“Healing power of sports” nonsense thoughtfully refuted:
If, in the long run, you need sports to help you through a time of tragedy and to take your mind off a grimmer reality, then you are emotionally in so much trouble in not understanding what is real and what is fantasy that the prospects for your long-term emotional health are probably not very good.
We have Mr. Walker for 4th grade this year . . .
I saw an article today: Do Kids Need MP3 Players for School?
It seems obvious to me that they don’t, and why even bring it up, although a pair of my kid’s back-to-school pants actually came with a built-in MP3 player holder.
His reaction: “Cool! . . . what’s an MP3 player?”
With school starting up in a couple of days, my wife is trying to get our boy in an academic frame of mind . She has him doing some exercises from a geometry workbook and of course he’s not interested.
“I can’t tell if these lines are exactly alike,” he says.
Holds the book up to his face.
“They look exactly alike . . .”
Call me biased, but turning the whole exercise into a philosophical problem, rather than just saying “I don’t want to do this,” is a pretty sophisticated plan of attack for a 9-year-old.
A NY Times business editor took an apparently intentional header off the 15th floor of the Times building.
Too bad he wasn’t the crossword editor, it would have made a better headline. You’d want to work the phrase “15 Down” into it . . .
A brief conversation between Victor, one of our project managers, and our Sales VP as Victor is walking out of the VP’s office:
VP: You’re the greatest!
VICTOR: I’m trying.
VP (louder now, as Victor is halfway down the hall): Thanks, Wayne!
A former colleague of mine died over the weekend — “former” only in the sense that he’s now deceased; he was in the office as recently as last Friday.
Sadly, I suppose, my first thought was: “At least he doesn’t have to come to work today.”
ME: I hope when you and Jeremy are over at Jessica’s house, that you include her in your activities, not just ignore her because she’s a girl and do your own stuff.
HIM: Dude, she’s a STU-pido!
Nothing like this ever happens when I go to the ballpark.
The story doesn’t give the woman’s height and weight — it may have been newsworthy in that 28-year-old women normally don’t keel over and die after a short run.
At least one paper elected — somewhat insensitively, I think — to run news of the woman’s death in a baseball roundup column, immediately followed by the mesmerizing news that the Blue Jays activated Carlos Delgado from the 15-day DL.
An employer is always somewhat reassured by the ignominiousness of his staff. At all costs the slave should be slightly, even much, to be despised. A mass of chronic blemishes, moral and physical, are a justification of the fate which is overwhelming him. The world gets along better that way, because then each man stands in it in the place he deserves.
A being who is useful to you should be low, flat, prone to weakness; that is what’s comforting; especially as Baryton paid us really very badly. In cases of acute avarice like this, employers are always a bit suspicious and uneasy. A failure, a debauchee, a black sheep, a devoted black sheep, all that made sense, justified things, fitted in, in fact. Baryton would have been on the whole rather pleased if I had been slightly wanted by the police. That always makes for real devotion.
I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself, ‘Dijkstra would not have liked this,’ well, that would be enough immortality for me.
Dijkstra, a pioneer in computer science and structured programming, has died of cancer at age 72.
He was widely known for his note “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” — published in the March 1968 Communications of the ACM — which fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars.
(For an opposing viewpoint, see “Real Programmers Don’t Use Pascal.”)
Reportedly, the ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will, by policy, no longer print an article taking so assertive a position against a coding practice.
Use of titles of the form “X Considered Y” remains a persistent in-joke.
Another in-joke: Dijkstra and his wife enjoyed exploring state and national parks in a Volkswagen camper van called the Touring Machine.
Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die . . .
According to Slate, if NRA president Charlton Heston does in fact develop full-blown Alzheimer’s disease, California state law would compel him to surrender his firearms.
I can hear her heartbeat for a thousand miles . . .
“That’s impossible!”
How do you love someone so much knowing that you’re going to lose them — that in fact you are losing them a little bit every day?
In high school, I was in the school orchestra. There were no auditions; it was just a class you could sign up for, independent of whether or not you had any musical ability.
And when a student with no musical ability signed up for the orchestra, what transpired was something like this:
Director: What instrument do you play?
Student: I don’t really play an instrument.
Director: You’re in the percussion section.
There were three or four of us in the percussion section who could actually read music and play it, so it was kind of depressing that it was mainly a backwater where musical illiterates were sent to bang on cowbells . . .
I recollected my days as a high-school percussionist today when one of our tech leads — tech leads — pulled up some javadocs and announced that a method we were using was “depreciated.”
Now if this cretin is not familiar with the term “deprecated” — which he certainly should be — but since he isn’t, you’d think he might at least be capable of reading or sounding out his own language.
But no such luck there either.
Ever since the dot-com boom wiped out the hiring standards for the software business, this is what’s become of a once-noble profession.
Clang! Crash! Boom!
Thus spoke The Programmer.
There are no bad soldiers, only bad officers.
To: Developers
From: Director, Software Development
Subject: OutingWe are planning a outing to D&B1 on Friday 21 at 2 pm. I need to know who will be able to attend as we have to make the required arrangements.
Please RSVP to me by tomorrow morning.
1Dave and Buster’s, a restaurant featuring multiple bars and a huge video arcade.
To: Developers
From: Director, Software Development
Subject: OutingIn future if you RSVP to a planned outing please have the decency to show up. Since [the CEO] paid for this out of his own funds it shows a total lack of respect for him and the company. I would not be expecting any type of recognition from the company for commitment and work effort in the future since it was thrown back in his face. I am embraced1 to be part of the development team, other teams wanted to know why does development get this outing and not them, and then for most people not to show up after you all RSVP that you will be coming. When [the COO] and I try stand up for the department and this is the reward it makes it hard to justify anything in the future.
For those that did show up thanks. It is appreciated and I know who the people are that made the effort.
1He must have meant “embarrassed.”
Somewhere there’s a software manager who would have recognized this incident as the red flag that it is — that developer morale is abysmal — and would have set about pondering ways in which it might be improved, rather than exacerbating the situation by sending out an email insulting everyone.
The final paragraph is really the capper. I can tell you that the manager who sent these emails would much rather drink and play video games than spend the afternoon working, and rest assured that like-minded individuals will be taken under his inebriated wing.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
The only person who remembers if you finish second is your wife and your dog — and that’s if you have a good wife and a good dog.
Believe it or not, there was once a time when great golfers actually won majors . . .
Testicle cancer rates for World Cup nations ranked
Like they say, here’s one that won’t show up in the box score . . .
ORANGE COUNTY, CA – A 26-year-old Sacramento man was stabbed to death late Tuesday in front of a Garden Grove apartment where he was visiting residents, police said.
Probably the only way to stop him whining about the Lakers-Kings series . . .
The Nets have new uniforms. See, it says ‘New Jersey’ right on the front.
On Nets guard Lucious Harris shooting 2-for-23: “They’d be better off having Lucious Malfoy [a wizard in the Harry Potter books]. He could point his wand at the ball and make it go in the basket.
