USC coach Pete Carroll and UCLA assistant Eric Scott were both at Thursday’s Crenshaw game.
Interesting . . . I would have thought Eric Scott would be out robbing the houses of people attending the Crenshaw game . . .
FIGHT ON!
A Missed Opportunity
Pastagina
Theres a new restaurant opening up in our local shopping center: Pastagina. What is that — pasta for women?
Even the logo is highly suggestive . . .
You’re My Dad
Will you come to see me Jack
When I’m old and very shaky?
Yes I will for you’re my dad
And you’ve lost your last old lady
Though you traveled very far
To the highlands and the badlands
And ripped off the family car
Still, old dad, I won’t forsake you.Will you come to see me Jack?
Though I’m really not alone.
Still I’d like to see my boy
For we’re lonesome for our own.
Yes I will for you’re my dad
Though you dumped me and my brothers
And you sizzled down the road
Loving other fellows’ mothers.Will you come to see me Jack?
Though I look like time boiled over.
Growing old is not a lark.
Yes I will for you’re my dad
Though we never saw a nickel
As we struggled up life’s ladder
I will call you and together
We will cuddle up and see
What the weather’s like in Key West
On the old-age home TV.
Don’t Argue About Things That Don’t Exist
Some ideas. . . .
Don’t argue about things that don’t exist, like whether Save buttons should do this or that. Instead, code or prototype it and then team members use it themselves. You’ll be able to tell if it could be better when you use it instead of talk about it. . . .
One of the biggest blockers to team greatness is that members of team will have really good team diagnoses but they don’t say them out loud. So nothing can be done with the idea. You gotta say your great ideas out loud. . . .
Stay out of the content. The real issues are not about UI and architecture. Those are just the excuses to act out team neuroses. . . . If you resolve the interpersonal issues you won’t feel like you have UI or architecture issues.
Processes and planning will not make this better. They will make it worse. Don’t have a meeting to discuss how you will do the UI, for instance. That’s one of the worst things you can do. Don’t talk about stuff that doesn’t exist. Make stuff and then perfect it.
Hola, Estúpidos
Mr. Penn, Mr. Spacey, Ms. Campbell — Thank you so much for coming to visit me. Muchas gracias!
Shortly after your visits, 80,000 Venezuelans will gather at the Central University to protest my attempts to expand my dictatorial rule. Eight of these people will be injured when masked gunmen open fire on them.
I of course will be shocked by this display of brutality — as shocked as I’ve been since Claude Rains discovered gambling at Rick’s Cafe.
The incident will no doubt raise questions in people’s minds as to whether you actually support the armed suppression of free speech, or whether you are just naive simpletons.
Regrettably, there will be a writers’ strike on at the time and you will therefore have nothing to say . . .
Tu amigo,
Hugo Chavez
Too Close to the Piano
I play the piano for fun. I’m self-taught . . . I can play notes but I don’t know the first thing about proper technique, which is why I’m not very good.
I don’t know why I never thought of it before, but last night as I was struggling to play a new piece, I decided to move the piano bench farther back than I usually do.
Wow! Big improvement! For 40 years, I’ve been sitting too close to the piano.
It’s the kind of thing that a qualified instructor could point out at the first lesson, but when you have to figure it out yourself, it takes a little longer . . .
Got a Job
After three months on the dole, I got a job offer from the IT director of a local non-profit healthcare association here in Orange County. I start next week. As Gerald Ford used to say, “Our long national nightmare is over.”
It’s a small IT group — 8 people, including the director. I’ve got to admit I’m a little burned out on big corporate IT shops.
I got out of hands-on programming and into leadership roles because I thought I could do a better job than the people I saw doing it. I wanted to develop teams that got things done using their skills and their collective intelligence, but in practice, you typically get locked into some corporate process standard.
A process may be good for delivering consistent results, but they may not be consistently good results. Like at McDonald’s, every Big Mac is just like every other Big Mac because they have a process for making Big Macs. But is a Big Mac a high-quality dining experience? Not really . . .
A friend and former colleague, who was also recently let go by a local mortgage company, emails to say
I’m doing well… still spending a lot of time in Bakersfield, spending time with my parents. I’ve been looking for jobs, but haven’t applied for anything. I guess I actually need to apply.
She’s single, she can afford to be sanguine.
I was in contact with at least 100 companies in one way or another – sent a resume, called, phone interviews, in-person interviews – and got two job offers. So the upside with her approach is that I could have avoided 98 rejections.
Did I mention the job is with a healthcare organization? I was laid off from my last job, with a mortgage bank, when the mortgage industry tanked. Prior to that, I was laid off from a dot-com consulting company when that industry imploded.
I’ve got a knack for getting into industries at their absolute zenith, then riding them down the drain.
But healthcare — it’s recession-proof! Isn’t it? You can’t say, “I’m going to put off getting critically ill until I have a better read on the economy.”
Halloween 2007
My son put on a cap, a pair of sunglasses, hung a clock around his neck, and went trick-or-treating with his friends as Flavor Flav.
I can’t imagine anyone in Irvine is going to be able to figure that one out.
Postscript
“One woman asked me, ‘Are you supposed to be Flavor Flav?'” he says.
“What was her ethnicity?” I ask him.
“White.”
OK, I stand corrected.
Lost
As I arrived for an interview today, the hiring manager asked me, “Did you have any trouble finding the place?”
As it happens, I did not have any trouble finding the place and said so. I had printed out a map from one of the numerous online map sites and the building was right where it was supposed to be.
But even if I had had trouble finding it, my answer would have been the same.
“Some people have trouble finding it,” he told me.
Interesting. As an IT person, I consider myself a problem-solver — actually, I could make a case that any person in any job is hired as a problem solver — so I wouldn’t start out an interview by admitting that I got lost on my way over.
“Don’t hire anyone who can’t find the building,” I said.
Crime and Punishment
As you can see on this perimeter map of the Santiago Fire, the active fire line is now far enough east that my wife and I can clean the ashes and soot off our patio this morning without worrying about having a new load of ashes and soot dumped on it the next day. (We live in the small notch northeast of the now-decommissioned El Toro MCAS.)
I say to her, “They should find the guys who set the fire and make them clean up this mess.”
“Kill them!” she suggests.
“Couldn’t we make them clean up the mess and then kill them?”
Greed
The dog is sitting attentively watching my son eat a chili dog.
“You’re not going to get any of that,” I explain to the dog. “He’s greedy. He makes Jack Welch look like Good King Wenceslas.”
“And you,” the boy says, “make Donnie ‘We Found Him’ look like one of the Three Wise Men.”
The boy going deep in the archives to pull out a Wild Thornberrys reference, in which Donnie — seen here hanging from a tree limb — was a feral boy raised by orangutans.
How to Destroy Creativity
- Always pretend to know more than anybody else
- Police your employees by every procedural means
- Have your professionally-trained staff members do technicians’ work for long periods of time
- Erect the highest possible barrier between commercial decision-makers and your technical staff
- Don’t speak to employees on a personal level, except when announcing raises
- Be the exclusive spokesman for everything for which you are responsible
- Say yes to new ideas, but do nothing about them
- Call many meetings
- Put every new idea through channels
- Worry about the budget
- Cultivate the not-invented-here syndrome
No Serenade, No Fire Brigade, Just Pyromania
Air quality and visibility were much worse today than yesterday. I don’t know if the winds shifted or if it just takes a day or so for all the ashes and soot to fall back to earth.
Proving that there’s a positive side to everything, the Santa Ana winds that have fanned these fires around Southern California also knocked down half the trees in our community, which will now have to be removed and replaced, so if you’re in the landscaping service business, this is a good time for you.
“Honey! Call Farmers and get a quote on
homeowners insurance – stat!”
My wife is in the insurance business. She’s received several calls over the past few days from people wanting to buy a homeowners policy. Ordinarily, she’d be happy to sell them one . . . the problem is that the houses are in zip codes that are currently on fire, and her company has suspended sales of homeowners insurance in those areas.
Here’s a tip, folks: The time to buy insurance is before your house is on fire.
A Lesson in Leadership
I took the dog for a walk this morning before dropping my son off at school . . . in theory, the dog is “his” dog, but in practice, I wind up doing most of the work.
As we got back from the walk, the boy was standing outside yelling, “Let’s go! We’re late!”
“Okay, Mr. Doesn’t-Do-Any-Work-While-Barking-Out-Orders-To-Others,” I said.
“That’s what leadership’s all about,” he said.
Ashes to Ashes
As a result of the fires, particularly the one that burned across the northern border of Irvine, everything in the neighborhood is coated with either a thick layer of soot or a thin film of soot, depending on whether the object in question is outdoors or indoors.
Fire Update
As of this afternoon, the fires had shifted and were no longer considered a significant threat to Irvine homes.
Here’s a map of the areas affected so far. The fire started — or I should say “was started,” since it’s now believed to be an arson fire — in the area bounded by the top of the map, the 261 to the west, the 241 to the east, and Portola Parkway to the south.
Firefighters were able to stop the fire from crossing Portola, but it continued to burn east and is now bearing down on Foothill Ranch, the residential area in the lower right corner of the map . . .
Setting the World on Fire
Wildfires are burning all over Southern California, including one here in Irvine:
What they’re saying on the TV news is that firefighters are planning to make a stand at Portola Parkway and stop the fire there, which is good news because we live south of Portola. About 100 feet south, but it’s better than nothing.
Here are some blurry photos from our patio:
Job Posting
My days of unemployment may be over:
No, wait . . . I just read the rest of the story and it turns out not to be a job advertisement . . .
In Fair Verona
My son and I are in the kitchen looking for something to eat. He finds a bag of Pepperidge Farm Verona cookies (I prefer the Raspberry Milanos myself), holds the bag up to my face, and says
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean
Two hours traffic on our stage blah blah blah
Then he eats the cookies.
So who says Shakespeare has no relevance for the modern student?
More School Choice
And if you want your kid to know what to do when the principal says “Code Blue” over the intercom, move to Cleveland:
Students said they took cover in closets after the school principal announced a “Code Blue” on the intercom.
I just asked my own high school-age son if he knows what “Code Blue” means and he doesn’t know. In a health care setting, it means cardiac arrest, or more generically, imminent loss of life. So the day your kid comes home and tells you he learned what to do when the principal says “Code Blue” over the intercom is a good day to start looking for a new school.