Remembering Mister Rogers

Marie posted this link of Mr. Rogers:

It reminded me how I was fortunate enough to have met him.

…

My mom’s side is Catholic, but my Dad’s side is Presbyterian—Dad’s family, not Dad—Dad is what my mom liked to call a Seventh-day Absentist—every seventh day, he was absent from church. After Ken was confirmed Mom would allow us to go to either church. In high school, when my brother had a car, this meant trips every Sunday to the Korean Presbyterian Church.

Mr. Rogers Neighborhood was filmed at the local public television station of Pittsburgh and he was ordained a Presbyterian minister. He belonged to the Sixth Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh located in Squirrel Hill. At the time, in the afternoon on Sundays the Korean Presbyterian Church hadn’t scraped enough money yet to buy their own church so the services would be out of the Sixth Church. Sometimes Mr. Rogers would stay late for Korean Sunday school kids.

One time he made a guest appearance with us high schoolers. He sat down and had a suitcase with all his puppets on his lap. We’d ask him to do all the voices of our childhood: King Friday, Queen Saturday, Henrietta Pussycat, etc., and with a nervous smile, he’d reach into the suitcase and the requested character from the Neighborhood of Make Believe would pop up from behind the open case and address us. Even Daniel Striped Tiger made an appearance even though he was very worn-through and extremely shy.

Some people are exactly who they appear to be, and Mr. Rogers was one of them. It was pretty awesome.

He was pretty awesome. 🙂

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Work Life

Cross posted from The Think Tank.

This is a blog about work life.

…

As a kid in the 80’s, futurologists predicted a coming generational war between baby boomers hitting retirement and my generation (Gen X) and the next (Millenials). This war would be a series of escalating battles fought on the ballot box over the removal of depression-era social contracts such as Social Security.

And yet baby boomers have been hitting the traditional age of retirement for half a decade now and it hasn’t happened yet.

Ignoring the obvious absurdity of a generation of “slackers” and “hipsters” combining forces to wage war against our own parents, the need was nullified because previous generations delayed retirement and work in retirement while our generation redefines success in work to be more than a race for economic rewards.

We went to war, not with each other, but with the traditional meaning of success and failure, of reward and punishment, of life and work.

If we were to extrapolate this to generational theory, it is not in the rightness of each generational archetype1, but in the wrongness of fundamental assumptions we’ve previously all bought in to.

This wrongness is no more evident evident in “work life.”

Continue reading about work life after the jump

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Wrong model?

Me: *grabs the Victoria Secret flyer out of girlfriend’s hands*. Oh, it’s just a L…

Her: Yeah, they always have that free panty deal.

Me: You thought I was looking at the underwear? I was looking at the model…(long pause)… of camera! Hahaha!

Her: *rolls eyes* (sarcastically) Oh, very funny.

(It was a Leica film camera, of course.)

You know you’re a photographer at heart when when the thing your eyes are immediately drawn to in this photo is the camera.
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Rituals and Religion

From an e-mail I received a year ago:

What does that actually mean? It means facilitating the “rituals” that
are part of an agile team’s work (e.g. the daily stand-ups, the
sprint planning meetings, retrospectives, etc.) and continually facilitating
the team’s discovery of improving the way they work.

What is the difference between a software process and a religion? Nothing.

I’m cool with software process, just like I believe in God.

I hate named software process because, like organized religion, it’s full of theology removed from reality, practice without the empiricism, theory without the application. When you show them empirical evidence on the consequence (or outright failure) of one of their particular rituals, they’re quick to maneuver with the words, “That’s ‘big A Agile.’ I’m not talking about that, I’m ‘little A Agile.’” (Whatever the fuck that is.)1

You can’t pin them down because they actually stand for nothing—there is no “there” there. It is the natural result of adapting a process that originated to allow sub-1000 page software consulting contracts with Fortune 500 multinational industrials in the 80’s and 90’s and blindly applying it to a shoe-string funded startups over a full decade after the dotCom crash in non-enterprise consumer-facing Internet whose entire business is software. Two different worlds; two different failure costs; one would assume that there would be two different names for two different software processes.

Instead there are hundreds of different processes all under the “little A agile” banner. And they look not alike at all. To watch the rhetorical hoops these agile adherents go through to call it “all agile” would be amusing if it wasn’t so unnecessary.

…

When I was a kid at evangelical summer camp, there was a parable I heard the counselor’s tell:

A man gets the opportunity to visit Heaven and Hell. He visits Hell first and meets Satan and asks, “Do you have any Catholics here?”

Satan responds, “Oh yes, we have a lot of them.”

“Presbyterians?”

“Yep!“

“Baptists?”

“Them too!”

And so on, listing every denomination and finding them well-represented in Hell.

Depressed he goes to Heaven and chats with Saint Peter. “Do you have Catholics in Heaven?”

“No,” Peter says.

“Prebyterians?”

“No, none of those.”

“Baptists?”

“No.”

And so on. Exasperated, the man asks Peter, “Well then what do you have in Heaven?”

“Christians.” Peter responds.

Catholicism is Scrum; Presbyterian is Extreme Programming; Baptists is Kanban. I suppose Hell is the dead-pool, Heaven is getting a getting funded or IPO2, and Martin Fowler is Saint Peter.3 It reads the same.

“Little A Agile”: the “non-denominational Christians” of the software process religions. If it works, it’s “Agile.” And if it fails to get you to Internet Heaven?4

Oh, that shit is “big A Agile.”

  1. If your process is defined by the outcome alone, then it is useless in a business setting. ↩
  2. A successful exit, in life or startups. :-) ↩
  3. Does that make me Satan? ↩
  4. The goal is to have an lucrative exit so you can blog about how hard it is to be a Founder and tweet about your First World problems. ↩
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17667916236

San Rafael, California, United States

Apple iPhone 6, Apple iPhone 6 back camera 4.15mm f/2.2

0.001 sec (1/1647) @ f/2.2, iso32 (29 mm)

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Pork Tocino

If you live in The Richmond, you know that B*Star Bar is like eating at Burma Superstar but without the line.

Breakfast plate with pork tocino, garlic fried rice topped with two eggs cooked over easy. Spoon in foreground
Pork Tocino with Garlic Fried Rice
B*Star Bar, The Richmond, San Francisco, California, United States

Sony DSC-RX1
0.013 sec (1/80) @ f/4.5, iso400, 35 mm

My favorite brunch dish there is the Pork Tocino. Grilled jerk pork over a bed of garlic fried rice and cherry tomatoes, topped with scallions and balsamic vinegar.

Since Marie loves their Huevos Racheros, I end up ordering this dish a lot. The only times I don’t is when we bring a guest, then I suggest they get it and I order something else.

Continue reading about some WordPress plugin notes after the jump

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FYWP #257-262: wpautop and shortcodes/oEmbed do not play nice at all

It occurs to me that wpautop() is the register_globals of WordPress—a feature that was instrumental for its growth and popularity, but really needs to DIAF. They should rename the function wppeepee() because it finds a way to pee pee on your content at the most inopportune moments, causing unending headaches in your code.

For those of you who don’t know, wpautop can be seen as nl2br() on steriods, or (as I prefer to call it) a poor man’s Markdown. It’s been in WordPress for almost forever, and it’s hard to imagine writing a blog post without it, even if it’s a Really Bad Idea™.

Continue reading about the interaction of wpautop, shortcodes and oEmbed after the jump

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