Lord, my former favorite NBA Team, the Wizards, are such a mess. Players refusing to go back into games. And just who does Andre Blatche think he is? Abe Pollin must be turning over in his grave.
In Ninth Grade, I would have killed to get that kind of run. Let's just say that I had a lot of "DNPCD"s next to my name in the scorecard that year.
Hell, in one game against (I believe) Cochran Junior High from Johnstown, Coach inserted me into the game (for the first time that game) with 2 seconds left. We were winning by 14 points :-)
I wonder what the thought process was there? For example. when we were winning by 10 with two minutes left, did Coach assess the situation and come to the conclusion that the risk was too great?
Did I bitch and moan because of this massive dis? Did I just refuse to go in the game like Andre Blatche?. Hell no, I ripped off my warmups, sprinted to the scorer's table, and checked in. Cochran had the ball at mid-court and I had single-minded purpose - I was damn sure not going to let my man get off a 14-point shot!
I was playing the 3 (small forward) then. The guy I was guarding made a hard cut to the wing, and I denied that with a perfect overplay. He must have thought I was some sort of chump because he tried to backdoor me - no dice, just like I was taught, I opened up perfectly - ball - you - man.
Dude didn't even touch the ball the rest of the game. Given it my all for dear old BG. I thnk I had to even shower after that game.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Saturday, March 27, 2010
There's Three Hours of My Life I Won't Get Back
The next release of our product isn't slated to ship for months, but apparently our backlog of defects is getting important folks nervous. So the word was put out Friday (in a sort of passive-aggressive manner) that team members were expected to work the weekend (developers fixing bugs and testers verifying the fixes).
So I got up Saturday morning to work on a couple of bugs. Started at 8:00 AM and wanted to be done by noon or so. Was making good progress on this one defect, but when I went to test it, was having a hell of a time getting one of my new messages to render correctly. Our product runs on top of a framework written in Java and the messages use the Java MessageFormat class to substitute variables into the message.
From about 11:00 to 2:00, I could not get the damn message to format correctly. This is such a simple thing and I was really getting frustrated and pissed. In the framework the messages are stored in a database, so I was originally not sure if the message was being stored correctly in the database or if there was a cache issue where my message was not getting loaded because the message cache was stupid.
Finally, around 2:30, I finally realized that I had mistyped a right paren instead of a right brace in the message text. {2) instead of {2}. Arghh. Once I realized my mistake, everything was good to go, but it was more than a little embarrassing to have wasted that much time on such an obvious mistake that I made. (First rule of debugging - never overlook the obvious and never assume your code is correct.)
But as Neil Peart once wrote, blame is better to give than receive....so my next mission was to look for a partner in crime. I was pretty sure that the MessageFormat class should have detected that unbalanced braces error and thrown an obvious exception. So I wrote a small driver program to test that and sure enough, it did just that. So now I was curious why I didn't see that exception when I was debugging my problem. If I would have seen that exception at 11:00 AM, I would have had my problem fixed at 11:01 instead of 2:30.
So now this was personal! So, for about the next 30 minutes, I was determined to find the culprit - the sloppy code in the framework that had just resulted in 3 hours of wasted effort. And sure enough I came across the following:
public String getMessage(Object[] params)
{
try
{
Message msg=new Message(getKey()+"="+value);
return msg.getMessage(params);
}
catch(Exception e)
{} <<<<---Ah-hah!
return getGroup()+"#"+getKey();
}
So a simple stupid 1 character typing error on my part wasted three hours of my time on a sunny Saturday in March because some gibrone was too lazy to log an exception and instead just ate it.
Man - when I saw that block of code, I was almost as angry as this kid.
So I got up Saturday morning to work on a couple of bugs. Started at 8:00 AM and wanted to be done by noon or so. Was making good progress on this one defect, but when I went to test it, was having a hell of a time getting one of my new messages to render correctly. Our product runs on top of a framework written in Java and the messages use the Java MessageFormat class to substitute variables into the message.
From about 11:00 to 2:00, I could not get the damn message to format correctly. This is such a simple thing and I was really getting frustrated and pissed. In the framework the messages are stored in a database, so I was originally not sure if the message was being stored correctly in the database or if there was a cache issue where my message was not getting loaded because the message cache was stupid.
Finally, around 2:30, I finally realized that I had mistyped a right paren instead of a right brace in the message text. {2) instead of {2}. Arghh. Once I realized my mistake, everything was good to go, but it was more than a little embarrassing to have wasted that much time on such an obvious mistake that I made. (First rule of debugging - never overlook the obvious and never assume your code is correct.)
But as Neil Peart once wrote, blame is better to give than receive....so my next mission was to look for a partner in crime. I was pretty sure that the MessageFormat class should have detected that unbalanced braces error and thrown an obvious exception. So I wrote a small driver program to test that and sure enough, it did just that. So now I was curious why I didn't see that exception when I was debugging my problem. If I would have seen that exception at 11:00 AM, I would have had my problem fixed at 11:01 instead of 2:30.
So now this was personal! So, for about the next 30 minutes, I was determined to find the culprit - the sloppy code in the framework that had just resulted in 3 hours of wasted effort. And sure enough I came across the following:
public String getMessage(Object[] params)
{
try
{
Message msg=new Message(getKey()+"="+value);
return msg.getMessage(params);
}
catch(Exception e)
{} <<<<---Ah-hah!
return getGroup()+"#"+getKey();
}
So a simple stupid 1 character typing error on my part wasted three hours of my time on a sunny Saturday in March because some gibrone was too lazy to log an exception and instead just ate it.
Man - when I saw that block of code, I was almost as angry as this kid.
Talent Is Overrated
I have been working my way through a fantastic book named Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin (Senior Editor at Fortune Magazine). The book systematically tears apart long-standing beliefs that the highest performers in various fields (music, sports, business) were somehow blessed with innate talents or preordained for greatness.
Rather, scientific studies of high performers across many different fields suggests that innate talent has very little to do with high performance. Rather, the one common theme that emerges from these studies of top performers is the presence of "deliberate practice" - challenging, difficult practice that is highly designed to address performance weaknesses.
In other words, there are no shortcuts to greatness. At the same time, hard work isn't enough either. It has to be the right kind of hard work, specifically targeted with expert coaching and feedback and sustained over years of craft development. This is the kind of book that one wishes they had read when they were 19.
Colvin posits that these techniques of deliberate practice are available to all of us, though I am not sure how well they map in the daily grind that is corporate America. In any event, I found the book inspiring and enlightening.
Pete Maravich comes to mind as a perfect example of the deliberate practice model. Raised by a basketball coach father (Press Maravich), the Pistol's work ethic growing up was second to none. Tales of his practice regimen were legendary.
Ultimate COLLEGE Pistol Pete Maravich MIX
Maravich Book | MySpace Video
That sequence of passes from around 2:25 to 2:47 was just sick.
Rather, scientific studies of high performers across many different fields suggests that innate talent has very little to do with high performance. Rather, the one common theme that emerges from these studies of top performers is the presence of "deliberate practice" - challenging, difficult practice that is highly designed to address performance weaknesses.
In other words, there are no shortcuts to greatness. At the same time, hard work isn't enough either. It has to be the right kind of hard work, specifically targeted with expert coaching and feedback and sustained over years of craft development. This is the kind of book that one wishes they had read when they were 19.
Colvin posits that these techniques of deliberate practice are available to all of us, though I am not sure how well they map in the daily grind that is corporate America. In any event, I found the book inspiring and enlightening.
Pete Maravich comes to mind as a perfect example of the deliberate practice model. Raised by a basketball coach father (Press Maravich), the Pistol's work ethic growing up was second to none. Tales of his practice regimen were legendary.
Ultimate COLLEGE Pistol Pete Maravich MIX
Maravich Book | MySpace Video
That sequence of passes from around 2:25 to 2:47 was just sick.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
New Department Lunch
One of the managers on our team from Austin is in RTP this week, so he joined our department and 2nd Line Manager for a lunch out at Uno Chicago Grille in Brier Creek. Service was incredibly slow and there were issues with the restaurants credit card handling system. As a result, we were there from about 11:45 to 1:45. I am relatively new to my department and, aside from a Christmas lunch, I had never been to lunch with them. So I learned a couple of things in those two hours.
My new department is really into food. I mean really! Like "order everything off the desert menu at one sitting" into food - which one of my colleagues had actually done at the restaurant we were eating at. Another colleague discussed with passion his recent trip to Austin where he and his buds did the Food Network Man Vs Food Austin challenge - Round Rock Donuts (complete with the famous 2 pound donut), Salt Lick BBQ, and Juan in a Million. Oh, I also learned from my 2nd Line Manager of a really cool place to get good Western New York and Coney Island-style hot dogs in Apex, NC. Though I had been to Salt Lick (Driftwood Location) on my last trip to Austin a few years ago, I'm afraid that I didn't have much to offer in the conversation - I don't eat out much and don't seem to share the passion surrounding food that my colleagues do.
(I thought about countering with some smack about Texas Hot Dogs, but it would have been pretty lame - everybody else was bringing it strong.)
The other thing I learned is that lots of people apparently still go to the movies. As in physically go to a movie theater to watch first-run movies. I guess I am projecting a bit, but for the life of me, I can't see (with affordable 1080p displays, AV receivers, Blue Ray players, and Netflix in the convenience of your house) why anyone would want to go to the theater and put up with high prices, obnoxious patrons, expensive and bad food and (most of the time) improperly calibrated projectors and sound systems. To each his own I guess. I get the "larger than life" appeal of the big screen (my mini theater room is still unfinished, sigh) but that isn't compelling enough for me. I'll just wait out the delay until the movie I am interested in is available on Blue Ray.
Finally, I found it interesting that in the second week of March, smack dab in the middle of Tobacco Road, that not once was the topic of college basketball discussed during two hours with this collection of a dozen or so people. Yes, it was a really long two hours.
My new department is really into food. I mean really! Like "order everything off the desert menu at one sitting" into food - which one of my colleagues had actually done at the restaurant we were eating at. Another colleague discussed with passion his recent trip to Austin where he and his buds did the Food Network Man Vs Food Austin challenge - Round Rock Donuts (complete with the famous 2 pound donut), Salt Lick BBQ, and Juan in a Million. Oh, I also learned from my 2nd Line Manager of a really cool place to get good Western New York and Coney Island-style hot dogs in Apex, NC. Though I had been to Salt Lick (Driftwood Location) on my last trip to Austin a few years ago, I'm afraid that I didn't have much to offer in the conversation - I don't eat out much and don't seem to share the passion surrounding food that my colleagues do.
(I thought about countering with some smack about Texas Hot Dogs, but it would have been pretty lame - everybody else was bringing it strong.)
The other thing I learned is that lots of people apparently still go to the movies. As in physically go to a movie theater to watch first-run movies. I guess I am projecting a bit, but for the life of me, I can't see (with affordable 1080p displays, AV receivers, Blue Ray players, and Netflix in the convenience of your house) why anyone would want to go to the theater and put up with high prices, obnoxious patrons, expensive and bad food and (most of the time) improperly calibrated projectors and sound systems. To each his own I guess. I get the "larger than life" appeal of the big screen (my mini theater room is still unfinished, sigh) but that isn't compelling enough for me. I'll just wait out the delay until the movie I am interested in is available on Blue Ray.
Finally, I found it interesting that in the second week of March, smack dab in the middle of Tobacco Road, that not once was the topic of college basketball discussed during two hours with this collection of a dozen or so people. Yes, it was a really long two hours.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Is Hot Water Really That Expensive?
We used to get free coffee, tea, pop, and bottled water at work. At the end of 2008, those luxuries were eradicated in the interest of cost savings and, it was asserted, in the interest of fairness as apparently our location was one of the only ones in the company with such perks. No big deal and if that means more engineers get to keep their jobs during a down economy, I am cool with it.
When that change was made, each of our mini-kitchen areas was equipped with a Flavia coffee machine, which charged 50 cents for a variety of coffees and hot chocolate.
One of the features on this thing is the ability to dispense steaming hot water for free and I took advantage of that, drastically cutting down on my coffee consumption in favor of green tea that I would bring in boxes of from home.
Recently, the menu option for the free hot water seems to have disappeared from the machine's user interface. Apparently these machines are highly configurable and someone decided to disable the free hot water choice. Sigh. I didn't realize that the economy was that tight. I guess every little penny helps to get to $13.4 billion of profit.
When that change was made, each of our mini-kitchen areas was equipped with a Flavia coffee machine, which charged 50 cents for a variety of coffees and hot chocolate.
Recently, the menu option for the free hot water seems to have disappeared from the machine's user interface. Apparently these machines are highly configurable and someone decided to disable the free hot water choice. Sigh. I didn't realize that the economy was that tight. I guess every little penny helps to get to $13.4 billion of profit.
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