Binary Oasis

Teaching children is hard.

That’s my latest conclusion. Sure, I like to spend time with kids (especially my own), but teaching them is not my forte.

I’m glad to say that my wife is very good at teaching our children. While I’ve sometimes thought that I am more patient with the kids and would therefore be a better teacher than she, that thought no longer exists. She is able to consistently teach them in spite of the distractions that they create.

Thanks, Katie.

I just recently read The Mythical Man Month. It’s a book by Fred Brooks that many people in the computer field will be familiar with. While its subtitle (”Essays on Software Engineering”) implies a fairly narrow topic, there is a lot of good information here and great analogies that most people would enjoy and benefit from.

My summary of the book is this:

Certain types of work of large scale (including most moder engineering projects) can’t be strictly divided into work units since intense communication is required. Or, in other words, two people cannot complete a job in half the way that it would take one person to complete the job.

Camelback Bible Church has now completed a pretty significant update of their website. Of particular note is that their sermons are available as separate or streaming downloads.

Update: just verified that the site was done by Rob Hedrick’s company Net Eclipse.  Good job, Rob.

The title doesn’t say it all here, but I just recently hit three somewhat-related websites that I wanted to highlight:

* Positive Sharing: Covers a few topics, including happiness at work
* EA Spouse: This 2004-blog led to some significant changes with the software development industry in particular
* Joel on Software: Joel Spolsky focuses on software development issues, but he has great insight on some other general topics; here’s one that caught my eye: Whaddaya Mean, You Can’t Find Programmers?

Politics is one of the most contentious areas around the dinner table or anywhere else. That’s why this idea from the founder of Wikipedia sounds a bit like a long shot, but hey, it’s definitely worth a shot and worth following: he explains the idea in a 4th of July posting. He notes that political debate has been largely a joke over the past 50 years or so. (See also Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”) The new website is supposed to be a place for those with different political ideas to hash them out, or at least to weed out the nonsense from the debate (my paraphase with the descriptions).

One optimistic hope is that this becomes enough of a mover-and-shaker that politicians and policy makers can’t afford to ignore it. If that becomes true, we might be able to recover the regularity of constructive debates.