Chris Hansen’s blog

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Last night my computer became somewhat unresponsive&#8212it would start working, then when I tried to do something, it would freeze up and I’d have to reboot. A lot of swearing later, I just went to bed.

I worked on it all today (with a job interview over the phone in between bouts of working) and finally think I’ve figured out what was causing it. I’m not sure, but things have been pretty much OK since I disabled a few services.

It’s now midnight 32 am and it’s time for bed. Foot clinic tomorrow.

…and many happy returns of the day.

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One of the things that we don’t do often enough is make other people feel good about themselves. Living in modern society often makes us callused around the edges; being rubbed raw by every passer-by and annoying person you meet makes you put up a barrier to avoid being hurt any more.

This short movie, Validation, which I’m sure everyone else has seen before me but which was brought to my attention by , is about making people feel good about themselves and thus make the rest of us feel good too. If you haven’t seen it do watch it. I guarantee you’ll smile.

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Some of you are Singaporeans or know something about Singapore and will find this video side-splittingly funny. I laughed until the tears were rolling down my cheeks.

Those of you who are not Singaporeans and who don’t know much about Singapore should go to this link, read the story about the erstwhile Miss Singapore World, Ris Low, then watch the video. You should watch it in full-screen mode as most of it is in Singlish and there are supertitles projected on the back curtain that will help with comprehension.

I dressed my foot this morning. When I took the old dressing off, I was very pleased to find that the wound, which had previously looked like a tadpole (an oval “head” with a long “tail”), had lost its tail and turned into a rather small oval. The healing continues, and I think that if everything goes well, the wound will be healed by the time the study ends for me in three weeks.Will I be relieved not to have to wear this freaking boot!

The course on Communicating with Management given by Tom Gilb finished Friday. As is usual with such courses, the material he wanted to cover on the last day was more than the allotted time afforded so it was a bit rushed at the end. However, all in all, the course was profitable for me and, I’m sure, for the rest of the delegates.

Interesting points:

• One of the delegates was disruptive in a major way. I’m sure you’ve all been in courses or classes where one or two people ask questions incessantly, not particularly to gain any further understanding but really to show off their erudition, education, or experience. These people are the main cause of classes running over, I believe. Tom was fairly deft at parrying this guy’s questions but I think we would have had about an hour more if the guy had just kept his big fat bazoo shut.
• While the course was fascinating, one of the things about Tom Gilb is that he’s been around the software development arena since 1958. He worked for IBM for a few years, and has been an independent consultant since then. Fifty-two years of working has gifted him with a fund of war stories, most of which end by Tom either saving the day or by Tom being ignored, with a major catastrophe for the client ensuing. So, in a way, all the courses Tom gives are about Tom Gilb. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I would like to hear about some times when Tom tried to do something and failed at it. A long succession of successes doesn’t teach you much, while one instructive failure can bring a lot more insight into a subject.
• I should thank TSG for making their classroom available for free for an entire week for this course. Not many training organisations would do something like that.
• The major reason for software (or any) projects to fail is, in Tom’s opinion, is Prince II, the management method adopted by the UK government and large corporations. You can get certificates in it, take training in it, but when applied to projects it produces a mountain of paperwork and usually unsatisfactory results. Tom’s method is to determine requirements, produce a metric by which to measure them, do a reasonably accurate estimation, and then chunk the project up into iterations of about 1 a week (no more than 2% of the total effort), where each iteration delivers value to somebody. Each of these iterations is estimable, but estimates become clearer nearer to the time when the iteration occurs. This is, of course, an oversimplification. He has created a planning language called planguage in which all this planning and engineering is written. His book, Competitive Engineering, gives a much more comprehensive (and very dense) treatment of the subject.
• He claims, and I have no reason to doubt it, that his methods (which have been around since the late 1960’s/early 1970’s) were drawn upon by Kent Beck in the development of Agile, Extreme, SCRUM, and other forms of evolutionary and cyclical software development methodologies. Apparently he has written statements from Beck and some other people to this effect. I think he was probably the first.
• His major problem with Agile, Extreme, and SCRUM is that, rather than aiming at delivering value on each iteration, these methods aim at delivering lines of code (the “burn rate”) or chunks of program but not necessarily value with each iteration. Gilb’s Evo method is planned so that every iteration produces something of value for some stakeholder(s) in the project.
• His website has a multitude of interesting documents on this and many other subjects.

I caught up with my chum Steve, who is still unable to offer any work, despite the work being just over the horizon for years. He was on the course and will be on a similar, shorter, more technical course next week with Gilb.

I look forward to reading the Competitive Engineering book and perhaps gaining some insight and useful tools for both project planning and general life planning—he gave examples of where people used his planning methods on life goals as well as project goals.

&#8230and for once this link to a video to which I refer him does NOT involve P**ps, but has a chemical and culinary angle that I was not familiar with.

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…and many happy returns of the day.

In Singapore, OCBC Bank advertised that they would give you a cake on your birthday and have the staff sing “Happy Birthday” to you. When you advertise something like that, you do have to pony up when a customer comes in on his or her birthday and asks for a cake. But here’s what happened when someone took them up on the deal.

…nor do I play one on television. However, my LJ friend is a movie critic. I never knew how cushy the life of a movie critic might or might not be until I read his latest blog post “Take Your LJ Friend To Work” Day.

It is a scream. Please read it. But beware: don’t drink coffee while you’re reading. Your keyboard may need some drying out if you do. You have been warned.

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