Author Archive: Paul Epps

EppsNet at the Movies: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

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When you are young, your potential is infinite. You might do anything, really. You might be Einstein. You might be DiMaggio. Then you get to an age where what you might be gives way to what you have been. You weren’t Einstein. You weren’t anything. That’s a bad moment. Chuck Barris was way ahead of his time in recognizing how many Americans are willing to make an ass of themselves on television. The tone of the movie is inconsistent — is it a comedy? a thriller? a tragedy? — but it’s entertaining. Thus: Recommended! Confessions of a Dangerous Mind Director: George Clooney Cast: Sam Rockwell (Chuck Barris), Drew Barrymore (Penny), George Clooney (Jim Byrd), Julia Roberts (Patricia Watson) IMDb rating: ( votes) Read more →

Can You Hate Both Political Parties Equally?

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Democrat or Republican. Liberal or conservative. If you’re not one, you must be the other. If you don’t vote, people — apparently rational, functional people who manage to drive their cars without ramming them into walls — tell you with a straight face that your non-vote is a de facto vote for the candidate you would have voted against (had you voted). Because you’re not allowed to hate both. Because, in under our idiotic one-or-the-other political system, even if you hate both parties, you’re supposed to hate one party more than the other. — Ted Rall Read more →

Certifications

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Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, offer him a fishing certification and he'll open up a consultancy without ever having seen a fish. — Dan Lyke (@danlyke) July 29, 2013 Read more →

Pictures of Food

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Years ago, if you wanted to show your friends a picture of your food, you’d have to break out the palette and the easel and paint one. Time-consuming! Nowadays, with the likes of Facebook and Instagram, it’s just point and click! Another way life gets better and better thanks to computers . . . Read more →

Chaconne

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On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind. — Johannes Brahms, in a letter to Clara Schumann, regarding “Chaconne” from Johann Sebastian Bach‘s Partita No. 2 in D Minor for solo violin. Read more →

Do People Recognize Beauty in Everyday Life?

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This is a few years old now, but I just saw it today. (Please read Gene Weingarten‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning story from the Washington Post for the full details.) [youtube https://youtu.be/hnOPu0_YWhw] The premise is that Joshua Bell, international virtuoso, one of the best violinists in the world — maybe the best violinist in the world — dresses in jeans, T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap, and for 45 minutes plays several renowned classical pieces (on a good fiddle — the Gibson ex-Huberman Stradivarius of 1713, purchased by Bell in 2003 for $4 million) in a Washington, D.C., metro station, during a Friday morning rush hour, with a violin case open in front of him for donations. Do people recognize beauty in everyday life? [SPOILER ALERT] No. They don’t. Stacy Furukawa, a demographer at the Commerce Department, is the only person out of 1,000 or so passers-by who recognizes Bell. “It was the… Read more →

Amateur Design

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The worst scenario I can imagine is when we allow real customers, users, and our own salespeople to dictate “functions and features” to the developers, carefully disguised as “customer requirements.” Maybe conveyed by our Product Owners. If you go slightly below the surface, of these false “requirements” (“means,” not “ends”), you will immediately find that they are not really requirements. They are really bad amateur design, for the “real” requirements — implied but not well defined. — Mary Poppendieck Read more →

Dog Eat Dog

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Land of snap decisions Land of short attention spans Nothing is savored Long enough to really understand In every culture in decline The watchful ones among the slaves Know all that is genuine will be Scorned and conned and cast away — Joni Mitchell, “Dog Eat Dog” Read more →

Agile, ALM, and Agile 2.0 — Putting the Cart Before the Horse?

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Speaking of selling chickens still in shells, an august panel of industry giants laid out their recent improvements and plans for ALM products (Application Lifecycle Management, for those not in the know). These guys dazzled the audience with how they’ve moved far beyond simple source code repositories and testing tools to a complete integration of all modern software practices. Quite a coup, indeed, since most real live software developers I’m seeing out there today still aren’t using the practices automated by the ALM tools. . . . In other words, many software developers aren’t using practices such as test driven development or source version control. Yet here are HP, Microsoft, and IBM announcing new ALM tools that automate more advanced practice in areas not even in use in the first place. Unbelievable. — Ken Schwaber Read more →

Aside

If Grateful Dead fans are Deadheads, what are fans of Philip K. Dick?

Do You Want to Take the Human Race to the Next Plateau?

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In 1986, Steve Jobs famously challenged John Sculley, asking him if he wanted to keep on making sugar water or help Apple change the world. While that did not quite work out the way either of them intended, the challenge itself still holds. Do you want to spend your next decade developing more digital distractions to amuse people while they stand in line at Starbuck’s, or do you want to take the human race to the next plateau? — Geoffrey Moore Read more →

Self-Portrait, August 1889 Oil on canvas, 57 ×...

I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart. — Vincent van Gogh

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