Reading an excerpt from the tray liner at KFC: We plate your food while it’s still hot, and serve it at the peak of flavor perfection. “Tell me something I don’t know,” my son says. Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Kids
Ghosts of Christmas Past
I found an old Christmas card from my son this weekend, the kind of thing that’s looked upon wistfully by probably no one except the child’s parents. Here it is anyway . . . Dear Mom and Dad, I wish you an awesome Christmas and I would’ve bought you an expensive present but I couldn’t afford one. I still love you though. Love, Casey Read more →
One Thing Bill Clinton and I Have in Common
. . . I was once the only kid at an Easter egg hunt who didn’t get a single egg, not because I couldn’t find them but because I couldn’t get to them fast enough. — Bill Clinton, My Life Read more →
Working Late
Sometimes when I’m working a little late, my boy calls me at the office . . . Read more →
Lost and Found
We lost our dog the other morning. My wife thought the boy was watching him and he thought she was watching him . . . it turns out no one was watching him, so he ran out the front door and disappeared. Read more →
What Would Jesus Download?
According to a survey commissioned by the Gospel Music Association, only 10 percent of born-again teens believe that copying CDs for friends and unauthorized music downloading are morally wrong . . . Read more →
HW Solves Two of the Thorniest Problems in American Education
Racial Gaps On average, black students who graduate from high school are equipped with the skills the average white student mastered by the eighth grade, according to federal tests. — “Equal access to schools fails to equalize education,” USA Today Blah blah blah . . . Read more →
Raising Kids and Dogs
I’m brushing my teeth in the bathroom when the dog, as he often does, runs in, jumps up, pulls the bath towels off the rack and starts shaking them around. It doesn’t do any real damage, but of course someone has to re-rack the towels. My son, who’s decided this morning that it will be funny to walk around shouting at everyone, walks in, surveys the damage and shouts at me, “Who let him do this? You?” Read more →
How to be Annoying
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!” Read more →
The Comfort of Methodology
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… Read more →
Explaining
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! Read more →
Role Model
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 . . . Read more →
A 10-Year-Old Sings The Beach Boys
“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?” Read more →
Life’s Work
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: Read more →
Nice Try, Kid
Depression occurs in up to 10 percent of youth, and 1,883 10- to 19-year-olds killed themselves in 2001. Some 1.8 million teenagers attempted suicide that year, a quarter of them requiring medical attention, according to Columbia University scientists . . . — CNN.com, “FDA issues suicide caution for antidepressants” Out of 1.8 million attempts, only 1,883 successes?! What methods are they employing to get a success rate of 1 in 1,000? That’s not very good . . . Read more →
Less Than Zero
More whittling away at logic and critical thinking . . . WASHINGTON (AP) — Patients on some popular antidepressants should be closely monitored for warning signs of suicide, the government warned Monday in asking the makers of 10 drugs to add the caution to their labels. — CNN.com, “FDA issues suicide caution for antidepressants” Read more →
Rent-A-Book
DAD: What are you reading? 10-YEAR-OLD: It’s a book I rented from the library. DAD: You don’t rent books from the library, you check them out. 10-YEAR-OLD: Whatever. Read more →
Mother and Son
“Do you ever listen to me?” “What?” Read more →
Kids in America
The woman cutting my hair today tells me her son’s favorite things to watch are horror movies — he really likes The Evil Dead — and The Simpsons. Did I mention that her son is 4-1/2 years old? Read more →
You’ve Got a Problem
You know you’ve got a problem when: You take your stroller-age child to an amusement park and you’re buying a beer at 11:30 in the morning; or You are the stroller-age child. I was at California Adventure yesterday and I saw this happening over and over . . . Read more →