rare bird

My twist on the BibleCentre definition: "And the Lord kept adding to the project the bugs who were being found."

By the time my daughter is as old as I am now, the polar ice cap will have completely melted, resulting in a sea-level rise of 20 feet.

(RED) manifesto

My wife’s water broke on a Wednesday afternoon, right as I was getting off work. Perfect timing , I thought. My wife’s due date was the next day. She even does labor in a scheduled way . I had heard that if the water breaks, the baby has 24 hours to be born, after which she starts to lose oxygen. I had the image and sound of a ticking digital clock in my head as I walked down the long outside stairway of my employer's building, to my car. The sun was setting – it was a perfect moment. My wife’s bag was packed – we were ready. She was driving home from the auto dealership where she works. I would meet her there and we would go to the hospital together. It went according to plan. We arrived, they put us in a room, and hooked my wife up to a fetal monitor. It had an amber display, like an old IBM PC. The only graphic was a pulsating heart – keeping track of the baby’s heart rhythm was the machine’s main purpose. The room was cool inside – why are all hospital rooms that way? It must...

This was published using Google Docs.

"And now, your Highness, we will discuss the location of your secret Rebel base..."

From Morning Edition on NPR: Here are some keys -- if you can remember them -- to a better memory. Do Crossword puzzles, read fiction, avoid heavy drinking and, most of all, turn off the TV. That's according to a survey of 30,000 people in Australia. Researchers found those who watch TV less than an hour a day have the strongest memories.

Potential Israel-Syria conflict During his appearance on the John Batchelor Show on July 26 , 2006 , Yossef Bodansky delineated a set of red lines that are not to be crossed by Hezbollah or by their Syrian backers. Bodansky is the Director of the Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare. The red lines are: a missile attack on Tel Aviv or Jerusalem the use of chemical or biological weapons on Israelis the execution of any of the three kidnapped soldiers any movement or suspicious activity by Syrian tanks or artillery He indicated that if any of these lines should be crossed, Israel would open a third front in the conflict by bombing the Syrian capital, Damascus . Since Iran has declared it will stand with Syria against Israel in the face of an attack, it is possible that Israel will also pre-emptively attack Iran as well, though Bodansky says the United States would have to approve that action. He specifically said that Israel does not need any approval from the United State...

GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN... WHICH SIDE DO YOU WANT? 1) Israel 2) Arab Axis (Theater = middleEast) Israel* vs Lebanon(Hezbollah) Israel* occupies Lebanon Israel attacks Syria? / Syria attacks Israel? Iran vs Israel Morocco vs Israel? Yemen vs Israel? Saudi Arabia vs Israel? Egypt vs Israel? Anti-Israeli Axis forms? Iran enters Iraq US* (Iraq) vs Iran US* (Afghanistan) vs Iran US vs Anti-Israeli Axis? NATO* vs Iran? India* vs Pakistan*? Pakistan* vs Israel*? * - nuclearWeapon state Remarks: -------- ?'s are hypothetical possibilities, not given as probabilities. every event is inter-dependent on the previous event; if the previous event does not occur, the following event probably will not occur. rule of escalation : if a country/alliance perceives that continuing war may be more beneficial than not, then war will continue. if a country/alliance perceives that continuing war may be more detrimental than not, then Ceasefire may be...

For the rare bird lurkers that didn't live through this first hand, there have been two books recently published about the Orange Revolution. Last week's Economist had a full review . RandomHouse has more information about "An Orange Revolution" , and the Carnegie Endowment has more information about "Revolution in Orange" (which is an excellent website, by the way). Does anyone else think the titles are just a little too similar? Only one vowel different!

I love free things even more that I love comic books. You can enter your zip code on the web page and it will give you a list of stores participating. There seems to be quite a few. I looked at the sponsors for this and they aren't giving away anything too great... but still, it's free and we should support local businesses.

Note: This is a chemical equation. US airstrikes + US tactical nuclear weapons -> (WMD war) + Iranian chemical & biological weapons + Hezbollah -> Sum of All Fears

A programmer's wife tells him to go to the grocery store. She says, "Buy a link of Kielbasa (sausage). And if there are eggs, buy a dozen." The programmer comes home with a dozen Kielbasa links. He says, "There were eggs."

Wait for SP1? Maybe by then Sinofsky will have fixed things.

Instead of pontificating, we should ask ourselves - is this realistically going to make you, personally, more likely to buy a Mac than a PC the next time around? How soon do you think that will be?

Do you remember the computer games that we used to play, before PC processors became capable of rendering high-graphics laden video games, and consoles became mainstream? All we had to go on (other than fantastic writing) was our imagination. Do you remember Adventure, Zork, The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (when was the last time "eat bufferin" was something that you did in a game)? The commercial viability of this "interactive fiction" may be gone, but the tradition continues.

I've also read this book, and thought it a very worthwhile read. I would say buy the book, or borrow it from the library. Hamlet's right, it shouldn't be news, but to a lot of people it still is, especially the details, and concerning those outside the technology sector. We all know how insulated CEO's can be from facts on the ground. If you're rich enough, you don't care about being outsourced. And if your CFO tells you it will cut costs, you just do it. (Our President equally doesn't seem to be affected by facts when they inconvenience him. He should be slapped with a fish, too, but that's a different matter.) Friedman's anecdotes serve to reinforce his point. There's a big difference between reading about outsourcing and insourcing in newspapers, and reading details from a full-length book. Friedman's facts can't be argued with – only a fool would try. Globalization is happening. It affects your life. It is i...

I don't like it when people talk in the bathroom. Especially when managers do it. If there are any managers out there reading this, please stop doing it. This is much more of a temptation for men than for women, for obvious reasons. It's seen as a way of catching up or touching base. Or else just a fear of silence. But it only serves to embarass, I think, and nothing constructive can come out of it, ultimately.

I finally finished reading The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman . His basic premise is that technology and free trade have allowed domestic companies and developing nations to compete on a previously unknown scale. There isn't a lot to disagree with about his opinion, and there are some interesting anecdotes about how Mexico is outsourcing to India and India is outsourcing to Sri Lanka. Overall, though, the first 400 pages of the book are a complete review of what I thought was common knowledge. You mean IT is being outsourced to India? China is churning out computer science graduates ten times faster than the U.S you say? This shouldn't be news. If this book really is "a must read for today's CEO", as a friend of mine says, then those CEOs should be slapped with a fish for being hopelessly out of the loop. Throughout the book, I felt that Friedman failed to find a single voice of dissension. Everyone he interviewed agreed with him wholeheartedly. I can't b...

The follow up to Mary Poppendieck's Lean Software Development is available online as a review copy. The original book led to a lot of changes in the agile software community. I find myself giving the book to both developers and managers. In my opinion, it is still the must read book about the software development process. Plus, it is good to see ex-3M employees make a mark in the world. Each chapter is a seperate .pdf file... I like to print them out double sided and make one big binder.

Pity the Gelth. I felt like a Gelth this morning, thanks to my nearly six-month old daughter, who woke up at 1:30 AM last night. And I thought she had settled on a schedule already. Silly me. BTW, this link has nothing to do with "The Unquiet Dead," the episode featuring the Gelth, but it is what you get if you Google "pity the gelth" and it is a fun Dr. Who acecdote of kids reviewing how scary the program is. The kids refer to the Gelth, though it's in a different episode.

A story about a Minnesota WWII pilot that reminds me of the song by James Taylor.

This sci-fi television series forms some of my (and VM's) fondest childhood and teenagerhood memories. It disappeared in 1989. It has been re-generated :) so if you're clueless about it, Wikipedia gives you ample chance to catch up.

Sometimes popular myths about a famous figure—such as the legend that St. Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland—can obscure that person's real accomplishments. In honor of St. Patrick's Day, The Teaching Company is proud to present Professor William R. Cook in a lecture that provides historical context and background to the biography of this 4th-century Christian saint.

So Google may use MSFT technology (.net) to present a word-processor (to compete with Word). Either that's inexplicably bizarre, or it shows just how inter-dependent the technosphere has become.

I know it's lame to just link to what other blogs are saying, but sometimes the content is so compelling that I have to do it. I especially like how Frank points out that it's not the case that the western system is entirely bad and the Asian system is entirely good; rather, each are good at different stages of the game. I've always been interested in education as a subject - now that I have a daughter, it jumps to the top of my concerns. Let me also say while I'm here that the bloggers at Microsoft are producing some of the most nteresting stuff out there, and it's not at all about standing on a particular soapbox. MSFT employees are genuinely interested in all facets of work and life, and have interesting things to say.

I just finished reading Jeff Hawkin's On Intelligence in about two days... which is fast for me. I read Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines a few years ago and I still think that is a better introduction to computer AI and the future, but this is definitely a good and thought-provoking book. Hawkins defines intelligence as the ability to predict the future based on analogy from the past and goes into depth on how the human brain does this. I feel it's a refinement of neural networks more than a rejection of them, but I'm no expert. I'm just a guy that like non-fiction.

Scroll down and read the section called "If God were a computer programmer". Some of these are pretty funny!

One of my managers at the company I work for has told me we need a furniture solution for our software testing lab that gives us lots of space to place hardware, and increases the tech look of our lab. The AnthroBench fits the bill!

I'm too excited not to share this with pretty much everyone I know. I released the first version of the open source project I've been working on this Winter. It is a Java port of a time tracking tool that I use to track my time at work... plus I made some enhancements. Check it out . I'm proud yet ashamed of myself for spending all my nights and weekends coding.