The unfortunate thing about working in a corporation is you have to ’tie out’ with people.  This sounds awfully exciting, with visions of ropes, knots, maybe even a lasso or wrestling someone to the ground.

It’s not that exciting.  No, what “tie out” really means is getting 2 or more people to agree to do something.  In general, that requires those people be physically or virtually in contact at the same time.

Thought I’d just shout this one into the ether:  When one feels wronged by a person, the correct procedure is to go to that person one-on-one and discuss it.

15 “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over.  (Matthew 18:15)

Okay, that’s what to do, but why does God want us to do it that way?  Because it’s human nature to gossip, and conflict destroys community.

Well, I had a good run.

I exited Facebook on December 30th 2012 and remained off until 4 April 2014.  Last week, Whitney asked me to dig up some pics from my trip to Cebu in 2012, most of which were on my dead MacBook Air…and on Facebook.

Hmm…quandry.  So, I bit the bullet and dove back in.

It’s good and bad.  As one would expect, the “network effect” is wonderful.  Most of my dad’s family is active, along with some key people from mom’s family.   Instantly, I saw pictures of people I haven’t seen in person in 3-5 years.  Likewise, much of my high school class is on there and it’s neat to see people grow, change, and rear children of their own.  It also seems they’ve adopted more of the “limited sharing” tools from Google+ so you can share a story with one “list” but not your entire friend group, or go whole hog and share out to “Public” like Twitter.

At the risk of sounding like a mommyblogger: It’s difficult to hear yet another thing your child’s food allergies prevent.  Honestly, at times, it feels like my kids are going to end-up in some Food Allergy ghetto wearing a medical alert bracelet staring out through plexiglass at kids luxuriating with their peanut butter, quiche, and potato salad.

Yeah, I’m sad.  This is part of my process of getting over it, so bear with me.

Methodology Doesn’t Matter; People Do

I’ve been in industry for 15 years, as unbelievable as that seems.  I just want to shake people when all they can talk about is Process this and Methodology that and Tool this other.

It.

Doesn’t.

Matter.

Okay, it does matter, but only when you have the people end of things sorted out first.  Assuming an equally talented group, those with a better system will (generally) perform better over time.  However, no methodology in the world is going to make disengaged, sloppy employees perform well.  (It’s tempting to draw a parallel to the Auto Industry, but I’ll spare you.)

Sorry I was unable to ___ because….

• the Loyal Order of White Castle was meeting at the same time.
• I was playing ping-pong.
• I was playing XBox.
• I didn’t get to work until 11am.
• I couldn’t find the indicated conference room with a map, sextant, compass, GPS, diving rod, and several readings of appropriate entrails.
• I was busy juggling.
• I was at lunch ’til 2pm.
• I chose not to go to bed until 3am, and a nuclear explosion couldn’t wake me at 7, let alone my 20 year old Sony clock radio

Five-year-old Joey:  “Harold, when are we going hunting?”

My step-son is a canonical boy:  Around age 1, his mother reported him fashioning pistols and shooting her with his toast.  He likes taking things apart.  He loves archery, and he’s fascinated by firearms.  We live in Kentucky, so most consider this not Neanderthal DNA expressing itself, but the natural order of things.

So yeah, hunting.

As with many things in my life, I found myself in the 1.5 day Kentucky Orange Card certification class this past Friday and Saturday through an odd chain of events:  We actually read the 4-H letter from our local Ag Extension office.  (We get the 4-H letter because we signed-up for a community garden plot last year, but I dropped the ball and we never planted it.)  In the newsletter was a blurb about Scott County 4-H Shooting sports:  Archery, air rifle, air pistol, .22 rifle, .22 pistol, and trap.  It appeared this was all free.  There was an additional blurb:  In order to participate in the things that go boom, you needed your orange card certification.

I’m part of an initiative developing curriculum and training resources for developers.  Here’s what I have so far on fundamentals and skills for a developer.

Fundamentals

Design and Structure

• Design / Domain Modeling

• Object Orientation / Design Patterns

Development and Delivery

• IDE mastery: IntelliJ, Eclipse, etc.

• Code Reviews / Pull Requests

• Testing: Unit testing, test coverage

• Effective Debugging / Using a symbolic debugger

* Working on an Agile Development team

Way back in 2004, I wrote a short review of Tate’s Bitter Java

Basically, when this book appeared, Java was ~8 years old, and was at the peak of its hype cycle.   Embraced by both the enterprise software world (okay, IBM) and the nascent open source community, Java was the golden hammer, fit for any problem.

Except, it wasn’t.

People who could program, but who weren’t familiar with domain requirements began writing Enterprise Software, and they began making a mess of it.  My own company had to write-off about $7.4 million on a “failed software project” back in 2003.  Suddenly, the C-levels stopped saying “Maybe we should rewrite our stuff in Java.”  Historians term such retrenchment the Thermidorian Reaction, predictable after every revolution.  For us in the industry, it was the heart of the doldrums between the Y2K largesse and the onslaught of Web 2.0.

So, my daughter found a cute trick about 3 weeks ago:  If you set a bunch of dry oatmeal in a non-microwavable playset bowl on 5 minutes in the microwave, it catches fire.

Lots of fun things result:  You mommy trotting you out into the cold, lots of folks with sirens showing up, seeing the inside of a Crown Victoria as you shelter from the sub-zero temperatures.

Thankfully, though the microwave was toast and there was smoke in the house, nothing happened permanently and everyone was safe.

I understand this is meaningless to anyone besides me, but I just wanted to jot it down.

She said, “I don’t know who it is, but it’s not you.  It used to be, and I think it’s sad that it’s not anymore.”

And you know what, she’s right.  I agree with her.  Long about July 2011, I took a left turn and lost myself a bit.  Not quite sure what to do with that.

It was pouring outside, and my daughter was trying to convince me how much she hated a children’s museum 4 hours’ drive away.

“Cosi? You mean the museum in Columbus?”  I said between bites of Subway sandwich.  Oooh, with mayonnaise.  My youngest is allergic to eggs, so mayo was a delicacy.

“YEAH,” she exploded.  I was thankful we were the only customers; Maria’s like a combination of my passion and her mom’s expressiveness.  In comparison, a nitromethane Funny Car mouses about.

Caution: This is an entry about things that go boom.  It’s NSFW (well, at my work, anyway)

So, for my bi-weekly time to myself, I choose to go to The Gun Warehouse (a.k.a “Bud’s Gun Shop”) in Lexington and try out some techniques I saw here:

Bud’s was busy (as typical of any Saturday), but I got on the range about 11:30am.  If you’ve never been in a busy gun shop, it’s truly an experience:  Excitement, fear, bravado from customers and staunch professionalism from the staff.  Can’t recommend the place enough.

Here in Kentucky, we root for hopeless causes:  Most incarnations of UK Football, the Broncos in Superbowl XVIII, and winter.

Winter? you ask.   Indeed!

Usually, Winter is a neutered season.  It’s like a buffer between our long, dry falls and our all-too-short wet Springtime.  Summer’s the top-dog.  Summer’s on the beach, kicking sand in the face of nerdy Winter, breaking his glasses and shooting tequila like a Carrie Underwood song (underage, natch).   A “hard” winter here is one big snow of 3" and an average daytime high under 40.  “You know, I had to scrape my windows this morning!” we exclaim in disbelief.

There’s been much discussion lately on the web about the dismal # of women choosing Computer Science.  I thought I’d go straight to the source and ask, you know, a woman, who did not choose CS.

My wife.

Her theory on gender imbalance in CS.  (I had to transcribe as quickly as I could, and I’m not sure I quite caught the spirit of it all)

It’s stupid.  You don’t make anything tangible.  When I think of Computer Science, I think of greasy gamer nerds who want show off for their greasy gamer nerd friends.  

Random stuff that’d annoy my twitter stream to death:

• The animation in He-Man and She-Ra is laughably bad.  Not “it’s anime and they only shot one cel but panned across it for 2 seconds” bad, but “we reused the same sequence of he-man rolling 25 times in 5 episodes” bad.
• Natural Gas heat furnaces are amazing.  My house is a toasty 70 degrees.
• It’s painful to start my Camry every morning.  That glowing “low oil pressure light” (while normal) goes out much more slowly in zero degree weather, and there’s this groan it makes about 5 seconds after startup that I interpret as the car saying, “Really?  Again?”
• Useless related factoid I remember from my childhood absorbing everything about aviation:  When pilots started flying in Alaskan winters, they preferred radial engines (no water cooling system to freeze) and they were careful to drain the sump oil from the engine on shutdown into a container, then heat-up the container the next morning and pour it (hot) into the engine.  Otherwise, past a certain temperature, the oil would sludge and the engine would seize.
• Related:   In Minnesota and the Dakotas, it used to be common for people (especially those with diesels) to simply never turn their trucks off in winter.  Diesels run variable fuel/air ratio based on load (as high as 200:1 at idle, unlike the 14:1 or richer required by gasoline) so they used relatively little fuel and there was no danger of the truck being “dead” the next morning.

Dat Trig

Also, just to expand on a story I tweeted yesterday:  My eldest likes math, and he’s quite good at it.  He loves puzzles, building things, and generally things he can get “lost in.”  So, I’m up in our closet on a ladder coming down from the attic, having just changed our air filter in the upstairs HVAC, and he (apropos of nothing) holds up a sheet with this on it:

I imagine this convo someday:

“You really believe there’s some magic guy up in the sky who created the Universe?  Do you also believe in Santa Claus?”

The respondent will be one of my children:

I’ve never believed in Santa Claus.  I would like to tell you about a real guy named Jesus and what He did for me….

Yep, we’re those people.  Santa Claus doesn’t give our children presents, we give each other presents to celebrate the greatest unearned present ever, salvation.   Our kids are the all-too-honest little antichrists who send your little Timmy or Terry home crying from Kindergarten, “MOM!  Maria said Santa Claus isn’t real.”

[Exterior:  3am as the Snow falls]

[Garage door rises]

Fusion: Psst….hey, Camry of Doom.

CoD (annoyed): Don’t start what you cain’t finish, Sparky.
F: Mmmm….looks mighty cold out there in all that snow.  I’d offer you a place in here, but this is only for the cars they like.

CoD:  Yeah, yeah….I’m fine out here.  I don’t need no sissy garage.

F: But it’s been frackin’ cold forever it seems like.  Doesn’t it hurt?

So, my church is going through Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren.  The second item within the 40-day book is “You are not an accident.”  With this as the follow-up.

Your parents may have been good, bad, or indifferent.  It doesn’t matter:  God had a design for you before you were even born, with the combination of DNA inside your body determined.

 Immediately, the reality that soon enough (if some rogue nation hasn’t already) a cloned human being will be created.  No mother, no father, just a sequenced genome injected into a sterilized embryo.  It begins dividing and gestating, with a person resulting 40 weeks later.  Maybe less if we accelerate the process.

So, working late(-ish) last night, I drove home listening to the dulcet tones of Governor Steve Beshear delivering his annual State of the Commonwealth speech.

I’ve long held Beshear to be a dichotomy:  He’s a moderate, reasonable with genuine communication and leadership ability who has a folksy, drawling twang that drives me bonkers.  Though he sounds like a character from Hee-Haw, he’s been genuinely good for the state, surmounting two scandalous previous administrations and noted egomaniac Senate President David Williams.  Beshear has both the common touch of a well-meaning Grandfather, and the business administration sense of a decent CEO.