I recently sold a house in Laguna for $3.5 million. It was on about 2,000 square feet of land, maybe a twentieth of an acre, and the house might cost about $500,000 if you wanted to replace it. So the land sold for something like $60 million an acre.
My Son Points Out Something . . .
. . . that I’d already noticed:
You know, nobody really cares what you have to say about anything.
You Asked For It
My wife wants a massage . . .
“Moderate pressure or deep?” I ask.
“Deep . . . AAAAHHH! Moderate!”
Sports Parents Are Ruining the World
To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are very naughty — much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority . . . This is called moral influence . . .
One of the moms from my son’s hockey team tells me that there’s too much “silliness” on the team, that the kids need to prepare for games with a little more seriousness.
Frequently Wrong But Never in Doubt
Absolute moral certitude through the ages
I read today where someone called the new pope, Benedict XVI, “a tremendous intellect” because he speaks 10 languages and has written 40 books.
I don’t know if that’s true, but let’s say it is. What are the 40 books about? His unquestioned acceptance of everything he’s ever been told?
Evidence?!
Explanations of daily changes in aggregate stock market indices are among the most ridiculous, speculative, and uncertain causal inferences made by journalists . . .
The Happy Wife
Today I saw a woman driving a car with a license plate frame that read:
A HAPPY WIFE
IS A HAPPY LIFE
How ominous is that? It’s a threat, really. Get ready to have “I’m not happy” brandished as a weapon against you for the rest of your life.
You see, the wife can’t figure out how to be happy, therefore the husband must devote all of his energy and attention to figuring out how to keep her happy, solve her problems, and somehow get her through the day.
And what if, as a result of this, he is not happy? Who cares!?
Be very careful, young man, is what I’m saying here . . .
99 Rules
Here’s a short excerpt from an article called “Ninety-Nine Rules for Managing ‘Better, Faster, Cheaper’ Projects” by Alexander Laufer and Edward J. Hoffman:
In a dynamic environment, project management is not about performing according to plan, with minimal changes. It is about meeting customer needs, while coping successfully with unavoidable changes. Therefore, the planning system should be capable of coping with changes.
Jesus Christ, if I could articulate even one rule that perfectly, I’d publish it and call it a day . . . but there are 98 more of these!
Here’s another one:
More paperwork does not ensure greater information reliability or accuracy — it only adds to the non-value-added cost. It only seems that adding more measurement and reporting means better control. The illusion of control may partially explain an obsession with control.
A must read!
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Meet the Writers
Please welcome . . . Anton Chekov!
Job Posting of the Week
6 Programmer Analysts with Java, J2EE, Weblogic, Websphere (before Java you should have programmed in C++ not VB or Visual Basic)
I don’t entirely share the author’s view that programmers can be ordered up like pizzas — Java, C++, hold the VB — and I would point out, sadly, that the hiring path for developers is now littered with jackasses who don’t know that VB and Visual Basic are the same thing . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Women Leaving IT Considered Discouraging?
Women represent nearly half the workers in the U.S. — 46.6 percent. However, they always have been underrepresented in I.T. Even more discouraging is the fact that the percentage of women working in I.T. jobs is not growing but dropping.
Why is that discouraging? Who exactly is discouraged by it?
Here’s a simple explanation: Maybe women don’t want to work in IT. Is there nothing more rewarding that a woman can do with her life than work in IT?
IT in the post-dot-com era is a stagnant industry. A lot of people in it would like to get out of it, but they need the money.
I don’t encourage my son to get into it, nor would I encourage my daughter to get into it, if I had one . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Dropoffs Through the Years
When I used to drop my son off for a half day of pre-school, he’d try every trick in the book — Dad, I need someone to push me on the swings! — to get me to stay just a few more minutes . . .
I Feel This Guy’s Pain
Misspellings are in the original document:
I am not the most organised person in the world. I have a poor short-term memory, so I write things down. But because I have a poor short-term memory, I loose the paper. I tried to become more organised — I brought Getting Things Done. Then I lost it. I feel I might be more organised if I stop loosing my organisational aids.
Sharks: Another Reason I Don’t Snorkel
This is such an inane activity — snorkeling, that is, not biting people in half — that if you find yourself engaged in it, it’s a pretty good indication that your life has already gone on way too long.
Bush vs. Kerry
A Way of Life
Of course it is only a game, but somehow the Trojans, bursting out of that stadium tunnel, have come to stand for a way of life. The sight of those USC teams rolling across the Coliseum grass, dominating their opponents — and without a single penny of government aid that the UCLA’s and Oklahomas and Nebraskas depend on, damn it. All of it happened, year after year, because the school annually turned out a phalanx of new achievers, men who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps and went on to become the cream of their crops and the captains of their industries, men who started companies and expanded businesses that created jobs and took people off the welfare rolls, men who took care to plow back their superabundance into the institution that launched them, so that the Trojan tradition of independence and excellence would go on and on. Yes, the sight of that wave of cardinal and gold articulates everything. Maybe you cannot comprehend that. But a Trojan can.
St. Patrick in Action
A little-known sketch of St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland . . .
Love Hurts — So Does Frostbite
WINNIPEG, Manitoba — A Los Angeles man who sneaked into Canada in February to see his Internet girlfriend will be deported — minus all his fingers and some of his toes, the Winnipeg Sun newspaper reported Tuesday.
Homework Follies
“How did you multiply this times 2.5 and get this?” I ask.
He looks at the problem for a while.
“I multiplied it a different way,” he says.
ME: Shouldn’t this answer be 41 instead of 71?
HIM: No, Alex.
ME: Why are you calling me Alex?
HIM: What is “no”?
He’s reading a word problem aloud:
“Maggie was traveling with her family on the Oregon Trail. The first day, they traveled 11 miles, the second day they traveled 9 miles, and the third day they traveled 14 miles.”
Pause.
“Now that was a good story!”
Disorganization
We’re trying to figure out a directory structure that lets us organize project documents in a way that’s less confusing than the current directory structure. We’ve got a lot of documents and nobody can find anything when they need it.
Thinking outside the box for a minute, maybe a better question would be: Do we really need to produce this many documents?
Thus spoke The Programmer.