While it's true most of us enjoy the beer and food of the holiday cookouts they are also a time when family and friends gather and exchange stories of life and service - the exact thing we are memorializing. This weekend I spent time talking with my wife's cousin, a Lt. Colonel in the US Army Rangers, who has already served tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq and is soon returning for yet another tour. I also spent time talking to a 91 year old women who told me stories of her brother who flew in B-17s into Germany during WWII. He was killed on his 25th mission, just before he was slated to return home. If it weren't for these frivolous cookouts I wouldn't have heard their stories and the stories of the people they knew who served our country.

Then there was the young Marine, the son of a friend (a Vietnam vet himself), who home on leave from service in Afghanistan took the time to don his Marine dress blues and march in the local Memorial day parade. Is this day too somber for him to then sit back and relax with his friends and family with a beer and hotdogs? Hell no.

And of course, last but not least, I spent time this long weekend with my favorite veteran, my wife, who is a decorated medic from Desert Storm. I probably don't deserve her, but she sure as hell deserves a cookout without any neo-conservative guilt.

Tangentially, the site where I found the big drawing, and that I link above, is involved with green ocean travel as well. They are 'Solar Navigation - World Electric Navigation Challenge'. They want to circumnavigate the globe in a custom build solar powered catamaran. Sounds fun. If you have some extra cash they could use your help.

Why does this doom MS? MS is already behind the curve on IDE technology and loosing ground fast. If they think they are going to endear new developers to their platform with experiences like this, when you can just download and run with Eclipse or NetBeans in seconds, they are in for a rough ride.

My spouse just left IBM global services. They've laid off so many people and had talented people opt to leave the company, that the folks who are left are *way* overutilized. Before she left, my partner was pulling 60 hour work weeks as the norm, while 70-80 were frequent. The endless round of meetings was taking it's toll since the folks who've been spared the ax aren't the doers. They're terrified to make a decision so they just waste time twirling and having meetings about the same issues over and over. They appear to be under the illusion they can keep doing the same old "nothing" every day and wake up one morning and somehow the work will magically have gotten done.

There may have been some dead wood in the company that needed to be culled, but quite a lot of those people are brown nosers who have figured out how to misrepresent their skills to managers who have no technical experience. Laying off massive amounts of people, hoping to cull these folks is like playing a shell game. It ain't working. It's demoralizing the employees that are left and the people with real talent are jumping ship...fed up with over work, pathetic management, endless meetings, and not enough talent left to actually implement designs.

So...if that's the results of appeasing stock holders here in the states, why in the world would you want to do the same thing in Europe? Yeah, there's a lot of peple just getting by; never really doing anything. But if management is not competent to figure that out and the en masse layoffs to get rid of them are failing and demoralizing...then you're possibly causing more harm than good by doing it.

IBM is too full of processes, too top heavy (duh as if y'all didn't know that already), and people are constanty job hopping in the company every year or two (or being restructured) with the result that no one know how the hell to do their job.

From the looks of all the Google links about this, I think I'm showing up very late to this party. Enjoy or gouge out your ears. (that last part's from Don too)

Baseball is a red-blooded sport for red-blooded men. It's no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out. It's a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest.

The short version of the policy as I read it goes like this: feel free to promote IBM on web. Is that bad, no; will it make employees blog like crazy, time will tell. I evangelized the fun of blogging among my peers but few have felt inclined to take it up. The fact is, it takes a lot of time, even for a "E-list" blogger such as myself, and most people already have a hard time balancing work and family without trying to post regularly on a blog.

The one line that drove me a little nuts, and is ironically highlighted by Ed Brill in a recent post, is the one that says: "We believe in transparency and honesty." I do believe IBM is a very honest company but my recent experience leads me to believe they have a long way to go before they become transparent. For "A-list"ers who report on the world from the stratosphere there may well be real transparency into IBM strategy but for the grunts in the trenches, I really doubt transparency into their world would be allowed. IBM could prove to the me and my readers that they mean what they say by simply allowing me to restore my previous comments. That would be really cool, but I doubt it will happen.

I chalk it up to one major thing, code reuse. Code reuse is one of the panaceas of modern software theory and practice, but it has a dark side. While the reused components may provide desired functionality they often have their own share of issues. If you're lucky enough to have the source code to the shared component and can ship modifications, there's no problem, but if you don't, hackery is often the only solution. Given that Windows is a closed system and is rich in reusable components, it is a fetile environment for hacks.

This reminds me of an old joke from the '60s. A man was arrested for running through Red Square shouting "Khrushchev is an idiot!". He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to 30 days for insulting the party secretary plus 30 years for revealing state secrets.

On a side note, I actually had lunch with Sam one day when he visited Westford back before Workplace in the days of Garnet. He is one of the good STSMs - he may well be a DE by now, but I haven't kept track.

In this day and age of dialog boxes for everything it was nice to work with a GUI tool that exploits simple text editing so well. Rather than fill in a table of attributes and functions, in UMLet, you just type in free form text to describe a UML object. For example a class could be described with this text block.

Foo
--
string id;
--
string runIt(string cmd);
int getStatus()

If you've ever fought with a diagramming tool that was trying too hard to validate all your inputs it's a pleasure to use something that validates nothing.

The choice of the word FOR to describe an interative control block seems rather arbitrary, but most languages use it. Imagine if the common keywords: IF, WHILE, FOR were not common at all?