Much like Dave Geary's issues in the link above, one of my worst experiences was with a pre-presentation glitch. I was showing some Java stuff at LotusSphere Berlin and the demos required numerous pieces of pre-positioned software in order to finish in the allotted time. My presentation was the first demo in the morning so I stayed up late double checking everything on my laptop. When I was satisfied everything was perfect, I closed the laptop lid and went to bed. I awoke early, showered, dressed and decided to check the demos one last time. Much to my horror, my laptop had failed to hibernate and had run out of power during the night. Instead of a nice relaxing breakfast I spent every last minute before the demo franticly repositioning the demos. I was able to get everything running again but the experience totally sucked.

My second story comes from LotusSphere during an infamous Garnet session. During this session I was co-presenting with a great developer, who I will refer to as Developer-X, who had never presented before. I was the lead presenter but Developer-X had a key demo halfway through the presentation. When it came time to do our first dry run things didn't go so well. Developer-X presented with zero emotion in a complete monotone. He was downright robotic. It's a given that not all developers are born presenters so Iris would regularly hire presentation coaches to come in and work with the developers. Developer-X and I had quite a few sessions with the coach and to Developer-X's credit he improved remarkably. By the last practice there was intonation and actual emotion in his voice. Things were looking good.

So the presentation rolls around and I take the lead. We are on a wide stage in front of a few hundred people, me at one podium, Developer-X at another way over on the other side of the stage. I get through my first section OK and pass the presentation over to Developer-X. Within a few words, I knew we were screwed. Developer-X was speaking in a monotone, a very slow and deliberate monotone, worse even than the first practice session. Given that I wasn't speaking I had a lot of time to just watch the audience. It was apparent very quickly that people were not enjoying the presentation. In fact, a steady flow of people were getting up from there seats and leaving. Developer-X's section only lasted ten minutes but it felt like an hour. In that short time he had scared away half the audience. It was that bad.

A month or so later when the session reviews came in the comments were not kind to Developer-X. I recall one comment in particular that struck me funny. The guy pointed out how painful Developer-X's demo was to listen to but he noted that he felt sorry for the Developer-X because I was glowering over him from the other side of the stage.

Firestone and West also uncovered evidence of an even earlier event that blasted parts of the Earth with iron-rich grains. Three mammoth tusks found in Alaska and Siberia, which were carbon-dated to be about 34,000 years old, are pitted with slightly radioactive, iron-rich impact sites caused by high-velocity grains. Because tusks are composed of dentine, which is a very hard material, these craters aren't easily formed. In fact, tests with shotgun pellets traveling 1,000 kilometers per hour produced no penetration in the tusks. Much higher energies are needed: x-ray analysis determined that the impact depths are consistent with grains traveling at speeds approaching 10,000 kilometers per second.

"This speed is the known rate of expansion of young supernova remnants," says Firestone.

Reading the above explanation it sounds like the extinctions were the result of everything being shredded by BBs from space. I don't think that's what they are suggesting but it makes for a scary new doomsday scenario.

Link: Supernova Explosion May Have Caused Mammoth Extinction

Top Gun: It's stupid and I hate the theme music, but I love the jets and the story numbs my brain like cold beer.
The Holy Grail: The greatest comedy of all time. Over the years even the unfunny bit have become funny.
Road House: Hot chicks, bar fights and eastern philosophy. The whole thing just doesn't make any sense, but it's still a lot of fun to watch.
In Harms Way: A personal favorite. The Duke kicks ass with ships. OK the ships look like models in a tub but even as kids my sister and I would stay up late to watch this movie.
Dead Man: One of my top three favorite movies of all time. Recursion on film. Nobody is better than Nobody (You have to see the movie to understand that one).
Patton: George C. Scott as poet warrior. I love the contrasts in the man.
Rudy: This is just a great story that always reminds me about the power of hard work.

Everything is Relative

Regarding @18 Bob. (following the referrer links)

For what it's worth, I worked at IBM from the time Iris was absorbed until April 2005. Over that time I've known 4 people who left IBM to go work for MS. I've spoken directly to 3 of those 4 people and in each case they preferred the MS culture to that of IBM. In each case they found it less stifling and more productive (albeit not perfect). The fourth person who I've not yet spoke to about this is @18 Bob. I don't know if Bob's been at MS long enough to have an opinion on the topic but given we had many conversation about the mess in Westford, I'm pretty confident what his opinion will be.

That said, I don't doubt that some MS developers are upset. I'm sure old MS hands miss the good old days. Compared to what they had previously it's probably very hierarchical and bureaucratic, but that doesn't mean it worse than IBM.

I'm involved with suicide prevention both through this walk and the See A New Sun organization because I lost my very close friend Bryan to suicide. Bryan had been best friends with my wife since High School and he and his wife became our closest couple friends. For many years we did everything together. Later, when their first child Ben was born we were chosen as his God parents.

I knew Bryan could be moody at times, but in general he was full of life and a bright light to be around. The day Bryan committed suicide, I was with him. We spent the day watching football as we often did. I noticed his mood was darker than normal and he was drinking more than usual but I brushed it off as him just having a bad day. I left their house in the early evening and we made plans to get together later in the week. It was four or five hours later that we received the call that he was dead.

I don't know if I had known more about the signs of suicide whether I could have saved Bryan. I don't know if Bryan had known more about depression and its treatments that he could have saved himself. What I do know is that suicide leaves a wake of devastated people in it's path and that by its very nature it can be prevented. That's enough for me to want to help.

If any of you would like to support me in this effort with a donation to the cause I would greatly appreciate it. The following link will take you to my online donation page.

Pete's Out Of Darkness Walk Donation Page

Bah, if it's a manager, call it a manager. If it were something else, you'd call it something else. There are a lot of things to manage in a software product, so you're likely to have a lot of managers.

Bah, if it's a coordinator, call it a coordinator. If it were something else, you'd call it something else. There are a lot of things to coordinate in a software product, so you're likely to have a lot of coordinators.

or

Bah, if it's a jockey, call it a jockey. If it were something else, you'd call it something else. There are a lot of things to jockey in a software product, so you're likely to have a lot of jockeys.

or

Bah, if it's a wrangler call it a wrangler. If it were something else, you'd call it something else. There are a lot of things to wrangle in a software product, so you're likely to have a lot of wranglers.

I think Nate was actually saying that Manager is common generic name for objects that work on other objects, so why not stick with it. I don't disagree with that notion of conforming to a standard, but in the case of using Manager to the exclusion of other names, I think that's a slippery slope. Often another words could be used to describe what sort of management was being performed that are more accurate or descriptive or would better differentiate the classes position in the object model.

This leads me to the second comment by my old buddy and star developer Bob. Bob points to an old Taligent C++ guide that says:

The presence of a manager object typically signifies a problem with your design, the result of which is a client interface expressed as objects outside the client's problem domain. The word manager in a class name often indicates this problem. A centralized implementation, either within an address space or between address spaces, is just an implementation detail. For example, suppose you want a function to apply to multiple windows, such as CloseAllOpenWindows. The wrong way to do this is to have clients call a TWindowManager class. The correct way is to make CloseAllOpenWindows a static member of TWindow. It is associated with the class it applies to, and its multiobject function is reflected by its being static.

In defense of Bob, he indicated he didn't agree in totality with the statement, he was pointing it out more as an anecdote. I've been pondering this advice a lot since then and I've reached the conclusion that it's just plain bad. Consider the example they give about TWindowManager and the call to CloseAllOpenWindows. They recommended making the call CloseAllOpenWindows a static on TWindow. How convenient that the example call was to close ALL open windows. It's an edge case where this design would work but what if you wanted to operate on a subset of windows. The reason you would use a manager type class is for exactly this reason. Perhaps calling the class TWindowSet would have been better than TWindowManager, but that's besides the point. I agree with the idea of asking objects to operate on themselves, but a classes static interface is not an object. It's just a namespace of functions related to a class of objects. An instance of class that manages, jockeys or wrangles a bunch of other object is an object and a better design.

Link

What has gone wrong? Microsoft, with $40 billion in sales and 60,000 employees, has grown musclebound and bureaucratic. Some current and former employees describe a stultifying world of 14-hour strategy sessions, endless business reviews and a preoccupation with PowerPoint slides; of laborious job evaluations, hundreds of e-mails a day and infighting among divisions so fierce that it hobbles design and delays product releases. In short, they describe precisely the behavior that humbled another tech giant: IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people ) in the late 1980s. Tellingly, IBM reached a point of crisis just over three decades after it started selling computers to commercial users.

The point about the preoccupation with PowerPoint slides hit really close to home. But then again, perhaps my division was an anachronism. Nah. The following is a great quote too.

"Microsoft has become what it used to mock," says Gabe Newell, a developer on the first three versions of Windows. At late-night rounds of poker with "Bill and Steve" in the mid-1980s, he says, "we laughed at IBM. They had all this process for monitoring productivity, and yet we knew they had spectacularly bad productivity. That's Microsoft now."

If my experience was close to typical, Gabe should still be laughing.

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Abstractor, Accountant, Actor, Adjudicator, Adjuster, Administrator, Agent, Appraiser, Apprentice,Arranger, Assembler, Attendant, Auditor, Babysitter, Bagger, Breeder, Brewer, Builder, Bundler, Captain, Checker, Chief, Classifier, Clerk, Collector, Comptroller, Controller, Coordinator, Dealer, Director, Distributor, Drainer, Estimator, Eviscerator, Executive, Expediter, Finisher, Gatekeeper, Gatherer, General, Generator, Guide, Handler, Helper, Host, Hostess, Inducer, Inspector, Installer, Jockey, Judge, Juggler, Keeper, Laborer, Librarian, Lieutenant, Manager, Mechanic, Mediator, Modeler, Observer, Operator, Pilot, Planner, Polisher, Porter, Preparer, Processor, Purifier, Receiver, Referee, Repairer, Representative, Salvager, Scribe, Secretary, Sergeant, Shepherd, Stacker, Supervisor, Tender, Tester, Umpire, Winder, Worker, Wrangler.

Much thanks goes to the Job Genie. Of course, you know, after wasting a bunch of time compiling this list I'm still inclined to stick with Manager. It just seems less contrived.

Updated on 9/15: Added Umpire, Referee and Controller
Second update on 9/15: From Ned, Judge, Adjudicator, Comptroller, Scribe
Third update on 9/20: From Ned, Juggler

Link: From the Dungeon to the Dictionary

I left Larry’s office wishing I was at home so I could turn on the news. I wandered down back towards my office when it dawned on me that the Iris second floor lunch room had a TV. I bolted up the stairs to the second floor. The lunch room was already fairly full with people fixated in the TV. I can’t recall who was in the room or if found a seat or stood but I can recall the stunned, jaw open looks on peoples faces when the first tower fell. My own feeling I find hard to describe. Like most people I felt a mixture of horror and awe but I also felt excitement. I’m embarrassed to admit that last emotion but it was there. The best I can describe it is like the feeling of excitement when you get in a fight and you’ve just been hit by the first punch and you now feel morally justified to unleash your own civilly constrained animal anger and violence.

The rest of the day and the following weeks are a blur. I recall watching a lot of news and feeling a pent up anger aimed at Afghanistan as we waited for the seemingly unavoidable war to follow. I recall all the flags people hung on their cars and doors. I recall the giant smoking pile of rubble and human remains that had once been the two towers. And I recall the seemingly never ending funerals for the lost firefighters and other emergency responders.

Sitting here now, it seems almost like ancient history even though it was only four year ago. The event changed me like I’m sure they changed most every other American. I’ve changed in ways I recognize and probably in ways I don’t. Personally, I know I’m more jingoistic than I ever was before and while most people still label me a Liberal, I’m finding less and less of the Liberal agenda I agree with. It will be interesting to see how things change in my perspective on the major anniversaries of this event to come.

Moving past the initial response, I think this event has exposed our societies inherent classism. We are a classist society. We use classism in our society to drive people to work hard and make a better life for themselves. That's not to say the middle and upper class don't have compassion for the lower class (just look at the donations and ongoing relief efforts) but there is an ingrained mentality of expecting others to be able to take care of themselves. For better or worse, that's the American way.

via (spaceflightnow)

If you actually follow any of Why's link and get curious about the whole hoodwink'd thing, don't come to me looking for an explanation. I still haven't figured it out.