Rest in peace Mr. Wizard (Don Herbert).
I never got to watch the original, but I did see the later stuff on Nickelodeon. I also knew a lot of people, many of them teachers, who were inspired by his work and in turn, inspired me. He was also born the same day I was.
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Slightly more connected today, and a good thing, as a new, urgent, and likely impossible task has been set before my team. We are paying the tab for someone else's lack of planning. Being an IT person, this seems to be the norm and the expectation. The sad thing is that it does not have to be.
At some point, IT became a commodity, not just for the basic services, but for everything. From low-end repetetive activities, to the high-end analysis and custom application design, the business expectation is that this work can turn on a dime and cost as much. To make matters worse, the expectations are typically part of a reality that do not coincide with this world or any other I've experienced. A friend of mine once put it this way:
Imagine a scenario where you want someone to build a deck for you (no, not this deck):
[Picture of a deck of programming cards, from the dark ages of mainframe computing]
I mean the other kind of deck. The one made of wood that you have to paint.
So you want to build a deck. So you hire a contractor, and tell him “I want you to make me a deck. I want it made out of wood, and I want it to be nice. You can decide what color to paint it.” And that’s all you tell the contractor, and he goes off to work. A week later, he finishes the job, and you look at it, and decide “you know, I really don’t like this deck. The color is wrong, and it needs more benches. And I expect my changes done in 2 days at no additional cost to me”. And the contractor says, “Ok, but you never told me what color you wanted in the first place. What color do you want?” and you respond “Oh, I don’t know. I need to see it completely painted before I can decide which color is right”.
Sounds insane, right? This is the insanity of software development. I’m in this cycle right now, currently in it’s 4th iteration. And this customer, who is actually a pretty good customer, can’t seem to nail down exactly what they want, and it’s costing us a lot of time and money. They just want changes, and once the changes are complete and put into production, they’ll decide if they like it or not. And they think this is fine, and natural, and normal. This, of course, is not the first time this has happened in my career, this is just the most frustrating.I’m just glad I don’t have to build decks for these folks.
And, they don't want to pay you more than your original quote, even with all of the changes.
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Home and out to pick up a fountain for the deck. They were out of stock on what we wanted, so we got the floor model for 10% off. Poking at the local mallish place, too many little cool things at Williams Sonoma, all too expensive. Questionable dinner at Johnny Rockets (American Fries!), but a really good malted milkshake.
Home to set up the fountain. The splashing water inside sounds a bit hollow, so I'll dampen it with Styrofoam tomorrow. A little comupting, and then bed.
Irregular comments, noticings, and perhaps the occasional observation.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
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