Replacing an on-site customer with some use cases is about as effective as replacing a hug from your Mom with a friendly note. — Ron Jeffries Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Quotations
A Venn Diagram of My Holiday Get-Togethers
A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats. — George Orwell I have relatives like this — people who are either so dishonest or so lacking in self-awareness that all they seem to gain from any experience whatsoever is an inflated sense of their own self-importance. I also have relatives who can’t remember that they’ve already told you the same story on 10 previous occasions, forcing you to grit your teeth and nod appreciatively for the 11th time. Then there are the relatives who fall into both of the above categories. These people are hell on earth. Read more →
Useless Junk
I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily . . . and threw them out the window in disgust. Read more →
Driving a Car at Night
E. L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard. — Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life Read more →
Having a Dream
How I thought it worked was, if you were great, like Martin Luther King Jr., you had a dream. Since I wasn’t great, I figured I had no dream and the best I could do was follow someone else’s. Now I believe it works like this: It’s having the dream that makes you great. It’s the dream that produces the greatness. — Barbara Waugh Read more →
We Have Been Distracted
We have been distracted by colleges and the PMI. We’ve been told if you want successful projects, then do those things recommended by the ANSI standard for project management. What is that standard? It is the PMI Body of Knowledge®, ANSI/PMI 99-001-2000. (Did you notice the designation of the registered trademark? Trying to refrain from cynical comments let me say might there be commercial interests involved?) We’ve been told to do more of what we’ve been doing. To get more people certified by PMI, to do a more comprehensive job of creating project schedules, and to always keep our CPM schedules up-to-date. It seems to me doing more of the same only benefits the status quo: the providers of software, training, and consulting. Yet we all know of projects where they are doing everything PMI recommends, and the project is still late, over budget, missing key functions, or all three.… Read more →
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
But in Old Rimrock, New Jersey, in 1995, when the Ivan Ilyches come trooping back to lunch at the clubhouse after their morning round of golf and start to crow, “It doesn’t get any better than this,” they may be a lot closer to the truth than Leo Tolstoy ever was. The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that — well, lucky you. He had learned the worst lesson life can teach — that it makes no sense. And when that happens the… Read more →
Let the Rubes in on the Gag
If there’s any justice, David Letterman will one day be recognized as the father of our era. Like other great men, Letterman knew that Americans were dumb as rocks but still had their pride, so if you were going to feed them the intellectual equivalent of hogslop, you had better flatter their intelligence at the same time. . . . Let the rubes in on the gag. Call the pet tricks “stupid,” make the showbiz flash-and-rattle even stupider than it needed to be, and cheerfully represent yourself as the hollowest of hollow men, and the suckers would applaud not only your twaddle, but the label on the twaddle that said it was twaddle. — alicublog Read more →
Popsicles and Crucifixions
My creative-writing students say they’re postmodern, too. One wrote the relativist sentiment that popsicles and crucifixions were equal; I said it depended on which you were offered. — Oronte Churm Read more →
This Will Be My New .sig File
Chris Rock on marriage: Fellas, when you wake up in the morning, you should look yourself in the mirror and say: Read more →
Halp Us Jon Carry
You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq. — John Kerry And I think this reveals, is a glimpse into what the Democrats actually mean when they say we support our troops. They support them as victims, as children, as people too stupid to know better. But they don’t support them in the mission they’re fighting, thousands of miles away. — Mark Steyn Read more →
A Forceful Dose of Reality
. . . there is nothing like a tested, integrated system for bringing a forceful dose of reality into any project. Documents can hide all sorts of flaws. Untested code can hide plenty of flaws. But when people actually sit in front of a system and work with it, then flaws become truly apparent: both in terms of bugs and in terms of misunderstood requirements. — Martin Fowler, “The New Methodology” Read more →
Leaders Who Don’t Care About People
Leaders who don’t care about people don’t have anyone to lead, unless their followers don’t have a choice. — Jerry Weinberg, Becoming a Technical Leader Read more →
In Praise of Invective
Via Alicublog: He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of tosh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash. — H. L. Mencken, on the speeches of Warren G. Harding Read more →
How Did Peopleware Become a Best-Seller?
I don’t know how Peopleware became a best-seller. . . . I hardly run into any managers who read about their industry, management theory, or psychology, period. I used to believe that they were overloaded with information regarding the specifics of their job, but frankly, managers still aren’t trained, or do not educate themselves, to do their jobs. — Brian Pioreck Read more →
Never Give In
Never give in. Never give in; never, never, never, never. In matters great or small, large or petty, give in only to convictions of honor and good sense. — Winston Churchill Read more →
There is No Road
Is it all a dream, yes, perhaps a dream. . . . Death, its closeness. . . . Was I in prison once? I cannot remember. At the end of what is necessary, I have come to a place where there is no road. — Iris Murdoch, Jackson’s Dilemma Read more →
A Rule of Thumb on Documentation
As a rule of thumb, I’d guess that 90 percent of what a team knows would be lost if they tried to write it down, and that 90 percent of what they wrote down would be lost when some other team tried to read it. But then, I’m an optimist. — Ron Jeffries Read more →
Sweet Land of Liberty
What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it. — Learned Hand Read more →
Better, Faster and Cheaper?
Somehow we’ve got it in our heads that every programmer in India is good, fast, and cheap, and every programmer in the United States is lousy, slow, and expensive. My theory is that for version 1.0 of a product, the maximum allowable distance between the engineers and marketers is thirty feet. — Guy Kawasaki Read more →