Hopefully you had a follow-up meeting to discuss the problem of too many meetings.
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At our scrum standups we don’t have a scrum master. I am a millimeter away from appointing myself. My foot still effing hurts, so standing for 55 minutes (!!!) has been brutal.
“People, you have three minutes. Solve problems one on one, not at status. Hell, I’ll even take notes to remind you”
It’s flippan’ herding cats some days.
Also, I know we are all soft spoken, but three inch voices is a tad… Quiet in a room with construction going on outside.
Also, when we have remote employees on Skype, don’t turn your back to them.
Also, don’t interrogate someone else and give their status update as your own.
Also, positively acknowledge when you are don’t. Shuffling feet is not an EOL glyph.
Also, mute yer damn mics.
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I hide in the lab as much as possible and do all my meetings by phone. I rarely pay much attention to them.
The daily ones are an utter waste of time. And I think I’m the least cynical about them.
Heh. Recently I thought I’d hung up on a call with our suppliers, and turned around and slagged off how useless they were. I got an IM from a colleague suggesting I hang up…
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I enjoy our daily standups when we keep it concise and geared towards status, not mini code or architecture reviews.
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I think we have all done that exactly once.
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I had an old boss who got so pissed off with the people on the other end of an international call he just hung up on them.
Awesome chap.
Also resigned once, cc’ing all of us, because he thought our safety wasn’t being taking seriously enough.
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Oh, wait, it isn’t? What about soulfully looking at your shoes? That’s EOF, right?
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Today was a good day. The light weight prozac I started this week is finally starting to make a difference. Plus I’ve been spiking the coffee supply at work with crushed up Xanax, so everyone is reeeally mellow.
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Time for my recent favorite joke:
How can you recognize an extroverted computer programmer?
He looks at your shoes when he’s talking to you.
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I got to the office this AM and we did standup and we’re done in 30 without the digressions/crap, it was looking promising. Then with standup done, since we’re GMed, it was time to have a dev meeting to plan the next release. I did successfully stop the boss from adding a second layer of hierarchical inheritance on top of the current model by drawing what he suggested on the whiteboard with some data in it and then asking enough things about it that he had to admit it was too confusing. Small win, not quite good enough to take a break to eat.
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It was a dudes birthday today, so the office took a two hour lunch with two pitchers of IPA. I had deep fried pastrami croquettes. Yeah, awesome as they sound.
Oh, and the emergency build we had to rev worked perfectly, and the four hundred mechanical Turk jobs I parsed through had a 95% success rate, along with the positive discovery of some edge cases we weren’t aware of.
Maybe all lunch should include an IPA 
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There should at least be lunch. Happily I ate at Torchys’ Tacos (the best in Austin) am now playing with molten glass and all is well.
Vitrigraph
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Sinus infection… again.
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Baby with a ear infection.
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Gah!!! If you were nearer I’d loan you some happy pills, but alas. (You have to give them back)
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Torchys … Austin … Will be there Tuesday!!!
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For a variety of reasons I live with my parents. Fine, whatever, when the economy tanked a lot of people moved back home.
Thing is I can’t drive due to my vision, have no social net locally, and my folks live rural to the point mobility for me is an issue. I talk to my folks about feeling like nothing I do means a damned because whatever happens i’m going to get screamed at, or my (special needs mentally stunted) sister going to go nuclear, or… something will just plain go WRONG.
My stepad’s response was ‘Stop fucking up and do it right the first time so it won’t be a problem.’
In the face of that… constantly and getting dinged on for everything I’ve ever done and apparent blindness to any improvements I’ve made why bother trying? He considers me little better than a child myself, putting me explicitly at the same level as my sister in his eyes, with mom not exactly endorsing his worldview but doing nothing but weak protests to try getting him to lay off. On the face of it awesome. I don’t have bills, I have a roof over my head, food, internet, whatever.
However i have no peer group, and when the only people that can physically help me just… won’t and even sixteen years later bring up how I screwed up college and trot out everything I’ve ever done wrong in their eyes? I’ll admit to having a variety of problems and at times being very difficult to work with, but… Why should I try anymore?
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For me it’s nearly every winter, dry/frozen northern air and all. Drink lots of fluids, don’t take any cold medicines, use a humidifier (and CRANK that sucker at night), give yourself a mini-schvitz (pot of boiling water with a towel over your head to get the steam, sometimes I add a tsp. of rosemary-- aromatic), and saline nasal spray. Also avoid alcohol and caffeine. You gotta fight it with a single-mindedness. I won’t use antibiotics unless I’m on my deathbed. Also: garlic, but you should be eating that anyway to keep vampires at bay.
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I don’t know. We only get one of these, and that’s what keeps me going. Even when I don’t want to keep going.
Are you looking a career, a social life, independence, or all three? 
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Horse radish. Horse radish. Horse Radish. By the spoonful.
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