I’m at the Carl’s Jr. drive-thru, and in keeping with the time-honored fast food tradition of having the person with the worst command of the English language and/or the most unintelligible accent work the drive-thru, the guy says, “Welcome to Carl’s Jr. Would you like to try [unintelligible] patty [unintelligible]?”
“What?”
“Welcome to Carl’s Jr. . . .”
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
Knight turned the machine off and on.
The machine worked.
You can’t tell which way the train went just by looking at the track.
If you want to be great, you need to learn about all the possible relevant ideas that have worked for others. You need to create new ideas, blend, adapt and prioritize them, and constantly test the best ideas to see which ones work for you. Only then can you fully implement — while continuously adjusting — the ideas that really work.
This notice went out today from David Carson, the moderator of the Who’s Alive and Who’s Dead mailing list, which among other things, sends out an email to subscribers when a famous person (like Andrew Breitbart) dies:
Something I unfortunately have to remind everyone of once in a while is, if you have something uncomplimentary or unpleasant to say about the recently deceased, you don’t need to say it to me. (This is only an issue when someone conservative dies, by the way. I’ve never gotten any nasty-grams when a liberal, moderate, or any other kind of person has died. But a conservative? Every single time, including today. Make of that what you will.)
The next one is a little hard to explain. For example . . . in the morning, when my owner lets me out of my enclosure, instead of running to my food dish, I run and sit in front of the cupboard to say, “This is where the dog food is kept. Can I have some please?”
So . . .
— Lightning 
Footnote: The “pilot” (the guy throwing the plane) is Joe Ayoob, who replaced Aaron Rodgers as the quarterback at Cal in 2005.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wedcZp07raE]
Why doesn’t this guy have a reality show:
The son of Robert F. Kennedy has been charged with harassment and endangering the welfare of a child for allegedly clashing with two nurses who tried to stop him from taking his 2-day-old baby boy from a Westchester maternity unit, NBC New York has learned.
According to a Mount Kisco, N.Y. police report obtained by NBC New York, Douglas Kennedy, 44, took his baby from the newborn unit of Northern Westchester Hospital on Jan. 7, against the instructions of hospital staff who told him the infant needed to stay there. He faces misdemeanor charges. . . .
While holding the child in his right arm, Kennedy kicked [a nurse] in the pelvis with his right foot, knocking her backward onto the floor, police said.
As he did this, Kennedy fell onto the floor with the baby in his arms. Kennedy then got up and ran “down the stairs with the infant until he was stopped by security and escorted back to the infant’s room,” the police report said.
This comes on the heels of a new book by a JFK White House intern “revealing” that Douglas Kennedy’s Uncle Jack used to pimp the interns to service presidential aides as well as his own family members.
At least the author lived to tell the tale of her sordid encounter with the Kennedys. Not everyone was that lucky.
You might also remember Douglas’s brother David, who died of a drug overdose in 1984, or his brother Michael, another in the family’s long line of alcoholics, who died by skiing into a tree, but not before distinguishing himself with a statutory rape allegation involving the family’s 14-year-old babysitter.
I could go on with this but you get the point: thugs, pimps, alcoholics, drug addicts, rapists . . . maybe calling Teddy a murderer is a little strong, but he did kill that girl. It’s hard to imagine a more appalling bunch of degenerates.
The Kennedys make the Kardashians look like America’s royal family.
Let me tell you something about crows: Sometimes they fly in a big circle. Sometimes they fly every which way.
Whoever invented “as the crow flies” to mean “in a straight line” must have never seen an actual crow . . .
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE]
Next year I’m going to live tweet the Oscar In Memoriam segment so I can tell you which celebrities are in Hell.
See you at the movies!
Before you contradict an old man, my fair friend, you should endeavor to understand him. — George Santayana
Via Curbed LA on the occasion of what would have been DFW’s 50th birthday today.
What a depressing abode! I’m ready to drive out there right now and hang myself . . .
Discriminate against Asians in college admissions.
Use “Chink in the Armor” as the headline for an article on the New York Knicks.
Excerpts from “Behind Every Great Product: The Role of the Product Manager” by Martin Cagan, Silicon Valley Product Group:
Behind every great product you will find a good product manager, in the sense we describe here. We have yet to see an exception to this rule.
Product ideas can come from any number of sources. Your job as product manager is to evaluate these product ideas and decide which product ideas are worth pursuing, and which are not.
The art of product management is to combine a deep understanding of your target customer’s needs and desires with the capabilities of your engineering team and the technologies they have to work with in order to come up with a product definition that is both compelling and achievable.
Of the hundreds of possible and even desirable features in the product, which are the few that are actually essential to the success of the product?
The owner of the requirements and the person ultimately responsible that those are the right requirements is the product manager.
Harvard Business Review: Steve Jobs Solved the Innovator’s Dilemma
When there are many approaches possible, the shortest path to exceeding expectations rarely goes through meeting expectations. — Ward Cunningham
To be overly preoccupied with the future is to be inattentive toward the present where learning and growth take place. To walk around asking, “am I a success or a failure” is a silly question in the sense that the closest you can come to answer is to say, everyone is both a success and a failure.
Sometimes the best management is no management at all — first do no harm!
A full day of sleep, systematic overdose of cold medicines, and phlegm reduction techniques (like hocking and nose blowing) that tend to be disruptive to people when practiced non-stop in the workplace can really help in battling a tough cold.
It’s also a perfect excuse to close your eyes, curl up in a ball and hide from the world, which is my preferred leisure-time activity anyway . . .
