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• RT @tweetmeme Google Maps Navigation Launch Aftermath: Yes, This Will Be Huge http://bit.ly/4D6qtj #
• Google Envisions 10 Million Servers http://bit.ly/13sPox #

• If you leave the final s off the word assess, spell-check will not flag it as an error. This was an accidental discovery, like penicillin. #
• I saw a kid walking around today wearing a ski cap. A SKI CAP!? IT'S 93 DEGREES! Wearing SKIS would make more sense! #

His mom took the boy’s laptop computer away because she didn’t like his attitude about something or other, and now he’s trying to involve me in a secret plan to get it back.

I ask him, “Why don’t you forget about the computer and do something else tonight? Read a book or something?”

He says, “I need the computer so my friends and I can talk to each other.”

“Use text messages. Or a phone. There’s an idea.”

“We need video.”

“Video? What do you need video for?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Exactly. So you don’t really need the computer.”

“‘Don’t worry about it’ doesn’t mean I don’t need it. It means don’t worry about it.”

“What are you going to do? Have a biggest dick contest?”

“Is that what you used to do?”

“We didn’t have webcams when I was your age. We had to take ‘em out and do a side-by-side comparison. Everything’s easier nowadays thanks to computers.”

One thing that I resent about our computer culture is that they say we are nerds and that nerds don’t get along with people. I think that’s just insane. We are not just nerds — we are nerds, I mean, look at us! But we are not just nerds, we are like the priests or something in the Middle Ages, we are the Lords and Ladies of Logic. We are in charge of rationality for our era. We are bringing common sense and good practice and sound judgment and aggregated wisdom and glory to everyone.

That’s our job.

— Jim McCarthy

I posted this quote on a blog at work and IT people were calling each other nerds all day.

Good morning, nerd! How’s it going, nerd?

Being a nerd felt like, like being a hero — just for one day.

I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.

— Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++

His mom and I are trying to get the boy to log off the computer and go to bed.

“Hang on,” he says, “I’m looking at a PC World thing.”

“What is it?” I ask.

“‘10 Cool Gadgets You Can’t Get in the U.S.’”

“If you can’t get them in the U.S., what do you care?”

“They’re cool. Don’t forget about that part.”

His mom is running out of patience. “Oh, am I steaming,” she says.

The boy’s still looking at the computer.

“Mmmm . . . cool,” he says.

My son’s just diagnosed and fixed a problem with my wife’s laptop PC . . .

“I should join the Northwood [his high school] Tech Squad,” he says, “with all the guys who tuck their shirts in.”

“That reminds me,” my wife says to him. “What clubs are you in at school?”

“What clubs am I in?” he says. “How about none?”

“You need to be in a club,” she says.

I say, “He’s in football and roller hockey.”

“He can be in those,” she says, “but he still needs to be in a club so he can get to know people.”

For some reason, this launches the boy into a Rodgers and Hammerstein tune . . .

“Getting to knooooow yooooou . . .”

“Can you look it up,” my wife says, “and see what clubs they have at Northwood?”

“No,” I say. “I’m busy.” Which I am.

“When can you do it?” she says.

“Why can’t you do it?”

“I need it by tomorrow.”

The boy’s now coming to the end of the stanza . . .

“. . . my cup of tea.”

How he knows that song so well, I have no idea, but maybe there’s a musical theater club we can get him into . . .

The annual ACM Awards banquet was held last month in San Diego. Recipients were afforded the singular honor of being photographed next to the embalmed corpse of ACM President Stuart Feldman (left):

Bill Gates and the Microsoft crowd have been very prominent in charitable circles, saving Africans from disease, etc. By contrast, a Google search for “Steve Jobs charity” or “Steve Jobs donation” turns up nothing except an article on how Apple bought him a $90 million Gulfstream bizjet.

So… if Steve Jobs doesn’t give money to charity and doesn’t pay for his own jet, is he doing something interesting with his $billions?

— Philip Greenspun

I’m rereading parts of The Psychology of Computer Programming and I notice that several of Weinberg’s “food for thought” questions at the end of each chapter would be good questions to pose to a hiring manager:

1. How long have you been in charge of your present group? How many of the original people remain? How many people have left and what were the reasons for their departure? What sort of provisions do you make for this kind of turnover?
2. Describe the sequence of work planned for your current project. Is the actual work proceeding according to the original plan? Do you expect it to continue in this manner?
3. How close is your progress reporting scheme to the reality of the work that goes on? What checks do you have to find out if it corresponds to reality?
4. What is your impression of what motivates your staff? Is it the same for all of them?

I’m listening to an online interview with Kent Beck, Cynthia Andres and Tom DeMarco. My son hears Andres’ voice and says, “You’ve got a woman teaching you about technology?!”

“What a sexist you are,” I say.

“I’m just repeating what you always say: ‘Oh, women don’t know anything about computers.’”

“When did I ever say that?”

“You say it all the time. ‘Men are a lot smarter than women.’”

I deny this vehemently, and not just because my wife is sitting across the room.

Meanwhile, Andres is saying something: Blah blah blah Kent blah blah blah . . .

“Ken!?” the boy says. “Who’s advising you? Barbie?”

I saw the following attributed to Ralph Johnson. I’m not sure if that’s the Gang of Four Ralph Johnson, but it probably is:

The problem is that almost all software schedules and budgets are bogus. They are created for political effect and have little relationship to reality. Thus, whether they are met has nothing to do with the people working on the project.

Who makes your schedules? Project managers? They are almost certainly the wrong people. You can’t predict how long something will take unless you are an expert at doing it. The programmers? Are they allowed to say “we don’t have enough information to make a prediction”? Are they ever told “that is too long, you’ll have to do it in six months”? The only way to get honest schedules is from people who have experience in doing the work who know that they need to get the schedule right and not under or over-estimate.

I asked an IT VP the other day why he thought every project in the company is late, and he said, “Bad estimating.”

No . . . there’s a difference between bad estimating and dishonest estimating. If we were dealing with bad estimating, I’d expect to see estimates all over the place, including some way too high and some way too low.

“Man, that’s some bad estimating!” I’d say.

But when every estimate is too low, that’s not bad estimating, that’s dishonesty. It may be forced dishonesty, but it’s dishonesty nonetheless.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

My son’s sitting in the family room playing the new Madden NFL 07. His computer-controlled kicker misses two extra points, after which the other team’s computer-controlled kicker makes a 50-yard field goal.

“Oh my gosh!” he yells. “Can you say ‘racist’?”

He’s a mixed kid — his mom is Asian — and he treats every slight as a racial issue. I think he’s kidding most of the time.

One feature of Madden 07 is that when there’s a break in the action, it pops up player profiles — photos and career blurbs — of old school players that, for the most part, the boy has never heard of.

“Fred Biletnikoff!? Looks like a stuck-up white boy to me! OHHHH! WOOOOOO!”

Every time one of those iPod silhouette ads comes on, my son asks can we make something like that with him in it. This weekend we tried it with Paint Shop Pro and this is the result (click to enlarge).

Somehow we’ve got it in our heads that every programmer in India is good, fast, and cheap, and every programmer in the United States is lousy, slow, and expensive. My theory is that for version 1.0 of a product, the maximum allowable distance between the engineers and marketers is thirty feet.

— Guy Kawasaki

• Ken Lay – On trial for conspiracy and fraud. Could get 20 to 30 years in prison. Not good if you’re already 64 years old.

• Scott McNealy – Following yet another dismal financial report, resigns as Sun’s CEO after 22 years.

• Sanjay Kumar – Former CA Inc. CEO pleads guilty in $2.2 billion accounting fraud, faces up to 20 years in prison.

Sun Microsystems Inc. said co-founder Scott McNealy will give up the job of chief executive to the No. 2 person at the company, Jonathan Schwartz, a historic transition for a computer maker facing stiff pressure to cut costs and boost revenue.

— The Wall Street Journal

So long, funny man!

Continue reading Sun Microsystems Circles the Drain

My kid’s explaining World of Warcraft to me . . . if I understand it correctly, it’s like an old-fashioned game of Capture the Flag, but with some killing. And yet as I’m watching him play it, it looks more like World of Running Pointlessly Through a Forest. There’s no warcraft, no nothing.

“Dude,” he says, “that’s because I’m at Level 6. When you get to, like, Level 19, there’s more warfare.”

“Maybe it should be called World of Jogging Aimlessly Through the Fields Picking Flowers Like a Girl Until You Get to Level 19,” I suggest.

“You don’t pick flowers, stupid. You quest.”

The guy in the next cubicle is spending the afternoon looking at animal cams on the web.

“Look at this whale cam,” he says. “It’s underwater!”

Continue reading Whale Cams