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It poured rain all the way from San Jose to Los Angeles . . .

“It’s a good day for cows,” I say to my son, as we drive by a field of happy-looking bovines.

“It’s raining,” he points out.

“I don’t think cows mind a little rain. They get to eat lush, moist grass. Instead of dry grass. Do you like to eat a dry salad with no dressing? You don’t, right?” No answer. “I’m trying to think like a cow here.”

“My phone would go out right in the middle of a text message,” the boy says.

“That’s awful,” I say in mock sympathy.

“It is,” he says. “It was a thoughtful, heartfelt text message.”

“How thoughtful and heartfelt can a text message be? Aren’t you limited to 160 characters?”

“Not to Verizon numbers.”

“Oh. Well, that is disappointing then.”

We’re driving past an agricultural area with nothing but four- to five-foot sticks in the ground as far as the eye can see.

“What are they growing here?” he asks.

“Sticks,” I say. “It’s a stick farm.”

When I pass trucks on the highway, I always signal before pulling back in front of them.

Most people treat truck drivers and their vehicles just as obstacles to be bypassed. I treat them as real people with real feelings.

I think it makes life better for everyone . . .

Semifinal

This one was like a replay of the third round-robin game.

Final Score: West Coast Warriors 2, Devil Dogs 0

“They couldn’t buy a goal,” one of the moms said.

“Are you allowed to buy goals?” I asked.

“We need to make a new rule for that,” she said.

The Warriors went on to lose 5-1 to NorCal Riot Black in the 16U final. That score surprised me, since NorCal couldn’t score on the Devil Dogs and the Devil Dogs couldn’t score on West Coast.

I’ve got to find out if any parents stayed to watch the final. How did NorCal get 5 goals on the West Coast boys? Whatever they did, the Devil Dogs should start doing it . . .

Originally uploaded by lippo

At hockey tournaments, especially travel tournaments, there’s a lot of down time between games. I usually bring a book to the rink so I have something to do. Nobody else does this. Nobody. In hockey circles, I’m known as the guy who brings books to the rink.

This weekend, we’re at a tournament in San Jose. One of the dads from our team — I think he’s a copier salesman — says to me, “I can’t understand why anyone reads fiction.”

He says it, not in a rude way, but not in a complimentary way either.

I say, “Oh. Well, I can’t understand why anyone lives his whole life inside his own head and never gets curious about what life looks like to other people.”

So I probably won’t have to talk to him the rest of the season.

Later the same day, this guy knocks back a couple of double Scotches at a team dinner and proceeds to make gay sex jokes — loudly — the rest of the evening.

Game 4

The Devil Dogs are running into hot goalies. They’ve been shut out two games in a row, this one a scoreless tie against undefeated NorCal Riot Black.

Final Score: Devil Dogs 0, NorCal Riot Black 0

The tie is good enough to put the Dogs in tomorrow’s single-elimination round against the West Coast Warriors — who beat them yesterday — with the winner playing NorCal Riot Black in the final.

Game 3

The West Coast Warriors are a team of big kids from British Columbia. The Devil Dogs had some trouble dealing with their size and speed. And the Warriors’ goalie played a great game.

Final Score: West Coast Warriors 2, Devil Dogs 0

The final round-robin games are scheduled for tomorrow. Depending on how things go, the Devil Dogs could be the top-seed for the single-elimination round or they could get knocked out of the tournament. Their game is against NorCal Riot Black, who are undefeated at 3-0.

Game 1

Everybody wants to score goals; nobody wants to play defense. Everybody wants to make a big play; nobody wants to make the little plays.

The kids came out too revved up, made a lot of mistakes and were fortunate to win the game.

Final Score: Devil Dogs 5, Silicon Valley Quakes 3

Game 2

The boys calmed down and played the best game I’ve ever seen them play — and I see every game.

Final Score: Devil Dogs 4, NorCal Riot Red 0

Two round-robin games left, against what look like stronger teams.

There were some San Jose State fans at the game . . . as we were walking in, we saw a guy wearing a blue and gold T-shirt that said “The Only Trojan I Need Is On My D*ck”

(The asterisk was actually on the shirt. Wouldn’t want to offend anyone.)

“Enjoy the game,” I said to him.

Final score: USC 56, SJS 3.

We saw Matt Barkley play his first college football game today, a 56-3 win over San Jose State. If he turns out to be as good as a lot of people think he is, that will be a cool thing to remember . . .

Background

The Winchester House in San Jose was built by Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester (“The Gun That Won the West”) Repeating Arms Company fortune.

After her daughter and husband died, she came to believe that the family was haunted by the ghosts of people killed by Winchester rifles.

She consulted a medium in Boston, who told her to move west and build a mansion that would never be finished.

As long as she kept building, she would never die.

(Whether or not you believe in spiritualists, you’ve got to give high marks here for originality.)

In 1884, Mrs. Winchester moved to San Jose, which was then a rural community, and bought an eight-room farmhouse. She kept builders employed at the house 24 hours a day for the next 38 years, until her death in 1922.

By that time, the house was four stories high (it had been seven stories before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake) and had 160 rooms.

Of course there was no master plan for all this construction. Mrs. Winchester had a seance room in which she consulted “good spirits” for architectural advice.

Mostly she was building for the sake of building, per the medium’s advice. As a result, the house is full of structural oddities: staircases that lead nowhere, doors that open to walls, fireplaces without chimneys . . . a classic case of ineffective change management.

I originally developed the idea of a Winchester House Effect in software in collaboration, I guess you could say, with a former colleague of mine — shortly before he went insane.

He was a project manager on a project that had fallen behind schedule, so he decided to jump in and do some coding in an effort to make up for lost time.

He unwittingly wound up trying to code the most complex program in the system, the one the rest of us had been trying to avoid.

In retrospect, I wish we’d tipped him off to maybe start with something a little simpler, but there was really no way to foresee the effect the program would have on him.

His behavior became increasingly strange and paranoid. He wound up leaving the project suddenly, although not before finishing the fateful program.

The code was bizarre; the program flow made no sense. I remember thinking at the time, “He’s created the Winchester House of software.”

His subsequent hospitalization was (we were told) for high blood pressure, and not — not — the result of a nervous breakdown.

The program was unmaintainable and was eventually rewritten from scratch.