When a true genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him.
I’m reading a great, very funny book called A Confederacy of Dunces, written by John Kennedy Toole in 1963. Unfortunately, Toole could not find anyone willing to publish the book and subsequently killed himself in 1969 at the age of 31.
We lost our dog the other morning. My wife thought the boy was watching him and he thought she was watching him . . . it turns out no one was watching him, so he ran out the front door and disappeared.
That Wegman guy who dresses up the Weimaraners . . .
I saw him on a TV commercial this morning. Enough already! Let’s move on!
Dressing up a Weimaraner once is kind of funny, but if you’re going to spend your whole life doing it, somebody really needs to kick your ass.
The same goes for Anne Geddes . . .
Do you want innovation?
What are you willing to give up in terms of efficiency, predictability and control?
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Abandoned buildings give me a weird feeling. Where are the people? Where’d they go?
Here’s one of the weirdest ideas I’ve heard today . . .
Cinespia is screening the film Detour at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery:
Bring blankets, picnic dinner and cocktails for this special screening below and above the stars.
According to a survey commissioned by the Gospel Music Association, only 10 percent of born-again teens believe that copying CDs for friends and unauthorized music downloading are morally wrong . . .
On average, black students who graduate from high school are equipped with the skills the average white student mastered by the eighth grade, according to federal tests.
Blah blah blah . . .
I got an email today with the subject line
i’ve had eonugh of your bluslhit
This should be great!, I thought. I don’t know what I’ve done, but some illiterate has had enough of it and is now going to settle my hash!
Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be just another ad for online pharmaceuticals . . .
I’m brushing my teeth in the bathroom when the dog, as he often does, runs in, jumps up, pulls the bath towels off the rack and starts shaking them around. It doesn’t do any real damage, but of course someone has to re-rack the towels.
My son, who’s decided this morning that it will be funny to walk around shouting at everyone, walks in, surveys the damage and shouts at me, “Who let him do this? You?”
Your dad says: “Time to take a shower.”
You say: “Customer service will be with you in a few minutes. Please hold.” Start humming a song . . .
“Take a shower!”
“Please hold!”
The candidate [John Kerry] offered his guests peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, a daily staple for him on the road.
His passion for PB&Js, Kerry told his companions, dated back to Vietnam, where he not only ate them frequently but traded them for other commodities.
The National World War II Memorial opened today in Washington, D.C.
My dad served in World War II. He’d be so proud and excited if he hadn’t been dead for 25 years.
Let us recollect that peace or war will not always be left to our option; that however moderate or unambitious we may be, we cannot count upon the moderation, or hope to extinguish the ambition of others.
“Don’t fart when I’m talking!”
“Don’t start talking when I’m about to fart!”
Ill-specified systems are as common today as they were when we first began to talk about Requirements Engineering twenty or more years ago. Yet the task of creating complete and perfect specifications is not rocket science. We have adequate and comprehensible theories at our disposal for specification of finite state automata. We have proceeded over the past decades to develop and refine a discipline of applying these theories to real-world systems. In our methodological focus, we may have lost sight of some endemic problems that plague not the process but the people who do the process. Is it possible that an engineering approach to requirements is as badly suited to our real need as would be an engineering approach to raising teenagers? I’m beginning to think so . . .
There are zillions of books on how to raise kids, and I think my wife has read most of them, along with countless magazine articles . . .
In fact, she’s far more open to taking child-rearing advice from books and magazines than she is from me, despite the fact that none of the authors has ever met our kid, and can therefore offer no insight into our particular situation.
But how comforting must it be to think that there’s a “methodology” for raising kids or for building good software — that someone has already solved all the hard problems for us . . . that we don’t have to rely solely on our own judgment to make critical decisions when we have only a limited amount of time, a limited amount of information, and no certain knowledge of the consequences . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Also, whether I died now or forty years hence, this business of dying had to be got through, inevitably. Still, somehow this line of thought wasn’t as consoling as it should have been . . .
I’m letting my subscription to Real Simple magazine expire. I’ve been taking it for a year and my life didn’t get any simpler.
In fact, it got more complicated because I had one more magazine to read . . .
My son, with mock pathos, is explaining to his mom how he managed to mess up a word definition on his homework:
I’m a little boy, not a Merriam-Webster dictionary!
The ability to ignore costs is at the heart of the attraction of government for some and of the expansion of government over time. Anything that might conceivably be of some benefit to someone, sometime, is worth doing, if someone else is paying. In our own lives, we pass up all sorts of benefits when we decide that they are just not worth their cost. Maybe we would like to have a new car or add another room onto the house or take a vacation in the Caribbean but it may not be worth what it would cost. So we keep driving the old jalopy, get used to not having a den and take in a few ball games during the summer instead of going on a cruise. Life is full of trade-offs when it is your own money.
