How many artists are there in the room? Would you please raise your hands. FIRST GRADE: En mass the children leapt from their seats, arms waving. Every child was an artist. SECOND GRADE: About half the kids raised their hands, shoulder high, no higher. The hands were still. THIRD GRADE: At best, 10 kids out of 30 would raise a hand, tentatively, self-consciously. By the time I reached SIXTH GRADE, no more than one or two kids raised their hands, and then ever so slightly, betraying a fear of being identified by the group as a ‘closet artist.’ The point is: Every school I visited was participating in the systematic suppression of creative genius. — Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball Read more →
Author Archive: Paul Epps
Two People Sorry They Bet on Baseball
Barbie Speaks
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?” Read more →
The Age of Cynicism
I bought a bagel this morning from the company cafeteria, as I often do. “$1.08,” the woman at the register said. I noticed she had a new haircut. Not to hit on her or anything, but I thought it looked good and said so. “It’s still $1.08,” she said. There’s entirely too much cynicism in the world . . . Read more →
The Favor of Ending
[S]tories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. Where God is absent from the lives of all but the most blessed, the writer, of all people, replaces that ordering principle. Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that, while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending. — John Hodgman Read more →
A Lesson in Procrastination
My son’s supposed to be finishing up his first 8th grade assignment — a math collage for his Algebra class — but instead he’s bouncing a basketball around the house. “Finsh the assignment!” my wife says. “No more procrastinating!” “I’m not PRO-CRAS-TI-NA-TING!” the boy yells, punctuating each syllable by slamming the ball on the floor. “You are procrastinating,” I say. “Stay out of it,” my wife says. “You see how long it took him just to say ‘procrastinating’? That’s procrastinating.” Read more →
Controlling the Wealth
Women control [all] the wealth. — Tom Peters Don’t worry about it, Tom . . . because we control the women. Read more →
Tom Peters Sucks
Evidently, this is not as well known as I expected, based on a Google search for “Tom Peters sucks,” which returns basically nothing. Shocking. I followed a link to Peters’ site today. He’s got the undirected mania of a 5-year-old being chased by a mad dog, or a crack addict with a new girlfriend. Vague, mindless exhortations — Wow! Gaspworthy! — in service of nothing. Can you really improve people’s lives by shouting random slogans and buzzwords at them? Read more →
Dishonest Estimation
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… Read more →
Self-Portrait With Pug
How Big Was That Elk?
One morning at the Grand Canyon, my son and I were walking to the Canyon Cafe for breakfast when we saw a big elk near Yavapai Lodge. “How big was it?” my wife asked later, when the boy was telling her the story. “Big enough to CHOMP MY HEAD OFF!” he said. “If he wasn’t an herbivore.” Read more →
Route 66 Road Trip
We stayed on Route 66 as much as we could on a recent family drive to Arizona. The Mother Road has long since been bypassed by the interstate highway system, but long stretches of it are still driveable, including hundreds of miles in California and Arizona. Read more →
The Grandeur of the American Southwest
We just got back from a family drive to the Grand Canyon . . . Have you ever tried to introduce family members to things that have made a deep impression on you personally? It’s often disheartening, isn’t it? For example, here’s what my son got out of the sea of sage and grasslands that make up the Kaibab Plateau: “I’d put an amusement park over here,” he said, pointing to the right. “And over here,” — pointing to the left now — “a shopping center and a sports arena.” “Look at the mountains,” I said to my wife, indicating with a sweep of my hand the silent, austere beauty of the East Mojave, where desert mountains rise dramatically from the sloping terrain. “I’ve been looking at them for five hours,” she said. “You know,” I said, “you guys just don’t appreciate the grandeur –” “HEY, LOOK!” my son yells.… Read more →
Failing to Prepare
I joined my son’s fantasy football league because he asked me to, although the low esteem in which I hold fantasy football leagues is only reinforced by the fact that the league is populated by all of the nerdiest kids he knows. The draft is today. “Have you given any thought to who you’re taking with the fourth pick?” my son asks me. “Not really,” I say. “Are you telling me you haven’t done any preparation at all?” he asks in disbelief. He’s been doing mock drafts for a week. “Yeah, that’s about right.” “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail!” he informs me. It’s going to be a long season . . . Read more →
Madden NFL 07 Racist?
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-race 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!” Read more →
Two-Minute Drill (With Your Mom)
My son’s got a fantasy football league with some of his friends and he asked me to join, so I’ve got to think of a team name. I thought about using Two-Minute Drill With Your Mom, except you can see how it might lead to a physical confrontation with one of the other kids’ dads . . . Read more →
My Kid Got a New Drum Set
Lightning on the Bed
CatsThatLookLikeHitler.com
As for Hitler, he comes in for a lot of criticism — much of it justified, in my opinion — but at least he did something with his life. He didn’t just sit around laughing at pictures of cats, like a simpleton. — Harry Hutton Read more →
Massive Accountability
Maybe you’ve noticed that most software sucks. Maybe you’ve wondered — if you work in the software business — why our aspirations are so low compared with the possibilities of our profession. Maybe you’ve wondered what, if anything, could be done about this. Here’s a fun story about the benefits of really holding people accountable for the shoddy quality of their work. In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain wrote about King Xerxes, who in the 5th Century BC ordered a bridge of boats to be built across the Hellespont: A moderate gale destroyed the flimsy structure, and the King, thinking that to publicly rebuke the contractors might have a good effect on the next set, called them out before the army and had them beheaded. In the next ten minutes he let a new contract for the bridge. It has been observed by ancient writers that the second bridge was… Read more →