Wal-Mart heir John Walton died Monday when his ultralight aircraft crashed after taking off from an airport in Jackson, Wyoming. Read more →
June 2005
We Don’t Have the Money, So We Have to Think
We don’t have the money, so we have to think. — Ernest Rutherford Ernest Rutherford was an illustrious scientist — the 1908 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, and the father of nuclear physics. His humble upbringing as the fourth in a family of 12 children in rural New Zealand influenced his approach to science, as summarized in the above quote. A recruiter called me today about a job managing an $80 million IT project. How in the world can you spend $80 million on an IT project?! I could put your company logo on Mars for $80 million. Most of the big, expensive IT projects that I’m familiar with, there really was no reason for them to take so long or cost so much. A lot of time and money could have been saved with some upfront thinking. I get a lot of this now — recruiters asking me if I… Read more →
Often-Repeated Lies
A lie repeated often enough becomes truth. — Lenin As the GOP drifts further to the right, and becomes more starkly the party of the wealthy, it is gaining support among the working class. I have never seen a wholly satisfactory explanation for this trend, which now spans two generations. . . . Republicans, of course, will argue that it’s simply the working man’s understanding that the GOP has the better argument, i.e., that the best way to help the working class is to shower the rich with tax breaks. But the Bush administration has been showering the rich with tax breaks for more than four years, and the working class has nothing to show for it. — Timothy Noah, “Conservatism As Pathology” Read more →
Steve Jobs: Me, Me, Me
Self-absorbed, self-aggrandizing BS, a.k.a. Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford, gets a good skewering . . . Read more →
Don’t Trade Insults With a 6th Grader on the Day Vocabulary Words Are Assigned
ME: You’re a real wise guy. HIM: You’re lamentable. Read more →
Hockey Boy
My son’s hockey team won the TORHS West Coast Conference championship. They got jerseys and a trophy. I took some team and individual photos. Read more →
The Great Chair Race
We’re having a fundraising event at the office today. Executives will race around the parking lot in office chairs. Wagering is permitted, with proceeds going to the United Way. Here’s how I handicap it: The CFO is pretty fit and looks like a winner. On the other hand, the Sales VP is a Snidely Whiplash type who’s probably loosening the wheels on the other guys’ chairs as we speak, which makes him a dangerous guy to bet against. No one else in the race looks remotely capable of winning any sort of athletic contest. It would be fun to run a side pool on which fat-ass will be the first to go down with a torn ACL or other crippling injury . . . Read more →
High-Tech Turnaround
High-Tech Industry Employment Slowly Turns the Corner, Says New Report — Government Technology I clicked that link, only to learn that while high-tech employment continued to decline in 2004, it did so at a lower rate than the two previous years. Hence, the job market has turned the corner, if by “turned the corner” you mean “continued to disintegrate, but at a slower pace.” Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
Pre-Automation
My son is doing a “generation gap” essay for school, in which he contrasts my life as an 11-year-old with his. Read more →
Be the Worst
Pat Metheny was asked in a recent interview what advice he would give to younger musicians: I have one kind of stock response that I use, which I feel is really good. And it’s ‘always be the worst guy in every band you’re in.’ If you’re the best guy there, you need to be in a different band. And I think that works for almost everything that’s out there as well. Read more →
Prolific Authors
George Murray, a poet and co-editor of the literary blog Bookninja.com, sees the near-annual release of a new Stephen King novel as ‘the literary equivalent of watching a skinny Japanese dude scarf down 100 hot dogs in an eating contest; you are kind of grossed out, but gotta hand it to him.’ Murray harbors a unique theory about what distinguishes a genre writer like King from a so-called serious artist like Joyce Carol Oates. ‘It seems with Oates the hotdog eater is a performance artist commenting on the nature of consumption and American hegemony,’ Murray avers. ‘With King it’s just a guy eating 100 hot dogs, then looking like he’s going to die of nitrate poisoning.’ — CBC.ca, “Automated Storyteller” Read more →
Setting Expectations
A family member had surgery recently and had to sign a consent form: I have been advised that all surgery involves general risks, including but not limited to bleeding, infection, nerve or tissue damage and rarely, cardiac arrest, death or other serious bodily injury. I acknowledge that no guarantees or assurances have been made as to the results that may be obtained. And so on . . . Don’t say you weren’t warned! Medical professionals are very good at setting realistic expectations with the customer, whereas in IT we take customers into projects with glib assurances and wishful thinking. I wonder if we could make a practice of saying to customers even something as simple as this: “This project — like all projects — has a number of possible outcomes, and not all of them are good. Let’s go over some of the more likely scenarios . . .” Thus… Read more →
Gatsby 2005
Fitzgerald had to kill off his own famous striver because, to the author, Gatsby represented a dying American dream based on making it the hard way. But no such grim fate awaits today’s little Gatsbys. When they peer out at the universe, they don’t see a green dock light blinking from an unbridgeable distance where the Establishment folk live. This is the age of the red camera light, where everyone arrives sooner or later, if only for a moment, and nobody ever dies of ambition or shame. — The Wall Street Journal, “Gatsby’s Heirs” Read more →