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 →
Author Archive: Paul Epps
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 →
Conversations With My Wife
My wife calls me at work. “How do you spell ‘Casablanca’? she asks. “Like the movie.” “C-a-s-a-b-l-a-n-c-a.” “I am so good!” she says. “I just need more self-confidence.” Read more →
Respect the Classics, Man: No Silver Bullet
This essay by Turing Award-winner Fred Brooks is almost 20 years old now. Sadly, the ideas on incremental development are still considered outside the mainstream in IT, which continues to favor the widely-discredited waterfall approach. Read more →
Is Soccer a True Sport? Discuss.
A true sport is where athletes get broken legs and limp gamely off the field. A phony baloney sport is where athletes skin their knees and fall down, waving their arms as if they’ve been stabbed, and flop around like fish on a boat deck. — Jim Bouton Read more →
Nobody Likes Us
The educated coastal public thinks that evangelical Christianity is America’s number one religion. They are wrong. It is the Worship of Unearned Riches, and Las Vegas is its holy city. The belief that it is possible to get something for nothing is more potent in our land than the belief that the Son of God will return to rescue mankind. The Religion of Unearned Riches was established here in the desert by organized crime. It has turned us into a nation of slobs, clowns, patsies, and cravens. Las Vegas is what we have become. Is it any wonder that the rest of the world despises us? — James Howard Kuntsler I live a few hours’ drive from Las Vegas. I share the author’s contempt for the place, right up until the last sentence where he suggests that there’s something uniquely American about irrational greed. Other countries don’t have casinos and… Read more →
Why You’re Not Losing Weight
Souplantation is our favorite family restaurant, but it really does give me the creeps watching fat people at all-you-can-eat buffets. Tonight there’s a fat guy plodding through the bakery section, loading up on pizza, muffins, etc. He takes one of everything, except the things he takes two of. An obese woman decides that the bowls provided at the dessert bar aren’t big enough, so she brings over a soup tureen and loads it up with frozen yogurt, before slathering on the chocolate chips, peanuts and syrup. Have you ever wondered why fat people are fat? Neither have I. But for everyone who’s ever said, “I don’t know why I can’t lose weight,” it’s because you’re eating everything that’s not nailed down. Read more →
Thomas Mann: Patron Saint of Bloggers
In the case of Mann and his diaries, what strikes one most is that he obviously felt that absolutely everything that happened to him was worthy of being recorded. . . . [The diaries] give the impression that Mann was thinking ahead to a studious future which would exclaim after each entry: ‘Good heavens, so that was the day when the Great Man wrote such and such a page of The Holy Sinner and then, the following night, read some verses by Heine, that is so revealing!’ — Javier Marias, Written Lives Read more →
Glass Houses, Stones, Etc.
Antonio Villaraigosa, UCLA graduate and mayor of Los Angeles, gave a commencement speech at USC last month, at which time USC generously awarded him an honorary doctorate. This week, Villaraigosa delivered a commencement speech at UCLA, in which he made the point that UCLA, unlike USC, does not confer honorary degrees. “You’ve got to earn your diploma from UCLA!” he said. HA HA HA! Good one, Mr. Mayor! Why don’t you go flunk the bar exam a few more times, genius? They don’t give that away either. Read more →
What is Life?
My wife, a non-native English speaker, is explaining her philosophy to me . . . “Life is a journal,” she says. “It is?” “You take a trip,” she says. Read more →