Heartcrossings

K and his wife M were in town this past weekend and when they called to say hello, we invited them over for dinner. K and DB went to school together and were meeting after twenty years. The couple has led a very interesting life and I was looking forward to meeting them.We chatted over chai and snacks and then DB did the obligatory tour of the house. He was really looking forward to showing them some of J's artwork that we have framed and hung on the walls of the office.  He is incredibly proud of the child's artistic abilities and at times acts like an over-indulgent dad of the worst kind. That evening he was having one of his moments. J enjoys the adulation and I am happy for her - I do believe at least one parent must openly demonstrate pride in their child. It is then okay for the other to be a little reticent and keep things in balance. So while DB pulls the stops on occasion, I make it a point never to do so.  K indulged us and gushed over how nice the pictures wer

I got a flyer in the mail today that had contained an infomerical about a product called Liquid Granite. The story was too good to be true - the look of granite for a fraction of the cost and you would not even need to gut your existing counter-tops. I was intrigued enough to do some research online and came across IdeaConnection . I  quickly moved on from Liquid Granite to more fascinating things. I must have spent an hour reading about inventions I had no idea existed.  This is how the internet experience used to be when I first got online in the mid 90s. There were no filters or aggregrators - you started somewhere and ended up in entirely unexpected places - the journey was fun and unpredictable. You could waste an inordinate amount of time looking for information and digress all too easily. These days, most of my reading online is via Google Reader - the reading list is long and diverse but there is still a corralled feel to it. I get what I want in one place and related informati

Recently Ms L, J's 4th grade teacher got engaged. The girls were a flurry of excitement over her sparkling diamond ring. J and friends attended her class last year but continue to swing by to say hello during recess. Not surprising considering how much they loved her. Ms L is in her late twenties, very pretty and has a million watt smile. That in addition to being a wonderful teacher. I was happy for her when J told me she was getting married to her former doctor.  A few weeks later J told me that she and her friend M were concerned for Ms L. Apparently, she looked sad and did not smile anymore. She cheered up for a bit when the girls stopped to say hello so they made it a point to do so more regularly than they had done before. I was curious to know what a bunch of ten year olds made of the change in Ms L. They had figured she was sad because of the engagement and it burst their bubble a little - looking forward to marriage is supposed to be a happy time. They were doing their par

I have been on Lean/Agile project teams off and on for the last seven years. During that time I have met an assortment of Agile Gurus peddling their mantra, silver bullets, charlatanism garbed as expertise and other travesties to gullible clients desperate to go Agile. Very few had real experience taking projects to successful completion in the client's specific domain and to that extent a very limited appreciation for the challenges involved in doing so.  Often the prescription provided to the project team required us all to struggle with force-fitting our problems into a solution that just did not mesh. We were warned of the dire consequences of not following due process- the Guru had coached hundreds of teams and knew what they were talking about. The Scrum Master was left with the unpalatable job of evangelizing the mantra he or she did not find particularly credible or useful. The unenthusiastic team went through the motions of being Agile - shuffling their task cards