I just got word that the new iMac I ordered at the end of August has shipped. Curiously, it appears that it’s being sent via FedEx directly from China, where the factory presumably is. I’m quite looking forward to getting my hands on it!

Another note of interest: The comments say “Future delivery requested.” I guess bending the very laws of space-time so that the shipment can be delivered into the past costs a little extra.

Today, I have brought to bear the collective powers of Artificial Intelligence, Conversant, gamma rays, RSS, and the atom to allow you to peer into the darkest recesses of a man’s soul, into the very fiber of his being; a glimpse of something few mortals have seen.

Behold! MY NETFLIX QUEUE!

Yeah, that’s all it is. Hey, I’m a busy guy. The next six items in my queue are in the sidebar here on the web page, or you can see the whole queue here. I’ve also added links to the books I’m currently reading in the sidebar as well. (You folks reading via email or RSS won’t see those without visiting the site.)

This afternoon while Geocaching with the kids, I took a series of photos from the location of one of the caches, later combining them into this panorama. While it’s technically not the best panoramic shot I’ve managed to put together, it does communicate some part of why I love the Texas Hill Country.

To celebrate our friend Lori’s birthday, Kathy and I went bowling last night with her and her husband Kelly. We had the singular good fortune to have a lane next to a group from the local brain injury treatment center — a bunch of characters who were great fun to talk with. Corey, a patient who claimed a physical age of 30 and a mental age of 4, told us this joke: “I once had a girlfriend who told me that I had the body of a god. That made me feel pretty special inside, until a couple of weeks later when I found out she was a Buddhist.”

Since none of our party were particularly good at bowling, we livened up the two games we played in a variety of ways. Kelly struck the Big Lebowski “Nobody Mess With The Jesus!” pose as he prepared to do his worst. Kathy used the granny shot to great effect. (Kelly reminded us of a motto from his time in the Army: “If it’s stupid, but it works, it isn’t stupid.”) And in a futile attempt to pick up a 7/10 split, I tried bowling with two balls at the same time.

There was a band of 10 year old boys a few lanes over who were celebrating one of their birthdays with bowling, cake, and one of the most tonally uncertain renderings of “Happy Birthday to You” to which I’ve even been witness. Evidently the boys noticed my illicit two-ball technique, as they all started doing the same thing shortly after I did. The dad, who had already been pretty irate with the boys, came close to blowing up when he saw their latest shenanigans. I thought for sure that the boys were going to point over our way and say “but HE did it!” Fortunately, the code of the playground is still evidently intact, and I didn’t get ratted out.

Thanks for your discretion, boys, and Happy Birthday!

A few weeks back the kids and I went to the San Antonio Zoo, a beautiful spot in the city’s Brackenridge Park, adjacent to the San Antonio River and close to downtown. I distributed the tickets to the children so that they could enjoy the sense of responsibility as they “paid” their own ways into the zoo, and we began the trek around the zoo grounds, visiting the jaguars, flamingos, lions, javelinas, and other ferocious beasts.

As we peered earnestly at a giant, ill-tempered grizzly bear, I casually remarked to Liam that he should hang on to his ticket stub, because the animals are allowed to eat anybody that sneaks into the zoo and doesn’t have a ticket stub. He gave me the purse-mouthed roll of the eyes that so concisely communicates the fact that he knows Dad is talking nonsense, and is therefore giving his words all the attention they deserve.

We moved on from the grizzly to the spectacled bear, the lemurs and llamas, the giraffe and the elephants. As the afternoon wore on, I continued my little joke: reminding Liam to hang on to his ticket, and occasionally pulling mine out of my pocket to show to a listless and disinterested rhinoceros. He continued to skip merrily along, agape at the variety of fauna laid out before him, apparently oblivious to my silliness.

A few minutes later, I caught up with Liam after he had run on ahead, only to find him standing next to Kathy, sobbing as if his small heart had been broken. He had been fine moments before, so I assumed he had tripped and hurt himself or suffered some other accidental injury. “What’s wrong, Sport? Are you OK?”

Liam was crying too hard to speak, but Kathy filled me in, eyes shooting fire: “He lost his ticket, and says you told him the animals would eat him.”

Oh. Crap.

Getting down on my knees, and feeling like the worst father in Texas, if not in fact the history of civilization, I folded Liam in my arms and babbled “I’m so sorry, buddy. I was only joking. I didn’t think you were even listening to me. The animals won’t eat you; they can’t even get out of their cages. Do you want my ticket?” He shook his head no, but his sobbing eventually subsided as he realized that the only mauling he would suffer at the zoo was the emotional one I’d already inadvertently inflicted on him.

Of course, being a five-year-old, Liam had forgotten the incident within minutes. I, however, have been left with a lasting reminder of what an awesome, terrible responsibility it is to be a father, while at the same time being a big, clumsy, sinful human. How can God possibly entrust such an important, difficult job to us? Tread carefully, dear parents — it’s a wonderful and perilous road we walk.

It’s been a while since I put up a new photo gallery, but I figured that with the onset of fall and a new school year, our far-flung family might enjoy seeing a more current collection of photos of the children. Please enjoy your visit to Autumn 2004 Photos, and be sure to tip your waitress!

The Dragon’s Lair is my favorite place for board and card games, comics, etc. My cronies at Origin and I used to frequent the store in Austin regularly at lunch time, mounting large-scale pilgrimages when new D&D books were released and when particularly enticing new games were available. The staff is extremely friendly and helpful and always have a superb selection of products on-hand.

Several times over the last month, I’ve seen a Dragon’s Lair van lurking here in San Marcos. And then last night, as Kathy and I were driving around, I saw — oh frabjuous day! — a storefront, open for business. I dragged my friend (and pastor) Craig to the store after lunch to check it out. We met the manager and the owner, and spent 20 minutes rooting through the games and chatting with them. While not quite as expansive as the Austin store, the selection is already solid, and they seem well on their way to hiring some good folks. San Marcos has been without a game store for a couple of years now, so I suspect they’ll do bang-up business.

The only downside for me is that they’re in easy walking distance from my office, which may make spending money responsibly that much tougher.

The day before yesterday, I was sitting in a meeting, examining the project schedule which our project manager had just handed out. “Not another @^#%& Gantt chart!” I thought to myself. I know this sort of planning is essential for the people outside the project who need to know when it will is likely to be done and what progress is being made, but as an individual developer contributing to the project, I’m generally only interested in two things: the very highest-level view of the scope of the project and our progress, and the details of my tasks.

The first of these is, of course, the same thing that outside observers want from the project management process. The latter is something that’s only of interest to me, and which nobody else cares a bit about, except perhaps when the project falls behind. But because we use Microsoft Project for our scheduling, I have to see the giant task list, 85% of which doesn’t even remotely apply to me. After staring at the monstrous chart for a few minutes, I went into reverie, considering what this process should look like. Here are a few of my scattered thoughts:

• When a project is started, all the projected tasks will be enumerated in a web application. (Part of the problem with Project is that, at least as it’s generally used, everything has to go through the project manager, who is The Keeper of the File. Using a web app distributes the maintenance of the project plan.) A project manager creates high-level tasks. The developers would then create sub-tasks with increasing granularity until the work units are small enough to be estimated accurately. (My experience is that any task that one expects to take more than a few hours probably should be broken into sub-tasks.) When this process is complete, the total for each developer is multiplied by his personal “fudge factor” as computed by the system and fed into the project estimate total.
• Each developer will have an individual and continually revised “fudge factor” computed, based on his initial work estimates and the actual time it takes him to complete the jobs. This will be well-buried, as it’s only used to increase the accuracy of work estimates, not to point out deficiency in her estimates.
• Each project should have a “dashboard” which shows the original estimated date of completion, the current estimated date of completion, the number of tasks completed, the percent of tasks completed, etc. There should be a single, big pretty progress bar/timeline with color coding to indicate scheduled progress, schedule slips, etc. This is the view that most everyone from outside the team doing the work will want to see. The highest-level tasks will be marked on the timeline.
• A developer will have a personal “work entry” page which lists all the tasks assigned to her. If a task has prerequisites, it will only appear here once the prerequisites have been completed. By accessing this page at the start of a work day, the developer will be able to easily see what parts of the project she can work on. At the end of the day, she’ll simply enter the number of hours she worked on a given subtask, and click a checkbox if the subtask has been completed. (The checkbox, rather than a “percent complete” setting, also reinforces the idea that subtasks should take no more than a few hours.) This allows progress to be tracked easily, and helps to keep the developer’s “fudge factor” accurate by comparing the original estimate to the actual time spent on the project. This page should also include a small version of the dashboard progress graph, thereby consolidating all the information that the developer needs on a daily basis into a single page.

That’s what I’ve got so far. I know some of my developer friends have thought about some of this stuff before too, so please feel free to chip into the discussion, or alternately to swipe any of these ideas you like for your killer project management application.

I just put in an order for a 17″ new-style iMac to take over as my principal computer at home. I added RAM and a big hard drive to make it a usable audio/video workstation, and picked up Final Cut Express for a song as part of the order. It’s nice to have access to academic discounts for Apple gear again!

Estimated delivery time: 3-4 weeks. (Guys who were on the Santa Fe trip: I’ll start work on the video after it arrives, as it will make that process a lot easier.) I’ll be rearranging my work area when it comes in to hopefully make it easier to get recording done when inspiration strikes.

If you’ve been wondering what those little orange buttons that say “XML” on people’s weblogs are for, or why there are links to “syndicate this weblog” that look like gibberish when you follow them, you should know about News Aggregators.

Aggregators are a type of software that monitors special files called “RSS Feeds” or “Atom Feeds” on weblog-style websites (like this one) and let you know when something new has been posted or when the content of an article has changed. The advantage to using a system like this is that you don’t have to spend your time visiting each of the websites you’re interested in following, but instead only see those with material you haven’t read.

I switched over to using a web-based aggregator called Bloglines a couple months back, and have been really impressed with the application. Since it’s web based, I can follow the news I want just as easily from the office as I can from home. Because it’s centralized, it actually reduces the load on the sites I watch, as their news feeds only get loaded once per hour for the whole Bloglines service, rather than once per hour per user. It also automatically generates the “Reading Material” sidebar for my site, which lists each of the feeds I keep an eye on through their service.

If you use aggregators, I recommend taking a look at it. If you follow a lot of news sites, but don’t use an aggregator, I recommend it as well. Here’s a link to subscribe to my weblog to get you started. (Aha! The ulterior motive!)