December 2009

Remember When?

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Remember when Barack Obama was a brilliant and inspiring young leader who was going to revive an America that had gotten dangerously off track? To be honest, neither do we, but we were reliably informed of it at the time. — Best of the Web Today Read more →

Adventures in Agile: The Scrum Board

by  on The Programmer
 

For 3-1/2 months, we’ve been using a scrum board — not the one in the photo, but similar — to track tasks on a development project. Tasks start out on the left side of the board in a Not Started column, then move through In Progress, Code Complete and User Testing on the way to Done. Today someone said, “We need a list of everything that still needs to be done — like the scrum board, but could you put it in a spreadsheet?” Ummm, I could, but it wouldn’t contain any additional information than what’s on the board. That was an eye-opener to me. I like the scrum board format because it keeps things visible. It’s easy to see what all the tasks are and it’s easy to see the status of each task. It never occurred to me that if you record information on Post-Its and stick them… Read more →

Lack of Privacy Is Part of the Deal

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Product endorsement is “implicitly aspirational”: The grandaddy of such advertising in the modern age, of course, is three simple words: “Be Like Mike.” Once you’re asking people to be like you, you’re inviting them to wonder about the “you” they’re supposed to want to be like. End of privacy. In case your agents, lawyers, managers, and other handlers didn’t mention it, that’s the deal. — Harry Shearer Read more →

What Would Hope Do?

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A young lady named Hope Xu — from University High right here in Irvine — scored a perfect 2400 on this year’s SAT exam. I’ve advised my 16-year-old son that henceforth, when he’s faced with a tough decision in life, he should ask himself the question “What would Hope Xu do?” I know one thing she wouldn’t do and that is to run into her dad’s bedroom at 11 p.m. and start doing flying front kicks when he’s trying to sleep. “Why are you doing that?” I ask him. “I just drank a Red Bull,” he says, then dances back out the door singing a song I don’t recognize . . . Read more →

Bad is Good

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I saw a guy I used to work with on LinkedIn today . . . The thing I remember most about him is that he believed it was bad luck to wish good fortune on someone. For example, if you said to him “Have a good day,” he believed that would in fact cause him to have a bad day. When I worked with him, if I saw him as I was leaving the office, I’d say “Have a crummy evening.” And he’d say, “Thank you.” Read more →

That Clears the Air!

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Sarah Henderson, daughter of Fritz Henderson, the just-resigned-minutes-ago GM CEO, posted some choice words about Ed Whitacre, the random white guy taking her dad’s place at the top of the just-emerged-from-bankruptcy automaker, on the automaker’s public Facebook page! — Daughter Of Resigned GM CEO Attacks New GM CEO On Facebook – Ed Whitacre – Jalopnik. Read more →

We’re Going to Let You Die

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I will actually give you a speech made up entirely–almost at the spur of the moment, of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. . . . “Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I’m so glad to see you, and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health-care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. [laughter] That’s true, and what I’m going to do is I am going to try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people. But that means you–particularly you young people, particularly you young, healthy people–you’re going to have to pay more. [applause] Thank you. “And by the way, we are going to have to–if you’re very old, we’re not going to give you… Read more →

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