The One-Sentence Motivator

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My friend G.L. Hoffman has a great post over at U.S. News and World Report called “The One-Sentence Motivator.” His own one-sentence motivator (spoiler alert) is “Be the man you dreamed you could be when you were a little boy.”

Here’s mine:

To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.
— Albert Camus

It’s not as heartwarming as the little boy one but it gets me out of bed in the morning . . .

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Two More Reasons I Won’t Go on a Cruise

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Captured by pirates, you are given a choice between walking the plank or joining the crew. The crew are all Yankees fans.

 

When your luxury cruise ship, featuring Las Vegas–style live entertainment, sinks in midocean, you find yourself adrift in a lifeboat with a tiger, a chimp, and an Herbalife salesman. On the second day, the tiger and the chimp commit suicide.

— Susan Schorn, “Worse Things Happen at Sea”

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Interview with Jim McCarthy

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Q: What do you perceive as the greatest current challenge for software development managers and how do you help them overcome it?

The greatest current (and past and future) challenge for software development managers, and for all humans everywhere I suspect, is accurately perceiving reality and effectively accounting for it in their behavior. . . .

 

Q: What is your number one software project management tip, trick or technique?

Discussion should be illegal. Less talk, more code.

— PM Interviews: Jim McCarthy

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House of Cards

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House of cards

My son suggests that we buy some red wheels for the SUV to match the color of the vehicle.

“How much would that cost?” my wife asks.

“I don’t know,” I say. “A lot of money.”

“But it’d be the pimpingest pimp sauce thing you could ever do,” the boy replies.

That’s what Ed McMahon’s financial adviser used to say when Ed said, “Are you kidding?! The only way I could afford that is to work till I’m 90!”

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The Girl in the Fishbowl Sunglasses

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I suppose there’s a part of me that still wants the girl in the fishbowl sunglasses and Ramones T-shirt she got from an eBay vendor to invite me to a roof-deck party where a DJ is remixing music that I never heard originally, if for no other reason than it would somehow signify that the faint bags I’m beginning to notice under my eyes even after a good night’s sleep are imaginary. But they aren’t.

— Jason Roeder

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Who Says Creativity is Dead in Tinseltown?

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It was a sickness: this great interest in a medium that relentlessly and consistently failed to produce anything at all. People became so used to seeing shit on film that they no longer realized it was shit.

— Charles Bukowski, Hollywood
The Incredible Hulk

I keep seeing commercials during the NBA Finals for The Incredible Hulk.

Wasn’t there an Incredible Hulk movie out just a few years ago?

Why do we have to keep making Incredible Hulk movies?

Way to reach for the stars, thespians.

Shit . . .

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A 9th Grader Reviews the World Literature Canon

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For his English class this year, my son read Antigone, A Doll’s House, Romeo and Juliet, Things Fall Apart, and just finished All Quiet on the Western Front.

“Everybody died,” he said. “I knew that was going to happen. All the books we read this year, everybody died. Except A Doll’s House, and that sucked more than kids in a lollipop factory.”

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Our Kids Are Smarter Than Your Kids

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A new set of California Academic Performance Index (API) scores are out . . .

Boy doing math problems

In Irvine, where I live, education is king, and the school district posted a very nice score: 888 out of 1000.

Breaking it down demographically, the Asian kids led the way with a 933. African-American and Hispanic kids were both more than 100 points below the average, but there are so few of them in the district that they don’t affect the overall score very much.

Even the special ed kids scored a respectable 705, higher than the 668 scored by the neighboring Santa Ana district, where education takes a back seat to gang-related slayings.

Irvine: Our special ed kids are smarter than your honor students.

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What is a Trans Fat?

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According to the Krispy Kreme box on the receptionist’s desk this morning, they’re now making their doughnuts with zero trans fats. I read the other day that McDonald’s is serving zero trans fat french fries.

What the heck is a trans fat anyway?

This has got to be the biggest nutritional scam in history. Everyone’s advertising “zero trans fats” and yet I look around and people are fatter than ever, because this trans fat scam lets them convince themselves that eating french fries and doughnuts is actually healthy . . .

No trans fats in the doughnuts?! In that case, I’ll eat six of them!

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It’s Not Easy Being Green

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“If we shortened our showers by one minute, we’d save $100 a year,” my son informs me, pausing for a moment to let the news sink in. “And if we shortened our showers by two minutes, we’d save $200 a year. If we didn’t take showers at all, we could be rich!

Personal fans

“As for the AC, we leave it off and everybody gets one of those personal fans and points it at their face.”

“Why don’t we get the old-fashioned fold-out fans and wave them back and forth?” I ask.

“Now that’s just stupid,” he says.

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Scrum Doesn’t Do Anything

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In the end it doesn’t matter what names you use for your processes, good people will do good work and continuously improve what they do. So much of the discussion around Lean versus Scrum (etc.) is about marketing hype, selling consulting and training services, and cornering the market with new name-brands. . . .

Scrum is not a methodology, it is not a process. It is a simple framework underpinned by some common sense principles. Scrum offers individuals and organizations the opportunity to continuously improve the way they work. It provides a space for people to behave like human beings, with trust, respect and passion. That’s about it. But that is huge.

— Tobias Mayer

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Another Reason I Like to Just Stay Home

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ROME – Italian railway police say an American tourist was hit and killed by a train at a Rome station as he was walking on the tracks in a daze after being drugged and robbed.

Police official Giovanni Piccolantonio said Monday that 74-year-old Frank Phel from California died early Friday at the suburban Tiburtina station.

— Associated Press

Arrivederci Roma!

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