My wife, a non-native English speaker, asks, “What does ‘ambidextrous’ mean?” My son says, “It means you’re just as comfortable with one side as the other.” “So it means gay,” she says. Read more →
Author Archive: Paul Epps
Yin and Yang
Yang never drops its sword until death has made its decision who to take. Yin hopes that the other guy will die of a heart attack while he’s stabbing you. — Stanley Bing, Sun Tzu Was a Sissy Read more →
Conversations with a 7th Grader
I was driving my son to school one day when the following conversation ensued. ME: Do you have any exams today? HIM: No . . . and why do you call them “exams”? We have “tests” and “quizzes,” not [in a dopey voice] “exams” — or whatever they called them back in the 1800s. If he thinks that comments like that are going to put me off my game, he must have me confused with his mom. ME: Do you have any exams tomorrow? Read more →
Orange County Fair
[UPDATE: Macphoto1 has a better set of OC Fair photos than mine.] Read more →
Why Good Projects Fail Anyway
A September 2003 Harvard Business Review article, “Why Good Projects Fail Anyway” by Nadim Matta and Ronald Ashkenas (free summary here), says that the high failure rate of major projects — not just IT projects — suggests that either these projects are inherently unmanageable or else something is wrong with the standard approach to project management. Matta and Ashkenas argue that the standard project management model is designed to control “execution risk” — the risk that designated activities won’t be carried out properly — by means of project plans, timelines, and budgets, but ignores two other equally important risks: Read more →
Mulholland Drive
What Does Merriam Webster Know?
My son picks up a pair of my pants that I’ve tossed on the bed, puts them on, and pulls out the front of the waistband. Because he weighs 60 pounds less than I do, there’s a lot of extra room there. “I lost 60 pounds by eating at Subway,” he announces. Then in a gangsta voice he adds, “You fat. You ain’t got the abdo-min-als like I got.” “The word is pronounced ab-dom-inals,” I say. “That’s in the real dictionary,” he says, still with the gangsta voice. “But what does Merriam Webster know? He a playa hater.” Read more →
How Extortionists Get Their Start
A commercial for You, Me and Dupree — or maybe it was Little Man — comes on the TV and I say to my son, “That looks like a real jackass-o-rama.” “Put a quarter in the swear jar,” he says. We don’t have a swear jar. “OK — first of all,” I say, “‘jackass’ is not a swear word. It’s the name of an animal. And second, where did you get the idea of a swear jar?” “They’re available in catalogs.” “What would we do with the money that goes into the swear jar?” “Give it to me.” Read more →
Safe is Risky, Risky is Safe
Via Kathy Sierra, an illustration of Seth Godin‘s “safe is risky, risky is safe” maxim. A guy in Colorado goes rock climbing. Meanwhile, his parked car gets crushed by a gigantic — and I mean gigantic (you’ve got to see the picture) — boulder. Read more →
Administrivia
So much of our developers’ time is wasted by managerial fiat that some days they can’t get a damn thing done. One manager asked me in exasperation “Why can’t my people ever get through their work on time?” And my answer, after observing his organization for a while was that they couldn’t get through their work because most days they never even got to their work. They were too busy doing all the administrivia that he and the organization had imposed upon them. — Tom DeMarco Read more →
Hot Diggety Dog
I urge Nathan’s to allow canines to enter next year’s contest; then the world will see some real eating. — Ayatollah Mugsy Read more →
Pug Puppy with Beer
Via Cute Overload: Read more →
The Weaker Sex?
My son and I are eating lunch at Subway when a group of teenage girls comes in. I notice that in the process of pushing one another through the door, one of the girls has dropped a hat on the sidewalk. “Hey, girls,” I say. “One of you dropped a hat outside.” “Oh, that’s mine,” one of the girls says. “Thanks.” And she goes out to pick it up. “You see the way I saved those damsels in distress?” I say to the boy, who’s about the same age as the girls. “Try to learn something from that.” “Why?” he says. “Because you’ve got to take care of girls. They’re the weaker sex.” “Mom would kill you if she heard that.” He’s right about that. His mom is extremely volatile and always on high alert for slights, real or perceived. “I’m gonna tell her,” he says, nodding and taking a… Read more →
Why 12-Year-Olds Are Not Allowed to Drive
We’re at a stop sign on 6th St. in San Pedro, waiting to cross Pacific Ave., a busy street with multiple lanes of traffic in both directions. We’ve been waiting for an opening for quite a while when my son says, “You gotta go Tokyo Drift on these pansies.” Read more →
I Am 90 Percent Confident!
If by “90 percent confident” you mean “30 percent confident.” Key takeaway: We are conditioned to believe that estimates expressed as narrow ranges are more accurate than estimates expressed as wider ranges. We believe that wide ranges make us appear ignorant or incompetent. The opposite is usually the case. — Steve McConnell, Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art Read more →
A Modern Stone Age Family
We finally caved in and got my son a new cell phone. The one he had was a very old model where you had to pull the antenna up manually. He used to say things like, “This phone must have been invented by a primitive Stone Age family. ‘Hey, Barney! Come here and look at this new communication device I invented!’” “Actually, the Flintstones were a modern Stone Age family,” I reminded him. “Then it was invented by a normal Stone Age family. Fred Flintstone probably used it as a backup to his regular phone, which was a bird, or a rock with a hole in it.” On the plus side — and this was sort of an unintentional stroke of genius on my part — he didn’t rack up a lot of minutes on the old phone because he was ashamed to be seen with it. Read more →
Sweet Land of Liberty
What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it. — Learned Hand Read more →
Shibboleths
And the Gileadites took the passages of Jordan before the Ephraimites: and it was so, that when those Ephraimites which were escaped said, Let me go over; that the men of Gilead said unto him, Art thou an Ephraimite? If he said, Nay; Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan: and there fell at that time of the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. — Judges 12:5-6 Thus the original meaning of the word “shibboleth”: a password that people from one side can pronounce but their enemies can’t. The word has since taken on a more general meaning as not necessarily a password, but a custom or practice that separates the good guys from the bad guys, the insiders from the outsiders. Read more →
Whatever Happened to Love?
In the old days, greed and covetousness were seen as sinful; now they are encouraged. Jack Welch’s Winning sets the tone. The author grins manically from the cover – despite the silver hair, manicured nails and perfect teeth, he looks like Beelzebub incarnate. But why is “winning” so great? Because, says Welch, it enables people to make lots of money which . . . erm . . . enables them to “get better healthcare, buy vacation homes, and secure a comfortable retirement”. That’s it. Those are the three goals of our mortal existence, otherwise known as more pills, more mortgages and more burglar alarms. Whatever happened to joy, pleasure, brotherhood? Whatever happened to enjoying life? Whatever happened to creativity? Whatever happened to love? — Tom Hodgkinson Read more →
You Remind Me of Superman
A guy at work — let’s call him “Steve” — has been wearing what looks like the same shirt, shorts and sandals for weeks. Another coworker says to “Steve”: “These new Superman ads remind me of you. He wears the same friggin’ outfit every day too.” Read more →