Someone wiser than me once said “People decide how you must feel about something by what you do, not what you say.”

This evening I was reflecting over a workshop I once participated in on work-place behaviors. It was one of those workshops where you wondered why someone actually has to tell you some of this stuff. As is often the case, personal behaviors and styles are the key in any relationship — personal ones and work-place ones. So we included personal topics.

We were asked the question “How does your husband or wife know you love them?”

The usual responses where people talked about remembering flowers on a birthday or chocolates on some other occasion were mentioned. I never much cared for these typical answers.

I raised my hand and said, “I make sure there’s fresh fruit in the refrigerator.”

Yesterday, Bloomberg News published a piece by Andy Grove – the co-founder of Intel Corp. He makes a passionate and reasoned case for how the U.S.A. is making a mistake by outsourcing much, perhaps all, of our manufacturing base. Read the article here.

This excerpt hits a nerve that applies to more than just manufacturing:
Not only did we lose an untold number of jobs, we broke the chain of experience that is so important in technological evolution.

I see the same thing happening in software development. While it is thought true that less expensive developers are available offshore, that’s not necessarily the same thing as saying developing offshore is less expensive. The “chain of experience” gets lost somewhere in the translation. Never mind the literal loss during translation back and forth to English. Some of this gets resolved by training, mentoring and patience.

But who really believes that patience and longer term investment is given credible support today? Just because a developer knows the pertinent technology employed to accomplish your business goals doesn’t mean they understand what you are trying to do. That comes from years of experience.

I’m an “agile software” enthusiast, and there’s a saying often quoted in my world. “Do the simplest thing that could possibly work.” Those are sound words of advice. However. Just like anything else in life, you can carry this to the extreme that you lose sight of the real goals. Software development is all about 2 things:

1. Deliver solutions for your customer
2. Maintenance

Don’t lose sight of that 2nd one. I once worked for a very smart company president who used to say “The first order of business is to stay in business.” If you only focus on what you need right now, and don’t understand what you really need right now, you will add considerable software debt. Now I’m not talking about writing software frameworks with extensions for the future that are over-reaching. We all recognize that when we see it. What I am talking about though, is if we just focus on fixing this problem really quick so I can get onto something else, we are not doing the right thing.

As anyone who has worked in the software development world long enough knows, it’s a delicate balance.

That balance is even harder to maintain when you’ve sent all your knowledge home and asked some folks overseas to help you stay in business. The imbalances Andy Grove mentions say it all. Who’s going to stay in business, the guy with all his business knowledge contained in another company’s people?

Melissa and I went to see Toy Story 3 tonight. She picked a Digital-3D presentation and it was great. The movie made me laugh and feel. It was like spending time with some old friends. A very enjoyable experience.

You may have already seen this photo passing around the Internet.

BP Irony.

Look carefully, the sign is posted at a BP gas station.

VEX robotics Championship of the Americas continues.

NASA live web feed can be found off this site: http://j.mp/9n6Csx

Nick’s team (Kiwis): 1064C

I’ve deleted, or deactivated, my FaceBook account. I know there has been a lot of Internet buzz recently about changes that FaceBook has made to its privacy agreement, but that really has no bearing on my reasons for deactivating. It just no longer interests me.

I believe that FaceBook has become the AOL or MySpace of the Internet. There is a lot of uninteresting junk, too much traffic, and I’m not interested spending mental bandwidth keeping up with it.

I have this BLOG space for sharing opinions, a personal web site, my board gaming BLOG for other hobbies, my Squeak Enhancements site for sharing specific technical stuff, and I still use Flickr for photos.

My preferred way of communicating daily status and thoughts is to utilize the micro-blogging tool Twitter. With Twitter I feel more connected with what I need to know and easily share with others.

We had quite an interesting weekend.  Friday morning Nicholas complained that he had pain in his abdomen.  Melissa got on the Internet and looked up his symptoms and it looked as if Nicholas might be having a problem with his appendix.

We discussed the situation briefly, decided he wasn’t going to school that morning, and she called the doctor’s office.  I went to work.

While I was at work, Melissa heard back from the doctor’s office and after hearing his symptoms they recommended that Nicholas be immediately taken to Children’s Hospital ER.  At the hospital they determined that he did indeed have an inflamed appendix and that they would be performing surgery to remove it.  Melissa informed me right away and I left the office to be with her at the hospital.

Because of the H1N1 flu problems, everyone at the hospital was wearing masks.  Here’s the two of us while we were waiting to hear how the surgery went.  

The appendix is that curly looking thing in the top picture. I’d never seen one before.

It took a while before they released him from post-op.  I think it took a while for him to come out of the effects of the general anesthetic.

Finally, they brought him up to his hospital room for him to recover and be observed by the hospital. Here’s a picture from right when he was rolled into his room.

Melissa spent the night with Nicholas in the hotel room.  She slept on a very hard uncomfortable looking “padded slab”.  I went home, thinking I would be getting up in the morning to go into work (on Saturday) just to see what I may have missed from Friday.

I got home around 8:30 PM that evening.

Later that night I exchanged several e-mails with folks from work and decided that I didn’t need to go in on Saturday.

The next morning I went back to the hospital and waited there with Nicholas and Melissa for him to recover enough for them to release him.  The good news is that he was eating, but still in some pain.

We were able to leave around 1:30 PM Saturday.  It was quite an interesting weekend.  Nicholas is doing better and will have probably 2 half-days beginning the school week, and at the advice of the surgeon, no Gym class activity for about 2 weeks.

I added pictures of my wife, Melissa, and a few photos from Mother’s Day 2009.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/91786944@N00/

At the office they have these large ice machines and chilled water dispensers. There’s 2 on every floor.

The Ice Machine

It seems that these machines need frequent servicing. Well the other day I noticed that I never see the service guy take a sample of water and drink it after working on the machine.

So these scientists have published a white paper describing how they think the problems with the Large Hadron Collider might be because of sabotage from the future.

It does sound like material for an episode of Fringe, a TV show I enjoy watching.

But this got me to thinking. Hey, if these guys are right that might explain all the problems with Windows. Maybe scientists from the future have learned that a well working Windows system could doom the world. So they go back and insert bugs and other…

Nah. Occam’s Razor gives us the right answer. It’s probably just bugs.