About My Father's Business

I recently had the chance to take my 7 year old daughter on a date to a Jazz game.  Basketball isn't her favorite sport, but she loves spending time with her dad.  She's loves to learn and is very excited about math in school so she spent most of the game trying to figure out which team was winning and by how much.  Unfortunately, it wasn't the Jazz. In a game where they had to win to have a shot at making they playoffs, they fell flat.  It was a hard game to watch for a die-hard fun such as myself because we just couldn't seem to make a shot. My daughter noticed this too.  I remember listening to the talking heads on the radio the next morning break down the game and analyze every detail to find out what went wrong, but my daughter provided the best analysis I'd heard.  We were watching the Jazz warm up at halftime and she said to me "Dad, how come they [the Jazz] can make these three pointers, but not the other ones?"  She had noticed during the...

March is a magical time of year.  A time when Winter begins the give way to Spring.  A time when flowers begin to bloom and the morning air is filled with the songs of birds.  But more important, it's time for March Madness.  Time for filling out brackets and all-you-can-eat college basketball.  (In my opinion Selection Sunday should be declared a National Holiday). All over the nation people everywhere take time out of their busy lives to fill out brackets.  Even people that don't gamble fill one out.  Even my wife, who sort of hates basketball, fills one out.  Everyone has their own method.  Some people spend hours breaking down match-ups and analyzing teams strengths and weaknesses.  Some people pick based on which mascot would win in a fight.  I know one person who picked for/against colleges that accepted/denied her husband's application.  And everyone is in it to win it. Its interesting to me how much satisfactio...

There is a saying common among software developers.  "If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail."  It means that you have to figure out which tool is right for the task at hand.  If you need to set a nail, or severely bruise your thumb then a hammer is the perfect tool.  If, however, you are trying to cut a board, or paint a wall you will discover there are other tools bettter suited for the job.  The job becomes much easier if you know what tools are available and how to use them. In Matthew 25 there is a parable taught by the Savior known as the parable of the talents.  In this parable a man prepares to go on a trip.  As part of his preparations he calls in his servants who will be responsible for taking care of his goods while he is away.  To one servant he gives 5 talents.  To a second servant he gives 2 talents and to a third servant he gives 1 talent.  It is widely believed that this scripture is the ...

A woman who was married to a computer programmer sent her husband out one day to the grocery store to buy bread.  As he was leaving she added: "If they have eggs, grab a dozen."  It will come as no surprise to the computer programmers reading this that he came back from the store with 12 loaves of bread.  In response to his wife questioning his mental state in bringing home that much bread he simply said "They had eggs." You can't always trust a computer programmer to make great decisions.  We tend to operate the same way a computer does, which is to follow each instruction literally.  If we examine the above case we can see that the husband was given a program to run; Buy Bread.  After starting the Buy Bread program his wife altered the parameters and told him to check for eggs.  The husband did this, but because he was still running the Buy Bread program it never even occurred to him to buy eggs.  The only thing he cared about was buying was b...

Nobody is perfect.  Read that last sentence again, but this time imagine that Nobody is the name of a person.  Now with that in mind read the following paraphrased version of a poem by Charles Osgood: Everybody,  Somebody,  Anybody and Nobody were at work one day when an important task came up.  This task was something that Everybody should have done, but Everybody assumed Somebody would do it.  Anybody could have done it, but he also assumed that Somebody would do it.  That made Somebody mad because it was Everyone's job, and in the end Nobody ended up doing what Everybody should have done. This fable is usually used to illustrate the importance of taking responsibility, but it also illustrates an important trait about Nobody.  Nobody is perfect.   He is always willing to do the tasks that we leave undone.  But we on the other hand are far from perfect.   So why is it that we are unwilling to allow others to be...

As a software engineer I have come to understand the importance of asking the right questions.  When you build software it's important that you build something useful.  Most of the time you are building software for someone else, known in inner circles as the "user".  This user's job is to give you something called "requirements".  Your job as a software engineer is to take these requirements and turn them into "software".  But this process can break down fairly quickly if you don't ask the right questions.  From the perspective of a user, in order to get software that's useful to me, I need to keep the focus on what I truly want the software to do.  Software engineers are notorious for starting to build the software and getting sidetracked with the phrase "You know what would be really cool....".  Too many of those conversations and you end up with Windows ME.  Looks cool, has a lot of features, but ends up virtually unusable. ...