Maszman Speaks!

Since this is my last day online until after Thanks­giv­ing, read my Jour­nal to see the things I’m thank­ful for this year.

Look­ing to get some Apple refurbed equip­ment cheap? Dove­Bid is auc­tion­ing a large lot in December.

Over at Slash­dot they’re deabt­ing whether soft­ware devel­op­ment has really improved. Every decade has it’s break­though (Struc­tured Design, Object Ori­ented Design, CMM, XP, Open Source) but I’d be hard­pressed to say if I think things are sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent than when I started in the 80’s. Hav­ing man­aged only small teams, I may be biased but I think a small team of tal­ented devel­op­ers still beats a big team of aver­age ones. All that new tools and meth­ods can do is raise the level of every­one, it will never close the gap between the best and the worst.

Some­times change is bad. My favorite geek show, Jeop­ardy, has a new set design, it’s first in over 5 years. You’d think a show with such obvi­ous smarts would know at least some­thing about design, but instead it’s awful, too busy and dis­tract­ing. I hope the next change doesn’t take 5 years.

Mark Pil­grim turns 30. With cat urine. But he’s pre­pared for chil­dren now.

I can now view his site with Mozilla, but it causes some Javascript prob­lems that make my “Blog This!” but­ton to not work. The prob­lem dis­ap­pears when I leave the page.

World AIDS Day is next Mon­day. Please click on the Link and Think but­ton in the left-hand col­umn and learn and per­haps participate.