Great Movie Review Line from Review of Apparently Worst Move

The New York Post excerpt is classic, although there are a number of good ones on the page. It's always good to read a meta-review of an awful movie.

88 Minutes holds you in a state of acute suspense, keeping you wondering until the very last minute whether this is the worst Al Pacino movie ever made.

Alumni Donations

I am trying so hard to find the text of a column I read in Time magazine about 5 years ago. It really stuck with me. I'm pretty sure it's written by Joel Stein. Joel is talking about the ridiculous amount of money he paid for a Stanford education and the subsequent requests for alumni donations. 

I'll paraphrase about the fictional letter he received from Gillette, the fine makers of the Mach 3 razor: "Mr Stein, I understand you enjoyed our Mach 3, which offers you a very close and comfortable shave. Would you consider giving a small donation to Gillette?"  He then goes on to lament the expensive "art" around the $30,000-a-year tuition Stanford campus which he notes is a private institution.

If anyone knows where I can find the original text of this column, could you let me know in the comments?

Update: I found it.

Something Very Interesting About Speed Dating

I've been thinking of doing speed dating for a while now, if only as a social experiment.

I'm currently reading The Logic of Life by Tim Harford (who I happened to miss when he was in Melbourne Business School last month). He has a very interesting chapter on dating and marriage. A few interesting bits:

• men will usually pick 1 in 5 women to date in speed dating. Women: 1 in 10
• men will select 1 in 5 regardless of the actual talent pool, i.e. we will lower our standards
• young, single women tend to congregate where men earn the most money, i.e. in the cities. This creates an abundance of single women.
• the high incarceration rate of young black males is one reason why African-American females are more likely to go to college.

When Projects Go Wrong: Scrum vs. Waterfall

I was thinking of the comparison between a traditional IT project going over budget or late vs. a Scrum project. In Scrum, we reduce scope instead of moving milestone dates. So whereas a project manager might tell the business sponsors

I need another 3 months and $250,000 to finish this project

a Scrum-master might say

As the product stands right now, a few minor features have yet to be implemented. The software is documented, tested and ready for use. For another $250,000 we could get the other features done.

I know which one I would prefer to say, and which one I would prefer to hear. Luckily, they are the same.

Update: As a I get a lot of traffic to this page, I thought of the problems mentioned in CIO magazine about when Agile projects go wrong is also important. What resonates with me is the tendency to avoid getting into too much detail with the client, even though you probably should.

Still, we just deployed a new CRM system over 1 year in the making, and I think an iterative, agile approach would have been much better (and yes, the project was late and over budget).

A Very Interesting Hobby: The Hidden Mickey Finders

Did you know that Disney hides references to Micky Mouse throughout their movies and theme parks? Neither did I. But there is a whole site dedicated to documenting this.

Who are the people who want to be my Facebok friend?

I mean, seriously, I'm all for Facebook. But you can't just click a button and expect to be my friend. Just like I will not connect with you on LinkedIn if you if I hate working with you (yes, I'm talking to you, guy-I-hate-working-with), I will not be your Facebook friend if I don't like you. 

Hint: I like people that send me Facebook messages. I'm not sure about the poke... it tickles.

On Tibet: If you're Chinese-Australian, Should You Protest?

On my tram ride home today, I noticed a few dozen young Chinese protesting. They were holding long banners that read "Tibet was, is, and always will be part of China." There were at least 3 such banners held up by aournd 8 people so everyone could read it several times on the their way up Swanston Street.

My first question is: what exactly were the people protesting? Were they taking issue with some of the comments by Kevin Rudd the other day? If so, I believe his statements were more about human rights than geopolitics; I don't think he was disputing the borders of China.

Perhaps these people were simply showing solidarity with the Chinese government. On first thought, this seems fairly innocuous. Certainly I believe that these people have the right, in Australia, to speak out in favour of any policy they want, whether of the Australian government, or of some foreign regime. 

Here's where the contradiction arises. You see, the Chinese government doesn't believe that foreigners should interfere with what is essentially (according the banner of the protesters, to be sure) an internal matter for China. How then does it make any sense for those on Australian soil to essentially intefere with an internal matter, even by showing their solidarity? It seems the Chinese goverment would be prefer -- whether you're for or against their behaviour -- to keep your mouth shut. These protesters are trying to have it both ways, but make sense in neither realm.

Worst. President. Ever.

And everyone knows who you mean. Interesting, no?

Mac Stuff: Using Mail to Run Scripts

Here's a good and simple post on getting your Mac to run commands based on e-mails it receives. Try doing that with Outlook Express.

I know that post is supposed to be simple, but wouldn't be even better if there was rule that just evaluated the message of your e-mail as if it was an Applescript file? I've never tried any Applescript-ing, but surely this must be possible.

Google App Engine Blog: Introducing Google App Engine + our new blog

Google recent released a new application engine which runs "in the cloud." I tried to sign up, but the 10,000 spaces were taken up faster than my tiny fingers could type.

This is a major step forward for making scalable application infrastructure something handled by the likes of Google and Amazon and not by Dell consultants or your IT folk: the so-called Red Shift that someone saw coming.

My advice is twofold:

• If you're investing heavily in virtualization for new projects or an attempt to scale existing one, seriously reconsider and explore these new options.


• Invest in Sun, Amazon, and Google. Not VMWare or Microsoft.

There's good potential here.

Signing Up for Microsoft's TechNet Forum

Trying to help a poor soul on the Microsoft forum, I decided I would create an account so I could do just that. I was presented the following screen:

Note the advice beneath "Display E-Mail" field. Microsoft is essentially saying that you shouldn't actually put your e-mail address there at all and offers a rather silly ways of preventing spam which I believe even a simple e-mail harvester would figure out (since the open bracket is a token which would end an e-mail address). It reads:

This will be visible to all forum members. If you enter your real e-mail address, you will likely receive unwanted messages (spam) because spammers regularly gather e-mail addresses from public communties. We highly recommend that you use a modified version of your e-mail address. For example, if an e-mail address were someone@example.com, we would recommend modifying it to someone@example.com.(donotspam).

How does Google solve this problem? Google parses every posting and obfuscates the e-mail address with the first few characters followed by some ellipses. To retrieve the full e-mail address, I would need to click the link, fill in a CAPCHA form and only then would I be able to see the full e-mail address. This seems like a very reasonable process, especially compared with Microsoft's "please don't actually put an e-mail address into the form" recommendation. To date, AFAIK, I have not received any spam to my GMail account from something I posted on Google Groups. (Actually, I don't think I ever received a single spam e-mail to my GMail account ever).

For those who wish to use a real e-mail address for the MSDN forums and who use GMail, you can try using a custom e-mail address with rules. It's a very simple and elegant solution which I am about to use.

The Geek Inside Me

Better that the geek outside you, but still...

The new X-Files movie is fast approaching and I'm quite excited. I haven't any posters, trailers, or mainstream media buzz so whether it's a good movie or not, I'm predicting a total financial failure and if we ever come across the X-Files again, it will have to be in a new TV series with a new or partially new cast.