I got a job description via email from a recruiter named Nicholas Sparks.
Like most jobs I get from recruiters, 1) it was unrelated to my actual experience; and 2) it was nowhere near where I live.
I wrote back anyway to say, “I’ve never enjoyed you as a novelist and I’m glad to see you’ve gone into another line of work.”
This is the world we live in now. It’s one where computers improve so quickly that their capabilities pass from the realm of science fiction into the everyday world not over the course of a human lifetime, or even within the span of a professional’s career, but instead in just a few years.
When I was working at the Boeing Company in the mid-1980s, one project with about 80 programmers was at risk of missing a critical deadline. The project was critical to Boeing, and so they moved most of the 80 people off that project and brought in one guy who finished all the coding and delivered the software on time. I didn’t work on that project, and I didn’t know the guy, but I heard the story from someone I trusted, and it struck me as credible.
I am a holder of nonconformist ideas. You are a crackpot.
‘Big Bang Theory’s’ Jim Parsons comes out as gay — latimes.com
Never heard of him, never seen the show, but do you really expect me to believe that the guy in this photo is gay?
My boy saw Derrick Williams out and about the other night . . . Williams is from La Mirada (like me!), so it wouldn’t be unusual to spot him in the SoCal area.
“You’re Derrick Williams, right?” the boy said.
“No, that’s not me,” Williams replied.
Williams was cleverly disguised in an Arizona basketball hoodie and Minnesota Timberwolves sweatpants. Oh, and he’s 6-foot-8.
David Anderson: Lean Kanban Southern Europe 2012 keynote
Officers reported that several people began jumping over a fence when they arrived and, specifically, they observed a group of five men attempting to jump over a fence and ordered them to stop, said Capt. Phil Trent, South Bend police spokesman.
Police arrive to break up a party, five guys jump over a fence and the only two who get caught are Notre Dame football players.
Oakland Raiders sign Matt Leinart to back up Carson Palmer
Deja vu! Here’s a picture of Matt Leinart backing up Carson Palmer 10 years ago.
Backing up both of these guys was Matt Cassel (#10), who has so far had a better NFL career than Leinart, despite a college career in which he threw zero touchdown passes and never started a game.
I don’t know who the other two kids are. The coaches are current Washington head coach Steve Sarkisian and current Hawaii head coach Norm Chow.
Junior Seau Dead in Apparent Suicide
Seau was a legend in San Diego, where he lived and played most of his career. He was also a legendary member of the USC Trojan Family.
The number 55 is now synonymous at USC with great Trojan linebackers, but Seau was the player who made the number famous. It has since been worn by Willie McGinest, Chris Claiborne and Keith Rivers and is only assigned at the head coach’s discretion.
This picture was taken just a couple of weeks ago at the USC Spring Football game. He doesn’t look like someone ready to end his own life, but you never really know what someone’s life looks like from the inside.
The biggest headache in software development is that most programmers can’t program and don’t want to learn anything.
I recently finished up a MOOC called Software Engineering for SaaS, offered by UC Berkeley through Coursera. For a modest investment of a few hours a week for five weeks, I learned some Ruby on Rails — a well-designed platform and a lot of fun to work with — as well as tools like GitHub, Cucumber, RSpec, SimpleCov and Heroku.
Over 50,000 students from 150 countries signed up for the class. According to a final email from the professors, about 10,000 students attempted at least one assignment or quiz. Or to look at another way, 80 percent of the students gave up without even trying.
Approximately 2,000 students, or 4 percent, completed all four of the assignments and the three quizzes.
One of the enrollees who gave up without trying is a former colleague of mine, an ASP.NET programmer, who threw in the towel when he realized he wasn’t going to be allowed to do the programming assignments in C#.
Evidently he read under Prerequisites: “Programming proficiency in an object-oriented programming language such as Java, C#, C++, Python, or Ruby” and missed the course description at the top of the page: “This course teaches the engineering fundamentals for long-lived software using the highly-productive Agile development method for Software as a Service (SaaS) using Ruby on Rails.”
“I’m not going to learn Ruby on Rails,” he said, as though it was a silly, irrelevant thing to suggest to a professional programmer, like learning a yo-yo trick.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
We have to live today by what truth we can get today and be ready tomorrow to call it falsehood. — William James
From the LinkedIn profile of a linguistically challenged IT manager:
High-Level Strategic Planner and Executioner
I’m picking up a few things at Trader Joe’s — some Clif bars, a couple boxes of cereal and a bottle of IPA.
The checker points to the bottle and says, “That’s good. Have you tried it?” Like he’s the beer expert and I don’t know anything.
“Yeah, I’ve tried it.” Not to be outdone, I pointed to the cereal boxes and said, “Have you tried it on cereal?”
“No.”
“Well . . . think about it.”
From Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox:
The basic ideas are to:
I got this in my email today:
From: paypal@service.com
Subject: account information needs to be updatedDear PayPal Costumer …
Dog bites man — not news.
Gravy-wrestling model hit in the face with monkey wrench after finding friend having sex on her sofa — now THAT’S news!
