atomicthoughts.com

I request you do the needful

This phrase pops up in most of the feedback we get, usually originating from India. I’ve always been curious where it originates from.

I agreed to a sales call today that didn’t go so well. When you trying to sell me something, please don’t invest half your presentation in to why I shouldn’t buy your competitors product.

And when you tell me “Web 2.0 is going to be a huge thing now”, you lose a lot of credibility.

Comps to the bathrooms at Arizona Stadium for having waterless urinals. I’m often frustrated that they’re not more common out here. Although they’re so tightly spaced they might as well have stuck with a trough.

They also had a sink I hadn’t seen since 4th grade. My elementary school had one huge sink that both boys and girls used to wash their hands. It was a 10 foot circlular basin with a fountain in the middle and a ring on the bottom that you stepped on to activate. When you stepped on the ring water would spray out in every direction to the edge of the basin.

So the men’s room had two of these, each much smaller and only a half circle. We were there for band day so it was mostly teenage boys and younger.

My son has a bladder a rat would be embarassed by, so I had lots of chances to observe people using it. It was interesting to watch them try and activate it. Generally they assumed it was automatic and flailed their arms about. Then they touched a bolt on top of the fountain. Eventually they gave up and moved over to the other one, which is already more effort than I put into washing my hands at that age.. Sometimes a parent would activate the first one and they hustled back to it. When I clued in a few of them to try their foot, they looked down at the bar, then back at me, back at the bar, back at me. They hesitantly tapped the bar with their foot while twisting their backs away from the fountain, to shield themselves from Empire Strikes Back bolts of power that were apparently going to shoot forth. Instead, water came pouring out every nozzle and they shot a big smile back to me as if they had just discovered the secret of life. And I happen to agree that little moments of joy like that are a pretty big part of that secret.

Moments of joy like this one, later in the same day. While watching one of the bands Isaac insistently tugged on my arm, “daddy daddy daddy!” he said urgently, like when he really has to go potty really bad, or when he figures something out on his own and is super proud of it. “Yes son?” “What was the tall robots name in Star Wars?” Glad that was so important son. :)

I know it sounds cruel, but seeing a 4 year old peel an orange then squint and scream from flying juice is kind of funny. But after five times it’s downright hilarious.

Click to call in Google Maps

On the one hand I’m thinking “My god could we be any lazier?”. And on the other hand I’m mostly thinking the same thing. However… We foot the bill for calls (local and long distance). So you basically now have free long distance to any business in the US.

Hey, Cars, by Gary Numan, get the heck out of my Fatboy Slim station. You’re a fine song in your own right, but not here.

Gmail Mute: Ignore “the thread that won’t die”

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I’m sitting here at my desk with my mouth literally agape, completely stunned at the email I’m reading. I’m still saying “wow” to myself. Not just in my head, out loud too.

I was trying to register on a technical forum for a product we use. I was trying to register using ‘bbendick’, the same username I’ve registered with at what has to be over a thousand places before. But for some reason that username isn’t allowed on that board. Maybe I had registered before with the name, and it’s just a bad error message. There’s no way to recover a password, so let me mail someone…

The response: ‘The problem stems from an obscenity filter on the username field that prevents any user names with the word “dick” in it. Sorry for the inconvenience.’

Again, wow.

I did some research on the forum software in question. Someone in the forum submitted a similar problem trying to register as ‘rlarsen’.

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What is with lazy ass parents shadowing their kids in cars? And what’s with their lazy ass kids GETTING IN THE CAR to be DRIVEN 4 houses away, past the houses with no lights on? It’s not like it’s 30 and snowing here, which still wouldn’t cut it as an excuse. I froze and got snowed on to earn my candy a few times, and it just made it taste better damnit.

Creepiest thing we saw all night: Some dude strolled up to ask and ask if we had gotten a lot of candy. “We just got started,” I replied. “Yeah. I’m out trick or treating for my niece. She’s 3. Her Mom doesn’t trust me alone with her at night.” Ohhhkay. Fortunately he didn’t hang around.

Kids went as “Earth” and “Woody” from Toy Story. The earth costume was an idea from a parenting magazine we had picked up, and Jane loved it. The kid in the picture had brown hair, which would have made a world of difference. Green hair spray in blond hair doesn’t exactly scream “grass”. But she loved it and it was awesome, as was Isaac.

Here’s an excerpt from the excellent Code Complete

Suppose you need a report that shows your annual profit. You already have computerized reports that show quarterly profits. If you’re locked into the programmer mindset, you’ll reason that adding an annual report to a system that already does quarterly reports should be easy. Then you’ll pay a programmer to write and debug a time-consuming progrm that calculates annual profits. If you’re not locked into the programmer mindset, you’ll pay your secretary to create the annual figures by taking one minute to add up the quarterly figures on a pocket calculator.

The most valuable people in your organization are probably the ones that can see and avoid that trap.

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