kindproject

world book day chapter II

Posted by jonathan - 26/04/08 at 07:04:30 am

Here at google aka neverland ranch, they have a great authors series where guess what authors come to speak about their books. Not only that, they give books away and in return the author gets some youtube video exposure. In honor of world book day on Wednesday I finally made it to a session, Authors@Google NYC Presents: Kelly McMasters, “Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town”. I intended to see some others earlier, but last minute capachinos and google terminology investigations always managed to trump them.

I had briefly heard about some environmental issues in long island, obviously not as much as LoveCannal, but as most jersey peeps I tend to ignore anything on the other side of the east river. The author, Kelly was nice and friendly, I could associate with her cast in the shadows of the hamptons mentality as I grew up bordering an open sewer, barely in the boundaries of a super wealthy town.

For anyone who suffers from a chronic illness like myself, there are times when the grass looks greener in the reflection of the medicine cabinet, making another illness appear easier to deal with. This common feeling was confirmed in an article about morgellons I read a few months back, but Kelly’s book has helped me shake these thoughts. Previously I guarded a twinge of jealousy at the success of breast cancer awareness. The pink ribbons, the walk-a-thons, the stamp, all the attention in a zero sum game could only be distracting from the potential cures for my disease. Two days and a book later and I no longer harbor any jealousy of other peoples diseases.

That was a good book!

no netflix, no problem

Posted by jonathan - 25/03/08 at 07:03:47 am

Yesterday I popped over to netflix to peruse the fringes of their streaming service for any gems to distract me while emma was having the fits, only to find that their site was down. Apparently it was down for more than 12 hours and it reminded me of times when I was young and the power went out. I had that fleeting sense of anxiety wondering what I was going to do with the rest of my night, but then I made some tea, swaddled emma and curled us up to the tome I’m reading, David McCullough’s John Adams.(It bothers me that the cover of this book now has a picture of paul giamatii as john adams rather than plain old john adams)

I wonder what kids will do these days when the power goes out. Seems like we have gone to an extreme where micro-boredom is considered a scourge, but we don’t allow for unstructured time where kids can develop the creativity to occupy themselves without electrical stimulation. If your interested in this subject go spend the couple bucks on a subscription to the week, and read the last word column for this week, “in defense of boredom”.

“In this era of incessant text messaging and two-minute sitcoms, idle moments are going extinct, says The Boston Globe’s Carolyn Y. Johnson. But what if being human means having time to think? “- The week

mac attack, how the hell do I…

Posted by jonathan - 27/02/08 at 06:02:28 pm

While the web kidz out there might be shocked, our company is making a giant leap to support more than one browser after 7 years of forcing ie on our clients. We also are branching out of windows and supporting macs as well. A few days ago I got myself hooked up with a kvm switch and a mac mini to open the bug flood gates as I test on the mac.

The first “itjustworks” feature I found was that I could not tab to a button on a form. In order to change this you need to:

1. Open System Preferences
2. Click on Keyboard & Mouse
3. Under Full Keyboard access: in windows and dialogs press Tab to move the keyboard focus between: select the radio button, All Controls

One thing I have learned over the past 7 years doing web dev is that there is always a logical history to what might appear unintuitive or even ridiculous to you right now. I wonder what the thinking was to have the the tab button only work on textboxes and lists. Any ideas?

PS: I am posting this from the mac and I do not know how many times I have hit ctrl+home and ctrl+end only to see nothing happen on the screen. Urgh! 15 years of muscle memory is hard to overcome. apple key + shift + left arrow plus the context switch on the kvm switch is kind of funny. I do like brushing my teeth with the opposite hand occasionally just to keep myself honest.

pissing on things

Posted by jonathan - 10/02/08 at 09:02:49 am

It all started a few days ago when storytime at the bar with my buddy Bill ventured in to a recent tale of a date who kicked him out of her house. That wacky mind of his called her shortly thereafter to let her know that he pissed on her door on the way out. Now he probably did not do it, he’s been known to do crazier things, but what a great mind-fuck. This whole week has been full of references to peeing on things. In The Week, a political rib described someone’s hated of another as “I would not piss on his head if his hair was on fire”. Then, on a Joel on Software post, he quoted Judge Judy as saying “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” I’m not afraid to throw-in some colorful language, and what great phrases these are to visualize the yellow.

the week, the magazine

Posted by jonathan - 03/02/08 at 04:02:39 pm

In my house growing up we always had stacks on magazines laying around. To this day they remain a favored form of reading for their physicality, take anywhereness and adhd-friendly length. Back on the ranch, located in a 1950s era subdivision bedroom community on the poor side of a rich neighborhood in northern NJ, the pile included the usual fare, Newsweek and The New Yorker, but toppled over by the oddly shaped Foreign Affairs and slid sideways by Psychology Today and the Atlantic Monthly.

My circle of friends parents in high school never strayed from Time, Newsweek and the New Yorker. When I moved down south and met an intellectual southern bell I remember being surprised by her large rack … of US News & World Reports. While this mag is common, it was this encounter which started my accounting people’s magazine preferences, started my exploration of different genres such as the Southern Review and started my periodic grilling of friends and acquaintances always in a quest for fresh material.

Moving from the deep south to just below the the mason-dixon line, I wound up working for a now defunked, victim of time-warner-AOL web 1.0 accounting shenanigans, called enews.com (to this day I don’t trust AOL). What did we do but sell magazine subscriptions. I worked on a cool project to bring magazine subscription buying to the point-of-purchase at Barnes & Noble stores. Unfortunately, changing consumer behavior takes an awfully long time and the hissing sound of the balloon bubble deflating could be heard as the company postponed the ipo and eventually I was the 4th to last person closing the company. During this time, in the nations capital, my reads were fast company, wired, the economist, and my favorite of the time, the industry standard.

The economist fell off the list one for its sheer density, often taking me every commute for a week to digest, but mostly for its deadly boringness. The dismal science, which I studied in school only to drop in favor technology, read that way. Its lack of diversity on position, free-markets will save the world, made me realize I knew the conclusion of the article before I read it.

The industry standard was an interesting if tragic story which my young twenty something colleagues probably know nothing about. This magazine ballooned to 200 pages an issue of ad-bloated self referential material about the next big thing and the money train it rode on. I loved it! This continuous circular references documenting the hunt for vc money and the it way to make it, social networks for example have been well documented on the web 2.0 spaces such as technorati, mashable, read/write/web, gigaom which have all fallen off my rss feed. Luckily they have much lower operating costs which will keep them alive.

The only mag-rag from this era that remains on my reading list is wired which while on hiatus for a few years remains positioned on the forefront of cool ground breaking, potentially life changing technology which I often read about in more main stream publications months later as the ideas move into the more tangible everyday landscape, marked by technology sections in major newspapers and websites.

My current list of magazines is:

• Wired
• New York
• Business week
• The Week

All this blah blah blah to get to my point. My good buddy, Mark Malseed, a co-author on The Google Story, partner in ohmygov and consultant on chacha spoke highly of a magazine The Week, which my dad ended up without prior knowledge purchasing for me. This is a meta magazine, aggregating news sources in a format I have never seen before but I sense will be copied in the future. Unlike the natural tenancy to limit your sources to reinforce your given opinions online, this magazine gives a nice quick 40 or less page summary of news events I find refreshing, balanced and sufficiently global. It seems to fit the independent nature of todays modern voter. If you have not picked it up yet you should give it a try.

book critique: lean software development an agile toolkit

Posted by jonathan - 29/01/08 at 06:01:30 am

I picked this one up coming out of the agile dev practices conference in Orlando. The speakers I meet, Jeff Patton, Rob Myers, Jean Tabaka, James Shore and some folks from Rally Dev were jazzed to hear the key note of the book’s author Mary Poppendieck. Mary’s keynote pitch, stuffed with an abundance of historical comparisons, focused on agile’s step onto the main stage. I’d have to agree, I met many people there from companies such as State Farm, Lockheed Martin, and UPS. Agile has now has the potential to fail just like any other management philosophy before it.

A relatively quick read, the book is divided into 8 chapters:

1. Eliminate Waste
2. Amplify Learning
3. Decide as Late as Possible
4. Deliver as Fast as Possible
5. Empower the Team
6. Build Integrity In
7. See the Whole
8. Instructions and Warranty

Overall I’d put the value of the book at a 9 out of 10. It highlights principles that manufacturing has honed but the young knowledge based software industry sometimes forgets. While some people might call these principles obvious the book has provided me with a richer vocabulary for describing some practices I have already been using. I’ll pontificate about just one and let you read the rest since the source can always explain it better.

In Jean Tabaka’s Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders (The Agile Software Development Series) workshop we discussed how to facilitate from divergent viewpoints through to convergence. These skills are extremely important if you are going to attempt the practice of set-based design.

In set-based development, communication is about constraints, not choices. This turns out to be a very powerful form of communication, requiring significantly less data to convey far more information.

You probably use this technique already. If you have a tight calendar then you know how to setup meetings in this fashion. Rather than asking the other person when they would like to meet or giving them one option you let them know you can meet Friday between 1-2 or Monday between 3-4. Always give them a face-saving way out, like “if these times do not work please let me know a better time within the next week.” This decision making process is much more efficient than asking open ended questions like, when can we meet? It usually only requires 1-2 rounds of negotiation rather than 3-4.

You might be wondering, what does this have to do with my current project? Well if your team struggles to move to convergence, and/or your development lifecycle is too long, then your set-based process will be in jeopardy as the divergence begins to affect product integrity. Communication about which state you are in convergence or divergence on any particular aspect of your development must be clearly stated.

If your attempting to “go agile”, read this book and then pass it on to your boss. And don’t forget to buy it through the link above :)

can greed save africa?

Posted by jonathan - 05/12/07 at 05:12:31 am

The most recent business week cover story covers the age old international development subject of the potential for greed to save africa. There was nothing ground breaking here, but this quote sparked my curiosity.

Yet such risks are tempered by Africa’s economic idiosyncrasies, which, counterintuitively, might be its biggest selling point. As markets become ever more closely linked, investors are scouring the globe for assets that don’t move in lockstep with those in the rest of the world. Mainstream emerging markets such as Brazil and India now track 70% to 80% of the market movements of the U.S. and Western Europe, up from 50% a decade ago. Frontier Africa, in contrast, tracks just 10% of emerging market moves and even less of developed markets.

What is the implication of a completely globally connected economy? Does the current free market love fest have some consequences? Only our kids might know.

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