The rest of the family got up early and went to the Rose Parade. I stayed home and watched it on TV with the dog. This is what the parade looks like to a 10-year-old. Read more →
EppsNet Archive: USC
UCLA Hires Karl Dorrell
My son is watching SportsCenter in the other room . . . He says, “UCLA hired a new coach: Carlos Burrell!” By which I think he means Karl Dorrell. That is a great, great hire. I say that as a USC grad who was sorry to see Bob Toledo go. They might never beat the Trojans again . . . Read more →
Another Difference Between USC and UCLA
NBC analyst Bill Walton attended UCLA. FOX Sports analysts Marques Johnson and Jack Haley also went to UCLA. Los Angeles Lakers owner Jerry Buss attended USC. Read more →
USC Alumni Notes
Trojans win 16th NCAA men’s tennis championship. Mark Prior strikes out 10 in major league debut with Cubs. Chandra Levy found. Read more →
Kidding Around
Parents who joke in a light-hearted fashion during tense or stressful situations may make their children feel more comfortable and accepted, less anxious, and more willing to communicate in a positive manner. This is according to a study done at Arizona State University. My kid’s reaction: “Go, Arizona State! If USC [where I went to school] is so great, why didn’t they figure that out?” Read more →
Radical Notions Debunked!
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… Read more →