Tsunamis: Another Reason I Just Stay Home

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From Reuters: PHUKET, Thailand — William Robins vowed Monday to change his life forever after the professional golfer from California and his new bride, Amanda, narrowly escaped death in the grip of a tsunami. The newlyweds were honeymooning on Phi Phi island — made famous by the film “The Beach” starring Leonardo DiCaprio — when a giant tsunami wave slammed into it Sunday. Read more →

Learned Helplessness

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Psychologists have found that if you put a dog in a cage and repeatedly zap him with an electrical shock, the dog will soon stop trying to avoid the shock because he realizes he’s got nowhere to go. This is called “learned helplessness.” I mention this for educational purposes, not because it sounds like life in a nutshell . . . Read more →

Christmas at the Office

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I’m in receipt of the following “Secret Santa” email: Please come by my desk to pick a name. Then go buy (and wrap) a new toy that represents that person. Humor is the key here! Get creative and have fun! We’ll open the toys, have a laugh with each recipient, and then donate the toys to charity. Translation: Buy something that confirms the recipient’s worst suspicions about what people really think of him (or her), and then we’ll all go home and hang ourselves. Read more →

Something I Learned Today

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There’s a good Chinese restaurant in Orange called Yen Ching. The last four digits of the phone number are 3300. If you make a mistake and dial 3000, you’ll get Children’s Hospital, also in Orange, but they won’t take a dinner reservation. Read more →

Two Simple Rules

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More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined. — Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month As a corollary to this, I’d say that lack of calendar time very often forces us to admit that our projects have gone awry. Denial is a viable strategy when delivery dates are far in the future, but when the deadline is staring you right in the teeth, the time for sunny optimism is over and the time for the Day of Reckoning (DoR) meeting is at hand. I attended one such DoR meeting yesterday afternoon . . . This particular meeting broke down into a battle between the Designers and the Implementers. The Designers — who happen to be the more senior members of the team — felt that they had written the specs in such excruciating detail that the system should pretty much have coded… Read more →

Homework Follies

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My son takes a break from his social studies worksheet to explain his new system for organizing homework assignments. “I write everything down in my organizer, then I draw a happy face next to the easy assignments, a sad face next to the hard ones, and a sad face with tears next to the ridiculous ones.” “What kind of a face did you put next to that social studies assignment?” I ask. “Sad face. I should have put one tear. I gave reading comprehension two tears.” “Have you ever had an assignment where you put a sad face with tears showering from both eyes?” “I just started the system today.” Read more →

Happy Halloween

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I look forward to taking my son out trick-or-treating every year. I have lots of Halloween memories, mostly happy, some sad . . . One year — he was in kindergarten or 1st grade, I can’t remember which — I took him out and he was so excited, running from house to house . . . As he was running back from one house, he slipped and fell right in front of a group of older kids. They were very nice, helped him up, asked if he was okay, which he was, but it really demoralized him. A couple of houses later, he said he wanted to go home. I asked him if he felt bad about falling down in front of everybody and he said no, he was just tired and wanted to go home. So I took him home. He’s 11 now and tonight he and his friends… Read more →

I Love the BCA!

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The Black Coaches Association (BCA) is about to issue grades to colleges and universities on their minority hiring practices: The BCA asked each of the 28 schools that had job openings during the past year to complete a form that was analyzed by an outside firm. Any school that does not complete a form receives an F. At USC, our traditional football rivalries are with UCLA and Notre Dame. Both of these schools have black head coaches and we kick their tails every year. Last year’s scores: USC 47, UCLA 22 USC 45, Notre Dame 14 More black head coaches! Fight On! Read more →

The Flintstone Nickel

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I found this amongst some pocket change . . . a new entry in the Lewis and Clark Westward Journey nickel series. According to the U.S. Mint web site, the design depicts a 55-foot keelboat with Captains Lewis and Clark in full uniform in the bow. I can make this out on the enlarged image, but on an actual nickel — maybe it’s my failing eyesight, but the only feature I can see clearly is the sail, which to me looks just like one of those brontosaurus burgers that tips over the Flintstones’ car at the drive-in . . . Read more →

Into the Digital Abyss

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The Globe and Mail reports that a “small but determined group of computer geeks [is] trying to translate open-source software into African languages, in an effort to reach the continent most isolated by the digital divide.” Read more →

High Noon

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“I can’t believe people are playing tennis at high noon,” my son says as we drive by the local courts. “They’re building up their stamina,” I suggest. “They’re getting skin cancer,” he replies. “They’ll need stamina to battle the skin cancer.” Read more →

The Blog of Anne Frank

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. . . everything can be taken from a man except one thing: the last of the human freedoms–to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. — Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. — Anne Frank On this date — September 2 — in 1944, Anne Frank was among 1,019 people on the 68th and last train from Holland to Auschwitz. Anne and others hiding with her had been betrayed and captured a month before and held in the Westerbork detention center. Read more →

Hollywood Confidential

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Tom Cruise says wife number three has to be funny, honest — AFP headline As opposed to the rest of us, who would be looking for humorless liars, if we weren’t still hanging in there with our first wives. I ask you — who is stupider: Tom Cruise or the people whose job it is to follow him around and write this crap down? Read more →

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