Anti-Theft Lunch Bag Deters Sandwich Thieves

Here is a simple but clever idea to keep people in the office from pinching your food (although they may instead throw it out!).

It reminds me of people I've met in the past who write disgusting things all over their favourite basketball or make their bikes ugly to deter people from stealing them.

I wonder if there are benefits to uglifying code? Hhhmmm...

US election hots up: Palin in a bikini, Battlestar Galactica stars enter the race

The US presidential election continues to serve up all sorts of surprises.

Last year it looked like Bush and Cheney would ignore the constitution and make run for a third term.

Recently McCain made a bold choice in selecting a young-ish, female, gun-toting outsider as his Vice Presidential running mate.

Sarah Palin, the next US Vice Preseident?

And now inspired by McCain's Vietnam war experiences and hard line on terrorism a couple of the characters from Battlestar Galactica have thrown their hat into the ring.

tighroslin2008.com

Nearly Half of Employers Have Caught a Lie on a Resume

Half of the employers in this survey have caught candidates lying on their resume, with some of the more outrageous lies being:

• Claimed to be a member of the Kennedy family
• Claimed to be a member of Mensa (duh!)
• Claimed to have worked for the hiring manager before, but never had
• Claimed to be the CEO of a company when the candidate was an hourly employee
• Listed military experience dating back to before he was born
• Included samples of work, which the interviewer actually did
• Claimed to be Hispanic when he was 100 percent Caucasian
• Claimed to have been a professional baseball player

Those beats the guy I interviewed two years ago who claimed to have developed with Spring 5 and Hibernate 6 :)

Just as interesting are the keywords that employers use to search for candidates (SDLC, e-commerce and n-tier are no longer in vogue!):

• problem-solving and decision-making skills (50 percent)
• oral and written communications (44 percent)
• customer service or retention (34 percent)
• performance and productivity improvement (32 percent)
• leadership (30 percent)
• technology (27 percent)
• team-building (26 percent)
• project management (20 percent)
• bilingual (14 percent)

Build your own Charging Station

A couple of months ago I saw this DIY charging stand:


What is a charging stand? Its a place where you can plug in all your gadgets for charging overnight.

If you think about it a "typical" family has lots of gadgets, say a mobile phone for every member of the family, mp3 players, gameboys, iPhone for daddy, portable DVD players, laptops, etc. Instead of having chargers lying all around the house I could see a dedicated charging station as a useful way to tidy things up.

As one of the comments to the above charging station points out all of the chargers draw power even when their gadgets are not plugged in, so it would be a useful improvement if the charging station turned off when no gadgets are connected.

The Agile Elevator Pitch: It's all about Low Risk

I recently saw a technically-focused manager, who was talking to a marketing person, point to an early version (sprint 1) of an application and say:

You see, agile means you don't get everything you wanted.

The remark surprised me since this manager had been heavily involved in the planning of the application, including prioritising which functionality got built every sprint.

This got me to thinking once more how I often have to describe agile in 30 second "elevator pitches" to non-technical people. In the past I've tried to describe agile using terms like "hyper-productive environments" and "delivering increments of functionality", but that never seemed to convey the meaning behind agile. More and more agile seems to me to be all about risk, so I think my elevator pitch is evolving into something like:

Agile is a set of low risk practices for delivering working software within the usual constraints of project management (scope, resources, time and quality).

What do I mean by low risk? The opposite of high risk :) High risk practices include spending too much time on analysis, not recognising that requirements will change as people get a chance to interact with the application, trying to build a complex solution based on possible future requirements instead of just what you need for now, putting people in strict roles instead of allowing them to freely interact with each other, and many more. Of course a project may still succeed using high risk practices, it just has a lower probability of doing so.

So back to the remark that started this train of thought. How would I respond to "agile means you don't get everything you want"? Simply: Regardless of whatever practices or methodologies you use you are still constrained by the usual project management variables (scope, resources, time and quality). Agile or not you will have to make choices.

.NET 3.5 SP1 Runs Managed Applications From Network Shares

Finally!!!

Verizon gives someone the Libshitz

When I was living in New York it was TimeWarner Cable that often made my blood boil with their poor customer service and lazy attitude to fixing their broken equipment, but TimeWarner is not alone in dragging out issues.

The sad story of Herman Libshitz who, when he tried to upgrade from AT&T dial-up to Verizon DSL, was told by Verizon they couldn't do it because his last name contained a naughty word. It turns out their account software had some sort of profanity filter, so Verizon managers suggested Mr Lipshitz deliberatley mis-spell his name instead of going to the effort of requesting the development team in India make a change to the account software.

As a side note, I've often hoped for the opportunity to write a profanity filter. The actual implementation should be just a basic list matching algo, but it will be fun putting together a list of profane words, variations (e.g. one of two character differences), multiple languages, etc!