A male and female co-worker are bickering, as they often do.
An onlooker says, “You two are like a married couple . . . but without the sex and everything.”
Lady Bird Johnson, 1912-2007
7-Eleven marks 80 years with free Slurpees
Former first lady Lady Bird Johnson dies
She was 94 years old. I actually thought she was already dead.
I hope she got her free Slurpee . . .
Miyamoto Musashi
On second thought, we have a family member who perceives things that cannot be seen, so #7 may be more indicative of mental illness than enlightenment . . .
Get to Work
The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
Rather Disrespectful
Another aspect of respecting people is the idea that the process that the team uses to generate value is owned by the team. The process is what the team uses to achieve its goals. By the time things get formalized, it rapidly morphs into a situation where the team is a tool that the process uses to achieve its goals. That’s rather disrespectful of the individuals involved. It doesn’t leverage their capabilities and strengths and insights.
This is the Way
This is the Way for men who want to learn my strategy:
- Do not think dishonestly.
- The Way is in training.
- Become acquainted with every art.
- Know the Ways of all professions.
- Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters.
- Develop intuitive judgment and understanding for everything.
- Perceive those things that cannot be seen.
- Pay attention even to trifles.
- Do nothing which is of no use.
UPDATE: One of my son’s friends has a hamster named Miyamoto Musashi. His book says he’s very famous in Japan, but then it would say that.
Pacific Cup 2007
My son’s roller hockey team won the Pacific Cup final last weekend. For teams in California, Arizona and Nevada, Pacific Cup is the biggest tournament of the year, not counting national championships.
The team will be playing at NARCh in a couple of weeks. His 12-and-under team won the NARCh tournament two years ago, but I’m not as optimistic with this year’s bunch.
The problems include:
Proud to Be Livin’ in the U.S.A.
Ain’t getting old, ain’t getting younger though
Just getting used to the lay of the land
I ain’t tongue-tied, just don’t got nothin’ to say
I’m proud to be livin’ in the U.S.A.
Easy Mac
My son takes a break from doing some video editing on the computer, trudges downstairs and into the kitchen, where his mom is cleaning the floor.
“Can you make me some Easy Mac?” he asks.
“I’m cleaning, honey,” she says. “Can you make your own Easy Mac?”
“Bah!” he says, trudging back upstairs. “Does Steven Spielberg have to make his own Easy Mac? Does George Lucas have to make his own Easy Mac? Does M. Night Shyamalan . . .”
Go Tell the Spartans to Program a Football Game
I ponied up the 50 bucks to join the XNA Creators Club and so far I’ve been able to code and deploy some rudimentary 2-D games on our Xbox 360.
“Can you program a football game?” my son asks.
“No . . . first of all, I’m just learning this stuff, and second, you can’t expect one person to duplicate the efforts of dozens of people over a period of years.”
“Haven’t you ever heard of The 300?” he shouts.
“Yeah. They all died.”
“But they gave a valiant effort!“
Professional Enraged Fanatics
Many years ago, when I worked on construction sites, I learned that the people you see on picket lines are not necessarily union members. If a union man doesn’t feel like walking a picket line, he can pay a “professional picketer” to walk in his place.
Yesterday, I learned that this same technique is used in the Muslim world. If a Salman Rushdie knighthood or a Danish cartoon doesn’t generate enough spontaneously enraged fanatics, you can hire some professional enraged fanatics, like Islamic Rage Boy here.
Click through on the photo or link to see him in action . . .
He Looks Almost Lifelike!
The annual ACM Awards banquet was held last month in San Diego. Recipients were afforded the singular honor of being photographed next to the embalmed corpse of ACM President Stuart Feldman (left):
Is There a Drummer in the House?
We were at my son Casey’s 8th grade graduation this morning when one of his teachers came up to me, obviously revved up about something, and asked, “Did you hear what happened at the assembly yesterday?”
From the breathless tone of his question, I assumed at the very least that someone had lost a limb.
“No,” I said, “what happened?”
He told me they had a performance by a street percussion group called Street Beat, and as part of the show, they asked for a couple of volunteers from the audience. Casey plays the drums, and a lot of kids were yelling and pointing at him to be selected, so he was.
What they did with the volunteers was, the Street Beat guys would play something and the kids would try to match it. My kid was able to match everything perfectly, the other kid wasn’t, so they sent the second boy back to his seat and invited Casey to sit in and jam with them on the next song.
Keep in mind this is street percussion, where they use found objects as instruments, so his “drum set” consisted of a gas tank, an upside-down bucket and a water-cooler-size water bottle.
According to the teacher, he was awesome! I wish I’d been able to see it. I’ve been to all of his activities and performances since birth. I noticed he got a lot of comments about it from kids who signed his yearbook.
So his junior high career had some ups and downs, but I’m glad he was able to close it out on a high note.
I asked him, “Did everyone go crazy when you finished, like in Napoleon Dynamite?”
“Sort of,” he said.
One Grows Out of That Kind of Thing
‘Now it might be a very romantic sight to some chaps, a light burning in a tower window. I knew a poem about a thing like that once. Forgot it now, though. I was no end of a one for poetry when I was a kid — love and all that. Castle towers came in quite a lot. Funny how one grows out of that kind of thing.’
Antipattern: Exactly on Schedule
I work with a company that has the following set of milestones in its standard project methodology:
- Vision/Scope Complete
- Requirements Complete
- Design Complete
- Definition Complete
- Build Complete
- Test Complete
- Rollout Complete
I’ve noticed an interesting pattern at the weekly enterprise status meetings: a significant number of projects report being exactly on schedule for each milestone — not one single day ahead or behind! — until they get to rollout, at which point they suddenly go several months late.
Some things can be faked and some things can’t. As long as you have milestones that can be met simply by declaring them done, or by signing off on a document, you can always hit them on time.
But when it comes to putting actual working software in front of a customer, that’s when you really have to deliver the goods, and that’s when the milestones start getting missed.
This is a very high-risk approach to software projects. Deferring testing to the end of a project guarantees that if your project fails for any reason — and if your testing is honest, there’s always some non-zero probability that it will fail — you will have already invested in the entire cost of construction.
That’s why the history of software engineering is littered with big-ticket disasters. You never really know what you’ve got until the end, after you’ve spent all the money.
It’s also a good argument for iterative, incremental development. If you have to deliver working software early and often, you can’t fake it.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
What’s Going On?
LUCY (kneeling and looking at the ground): Look at those stupid bugs … They don’t have the slightest idea as to what is going on in this world.
CHARLIE BROWN: What is going on in this world?
LUCY: I don’t have the slightest idea.
Schwaber on Scrum
You know that Scrum is gaining traction when all of the things that have been ignored to date become painfully obvious and you just wish you had never started the whole thing. This often happens within three months. At that point, the only thing that pulls me through is looking back and realizing that things have actually improved.
Did She Find an Aardvark?
Ann Avery Andres has been selected as the Foreperson for the 2007/2008 [Orange County] Grand Jury, which will begin its term July 2.
Albert Andreas Armadillo was unavailable?
I Forgot About Her
I’m explaining to my 8th-grade kid that his mom is pretty attractive for a mom, but he’s not seeing it.
I list off several of his friends’ unattractive moms by way of example, and then ask him, “Which of your friends has a better-looking mom than Mom?”
“Lopez,” he says, naming one of the kids on his hockey team.
OK, I’d forgotten about her . . .
Another Mystery Unraveled
Our dog is not fat, but he could probably stand to lose two or three pounds. To that end, I’ve been taking him for more walks and carefully measuring the amount of food he eats: one-half cup twice a day.
I’ve instructed my wife and kid, “When you feed the dog, no more than one-half cup per serving.”
I even bought a new measuring cup with bold markings to make it easy for everybody.
In spite of all this, the dog hasn’t lost any weight.
This morning, as I was about to give the dog his one-half cup of food, my wife looked at the measuring cup and said, “Oh my god! Is that all you feed him?!”
