9 More Signs of Bad Team Spaces

Scott McPhee's 9 Signs of Bad Team Spaces was good, but is missing some even more egregious team space mistakes. Here are 9 more:

1. Groups huddling together for warmth.

2. Pair programmers sharing one set of headphones.

3. Contortionist showing off agility in team room.

4. Pair programmers composing tweets.

5. Team wall used to chart stock price.

6. Pair programmers sharing one chair.

7. Unproductive teams moved to rest rooms.

8. Team members competing for weirdest laugh.

9. Walls plastered with deodorant ads.

Tom Swifties

The New York Times Schott's Vocab blog is having a Tom Swifties competition this weekend.

http://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/weekend-competition-tom-swifties/

The funniest so far is this raunchy one:

“I learned a lot of new things in Paris: said Tom, indifferently.

— Arthur J. Shaw III

I challenged myself to do an adverb for every letter of the alphabet. Some of the less awful ones were:

“I fell asleep by the pool!” said Tom appealingly.

“We’ll close Guantanamo when we figure out where to house the detainees,” said Obama, cagily.

“I finally got my converter box working,” said Tom, ecstatically.

“Before braising organs you must cut away all excess fat,” said Tom heartrenderingly.

“These chest-building exercises aren’t working for me,” said Tom, impeccably.

“We flood Turkmenistan. The Sixth Fleet moves in from the Caspian Sea, attacking Al Qaeda from the west while the Third Marines sweep in from the east,” Admiral Mullen strategized knavishly.

“I shall apply this feather to every inch of your body,” said Tom, meticulously.

“I’m a sucker for All You Can Eat Pizza,” said Tom, obeisantly.

“My latest invention is a Candy Vaporizer!” said Tom, pessimistically.

“You won’t get any publicity unless I implant at least five,” said Tom, quintessentially.

“My latest invention is a Bugger Bundler!” said Tom, rhapsodically.

“In my new job I report to the housemaid,” said Tom, subserviently.

“I would lick Leonard Cohen’s toes,” said Tom, sycophantically.

“Use any means necessary to find the link between Sadaam and Al Qaeda!” said Dick torturously.

“Dammit, be on time!” Tom ululated.

“I just about break even on my trips to Vegas,” said Tom winsomely.

"It appears he was crocodiled or giant pythoned," said Tom, verbatim.

“I hate Greek paradoxes!” yelled Tom xenophobically.

Dueling Limericks

As we all know, blogging and commenting on blogs is about 10% bonhomie and 90% ego. I can think of no finer illustration of this than the recent series of comments on a New York Times blog about a mackerel recipe.

http://bitten.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/saving-money-on-dinner/#more-2425

All is sweetness and light until one Robert Rothman weights in with an entry that is mostly about the virtues of fileting your own fish, but closes with:

"Of course, given that it was mackerel, I could understand if one is afraid that the stench might forever contaminate your knives if you clean it yourself."

I love this sort of thing, and was delighted to see another commenter (sucker) riposte with an entirely ad hominem remark:

"My, my Robert you certainly are full of yourself aren’t you? What happened, couldn’t find something to rhyme with mackerel?"

It gets better! Someone else chimes in with:

"I know you won’t post this...but what I don’t comprehend is why “Richard Rothman” comments are published daily. This person is one of the most negative, surly, nasty and opinionated..."

Rather paranoid, it seems, as the comment is clearly posted. But this sets up the pins for Rothman's preemptive strike:

"If you’re going to engage in personal abuse, you might at least get my name right."

Followed closely by:

"As requested:

"An odiferous fish, name of mackerel
"Is oft eaten by birds, like the black gull,
"Though I, for one, think,
"That the damn thing does stink,
"Some folks eat those fish by the sackful."

This is where I come along. This is good stuff, but the rhyme in Rothman's limerick seems a bit fishy, so I look it up. Aha! (Remember, this is 90% ego.) So I post something along the lines of:

"It's fair game for a poet to choose a convenient pronunciation, but my dictionary and dictionary.com both show the preferred pronunciation as mack'-er-uhl (three syllables), which I'm sure is what the challenging poster had in mind. This is slightly more difficult...

"When packing a picnic of mackerel
"Throw in some ice cubes and pack 'er full.
"This keeps it from spoiling
"So your guts won't go boiling
"But still it will smell like a knacker's cull."

But no! I get the dreaded "Your comment will appear when it is approved"! What sane person at the Grey Old Lady would approve that comment? And that's why, dear reader, you see it here.

Remember, this is 90% ego.

Everything Louder Than Everything Else

In the '80s at an industry conference I was sitting across a crowded table from my good friend Steve Leighton and I began to speak. Steve interrupted, "Excuse me Bob but this is important," and went on to speak his piece. What he said didn't seem all that important to me. It wasn't the speech, but the speaker who was more important. I was suitably chagrined. Steve worked for the company Bob Metcalfe founded, what was it, 3Com? Or maybe I misremember that. Perhaps it was Cisco. These were early days. But Bob (I look at his wikipedia page today and I wonder, who is that white-haired guy?) used to say something that was actually important. He said he maintained an all-time heroes list. You got on the list by achievement, like so many lists, but the difference in Bob's list was: once you got on the list, nothing you could do afterward would remove you from the list. I heard later that Steve developed some bad habits and had got fired. The habits may explain his rudeness, but it doesn't explain his opinion of his own importance, he always had that. It was one of the best things about him. Outside a tight circle of friends and loved ones, there is no goddamn point listening to people who don't have anything important to say. The odd thing is, in those early days of networking, Steve was wrong about almost everything. He thought we (in the mid-80's) could produce network routers for $300; the actual cost was about $5K. Now, of course, you can buy a router at Best Buy for $75 and it will do wi-fi in the bargain. He picked the Xerox protocol. When it became obvious that was a bad choice, he picked the OSI protocols, condemning me to the hell of three years of Corporation for Open Systems meetings. There were only three choices, but TCP/IP eluded him. Maybe I'm too hard on him. Who in the '80's knew that networking would converge on the internet? But the big thing he understood to the depth of his soul was that networks were a fulcrum on which you could rest a lever with which you could move the world. Maybe you can tell from the title, but I've been listening to Meat Loaf on my iPod. Meat Loaf grabs you by the throat and says, "Listen! What I have to say is important!" He does that for every song, good or bad. That's the curse. I guess the point of this post is, Steve, you're on my all-time heroes list. Don't know where you've got to, but nothing can ever take you off.

Semantic Web Cheer

Never let
Pipe dreams ebb
Next big thing
Semantic Web!
Semantic Semantic Web Web Web

Web reborn
As database
Of all the lies
Of the human race!
Semantic Semantic Web Web Web

Semantic Semantic Look At Me!
Semantic Semantic Me Me Me

5 Good Reasons to Wonder Why

5. Mark Cuban dancing.

4. Countrywide refinancing.

3. Joe Biden chancing.

2. Thompson advancing.

1. George Bush prancing.

Spam and Pron in No Particular Order

I guess I was wrong, in my previous entry, to assume that modern blogging software has better comment spam filters. Out of the four comments it drew, two were really ads for other blogs and two were, uh, spam. Or it could be my writing reminded someone of free porn. Just to keep my personal yuk factor down, I'd like to ask readers to keep their hands out of their pants while reading my stuff. 

I'm very disappointed in the quality of scam spam. Do African bankers have only capital letters on their keyboards? Am I really expected to believe my bank is sending me urgent email? Not to mention all those other banks I don't have accounts at. Don't you think the subject "Re: Hi" is the product of an extremely dull mind? I get about 25 of those a day. Here's a clue. I have never, ever sent an email subject "Hi", and if I ever did, I doubt I'd forget who I sent it to. 

And those names. Phineas J. Blaspheme. Wanker T. Most. I'm supposed to believe I'm getting mail from a Harry Potter character? Not to mention all the breezy notes from Suzi, Cherie, Muffy and Jeri. "Need a lift?" "You'll get a rise out of this." 

Oh, yeah. And even though the subject "V * t * A * g * rr * A" doesn't set of my Gaussian spam filter, it does set off my personal spam alarm. 

All I can figure is that spam is some sort of weird denial-of-service attack. You can't read your email until you've manually clicked away the spam that gets past the filter. They're hoping to wear out our click fingers. After that, world domination! 

I'm thinking I could do better. 

"Nigerian school could use your help"

"Hi,"

"Maybe you've been reading that our government is promoting the city of Calabar, where I live, as a tourist destination. That may happen someday, and we do hope you'll come visit us, but in the meantime, the residents of our city are in a very bad way. There are practically no jobs and even able-bodied men are forced to support their families by composing email to send to residents of wealthier nations requesting contributions. "The problem is, returns from these emails are very low, because many people here have poor English skills and, because they have no money, are untrained in internet etiquette. What seems to them to be a quite plausible plea from a banker who needs help getting funds out of the country is dismissed at a glance by the more sophisticated people who receive it."

"To aid my fellow countrymen and increase prosperity in our city, I have founded the Nigerian School for Advanced English Studies. With the sparse funds at my disposal, I have been able to attract a few elderly Englishmen to serve as teachers and have enrolled several dozen students in our first year of classes. But the need is so much greater. There are hundreds of people clamoring to get in, but we cannot accommodate them. We desperately need teachers who are fluent in U.S. and Canadian English, but we cannot afford them."

"Could you please help? You would be amazed to see how far even $5 or $10 will go in this country. Your contribution will help assure continuing, quality education for our many young adults who wish to better themselves. Please give just a little. You will do a great deal of good. All contributions tax-deductible."