Reading an excerpt from the tray liner at KFC:
We plate your food while it’s still hot, and serve it at the peak of flavor perfection.
“Tell me something I don’t know,” my son says.
Ghosts of Christmas Past
I found an old Christmas card from my son this weekend, the kind of thing that’s looked upon wistfully by probably no one except the child’s parents.
Here it is anyway . . .
Dear Mom and Dad,
I wish you an awesome
Christmas and I would’ve
bought you an expensive
present but I couldn’t
afford one. I still
love you though.
Love,
Casey
Strike a Pose
In Iraq this week, Saddam Hussein was handed over to his countrymen to answer for his deeds, including genocide and crimes against humanity. The possibility now exists for Iraq to become the second functioning democracy — along with Israel — in the Middle East.
I think this is great news, but if you’re pessimistic and having trouble striking the correct cynical pose, here are some suggestions.
Pacifism
The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of western countries. . . . Pacifist literature abounds with equivocal remarks which, if they mean anything, appear to mean that statesmen of the type of Hitler are preferable to those of the type of Churchill, and that violence is perhaps excusable if it is violent enough.
Mixed Reviews
Christopher Hitchens takes a chainsaw to Fahrenheit 9/11. Here’s an excerpt, on the film’s closing quote from Orwell’s 1984:
A short word of advice: In general, it’s highly unwise to quote Orwell if you are already way out of your depth on the question of moral equivalence. It’s also incautious to remind people of Orwell if you are engaged in a sophomoric celluloid rewriting of recent history.
Predictable, Unfunny and Eminently Forgettable
A Slate article confirms my 20-year suspicion that Garfield the witless comic strip is just an adjunct to Garfield the marketing empire, rather than the other way around:
Meet the Press
Contacts between Iraqi intelligence agents and Osama bin Laden when he was in Sudan in the mid-1990’s were part of a broad effort by Baghdad to work with organizations opposing the Saudi ruling family, according to a newly disclosed document obtained by the Americans in Iraq. . . .
One Thing Bill Clinton and I Have in Common
. . . I was once the only kid at an Easter egg hunt who didn’t get a single egg, not because I couldn’t find them but because I couldn’t get to them fast enough.
Inspired Idiocy
It’s amazing how much havoc a person can wreak in the workplace by applying a certain kind of inspired idiocy to every situation: follow all procedures to the letter, do exactly what you’re told, and respond to all questions exactly as asked. One-word answers are ideal.
The latter technique is especially effective via email.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
One Never Knows
A former neighbor of ours, a man about my age with two young children, was recently diagnosed with lung cancer. His doctor says he has a year to live.
A friend of mine from grad school died recently of stomach cancer, age 38. He too was married with two young daughters.
One never knows when the blow may fall . . .
Clinton on Iraq
After 9/11, let’s be fair here, if you had been President, you’d think, Well, this fellow bin Laden just turned these three airplanes full of fuel into weapons of mass destruction, right? Arguably they were super-powerful chemical weapons. Think about it that way. So, you’re sitting there as President, you’re reeling in the aftermath of this, so, yeah, you want to go get bin Laden and do Afghanistan and all that. But you also have to say, Well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network and other terrorist networks cannot reach chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material. I’ve got to do that.
This Just In
I’m listening to a radio ad in which a man purporting to be a medical doctor is pitching an herbal rejuvenator:
Call now and I’ll send you my free report on aging and its effect on energy and sex drive!
Let me guess: they go down . . .
Two Short Arguments For Affirmative Action
It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it . . .
High-Visibility Management
A friend of mine asked me the other day, “Do you think an organization really values a good manager?”
He asked me that because he’s moving from a position as lead developer on a high-visibility system (lots of job security) to a position managing the developers of that system.
And I had to say that in general, I think the answer is no, which is why you see managers generating a lot of useless paperwork to make their work visible: project plans, Gantt charts, spreadsheets, flowcharts . . .
Does this help? I haven’t found that it does, but it does provide an illusion of control and an acceptable way of failing: the manager can point to all the paperwork and say, “Well, I followed the accepted process right down the line, so the fact that we failed can’t be my fault!”
An analogy
Our local basketball team is coached by a guy named Phil Jackson. He’s not nearly as animated as most coaches . . . he spends most of each game sitting quietly in his chair on the sidelines, even when things seem to be falling apart for the team.
When things aren’t going well, he gets a lot of criticism for this:
They lost the game and he didn’t do anything!
I think this is why most coaches spend the whole game jumping up and down, yelling, tearing their hair out . . . they want to be seen as having done something.
Even if the team loses, people say, “Boy, he really coached his ass off.”
A second analogy
I grew up in Southern California during the years that John Wooden was coaching the UCLA basketball team. Like Phil Jackson, Wooden was distinctly non-animated during games.
He sat on the sidelines holding a rolled-up program in his hand, rarely called time-outs . . . his teams won 10 national championships and he hardly even got out of his chair the whole time.
He believed that the real work was done behind the scenes — preparation, attention to detail. Bill Walton summed up Wooden’s coaching style like this:
Don’t confuse activity with achievement.
Summary
Managing a software project is not a process of managing dependencies . . . it’s more a process of managing uncertainty, complexity and change. That’s why the Gantt charts and flowcharts don’t help, but they do allow the manager to show that he did something.
A well-managed team should have a clear, common vision, a robust flow of ideas, a reputation for high-quality work . . . but it may not be obvious to an observer what role, if any, the manager had in developing these qualities, because a lot of what a good manager does is not visible . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
I Sit By The Window
A loyal subject of these second-rate years,
I proudly admit that my finest ideas
are second-rate, and may the future take them
as trophies of my struggle against suffocation.
I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out
which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.
Meet the Press
. . . I do think there was what amounted to a kind of conspiracy to get the U.S. into a war against Iraq, if we define the term as a secretive plot involving a group within the government but excluding many important officials, who bent events and information to their undeclared purpose. Although you’d have to say it was a barely undeclared purpose.
Is it really a secret conspiracy if it involves a congressional vote and 17 U.N. resolutions?
Obesity vs. Thought
I believe that. I run into a lot more fat people than thoughtful people . . .
People I Thought Were Dead
- James Arness – actor
- Doris Day – actress
- Yvonne DeCarlo – actress
- Lady Bird Johnson – U.S. first lady
- Art Linkletter – TV host
- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi – spiritual guru
- Fess Parker – actor
- Paul Winchell – voice of Tigger
Updates
- James Arness – died 6/3/2011, age 88
- Doris Day – died 5/13/2019, age 97
- Yvonne DeCarlo – died 1/10/2007, age 84
- Lady Bird Johnson – died 7/11/2007, age 94
- Art Linkletter – died 5/26/2010, age 97
- Maharishi Mahesh Yogi – died 2/5/2008, age 91
- Fess Parker – died 3/18/2010, age 85
- Paul Winchell – died 6/25/2005, age 82
Working Late
Sometimes when I’m working a little late, my boy calls me at the office . . .
Sex Tips for Girls
Things to Say Afterwards
“I really needed that!”