Mobility!

The entire 1st floor is now the domain of my 9 month old. Not quite crawling, but she can go wherever she wants.

Now the choke toy alert really goes up. Also no more leaving the basement door open.

Bazaar

The oldest two kids have fallen in love with one of my favorite childhood games. Yes, I still have the sale price, and rents memorized for every property. For a time I knew all of the house/hotel/mortgage values as well.

While at the in-laws this last weekend, we were looking for Monopoly. My mother in-law was sure she had a copy, but it was not to be found. Instead she pulled out Bazaar It is an old game of logic. I played with my oldest and one brother in-law. I was hooked. All these years I have seen it sitting in their closet and I didn't play. Tisk Tisk

Out Like a Lamb?

On Tuesday, it rained. Sans a few small shaded locations, we had no snow on the ground. When I put the trash out at midnight, it had turn to snow and was just starting to not melt when hitting the ground.

On Wednesday we had high winds and heavy snow. At times I could not see the building a block away from my office window. By Wednesday night we had 3 foot snow banks outside my office window. My drive was drifted shut. The kids and I shoveled for over an hour. The snow was wet and heavy. To make it worse the bottom was slush. We cleared just enough to get the van out. My wife took the one of the kids to the beach. The waves were roaring, crashing many feet higher onto the shore than normal.

Thursday was no change in weather. There were 5 foot drifts outside the office in the morning. The kids and I again shoveled out the drive. Still some slush and a little less drifting. Because of the wind, I have areas of my yard with almost no snow and others with huge drifts. Again my wife had been to the beach. This time she met my neighbor with the dogs. She said her husband had been out surfing both days. Very cool!

Today, Friday, the storm warning has been extended another 2 days! We are back to barely being able to see the building a block away. We are headed for Harbor Springs this afternoon. I think we are going to take the long route and get on US2 as soon as possible.

Kind of too bad I put the skiis away already!

Interaction Testing

I am a fan of unit tests. From the first time I saw them I have been selling their benefits.

Up until this time I have not used a mock objects framework. It is time. I am considering NMock2 and Rhino Mock.

Oren Eini, author of Rhino Mock, has some good feedback on how to use a mock library effectively in his post Guidelines to Using Interaction Based Testing. I had not thought about the distinction between fake and mock objects.

Right not Revolutionary

I got a chance to listen to Tim O'Reilly's 2006 O'Reilly Radar while traveling. Tim did a great job presenting how asynchronous competition creates the big changes in industry.

First off, Tim is spot on, but second while Tim's message is very interesting, it is not new. It is the subject of Clayton M. Christensen's 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma. Clayton calls it Disruptive Technologies where Tim calls it asyncrhonous competition. They are really the same idea.

I cannot do The Innovator's Delimma justice, but here are a few quotes.

the established firms stayed atop wave after wave of sustaining technologies (technologies that their customers needed), while consistently stumbling over simpler disruptive ones.

...It is very difficult for a company whose cost structure is tailored to compete in high-end markets to be profitable in low-end markets well.

...Companies whose investment processes demand quantification of market sizes and financial returns before they can enter a market get paralyzed or make serious mistakes when faced with disruptive technologies.

Surely few in the technology world have heard of Clayton M. Christensen, but who there hasn't heard of Tim O'Reilly. Tim brought some excellent graphs and some serious study to locating disruptive technologies. And certainly, he will make the idea known to many many more people. If you get the chance, don't stop with Tim's work. Read The Innovator's Dilemma as well.

Kudos to both Tim and Clayton for introducing us to new ways of viewing the world.

Vocabulary

I enjoy hearing people with good vocabularies speak. Jim Harper who I referred to in Identity is Not Fixed is one who uses vocabulary well, not attempting to make himself look more important, rather to communicate concisely.

I am listening to a Channel9 interview and one of the speakers used the term "hugely". Okay, okay, it is in the dictionary. But, for me it is like drawing fingernails across a chalk board. I am not enjoying recent the increase of this word in common diction.

Identity: It is not fixed

I took a trip this last weekend. As is my usual style the podcasts were playing much of the driving time. Due to this I have many thoughts running through my head.

I relistened to Jim Harper's talk about Identity on IT Conversations. He outlines the four categories of identity:

• Something you are


• Something you are assigned


• Something you know


• Something you have

About half way through the talk he states; "Children don't have identities. They have to build them, and we get our identies from the things we do, and the people we know, and the institutions we work with." I thought this was interesting. You can change your identity.

One of the unstated pieces in the Tree of Self-Realization is that if you change the inputs to your life (the roots), you change the results. I have found that by forcing myself to learn new things about software development, it changed my position within the software development team. I changed my identity from newby to expert.

Do you have an identity you are not happy with? You can change that!

The Tree of Self-Realization for the Corporation

For a while there was a lecture by Keoki Andrus online. It was titled Turning High Potential into High Performance. Unfortuantely it is no longer available. When I asked how to get a copy, I was told that Mr. Andrus is working on a book and the publisher wouldn't allow the lecture to stay up. So we have to wait for the book, which as far as I can find is still not published.

A while back I went looking for the book and ended up finding a quote from Mr. Andrus in Virtual Teams

The biggest thing that can undermine a virtual team is passive aggressive behavior. You send me e-mail, I don't like it. I pretend I didn't get it, and you are damaged with out recourse"

I was looking at Mistrust in the Tree of Self-Defeat today and thinking about how this quote was a corporate example of mistrust and its effects of that on an company. How individual actions lead to corporate wide mistrust and the fruit it produces has some overlap in Alienation and Interpersonal Conflicts, but I think it has some fruits unique to a corportation to. What comes to mind is turnover, lack of productivity (maybe that is Apathy), lower profits, poor customer support.

All this lead me to wonder what the poster might look like for a corporation and not a individual. Alcoholism, drug addictions, and mental illness for example wouldn't be in the left tree. What do you think would be the signs of a healthy corporation?

So how might one person fight back and work to repair the damage caused by corporate mistrust? I think you start with Forgiveness for those who seem to be sources of mistrust.

Designing .Net Class Libraries

Krysztof Cwalina gives a presentation on Designing .Net Class Libraries. Courtesy of Brad
Wow! Three hours of instruction from one of the better class designers out there. Gotta love it when you live in a remote area.

The Tree of Self-Realization

I know the creator of this quite well. I grew up seeing it and I think I have been taught to live by it. From time to time I plan to write about each of the words used on the two trees. They will be my thoughts and not the creators. Hopefully the will do justice to his work.

Coping or Deliberate

A few years ago I listened to Six Thinking Hats by Edward de Bono on audio cassette. I picked up a used copy recently and have slowly been working my through it.

One of the first concepts Mr. de Bono puts forward is that there are two kinds of thinking.

There is the walking-talking-breathing type of thinking that we do all the time. We answer the telephone. We cross the road. We switch in an dout of routines. We do not need to be concious of which leg follows which when we walk or how to manage our breathing. But there is a different sort of thinking that is for doing better than just routine coping. Everyone can run, but an athlete runs deliberately and is trained for that purpose.

I am no longer a runner, but I can translate this to other things. I cross country ski quite poorly. To improve, I have had to study video footage of world class athletes, read, and practice. Slowly I am gettting better but only by deliberately working on form.

I bike and am better than average at that, but I deliberately pay attention to muscle usage, breathing, drinking, eating and timing.

As a professional, I write software and I see way too many people "coping". They learn one way of doing something and never change. They don't look for alternate ways, sometime worse and others better. Some of the ways you can be more deliberate in software include defensive programming, test-driven-development, refactoring, self analysis for common failures you create, becoming aware of the cost of using libraries and certain activities.

Where can you think deliberately today? Take your eyes off the routine reactionary responses and exercise your brain. It is fun!

A is not I

Well, I joined the group ride on Tuesday. My first real road ride of the year.
Marquette has enough riders to have three groups: A or elite, B above average, and C average. Being the end of March only the really serious riders are what you expect to see show up. I had no illusions. I expected to get dropped, but it is fun to ride and riding with faster people only makes you better.
We left the parking lot at a leasurely pace and I thought I might hang on for a while. But by the time we were a few miles out, I knew it was only a matter of time. Sure enough, at the 5 mile mark warm up was over on the Grove street hill near 492 and I got dropped. Not by a lot, but enough I just couldn't bridge up. After about a mile and a half, someone dropped back and towed me up. I hung on for the next 15 miles or so and then finally chunked out the back for good and soloed the last 8 miles or so.

A good ride, even if I was dropped. It looks like I may not be an A group rider here in Marquette. Maybe I can move up to it over the course of the summer. I'll keep at it.