- What is your target condition here?
- What is the actual condition now?
- What obstacles are now preventing you from reaching the target condition? Which one are you addressing now?
- What is your next step? (start of the next PDCA cycle)
- When can we go and see what we have learned from taking that step?
Tiny Buddha: Today I commit to doing what I can—being there for those who need me, standing up for what I believe in, and choosing not to ignore my instincts when I feel that something isn’t right.
Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a controversial, affirmative action-like bill Saturday that would have allowed public colleges and universities in California to consider demographic factors in admissions processes.
Like!
I hate to sound selfish but whatever “demographic factors” they were planning to consider, I’m 110 percent sure they’d serve to penalize my kid, nieces, nephews, grandkids — everyone in my family now and forever — and for what? Racial inequities of the past that they had nothing to do with?
Not interested in taking the hit for that, sorry.
We’re good people. We stopped inviting the slaveholders to the family reunions because they’ve all been dead for about 100 years . . .
Agile Training: The Four Levels of Agile Requirements
Before you spend hours debating with your colleagues and clients on how your menus should look, there’s something you should know. Users spend more time with in-page navigation links than they do with menus. In fact, some users don’t even look at menus. What users look at is page content. And that’s where they often go to navigate.
One firm has experienced this many times with users in their eyetracking research.
Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don’t care about them. You are not alone.”
At the noisy end of the café, head bent
over the table, an old man sits alone,
a newspaper in front of him.And in the miserable banality of old age
he thinks how little he enjoyed the years
when he had strength, eloquence, and looks.He knows he’s aged a lot: he sees it, feels it.
Yet it seems he was young just yesterday.
So brief an interval, so very brief.And he thinks of Prudence, how it fooled him,
how he always believed—what madness—
that cheat who said: “Tomorrow. You have plenty of time.”He remembers impulses bridled, the joy
he sacrificed. Every chance he lost
now mocks his senseless caution.But so much thinking, so much remembering
makes the old man dizzy. He falls asleep,
his head resting on the café table.
Out of talk, appearance, and manners
I will make an excellent suit of armor;
and in this way I will face malicious people
without feeling the slightest fear or weakness.They will try to injure me. But of those
who come near me none will know
where to find my wounds, my vulnerable places,
under the deceptions that will cover me.So boasted Aimilianos Monai.
One wonders if he ever made that suit of armor.
In any case, he did not wear it long.
At the age of twenty-seven, he died in Sicily.
Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops. — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
In real life, as in Grand Opera, arias only make hopeless situations worse. — Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect. — Mark Twain
If you want to take my guns away from me, and you’re all for murdering fetuses, and love it when homosexuals marry each other, and want to give them kitchen appliances at their showers, and you’re for the poor, you’re a liberal. If you are against those perversions and for the rich, you’re a conservative. What could be simpler?
A Solyndra investor, in an e-mail sent to the White House in late 2009, asked why the government had been willing to offer the solar start-up so much money.
“One of our solar companies with revenues of less than $100 million (and not yet profitable) received a government loan of $580 million,” the investor, Brad Jones of Redpoint Ventures, wrote in December 2009 to Lawrence H. Summers, then the president’s chief economic adviser, referring to Solyndra. “While that is good for us, I can’t imagine it’s a good way for the government to use taxpayer money.”
The investment, Mr. Jones said, demonstrated broad problems with the government loan program. “The allocation of spending to clean energy is haphazard; the government is just not well equipped to decide which companies should get the money and how much,” he wrote.
If a company like Solyndra can generate energy at competitive prices, why would they need $580 million in government aid?
And if they can’t generate energy at competitive prices, how are they going to pay back the loan?
“What’s terrifying is that after looking at some of the ones that came next, this one started to look better,” said one April 2010 e-mail, referring to the Solyndra decision, and others that followed. “Bad days are coming.”
“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before,” Bokonon tells us. “He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”
You go up to a man, and you say, “How are things going, Joe?” and he says, “Oh fine, fine — couldn’t be better.” And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn’t be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody’s having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.
Those who are weak don’t fight.
Those who are stronger might fight for an hour.
Those who are stronger still might fight for many years.
The strongest fight their whole life.
They are the indispensable ones.
Craftsmanship over Crap. — Uncle Bob
I’m listening to a couple of women talking about their new beaus and who should pay for the dinner dates in a budding relationship.
Man pays? Take turns? 50/50?
For what it’s worth, ladies, back when I was dating, I paid for the food, but depending on how the rest of the evening played out, I might have to say, “In that case, pay me back for the sandwiches.”
“Sunny Side of the Street,” right?
I’ve had it in my head for three hours and now I need to be lobotomized . . .
