LifeHacker is doing a series on how I work and one of my coworkers brought the concept to our wiki late last week. This is approximately what I posted. (I hadn't yet seen the LifeHacker posts, so the style doesn't exactly match.)

( Read more... )

[Originally locked, but I don't work there any more, so...]

Several weeks ago:

Tech lead: And we need to make a visualization to show X (which, from context, TL thinks is a big deal).
Me: Don't sweat it. I can code that in 10 minutes, once Y finishes the information architecture.
TL: I'm holding you to that.
Me: Project Manager doesn't go smaller than hours, so call it one hour.
TL: And we also need a chart that shows Z.
Me: That's harder -- put down two hours. For the pair.
Project Manager: I'll allocate a day to be safe.

Today:

TL: (angst) and you're going on vacation in August! What do you mean you haven't started?
Me: Y is finishing the information architecture this week.
TL: (angst angst angst)
Me: Ok, I'll talk to him and see if he can hurry it up.

Time elapses while I acquire a stable baseline. An hour and a half after that:

Me: See the two attached screen shots. By the way, you didn't specify A and B but they seemed like good ideas so I added them. I could add C and D tomorrow morning if you like.

I am vindicated. And I have learned something about how hard TL and PjM think certain tasks are, which I may someday need to use to my advantage. :-)

I interrupt preparations for the class I'm teaching next week at the music and dance collegium (gosh, I hope I have this calibrated right...) to pass along some random short bits.

Dear Netflix: I appreciate the convenience of your recent change to treat an entire TV series as one unit in the streaming queue, instead of one season at a time like before. However, in doing so you have taken away the ability to rate individual seasons of shows, which is valuable data. It also makes me wonder, when you recommend things to me based on my ratings, if you are giving all ratings the same weight -- 200 hours of a long-running TV show should maybe count differently than a two-hour movie. Just sayin'.

These photos by Doug Welch are stunning. Link from thnidu.

How Pixar fosters collective creativity was an interesting read on fostering a good workplace. Link from nancylebov.

Speaking of the workplace, I enjoyed reading how to run your career like a gentlewoman and several other articles I found there by following links. Link from _subdivisions_.

Rube Goldberg meets J.S. Bach, from several people. Probably fake, but it amused me anyway. (This is a three-minute Japanese commercial. Do commercials that long run on TV, or would this have been theatrical, or what?)

Speaking of ads, in advance of our SCA group's election for a new baron and baroness today, the current baron sent around a pointer to this video about an upcoming British referendum on voting systems. Well-done! (Of course, I agree with both the system and the species they advocate. :-) ) I wish we had preference ballots in the US.

A while back a coworker pointed me to how to make a hamentashen Sierpinski triangle. Ok ok, some of my browser tabs have established roots; Purim was a while ago. But it's still funny, and I may have to make that next year.

Speaking of geeky Jewish food, a fellow congregant pointed me to The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. which looks like fun. I've certainly found myself in that kind of conversation at times (e.g. is unicorn kosher? well, is it a goat (medieval) or a horse (Disney)?). Some of you have too, I know. :-)

dr_zrfq passed on this article about a dispute between a church and a bar. Nothing special about that, you say? In this case the church members prayed to block it, the bar was struck by lightning, the bar owner sued, and the church denied responsibility. I love the judge's comment on the case: “I don't know how I’m going to decide this, but as it appears from the paperwork, we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and an entire church congregation that does not.”

47 seconds of cuteness: elk calf playing in water, from shalmestere.

I don't remember where I found the link to these t-shirts, but there are some cute ones there.

Neat visualization #1: the scale of the universe, showing how big (and small) things are. Link from filkerdave.

Ooh, pretty: when Planet Earth looks like art. Link from browngirl.

Overheard at work: "Every time a developer cries, a tester gets his horns".

Neat visualization #2, from a coworker: 200 counteries, 200 years, 4 minutes.

I had sometimes wondered what the point of bots was -- what does somebody get out of creating bogus LJ accounts just to add and remove friends? (At least when they post nonsense comments they might be testing security for when the spam comes later.) Bots on Livejournal explored helps answer that question. Link from alienor.

Graph paper on demand (other types too). Thanks, loosecanon; I can never find the right size graph paper lying around when I need it.

A handy tool: bandwidth meter, because the router reports theoretical, not actual, connection speed.

And a request for links (or other input): does anybody have midrash or torah commentary on the light of creation (meaning the light of that first day)? I have the couple passasges from B'reishit Rabbah quoted in Sefer Ha-Aggadah and I have the Rashi; any other biggies? I was asked to teach a segment of a class in a few days.

This week we have customers in for a big development-and-integration event, with the result that I'm expected to basically spend the week in a lab doing development (configuration, not Java code, but pretty complex configuration). The lab, for sound security reasons, is not on the corporate network nor on the internet.

Monday morning was spent setting up customers' servers, providing an overview of changes since the last release, and stuff like that. So I really only spent about half a day working on that lab machine, but it was still exhausting. The default Windows configuration is not one that works well for me visually, and the tools available to edit XML (and read server logs) were Notepad and Wordpad, and, well, that sucked. Oh, and while I'd managed to get another monitor (the standard setup had them bolted to the back of the table; it's our deployment configuration but that's too far for me to see), I realized late in the day that it was at the wrong height and that was part of why my neck hurt.

Ok, then. Yesterday morning I appropriated a thumb drive (after confirming I was allowed to connect it to my corporate machine), went upstairs to my desk, and grabbed a few tools I'd need: Windows display theme, emacs (with my configuration file), and KeyTweak to remap caps-lock to control like Jim [1] intended. (The Cygwin installer relies on an internet connection so no joy there, but I was mostly just repeating the same command lines over and over in the DOS shell, so ok. And no IntelliJ for licensing reasons.) And a ream of paper, for the monitor.

Ah, much better. I can get through the rest of this week now. If we could do something about the fluorescent lights it'd be even better, but at least they aren't directly overhead or in my line of sight.

[1] Jim Gosling. I used his emacs for a few years before I encountered Stallman's, which morphed into Gnu, which is what everyone uses now. And back in those days, the control key was just to the left of home row (VT100 terminal), easily accessible -- important for a program where almost all commands involve that key. I have never, ever adjusted to the PC (and Mac) putting that key down on the bottom row where I can't easily reach it without actually moving my left hand out of typing position.

There's a parlor game going around that calls for the poster to list three things he has done that he doesn't think any of his readers have done. I think I must be too boring; I can't think of three (that would also be interesting enough to post).

I keep a log for Erik, recording anything unusual and all medication starts/stops. I started doing this because I thought there might be correlations between meds and appetite changes; none have emerged so far, but it's turned out to be useful in other ways. ("Any vomiting?" "June 2, in the morning". "You know that stuff?") So anyway... Erik's appetite had been low last week, so at my vet's direction I gave him fluids for a few days (also logged). Things got better so I stopped, but Monday he was back to not eating so I hit him again, this time with a bit more because I could (150ml). Tuesday's log entry: "oink". :-) Good to see that work sometimes... (The healthy appetite has continued today.)

I have a minor workplace mystery. Yesterday someone left me a post-it note containing a charge code and nothing else, and used my Sharpie to do so without recapping it (so it was dried out and useless). I asked the usual suspects, but no one recognized the code. Shrug. Today I came in to find my entire post-it pad and several pens missing. WTF? I have the back desk in a two-person enclosed space; it's unlikely that a passerby needed a pen or some paper and my desk was the most convenient source. I wonder what surprise will greet me tomorrow.

Language peeves: "council" is a body; "counsel" is what advisors give. "Populous" means there are lots of people; "populace" is the people. The "populous" should not be giving "council" to anyone, ok? (Both of these errors are common on SCA mailing lists.)

Language Log reproduces some careless spam from Barnes and Noble. I like the poster's method of thanking them.

Funny cat video via thnidu.

Something in our house is chirping intermittently. It sounds like a smoke detector, but we've changed all the relevant batteries and it hasn't stopped. It does not happen predictably (and when it does it chirps only once), so it's very hard to localize. Whee.

Hummingbirds from egg to flight, courtesy of otterblossom.

Scott Adams speaks sense about flag-burning.

Lesson learned: interns go where you point them. :-) They'll do exactly what you tell them to do, and they haven't been out in the world long enough to encounter nuance, so don't give vague directions. (In this case: swap in this new logger class, and while you're at it get rid of the direct calls to System.out.println(). Um, yeah -- I should have said explicitly to replace them with calls to the logger where it made sense to do so. I didn't mean wipe them out entirely. Fortunately, that's why we have change control.)

I recently picked up (at deep discount) the first season of a TV show called Jeremiah, pretty much entirely because J. Michael Straczynski wrote it. (Well, he wrote the episodes; the story is based on a comic book by someone else.) The show ran two seasons on Showtime c. 2002-2003. Only the first is available on DVD, so there is disappointment down the road for me, but so far I'm really enjoying what I've seen (six episodes). The premise is that 15 years ago some mega-virus wiped out everyone on earth past puberty; the kids who survived are now adults living in the aftermath. Jeremiah and his sidekick Kurdy are two of the guys in (figurative) white hats; my one-word characterization of Jeremiadh is "paladin". Jeremiah is trying to find a place his parents named before they died, though he's not sure why it's important, and the few people who've heard of it won't talk about it. We've seen glimpses of his back-story (particularly that he feels responsible for his brother's death) and I assume more will be forthcoming. So far the show seems to be episodic with a loose arc, but it's early yet. ( speculation -- not technically spoilers, I don't think, but cut anyway )

In context this made perfect sense. Out of context, I'm glad no managers were walking by at the time.

"Well, if you don't want to do incest, nepotism will work."

(A coworker needed to cons up a relationship diagram with doubly-linked nodes, like a spouse who's also a sibling or a child who's also an employee...)

This is so wrong. Wrong, but expedient.

I needed to have a somewhat-private 5-minute conversation with a coworker. She and I hunted for an available conference room (or then-empty office) with no luck. Finally, we opted for the ante-room of the restroom.

At one point when we were low on meeting space at a previous company, we added the elevator to the room list in the meeting software. (We had the building to ourselves, so we could.) That would have been better, but the elevators here are less handy.