I’d forgotten how funny this guy was.
Here’s a link to Lynde’s best Hollywood Squares one-liners.
Samples:
PETER MARSHALL: Burt Reynolds is quoted as saying, “Dinah (Shore)’s in top form. I’ve never known anyone to be so completely able to throw herself into a . . . ” A what?
PAUL LYNDE: A headboard.
PETER MARSHALL: Prometheus was tied to the top of a mountain by the gods because he had given something to man. What did he give us?
PAUL LYNDE: I don’t know what you got, but I got a sports shirt.
Thomas Junta, a 275-pound “hockey dad,” was convicted of manslaughter for beating to death another parent, 156-pound Michael Costin, at a youth scrimmage.
The point that Junta was trying to get across to Costin was that Costin’s sons were playing too rough and spoiling a nice, fun game of hockey.
Way to go, Dad!
Former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale is disbanding his venture firm, the Barksdale Group, after two years of operation.
Many of the firm’s investments received favorable publicity mentions, none actually made any money, and some are defunct.
This guy is the kiss of death . . .
Julia Phillips — producer (The Sting, Taxi Driver, Close Encounters of the Third Kind), author ( You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again), cocaine addict — dies of cancer in West Hollywood, Ca. She was 57.
Her book, a memoir of life in Tinseltown, made her an icon and a pariah simultaneously.
“I wasn’t a pariah because I was a drug-addicted . . . rotten person [but] because I lit them with a harsh fluorescent light and rendered them as contemptible as they truly are.”
I was a student at Cal State Fullerton in 1976 when Ed Allaway went berserk, shooting nine of his co-workers in the university library, killing seven.
The big controversy at the office this week was a “radical” idea offered by one of our developers regarding data collection with a series of web-based forms.
The idea was that rather than just pouring the data into a relational database like everyone else does, we’d build up an XML tree, essentially a gigantic (in this case, ~200K) string, and pass that around from form to form.
The advantages of this, if I understood correctly, would be to simplify the data model design and eliminate the need for table joins.
Of course, it also violates every known rule of efficient data access and ratchets up the processing requirements by several orders of magnitude, but that didn’t stop one of the development managers from throwing his full-fledged support behind it.
I TA’ed undergraduate software engineering classes for a year at USC, and every so often an underclassman would advance some “radical” theory on how a programming problem ought to be solved, unaware of the fact that their proposed approach had actually been discredited 15 years earlier.
That’s okay . . . by the time they completed their degree, they usually had a much better understanding of the history and foundation of their discipline.
But the advent of web development has brought us a new generation of programmers, many of whom have not had the benefit of a formal education in computer science, which leads to sophomoric programming strategies being proposed by “professional” developers . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Him: I’m going to Shooters tonight, if you want to go. Have you ever been there on Wednesdays?
Her: I’ve been to Shooters.
Him: Have you ever been on a Wednesday?
Her: Actually, I try to avoid places like that.
Him: I’ve never been either. My buddy wanted to go.
Only one in five high school seniors has a solid grasp of science, according to the results of a national test released today.
Related link: Having It All!
Cato began to urge that the only sure defense against a resurgent Carthage was to destroy it. Rome would never be safe so long as Carthage stood. He made a campaign of it: Carthago delenda est! — Carthage must be destroyed! In the 150s this was Cato’s slogan, repeated endlessly. At parties he would bring it up — Carthago delenda est! In the Senate he might be speaking on any subject, but always found a way to work in his slogan: the harbor at Ostia should be expanded . . . and Carthage must be destroyed! the appointment of Gaius Gaius to provincial governor should be approved . . . and Carthage must be destroyed! A vote of thanks to a loyal tribal chieftain . . . and Carthage must be destroyed!
I tried to conduct myself in such a way that I wanted my players to act. I think our youngsters, whether they be basketball players or our children at home, need models more than they need critics.
From Time magazine:
BORN. To ANNIE LEIBOVITZ, 52, photographer: a daughter, Sarah Cameron Leibovitz. Neither Leibovitz nor her companion Susan Sontag offered word on the child’s paternity.
For some things, you still need a man.
I couldn’t help noticing that Harriet Quimby is a lot prettier than Harriet Tubman.
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
Our new Sales VP came down from his office on the 7th floor to the development area on the 4th floor. He was gripping and waggling a golf club, a driver.
As you might imagine, we don’t have a golf course on the 4th floor — so why is this jackass holding a golf club?
Does he want to be a golfer? Could we possibly find a salesman who wants to be a salesman?
Not coincidentally, our booking of new business since his arrival has been nonexistent.
He only seems to be able to keep one piece of information in his head at any given time — and usually that piece of information is his next tee time.
We got an email from him the other day stating that anyone who brings in a qualified sales lead that is subsequently closed and billed will be paid $1,000.
Honestly, if I had a qualified lead on a development project — unfortunately, I don’t — but if I did, I’d go work it myself before I turned it over to this guy and the collection of hayseeds and slobs he calls a sales team.
Thus spoke The Programmer.
Fortunately, however, the chief damage done will be to the author himself, who thus dishonors his own physical nature; for imperfect though the race is, it still remains so much purer than the stained and distorted reflection of its animalism in Leaves of Grass, that the book cannot attain to any very wide influence.
“I’d like to thank my family for loving me and taking care of me. And the rest of the world can kiss my ass.”
“I did not get my Spaghetti-O’s, I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this.”
“Hurry it up you Hoosier bastard! I could hang a dozen men while you’re screwing around.”
Resemblance to persons living or dead is statistically probable.
Name: Snopes, Flem
Title: Software Development Manager
| Developing Others |
|
Flem was not effective in giving team members an opportunity to be successful or to do high-quality work. The project development process was limiting and frustrating.
Rating: Did Not Meet Expectations |
| Integrity |
|
Good work ethic. Big problem here is that Flem didn’t seem to see how poor project outcomes were a direct result of anything he did or didn’t do. He seemed to feel that he was a victim primarily of bad technology, as well as bad clients, bad luck, bad karma, etc. And while there were some unavoidable setbacks on the project, as there are on any project, Flem didn’t seem to see the human decision points in the process where he could have made a difference.
Rating: Met Some Expectations |
| Change Management |
|
Flem was slow to react to changing circumstances. He took a “stay the course” approach and continued to pursue strategies long after they had proven ineffective. Rating: Did Not Meet Expectations |
| Communication |
|
Flem is an articulate communicator but does not seem to be effective in reporting bad news to clients and upper management. He has a “can do” communication style that unfortunately keeps people in a state of total denial about what’s actually happening. As a result, what could have been modest setbacks, had they been acknowledged as such and dealt with, escalated into full-blown breakdowns. Rating: Met Some Expectations |
| Customer Service/Responsiveness |
|
Flem was probably overly responsive to customer requests, with a resulting boomerang effect. He took client requirements at face value and did not provide the kind of risk management one would expect from a responsible professional. As a result, most of the client’s investment in web development was wasted on non-productive activities.
Rating: Met Some Expectations |
| Leadership |
|
Flem maintains a positive attitude when things aren’t going well. Unfortunately, his projects never seem to be going well. He failed to fulfill the main role of a project leader, which is to monitor plan vs. actual and to take action as needed to bring the two closer together. In some cases, a project manager fails to observe that a project is veering off course, but I don’t think that was the case here. I think Flem just failed to act on that observation.
Rating: Met Some Expectations |
| Performance Effectiveness |
|
Flem did not establish any sort of professional quality standards for the project, resulting in a considerable waste of time, money and human potential. He did not demonstrate the ability to effectively steer a software project.
Rating: Did Not Meet Expectations |
| Problem Solving/Judgment |
|
Flem advocated a fairly random approach to problem solving. When dealing with system errors, rather than attacking root causes, we took some random action hoping that would fix the error. Sometimes it did, although we didn’t know why. Sometimes it didn’t. Sometimes it introduced a new error. This is an area where a technical leader needs to take a stand and do the right thing.
Rating: Did Not Meet Expectations |
| Team Orientation |
|
I think Flem’s failure to establish professional quality standards had a disheartening effect on the team. People will work hard to achieve excellence, but not if they see that management places no value on it.
Rating: Did Not Meet Expectations |
| Technical Expertise |
|
Flem has some very good technical skills, but did not exhibit a good understanding of the full range of technical options, risks and tradeoffs involved in developing a web application.
Rating: Met Some Expectations |
Thus spoke The Programmer.
More highlights from the Census Bureau’s Fertility of American Women report released last week:
The labor force participation rates of mothers with infant children fell from a record-high 59 percent in 1998 to 55 percent in 2000, the first significant decline since the Census Bureau developed the indicator in 1976, according to the Fertility of American Women report released last week.
