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Archives for August, 2013

pc gaming

As I mentioned last month, I was thinking of hooking up my laptop to the TV so I could play System Shock on it. That idea didn’t go away; so I ordered a mini-DVI-to-HDMI converter and a lap desk. It took me a little while to get around to setting things up—I was playing the […]

2136 down, 0 to go

I’ve been putting the standard “jōyō kanji” in my collection of items to memorize, adding seven a week; this week, I finally reached the end of the list. I’ve skipped the occasional week, but not very many; that suggests that it’s probably taken me about six years. Long enough, in fact, that the list was […]

on estimation

It probably would surprise people who have interacted with me recently to hear it, but I actually spent a fair amount of time a few years back trying to get good (as an individual, as part of a team) at estimating: reading the literature (both agile and otherwise), trying it out, and refining and repeating […]

the unfinished swan

I got off on the wrong foot with The Unfinished Swan, starting from its very first storybook page: that page begins with the sentence “The King was young, arrogant, and amazingly talented”, and that set up too many associations for me. Associations with my personal life: I spent a lot of time doing math contests […]

structure within teams

Since my role shift at work, I’ve been thinking about teams: partly being surprised by my reactions to some interactions, partly thinking about ways in which my instincts are a bad fit for some aspects of our house style. And three questions about organizational team structure (in general, not about my current job) that I’ve […]