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.)
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.”
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)
If you live in The Richmond, you know that B*Star Bar is like eating at Burma Superstar but without the line.
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
This is my tooltip. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My tooltip is my blog’s best friend. It keeps the blog posts readable. I must master it as I must master my blogging.
The outline slide from an executive briefing one year ago(2014-05-06) (with my commentary):
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
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick
I’ve bought this book a while ago, since before I knew that Ridley Scott was working on a TV series based on it. Since the pilot was released on Amazon, Marie borrowed and read it before she started to see spoilers on her social network. Since she read it, we watched the pilot. Since I watched the pilot, I started reading the book in the evening. Since I started reading the book (and it is sci fi/fantasy), I finished it sometime in the middle of the night.
This is why I don’t read science fiction anymore.
Most movies (and I’ll assume this TV show) based on Phillip K Dick are usually loosely based on his books and short stories, where the core ideas (or, more likely, one or two of them) are kept and most of the storyline is not. From the pilot it is clear that this will follow that trend.
I mention this because I find it interesting that when this is done to nearly anyone else’s work readers are angry that either it doesn’t hold true to the original (in the case of contemporary writers), or they clearly list it as an adaptation (in the case of classic writers such as Shakespeare). The only common exception I can think are movies based on comic books—but the source material itself is inconsistent and full of reboots and retellings.
My only real criticism of the book is the use of the I Ching which I found frustrating and boring. After all, you are talking about someone who used to publish “horrorscopes” in college — horoscopes with unfortunate fortunes. This scientist has never taken kindly to that sort of mysticism.
The new version of Ulysses is out for Mac and iPad. (The Mac version is a free upgrade from Ulysses III; the iPad app is new).
It’s really hard to explain what this app is. In fact, I’ve been purchasing (and not using) this application for years before I realized that it strikes the right balance for a certain set of work.
Photo from July 18th, 2009.
Nikon D3, Lensbaby Composer, Tokina .45x macro
1/160 sec @ f/6.3, iso640, 50mm
This was the day of the 2nd Annual Worldwide Photowalk. On the way back to the car, I noticed these yellowjackets congregating around something. This became an excuse to pull out a closeup adapter and attempt some macro photography. I had to get pretty close though which caused my girlfriend some consternation.
The photo and processing was done a long time ago so I can’t comment on it very much. It looks like I had a predilection for overly saturated colors back then. 😉