My son’s supposed to be finishing up his first 8th grade assignment — a math collage for his Algebra class — but instead he’s bouncing a basketball around the house.
“Finsh the assignment!” my wife says. “No more procrastinating!”
“I’m not PRO-CRAS-TI-NA-TING!” the boy yells, punctuating each syllable by slamming the ball on the floor.
“You are procrastinating,” I say.
“Stay out of it,” my wife says.
“You see how long it took him just to say ‘procrastinating’? That’s procrastinating.”
Women control [all] the wealth.
Don’t worry about it, Tom . . . because we control the women.
Evidently, this is not as well known as I expected, based on a Google search for “Tom Peters sucks,” which returns basically nothing. Shocking.
I followed a link to Peters’ site today. He’s got the undirected mania of a 5-year-old being chased by a mad dog, or a crack addict with a new girlfriend. Vague, mindless exhortations — Wow! Gaspworthy! — in service of nothing. Can you really improve people’s lives by shouting random slogans and buzzwords at them?
I saw the following attributed to Ralph Johnson. I’m not sure if that’s the Gang of Four Ralph Johnson, but it probably is:
The problem is that almost all software schedules and budgets are bogus. They are created for political effect and have little relationship to reality. Thus, whether they are met has nothing to do with the people working on the project.
Who makes your schedules? Project managers? They are almost certainly the wrong people. You can’t predict how long something will take unless you are an expert at doing it. The programmers? Are they allowed to say “we don’t have enough information to make a prediction”? Are they ever told “that is too long, you’ll have to do it in six months”? The only way to get honest schedules is from people who have experience in doing the work who know that they need to get the schedule right and not under or over-estimate.
I asked an IT VP the other day why he thought every project in the company is late, and he said, “Bad estimating.”
No . . . there’s a difference between bad estimating and dishonest estimating. If we were dealing with bad estimating, I’d expect to see estimates all over the place, including some way too high and some way too low.
“Man, that’s some bad estimating!” I’d say.
But when every estimate is too low, that’s not bad estimating, that’s dishonesty. It may be forced dishonesty, but it’s dishonesty nonetheless.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
From a corporate diversity report:
The issue of having less diversity in the management ranks than in the aggregate among the workforce is faced by virtually every company in America and is one for which we do not have a ready answer.
You don’t have a ready answer? I’ll give you one: From a management perspective, diversity, like outsourcing, is best implemented on some other sucker’s job.
One morning at the Grand Canyon, my son and I were walking to the Canyon Cafe for breakfast when we saw a big elk near Yavapai Lodge.
“How big was it?” my wife asked later, when the boy was telling her the story.
“Big enough to CHOMP MY HEAD OFF!” he said. “If he wasn’t an herbivore.”
We stayed on Route 66 as much as we could on a recent family drive to Arizona. The Mother Road has long since been bypassed by the interstate highway system, but long stretches of it are still driveable, including hundreds of miles in California and Arizona.
We just got back from a family drive to the Grand Canyon . . .
Have you ever tried to introduce family members to things that have made a deep impression on you personally? It’s often disheartening, isn’t it?
For example, here’s what my son got out of the sea of sage and grasslands that make up the Kaibab Plateau:
“I’d put an amusement park over here,” he said, pointing to the right. “And over here,” — pointing to the left now — “a shopping center and a sports arena.”
“Look at the mountains,” I said to my wife, indicating with a sweep of my hand the silent, austere beauty of the East Mojave, where desert mountains rise dramatically from the sloping terrain.
“I’ve been looking at them for five hours,” she said.
“You know,” I said, “you guys just don’t appreciate the grandeur –”
“HEY, LOOK!” my son yells. “IT’S A BUSH!”
“– of the American Southwest.”
I joined my son’s fantasy football league because he asked me to, although the low esteem in which I hold fantasy football leagues is only reinforced by the fact that the league is populated by all of the nerdiest kids he knows. The draft is today.
“Have you given any thought to who you’re taking with the fourth pick?” my son asks me.
“Not really,” I say.
“Are you telling me you haven’t done any preparation at all?” he asks in disbelief. He’s been doing mock drafts for a week.
“Yeah, that’s about right.”
“Failing to prepare is preparing to fail!” he informs me.
It’s going to be a long season . . .
My son’s sitting in the family room playing the new Madden NFL 07. His computer-controlled kicker misses two extra points, after which the other team’s computer-controlled kicker makes a 50-yard field goal.
“Oh my gosh!” he yells. “Can you say ‘racist’?”
He’s a mixed-race kid — his mom is Asian — and he treats every slight as a racial issue. I think he’s kidding most of the time.
One feature of Madden 07 is that when there’s a break in the action, it pops up player profiles — photos and career blurbs — of old school players that, for the most part, the boy has never heard of.
“Fred Biletnikoff!? Looks like a stuck-up white boy to me! OHHHH! WOOOOOO!”
My son’s got a fantasy football league with some of his friends and he asked me to join, so I’ve got to think of a team name. I thought about using Two-Minute Drill With Your Mom, except you can see how it might lead to a physical confrontation with one of the other kids’ dads . . .
As for Hitler, he comes in for a lot of criticism — much of it justified, in my opinion — but at least he did something with his life. He didn’t just sit around laughing at pictures of cats, like a simpleton.
Irvine police are investigating a possible hate crime that occurred early Saturday morning in the gated Turtle Ridge community.
Officers arrived around 6:10 a.m. and discovered a car parked on Rose Trellis had been painted with race-related graffiti.
The car belongs to an African-American family that lives there.
Now that’s a shocking piece of news. You mean to say there are black people living in Irvine?!
My wife just read me a news item about a worker who was trapped in a vat of chocolate for two hours.
“Really?!” I said. “Dark, milk or semisweet? Look, you think that’s bad, this guy should try working with some of the morons that I have to work with in the IT industry on a daily basis. In two weeks, he’ll welcome the opportunity to drown in a vat of chocolate. No sympathy here, candy man.
“Now . . . what else is happening in the world? . . .”
Maybe you’ve noticed that most software sucks.
Maybe you’ve wondered — if you work in the software business — why our aspirations are so low compared with the possibilities of our profession.
Maybe you’ve wondered what, if anything, could be done about this.
Here’s a fun story about the benefits of really holding people accountable for the shoddy quality of their work.
In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain wrote about King Xerxes, who in the 5th Century BC ordered a bridge of boats to be built across the Hellespont:
A moderate gale destroyed the flimsy structure, and the King, thinking that to publicly rebuke the contractors might have a good effect on the next set, called them out before the army and had them beheaded. In the next ten minutes he let a new contract for the bridge. It has been observed by ancient writers that the second bridge was a very good bridge.
Res ipsa loquitor.
Grandma died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure.
Just kidding; it was yesterday, but I never get tired of that joke.
Grandma was 94 years old. She was quick-witted almost to the end.
She died at St. Jude Medical Center, the same hospital where I was born. She was 47 when I was born, the same age I am now. It’s the circle of life.
Grandma was a Presbyterian. Everyone else in the family, except me, is Catholic. The Catholic chaplain at St. Jude anointed Grandma before she died. I’m not sure what that means, but I know that my mom asked the priests at her parish to do it and they wouldn’t because Grandma was not a Catholic.
“He said he was deeply sorry,” Andrew savagely caricatured the inflection, “but it was simply a rule of the Church.”
“Some church,” he snarled. “And they call themselves Christians. Bury a man who’s a hundred times the man he’ll ever be, in his stinking, swishing black petticoats, and a hundred times as good a man too, and ‘No, there are certain requests and recommendations I cannot make Almighty God for the repose of this soul, for he never stuck his head under a holy-water tap.’ Genuflecting, and ducking and bowing and scraping, and basting themselves with signs of the Cross, and all that disgusting hocus-pocus, and you come to one simple, single act of Christian charity and what happens? The rules of the Church forbid it. He’s not a member of our little club.
“I tell you, Rufus, it’s enough to make a man puke up his soul.”
One of Grandma’s brothers, who died at the age of 21 many, many years ago, is reputed in family circles to have had the highest IQ ever tested. Some family members believe he was the world’s smartest man, with the possible exception of Einstein.
How did he die? He stepped in front of a moving car.
True story.
There’s more to life than a high IQ, you see. I, for example, am a person of average intelligence, but I always look both ways before stepping into the street.
As we were walking out of the hospital last night, my wife, who’s Asian, said, “I’m not much about dying.”
“I’m not sure what that means,” I said.
“Chinese doesn’t like it,” she said.
She insisted on stopping at a restroom on the way out to wash her hands, not because of germs, but to get the spirits off. She made me do the same.
“You can’t bring that into the house,” she explained.
When we got home, she made me take all my clothes off and run them through the washer.
Beware metrics. We are enamored with them from the days of waterfall, when we couldn’t tell what was going on until the end of the project. So, we devised metrics to attempt to read the tea leaves of what might be going on so we could get early warnings. Earned value is a great example of this. Also, we developed metrics to prove that things were improving to our customers even though over 1/2 of our projects failed. See, we are getting better, so leave us alone and please don’t fire us.
