kitty_tape

There's nothing like getting two items, one in Amazon's frustration free packaging and one not, to make you appreciate the frustration free packaging even more. Fortunately I only ended up with a scratch from the unfriendly packaging this time.

The mistakes in our genome make a stronger case for evolution than the bits that are right. In essence, a common designer may have designed different creatures with the same "right bits", but why would an intelligent designer have put the same mistakes in two independently designed creatures?

I like the analogy with cheating. If two papers have the same mistakes (misspellings, odd grammatical errors, etc.), it is a pretty safe bet that one was copied from the other or they were both originated from a shared source.

FYI, Game Day will officially be at Mark's. If that is relevant to you and you don't see the friend locked post with the location information, comment here and I'll get the info to you.

Please reply by end of day.

Would you go to game day if it were temporarily relocated to the home of a friend in Redmond?

One of my college friends is having a house warming party w/ games and what not this weekend. He has expressed an interesting in merging our game day with that event. I think it would be fun, but I want to know what my wonderful friends thing.

The heat seems to have turned my cat into a small rug.

Be warned that a lot of book summaries will be coming in the near future. I have a 2 month backlog of 8 books that I need to write summaries for.

Finished Slow is Beautiful: New visions of community, leisure, and joie de vivre by Cecile Andrews. In this book Andrews motivates the idea of the "slow life" and discusses some way of slowing down your own life.

The central claim of this book is that the "fast" life does not lead to happiness. The constant chase after more money, more status, and more stuff decreases happiness rather than increases it. Some people find the fast life satisfying, but it is increasingly clear that the universal emphasis on the fast life is harmful to individuals and communities.

Andrews supports this claim with an overview of some of the recent research on happiness. This research supports the conclusion that the things that make us happy are the things that we have less time for in our overworked, over scheduled lives. For most people happiness comes from spending time with people they care about, participating in activities where they can achieve a state of flow, and having enough free time to do these things.

Andrews concludes that we need to slow down our lives to make room for the things that make us happy. She gives a number of tips for this, but she also emphasizes the importance of social change to allow more people to choose to slow down their lives. Andrews realizes something that much of the happiness literature misses: in American society today, slowing down your life is a privilege that few can take advantage of. Even those financially able to work part time have a hard time doing so in the career of their choice because many careers do not offer part time opportunities (part time software engineers are few and far between; I have heard stories of lawyers who were asked to leave their practice when they asked for a "part time" 40 hour week). Those who can find part time work that they find interesting usually have to sacrifice health care. Andrews recognizes that slowing down society (or at least giving all of its members the choice to slow down) will more than individual life changes.

Despite all the good things about this book, I can only give it a middling recommendation overall. The parts that were on topic were quite good. However, Andrews would occassionally go off into a political rant that was, as often as not, only tangentially related to the topic at home. These political rants rarely added to the discussion. Even reading this in April of 2009, the frequent criticisms of George W. Bush seemed dated. Sadly, these digressions were frequent enough to seriously detract from the quality of the book.

This book is a valuable read, but you have to be willing to leave behind the dirt and take home the gems.

FYI, by popular demand, we will have game day this month. =)

Anyone have a steam carpet cleaner I can borrow?

There are conveniences to having political parties. They act as a base class for communicating beliefs, allowing politicians to just specify where they differ from the standard party line.

However, articles like this one re-enforce my belief that modern American political parties have too much power over the members of their party.

Political maneuvering will always be a part of our legislative process, but when people are outraged when anyone goes against the party line, then the party is being valued over the individuals in it, and that is not a healthy trend.

On the upside, in this case it mostly seems to be pundits and other rabblerousers who are causing a ruckus and not the peers of the dissenting politicians.

Jeff and I are hosting a 4th of July BBQ at our place. It is, unsurprisingly, this Saturday. Important points:

• We will have 2 BBQs (1 charcoal and 1 gas)


• It will start at 2:00pm


• We are going to try a "bring your own thing to BBQ" format this year. We'll provide buns of various shapes. Feel free to use this post to coordinate joint purchasing of things.


• We'll probably purchase some other things that are undefined (drinks? snacks? small children? Partially depends on whether or not we have a car by then.).
  
• Like most of our events, this will be pot luckish


• Kirkland has a parade at noon (children's parade at 11:30). People who want should coordinate to meet up.


• Kirkland has fireworks at 10:15pm.


• Should this replace game day for this month? I know some people might be busy on actual game day
  

RSVP below so we know how many buns to get.

Home has kitty!
Home has bed!
Home has electric toothbrush!

Best of all, home has peoples! I missed you all.

Just an FYI, as of bed time tonight, Jeff and I will not be available through any of our normal communication mediums until we get back from Greece on the 27th.

Oh, and did I mention we are going to Greece? Super excited! (Although I worry that my poor precious kitty cat will miss us.)

FYI, roasted kohlrabi is delicious. (We only roasted ours about 20 minutes, stirring it at 15, and it came out just right.)

Posted with permission from my coworker Patrick.

All magic in software is dark magic.

Just a reminder, there is no game day this month. See you in July!

FYI, if you have the Passport Dining card, you can get $30 off dinner for two at the Herbfarm.

A name solidifies a concept and helps it do develop, but it can also make skeptics dismiss the idea as "just jargon".

I see this in the reactions of some of my coworkers to recent discussions about adopting some development practices from the Agile community. To a large extent, "Agile" is just a codification of best practices and an acknowledgement of the limitations of more fixed, linear development methods.

But naming these best practices makes some people worry that they are Methodologies, Processes, Procedures. That is they fear, as DeMarco and Lister discuss in Peopleware that the process will be valued for its own sake rather than for the benefit they may or may not give.

That is not an unfounded fear. Some flavors of Agile do seem more like a Methodology than like a set of methods for effective development. However, individual instances do not imply universality, and we should not assume that a ideology is empty rhetoric just because it is named.

Apparently totem poles are a Pacific Northwest thing. I never realized that.

Well, according to Amazon Fresh Mrs. Meyer's Clean Day Laundry Liquid Detergent is the only laundry detergent they carry with Weight Watchers points. (And Seventh Generation is the only Kosher brand of laundry detergent they carry.)