staple for him on the road.

His passion for PB&Js, Kerry told his companions, dated back to Vietnam, where he not only ate them frequently but traded them for other commodities.

— “Kerry Escalating Use of War Veteran Status,” Los Angeles Times

The National World War II Memorial opened today in Washington, D.C.

My dad served in World War II. He’d be so proud and excited if he hadn’t been dead for 25 years.

Continue reading World War II Memorial Opens

Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others.

— Alexander Hamilton

“Don’t fart when I’m talking!”

“Don’t start talking when I’m about to fart!”

Ill-specified systems are as common today as they were when we first began to talk about Requirements Engineering twenty or more years ago. Yet the task of creating complete and perfect specifications is not rocket science. We have adequate and comprehensible theories at our disposal for specification of finite state automata. We have proceeded over the past decades to develop and refine a discipline of applying these theories to real-world systems. In our methodological focus, we may have lost sight of some endemic problems that plague not the process but the people who do the process. Is it possible that an engineering approach to requirements is as badly suited to our real need as would be an engineering approach to raising teenagers? I’m beginning to think so . . .

— Tom DeMarco, “Requirements Engineering: Why Aren’t We Better at It?”, 2nd International Conference on Requirements Engineering

There are zillions of books on how to raise kids, and I think my wife has read most of them, along with countless magazine articles . . .

In fact, she’s far more open to taking child-rearing advice from books and magazines than she is from me, despite the fact that none of the authors has ever met our kid, and can therefore offer no insight into our particular situation.

But how comforting must it be to think that there’s a “methodology” for raising kids or for building good software — that someone has already solved all the hard problems for us . . . that we don’t have to rely solely on our own judgment to make critical decisions when we have only a limited amount of time, a limited amount of information, and no certain knowledge of the consequences . . .

Thus spoke The Programmer.

Related Links

• Peopleware
  If I could require that everyone in the IT business read one book, this would be it. Tom DeMarco (see above) is one of the co-authors.

Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn’t as consoling as it should have been . . .

— Albert Camus, The Stranger

I’m letting my subscription to Real Simple magazine expire. I’ve been taking it for a year and my life didn’t get any simpler.

In fact, it got more complicated because I had one more magazine to read . . .

My son, with mock pathos, is explaining to his mom how he managed to mess up a word definition on his homework:

I’m a little boy, not a Merriam-Webster dictionary!

The ability to ignore costs is at the heart of the attraction of government for some and of the expansion of government over time. Anything that might conceivably be of some benefit to someone, sometime, is worth doing, if someone else is paying. In our own lives, we pass up all sorts of benefits when we decide that they are just not worth their cost. Maybe we would like to have a new car or add another room onto the house or take a vacation in the Caribbean but it may not be worth what it would cost. So we keep driving the old jalopy, get used to not having a den and take in a few ball games during the summer instead of going on a cruise. Life is full of trade-offs when it is your own money.

— Thomas Sowell

C.K. Prahalad, one of the leading strategic consultants, has said that a mission statement should take less than three minutes to explain to an audience.

That is absolute horseshit.

Imagine making a declarative statement and then having to take an additional three minutes to explain what you just said.

A mission statement should be immediately comprehensible. Three minutes of explanation is three minutes too many.

I read a book on George Patton this weekend. Here is his mission statement for the Third Army:

I don’t want to get any messages saying that “we are holding our position.” We’re not holding anything! Let the Hun do that. We are advancing constantly and we’re not interested in holding on to anything except the enemy. We’re going to hold on to him by the nose and we’re going to kick him in the ass.

And most of that I included just for context. It really could be shortened to

We’re going to hold the enemy by the nose and we’re going to kick him in the ass.

It clearly states the goal of the organization, and it doesn’t need a three-minute explanation, does it?

On this date in 1775, the first shots in the Revolutionary War were fired at Lexington and Concord . . .

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, are sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heros dare
To die and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

My son is reading a biography of John Lennon. Here’s what he got out of it so far:

“John Lennon got all Cs in school.”

I think his mom is going to take the book away from him . . .

“And she’ll have fun, fun, fun till her daddy takes the TV away!”

“It’s T-Bird . . . not TV.”

“What’s a T-Bird?”

The company intranet has profiles of the Six Sigma team members, including their responses to the following fill-in-the-blank question:

If I weren’t in banking, I’d be . . .

Here are the answers:

Continue reading Life’s Work

The new Spanish government will soon meet with Germany and France to craft a ‘European’ approach to terrorism. Topic No. 1: How big should the white flag be? Oak or cedar for the pole?

— James Lileks

We come to work, have lunch, and go home. We goose-step in and goose-step out, change our partners and wander all about, sashay around for a pat on the head, and promenade home till we all drop dead.

— Joseph Heller, Something Happened

I feel like work gives my life the illusion of meaning. On the other hand, it really cuts into my day.

Dilemma . . .