Not that these are the only two reasons I think he’s awesome, but I wanted to share.
August 31, 2008
August 30, 2008
Umm, don’t we live in the land of free speech?
Found this link through a twitter (tweet? what’s the right word?) of Tim O’Reilly. Massive police raids on suspected protestors in Minneapolis. This is absolutely disgusting. I don’t even have words to describe how I feel about this.
August 26, 2008
Why do cows get this ability and we don’t?
Thanks to a twitter from Kathy Sierra, I found this article about cows aligning themselves with the magnetic poles. This is awesome! I also think all the uses people are finding for google earth and google maps are fascinating.
August 25, 2008
Traffic Jams and Software Projects
This post by Dave Smith seems rather apropos to my work situation at the moment. We develop traffic simulations and we never have slack built into anything. Plus it’s a good reminder that I heard about the book Slack at Agile 2008 and wanted to read it.
August 14, 2008
Agile 2008 Conference
Last week, I attended the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto. I’m intending to write up my thoughts about some of the sessions as I have time. Quickly though, I thoroughly enjoyed Michael Feathers legacy code keynote and both of Henrik Kniberg’s sessions I attended, one on technical debt and one about ways to screw up with XP and Scrum. Mike Cohn’s estimation and planning session was excellent as well. I’m excited again to apply many of the things I learned at the conference to my work and am hoping I can truly bring the benefits of agile development to the company who graciously paid my way to the conference.
The one thought that has really stood out above everything at the conference is that the practices under the agile umbrella give us the tools and knowledge to bring a new level of professionalism to software development.
The only bad news ( 
) is that I now have a whole new list of books to buy.
August 13, 2008
Sewing excitement
My daughter has been drawing pictures of dresses a lot lately so I pulled out some patterns I had of old dresses. She very intently looked through all of them and picked one out that she’d like to have. I haven’t done a lot of sewing (especially recently), but I think this could be a lot of fun. I have the pattern sitting on my desk so I see it every time I sit down. Just looking at the patterns has me very excited. I’m hoping to make the dress for her for Halloween, which is coming up quickly so I had better get started. I’ll keep you posted about my progress. First things first, I need to buy some fabric!
