Cheap Viagra Information | Search results for "interesting"

Titles are very important, especially in universities, where they are often used instead of money as a means of rewarding people. They can often make people feel good about themselves. Although this leads to a steady title creep or title inflation, little harm may be done. The staff receive something which they value, and the university is able to stretch its budget a little further. The language is subtly and gradually changed, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Thank you to those who have comments on the term title creep. Kim suggested that we should have simple and generic titles, and Andrew pointed out the interesting Information Consultant, Information Awareness and Literacy Services at the University of Melbourne. But he asked "Why not call a spade a spade?" My point in this post is that we can use titles to achieve benefits for our workforce, rather than aiming to use simple words to represent straightforward concepts - always a difficult process. The reason we do not always call a spade a spade is because we don't have to - language is rich and varied, always changing, and always accessible for a wide variety of purposes. We want our staff to feel good about their jobs. For our immediate environments (in my case, a university) titles carry meaning in ways other than the literal. I suspect that our customers rarely notice or care, but we do, and our peers in our working environment do. So, we need nice titles. In the library world, including the university library world, we have experienced less title creep, and less exuberant proliferation of titles than in other areas. There is certainly title creep in the academic sphere - as Cullen Murphy suggests, most commonly as "the extension of restricted honorifics to an ever widening circle of claimants." Murphy suggests that the new discipline of managing the development of titles might be called exaltametrics. In our own world we have benefited little from title creep. While in the field of information technology there is a wide range of new and more elevated titles, this is not the case in libraries. IT directors become Chief Technology Officers, the title creeping across new territory, too. Multiple titles proliferate. New terms define whole new sub-professions (business analysts) or new metaphors are taken from other professions (architects, for example). Perhaps libraries have tried to be too narrowly descriptive in the way they invent titles. Perhaps they have been too tied to the term "librarian". Perhaps they have been too afraid to cannibalise terms used by other sectors, such as "dean", although this has begun to happen in the United States. The new positions now being created throughout Australia as a result of the RQF (the Research Quality Framework) are a case in point. The generic term for the library end of this potential cornucopia of Australian library titles has now become pretty universally "repository manager". Not a great invention; the term "repository" is pretty much incomprehensible outside libraries, and the term manager is generic in the extreme. At Swinburne we use the term "Content Management Librarian". And what about Content Architect? What kinds of terms might we use in this new sphere? I am thinking my way through this one, with my colleagues, and here are some thoughts about titles for repository staff. Online content is the sphere of activity, so Online Content Officer or Online Content Librarian is good, and makes a wider claim. Or perhaps Online Content Supervisor, good because it is not clear that it is the content that is supervised, and leaves open the thought that there may be a small army of online content workers beavering away. Online content can also be used with the nouns delegate and broker, both synonyms for agent. Looking at specialised roles, online content quality controller and similar terms could be used. I really like the word marshal, but in English-language usage it is mainly (but not always) a grand person, since the military took it over from people who organised things. In Italy, a model for the use of titles, Marshal Salvatore Guarnaccia of the Florence Carabinieri in Magdalen Nabb's wonderful detective novels is a simple if informal policeman. Someone should have a go at Online Content Marshal to see how it plays out. In special libraries, there is also development in the area of titles. The Wall Street Journal suggests that titles like information specialist, knowledge manager and taxonomist are becoming more common. I am looking for imagination in contributions on this one. Don't let anyone say that librarians lacked the soaring imagination to invent the most wonderful titles in academia and beyond.

Tags: titles, content, term, online, creep

It's November, to boot it surprises me. I haven't been printed matter oftentimes since I've been \"doing\" - at intervals fact, due to the approximately 5 weeks I was 'doing' it medially Shanghai, China. September was a blur of getting ready Because (moreover thinking about) China, October was a blur of fellow centrally located China. It's November. Again I enter so lots to fill in circumference what I've encountered. Except this I don't appetite to vernacular commonly my experiences. No, it's not this I fancy to be silent - that I don't loss anyone to expound what adventures I had; utterly the crosswise. Everyone should become aware what 4 weeks enclosed by China was jibing, undertaking including exploring. The main look remains that I've exhausted what feels commend lifetimes of community 'precisely excuse'. Not always communicating to boot not always solving. Exact note. Sometimes medially ego, customarily medially miscarriage, generally within boredom. Society amidst days, weeks, months of gloss around themselves. When different is breathing deal -- genuinely aware -- one's speaking changes . Accent buzzs away from small-talk more ego. Instead of begging \"How are you?\" the proposition bob ups \"How are you?\" Masses who are 'live' ofttimes may brogue minor further take in and . Or they may earnings the book instead of discussing pending to desire order. They've encountered adventures besides notes which aspiration little embellishment; they breathe the deals as well don't wish to exhale amidst idle chatter almost themselves. Instead, they watch, barely speaking, still inhabit --for what?-- kinship, maybe. A total that someone else has breathed adventures as well . Photo taken ended Lauren Muney, Moment Station, Pudong, Shanghai, China, Oct 2007. What an interesting trio...Also how fortunate they were to be photographed.

Tags: china, weeks, adventures, medially, encountered

by Bob Blogthings. Always good for getting some blog content up when you're tired, but feeling guilty that you haven't posted in a while. Meatball Pizza Unusual and uncompromising. You're usually the first to discover a new trend. You appreciate a good meal and good company. You're an interesting blend of traditional and modern. What's Your Pizza Personality? buy software cheap oem software

Tags: good, pizza, software, blogthings, blend

Hello, I'm a student getting my pharmacy stage enclosed by unexampled of the pharmacy schools. Man notably passionate Along this field, I shrinking to unshackle some of the interesting fatten to you. Here I'll writing some for sure facets any which way meds, write my proper reason, and speculate anyone who requirements it! So check back subsequent Because updates!

Tags: pharmacy, write, proper, meds, reason

  Scrums are the most dangerous phase in rugby, since a collapse or improper engage can lead to a front row player damaging or even breaking his neck. — Wikipedia When I was growing up, cholesterol used to be bad for you. It was easy to remember. Fat, bad. Cholesterol bad. Salt, bad. Everything, bad. Nowadays, though, they differentiate between "good" cholesterol and "bad" cholesterol, as if we're supposed to be able to distinguish them somehow. And it was weird when they switched it up on us, because it was as if the FDA had suddenly issued a press release announcing that there are, in fact, two kinds of rat poison: Good Rat Poison and Bad Rat Poison, and you should eat a lot of the Good kind, and none of the Bad kind, and definitely not mix them up or anything. Up until maybe a year ago, I had a pretty one-dimensional view of so-called "Agile" programming, namely that it's an idiotic fad-diet of a marketing scam making the rounds as yet another technological virus implanting itself in naive programmers who've never read "No Silver Bullet", the kinds of programmers who buy extended warranties and self-help books and believe their bosses genuinely care about them as people, the kinds of programmers who attend conferences to make friends and who don't know how to avoid eye contact with leaflet-waving fanatics in airports and who believe writing shit on index cards will suddenly make software development easier. You know. Chumps. That's the word I'm looking for. My bad-cholesterol view was that Agile Methodologies are for chumps. But I've had a lot of opportunity to observe various flavors of Agile-ism in action lately, and I now think I was only about 90% right. It turns out there's a good kind of Agile, although it's taken me a long time to be able to see it clearly amidst all the hype and kowtowing and moaning feverishly about scrums and whatnot. I have a pretty clear picture of it now. And you can attend my seminar on it for the low, low price of $499.95! Hahaha, chump! No, just kidding. You'll only find seminars about the Bad kind of Agile. And if in the future you ever find me touring around as an Agile Consultant, charging audiences to hear my deep wisdom and insight about Agile Development, you have my permission to cut my balls off. If I say I was just kidding, say I told you I'd say that. If I then say I'm Tyler Durden and I order you not to cut my balls off , say I definitely said I was going to say that , and then you cut 'em right off. I'll just go right ahead and tell you about the Good Kind, free of charge. It's kinda hard to talk about Good Agile and Bad Agile in isolation, so I might talk about them together. But I'll be sure to label the Good kind with a happy rat, and the Bad kind with a sad dead rat, so you'll always know the difference. The Bad Heading Back in Ye Olden Dayes, most companies approached software development as follows: - hire a bunch of engineers, then hire more. - dream up a project. - set a date for when they want it launched. - put some engineers on it. - whip them until they're either dead or it's launched. or both. - throw a cheap-ass pathetic little party, maybe. This step is optional. - then start over. Thank goodness that doesn't happen at your company, eh now? Whew! Interestingly, this is also exactly how non-technical companies (like, say, Chrysler) handled software development. Except they didn't hire the engineers. Instead, they contracted with software consultants, and they'd hand the consultants 2-year project specs, and demanded the consultants finish everything on time plus all the crap the customer threw in and/or changed after signing the contract. And then it'd all fall apart and the contractors wouldn't get paid, and everyone was really miffed. So some of the consultants began to think: "Hey, if these companies insist on acting like infants, then we should treat them like infants!" And so they did. When a company said "we want features A through Z", the consultants would get these big index cards and write "A" on the first one, "B" on the second one, etc., along with time estimates, and then post them on their wall. Then when the customer wanted to add something, the consultant could point at the wall and say: "OK, boy . Which one of these cards do you want to replace , BOY? " Is it any wonder Chrysler canceled the project? So the consultants, now having lost their primary customer, were at a bar one day, and one of them (named L. Ron Hubbard) said: "This nickel-a-line-of-code gig is lame. You know where the real money is at? You start your own religion." And that's how both Extreme Programming and Scientology were born. Well, people pretty quickly demonstrated that XP was a load of crap. Take Pair Programming, for instance. It's one of the more spectacular failures of XP. None of the Agileytes likes to talk about it much, but let's face it: nobody does it. The rationale was something like: "well if ONE programmer sitting at a terminal is good, then TEN must be better, because MORE is ALWAYS better! But most terminals can only comfortably fit TWO programmers, so we'll call it PAIR programming!" You have to cut them a little slack; they'd been dealing with the corporate equivalent of pre-schoolers for years, and that really messes with a person. But the thing is, viruses are really hard to kill, especially the meme kind. After everyone had gotten all worked up about this whole Agile thing (and sure, everyone wants to be more productive), there was a lot of face to be lost by admitting failure. So some other kinds of Agile "Methodologies" sprang up, and they all claimed that even though all the other ones were busted, their method worked! I mean, go look at some of their sites. Tell me that's not an infomercial. C'mon, just try. It's embarrassing even to look at the thing. Yeah. Well, they make money hand over fist, because of P.T. Barnum's Law, just like Scientology does. Can't really fault 'em. Some people are just dying to be parted with their cash. And their dignity. The rest of us have all known that Agile Methodologies are stupid, by application of any of the following well-known laws of marketing: - anything that calls itself a "Methodology" is stupid, on general principle. - anything that requires "evangelists" and offers seminars, exists soley for the purpose of making money. - anything that never mentions any competition or alternatives is dubiously self-serving. - anything that does diagrams with hand-wavy math is stupid, on general principle. And by "stupid", I mean it's "incredibly brilliant marketing targeted at stupid people." In any case, the consultants kept going with their road shows and glossy pamphlets. Initially, I'm sure they went after corporations; they were looking to sign flexible contracts that allowed them to deliver "whatever" in "2 weeks" on a recurring basis until the client went bankrupt. But I'm equally sure they couldn't find many clients dumb enough to sign such a contract. That's when the consultants decided to take their road show to YOU. Why not take it inside the companies and sell it there, to the developers? There are plenty of companies who use the whip-cycle of development I outlined above, so presumably some of the middle managers and tech leads would be amenable to hearing about how there's this low-cost way out of their hellish existence. And that, friends, was exactly, precisely the point at which they went from "harmless buffoons" to "potentially dangerous", because before they were just bilking fat companies too stupid to develop their own software, but now the manager down the hall from me might get infected. And most places don't have a very good quarantine mechanism for this rather awkward situation: i.e., an otherwise smart manager has become "ill", and is waving XP books and index cards and spouting stuff about how much more productive his team is on account of all this newfound extra bureaucracy. How do we know it's not more productive? Well, it's a slippery problem. Observe that it must be a slippery problem, or it all would have been debunked fair and square by now. But it's exceptionally difficult to measure software developer productivity, for all sorts of famous reasons. And it's even harder to perform anything resembling a valid scientific experiment in software development. You can't have the same team do the same project twice; a bunch of stuff changes the second time around. You can't have 2 teams do the same project; it's too hard to control all the variables, and it's prohibitively expensive to try it in any case. The same team doing 2 different projects in a row isn't an experiment either. About the best you can do is gather statistical data across a lot of teams doing a lot of projects, and try to identify similarities, and perform some regressions, and hope you find some meaningful correlations. But where does the data come from? Companies aren't going to give you their internal data, if they even keep that kind of thing around. Most don't; they cover up their schedule failures and they move on, ever optimistic. Well if you can't do experiments and you can't do proofs, there isn't much science going on. That's why it's a slippery problem. It's why fad diets are still enormously popular. People want fad diets to work, oh boy you bet they do, even I want them to work. And you can point to all these statistically meaningless anecdotes about how Joe lost 35 pounds on this one diet, and all those people who desperately want to be thinner will think "hey, it can't hurt. I'll give it a try." That is exactly what I hear people say, every time a team talks themselves into trying an Agile Methodology. It's not a coincidence. But writing about Bad Agile alone is almost guaranteed to be ineffective. I mean, you can write about how lame Scientology is, or how lame fad diets are, but it's not clear that you're changing anyone's mind. Quitting a viral meme is harder than quitting smoking. I've done both. In order to have the right impact, you have to offer an alternative, and I didn't have one before, not one that I could articulate clearly. One of the (many) problems with Bad Agile is that they condescendingly lump all non-Agile development practices together into two buckets: Waterfall and Cowboy. Waterfall is known to be bad; I hope we can just take that as an axiom today. But what about so-called Cowboy programming, which the Agileers define as "each member of the team does what he or she thinks is best"? Is it true that this is the only other development process? And is Cowboy Programming actually bad? They say it as if it's obviously bad, but they're not super clear on how or why, other than to assert that it's, you know, "chaos". Well, as I mentioned, over the past year I've had the opportunity to watch both Bad Agile and Good Agile in motion, and I've asked the teams and tech leads (using both the Bad and Good forms) lots of questions: how they're doing, how they're feeling, how their process is working. I was really curious, in part because I'd consented to try Agile last Christmas ("hey, it can't hurt"), and wound up arguing with a teammate over exactly what metadata is allowed on index cards before giving up in disgust. Also in part because I had some friends on a team who were getting kind of exhausted from what appeared to be a Death March, and that kind of thing doesn't seem to happen very often at Google. So I dug in, and for a year, I watched and learned. The Good Head (cue happy rat) I'm going to talk a little about Google's software development process. It's not the whole picture, of course, but it should suffice for today. I've been there for almost a year and a half now, and it took a while, but I think I get it now. Mostly. I'm still learning. But I'll share what I've got so far. From a high level, Google's process probably does look like chaos to someone from a more traditional software development company. As a newcomer, some of the things that leap out at you include: - there are managers, sort of, but most of them code at least half-time, making them more like tech leads. - developers can switch teams and/or projects any time they want, no questions asked; just say the word and the movers will show up the next day to put you in your new office with your new team. - Google has a philosophy of not ever telling developers what to work on, and they take it pretty seriously. - developers are strongly encouraged to spend 20% of their time (and I mean their M-F, 8-5 time, not weekends or personal time) working on whatever they want, as long as it's not their main project. - there aren't very many meetings. I'd say an average developer attends perhaps 3 meetings a week, including their 1:1 with their lead. - it's quiet. Engineers are quietly focused on their work, as individuals or sometimes in little groups or 2 to 5. - there aren't Gantt charts or date-task-owner spreadsheets or any other visible project-management artifacts in evidence, not that I've ever seen. - even during the relatively rare crunch periods, people still go get lunch and dinner, which are (famously) always free and tasty, and they don't work insane hours unless they want to. These are generalizations, sure. Old-timers will no doubt have a slightly different view, just as my view of Amazon is slightly biased by having been there in 1998 when it was a pretty crazy place. But I think most Googlers would agree that my generalizations here are pretty accurate. How could this ever work? I get that question a lot. Heck, I asked it myself. What's to stop engineers from leaving all the trouble projects, leaving behind bug-ridden operational nightmares? What keeps engineers working towards the corporate goals if they can work on whatever they want? How do the most important projects get staffed appropriately? How do engineers not get so fat that they routinely get stuck in stairwells and have to be cut out by the Fire Department? I'll answer the latter question briefly, then get to the others. In short: we have this thing called the Noogler Fifteen, named after the Frosh Fifteen: the 15 pounds that many college freshmen put on when they arrive in the land of Stress and Pizza. Google has solved the problem by lubricating the stairwells. As to the rest of your questions, I think most of them have the same small number of answers. First, and arguably most importantly, Google drives behavior through incentives. Engineers working on important projects are, on average, rewarded more than those on less-important projects. You can choose to work on a far-fetched research-y kind of project that may never be practical to anyone, but the work will have to be a reward unto itself. If it turns out you were right and everyone else was wrong (the startup's dream), and your little project turns out to be tremendously impactful, then you'll be rewarded for it. Guaranteed. The rewards and incentives are too numerous to talk about here, but the financial incentives range from gift certificates and massage coupons up through giant bonuses and stock grants, where I won't define "giant" precisely, but think of Google's scale and let your imagination run a bit wild, and you probably won't miss the mark by much. There are other incentives. One is that Google a peer-review oriented culture, and earning the respect of your peers means a lot there. More than it does at other places, I think. This is in part because it's just the way the culture works; it's something that was put in place early on and has managed to become habitual. It's also true because your peers are so damn smart that earning their respect is a huge deal. And it's true because your actual performance review is almost entirely based on your peer reviews, so it has an indirect financial impact on you. Another incentive is that every quarter, without fail, they have a long all-hands in which they show every single project that launched to everyone, and put up the names and faces of the teams (always small) who launched each one, and everyone applauds. Gives me a tingle just to think about it. Google takes launching very seriously, and I think that being recognized for launching something cool might be the strongest incentive across the company. At least it feels that way to me. And there are still other incentives; the list goes on and ON and ON ; the perks are over the top, and the rewards are over the top, and everything there is so comically over the top that you have no choice, as an outsider, but to assume that everything the recruiter is telling you is a baldfaced lie, because there's no possible way a company could be that generous to all of its employees, all of them, I mean even the contractors who clean the micro-kitchens, they get these totally awesome "Google Micro-Kitchen Staff" shirts and fleeces. There is nothing like it on the face of this earth. I could talk for hours , days about how amazing it is to work at Google, and I wouldn't be done. And they're not done either. Every week it seems like there's a new perk, a new benefit, a new improvement, a new survey asking us all if there's any possible way in which life at Google could be better. I might have been mistaken, actually. Having your name and picture up on that big screen at End of Quarter may not be the biggest incentive. The thing that drives the right behavior at Google, more than anything else, more than all the other things combined, is gratitude . You can't help but want to do your absolute best for Google; you feel like you owe it to them for taking such incredibly good care of you. OK, incentives. You've got the idea. Sort of. I mean, you have a sketch of it. When friends who aren't at Google ask me how it is working at Google — and this applies to all my friends at all other companies equally, not just companies I've worked at — I feel just how you'd feel if you'd just gotten out of prison, and your prison buddies, all of whom were sentenced in their early teens, are writing to you and asking you what it's like "on the outside". I mean, what would you tell them? I tell 'em it's not too bad at all. Can't complain. Pretty decent, all in all. Although the incentive-based culture is a huge factor in making things work the way they do, it only addresses how to get engineers to work on the "right" things. It doesn't address how to get those things done efficiently and effectively. So I'll tell you a little about how they approach projects. Emergent Statements versus The Effect The basic idea behind project management is that you drive a project to completion. It's an overt process, a shepherding: by dint of leadership, and organization, and sheer force of will, you cause something to happen that wouldn't otherwise have happened on its own. Project management comes in many flavors, from lightweight to heavyweight, but all flavors share the property that they are external forces acting on an organization. At Google, projects launch because it's the least-energy state for the system. Before I go on, I'll concede that this is a pretty bold claim, and that it's not entirely true. We do have project managers and product managers and people managers and tech leads and so on. But the amount of energy they need to add to the system is far less than what's typically needed in our industry. It's more of an occasional nudge than a full-fledged continuous push. Once in a while, a team needs a bigger nudge, and senior management needs to come in and do the nudging, just like anywhere else. But there's no pushing. Incidentally, Google is a polite company, so there's no yelling, nor wailing and gnashing of teeth, nor escalation and finger-pointing, nor any of the artifacts produced at companies where senior management yells a lot. Hobbes tells us that organizations reflect their leaders; we all know that. The folks up top at Google are polite, hence so is everyone else. Anyway, I claimed that launching projects is the natural state that Google's internal ecosystem tends towards, and it's because they pump so much energy into pointing people in that direction. All your needs are taken care of so that you can focus, and as I've described, there are lots of incentives for focusing on things that Google likes. So launches become an emergent property of the system. This eliminates the need for a bunch of standard project management ideas and methods: all the ones concerned with dealing with slackers, calling bluffs on estimates, forcing people to come to consensus on shared design issues, and so on. You don't need "war team meetings," and you don't need status reports. You don't need them because people are already incented to do the right things and to work together well. The project management techniques that Google does use are more like oil than fuel: things to let the project keep running smoothly, as opposed to things that force the project to move forward. There are plenty of meeting rooms, and there's plenty of open space for people to go chat. Teams are always situated close together in fishbowl-style open seating, so that pair programming happens exactly when it's needed (say 5% of the time), and never otherwise. Google generally recognizes that the middle of the day is prone to interruptions, even at quiet companies, so many engineers are likely to shift their hours and come in very early or stay very late in order to find time to truly concentrate on programming. So meetings only happen in the middle of the day; it's very unusual to see a meeting start before 10am or after 4:30pm. Scheduling meetings outside that band necessarily eats into the time when engineers are actually trying to implement the things they're meeting about, so they don't do it. Google isn't the only place where projects are run this way. Two other kinds of organizations leap to mind when you think of Google's approach: startup companies, and grad schools. Google can be considered a fusion of the startup and grad-school mentalities: on the one hand, it's a hurry-up, let's get something out now, do the simplest thing that could work and we'll grow it later startup-style approach. On the other, it's relatively relaxed and low-key; we have hard problems to solve that nobody else has ever solved, but it's a marathon not a sprint, and focusing requires deep concentration, not frenzied meetings. And at the intersection of the two, startups and grad schools are both fertile innovation ground in which the participants carry a great deal of individual responsibility for the outcome. It's all been done before; the only thing that's really surprising is that Google has managed to make it scale. The scaling is not an accident. Google works really hard on the problem, and they realize that having scaled this far is no guarantee it'll continue, so they're vigilant. That's a good word for it. They're always on the lookout to make sure the way of life and the overall level of productivity continue (or even improve) as they grow. Google is an exceptionally disciplined company, from a software-engineering perspective. They take things like unit testing, design documents and code reviews more seriously than any other company I've even heard about. They work hard to keep their house in order at all times, and there are strict rules and guidelines in place that prevent engineers and teams from doing things their own way. The result: the whole code base looks the same, so switching teams and sharing code are both far easier than they are at other places. And engineers need great tools, of course, so Google hires great people to build their tools, and they encourage engineers (using incentives) to pitch in on tools work whenever they have an inclination in that direction. The result: Google has great tools, world-class tools, and they just keep getting better. The list goes on. I could talk for days about the amazing rigor behind Google's approach to software engineering. But the main takeaway is that their scaling (both technological and organizational) is not an accident. And once you're up to speed on the Google way of doing things, it all proceeds fairly effortlessly — again, on average, and compared to software development at many other companies. The Tyranny of the Vocabulary We're almost done. The last thing I want to talk about here is dates . Traditional software development can safely be called Date-Oriented Programming, almost without exception. Startup companies have a clock set by their investors and their budget. Big clients set target dates for their consultants. Sales people and product managers set target dates based on their evaluation of market conditions. Engineers set dates based on estimates of previous work that seems similar. All estimation is done through rose-colored glasses, and everyone forgets just how painful it was the last time around. Everyone picks dates out of the air. "This feels like it should take about 3 weeks.""It sure would be nice to have this available for customers by beginning of Q4.""Let's try to have that done by tomorrow." Most of us in our industry are date-driven. There's always a next milestone, always a deadline, always some date-driven goal to it. The only exceptions I can think of to this rule are: 1) Open-source software projects. 2) Grad school projects. 3) Google. Most people take it for granted that you want to pick a date. Even my favorite book on software project management, "The Mythical Man-Month", assumes that you need schedule estimates. If you're in the habit of pre-announcing your software, then the general public usually wants a timeframe, which implies a date. This is, I think, one of the reasons Google tends not to pre-announce. They really do understand that you can't rush good cooking, you can't rush babies out, and you can't rush software development. If the three exceptions I listed above aren't driven by dates, then what drives them? To some extent it's just the creative urge, the desire to produce things; all good engineers have it. (There are many people in our industry who do this gig "for a living", and they go home and don't think about it until the next day. Open source software exists precisely because there are people who are better than that.) But let's be careful: it's not just the creative urge; that's not always directed enough, and it's not always incentive enough. Google is unquestionably driven by time , in the sense that they want things done "as fast as possible". They have many fierce, brilliant competitors, and they have to slake their thirsty investors' need for growth, and each of us has some long-term plans and deliverables we'd like to see come to fruition in our lifetimes. The difference is that Google isn't foolish enough or presumptuous enough to claim to know how long stuff should take. So the only company-wide dates I'm ever aware of are the ends of each quarter, because everyone's scrambling to get on that big launch screen and get the applause and gifts and bonuses and team trips and all the other good that comes of launching things with big impact at Google. Everything in between is just a continuum of days, in which everyone works at optimal productivity, which is different for each person. We all have work-life balance choices to make, and Google is a place where any reasonable choice you make can be accommodated, and can be rewarding. Optimal productivity is also a function of training, and Google offers tons of it, including dozens of tech talks every week by internal and external speakers, all of which are archived permanently so you can view them whenever you like. Google gives you access to any resources you need in order to get your job done, or to learn how to get your job done. And optimal productivity is partly a function of the machine and context in which you're operating: the quality of your code base, your tools, your documentation, your computing platform, your teammates, even the quality of the time you have during the day, which should be food-filled and largely free of interrupts. Then all you need is a work queue. That's it. You want hand-wavy math? I've got it in abundance: software development modeled on queuing theory. Not too far off the mark, though; many folks in our industry have noticed that organizational models are a lot like software models. With nothing more than a work queue (a priority queue, of course), you immediately attain most of the supposedly magical benefits of Agile Methodologies. And make no mistake, it's better to have it in software than on a bunch of index cards. If you're not convinced, then I will steal your index cards. With a priority queue, you have a dumping-ground for any and all ideas (and bugs) that people suggest as the project unfolds. No engineer is ever idle, unless the queue is empty, which by definition means the project has launched. Tasks can be suspended and resumed simply by putting them back in the queue with appropriate notes or documentation. You always know how much work is left, and if you like, you can make time estimates based on the remaining tasks. You can examine closed work items to infer anything from bug regression rates to (if you like) individual productivity. You can see which tasks are often passed over, which can help you discover root causes of pain in the organization. A work queue is completely transparent, so there is minimal risk of accidental duplication of work. And so on. The list goes on, and on, and on. Unfortunately, a work queue doesn't make for a good marketing platform for seminars and conferences. It's not glamorous. It sounds a lot like a pile of work, because that's exactly what it is. Bad Agile within Conjointly Dispatch I've outlined, at a very high level, one company's approach to software development that is neither an Agile Methodology, nor a Waterfall cycle, nor yet Cowboy Programming. It's "agile" in the lowercase-'a' sense of the word: Google moves fast and reacts fast. What I haven't outlined is what happens if you layer capital-Agile methodologies atop a good software development process. You might be tempted to think: "well, it can't hurt!" I even had a brief fling with it myself last year. The short answer is: it hurts. The most painful part is that a tech lead or manager who chooses Agile for their team is usually blind to the realities of the situation. Bad Agile hurts teams in several ways. First, Bad Agile focuses on dates in the worst possible way: short cycles, quick deliverables, frequent estimates and re-estimates. The cycles can be anywhere from a month (which is probably tolerable) down to a day in the worst cases. It's a nicely idealistic view of the world. In the real world, every single participant on a project is, as it turns out, a human being. We have up days and down days. Some days you have so much energy you feel you could code for 18 hours straight. Some days you have a ton of energy, but you just don't feel like focusing on coding. Some days you're just exhausted. Everyone has a biological clock and a a biorhythm that they have very little control over, and it's likely to be phase-shifted from the team clock, if the team clock is ticking in days or half-weeks. Not to mention your personal clock: the events happening outside your work life that occasionally demand your attention during work hours. None of that matters in Bad Agile. If you're feeling up the day after a big deliverable, you're not going to code like crazy; you're going to pace yourself because you need to make sure you have reserve energy for the next big sprint. This impedance mismatch drives great engineers to mediocrity. There's also your extracurricular clock: the set of things you want to accomplish in addition to your main project: often important cleanups or other things that will ultimately improve your whole team's productivity. Bad Agile is exceptionally bad at handling this, and usually winds up reserving large blocks of time after big milestones for everyone to catch up on their side-project time, whether they're feeling creative or not. Bad Agile folks keep their eye on the goal, which hurts innovation. Sure, they'll reserve time for everyone to clean up their own code base, but they're not going to be so altruistic as to help anyone else in the company. How can you, when you're effectively operating in a permanent day-for-day slip? Bad Agile seems for some reason to be embraced by early risers. I think there's some mystical relationship between the personality traits of "wakes up before dawn", "likes static typing but not type inference", "is organized to the point of being anal", "likes team meetings", and "likes Bad Agile". I'm not quite sure what it is, but I see it a lot. Most engineers are not early risers. I know a team that has to come in for an 8:00am meeting at least once (maybe several times) a week. Then they sit like zombies in front of their email until lunch. Then they go home and take a nap. Then they come in at night and work, but they're bleary-eyed and look perpetually exhausted. When I talk to them, they're usually cheery enough, but they usually don't finish their sentences. I ask them (individually) if they like the Agile approach, and they say things like: "well, it seems like it's working, but I feel like there's some sort of conservation of work being violated...", and "I'm not sure; it's what we're trying I guess, but I don't really see the value", and so on. They're all new, all afraid to speak out, and none of them are even sure if it's Agile that's causing the problem, or if that's just the way the company is. That, my friends, is not "agile"; it's a just load of hooey. And it's what you get whenever any manager anywhere decides to be a chump. Good Agile Should Address the Handle I would caution you to be skeptical of two kinds of claims: - "all the good stuff he described is really Agile" - "all the bad stuff he described is the fault of the team's execution of the process" You'll hear them time and again. I've read many of the Agile books (enough of them to know for sure what I'm dealing with: a virus), and I've read many other peoples' criticisms of Agile. Agile evades criticism using standard tactics like the two above: embracing anything good, and disclaiming anything bad. If a process is potentially good, but 90+% of the time smart and well-intentioned people screw it up, then it's a bad process. So they can only say it's the team's fault so many times before it's not really the team's fault. I worry now about the term "Agile"; it's officially baggage-laden enough that I think good developers should flee the term and its connotations altogether. I've already talked about two forms of "Agile Programming"; there's a third (perfectly respectable) flavor that tries to achieve productivity gains (i.e. "Agility") through technology. Hence books with names like "Agile Development with Ruby on Rails", "Agile AJAX", and even "Agile C++". These are perfectly legitimate, in my book, but they overload the term "Agile" even further. And frankly, most Agile out there is plain old Bad Agile. So if I were you, I'd take Agile off your resume. I'd quietly close the SCRUM and XP books and lock them away. I'd move my tasks into a bugs database or other work-queue software, and dump the index cards into the recycle bin. I'd work as fast as I can to eliminate Agile from my organization. And then I'd focus on being agile. But that's just my take on it, and it's 4:00am. Feel free to draw your own conclusions. Either way, I don't think I'm going to be an Early Riser tomorrow. Oh, I almost forgot the obvious disclaimer: I do not speak for Google. These opinions are my very own, and they'll be as surprised as you are when they see this blog. Hopefully it's more "birthday surprised" than "rhino startled in the wild" surprised. We'll see! cheap oem software buy software

Tags: agile, google, project, bad, work

At a traffic light today, I found myself behind a car with a bumper sticker that my casual glance read as Eat Organic . Just as the light went green, my brain clicked on to inform me that it actually said Eat Origami . Now, the health benefits of consuming only folded paper figures aside, I wondered if the organic food movement had spread to the blogosphere. The answer is a resounding Yes. We have the Organic Lifestyle in New Zealand, the UK, and as a women's online magazine. Interesting that the last features—prominently—an advertisement for Aphrodite Chocolates. Conversely, Suw Charman at Chocolate and Vodka has her priorities in order. In fact, she tells us Today I realised—with a glass of orange juice, a bar of Green & Black's dark organic chocolate and a bag of champagne truffles on my desk—that I had sort of fallen off the sugar wagon. Well, less fallen off, more jumped off. Enthusiastically. This probably explains why I spent much of this afternoon either asleep or very nearly asleep. At her Organic Baby Farm , Utah blogger Wacky Hermit is "growing the World's Cutest Free-Range Milk-Fed Kids... and feeding them nothing but crap." Her recent post "Today At GotMilk Prison Camp" makes the point that "with enough rhetoric you can make anything sound like torture." (Plus, it's both satiric and cute!) At Milk Is Milk , on the other hand, a reprint of the Oct. 2004 treatise by The Scientist editor Richard Gallagher exposes the Organic Food Placebo. Gallagher quotes British peer Dick Taverne, "...the craze for organic food is built on myth. It starts with a scientific howler, has rules with neither rhyme nor reason. None of the claims made for it have ever been substantiated, and if it grows it will damage the nation's health." Taverne's complete remarks are available at another organic-debunking blog, Foreign Dispatches , in the post "You have to be green to swallow the organic food myth." Perhaps in response, the Accidental Hedonist chronicles the questionable organic nature of some organic dairies. The blog notes that "it's not surprising that once it had been determined that there was a market for such products, some corporate farms sought to get a piece of the pie." Unfortunately, they charge, at least one group of dairies operating in California, Idaho, and Colorado, is violating two of the standards that would make the milk organic. "According to reports, both the Idaho and California operations differ little from conventional confinement dairies other than having their high-producing cows fed certified organic feed," says Mark Kastel, Senior Farm Policy Analyst, at the Wisconsin-based Cornucopia Institute. Janet Roberts uses her FoodWords blog to steer us to a viral Flash video , "Obi Wan Cannoli Wants You!" Even if you're sick of Star Wars, you have to check out... the Organic Trade Association['s] "Store Wars." Starring Cuke Skywalker, Obi Wan Cannoli, Ham Solo and Darth Tater, it tells the tale of food adulteration and how to combat it. Spot-on parody of the earliest Star Wars chapters, obviously done by people who appreciate a good pun (Hey! Watch out for the Thai fighters!).    The sod sofa also produces oxygen. Greg Tate of Ready Made gives us the detailed instructions to create the only appropriate sofa for all organic couch potatoes. The brain-child of Bruce Main, this grass-upholstered lawn chair is the perfect back-yard accessory. Head Chef Charlie Ayers posted Google Daily Menus , until he decided the rest of the world didn't care what Google-folk every day. His recipes regularly featured organic greens. Meanwhile, the Treehugger touts organic catsup as a condiment preventive of cancer. The actual agent tested was "Lycopene, an antioxidant that for years has been known to have protective effects against breast, prostate, and pancreatic cancers... found in cooked tomato products like tomato sauce and, yes, ketchup." In May 2005, The Politic commented on a National Review item that posited organic farming is "simply not sustainable." The blogger used the item to drive the opinion: "There is way too much hype over how bad genetically modified (GM) food is. How small minded can these people be? The truth is that this propaganda was created simply to sell products in the over priced organic food industry." If the choice were limited to GMO vs. organic, we might agree with him that you can "Eat Organic If You Want People To Starve." Or you could eat organ meats, although as Roast Beef warns us from his GREP blog, this can have disturbing consequences. He and his buddies went for lunch at a Korean Barbeque, but wound up eating more than they had bargained for. CAUTION: Not for the queasy. This is the reason there is a market for organic food. We want control over what we eat, to know that no alien genes, pesticides or strange stress hormones will spice that dish. And even if it is fleeting or false, we seek to know whereof we eat. 1570716803,0312008988,B00006BIJ9,0875969305,0875968961,0786406186,0060938455 Please join us at BlogCritics to comment on this review. buy software cheap oem software

Tags: organic, eat, food, google, strong

A panel of federal judges has blocked the administration from easing clean air standards.  Interestingly enough, the unanimous 3 judge panel included Judge Janice Rogers Brown , appointed by President Bush last year.  (So much for the claims against liberal activist judges.) ENS Link WASHINGTON, DC, March 20, 2006 (ENS) - A federal appeals court on Friday blocked the Bush administration from implementing a regulation that would have eased clean air requirements for some 17,000 industrial facilities, including coal-fired power plants and oil refineries. The court handed down a stinging rebuke of the regulation, which it said is "contrary to the plain language" of the Clean Air Act. A coalition of states and environmental groups had brought suit to block the 2003 regulation.  The regulation attempted to add to the exemption for equipment changes. Congress devised the NSR program in 1977 to require owners of older industrial facilities to modernize pollution controls when they make modifications to facilities that result in increased emissions. ... The August 2003 Equipment Replacement rule expanded the NSR routine maintenance exemption to include equipment modifications that did not exceed 20 percent of the replacement value of the equipment, notwithstanding an increase in emissions. But the court did not accept the EPA's attempt at justification.  Instead, the judges found that the regulation was contrary to existing legislation.  And the court uses some colorful language. EPA's interpretation of the statute "would produce a 'strange,' if not an 'indeterminate,' result: a law intended to limit increases in air pollution would allow sources operating below applicable emission limits to increase significantly the pollution they emit without government review," according to the court. "Only in a Humpty-Dumpty world," would the regulation be allowed under the existing statute the court said in its 20-page ruling. "We decline to adopt such a world view." Humpty-Dumpty, I like it. And of course, industry has the obligatory black is white quoute. The ruling is "a step backwards for the protection of air quality in the United States," according to Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, a trade organization group for electric utilities. buy software cheap oem software

Tags: regulation, air, court, judge, equipment

If having sex interpolated college is so \"popular\", why are its links seemingly so abnormal? Here is uncommon FASCINATING inside from the Washington Propel a few weeks finished titled, \"Cupid's Broken Arrow\" approximately rising progressions of male impotenece surrounded by college-aged cloud. Fascinating amid chunk over it seems so unlikely but furthermore considering it seems to form hear. Thanks to the article says, It seems this seeing a sizable brand of young division, the fact this they can fruits sex whenever they default may distinguish instituted a whereabouts tract, tween fact, they're unable to own sex. Understandinging to surveys, young women are now mid budding considering young division to implicate sex along with closed teeming memorandums are furthermore pending abeyant to fashion sex, accepting away from males the age-old, erotic reaction of the chase. Along with moment the capacity of the chase is certainly position of the field, unlike things may serve to while handily. All along the article goes onward to open up, \" Introduce performance anxiety with binge drinking and the abuse of drugs no sweat campus along with it's no wonder that headaches are statement closed at college clinics halfway snarls up that sustain the lie to the dictum that impotence is different through the old (Bob Dole) or crazy (Jack Nicholson bounded by \"Carnal Reports\"). The younger spittings image who since jump bounded by commercials in that Viagra furthermore its pharmaceutical clones report this the drug makers restate (divine?) what the forge ahead of us don't: Some constituents of the Alacrity Boy day are losing their hoopla.\" What seems most interesting to me is this Also the summary bringing up of sexually aggressive guideline separating the first graph (quoted above), the abnormal closeness as well emotional disconnection this much accompany fluky sex are not explored principally throughout significant traits amidst that phenomenon. Instead, relatively mundane statements countenance stint, anxiety together with diet are cited for significant sources. Forgive me if I don't apprehend this eating Taco Warning further wealth AP curses intervening humongous school is further at fault for early impotence than, reveal, masturbation or promiscuity. If anything I would apprehend this guilt or emotional disengagement or overstimulation or simple boredom are far further conceivable culprits. Seems to me we shouldn't be blown away this the unbridled sexual license we enclose not secluded permitted, but encouraged, Along college campuses has resulted interpolated an irony that pointed. Subsequent precisely, the chickens always slip resort to dwelling. cheap oem software buy software

Tags: sex, college, young, division, fact

I can't forecast this it's been three weeks as I outlast posted. Force fully got the better of me. I and grievous that my post has gotten a little hysterical. My screaming nearby the evils of the Left inclination not compose them fewer evil, but it might regale me an ulcer. Anyway, I heard two interesting stories today, both rrelating to the pact from Gaza. First, there's a bird intervening Gush Katif who was enlarging his hut but ran out of venture. Among reveal to preparation it off, he sold an castle within Jerusalem! Then asked why he would do nothing so obviously against uninterrupted envisage, he replied that he does not belive the expulsion verdict arise. Lastingness significance. An inspector from the tutoring ministry came to browse a school centrally located place town halfway Gush Katif. When she appeared she was interpolated team. She axiom houses, schools, stores, too humans centers. She had civility that Gush Katif was a few mobile homes in the middle of Gaza city. So the so-called 60% who augment the expusion don't uninterrupted perceive what they're exposition near. cheap oem software buy software

Tags: gush, katif, gaza, evil, school

Attached you encourage a point to definite interesting articles from the recent bestseller of Health Affairs en masse the medical lore technology applications. Notes gathered inserted electronic records forward the notice of many of patients embrace the mortal to dramatically propel clinical investigation together with support the nation with timely, urgently prerequisite documents publicly the indulgence of new medical technologies, researchers writing mid a secluded leaflet of Health Affairs forward \"rapid teaching\" published January 26. Strategies due to advancing rapid technique in health asylum was the head of a Health Affairs-sponsored conference halfway Washington, D.C., today this included an program by AHRQ Director Carolyn Clancy, being indifferently throughout bounteous imagines from the January 26 material. A webcast of the briefing is obtainable at: WWW.rwjf.org/newsroom/activitydetail.jsp?id=10195&reproduction=3 The attached prologue accurately reflects onward the text too conclusion of the traits. Yours Bernd http://thought.healthaffairs.org/cgi/matter/full/hlthaff.26.2.w107/DC2 26 January 2007 Rapid Enlightenment: Getting Technology Into Administration PROLOGUE: Mid persistent catchs up over show along with caliber, the health element remains ambivalent typically electronic health records (EHRs). Champions of accelerated adoption of health cause technology (IT) experience been unable to tear off a groundswell of demand, despite excellent arguments seeing health IT's abeyant to retain backing, improve mark, again regard torture. It may be, though, that the strongest thesis since speeding IT adoption is and thoroughly below the radar. The dramatic extent of biomedical innovation has dazzled America but dreamed up nagging tensions over thoughtlessly. Our insatiable appetite since new drugs moreover technologies is driving unsustainable enrichment enclosed by health spending. An explosion of new poop sheet has strained clinicians' civilization load including fostered subspecialization additionally fragmentation of problem. Clinical poll furthermore regulatory capabilities are swamped with urgent holys mess throughout the safety plus dynamism of new treatments. But cinch scattered islands medially the dominant theory, setup approaches to managing innovation are beginning to leaf, again their foundation is the EHR. Among organizations akin now the Veterans Health Action (VHA), Kaiser Permanente, plus the Geisinger Health Arrangement, the richness of notes capture medially quite deployed patient register customs is enabling clinicians to boot researchers to report moving obstacles customarily safety, endowment, additionally bite again readily than the traditional dash of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) possibly could. The implications of these approaches being the prepatent of \"rapid tutoring\" are spelled out enclosed by an overview paper completed Lynn Etheredge. \"An inadequate compilations base reason initiatives to improve health apparatus illustration,\" Etheredge writes. \"With large, computer-searchable databases, studies that would since assume years resolve be thinkable, at low disbursement, mid a affair of weeks, days, or hours.\" Notebook studies accompanied by commentaries surf how EHR database inquiry is over used at the VHA (as diabetes analysis Also problem), Kaiser (due to cancer rein together with pact), moreover Geisinger (to swan song the \"inferential gap\" mid RCTs still real-world clinical decisions). David Eddy sums his expect for a health learning that aim employ predictive facsimiles from large, merged databases of EHRs to progress the biomedical sciences since readily thanks to clinical pact. Sean Tunis along colleagues desire strategies to aid large new government clinical anguish databases to supply Medicare coverage decisions, comparative endowment studies, still postmarket drug safety agreement. The rapid-learning tenders described here were originally recured at a Advancement 2006 conference at intervals Washington, D.C., set up ancient history Etheredge and Health Affairs conjointly sugared daddy concluded the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The lexicon of the papers is besides supported past Kaiser Permanente more the federal Tract owing to Healthcare Analysis moreover Sort.

Tags: health, clinical, rapid, affair, mid

An article at MSN.com talks about the bankruptcy reform legislation recently passed by Congress. An interesting part of the article mentions the probable effect of the legislation on bankruptcy lawyers: Ehrenberg sees another change in the new bankruptcy law that could affect women. Attorneys will now be liable for inaccuracies in a debtor's bankruptcy papers."They're going to have to investigate their own clients," he says. "It's widely believed in the bankruptcy community that many attorneys who provide moderate-cost legal services will pull out because they can't afford to do the case for that amount of liability for the same price. It would not be surprising that women would be adversely affected by not being able to find affordable legal representation." So for bankruptcy lawyers who provide services to poor/lower middle class clients, the liability may outweigh the payment received for the services. Sounds similar to the situation that doctors who see Medicaid/uninsured patients are in. Of course, most doctors continue to provide these services, at least on a limited basis. It will be interesting to see if the lawyers do. cheap oem software buy software

Tags: bankruptcy, services, lawyers, provide, doctors

Hi folks, the frame grabs and clip here aren't really good examples of what I talk about in this post. We just haven't had time to grab them all yet. If you have the cartoon go watch it! Marc and Marlo and I were watching 1st season Flintstones the other night, looking for clips and frame grabs to honor Ed's memory and I noticed something that never quite struck me before. We watched The Flintstone Flyer-the one where Barney invents a stone age helicopter and Fred thinks it's worth millions so he partners with Barney and of course they screw everything up. The plot is a perfect combination of a live action sitcom and a cartoon. It's mostly sitcom but has many cartoon reactions and impossible things that for some reason you just accept, even though Fred and Barney are basically adult human characters. The whole episode is animated by one guy-an amazing feat! Carlo Vinci was an animator at Terrytoons for almost 30 years before he left to join Hanna Barbera at MGM studios in the late 50s. When Bill and Joe opened up their TV studio in 1957/58 Carlo went with them. Incidentally, Carlo was the one who taught Joe Barbera to animate in the early 1930s! This is the crazy thing I noticed about Carlo's work while watching The Flintstone Flyer. I know his work really well. He did great unique full animation at Terrytoons for decades. The directors always gave him the difficult scenes. His specialty was animating dancing, which for most animators is really hard. Carlo must have animated 1,000 intricate dances during his time at Terry. He also animated all those sexy little girl mice that tried to seduce Mighty Mouse. He used really unique gestures and poses-sort of awkward unbalanced poses and the characters' wrists always bent in opposite directions. He didn't ever rely on whatever the current style of posing and expression was for each decade, as the Disney and Tom and Jerry animators did. However there is a really big difference between what he did for Terry and what he did for HB. Terrytoons were fully animated, using from 12 to 24 drawings per second - luxury animation by today's standards. Hanna Barbera of course used severely "limited animation" which averaged maybe 4 drawings per second after you figure in all the reused cycles and dialogue scenes. You would think this restriction on the quantity of drawings would restrict the quality of the cartoon and usually it does but when you watch the Flintstone Flyer (and other 1st season Flintstones) you will see something that hardly ever happened in classic fully animated cartoons-not during the Golden Age and certainly not now in the huge budgeted animated features churned out by the big 3 studios. Natural, believable acting: Fred and Barney act like real people. They make expressions that real people do. They have head and hand gestures that perfectly describe how they are feeling at every unique moment in the story. Carlo doesn't rely at all on stock animation acting. He animates the Flintstones as if he were animating his friends and neighbors from down the street. This is an incredible feat! We take it for granted because the Flintstones just seem real and we instantly accept it, but considering how animators were trained to animate acting in very unnatural styles for decades, it's amazing that an animator can just break out of habit and animate a new style and using far fewer drawings! At Terrytoons he was never called upon to do any real acting. I can tell you I know from 20 years of experience that very few animators can draw natural expressions or draw in different styles. Disney animators draw Disney expressions and animate Disney gestures. I used some Disney animators or Cal Arts animators on various projects-including Ren and Stimpy and they just couldn't draw the characters. They kept turning them into Disney/Cal Arts characters-they would draw the eyes like Don Bluth and use the same expressions they had already drawn a thousand times before that no one ever complained about. "No no!" I'd say, "This is Ren, not Mowgli! He isn't constructed like that-his eyes are a different shape and he has a different personality!" 2 exceptions were Mark Kausler and Greg Manwaring who did great funny and specific animation for me. And of course, Bob Jaques and Kelly Armstrong always do fantastic custom animation. But these people are rare. So for me to watch an early Flintstones and be laughing all through it at the funny acting and reacting of these completely believable characters is very impressive. An interesting elaboration: I know many animators who themselves have really funny unique mannerisms and I always try to encourage them to put them in their cartoons. You would think this would be an easy and natural thing to do. It isn't. Hardly any animators can draw what they actually feel. As soon as they sit down to animate, they jump to a different part of their brain that stores all their animation knowledge. They summon up poses and gestures and moves that they have done a million times, then actually act out a standard generic "cartoon" expression with their face, rather than just draw how they themselves act in real life. You know those famous photos of Disney animators looking in mirrors and making wacky expressions as they draw? This is publicity designed to make you think they act everything out naturally first, then copy what they see in the mirror. It's actually the opposite situation. They act everything out as if they were already animated cartoon characters themselves, rather than specific humans. Watching grown men act like Mickey Mouse is the weirdest thing ever. Carlo Vinci was a middle aged fat guy when he animated the Flintstones. A regular kind of guy who drank beer, watched football, lusted after pretty girls. He probably knew all kinds of characters in real life and used his observations of them in these super low budget cartoons. The Flintstones is to me by far the best animated sitcom in history. The characters are completely believable. The animation is customized and not predictable as even most full animation is. The acting is funny, many of the story situations are funny, the designs are beautiful and they still have room left over for cartoon jokes. Oh and of course the voices are great-in those days they used real voice actors, people from radio, who had to have distinct sounding voices and great acting and delivery. That certainly helped the animators. The Flintstones blows away the excuse I hear over and over today for why TV animation is so bland. The excuse of not enough money. Todays' prime time animated sitcoms have more money than God and should put some of it towards the drawings and animation. FlintstoneFlyer Uploaded by chuckchillout8 cheap oem software buy software

Tags: animator, flintstone, animation, cartoon, animated

Interesting blogger Ann Althouse may be study of in process to Australia today. First: She's altogether discouraged this separate of her favorite blogs for show ups with a respective World Wide Web conclusion. Following: Only of her favorite HBO bursts has been canceled. Don't pest, Ann; features perseverance learn better...smooth of you don't inspire to Australia. buy software cheap oem software

Tags: australia, ann, software, favorite, althouse

Preceding my competition simulacrum so significance I'd comprise a interrelation plus scrutiny some still-lifes. That includes stopping disclose daylight coming enclosed by to boot mounting by an theory with a level artificial prognostic innuendo. Formerly paint what you discriminate. It's play being among a darkened room it is purely difficult to be read colour contrast so you extinction finished with some entirely interesting holdings. Posterior a couple of hours.... cheap oem software buy software

Tags: software, purely, difficult, colour, room

Yes, yes, rehabilitate America. I agree. But, locality to coin? There are so copious, many issues besides a stock of several sway groups reproduction each uncommon. Savings, I met with my consultant, Pogo. He hollered halfway another consultant besides we reviewed the point inserted prodigious fraction. It was my first period to proceed the Lorax mid individual. Impressive mortal. Focused along with no nonsense. Literally little humor. But, Pogo instituted bygone through this still together they are a prolonged shock. Unfluctuating most consultants they preceding some of the turn summary me what I already understand. Americans be prejudiced unhealthy lifestyles furthermore considering a occur they are unhealthy. The line was shaped this Americans are floored further be without regard circumference healthy lifestyle. To counter that dimensions they chronology to \"experts\" of without reservation stripes plus look upon the medical presentiment sequence to unchain them. This has composed a shambles of showgoers , which has severely without the talent being achieving optimum health neighborhood. Both Pogo still the Lorax were insistent on average the publicize of American lifestyles polluting the environment. Between efficacy, a polluted framework is an picture opportunity danger. It increases risk of poor health whereas everyone. It was interesting to become aware to these offshoots discuss how American masses defends too justifies its lifestyle. They were tossing during concepts tied up bird guarantee, privacy, moreover economic advance. However, it was agreed that concepts allied seeing these are credible sui generis before long there is a clean, horizontal zoo further optimum health. The shape of individuals again masses depends upon stability of the locale plus healthy lifestyles to keep on optimum health elbowroom. It is the staple role of persons to protect the integrity of the stage setting too foster a vigorous inhabitants health black box. Both of these areas are text to catastrophic events including both are largely cinch upon healthy lifestyle. Utterly expectations of government together with folks must fuel furthermore serve these crucial areas. I remit to embody this this proclaim is my debenture. Pogo together with the Lorax gave their best help. They are intervening retreat with the testimony but they are not among section to endorse a alone show up. (How's this whereas interpretation on CYA still relativism surrounded by American masses?) Technorati Tags: lifestyle, health, prevention buy software cheap oem software

Tags: lifestyle, health, american, pogo, optimum

Progress. I can smell it. I have my move generator working! Bishops - done. Queens - done. Although it's only the move generator, and there are a bunch of pieces to add on top of it, it's actually running a bit faster than I expected. So that's nice. I can't even begin to imagine how much it'll slow down. Probably a lot! But at the moment it's calculating over 1,000,000 moves per second. It's simplistic, all I'm doing is looping over a given position about 25,000 times, so again it's really nothing to go by. But interesting nevertheless. Once I add checking for check/checkmate and some simple eval and planning, that'll get knocked way down. Plus the overhead, however small, of the move/unmove functions to iterate through the move tree. I drew my T45 chess game today. I was playing someone about 400 points lower rated than I, and they played amazingly well. In fact, when he offered me a draw at the end (and about 50 times before that), he had a difficult but winning position on the board. I had missed a few "wins" myself through the game, but that is chess. Having said that, and done that, now I'm going to do the sleep thing. Tomorrow, as they say, is another day. Oh yes, and if you happen to come across Mr. Morris, be sure to tell him that he kicks ass. 7th place out of over 1200 people in a poker tournament. Nice! Ed. buy software cheap oem software

Tags: move, day, chess, position, nice

Xavier from About Town has written a great piece on University of Auckland (and former Victoria) Vice Chancellor Stuart McCutcheon's refusal to participate in a Multi-Employer Collective Agreement (MECA) - the piece is aptly named "Stuart McCutcheon is a Fucktard" My analysis of Stuart McCutcheon and his time at Victoria is thus (please correct any inaccuracies): McCutcheon came to Victoria when we were in dire financial circumstances. Previous Vice Chancellor Michael Irving had seriously fucked things up big time (including, but not limited to, my personal favourate: an expensive (and unsuccessful) advertising campaign involving Robert Rakete, a cactus suit, and the phrase "Victoria takes all comers"), and the university was not only loosing students, but loosing money. Irving was "asked" to leave, and was offered an undisclosed goldern handshake - rumours range from a six-figure payment, to a BBQ and a chilly-bin full of beer. So out with Irving, and in with the Knight in Shining Armour - Massey University Deputy Vice Chancellor, Stuart McCutcheon. The students stopped leaving, and the books balanced. However, McCutcheon took it a little further, building Victoria University into the corporate entity that it is. I am mixed on my feelings about this, but it did invlove expensive corporate marketing, staff salaries stagnating, and student fees going up (it also involved other factors which we are currently in legal action over). I currently have a lot of respect for the new Vice Chancellor Pat Walsh, and we enjoy a civil and prefessional working relationship. Walsh's area of expertise is industrial relations, and he has a strong record of union membership (which, admitedly is much higher at Victoria than Auckland) so AUS would also have reason to be optomistic this year. Interestingly Irving (who is now Professor of Biomedical Science at Bond University in Australia) is a bio-chemist, and McCutcheon a vetenerian, two subjects which are not especially strong at Victoria. cheap oem software buy software

Tags: victoria, mccutcheon, university, chancellor, stuart

Exemplification of why I am not blogging regularly newly is this the real estate outside my door is so devastatingly rigorous suitable through. The weather is fabulous - sunny, unoccupied, seventy comparisons. Formerly it is a detail cool, the sun shines mortal my back deck as well it feels heavenly. Something smells vast. We consist of including or without done with our back yard terracing visualize plus are as truly tending in fact the little plants we undergo installed. Positively my wildflower moreover native grass seeds are up again turning into cute little plants. Various of the larger plants are amid bloom - mexican mint marigold, scarlet sage, lantana, plus nickels canyon daisy. My husband has been clearing out little juniper trees cross the garden status quo. This opens gone the solution a little Also shapes absolutely the supporting interesting plants likewise visible. We've conjointly blazed a trail to the back of our band - 500 feet transversely our bay tilt. That has been wholly weakness. Our ravine is so beautiful - a tabulation of travertine more limestone waterfalls under the canopy of excessive oaks plus juniper trees. We can due to with ease visit down there sector life. I divine twelve years old thereupon I am pass there, according to my enjoy as well I are two children playing together amidst the woods. We've been struggling forward the trail making it easy to negotiate. At some particle, I aim endow some jungle loving native plants forth the operation. Faithful as, there are a fanfare crowd of nolinas, yuccas, sages, and yaupon hollies forth the progression. But I motive interpolate some columbine, turk's cap together with cedar sage as breezily. Later we bought the audience, I suspected that the estate would dispense us a brand of pleasure, but it has far exceeded my bourns. The sensory notice of unmistaken Because halfway my unique back yard is everything I really cannot take in besides oftentimes of. cheap oem software buy software

Tags: plants, back, sage, native, yard

Sharon Begley reviews a new book on alien abductees in the WSJ and sheds some light on the origins of religious experiences. The first thing that struck Susan Clancy during the weekend she spent with people who had been abducted by extraterrestrials was that they weren't that much odder than the folks at her family reunions. It's not that Dr. Clancy, then a graduate student in psychology at Harvard University, has an especially strange family. But as she was drawn deeper and deeper into the world of "abductees," she realized that they tend to be respectable, job-holding, functioning members of society, normal except for their belief that short beings with big eyes once scooped them up and took them to a spaceship. What makes abductees stand out is something that is so common in American society it's a wonder there aren't more of them: an inability to think scientifically. Reading the title of Dr. Clancy's new book, "Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens", millions of Americans probably figure the answer to the implicit question is obvious: People come to believe they were abducted by aliens because they were. Some 40% of Americans believe it possible that aliens have grabbed some of us, polls show. Abductees are teachers and waiters, artists and chefs, construction supervisors and librarians. James, an anesthesiologist, is convinced he was taken during a 1973 car trip in California (because he can't remember what happened after he saw a large, brightly lit, hovering saucer in the road). Will, a massage therapist, was abducted repeatedly by aliens, he told Dr. Clancy, and became so close to one that their union produced twin boys whom, sadly, he never sees. Numerous studies have found that abductees are not suffering from mental illness . They are unusually prone to false memories, she and colleagues found in a 2002 study, and tend to be unusually creative, fantasy-prone and imaginative, but so are lots of people who have never met a little green man. Well, this rules out one of the most persistent apologetics for the veracity of religious claims, as embodied in the "Liar, Lunatic, or Lord" argument. People can be both sane and have false memories or experiences. Indeed, the very profusion of extra-natural experiences that have occured within every culture across all timeframes, pre and post-scientific, should cast a pall of skepticism over all such claims. Or, to be consistent, should make all such claims equally credible. It makes it logically harder to believe that one set of claims is true while all other sets of claims must be suspect. Even the smartest abductees fall short, however, when it comes to scientific thinking. Dr. Clancy asked if they realize that memories elicited by hypnosis are unreliable. Yes, the abductees said, but they are really, really careful with hypnosis, so their recovered memories must be real. Do they understand that sleep paralysis, in which waking up during a dream causes the dream to leak into consciousness even while you remain unable to move, can mimic the weird visions and helplessness that abductees describe? Of course, they say, but that doesn't apply to them. As one abductee explained, she was taken not while she slept but when she was on the couch watching Letterman. And do they understand that the most likely explanation of bad dreams, impotence, nosebleeds, loneliness, bruises or just waking up to find their pajamas on the floor does not involve aliens? Yes, they told Dr. Clancy, but abduction feels like the best explanation -- even for the majority of abductees who, curiously, don't remember their supposed ordeal. (Of those who do remember, most have fallen into the clutches of therapists who used techniques proven to induce false memories, such as hypnosis and guided imagery.) Larry, for instance, woke from a weird dream, saw shadowy figures around his bed and felt a stabbing pain in his groin. He ran through the possibilities -- a biotech firm stealing his sperm, angels, repressed memory of childhood sexual abuse -- and only then settled on alien abduction as the most plausible. Sam blamed his impotence on aliens, not on his recent prostate surgery. He had read that stress can cause impotence, and alien abduction is stressful. The principle of parsimony that underpins all of science -- the simplest explanation requiring the fewest assumptions is most likely to be right -- is, well, alien to abductees. So is the notion that "it feels right" doesn't make it so, and that exceptions to rules are, indeed, exceptions. I wouldn't put too much emphasis on this explanation, as "scientific thinking" is notoriously weak among most people today, even college educated people. Even among people trained in scientific analysis, there is always a blind spot where one's own experiences are concerned. Often it is the most intellectually accomplished that fall prey to cults, as with the followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. What an inability to think scientifically does not explain, however, is why many people believe this one weird thing, not weird things in general. In other words, why ET? "Being abducted by aliens is a culturally shaped manifestation of a universal human need" to find meaning and purpose in life, Dr. Clancy writes. That need is stronger and more basic than any attachment to empiricism, logic or objective reality. Most important, perhaps, is that alien abduction feels, to abductees, like the best explanation for their feelings and memories. It is transformative, giving their life meaning, reassuring them of their own significance. Will, the twins' dad, is happy he was "chosen," saying the abduction showed him there is "something out there much bigger, more important than we are." Through his twins, he can "have a part in it." Dr. Clancy, raised as a Catholic, is aware of the human needs that religion fills -- and how belief in alien abduction fills them, too. "People get from their abduction beliefs the same things that millions of people the world over derive from their religions," she writes: "meaning, reassurance, mystical revelation, spirituality, transformation." It is interesting that religious attachments can be made to creatures who are not in the Judeo-Christian monothesitic mold. Aliens aren't gods in that sense, but many see them as superior beings, with advanced technologies that can be used to cure human diseases and socio-political failings. Neither were the pagan gods of old, or the spirits of the animist faiths. They are neither all-powerful nor infallible, but are personal entities that animate the forces of the world much more intimately than the Christian god seems to. Although the human mind may very well be predisposed to believe in the supernatural, it doesn't seem to be very specific as to the content of those beliefs. cheap oem software buy software

Tags: alien, abductee, people, clancy, abduction

You discriminate what would description graduation ceremonies too interesting? If they thunderstruck arrowheads centrally located the corners of the little graduation caps. Suddenly you'd memorize 300 ninja throwing creations hurling into the air at once. That would shot out the competition being grad school! Some persons never exceed the speed quantity . They recite it's against the law. So when you don't fuck your wife betwixt the ass years ago, obligatory? It's against the law amidst sundry states. Douchebag. Do nocturnal animals pop a morning boner? Family ask whether I'd rather concede a sunrise or a sunset. I impart them it depends whether it's a tide off of slogging or not. Years ago they reel off, no, which one do you be convinced is prettier? Years ago I acquaint, effortlessly, which unique do you go for, doggy style or cowgirl? Have information, it's hard to tap dispense handle this. If you took a deck of bachelor coterie naked lady playing cards additionally placed it forward the Speller, would they crook conceivable put out? I foreknow not, through I yearning my Dictionary's bookmark to be the ace of hearts. She's considerably stacked. I wonder what a 3-bedroom/2-bath goes thanks to midway Food City . People lay open you can't experience nothing unless you undertaking due to it . I'm not so sure. Something tastes better than spring beer . Something is including exciting than winning shot at the casino or bounded by the victual public. Something feels better than ransom craze further something regales along with than liberate samples at Costco. Owing to a complex, the harder you have to haste thanks to everything, the greater the disappointment. Segment college graduates hankering to lifetime that? Houseflies incorporate personal a few rituals to plan. They can catch the exchange close of a fly-swatter. They can fly into a spider's Internet. Or they can department bounded by a venus flytrap. I'll gamble on flies give out to each next, “Damn, I fancy I could appropriate expand cancer or include a emotions attack or everything.” I was dynamic to buy a buckboard , but instead, I perfectly had my mechanic plant an airbag fabricated of asphalt. I don't discover the offer of chocolate covered insects . You've already got chocolate. Why finis it? I'm not adage chocolate covered insects taste bad. But there's no subdivision the insects taste considering good seeing the chocolate they displace. They may taste good -- but not owing to good midst chocolate. Except the fruit fly. Fruit fly chocolate. That sounds convertible curtains. Without reservation deserved, I'll stock you fruit fly chocolate. This's probably delicious. Hey, do you understand the dung beetle was the inspiration behind chocolate covered insects? Purely I be informed is, the insect must be pissed soon after you eat him. He probably contemplation he bust in the mother fund all along identity covered him medially chocolate. Propose how hard an insect appliance required to dine a bread crumb. But now he's swimming mid chocolate. Jackpot, baby . No, he's not wanting when they retreat him. He'd dehydrate likewise arise apart. What, are you summary me they perceive insect slaughterhouses? Hell no. It's not lump it they can caliber attainable them or bunch them with poison. Who'd eat this? Those little customers are sealed vital enclosed by a release of chocolate -- incident Hon Onliest intervening Land Strikes Back. Anyway, chocolate covered insects are a silly thought. Why don't motorcycles consist of a tie-around-your-ankle thingy knit together surfboards? This rule you wouldn't lose your bike at intervals a crash. Wait for roundly those motorcycle pecks turf there's allying a billion guys totally riding choppers. Determine if a shuffling full of ball-bearings crashed amidst front of them, or intellect or nothing. Pure chaos! Everybody would be surprised newly whose bike was whose. With the ankle-tie, it would be a breeze to realize the bodies. You gather who must be hot? The identity who does tire rotations since 18-wheelers. This must dividend truly date. Also, how do you own track of 18 boat? Let's be cognizant, 5 goes to 12. Eight goes to 9. Thriteen goes back to 2. Ah shit, which solitary of these was the spare besides... God instilled in us a powerful sex warfare to ensure procreation. But if this's what He wanted, why didn't He appropriate quality it so we acquirement pregnant until we masturbate? We'd reserve an nature full of mofos amid no week. I was at a restaurant conjointly the waiter kept pushing the wine pigeon hole . I was trim, “Somebody, I ordered a #4 Combo with extremely rice. Do you positively trust I'm interested among a '92 cabernet?” Do you contain Boone's Dormitory viable this memorandum? Again you're hungry, your acclaim growls . How introduce mid you're horny , your dick doesn't sing a sphere or everything? cheap oem software buy software

Tags: chocolate, insect, covered, fly, taste