My son and I are in the kitchen looking for something to eat. He finds a bag of Pepperidge Farm Verona cookies (I prefer the Raspberry Milanos myself), holds the bag up to my face, and says

In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean
Two hours traffic on our stage blah blah blah

Then he eats the cookies.

So who says Shakespeare has no relevance for the modern student?

Several ordinary life stories, if told in rapid succession, tend to make life look far more pointless than it really is, probably.

Is that a fact? Let’s try it and see! Here are some excerpts from this week’s obituaries in the Irvine World News:

Justin Pollard

Former Irvine resident Justin Pollard died Dec. 30. The 21-year-old resident of Foothill Ranch died in a noncombat incident while he was stationed with the U.S. Army in Iraq.

Military officials have told the family only that he was the victim of an “accidental discharge of a rifle,” said Spc. Pollard’s father, Bill Pollard. The Army specialist drove a small tank and was due to return from his tour of duty in April.

He was deeply angered by the attack on New York on Sept. 11, 2001. Within a few days he enlisted in the Army and left for training in October.

His grandmother, Ann Jensen, recalled that he was proud of his military uniform, as he had been of his varsity baseball and football uniforms at Trabuco Hills High School.

Donald John Dreeland

Longtime Irvine resident Donald John Dreeland died Nov. 29 of a heart attack. He was 56. He had no history of heart disease and collapsed at home in College Park.

He always loved sports and continued to be an avid fan after an ankle injury sidelined him some years ago. He was a coach for his sons’ baseball teams in Irvine. He enjoyed attending games of all kinds and was a particular fan of the New York Yankees and New York Giants.

He also loved golf, his wife said. At work he participated in a golf league and played additional games regularly. He was also on the emergency response team at his work.

Charles Maynard Taylor

Charles Maynard Taylor died at his Irvine home Dec. 16. He was 83 and he, his wife and daughter were one of the first families to live in University Park.

Mr. Taylor worked in the aerospace industry where his specialty was plastics. He worked for Douglas Aircraft and Rockwell and then managed the plastics shop at Ford Aeroneutronics in Newport Beach. A co-worker there once said that Mr. Taylor knew more about plastics than anyone else, recalled his wife.

He was the kind of man who was always busy, always helping people with projects, even outside his work.

“Anything anyone wanted to do in plastics — the Boy Scouts, friends — he helped them,” said Mrs. Taylor.

He liked playing golf and was an avid sports fan and an enthusiastic Lakers basketball supporter.

“He loved anything that moved on television, any sport,” his wife said.

He was interested in all kinds of things, especially historical things.

Luster ‘Hud’ Huddleston

Irvine resident Luster “Hud” Huddleston died Dec. 17 of natural causes after reaching his goal of passing his 90th birthday in November.

He was named Luster for the hero in a book his mother was reading while she was expecting him. For an unknown reason, the family called him Paul for several years until he settled on Hud, the name he was known by most of his life.

You’d have to assume from reading obituaries that no one ever had the least trouble with life.

A more likely scenario is suggested by the following excerpt, not from the Irvine World News, but from Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters, a collection of free-verse monologues from the dead in an Illinois graveyard:

CASSIUS HUEFFER

They have chiseled on my stone the words:
“His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him
That nature might stand up and say to all the world,
This was a man.”
Those who knew me smile
As they read this empty rhetoric.

My epitaph should have been:
“Life was not gentle to him,
And the elements so mixed in him
That he made warfare on life,
In the which he was slain.”
While I lived I could not cope with slanderous tongues,
Now that I am dead I must submit to an epitaph
Graven by a fool!

[The epitaph in the first stanza is from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, spoken of Brutus by Antony -- HW]

Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves . . .

The Programmer finds that the integration chickens have come home to roost . . .

I remember when Vignette first arrived at our company and the people who had made the decision to buy it would show up at meetings in their complimentary Vignette polo shirts and explain that the project was going to be delayed just a bit more because they still couldn’t work the bugs out of the Vignette installation — but hey, willya look at these free shirts we got?!

Well, we’ve been trying to work the bugs out of it for three months now, and to integrate it with IBM’s WebSphere for a client project.

We tried Vignette 5.5 with WebSphere 5.1, which didn’t work. We tried Vignette 5.5 with WebSphere 4.1, and that didn’t work either.

Through it all, we clung to the hope that the upcoming release of Vignette 5.6 would solve all our problems by working — as promised — with WebSphere 5.1.

That is to say . . . even though 5.6 hasn’t been officially certified by Vignette to work with WebSphere, the rep who provided the free shirts told us that he personally thinks it will work, so we’re counting on it.

And . . . it doesn’t work.

The failure of the 5.6 release has been a horrible psychological setback, and there has been mourning and lamentation.

“We trusted them . . .”

“If this is how they treat their friends . . .”

We handed a loaded gun to a (poorly) trained ape . . .

But . . . if we were to indulge in a moment of introspection, search our conscience, we would have to admit that this is a risk we incurred when we elected to create the dependency on Vignette — that Vignette might somehow drop the ball, that their next release might be a piece of crap, that they might change their product strategy, that they might fire the remaining 85% of the workforce and go out of business entirely, any of which would be a body blow to those of us who’d elected to build web sites around their technology.

It’s like handing a loaded gun to a trained ape (and a poorly trained ape at that). When something goes wrong, you can’t blame the ape.

It’s a way of living with a tragedy, I guess, to claim after it happens that you saw it coming, as if somehow you had already made the necessary adjustments beforehand.

— Russell Banks, The Sweet Hereafter

Sycophant: You saw this coming.
Project Manager: Big time.

Well, Mr. Project Manager, it’s not even something that was coming . . . the whole project from Day One has been an integration nightmare. And there’s really no credit in having seen something coming if you did nothing to avert it. It makes people think that maybe you didn’t see it coming, or if you did, that you grossly underestimated the severity of the problem, or you didn’t care, or you thought you could bluff your way through it.

Summary

Integration of third-party products is very hard and best avoided.

The problem isn’t specifically with Vignette or Websphere. Substitute your own favorite “best of breed” solutions; the issues would still be the same.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

Related Links

• IBM, Vignette team on e-business
  You might remember seeing this announcement last year. Don’t be confused. That was a marketing agreement; it doesn’t mean the products actually work together.

Vicious, despicable, or thoroughly disliked persons, gentlemen, and ladies can be project managers. Lost souls, procrastinators, and wishy-washies cannot.

— Jerry Madden, “One Hundred Rules for NASA Project Managers”

You can have a lot of bad qualities and still be an effective project manager, but you can’t be indecisive. Work out your personal insecurities on your own time.

Make a decision. Move on to the next problem.

Thus spoke The Programmer.