The whole “whatever happened five minutes ago was the biggest thing that ever happened” school of making sports arguments has to be one of the most annoying sports media trends of this decade.
Amen, brother! As far as I can tell, sports media do three things:
None of which add to anyone’s understanding or enjoyment of the games . . .
It took Detroit more than 20 years to ferret out the radical management principle at the heart of Toyota’s capacity for relentless improvement . . . Only after American carmakers had exhausted every other explanation for Toyota’s success — an undervalued yen, a docile workforce, Japanese culture, superior automation — were they finally able to admit that Toyota’s real advantage was its ability to harness the intellect of “ordinary” employees.
Let’s say your software development methodology tells you to do A, then B, then C, then D, and so on, until you get to Z, at which point, you’re done.
And let’s say you do A, then B, then C, then D, and you notice that your project is not going according to plan for reasons that appear to be related to the methodology.
What do you do?
Do you forge ahead with E, F and G, even though that now looks like the wrong thing to do? If you’re committed to the methodology, you have to, right?
Or — do you fall back on the knowledge and experience of the project manager and the project team, and rely on them to do the right thing?
And if you can rely on the knowledge and experience of the project team now, what was the point of the methodology in the first place?
Goofus sends out an email to the team stating that the company is going to decommission the custom CRM we just spent 18 months building and replace it with Seibel.
Five minutes later, here comes a reply from a troublemaker:
“So why did we build the custom CRM in the first place? Just asking . . .”
Goofus replies: “Siebel was not on the company roadmap at that time.”
Note that he completely sidesteps the actual question of why we answered a Build-or-Buy question by deciding to build a system, only to immediately thereafter buy a new system to replace it.
Goofus didn’t get to be a superstar in this organization by being unable to serve up bland, poker-faced responses to provocative questions.
The seven wastes of software development are:
- Partially Done Work (the “inventory” of a development process)
- Extra Processes (easy to find in documentation-centric development)
- Extra Features (develop only what customers want right now)
- Task Switching (everyone should do one thing at a time)
- Waiting (for instructions, for information)
- Handoffs (tons of tacit knowledge gets lost)
- Defects (at least defects that are not quickly caught by a test)
I heard the UCLA scout team uses God to simulate Pete Carroll in game preparations.
It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement . . . and they underestimate what is of true value in life.
Two men die in a plane crash. One man’s death is widely lamented; the other man is barely mentioned.
Why? Because the first man was good at throwing a ball.
It just goes to show how insignificant some of the things that we think are significant really are.
Really? Well, now that this has been brought home to you, are you going to quit your job as a ballplayer or a person who writes about ballplayers and do something “significant” with your life?
I didn’t think so.
“This is racist,” my son says.
I look over to see what he’s talking about. He’s sitting on the sofa doing math homework.
“What’s racist?” I ask. “The math book?”
“Yeah. They have answers in the back for problem 9 and problem 13, but not problem 11. Because I’m a Mexican.”
“You’re a Mexican?!”
“I’m a mixed kid,” he corrects me. His mom is Asian.
“You think the white kids’ book has the answer to number 11?”
“Yup. The Asian kids’ book has got all the answers.”
“Dude, check this out. Jackson collected s seashells. Petra and Tyrone collected 13 less than twice s. Now here’s the stupid part: I have to figure out how many seashells each person collected! COME ON! And the racist book doesn’t have the answers!”
I say, “Jackson’s pretty lame if a girl collected more than he did.”
“He’s pathetic!”
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Leaders who don’t care about people don’t have anyone to lead, unless their followers don’t have a choice.
From the Mighty Rubber Ducky Derby at Wild Rivers in Irvine:
Originally uploaded by Spike in Irvine.
My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understand
Via Alicublog:
He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of tosh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
Originally uploaded by amethystrainn.
A friend is leaving tomorrow for a wedding in Hawaii. She asks me if I have any souvenir requests.
Yes! If you can get a picture of the entire bridal party mooning the camera with ALOHA written across their asses in tropical colors — you don’t have to write the O, just AL HA and bend over — that would be great!
If not, I don’t want anything . . .
I can tell what dogs are thinking by reading their facial expressions.
This dog, for example, belongs to a friend’s sister. As you can see, they bought a pumpkin costume and put it on the dog.
She is thinking, “If I was bigger, I would kill these people.”
Originally uploaded by Doxieone.
