Twitter’s April Fools Joke

Oh, wait. . .

I like pants. And other inane things.

I like pants.

Jam is good.

Sometimes I stare at the sun.

Ooohhhh. . .bubbles.

Hi doggy. Woof!

Walk to store.

Games are fun.

The ball is blue.

And round.

And bouncy.

Kitty has a rough tongue.

Would you like to play?

Run away!

I read. A lot. Usually at least one book a week. I recently read Tim Ferris’s The Four-hour Workweek. It was great validation. You could say that I’ve been on a mini-retirement for 18 months now.

I save a lot and invest wisely — in that sense I’m very conservative with my money. But I also like to enjoy my career and personal life. So I work hard, and then take time to detox or work on something I enjoy. In that sense I’m very aggressive with my money. It was nice to read a bestseller where someone espouses the same ideals.

Thanks to Amazon’s “you might also like” feature, I also purchased Your Portable Empire.

Pointless drivel. Easily summed up in four to five pages. I sincerely feel dumber for having read it. I kept expecting it to get better, but it got more pointless as the chapter numbers crept higher. I’ve got brain cells trying to shake off the fog as I write this.

Midway through the book, we began to be treated with 1-page chapters — really, 1 page — that said something like “I’m drinking coffee and typing this chapter on my laptop. Ain’t life grand?”

Gee, Kenny, look at my shiny new bike!

So I submit to you my outline for my new book project. If you can help me get it published, I’ll give you half the royalties. I’ll fill in the gaps obviously, but I can’t promise much. Apparently the bar is set very low these days anyway.

Here’s to our good fortunes.

I bricked my TiVo (TiVo sucks)

I’ve been a TiVo user for quite some years now, starting with the Series 1 and moving to a Series 2. To me, it’s just an appliance. I turn the TV on, it works. I don’t feel compelled to upgrade to any new version or even a networked version. A year ago, I turned the onscreen guide subscription off. I was just watching too much TV. Simple enough. I also unplugged the TiVo from the home phone line.

Last month, that line was plugged back in, and the next day I was treated with a slick new TiVo UI, obviously downloaded overnight. And, the killer feature: my TiVo can no longer be used to record TV. My digital video recorder no longer records digital video. How absurd is that? After doing some research, I learned that this is common (and commonly known) in newer Series 2 and later TiVos. And I just don’t get it.

I paid for the box — the recorder itself. I didn’t get a discount, and I never agreed to purchase the onscreen guide in perpetuity. In a fair world, it seems that if the hardware is capable of recording, and I paid for the hardware, I should be permitted to record. But TiVo feels that even though I paid for the hardware, the price of admission must also include the guide subscription.

What perplexes me the most is that TiVo has always been close with their customer base. Contrast that to wireless carriers. I can’t think of any more adversial customer relationship that the average person has with any of their providers. Yet, even wireless carriers give you a free phone (or a subsidy) in exchange for purchasing their service. You’re not required to purchase a phone outright, and then also pay the carrier charges. What’s the rationale behind TiVo bricking a box I paid for just because I no longer want to use their service?

I was eyeing up a Series 3 to go along with a new TV, but I argue with my wallet, and this bricked TiVo is my last. I’m jumping ship. But where to go? My cable operator? Windows Media Center? Who cares, as long as it’s not TiVo.

All I want to do is punch that fat television and rip his damn antennae off. His stupid grin openly mocks me. Bastard.

The Tipping Point

I generally don’t use this blog to post daily musings. And by
generally, I mean never. I didn’t even mention last week’s incident involving
cheese, bananas, and a Walmart checkout line. I have to break that code
of conduct; I suspect because I’ve reached the tipping point.

Do you remember the first time you saw the phrase “Building a better
-something- one -something- at a time? For instance, “Building a better
Web, One Client at a time.” Ugh. It was mildly clever the first time
you heard it. Maybe. The second time or third sightings didn’t sting
that much. Good taglines are hard to come by after all. Then you saw it
again and again. Years pass, and you’ve forgotten all about this
hideous phrase, until one day it blindsides you.

I never suspected to read this phrase again, yet, inexplicably, there it is. Someone didn’t get the memo.

Link: Career Builders Blog. Check out the fantastically cheesy, dated tagline.

As an aside, how would like to have the last name “Mediocre?” Ouch.

My Life = The Dilbert Zone

It’s been a hectic few weeks. I’ve decided to leave full-time employment with my long-time employer (5 years is very long for me). Instead, I’ll be doing part-time consulting work for them, and will be working full-time on a mobile start-up. These past two weeks, I’ve been getting my ducks in a row, transitioning duties, lining up projects to work on when I’m part-time.

I’m a Dilbert reader. There are frequently interesting parallels between Dilbert and my experiences in the corporate world. But Dilbert is generally filled with hyperbole. That’s what makes it funny. The comic strips are based in common experience, but they are kneaded and exaggerated for effect. Most of the time.

My job covers a wide spectrum of responsibility. I’m a project manager, but I have a development and analysis background, so I’m generally brought in early to projects. I had the most bizarre, illogical, unrealistic conversation the other day with a senior project manager in my firm.

His organization needs a custom application built. Fine, I suggest a teleconference with a few of his people so that we can discuss their requirements. For those unfamiliar with the development process, requirements and design generally require quite a bit of effort. A decade ago, they would require as much, if not more, time than development. Agile and iterative development have been somewhat embraced in the corporate world, so they don’t take nearly as long, but they still require a lot of effort.

We begin discussing their requirements, and it very quickly becomes clear that no one in the room has even considered what problems they are trying to solve with this proposed application. Without a purpose, goal, or objective of any kind, it’s impossible to propose a solution. So I dig a bit further. Many times, even if clients don’t know what they’re trying to solve, they still have an idea of what they want. Maybe they’ve been looking at an off-the-shelf product they want to integrate, or they’ve seen a piece of functionality that they want to emulate. Maybe they have something firm in mind for a deployment approach — they want software that installs on a PC, they want a web-based solution, they have server X they’d like to leverage, etc. Still nothing.

Okay, we’re getting nowhere, so I politely say something to this effect of “why are meeting, what did you hope to accomplish today?” And the response I get back is along the lines of they want an application built (here we go again).

We continue this exchange for another minute, and then they drop the bomb. I kid you not, this is verbatim. This statement is burned into my brain, and likely will remain there until the day I die. The senior project manager says “We don’t know yet what we want, but we want you to build it for us, and then we’ll tell you if it’s right.” Stunned silence on my part. He must be joking, I’m thinking. But he’s not, and he continues talking about how he wants us to build something that does something magical for him, but he’ll only know what he really wants until after he sees what we’ve already done.

Needless to say, this is not one of the projects that I’ll be taking on as a consultant. A day or so later, the Dilbert of the Day arrives in my inbox, and it’s a near perfect parallel for my experience.

Tags: Dilbert, corporate, software development, requirements, design

Theaters may ask to jam cell phones

While I don’t necessarily agree that jamming phones is the answer, this is an indication of just how poor our cell phone etiquette has become.

Link: Theaters may ask to jam cell phones - Yahoo! News.