Sports Guy’s Golden Retriever
Yes this choked me up when I read it in my office.
Where’s Raul?
For our annual white elephant Christmas present exchange at work Raul created a life size poster himself. The thing has been showing up all over the office ever since.
It’s been in several offices including mine, conferences rooms, and my personal favorite was in the hallway just behind the door so when you opened the door you were nose to nose with Raul. Yesterday he showed up in a more permanent location, having been removed from his cardboard stand he is now plastered to the restroom wall. Yes I was shocked and I expect to be every time I walk in for some time to come.
How far was that?
We just finished our company “Step Fitness Challenge”. The individual goal was to average 10,000 steps a day for 50 days, our department goal was to walk to Brazil or something like that which was 8,000 average daily steps. Every department met its goal and 29 individuals made it too.
At 522,574 total steps I was one of the lowest of those 29. One person had 955,674! Some went precisley off of the pedometer, I went more for a fitness value approach. So yeah I may have only taken 3,000 actual steps during that hour of basketball, but the fitness value was worth way more than walking for an hour or walking 3,000 steps. I ended up reling on the online step conversion charts quite a bit.
It was a lot of fun and provided that little extra push to make sure I got my exercise in each week.
Somewhere along the way our vocabulary changed too. How far is it to walk J to school? 1,100 steps round trip. To the bathroom from my office? Right on 100 round trip. The breakroom is at least 200 steps round trip, depending of course on how long you pace pensively in front of the never changing array of frozen entrees.
Change?
Is this the change America voted for? Cabinet members picked from an extremely unpopular congress and a new “New Deal”?
My Fellow Taxpayers
What would happen to our collective point of view if we always replaced government with “my fellow taxpayers”? Would anyone go along with it if a politician proposed that “my fellow taxpayers” bailout whichever multibillion dollar industry is failing this week?
This idea comes from an exercise I read about a professor doing at Harvard in “Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds“.
Dreaming In Code
No new blog entries in weeks, my reading list is piling high, exercising is hit and miss, ward clerk duties are falling behind; yep it must be crunch time.
Normally we don’t have too many hard deadlines but a few weeks ago everything lined up at once resulting in four customer critical deadlines before the end of the year, including 3 custom jobs. I’m happy to report two are done and the other two will finish up soon. I’m even more happy to report that unilke during college when my brain was way overextended, I have not been dreaming in code.
Even if it is just an “excuse”, it’s still a blast
Gun sales have surged since Obama won the election; count us among those joining the crowd. I don’t really think I won’t be able to buy a shotgun in a couple of months, but I do worry about the decade old gun and ammo sales tax comment he made.
At any rate we took the new purchase (officially an early Christmas present) out yesterday and had a great time. Holli owned the day, hitting almost all of her pigeons even though the last time she went shooting was before we had kids.
The Daddy Model of Wealth
One of the most insightful things I’ve ever read was Paul Graham’s explanation of “The Daddy Model of Wealth”. You can find it under that same heading in his essay “Mind The Gap”. Similar ideas are explored in even more depth in his essay “How to Make Wealth” (start with the section “Money Is Not Wealth” unless you have a lot of time and are really interested in technology start-ups).
Anyway the point is that too many people still think there’s a fixed amount of wealth in the world and somebody (like the government) should be distributing it equally.
Although it should be noted the model still seems to work for large financial institutions that can’t make level headed decisions.
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Agile Software Development with SCRUM by Ken Schwaber
My rating: 3 of 5 stars SCRUM is a process I had heard a lot about but I hadn't ever really learned about. I'm glad I did learn about it, how it works and how it came about. The main idea is to enable development teams to focus on development without distractions or interruptions from management or anywhere else. The most helpful part was the section on empirical process control and how such an approach is the only way to deal with creative development. The defined process approach can never work; despite what they may have taught in school. View all my reviews >>
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