myShoggoth

Hilarious Irish humor

This is one of the funniest things I've seen in a long time, and actually made me spittake for real.  I had to clear off my monitor.

Dara O'Briain is hilarious as always, but Neil Delamere's bit about the hotel front desk nearly killed me.

Completely original new joke #1

"I see," said the blind man, who was a filthy stinking liar.

New stuff happening in tech

OpenBSD 4.2 is nearing release, this is my favorite firewall OS (I've been running it for more years than I can think back, maybe since 2000).  I'm considering trying to run X again as a desktop machine to see how far things have come since the last time I attempted it... and gave up in disgust.

LOLCode.net.  Words cannot describe the sheer awesomeosity.

Evidence Based Scheduling from Joel.  It will be hard for me to break down all the assorted reasons why I love this post/idea/tech, but no time like the present to start...

1. He builds the theory based on a number of practices that have already proven themselves to me in the past, such as breaking it down to very low granularity chunks (16 hours or less is a reasonable amount to me) and making cuts early based on cost/benefit.
2. Future predictions based on past performance?  Gee, that sounds awfully reasonable.
3. Including all the random interruptions/organizational overhead in the task length.  This is pure genius, by rolling all the non-task time into the tasks themselves you end up fully costing day to day activities into the end deliverables.  A number of times during his post I had moments of clarity, the kind where someone proposes something that simplifies things so perfectly that you begin kicking yourself for not thinking of it ages ago.
4. In the same way, adding bug fix time for a task into the task cost itself.  This means you're scheduling the time it takes to actually get the product ready for customers/users, not to some artificial milestone that only exists to try to get people 'motivated'.  Developer's goals are now to deliver shipping quality code as fast as they can, not to get something kind of working in time for the bug fixing period of the schedule.  You're not measuring the time to code, you're measuring time to code, debug, fix, integrate, and stabilize.
5. The focus is on getting the product done, at shipping quality with the highest value functionality.  This means that the product team's goals are aligning perfectly with the business goals, which is often not the case with current scheduling techniques.

While we're talking about Joel, I'll also point you to his excellent article in Inc. Magazine about how to fail at making software.  The two I want to draw particular attention to are #3 (negotiate the deadline) and #5 (Work till midnight).

These often go hand in hand, because when #3 inevitably fails management often asks for or rewards #5.  Whether the deadline is artificial because of "business needs" or as an attempt to get more productivity from the developers than they'd naturally do without feeling deadline pressure, it just doesn't work.  People meet deadlines with horrible quality, just miss it completely, or game the system to take advantage of the panic without solving the underlying problems.

Sadly, the mistakes are often repeated like clockwork within the same organizations.

Talent vs. Skill

I've seen something in my generation, and definitely in myself, where we value raw talent over actual skill and experience.  I suspect it is related to the kind of stories we grew up with in movies and TV:

Established, skilled protagonist is an evil cocky bastard.  Young laid back hero with little or no experience but tons of pure raw talent defeats them with little or no training, or if there is a lot of training it is done as a quick montage which doesn't really give you the sense of real hard work.  Everyone loves the hero, especially now that they understand how valuable he is due to his talent.  He continues to just magically be the best because he's awesome the end.

I think a bunch of us took this to heart, I know I did.  After some point in school it was a point of pride that I did as little homework as possible and didn't study for tests.  Anyone can study and do well (I thought), but how many people can totally slack and still do well?

There was to be a purity to raw talent, which was tainted by actual effort.

This was made more dangerous for me because I have a generalized 'talent' where I can get pretty good at most things with little effort (and pretty damn good at some stuff), and that just reinforced this ethic... it feels wrong to call it that.

I did it with music, sports, and school.  The first time it really didn't work was when I tried to take a 200 level computer science course at the local university during high school.  Not only, incredibly, did procrastination and slacking not work, it didn't work like a brick to the face.

My first semester in college had a perfect storm of badness:

1. I really hadn't learned my lesson from the above incident and still wanted to get by on raw talent and minimal effort.
2. Although I had passed with decent grades both Calc I and Calc II and could have received college credit for them during high school, I decided not to because I wanted to make sure I got an A in both so I could max out my GPA.  God I was so dumb.
3. Netrek.  'nuff said.  I was playing in the game where the term "Ogg" was coined.
4. I got pneumonia about halfway through the semester.
5. I got a part time job at the business college and by god programming professionally was a ton more interesting and fun than schoolwork, and at the time my pay of $10/hr. was huge.

It gets worse.  I got better a week or two before finals, and instead of doing the sane thing, which meant filing to drop all my classes due to extenuating circumstances, I pressed on and took the finals anyway, assuming my raw talent and brains would get me through.  Against everyone's recommendations.  For the professors it must have been like seeing a car wreck about to happen, getting the attention of the driver in plenty of time, but being unable to convince them to turn.

I drew a little mushroom cloud on the front page of one of the finals before handing it in, if that helps illustrate (haha) how well that plan worked.

Since then these lessons have finally managed to sink in, and now if anything I value experience and provable skill more than I should.  As you dig into any story where it appears someone with incredible talent blew away everyone else, you find out that they also outworked their competition.

The prototypical example is Tiger Woods.  Does he have the greatest raw talent of any golfer on the planet?  That's irrelevant, the no doubt large amounts of talent he has plus the incredible amount of work he's put into his craft leads to his results, which are the only thing we can truly measure.  He wouldn't be a better person or a better golfer if he worked less but still had great results.  If someone else claimed greater talent, first how do you measure it, and second what good is it without the effort and experience to translate that talent into skill?

My Pandora Station

Since I've been working in an office environment again I checked out Pandora for entertainment, a few friends of mine have been talking about it for some time with mostly positive reviews.

At first I created a few stations, each with a single artist/band as the seed (Fatboy Slim, Brandi Carlile, Buddy Guy, etc.).  It impressed me with the music it played based on that, and the thumbs up/thumbs down way of giving it further hints is very nice.  The main complaint friends have is the limit on the number of times per hour (or whatever the time period is) that you can skip or thumbs down songs, but that hasn't caused me too many problems.

One great solution: Make a station called 'Crap' or 'Trash' or whatever you'd like to call it, and move songs into it once you've reached your limit on thumbs down.  The downside is it doesn't give the service the feedback, the upside is you don't have to listen to it and won't get fed up with the site.

I've been trying to build up a single station that captures my... eclectic music tastes.  I'll probably add more specialized stations for specific moods (if Pandora goes on a female jazz vocalist binge while I'm in the mood for techno, which happened yesterday), but first I'd like to see if I can get one station that has widely different styles of music in it.

My profile on the site is: http://www.pandora.com/people/andrew5500

My eclectic station: http://www.pandora.com/stations/574435a78a3300efe8dd6b24d9130cac425ba2910f7abf8b

Damn Interesting

The site Damn Interesting sometimes really lives up to its name, and did so with an article on Flywheel Batteries.

I can't help but think about combining that with the research of Dr. Robert Bussard, who sadly passed away recently.  It is said that he had assembled a strong team that will be able to continue his research.  He also got more Navy funding to continue working on the fusion reactor that had such promising results.  I'm disappointed that Google didn't step up and drive it as a private sector project.  They're definitely losing their risk taking mojo.

Add to that cool stuff like Tesla Motors and the drool-worthy vehicles they're coming out with... man, exciting times to live in.  Sadly I don't have $100k+ to drop on a spiffy car at this time, but if I were wading in money it would be near the top of my list.

Pick the correct monkey

A friend of mine is trying to talk a client into using SurveyMonkey, which is a great site and exactly what they need.  She thinks they're having issues with the "Monkey" part, and taking it seriously.  I suggested the following approach:

Time to start explaining how cool monkeys are.

Okay, you guys need a monkey, I don't think I have to explain that.  So let's pick which monkey.

You're talking about surveys here, and I just happen to know a monkey that owns surveys, he's the survey monkey if you will.

Another friend who overheard this said I was channeling Tycho, and I'm going to take that as high praise.  For now.  I have my eye on you.

Stephen Fry on Fame

I know a small handful of people who are famous or semi-famous, low-level background radiation levels for the most part.  Even at that stage it starts affecting your life in different ways, and I've put some thought into the whole thing from time to time.

Stephen Fry's write-up on fame is extremely interesting, and it is heartening to get corroboration on what I had been thinking and heard from others from someone who is certainly more visible.

I've worked on famous products and at famous companies, but have not had personal fame. Even that is enough to get some experience with both sides of the equation:

"OMG you work on MSN Messenger?!  You know what I always wanted..."

That's always fun though, it is very nice to meet people who appreciate and use the products you work hard to create and improve.  On the other side was an experience (I can't believe I haven't mentioned it on the blog yet, maybe it is just way in the past) not too long after I had started at Microsoft.

We were vacationing in Hawaii, and I was wearing a Microsoft tshirt.  Walked into an ice cream store where some guy just went off on me about how he had testified against the company in the anti-trust hearings.  I more or less let it pass with minimal response and went on with our lives, yet when we left he was hanging around outside to give us the hairy eyeball.

It was just strange, but being associated with or working for a famous company means you're going to often get lumped into those associations, for better or worse.