My son’s hockey team won the TORHS West Coast Conference championship. They got jerseys and a trophy.
I took some team and individual photos.
The Great Chair Race
We’re having a fundraising event at the office today. Executives will race around the parking lot in office chairs. Wagering is permitted, with proceeds going to the United Way.
Here’s how I handicap it: The CFO is pretty fit and looks like a winner. On the other hand, the Sales VP is a Snidely Whiplash type who’s probably loosening the wheels on the other guys’ chairs as we speak, which makes him a dangerous guy to bet against.
No one else in the race looks remotely capable of winning any sort of athletic contest. It would be fun to run a side pool on which fat-ass will be the first to go down with a torn ACL or other crippling injury . . .
High-Tech Turnaround
High-Tech Industry Employment Slowly Turns the Corner, Says New Report
I clicked that link, only to learn that while high-tech employment continued to decline in 2004, it did so at a lower rate than the two previous years.
Hence, the job market has turned the corner, if by “turned the corner” you mean “continued to disintegrate, but at a slower pace.”
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Pre-Automation
My son is doing a “generation gap” essay for school, in which he contrasts my life as an 11-year-old with his.
Be the Worst
Pat Metheny was asked in a recent interview what advice he would give to younger musicians:
I have one kind of stock response that I use, which I feel is really good. And it’s ‘always be the worst guy in every band you’re in.’ If you’re the best guy there, you need to be in a different band. And I think that works for almost everything that’s out there as well.
Prolific Authors
George Murray, a poet and co-editor of the literary blog Bookninja.com, sees the near-annual release of a new Stephen King novel as ‘the literary equivalent of watching a skinny Japanese dude scarf down 100 hot dogs in an eating contest; you are kind of grossed out, but gotta hand it to him.’ Murray harbors a unique theory about what distinguishes a genre writer like King from a so-called serious artist like Joyce Carol Oates. ‘It seems with Oates the hotdog eater is a performance artist commenting on the nature of consumption and American hegemony,’ Murray avers. ‘With King it’s just a guy eating 100 hot dogs, then looking like he’s going to die of nitrate poisoning.’
Setting Expectations
A family member had surgery recently and had to sign a consent form:
I have been advised that all surgery involves general risks, including but not limited to bleeding, infection, nerve or tissue damage and rarely, cardiac arrest, death or other serious bodily injury. I acknowledge that no guarantees or assurances have been made as to the results that may be obtained.
And so on . . . Don’t say you weren’t warned!
Medical professionals are very good at setting realistic expectations with the customer, whereas in IT we take customers into projects with glib assurances and wishful thinking.
I wonder if we could make a practice of saying to customers even something as simple as this:
“This project — like all projects — has a number of possible outcomes, and not all of them are good. Let’s go over some of the more likely scenarios . . .”
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Gatsby 2005
Fitzgerald had to kill off his own famous striver because, to the author, Gatsby represented a dying American dream based on making it the hard way. But no such grim fate awaits today’s little Gatsbys. When they peer out at the universe, they don’t see a green dock light blinking from an unbridgeable distance where the Establishment folk live. This is the age of the red camera light, where everyone arrives sooner or later, if only for a moment, and nobody ever dies of ambition or shame.
HW’s True Hollywood Stories
Florence Lawrence: The First Movie Star
Interesting fact: Prior to 1910, movies did not list the names of the cast members! Actors were just nameless faces on the screen . . .
You’re Welcome
My son and I are enjoying a weekend nap . . .
“Thanks, Dad,” he says.
“What are you thanking me for?”
“Nothing really . . . just everything . . .”
The Individual Lemming
John Maynard Keynes said in his masterful The General Theory: ‘Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.’ (Or, to put it in less elegant terms, lemmings as a class may be derided but never does an individual lemming get criticized.)
Dying at the Right Time
[James] Dean died before he could fail, before he lost his hair or his boyish figure, before he grew up.
One must discontinue being feasted upon when one tasteth best; that is known by those who want to be long loved.
Many die too late, and some die too early. Yet strange soundeth the precept: ‘Die at the right time!’
God’s Gift to Kansas
The creationists’ fondness for ‘gaps’ in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God. You don’t know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don’t understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don’t go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don’t work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Don’t squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is God’s gift to Kansas.
10 Best Questions to Ask at the End of a Talk When You Absolutely Have To
From Bertrand Meyer:
You know the feeling: You’ve accepted to chair a session at a technical conference, you’ve managed to keep the speakers on time, and a talk has just finished. “Any questions?” asks the speaker, met only by stunned silence. It’s your job as Chair to fill in, and you have no idea what to ask. Here, as a service to the community, is the list of the Ten Best Questions To Ask At The End Of A Talk When You Absolutely Have To:
10. When do you come up for tenure?
9. This doesn’t look like PowerPoint. What presentation software are you using?
8. Very interesting theorem you just proved on the last slide. It’s lemma 2 in chapter 1 of my 1977 thesis.
7. I like your accent. Where did you learn English?
6. Who does your hair?
5. On slide 2, what did Lambda stand for?
4. Did you do your PhD in physics at Brigham Young University?
3. Have you thought of using a scientific approach instead?
2. Does your university offer courses on how to speak in public?
1. What else do you do?
Hey, Fat Ass!
I’m 46 years old. I’m no longer young. I hate it when people ask how old I am, but it’s only going to get worse.
So far, I feel like I’m aging more gracefully than a lot of people — without the use of hair coloring, ponytails, earrings, sports cars, and cosmetic surgery.
I’m still married to my first wife.
To the dads of several of my son’s friends, I pose this question: If you are in fact a bald, middle-aged fat-ass, how long can you pretend to still be young and hip?
Transcendental Meditation
Slate summarizes an article from the American Journal of Cardiology (emphasis added):
Transcendental meditation may prevent death from hypertension. In a study, hypertensive elderly people who used TM were 23 percent to 30 percent less likely to die than those who relied on other relaxation methods or drugs.
What is the difference between transcendental meditation and regular meditation? It must be pretty good if it makes people “less likely to die.”
I Know Lots of Different Languages
My son is looking over my résumé, including the part where it says I’ve worked with lots of different languages.
“You don’t know a lot of languages,” he says.
We’ll Kill Them Too
I remember being told less than two years ago that if you kill Osama bin Laden, thousands more bin Ladens will rise in his place. I didn’t think so myself; he looks like a one-of-a-kind guy to me, as does Saddam Hussein. But if people rise up to take his place they’ll be killed as well. There are more of us than there are of them, and we are smarter, cleverer and more tolerant; and we, too, believe that our culture and civilization mustn’t be offended, defamed, raped and defiled.
My Dog Sends a Bark Out to His Mom
Hi Mom!
Happy Mothers Day!
I know you were sad when I left, but I live with a loving family now, so you don’t have to worry about me.
Say hi to Dad.
Love, Lightning
P.S. Here is a picture of me with my owner.
— Lightning 
The Waterfall Approach Persists as an Urban Myth
Much of present-day software acquisition procedure rests upon the assumption that one can specify a satisfactory system in advance, get bids for its construction, have it built, and install it. I think this assumption is fundamentally wrong, and that many software acquisition problems spring from that fallacy.
We were doing incremental development as early as 1957, in Los Angeles, under the direction of Bernie Dimsdale [at IBM’s Service Bureau Corporation]. He was a colleague of John von Neumann, so perhaps he learned it there, or assumed it as totally natural . . .
All of us, as far as I can remember, thought waterfalling of a huge project was rather stupid, or at least ignorant of the realities. I think what the waterfall description did for us was make us realize that we were doing something else, something unnamed except for “software development.”
In his book, Agile and Iterative Development, [Craig] Larman has well documented the history of the many disasters introduced by accident when the Department of Defense standardized on a non-iterative method that was unproven on large projects. It was essentially a blunder by a consultant who had little experience with real software development.
The DOD has long since abandoned the waterfall method, and the consultant has recanted, but the waterfall approach persists as an urban myth in many software development organizations.