Eno River State Park – Eno Trace Trail

I am fortunate to live about 4 miles from Eno River State Park which is a 3900 acre state park in Orange and Durham Counties. There are almost 25 miles of trails in the park, many of which meander along the river. The trails are bisected by Pleasant Green Road into Eastern and Western Trails.

In early September, I took Hailey on a hike on the Eno Trace Trail in the park’s Western Trails and several hikes have been made with Hailey over this Christmas vacation on the Eastern Trails. A Flickr Slideshow follows from the September hike.

Paying It Forward

A good friend uses the term “Bank Error In Your Favor” when he comes across some unexpected beneficial financial transaction. The term derives from the Community Chest card from the classic Monopoly Board Game. A subclass of the general Bank Error In Your Favor condition is the “Too Much Change” ethical dilemma whereby a cashier gives you back too much change during a transaction. The theme of this post is to describe a recent personal encounter with Too Much Change back in the fall. 

I Prefer the Word Mature

The scene was the First Floor Alcove at work and the occasion was our daily Scrum Meeting when I casually commented that I was having trouble getting a RETAIN userid provisioned correctly. RETAIN is just one of the many systems at work that have their own userid registry – just yet another account that you need to keep track of and which needs password maintenance performed every 90 or so days.

Teaching Moments

Today’s parents have so many resources at their disposal that my parents didn’t have. Think about all of these best practices for child rearing, backed by all this behavioral science that allows today’s Super-Parents to Raise-The-Perfect-Little-Super-Johnny. With these hundreds of websites and competing parenting philosophies, you’d think that the end result (from natural selection) would be an aggregate improvement in the overall behavior of kids. Wouldn’t you? Have you been out in public lately?

Well, somehow my Mom and Dad figured it all out (or most of it anyways). They relied on healthy doses of common sense and the lessons distilled from their parents (or in my Dad’s case, Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Jean). Above all, they kept it simple and consistent.

Might As Well Do Something That You Enjoy

I think I have remarked in previous posts that I started my career at The Mother Ship not in Software Engineering but in a job titled Systems Engineer. In the Federal Systems Division, this was a weird position combining aspects of systems design and planning as well as proposal development and prototyping for large-scale DOD projects.

The job title of Systems Engineer in the rest of IBM was distinctly different than the FSD version. In the rest of the IBM world outside of FSD. a Systems Engineer was basically a Technical Sales role, complementing the Marketing Reps (who were non-technical salesman). In a typical non-FSD IBM Branch Office, new SEs would go through this standard training regimen, intended to indoctrinate one into the ways of Big Blue.

In 1985, somebody had the brilliant idea in FSD to institute a Pilot Program in which selected FSD System Engineers would go through the same education that commercial Branch Office SEs did. I am not sure of the motivation for this – FSD was like a completely different animal than the rest of IBM – a completely different culture – like I said before, FSD was weird.

Nick Snyderwhiskey

At the Duke Football games this season, there are an interesting collection of three good ole boys and a girl that are sitting several rows behind where we normally sit in Section 20 of Wallace Wade Stadium. Let’s refer to them as Loud & Proud.

Loud & Proud exhibits the characteristics that I would stereotypically associate with SEC football fans. They really get into the game, are boisterous, often obnoxious and occasionally funny, and never boring. I am guessing they are native North Carolinians, quite outgoing and engaging. They definitely stand out from the crowd.

Graph Theory to the Rescue

(This is the second post in a series about software demos - some of these even went well.)

There are all styles of demos ranging from very informal walkthroughs with other peer engineers on your team to more scripted scenarios that are recorded for later replay using software like Camtasia and made available on the interwebs. With Agile, we now demo the stories that we developed at the end of every 3 or 4 week sprint in front of all the project stakeholders (all internals but representing various disciplines on the team such as Development, Test, Product Management, Services, etc).

All Dressed Up and No Place to Go

In March, I accepted a real choice assignment to be a Scrum Master for a Critical New Component (CNC) in Project Pittsburgh. My manager threw terms around like high visibility and differentiator and critical success factors in pitching this CNC to me. These are all good things because they help you next January at Appraisal Time. So I figure what the heck and go for it – I’ll lead CNC – put me in coach.

This massive Project Pittsburgh was the impetus for an equally massive reorganization in our area at work. Because of my decision to work on this new component, I got reorg’ed out of my current first and second line managers to an entirely new management chain in a department associated with Build, Install, Upgrade, and Migration for Project Pittsburgh.

He Will Come Out and Kick My Ask!

I am sorry for those offended by off-color language and I certainly don’t want to promote foul language  among the “youth of America”, but that is some funny and cute stuff right there.

In our alley (between Ninth and Tenth Street in the Fairview neighborhood of Altoona) in the mid-70s, we had a little kid who could give that little missy in the above YouTube video a good run for her money.

He went by the handle of JR. This was before the Dallas craze in the late 70s so I assume those were the initials of his first and middle names (which I am not sure I ever knew). Anyways,it must have been either the summer of ‘74-‘75 or ‘75-‘76 when JR was hanging around the Alley. He must have been three and one-half or four years old. JR was a tow-headed blonde kid with a hair style that could be classified as “high and tight” on the sides.

Lazy Days of Summer

My blogging rate in 2011 is down 29% year-to-date compared to 2010 and, at current projections, figures to be down a whopping 38% by the end of the year.  (Insert standard legal mumbo-jumbo here about forward looking statements).

I set out to ascertain the root cause of this productivity shortage. Work has been busy, but no more so than previous years. It’s not like this summer has so been chock full of exotic and exciting vacations that I just haven’t been able to squeeze in time. (There have been none of those – and none are planned.) Maybe it is the heat? It is 92 degrees at 7:36 PM as I write this and that is about par for the course around here this summer. But it is like that every year here. Anxiety over the economy and the debt ceiling fiasco and the S&P downgrade? Hmmm – no.

Since these poor results couldn’t possibly be attributed to something as basic as, say, pure personal laziness, I stumbled across the perfect rationalization (cough, I mean reason): I have determined that I am a member of the Slow Blogging Movement.  This is of course a legitimate movement because it has a manifesto. (As an aside, I am wondering if it is theoretically possible to construct a manifesto that doesn’t make the author or his movement come off sounding like pretentious douche bags?)

Anyways, excuse me while I “reject immediacy and PageRank” and “reestablish the machine as the agent of human expression”. I’ll blog when I am good and ready. Slow Blogging – yeah, that’s it!

Owen Forgot to Run the Loader - Again

Software Engineers give lots of demos of the software they develop.  I’ve been thinking back to some demos I have done over the years and have started crafting some posts for the more memorable of those. Here is the first one of those posts – about my first demo.

For the first two years of my career at IBM, I was a Systems Engineer at IBM’s Federal Systems Division in Gaithersburg, MD. This was weird job and I really didn’t have a passion for it, though I was pretty good at it. You would develop system configurations of IBM hardware and software, identify 3rd party products, and identify custom software and integrations that would all be part of proposals for large-scale DOD contracts for which IBM was bidding. You would help prepare these massive proposals in response to RFPs. Sometimes the work involved developing prototypes as part of the contract acquisition process, but that was about the extent of the software engineering we were involved in the during the pre-award phase.

There’s No Crying in Baseball!

Growing up, I always prided myself on the fact that I was pretty low-maintenance as a kid. I didn’t bitch and moan or cry much about anything. Mom certainly wouldn’t tolerate any of that former stuff so, assuming I even tried to play that game with her, that behavior would have been corrected immediately in the traditional Mom way. Problem solved. As far as the latter cry-baby stuff goes, I think I got that out of my system on a bizarre trip to Pittsburgh to see the Pirates play the Mets on August 10, 1970 (right before I would start 3rd Grade at McNelis Catholic).

(In Third Grade, we would all have to deal with Sister Joseph Ann. But that is the subject of another post.)

As I have stated in previous blog entries, we were a single car family. However, by virtue of his employment at the Pennsylvania Railroad/Penn Central/Conrail, my Dad had access to free passes for train travel. This was pretty sweet for us. There wasn’t much disposable income in our family. There certainly wasn’t extra cash laying around in an emergency fund that could be used to make major repairs to our only car. So my Dad was very paranoid about long trips in our car – those were to be avoided if at all possible. When we did have to use the car for a long trip, it seemed that Dad could never relax, always worrying.

Lily

This is Lily, Joe Jr’s 18 month old (I guess) Tabby. As you can see, she is perfectly color-coordinated with my decor (which I like to refer to as the Bachelor-Dork Motif). Generally, cats are really weird creatures and Lily doesn’t disappoint in that department. She has all the typical attributes of her species: pretention, aloofness, arrogance, stubbornness – OK I am just kidding about that (I think).

Is There Anything on TV Tonight?

Bruce Springsteen wrote a song a couple years ago entitled 57 Channels and Nothin' On on his Human Touch album. (Yikes, just realized that ‘a couple of years ago’ was actually almost twenty years ago. Also, damn shame about The Big Man passing away recently.) 57 Channels was constructed around a couple of timeless themes:

• Wealth and material possessions can’t buy or guarantee happiness.
• More is not always better than less.

Today, it is kind of funny and quaint to think back how Bruce was lamenting the explosion of cable television (I think they know refer to it as) content at a point in time when the number of available channels hadn’t even reached triple digits. My cable provider is Time Warner Cable of Chapel Hill. Here is their Channel Guide. Good old progress at work there.

That Is One Big Rock

On my recent mini-trip through Central Virginia, I had four hours to kill on a Friday afternoon and ended up doing the tourist-trap thing at the Natural Bridge and Caverns in (who would have guessed) Natural Bridge, Virginia.

I’ll have to admit that my expectations were pretty low going into this visit. I had visions of a National Lampoon Vacation-type of adventure since the attraction itself is pretty well-scoped. Natural Bridge is basically this, well, natural bridge, that was formed over many years when Cedar Creek (a tributary of the James River) dug a gorge through a mountain of limestone. So I imagined that there wouldn’t be a whole lot to do other than taking a couple of pictures of the bridge. For the most part, I was right but I still had a good time and glad that I took it in.

Magicicada Brood XIX Emerges In Orange County, NC

No, I am not talking about some collection of Mexican Gangbangers. Magicicadas are a genus of flying insects that periodically emerge from underground, mate, and then die. In the Southeast right now, we are inundated with these things. They are commonly mistaken for locusts. The picture above is of a cicada on my driveway. As an aside, I haven’t seen eyes that red since I was in college.

They call a collection of these magicicadas that emerge together in a geographical location a brood. Entomologists attach cool labels and Roman Numerals to each brood which obviously legitimizes the whole deal – I mean it works for Super Bowls right? The batch of cicadas that is occupying my backyard right now is part of Brood XIX – The Great Southern Brood. This brood emerges every 13 years, having not made an appearance around here since 1998.

Seriously

This is my once-a-year (or so) foray into politics. Just skip it if you are fatigued about that whole mess. Trust me, I completely understand. These posts afford me a sort of cleansing (exorcism) of political thoughts (demons) from my system. In that respect, they are sort of like an enema.

After completing a 2.5 mile run on the trail where the James River crossed the Blue Ridge Parkway, I plopped down at this sweet picnic area right on the river banks. I was armed with a couple of fresh peaches bought from a roadside stand outside of Buena Vista, VA, a couple of bottles of water, and a printout of the PDF of the Paul Ryan Plan – check that,  I mean The Path to Prosperity: Restoring America’s Promise Plan.

I realize that I just painted a weird (and in some respects, absurd) picture. I basically had the entire park to myself surrounded by all this natural beauty, sitting at this picnic table, scarfing down some delicious fresh fruit, and rehydrating with some H20. What in the world was I doing with a printout of the Ryan Plan?

Blue Ridge Parkway

There are so many good things about Netflix. My personal experience is that the Internet streaming just works and combined with my Sony BDP-N460 provides a very pleasing viewing and listening experience.  The variety of the content available for instant streaming is quite good – I very rarely use the actual Disc Rental portion of my subscription. Lately I find myself binging on the titles in the Documentaries genre, visiting (and in some cases revisiting) the works of American documentarian Ken Burns.

Over the last several months I have gotten through the Jazz and Baseball anthologies and recently completed Burns’ 2009 take on the National Parks entitled: The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.

While I personally wouldn’t rank this as Burns’ best effort, the six part film is beautifully shot and there are more than a few poignant moments of pure Burns’ magic. Burns traces the history of the parks from the 1870s and chronicles the pioneers that were the driving forces behind the creation and development of the National Parks Service. I was woefully ignorant about much of this history before watching the series. While I was vaguely aware of the roles that John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club) and Teddy Roosevelt played in all of this, I hadn’t even heard of central figures such as Stephen Mather and Horace Albright.

What’s In a Name Anyways?

The company has a lot of strengths – the ability to name products has never been one of them however. Certainly the subject matter has something to do with that. There is only so much that even the most creative product managers can do given the nature of middleware and systems management software. It is just inherently boring stuff.

Before the product is given its official external name by TPTB, it usually has a code name attached to it so that everyone working on the project has a convenient label to apply to product artifacts and design materials. Many times the code names make more sense than the official name (to the developers at least). By the time the official product name is christened, sometimes you are left wondering what those folks doing the naming are smoking.

What’s Our Aggravated Defect Backlog Sitting At?

At the beginning of our weekly development status meeting last Wednesday, Brian, our Release Manager, got on his soapbox and was fussing about the defect backlog to the various Scrum Masters. He was clearly agitated and was establishing a pretty stern tone ( stern at least from the perspective of software engineers anyways – it is all relative).

Brian was threatening that we would stop new Story development and institute daily mandatory 8:00 Eastern Time Defect Management meetings for all the Scrum Masters if the backlog didn’t get some focus. Fair enough – I had no issue with what he was saying – but you generally don’t hear that sort of tone, so the atmosphere in the room was a little tense.

I was sitting in the “Heather Spot” in the Conference Room next to one of our Test Leads, Gary. The Heather Spot is this location at the end of the conference table where one of our former colleagues insisted on sitting at the Wednesday status meeting.

After the little diatribe last Wednesday, Brian looked at Gary and said: “Now I’d like to get an aggravated view of the defects from Gary.” Of course, Brian meant to say aggregated. I almost burst out laughing and it definitely broke the tension a bit.

Bulls vs Tides – DBAP – April 15, 2011

The day before the great tornado scare of 2011, I took in a minor league game at the DBAP between the Bulls and the Norfolk Tides. For some reason, I only made it out to Durham for one game last year. I hope to do better this year. This was the second home of the game of the year for the Bulls (hence the banners around the park from previous day’s Home Opener ceremonies).

It was a quite pleasant cool evening and the tree pollen (which gives me all sorts of problem this time of year) didn’t bother me that much. Seats were primo – between 3rd Base and Home in the second row of the Terrace Reserved section of the ballpark.

Really impressed with Desmond Jennings of the Bulls. With Manny done “being Manny”, it appears that Jennings will finally be getting a chance to be an everyday player in the Major Leagues sometimes this year. Bulls won 8-3. Here are some shots from my Flickr Slideshow.

The Ultimate Badass or Just a Lucky Idiot?

For your consideration, I offer the following video captured by North Carolinian Steven Hoag as he chills out in his truck while a tornado rips through Wilson, NC on Tornado Saturday. Be sure to have your audio enabled while viewing this video.

Coverage You Can Count On Indeed

While I had cable service during Tornado 2011, I was bouncing back-and-forth between the local ABC (WTVD), CBS (WRAL), and NBC (WNCN) affiliates for my coverage. My rationalization was that more data points on the approaching rotations would be helpful to my cause. Which was kind of silly if you stop to think about it – if the damn thing ends up blowing your house apart, does it really matter if you knew ahead of time?

Wow, Look at That Inflow Notch!

During Storm Saturday, I noticed that I gravitated toward a state of heightened intellectual curiosity for any information concerning my (potential) impending doom. From about 11:00 until my Internet bit it and I barricaded myself in the pantry, I was foraging online at Weather Underground and Weather.com.

There is a whole vocabulary associated with these severe storms that the meteorologists like to toss out while they are real-time interpreting the Doppler. It comes so natural to them and, while you might think this is just geek-speak, the good ones at least throw you a bone with some context and explain what these terms mean to you. In some cases, you even learn something.

The jargon and terminology that I picked up on while glued to the tube and laptop most of the afternoon included: hook echo, velocity signature, inflow notch, super cell, and mesocyclone. I quickly came to the amateurish conclusion that almost all of these terms mean you are pretty much in deep shit. (That last paragraph sounds like I have been channeling Dave Barry sub-consciously here.)

For what its worth, I came across a well-written blog that explains how you too can recognize rotation on the Doppler Radar. While I found this article quite clear and useful, it strikes me that if you find yourself, as a layman, becoming fairly proficient at the application of this type of knowledge, you might be better served finding another place to live. Quickly.

In Case of An Emergency

When the North Carolina Tornadoes of 2011 were bearing down on me, I had to figure out the best space in which I could hide. Y’all have heard the familiar words of wisdom when the tornadoes are coming:

• Get in the basement.
• Get to an interior part of your house.
• Get to a room without windows.
• Get in a first-floor bathroom with a tub and cover yourself with a mattress.

I have an open floor plan with a ton of windows, no basement, and no full bath on the first floor. So the ideal options of laying low in an interior room with no windows or a bathtub weren’t really practical. The only tubs are upstairs – believe it or not, taking a 15 foot ride downhill in one of those bad boys was not on my Bucket List (even considering that I could take a mattress along for the plunge).

Saturday Afternoon Destruction

The total randomness of natural disasters never ceases to amaze me. April 16, 2011 will live in infamy in North Carolina for the historic collection of tornados that arbitrarily steamrolled through roughly half of the entire state. As is typical with these deals, the assessment of the total damage won’t be complete for awhile. For example, when I went to bed the night of the tornadoes, I had never heard of Bertie County, NC and I have lived in this state since November, 1988. When I woke up Sunday morning, the news reported that 11 people died in this dirt-poor farming county when an F3 rolled through toward the end of the long day.

It is sort of surreal to go through this sort of thing first-hand and to try to comprehend and make sense of it – I can’t figure it out and certainly can’t make sense of it.

No Pressure, No Diamonds

On June 8, 1975, our family drove over to Pittsburgh to attend a doubleheader between the Bucs and the San Francisco Giants. I recall it being abnormally cold and windy that day at Three Rivers (confirmed with a quick check of Weather Underground) and it was a pretty long afternoon sitting through a double-header that day under those conditions. Dad had to work outside in crappy weather – he was none too excited that day about the chill – and I even recall shivering myself (in shorts) a bit during the second half of the second game.

Good Game

Electronic communication is fraught with all sorts of opportunities for disconnect between the two parties communicating. Because of the difficulty of conveying non-verbal attributes like emotion (sarcasm, kidding, seriousness), tone, and body language in an electronic exchange, miscommunication and ambiguity can often result. But ambiguities and misunderstandings can even arise when two communicating parties are using the best interface ever created: the direct face-to-face protocol.

In other blog posts, I have complained and taken little pot shots about the traffic and high cost of living in he DC Metro area. While these impressions are authentic and were formed while working in Gaithersburg and Rockville and living in Montgomery and Frederick Counties, there were actually plenty of positive attributes to that area that I did enjoy in my four years there. Chief among those characteristics of course were proximity to family, Pittsburgh, and Altoona.

Which One of You is Bob?

 

When it comes to life experiences that are tough to prepare for, the whole “meet your freshman year college roommate” deal has to be at or near the top of the the list. Start with the overall anxiety associated with moving out of your home into a whole new environment. Combine it with the the uncertainty associated with the pot-luck draw that is the roommate selection process and you have a pretty volatile mixture. Forest Gump’s proverbial box of chocolates indeed!

Today many colleges leverage sophisticated dorm and roommate management systems that match up interests of the prospective students and run various compatibility algorithms against those interests. In the late 70s, roommate selection was a tad less advanced, I recall filling out a very rudimentary application for student housing at Pitt and I am pretty sure that survey only covered basics such as Smoking/Non-Smoking and maybe religious preferences.

Wear Whatever You Want

In the old days of product development in IBM, the release of a new version of the product to manufacturing was a big deal and would often be greeted with some extra financial rewards of some types for the product developers. The rewards would typically be cash bonuses and awards for the key engineers that contributed to the release. Now times are tough though, and those traditions are long gone. Since 2005, the team I am working on currently has released roughly six major versions of our product – the milestones come and go.

Run, rabbit run. 
Dig that hole, forget the sun,
And when at last the work is done
Don't sit down it's time to dig another one.

Breathe: Waters, Gilmour, Wright

Irv, Cleanup in Aisle 5!

My siblings and their respective families have taken an extended  family vacation three times since 2002. We rent a single, very large, and very expensive beach front property for a week. In 2002 and 2004, we were at Nags Head and in 2008 at Virginia Beach. It is always a lot of fun and, as one would expect, there is usually an interesting social dynamic on display when you throw thirty or so people (who don’t normally live with each other) together for a week. (Don’t worry – no dirty laundry will be aired – in this post at least).

Meal ownership is divvied up among the families, with each sub-family responsible for planning and execution of a dinner for a night. As with most everything else in life when compared to my siblings, I usually underachieve on the beach dinner. I wimp out and go with pizza (if that hasn’t already been taken). I think I also cooked hamburgers one year. 

Haggling At Schulman’s

Schulman’s was a downtown Altoona landmark institution. Sitting on the main thoroughfare of Eleventh Avenue, Schulman’s was the de facto place to go to buy work clothes in the city. I remember my Mom telling me that they had near-monopoly status in Altoona’s glory days in selling work clothes to the railroaders working at the Downtown and Juniata shops. I think they also got a pretty healthy cut of the regulated school uniform market for various Catholic schools in the area. You could do a lot worse than targeting and owning those demographics in Altoona.

Schulman’s was a family-owned business. I am pretty sure that my Dad graduated with one of the brothers (there were like five or six of them) at Altoona High in 1941.

I Didn’t See You!

It is probably difficult for the whole current generation of fans to understand, but the Pittsburgh Pirates actually have a rich tradition. I was certainly reminded of that tradition reading the various stories associated with the passing of Chuck Tanner (aka Captain Sunshine), who managed the Pirates to their last World Series Championship in 1979. Bob Smizik posted an excellent obituary on Tanner on his blog last Friday. For those of us growing up in the 70s as Pirate fans, those stories brought back so many pleasant memories.

Though the Pirates had wonderful runs in the 70s and early 90s, they certainly have had many other periods of success and a large collection of great players and managers. Consider that the Pirates have multiple players who are in the Baseball Hall-of-Fame, yet whose uniform numbers have not been retired by the team. I have always thought that was a pretty good indication of a franchise’s tradition.

War of Attrition

January is always an “interesting” month at work. Usually this is the month when the results of the corporate-wide Fall Planning exercises, conducted by the Movers and Shakers at the end of the previous year, actually trickle down to the worker bees – the people that are most affected.

Fall Planning determines the budget allocated to each product team for the following year. Products that are kicking butt financially or products in new emerging markets get more money.  Struggling products get less money or sometimes get eliminated, with the developers moved to other projects (or worse). For all practical purposes, the amount of the budget equates roughly to the number of developers and testers.

Report Card Time

 The company gives us the results of our annual performance appraisal in the second week in January every year. There are 4 levels of performance. Your rating is supposed to provide an overall assessment of your work over the previous year, relative to your peers at the corresponding band level. The rating is a key factor in raises and annual bonuses, so I guess it is pretty important.

Of course, raises and bonuses also depend heavily on factors that are not entirely in your control - such as overall financial health of the economy, the company, and your business unit.

Where Did That Two Weeks Go?

“For the past few weeks I’ve been working with a fellow developer on a project that required an all-out programming effort. It’s done now, so we’re back to a regular schedule, but when people hear about the crazy hours they often say they’re sorry. They really shouldn’t be. I would never do this often, or for long periods, or without proper compensation if done for an employer, but the truth is that these programming blitzkriegs are some of my favorite periods in life. Under the right conditions, writing software is so intensely pleasurable it should be illegal.”  - Gustavo Duartes

One of the best blogs I have ever encountered is written by a software engineer named Gustavo Duartes. Gustavo has a wonderful writing style. He has a talent for describing complicated engineering topics with clarity and conciseness. Beyond the technical aspects of his blog, though, the real jewels are his observations about the software engineering profession.

The above passage is from a brilliant piece entitled Lucky to Be a Programmer. Recently, my time available for blogging has been drastically reduced due to my own little intense period of programming. Duartes’ piece is so spot on that it feels like he has written it explicitly for me and my life over the last 14 days.

880 In Greensboro

It was a pretty uneventful holiday break. The usual vices of food and drink were, of course, enjoyed - in far too much quantity. I did make it up to Greensboro on the Wednesday after Christmas to witness a historical event. Duke defeated UNCG for the 880th victory for Mike Krzyzewski, one more than legendary UNC coach Dean Smith.

Comparing these two coaching giants for the purpose of determining the single better coach is a fun, but futile, exercise. Brett Friedlander from the ACC Insider has a decent statistical summary. Their careers overlapped by only 17 years and the game (and the underlying culture) has significantly changed between the time Coach Smith took over UNC in the 60s and today.