Schedule Chicken

I came across this article in the MSDN Library, written in April 1999 concerning Microsoft's latest reorganization. What particularly caught my attention was this phenomenon dubbed "Schedule Chicken" after that famous scene in Rebel Without a Cause in which one unfortunate lad goes careening over a cliff during a game of chicken when his coat hangs on the car door. From the article:

The software project equivalence happens when two or more areas of a product claim they can deliver their features at a ridiculously early date because each assumes the other feature area team is lying even worse about how long it will take them to deliver their features. This charade marches forward past one psychedelic checkpoint after another until just before the goods are actually due. A more seasoned team lead will delay copping to what is painfully obvious for as long as humanly possible, hoping someone else will break first and jump out of their car. The ceremony where the team lead has to admit the emperor isn't wearing any clothes results in a tribal ritual that rivals Inca sacrifices, except that the virgin probably felt better about her fate. It is very difficult for the offending feature team to recover from being the furthest out on the schedule—because now that the truth is known, all everyone else has to do to look good is to finish just before that late team. Even if the schedule chickens end up beating the deadline, it is nearly impossible for the people on that team to beat the stigma of being unable to stay on a schedule.

Prior to this reorg, Steve Ballmer apparently spent some time studying company culture, and decided this and several other such practices had to go. For instance:

Distinctively unique ideas are no longer killed simply because they are distinctively unique. Specifically, "If this is such a big problem, how come you are the only one who has ever thought of it?" is no longer a valid reason to kill a feature or product.

Distinctively stupid ideas, unique or otherwise, are shot on sight by the newly created Stupidity Discipline Task Force, whose main mission is to walk around campus with rolled up back issues of Dr. Dobbs ready, able and willing to use them on the noses of program managers.

Whoever thought browsing the MSDN Library could be so, er, educational?

Don't light that match!

Was just playing around with Picasa and BloggerBot, and came across this photo I took a couple of weeks ago at Tiger Mountain State Park. Makes you wonder what's at the top of that mountain. ;-)
Posted by Hello

Akiyoshi's illusions

Ok, horribly geeky yes, but I thought it was cool. Makes a great wallpaper for annoying your coworkers. :-) 

Hmm... just occurred to me I forgot to post the URL where I found this.

Weekend Plans and Hi to Mom & Dad :-)

As usual, my weekend plans turned out nothing like I'd expected, but were rather more enjoyable than I'd planned. I'd made up my mind to do absolutely nothing on Saturday. Well, nothing other than getting my oil changed, apartment hunting, and a long walk with a book at least. Instead I spent a fun afternoon in downtown Seattle trying out French pastries, taking the Underground Tour, and meeting some new friends. I figure my car's waited a month for that oil change, it can surely take one more week. :)

Then on Sunday the young adult group at my church had a bbq at a park on Lake Sammamish. It was a little chilly out, and it still seems really odd to me to be wearing a jacket in the middle of June, but it was a beautiful day to spend outside. A number of people were out of town this weekend, but we had a great time tossing a frisbee around and knocking it out of trees.

On another note, my mom just told me that she and my dad, my aunt and a few friends have been reading my blog/website, so I just wanted to say hi to all of them and feel free to leave comments. (Click the comments link after a post, write something in the text box, select Anonymous and click Publish.) Blogs work as a sort of conversation over the web, and can be a fun way to keep in touch with people. :)

Microsoft, Pho and Me

I feel like a true Microsoftie now; put in a nearly 12 hours today and was strongly considering driving back up after salsa to check on my test cases. Ok, I did have a kinda long lunch in there; tried my first Vietnamese food, a dish called pho. It's this soup with lots of noodles, meat and tendons (which were suprisingly pretty good) that you eat with chopsticks. Was a little messy, but alot of fun. Now what would be even more fun would be to show up at work tomorrow and find that all my test cases passed. Wishful thinking.

Jonah as a Type of Christ

As I was reading Jonah last night, it struck me that both Jonah and Christ were found sleeping through pretty bad storms and woken by annoyed shipmates before the storm was calmed by God's power. Now I know Jonah's three days in the fish correlate to the Messiah's three days in the grave, but I'd never paid attention to these further similarites, though they now seem rather obvious.

Odd News of the Day and Other Stuff

Ok, I'd already posted my allotment of strange/odd/interesting news of the day, but this one's so odd I just can't help it! Officials from a rural town in China racked up a $24,000 bill at a restraunt, and can only afford around $600 a year to pay off their debt to the now bankrupt restraunt. You hafta wonder what the rest of the story might be...

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8285273/?GT1=6657

It's been a fun evening, went to work out with Abigail after work and I'm hoping to be nice and sore tomorrow. I'm afraid I often don't push myself hard enough to really be much good, but it gets so boring just shuffling weights around. Mariya usually joins us, but she skipped tonight and cooked up a delicious Russian meal for us and a coupla other Microsofties. She made tons of food - borscht, vinaigrette, and three or four other dishes I don't know the names of. I don't remember ever eating beets growing up, but they're actually quite tasty. At least, they were after she got done with them.

But now I'm thoroughly exhausted and full, and think I shall head off to read another couple chapters of a Greg Bear book on loan from a coworker. I had never read him before, and so far he reminds me a lot of Asimov. But then again, I've only raed one of his stories so far, so I haven't been able to decide if I like him or not yet.

A Big Woops for U of KA and the McD of the Future

Seems the University of Kansas got itself into a little trouble when someone sent a group email to all those students on financial aid who were failing all their classes. An easy but rather embarrassing mistake to make. I've seen this happen several times with mailing lists I've been on or service I'd bought when someone fails to understand the purpose of BCC. And then you've got the rash of spam as everyone replies all to complain about their email being visible.

Another news clip that got my attention this morning was on the McDonald's of the future. New ideas being played with at the flagship restraunt include WiFi internet access, plasma TV's and kiosks for burning CDs and downloading ring tones. And if that's not enough to attract today's techie crowd, how about a latte with that Big Mac?

Peanut Butter

Just made the nice discovery that I actually prefer Peter Pan's reduced fat peanut butter over the real stuff. It's got a nice texture to it, goes perfect with my caramel rice cakes and not-quite-ripe bananas.

Mutual Funds or Indexes?

I've read so many articles pressing index funds over mutual funds, it was a nice break to come across Motley Fool's recently commentary on what a mutual fund with a good manager can do for your money. True, most mutual funds fall short of the returns you can get off an index, but there's a few outstanding ones that could be a good investment tool if you're not up for investigating individual stocks.

Of particular interest to me was the difference a couple percentage points can make over the years. For instance, if you invest $10,000 for 30 years with an index earning 10.2% (which was the avg return for VFINX over the past 10 years) you'd have $184,267. If you'd invested the same money with a fund with an avg annualized return of 12.2% (such as VWNFX), you'd end up with 316,072. If you up the rate to 14.8% (TAVFX), you'd be sitting with a nice $623,522.

Unfortunately, it's just as impossible to predict the future results of mutual funds (and their managers!) as stocks or even indexes. So if you're like me and lack the time, interest or ability to research funds on your own, I strongly recommend Austin Pryor's newsletter, Sound Mind Investing. I checked them out after hearing Larry Burkett recommend his site numerous times; there's a number of articles on finances, investing and stewardship from a Biblical perspective available for free.

Monad Gets Slashdotted

One of my favorite Windows projects, Monad will be replacing the old Windows command prompt. Lots of fun functionality and completely object oriented, piping through objects instead of text. Nice scripting capabilities, and query results are returned as .NET objects for easy manipulation. What really caught my attention when I attended a demo several weeks back was the ability to map anything, such as the registery, to a drive which you can browse just like any old directory.

URL: http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/06/09/1219213.shtml?tid=201&tid=218

Other Monad links:
Instructions for getting the Monad beta
Jason Nadal's Blog on Monad
Chat Trascript with Monad Devs

Midnight Rambles

Just got home from a fun evening of dancing, and I'm still a bit too wired for sleep so I thought I'd make another post. Well technically, we finished dancing two and a half hours ago, but several of us went to Denny's afterwards. Not being up for a full dinner as I'd tried a terriyaki place right before the dance, I had a nutritious midnight snack of hashbrowns and gravy. And two cups of hot chocolate. (The nice waitress kept bringing out refills!) Was good stuff though, I hadn't had hashbrowns and gravy since before all the Shoney's in Dallas closed some years back.

Anyways... tonight's dance was a lot of fun as more guys than girls showed up for a change, but my feet will be paying for it the next few days. They had an open merengue lesson right before the dance, and as I'd shown up a little early and they were short a girl, I got a free dance lesson. I'd been talking to a lady and hadn't been paying much attention to the lesson until the instructor decided to use me for a demo; great way to learn a new step. It's fun being a follower. :-)

I learned a bit more WC Swing in my private lesson before the dance party, so tried out a bit of that tonight and discovered my feet haven't quite learned their place. It's a rather confusing dance though... most figures are done to six counts, but a few switch to eight counts just to throw you off. That's my excuse anyways. :) I'm going to a couple WC Swing workshops tomorrow afternoon in Kirkland, so I figured it'd be good to try out the basics beforehand at least. I'm probably getting in over my head, but several of us from the studio are going, so I figured it'll be fun anyways.

Hmm... this is entirely too lengthy and I'm still not tired, so I think it's time for another couple chapters of Harry Potter.

Microsoft Antispyware Beta

Works suprisingly well for a beta... I'm especially curious about the "peer-based exploit-detection data-sharing mechanism" (wording stolen from Scot's Review as I couldn't put it better myself) which aims to stop new exploits in their tracks. In this same review, MS's AntiSpyware utility compares favorably to AdAware and Spybot.

There's not much in the way of spyware to find on my dev machine at work, but I'll hafta run my own tests on my laptop later on and see for myself how we hold up.

URL: http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx

My Kind of English

This has been around for awhile now, but it still amused me so I figured I'd go ahead and post 'em. I guess I'm a true Southener after all, even if I am missin' that Texan drall.

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English

25% Dixie

10% Yankee

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Making money off your savings

If you're looking for a better place to save money than your local bank, bankrate.com offers a rather useful comparison rate table of the highest interest rates on savings accounts, money market accounts and money market funds. And if you're not sure what the difference between these is, Austin Pryor's latest newsletter has an article on Why You Usually Get Your Best Savings Deals from Money Funds.

While the difference between 1% and 3% doesn't sound like much, it adds up. Even if you only have $5000 in an account with a 3% APY, that's an extra $150 per year in your pocket with no risk of losing your hard earned dough.

On a not so random side note... if you decide to open an account with ING Direct, let me know and if you list me as a referrer, they'll start you off with $25 in your account and I get a $10 referral bonus. They're offering 3% APY now, but with interest rates on the rise, you can probably find better rates with a money market fund.

Tabs for IE6

Microsoft offers tabbed browsing for IE6 through the latest update for the MSN toolbar. I'm not quite sure this is enough to entice me to use the toolbar, but it's worth a try at least. :)

URL: http://toolbar.msn.com/

Inside Out Reeses

When I saw these at Fred Meyer's, I had to try them. If you haven't seen them yet, these little guys are just like the normal peanut butter cups but with the peanut butter on the outside and a chocolate center. I'm a big fan of peanut butter, so I thought this sounded like a neat idea. Unfortunately, the whole thing is just a little too dry for my taste, and even less healthy than the original with a nice 240 calories and 15g of fat for the normal pack of two. Next up - extra creamy Reese peanut butter cups.

Linux Cartoon

Daniel sent me this in an email this morning, and I liked it so much I hadta post it... :)

URL: http://www.pvponline.com/archive.php3?archive=19990818