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 . . .”
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!“
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 . . .
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):
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.
‘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?!”
Procrastination
The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don’t just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.
Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny.
The Finer Things in Life
One thing you can’t help noticing in spending a day at LACMA, what with the proximity to West Hollywood and all, is that gay guys really like art.
I mentioned that to my son and his response was “Case in point: you,” which wasn’t very nice.
He’s not much of an art lover . . . I admit that I occasionally drag him along to an art museum, because I feel like he should know at least a little bit about it whether he likes it or not.
On our way back to Orange County — in keeping with my mission of introducing the boy to the finer things in life — we stopped off at the original Tommy’s stand at Beverly and Rampart, not only an L.A. landmark, but a favorite of USC students for decades, where you can still get — as the boy did — a double chili cheeseburger, fries and a drink for $5.40.
Apologies to Pete Townshend, but I’d call that a bargain!
Safety First
According to the 2006 FBI Annual Uniform Crime Report, Irvine, CA — where I live — is the safest city in the country.
Coconut Pancakes
The Epps family was in Thai Town in Hollywood late Friday night. Most establishments were already closed . . . one exception was a Thai sweet shop called Bhan Kanom Thai, across the street from the famous Sanamluang Cafe.
There were three generations of Thai women in the shop: 1) A very cute, very poised 9-year-old girl, who probably could have run the place herself; her mom; and Grandma, who was cooking up some coconut pastries about the size, shape and consistency of silver dollar pancakes.
My wife walked out with about 25 dollars worth of the coconut pastries and other goodies.
When we got back on the 101 South, our son announced he was hungry.
“Try those coconut pancakes,” I said. “Best thing I ever tasted. I’m in heaven.”
“I don’t like coconut,” he said.
“How can you not like coconut?” my wife asked in alarm. “It’s a main ingredient in Asian food.”
“There’s no coconut in chow mein,” the boy said, by way of counterexample.
We couldn’t get him to try any, but that’s okay . . . more pancakes for me.
T.J. Simers Must Die
I thought sports columnists were appointed for life, like Supreme Court justices, no matter how irrelevant they become, and yet I see that the Los Angeles Times has just dumped J.A. Adande.
Well, by golly, that’s a good start!
I can’t think of a single print columnist, at the Times or elsewhere, who’s remotely relevant anymore. There are dozens of sports websites (not that one — start at Deadspin and follow the links) with at least an order of magnitude more energy, insight and wit than you’ll find in your local print rag, which is why newspapers are going the way of the 8-track tape, the buggy whip and whale oil.
The next in line to go at the Times should be fatuous blowhard T.J. Simers.
Simers positions himself as a pot-stirring wiseass, and the line on him seems to be that if people don’t like him, he must be doing something right.
Actually, nobody likes him because he’s a dull, uninformed, solipsistic clod, whose “style” consists of run-on sentences, juvenile name-calling, and endlessly repeated in-jokes and shout-outs that were never funny in the first place.
Up the Organization
You know what I saw at the bookstore this afternoon? A 35th anniversary edition of Robert Townsend’s Up the Organization!
If I’ve ever read a better business book, I can’t remember what it was. Townsend was way, way ahead of the curve in both style and content . . .
Highly recommended!
A Day at LACMA
We drove out to LACMA last weekend to see The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950, and Re-SITE-ing the West: Contemporary Photographs from the Permanent Collection.
I love exhibits like this . . . I’ve lived in California my whole life and I feel like these Western landscapes are part of my DNA.
While we were there, we also took in the Dan Flavin retrospective. Flavin’s work consists of standard fluorescent tubes arranged in patterns not beyond the imagination of the average six-year-old.
I tried viewing them up close, far away, from the side . . . I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it.
LACMA helpfully provided a detailed theory of Flavin’s work in the form of a fold-out brochure with a lot of small print, but I didn’t read it. Isn’t art supposed to provide some sort of pleasure and/or illumination — pardon the pun — on its own merits?
I was reminded of Tom Wolfe’s epiphany in The Painted Word, that the distinction between, say, a Jackson Pollock painting and the splatterings of a kindergartener is that the kindergartener’s work lacks a persuasive critical theory:
All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well–how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works only exist to illustrate the text.
Pug Photos from Flickr
Originally uploaded by Velvet_.
Originally uploaded by Pinkpollyanna.
Originally uploaded by gina64.
