Anger he smiles, towering in shiny metallic purple armor

Queen jealousy, envy waits behind him
Her fiery green gown sneers at the grassy ground

Blue are the life-giving waters taken for granted,
They quietly understand

Once happy turquoise armies lay opposite ready,
But wonder why the fight is on

My red is so confident that he flashes trophies of war and
Ribbons of euphoria

Orange is young, full of daring,
But very unsteady for the first go round

My yellow in this case is not so mellow
In fact I’m trying to say its frightened like me

And all these emotions of mine keep holding me from, eh,
Giving my life to a rainbow like you

Apparently you are…

“Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.”

Via Marginal Revolution

As I have posted several times, we are building some interesting technology on my team (all, well most, to be revealed at PDC).

While we still have a few (but going very, very fast) SDE positions open, we are starting to look for some program managers as well.

What is the program manager? 

There is a more detailed description up on the Microsoft site, but I have two simple answers based on my years of working in this role: 

• A program manager is a SDE (may not a good one :-)) that loves to talk. 
• A program manager is someone responsible for shipping the right product.

Program managers on my team are responsible for the general architecture & design of features, writing lots of code that prove out those designs, talking with customers (right product) and “driving” the cadence of the feature team (shipping).

If you are interested in this sort of role in the language and tools space, send your resume to jpinksto@microsoft (the group program manager for the Connected Languages team).

FFSync v0.5 is available for download.  

Three new features, available via the new iTunes tab:

The first feature is the ability to require “Song Linking”.  What this means is that FFSync will try to find the current song on Rhapsody.  If it can find it, it syncs with FF with a linked item.  If it cannot find it, it does not sync.

The second feature is the “Minimum Song Rating”.  This allows you to determine what the iTunes rating needs to be for the current song to be sync’d with FF.

The third feature is the addition of the song’s rating in the FF item.

Below is a screenshot of these features in action:

This is a great interactive quiz that highlights how MPG can fool you.

http://www.fuqua.duke.edu/news/mpg/mpg.html

Via: http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/the-illusion-of-miles-per-gallon/?hp

A good first step would be an IDE/Editor that can manage all of the code in a database and allow the programmer to dynamically construct queries to build views and otherwise manipulate the code. The environment could then generate flat files in order to be compatible with current compilers.

http://www.atalasoft.com/cs/blogs/rickm/archive/2008/06/06/why-are-our-programs-still-represented-by-flat-files.aspx

He could be on to something…

In the 1970s it was Smalltalk, this decade it is going to be something else.

Other than the fact that it uses Java (how 1990s), I love Wordle.net.

Below is the English translation of Gondola no Uta from Ikiru as a “Wordle cloud”.

Such a wonderful film, especially in light of my recent post around decline and fall.

Below is the song that the protagonist sings twice in the film — worth reading:

life is brief.
fall in love, maidens
before the crimson bloom
fades from your lips
before the tides of passion
cool within you,
for those of you
who know no tomorrow

life is brief
fall in love, maidens
before his hands
take up his boat
before the flush of his cheeks fades
for those of you
who will never return here

life is brief
fall in love, maidens
before the raven tresses begin to fade
before the flame in your hearts
flicker and die
for those to whom today
will never return

life is brief
fall in love, maidens
before the boat drifts away
on the waves
before the hand resting on your shoulder
becomes frail
for those who will never
be seen here again

All things die.  People. Companies. Countries. Civiliations. Planets. Stars.  Yes, even you will die.

Over the past two days, I have been thinking a lot about the “lifecycle” of complex systems.

Much of this thinking has been spurred on my the reading of four books in quick succession:

• The Black Swan
• Crossing the Chasm
• The Innovator’s Dilemma
• Collapse

Another surprising vector for this line of thinking was some dialog from Battlestar Galactica this week:

Children are born to replace their parents. For children to reach their full potential, their parents have to die.

Although I have many thoughts on the subject, the most striking thing for me is our unability to confront the inevitability of decline and fall.

It is most striking because even though I know it intellitectual, I am still very guilty of it every single day.

It can be severe emotional tax to continually remind one’s self that everything you touch, think about, hold dear will be gone; wiped clean by “… all-powerful Time which destroys all things.”

This is the stage where many of you are going to want to stop reading this post.  You are compelled to stop; not to face this reality.  Truth be told, I feel the same thing writing this.

But this feeling fails to take into account one important fact: things must be born to die.  For everything that declines and falls there is a birth and ascendence.  Our problem (at least my problem) is that we only identity with our birth, ascendence, decline and fall.  As such, the latter of these two stages is very painful to contemplate.

If you take a step back and squint at the issue just right (skillful means), you can see decline and fall as a positive thing.  A thing that we herald as the sign of a new birth, a new creation, something beyond, something new.

With this in mind, my thought is that we need some systematic way to deal with decline and fall.  We need to confront it head on and not let it surprise us.  We need to be adults about it.

Memento mori.

New album…

Love it…