malvasia bianca

In response to a not-very-coherent question of mine on the lean development list, Tom Poppendieck posted an interesting response. From it: Over a decade ago, when Jeff Sutherland invented Scrum, he was faced with a situation in which his product development process bottleneck was the capacity of skilled developers. He designed Scrum specifically to exploit […]

I would seem to be in a quiet mood these days. Not feeling much like blogging, not feeling much like programming at home. Maybe because I’ve been programming a fair amount at work; I was worried that, with the new larger group, I’d have almost no programming time, but now that things have settled down […]

As regular readers are aware, Yosha hadn’t been at his best for a while. A couple of weeks ago, though, he started getting even more lethargic, and pretty much stopped eating. We tried giving him food that actually tastes good; that helped for a while. But then it stopped helping, and he was having a […]

Two e-mails I received today: An e-mail from CD Baby with the name associated to the from address given as “CD Baby loves David”, saying (among other things) the following: Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 […]

Both DDR players are pretty amazing. But I really love the first one. Go creative commons. Hot library smut. I think my favorite is the Hague. Gender and pitch. (The course sounds cool, too.) I am speechless.

Today’s book: It’s Not Luck, the second of Eliyahu Goldratt’s business novels. Which I actually read after the third; cleared up a few issues, but the reading order didn’t matter too much. (I would recommend starting with The Goal, though.) This book presents some thinking tools for analyzing situations that confuse you, where you’re stuck […]

I just finished another one of Eliyahu Goldratt’s business novels on the Theory of Constraints. I didn’t lose sleep over it the way I did with The Goal, but it was quite good. And useful to see ToC applied to product development situations, instead of just manufacturing situations. One thing that caught my eye: not […]

Project X: Cup Noodle clearly has to go on today’s one-click list. Jackson Pollock. I would seem to be getting into interactive flash sites. House of dominoes. The Foundation replacement saga. Quite a storefront. Our money is badly designed (and getting worse). Nice manhole cover, too. A much longer talk than I usually tolerate on […]

My, the design for the new digs for the American Institute of Mathematics look posh – quite a change from the Palo Alto Fry’s building. Here are renderings from one side, another side, and a rendered flyover video. I will definitely have to wander over the first time Jordan goes to an event there after […]

One thing that I never got around to blogging about when I first became lean-obsessed: Toyota never fires anybody. Or something like that; at any rate, one thing that lean bloggers claim is that, for lean manufacturers, employees are a fixed cost instead of a variable cost. Which has interesting ramifications. In general, it’s a […]

Miranda’s daycare occasionally goes on bowling trips, and the local bowling alley also handed out cards entitling kids to one free game a day (plus free shoe rental) over the summer, so she’s been asking me if I could take her bowling some time. Which I finally got around to doing today. Fun. First time […]

Thanks to Mark and Marissa, I can report that the warehouse district seems rather more interesting than the blocks of downtown Minneapolis between the light rail stop and my hotel. Certainly more places where I’d want to eat.

A follow-up to my zombie sighting from Saturday evening: it turns out that the price they paid for livening up downtown was to spend two nights in jail. The police should be ashamed of themselves: any claims of “simulated weapons of mass destruction” or “intimidat[ing] passersby” are ridiculous.

And now day 2 is over. Better than day 1: I enjoyed all four talks that I went to, and hopefully got something out of them. One of the problems that I have is figuring out which talks to go to. I have enough agile experience that I’ve been avoiding the beginners’ tutorials. The main […]

I’m here now. Getting on the light rail and taking it to the Nicollet Mall stop was easy enough. Then I got off, looked around for my hotel, and didn’t see it. Or any useful street signs, or anything like that. Most people were walking in one direction, so I followed them; after a bit, […]

I wasn’t sure what I thought about this article on removing warning signs when I first saw it, and I’m equally confused by this one. On a basic level: does this really work? I’ve never driven in Europe, I’ve never been to Italy at all, so I don’t have much context for many of the […]

The previous owner of our house was quite a gardener. One of the things I liked about the place: out the back door, there’s a patio with a table and chairs, covered by a sort of trellis with jasmine growing over it (creating a nice, cool space). In the yard proper, many flowers, large, colorful […]

Vacation’s over now; back to work tomorrow. Some random notes: Miranda managed to last through all five plays we went to. She fell asleep during one; I, on the other hand, dozed a bit during two. All good, but our consensus favorite was London Assurance, which we’d never heard of before. It turns out that […]

We feel fine. Ed Felten goes ski jumping. Lean healthcare. Trained to fear. Visual complexity. Files are not for sharing.

One of the things I’ve been doing on vacation is going through my backlog of magazines. There are too many ways to make your suitcase heavier on a trip; might as well find ways to lighten it, by bringing discardable reading material along. They only make some of their issues available online, so I can’t […]