I thought the corniest thing I’d ever heard when I got here was when they kept talking about this family that we had and I’d been at several other universities and I said, look they’re all the same. But they really believe it, they mean it and they live it and I’ve gotten caught up in that and the traditions and the band and I really don’t want to coach anyplace else. This is where I’d like to finish my career.
Fight On!
We’re having dinner at Chili’s, and long before the food arrives, my kid has already informed me that I should have ordered meat instead of a salad, and that he can’t believe how quickly I ordered a refill on my soda.
“Are you going to micromanage the whole meal for me?” I ask. “I can’t see how it makes any difference to you what I order or how fast I drink my soda, but somehow it does.”
“It shows how much I care,” he says.
My son and I are watching a Citibank commercial in which a woman in Japan drops her son off for his first day of school.
As his mom starts to walk away, the boy looks back anxiously . . .
“What’s the Asian kid nervous about?” my son says. “He’s going to get better grades than the rest of the kids anyway. Oh wait, all the other kids are Asian too. Ouch.”
My primary complaint about scheduling is simple: that people are willing to proceed as if they can look into a crystal ball about the future. They act as if they can plan out the future. As if they can control the future. It’s the control part that really gets to me. It bugs me because it’s a false belief. It’s simply not true. You can not control the future, and the belief you can is just so destructive of creativity, teamwork, spontaneity and interaction among one another. This false belief is just a complete energy zapper, an unwholesome energy sink.
This transcript of a Jim and Michele McCarthy podcast is the best discussion of scheduling I’ve read today, maybe ever . . .
To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.
God will not have his work made manifest by cowards.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?
Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him.
The sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are become timorous, desponding whimperers. We are afraid of truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each other.
Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide: him all tongues greet, all honors crown, all eyes follow with desire. Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not need it.
A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event, raises your spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.
I came up with a new game-show idea recently. It’s called The Old Game. You got three old guys with loaded guns onstage. They look back at their lives, see who they were, what they accomplished, how close they came to realizing their dreams. The winner is the one who doesn’t blow his brains out. He gets a refrigerator.
At the time the book [Brave New World] was written this idea, that human beings are given free will in order to choose between insanity on the one hand and lunacy on the other, was one that I found amusing and regarded as quite possibly true.
In memory of the Rev. Falwell, here’s one of my favorite Woody Allen quotes, from Hannah and Her Sisters
But the worst are the fundamentalist preachers. Third-rate con men telling the poor suckers that they speak with Jesus. And to please send in money. Money, money, money! If Jesus came back and saw what is going on in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.
Farewell, Falwell!
I was telling my son about a woman in Arkansas who’s about to give birth to her 17th child. Her oldest is 19.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” the boy asked.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, “but it can’t hurt that much if you’re willing to do it 17 times. It can’t hurt as much as, say, a kick in the groin, because after I took one kick in the groin, I wouldn’t sign up to take 16 more.”
“The pain goes away, you know.”
“Are you suggesting that I would be willing to take 17 kicks in the groin?”
“Over a 19-year period, yeah.”
“Agree to disagree.”
Originally uploaded by david888lee.
One challenge we’re facing is that some high level executives are now concerned over how the project is progressing and want regular updates–they are used to Microsoft Project GANTT charts, excel charts with deadlines and stop lighting (e.g. yellow light, we’re behind schedule but it’s not critical).
How do we map our agile process into the traditional project plans used by upper management for their corporate planning?
At the Deep Agile seminar he and I did, Jeff Sutherland told of being asked for a GANTT chart or such. He asked the execs in question how accurate those charts were. They replied that they were never accurate. He declined to do them.
Originally uploaded by laputa.
Last weekend, we had dinner at a Chinese place with some of my in-laws. As usual, my son and I were left at one end of the table to entertain ourselves while the rest of the group chatted with each other in Thai.
Near the end of the meal, the boy started reading through the fortune cookies and ad libbing the messages: “‘If you’re reading this, you’re most likely Asian, which means your mom will yell at you a lot.’ ‘This fortune cookie is stale. You’re not going to like it.’ ‘You will fulminate in 10 seconds.'”
“Fulminate?!” I said.
“It was one of my vocabulary words.”
When I went to Boston, I knew they won championships but didn’t really know the history. But the players always came around, you’d ask questions, they’d talk basketball. You didn’t want to let the guys down. They set the bar high. It’s not like that here [in Indiana], or around the league. We stay at the nicest hotels. In Minnesota we’re right across the street from the arena, maybe a 45-second walk. They’ve got a bus for them. You’ve got to be kidding me. Charter planes. That’s not flying. I always say guys deserve the money, but it changes some people.
When the government says ‘Islamic militants,’ it sends a message to the public that Islam and militancy are synonymous.
No, that’s not correct. What law school did you go to?
If Islam and militancy were synonymous, then you could just say “Islamic” or “militants” and “Islamic militants” would be redundant, like “past history” or “unexpected surprise.”
So actually, when the government says “Islamic militants,” it sends a message that Islam and militancy are not synonymous, although you can’t help noticing that most terrorists are in fact Islamic . . .
In addition to the timely pay for acceptable services he offers, there are a few additional conditions that he imposes on you, if you are one of his subordinates. These are:
- What actions you take, you believe in.
- What commitments you make, you keep,
- What resources you have, you use.
- What words you say, you believe to be true.
- What you create, you intend to be great.
He knows that if you buy something from an expert, you are wise to let them to deliver it on their own. . . .
He requires that the team credibly believe itself to be doing something great, and also insists that all involved relentlessly pursue – and always adopt – what they think is the best available idea. . . .
He never allows people to say, “People say…” If unidentified “people” have something to say, they can come say it. He listens. He just doesn’t believe in the self-appointed representation of selves not one’s own.
Dinesh DiSouza, a noted conservative pundit, was moved in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings to say this:
Only the language of religion seems appropriate to the magnitude of tragedy. Only God seems to have the power to heal hearts in such circumstances. . . . Atheism seems to have nothing to say to people when there is serious bereavement or tragedy.
That’s not true. For example, one famous atheist response to tragedy is this: So it goes.
DiSouza also forgot to add that if you leave out platitudes, pleasant myths and happily-ever-after fairy tales, religion has nothing to say to people either . . .
I hadn’t been to a Norm’s restaurant in years. There isn’t one in my neighborhood. We discovered this one because it’s close to the new place where my son’s taking percussion lessons.
Not only was the boy able to get two eggs, two sausages, two pieces of bacon, half a dinner plate full of hash browns, and two gigantic slabs of French toast with butter and syrup for only $5.99, he managed to polish off the whole thing before I even finished my salad.
Excellent value!
Rating: Five stars.
Even when asked something noncontroversial, what he [Barack Obama] personally did to improve the environment, he said 3,000 campaign volunteers planted trees on Earth Day. With a prod from moderator Brian Williams, the NBC anchor, Obama added he’s “been working” to install energy efficient light bulbs at home. He sounded out of touch.
Is this the new version of the old joke? How many senators does it take to “work on” changing a light bulb? One to propose a bipartisan commission. One to threaten to de-fund the light bulbs. One to demand the impeachment of Bush and Cheney for keeping us all in the dark. One to vote to pull out the first of the light bulbs by fall of this year with a view to getting them all pulled out by the end of 2008.
New additions to the First Lines and Last Lines quizzes:
Call me Ishmael.
It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.
Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tidewater dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.
Last summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden–Jim Burden, as we still call him in the West.
The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting.
He loved Big Brother.
At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.
Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.
It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.
