Stan Taylor

I’ve heard repeatedly that there is an order of magnitude difference between the most and least productive programmers. I have no doubt that’s the case, but recently I’ve experienced that difference first hand, and I’ve also come to appreciate the effect of experience on that difference.
We hired a new QA engineer a couple of months ago, and I’ve been working with her closely the past few weeks. She’s very smart and seems to have high technical aptitude, but she doesn’t have much experience with the type of tasks we’ve been working on–dealing with various DBMSes. I’ve worked repeatedly with three of the four DBMSes and know quite a bit about the subtle differences between them. Furthermore, I’ve worked with DBMSes enough to know how to figure out how to do different tasks in each one. This experienced also helped me to get up and running with the one (DB2) that I’m not experienced with.
In this situation, I was an order of magnitude more productive due to my experience.

A great comment on MeFi:

I love MILF’s for their tragically unavailable, deer in the headlights “What’d I do?” selves, which is suddenly-gorgeous-and-completely-spontaneous in a way that makes the angle boned, air-brushed cover girls shot from low angles seem like pitifully dry and frail waifs. Show me a girl who can sling a 40 lb two year old, a big ass purse, and a diaper bag on one arm, and reach for groceries with the other, and I’ll show you a girl who will know what the hell to do with a baby sitter, a warm bath, a bottle of wine, some good takeout and 4 hours in a quiet room of a respectable hotel.
She’ll know, but 99.995% of the time, God love her, she won’t go, and on her typically wistful common sense lies the hope of civilization. But the hope that springs eternal in every man’s heart, that feeds love and lust and occasional wonder, is ministered to by the other .005%, who make grocery store day dreams on short odds a worthwhile endeavor.

There’s an interesting article at New Scientist that imagines what would happen to the earth if all humans disappeared today. The most basic conclusion is that pretty much all traces of human existence would be gone in 100,000 years.
Equally interesting is the discussion of this topic on MetaFilter. As usual, the MeFi discussion goes in many different directions, but I sense in some of the posts an unease that traces of the human race could be erased so quickly.

November 1 marks the opening of the toll freeways in red on the map below. Although I’m fundamentally against the idea of toll roads, now that they’re a fact, I’m sure we’ll take advantage of them. If I choose to pay for it, my commute should go from 35+ minutes to around 15 minutes. I’ll get on Hwy 45 about 1/2 mile from my house and exit Mopac (Loop 1) in front of my office.
Officials are saying that tolls will average $.10-.12 per mile, and I estimate that I’ll have 10 miles of toll roads eacy way, so I’m calculating a cost of $40/month for saving that 30-40 minutes per day. Time is indeed money, so this seems like a good buy to me.

I’ve long been convinced that developers who name subdivisions and shopping centers simply select ‘one from column A’ and ‘one from column B’ from lists of generic names. Well, I’m not the only one who thinks that. This blogger actually made such a chart for Denver.
This blogger also notes that the less desirable the subdivision, the grander the name. I’ve noticed these same trends in our own neighborhood. We live in the original development using the name ‘Blackhawk’: the Fairways of Blackhawk. Our neighborhood does indeed have a golf course in the middle of it, which was originally its big selling point, so the name is pretty descriptive.
But then several other Blackhawk neighborhoods popped up nearby, and the names begin to get more generic: The Meadows of Blackhawk, The Park at Blackhawk and Lakeside at Blackhawk. The lake that’s in Lakeside is a small pond. Go figure.
The most recent addition has the cheapest homes and is furthest off the beaten track. Therefore, it has the grandest name: The Estates at Blackhawk.
At least the word ‘Blackhawk’ is somewhat appropriate to the area: high plains with lots of redtail hawks and owls. What gets me are the totally inappropriate names, namely any subdivision or shopping center in Central Texas containing the word ‘Brook’ or ‘Meadow’. We have creeks and fields, no brooks and meadows.

Over on ask.metafilter, someone posted this question:

What’s the appeal of Steve Wozniak?
He’s everywhere these days and many nerds love him. To me, he seems like manboy who has managed to ride his Segway Polo-playing well beyond his 15 minutes of fame. He preoccupies himself with toys, is an awkward conversationalist (see here) and generally resembles a larger, mouth-breathing version of The 40 Year Old Virgin.
Seriously… what’s the deal?

The question got lots of interesting commetns, but even more awesome is the fact that Steve himself commented.

Giant insect devours German farmland

It’s a miracle!

I’m generally a very tidy person. I like to think that I don’t organize for its own sake (Katie’s opinion would differ), but I definitely like to know where to find things. Even when I leave things out, I tend to leave them in the same place. Conversely, it drives me insane that Katie leaves the portable telephone wherever she was when she ended her last phone call.
But after reading Jason Levine’s post about his new workbench, it dawned on me that my workbench is definitely the exception to my general tidiness.

I just pile stuff on my workbench. Every few weeks, I go out and put everything away, but then I let it pile up again. The photo above is about in the middle of this cycle. It’ll get a little worse before I get around to cleaning it off again.
I’m not really sure why my workbench is so messy. I suspect it’s because I just don’t have enough room to organize everything well in the garage. I’m thinking now that maybe I should rearrange the garage to make more storage space for tools and such. Unfortunately, that has to be a relatively low priority home improvement project. I’ve got several other more important tasks on my honey-do list.
Maybe I’ll find some better organization alternatives when the new Ikea opens in the next couple of months.

I live in suburban Austin, Texas–a long way from the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. In the days and months after that date, it made me really angry whenever I heard someone state that “Everything is different now” or “Things will never be the same again.” My anger was due to my belief that for pretty much everyone in America–save, perhaps, some in NYC or Washington–things were, in fact, very much the same. We’ll be freaked out for a while, but then life will go on pretty much like it was before. And I felt that life should go on like before, as most Americans’ chances of being directly affected by another possible attack were slim at best.
Fred Clark recently linked to a blog post by Athenae that offers an explanation for these declarations that irritated me so much. Athenae writes:

An awful lot of people, good people, nice people, people living what you’d call normal lives, are just sort of ambling around trying to figure out what the fuck they’re doing here. They have jobs they hate and families that drive them nuts and leisure time that feels more like work than work does, what with travel indignities and the rush and bustle of theme parks. They’re miserable in a low-level kind of way, quiet desperation and all, and church isn’t doing it for them, and drugs are too destructive, and most of them aren’t living the lives they wanted to live. Not at all.
…
And so, when George W. Bush came along and made a good speech, . . . they jumped on the bandwagon because really, any bandwagon would have done. It had nothing to do with George Bush and nothing really to do with Sept. 11. It had everything to do with a hunger in suburbia for the kind of purpose their parents had as young people in the 1960s, the kind of purpose America had when it was led by real men and not hucksters and thieves. The kind of purpose World War II necessitated . . . and the civil rights movement engendered, back when the people writing editorials today sincerely believed they could change the world.

I’d like to think that I’m just smarter than the masses, but if nothing else, I have a strong aversion to mindlessly pledging allegiance. It angered me that so many were declaring common cause where, to my mind, none existed.