In a recent meeting my technical lead on the MonsterOfAllProjects told me "It's not important that you know what you're doing. It's only important that you do it correctly." He was referring to my numerous questions about HOW THIS THING WORKED.

The shift from Quality Assurance to Project Management is a bit weird in this. I'm going from needing a full understanding of the process in order to bugger the hell out of it expose its weaknesses to needing to know absolutely nothing about the process. It was explained to me thusly:

Tech Lead: "Tell us what you're putting in and tell us what you want to come out. The rest is ours."

Me: "Wait a sec. 'The rest' is what I'm used to dealing with."

Tech Lead: "Not any more. Mwah hah hah hah hah!!"

The evil laugh might have been a tad shorter but that was essentially how the conversation went. So now I have to change my wall sign from "If you build it, it will crash" to "Garbage in, garbage out".

Posted by: Jim at 01:15 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 You have a sign too? Mine says "Please Do NOT Feed the Analyst." I know it's lame, but no one ever does anything zany in my office. I had to put a stop to that boring nonsense.

Posted by: shank at April 29, 2005 01:41 PM (+H1yK)

2 Hye that makes three of us with signs, except mine came from Despair.com. The signs I have are: Mettings and Get to Work

Posted by: phin at April 29, 2005 03:38 PM (Xvpen)

3 Welcome to my side of the sandbox! Loving it yet?!?! Garbage in Garbage out is good. Personally, mine says "No Whining" - you know, "Whining" in big letters, red circle, line slashing through it. Of course, no one comes by my cubby except Bear and he can't read, so guess who the sign's for, hmm???? Get the PMBOK. Join the PMI. You are part of the PM Colective, now Resistance is futile.

Posted by: Elizabeth at May 02, 2005 10:18 AM (LrGDI)

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I had a long meeting scheduled today. It is for a program asset database - a central location for all documentation, references and all information on every program we own, build or use. The idea started small and has been growing daily as more and more departments think of information that they want to store.

Today's meeting was to go over the high level requirements and get a basic development strategy. This way a decent development estimate could be made and we could take that to the Legion of Doom executive review board for cost approval. It was going to be a hellabad meeting.

I got there a few minutes early as usual. I set up the laptop, got on the network and hooked up to the overhead projector. I even plugged into the wall since the meeting was probably going to go longish and I didn't want to deal with any battery issues or that incredibly irritating screen-dimming.

People started arriving. The Vice President of Development. A Director of Application Development. Another Director of Application Development. The Vice President of Product & Quality Assurance. It dawned on me that I had all of the top people* responsible for all of our product development together in one room**. That's how big the scope for this program had become. I would have been nervous but my flight/fight reflex had landed firmly in fight mode. more...

Posted by: Jim at 03:55 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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It's begging week pledge drive time at NPR. This time they are doing something a little bit different. They are going to end the begging drive as soon as they reach their goal! Cool, right? Well, no. They've never reached their goal so the chance that they'll reach their goal early is about the same as Michael Moore passing on a deep fried Twinkie.

But I've thought of a way to end this annoying crap early after all. You see, the magic number is for pledges of donations, not the donations themselves. This means that all somebody (meaning "you") has to do to stop the madness is to call up and pledge $600,000 or so. Badda boom, badda bing, pledge drive is over.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Yeah that's great except for the $600,000 debt I'd incur". Well you're wrong. There's no legal financial obligation to fulfill your pledge. A pledge is just your personal promise to give them your money.

Now you're thinking "So you want me to break my word, corrupt my honor, defile my personal integrity just so you don't have to listen to a bunch of whining beggars during your morning commute?" Of course not! I would never ask you to do such a thing. All you have to do is get somebody else to make the pledge. I've got the perfect solution to this problem too. Bums.

That's right. Get a bum to make the call for you. Hell, if a bum is willing to suck a dick for a bottle of Thunderbird it shouldn't be hard to get them to make a phone call for you. If you're a decent negotiator you might even be able to get the BJ and the phone call for the same bottle. They don't have any teeth so it'll probably be worth it.

So get on out there now and find yourself a bum. I greatly appreciate your assistance in this matter.

Posted by: Jim at 08:24 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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That's the number of nose pickings I witnessed on the way into work this morning. One of them could possibly have been a mismanaged scratch but at least three were knuckles deep and digging for gold.

What is it about cars that makes people forget that glass works both ways?

Posted by: Jim at 09:05 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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So millions of people are marching by the Pope's remains to pay their last respects. Some people have been in line for days. They are coming to Italy from all over the world to say goodbye. For many it is their first time traveling to Italy and for most it is their first time seeing the Pope.

Isn't that just a little bit sick? I could understand a Pope groupie gathering the clan and hightailing it to Vatican City for a last look at the body but we're talking about people who've spent their entire lives without glimpsing His Popliness suddenly feeling the call to go look at a dead body.

What? You couldn't make the trip while the guy was alive? Do you prefer a viewing of a dead, made up, preserved, rigormortised* Pope to the live guy saying mass?

It's really creaping me out. It's like some death cult that comes out of the woodwork to get their jollies over a corpse.

Freaks.

* If he's stiff enough he'd be a Popesicle.

Posted by: Jim at 01:57 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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I love etymology*, the study of the source of words. Some of the words in our current lexicon come from some seriously weird places. Take the common greeting Hello, for example. Hello has one of the strangest sources I've come across, one that is seriously out of place with its current use.

Hello is a bastardization of a 14th century phrase Hie below. Hie is from Middle English and means to go quickly. Below in this context meant persons who were underneath the speaker. You see, Hie below was a warning yelled out by upper story tenants when they were about to dump their chamber pots out of windows or off of balconies. It was a very quick method of saying "Whoever is underneath me better get their ass moving fast or they're going to be wearing a shit coat".

Hie below, as is typical for common phrases, contracted over the years. The first commonly recognized contraction in print was in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream when Nick Bottom's character was being publicly ridiculed and despoiled. The feces coated weaver turned erstwhile player uttered the famous line "The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen; such unkind act with nary a hielow". This use of the word is one of Shakespeare's infamous double entendres. Bottom is complaining of both the lack of courtesy in a warning as well as the rudeness of not being properly greeted.

Usage of the word gradually shifted. With advances in sanitation there wasn't so much tossing of shit out of windows any more so that connotation died away. The word survived though and finally morphed into the common greeting of Hello that we all use today.

* Not to be confused with 'entomology', the study of bugs. Although that's pretty cool too. more...

Posted by: Jim at 11:05 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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1 Very interesting. Learn something new every day...!

Posted by: pylorns at April 06, 2005 11:23 AM (FTYER)

2 Well, you had me fooled. Unfortunately that's not too hard, I'm incredibly naive at times. My kids are always making things up and then laughing at me when I go "really?" Oh well. (I did look up what it really meant, but I'm not telling, so there pfbttt!)

Posted by: Rachel Ann at April 06, 2005 11:27 AM (jG2ss)

3 Damn Sam, Jim, that was good. Had me fooled, and now I've got to break out the gf's Complete Works of Wm. Shakespeare just because.

Posted by: Victor at April 06, 2005 12:21 PM (L3qPK)

4 Both ridiculous and believable. Until Shakes. Hey, did I miss the contest about your new political party slogans? Don't remember seeing your picks -- and good ones to choose from.

Posted by: Kenny at April 06, 2005 02:20 PM (sVrPB)

5 Most of that Shakespeare quote is real. The best lies are 80% truth. The contest is still open. I'll probably wrap it up tomorrow.

Posted by: Jim at April 06, 2005 02:47 PM (tyQ8y)

6 so I just made all of this up. Oh, you're a bastard, you are. Had me going. Now go look up the etymology of "bastard" and give us a good story about that one.

Posted by: ilyka at April 06, 2005 03:29 PM (wk1+o)

7 You suck! I was so ready to believe that and tell my friends. So, next time why not just leave that disclamer out and make us stupid blog readers look like the asses we are?

Posted by: Adamu at April 07, 2005 03:33 PM (bQFq3)

8 Too funny! I may have to try and convince my sister of this one. She believed our neighbor that she had to change the 'air' in the tires of her first car. Didn't want 'stale' air in the tires, they may go flat. I still laugh about that one.

Posted by: vw bug at April 10, 2005 09:29 AM (rhlNH)

9 yeah crazy. i thought "hello" was invented to answer the phone? i heard AGB thought "ahoy" would work.

Posted by: mickey mouse at April 25, 2005 08:58 PM (NICJR)

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A hippie is a dirty and smelly hugger of trees. A Goth is a member of an ultra-violent tribe of barbarians that kicked serious ass over half of Eurasia.

Posted by: Jim at 04:14 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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What will the new Pope be like? I was listening to NPR* this morning and one of the talking heads was saying he wouldn't be surprised if the new Pope was younger and more energetic. I thought "I sure as hell hope so, buddy. You can't get a whole lot older or less energetic than the dead Pope". Then I realized he meant like overall. He's expecting a younger, more vibrant, hipper Pope.

Maybe a Pope that does a little pop and lock up on the Pope balcony. You know - a little entertainment for the masses. Or for the Mass, depending on your point of view. Maybe a bit of karaoke. Hell, it's got to be one huge temptation to be up there at the Popepodium with thousands of people assembled in the courtyard every day and not occasionally break into Unchain My Heart.

Or maybe, just maybe (my heart trembles at the thought), a kick-boxing Pope. THAT is what the Catholic church really needs. Nobody is going to call the Mother Church old, tired and stodgy with a kick-boxing Pope at the helm. A kick-boxing ninja Pope.

How freaking cool would that be, eh? You'd have young toughs lining up around the block to convert to an ass kicking religion like that. And just think about how this would let the Catholics compete in the Asian markets. What Buddhist monk could stand up to the force of the kick-boxing ninja Pope? Or better yet, a kick-boxing ninja RoboPope!

Yeah, that would be tooooo sweet!

Sometimes NPR actually has some good shit on it.

Posted by: Jim at 02:42 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Who'll play the Pope in the movie?

I figure it'll be Matt Damon for the young Pope, Mel Gibson for the older Pope and Marlon Brando for the Popely Pope.

With Brando as the Popely Pope they won't have to do as much to fake all of the medical problems.

Posted by: Jim at 02:32 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Do you think they'll put the Popemobile up on eBay now?

Posted by: Jim at 02:02 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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The Pope died after a long and fruitful life and people all over the world are mourning and praying for him.

Why?

The mourning I understand. The pontiff was a well loved man. But why pray for the Pope? I mean, he was the frickin Pope! Leader of the Catholic Church, mouthpiece of God and all that good stuff. He's pretty much a shoe-in for whatever's supposed to come next.

Praying for the Pope is a waste of a good prayer. It's like praying that your reuben sandwich will have corned beef on it. Dude, it's a done deal. Already in the bag. Success by definition. Minutes taken, meeting adjourned.

So don't waste your effort with Pope prayers. Aim those prayers at a place where they can do some constructive good. Join me in praying that Hillary Clinton will find a soul. Or at least a clue.

Posted by: Jim at 11:26 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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With the Terry Shiavo thing so prevalent in the news and on everybody's lips living wills are getting some well deserved attention. All over the blogosphere you see people posting their digital equivalent. The three most common sentiments are:

• I want to live, no matter what, as long as possible.


• I don't want to live like a vegetable, no matter what, do me in please.


• I don't want to live like a vegetable but for the love of all that's holy please don't starve me to death.

I, James Peacock, being of (reasonably) sound mind and (for the most part) sound body do hereby solemnly swear and affirm that in the event my mental faculties are reduced to the point where I can be out-thought by a toaster that I officially do not give a damn what you do with my semi to fully mentally vacant meat puppet. It's up to you. If I am a financial burden and am holding back your life then do me in without regrets. If it is a comfort to you to have my non-sentient living corpse lying about then by all means keep me going. If you can make some cash by decorating me with sparkles and posing me in compromising positions with various woodland animals then have at it.

Seriously. Whatever will make the lives of my survivors better, no matter what that is, you have my permission to do it.

Now, to avoid the possibility of a repeat of the Shiavo/Schindler feud I'll take care of any possible disagreements right off the bat: In the event that my survivors disagree on what to do with me, whoever has the least permanent plan wins. So if one relative wants to inject me with morphine until I expire and another wants to pose me on their mantelpiece, the poser wins. Simple enough, right?

I think that covers everything. Carry on.

Posted by: Jim at 08:36 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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