Mirroring Miranda

My little brother got hitched this past weekend. It was a very beautiful wedding, held at St. Pius in Redwood City, followed by a reception at Mountain Terrace in Woodside.

I’m exhausted. Leading up to the wedding day, I was busy editing a little video surprise for him and his wife - a bevy of well-wishers from around the world - family and friends - who couldn’t be at the ceremony and festivities. And the day after, my home was host to the after-the-wedding BBQ/pool party at my place.

Exhausted - but extremely happy for my brother. He and his wife, Lisa, make a very cute couple. They’re all smiles - even the way they smile and expressions are the same. I’m happy for him that he found someone to share life with.

I can’t wait for the nephews and neices - I’m going to spoil ‘em rotten - just like any other uncle would!

Family4th028

Originally uploaded by Rice Bear

It’s the 4th of July weekend. Happy 4th to everyone.

Normally, I’d be enjoying this 3-day weekend. But for some reason, I’m feeling stressed. For one, there’s all this wedding stuff I have to do. My brother is getting married next week, and I still have to finish a few surprise things for him. Plus, I have to get my home ready - there’s going to be a day-after-the-wedding barbecue at my place (since it has a pool). Needless to say, I have to tidy up a bit. Nothing major, mind you, but I still have to do it, and it still takes time.

On top of that, I have to finalize the presentations for the Agile 2008 conference. I’m co-presenting two experience reports, and I volunteered to work on the PowerPoint presentations.

And then there’s work - I have to prep for the release planning and sprint planning coming up next week.

Ugh - I’m feeling overwhelmed - I need a vacation…and soon!

One bright thing about all of these - I finally got my ol’ D80 back from a friend who borrowed it, and I was able to experiment again with night shots - especially of fireworks this 4th of July. I took a lot of photos, and have a few gems that came out. I’m really enjoying all this photo experimentation again!

OMG! What a nice surprise to come home to…the Atlantis DVD of the Rio cruise came in the mail yesterday. I can’t wait to watch it in its entirety over the weekend and remember all the good times from that vacation!

It’s Pride weekend in SF this weekend. However, I opted to stay at home…well, except for Friday, when I hung out w/ the gang for Happy Hour and dinner. That was the extent of my social activities for this year’s pride.

I guess you could say I was feeling a little bit anti-crowd (as opposed to anti-social). During my trip to L.A. to visit Pipo for his birthday, I managed to squeeze in L.A. Pride. And now, I guess I’m just all Pride (fried) out. Part of me just doesn’t want to deal w/ the hordes of people on the street and on public transit, much less the horrid parking situation.

There was a little voice in me that sort of nag me to go - to put myself out there to meet people. But honestly - I’ve been feeling burned out from all the meet and date scene in the past year. There’s a ton of stuff that I want to do - and meeting and dating isn’t on that list…for a while, at least (and a long while, if my inner voice gets it’s way).

And what did I do w/ my weekend? Well - I was very productive - I got to do a lot of stuff that I’ve been meaning to catch up on…spring clean the downstairs rooms and stairwell, organize my music library, catch up on The Tudors, look into various travel options (yes, the travel bug is still w/ me) for the coming months, catch up on my magazines, work on my conference presentation and cook at home (for a change - I’ve been eating out a lot). So there - it’s not like I was sitting at home doing nothing all weekend long!

I decided to squeeze in some cooking time today. I currently have this goal of trying to get more veggies into my diet, and when I went out to the farmer’s market this morning, I came across a very nice surprise - one that I have been searching for a while. I came across fresh zucchini flowers.

Well, they weren’t exactly the freshest - I asked when they were picked - and the seller said Friday. I was hesitant at first to get it, since it’s already more than a day old (they’re very delicate - you need to cook them immediately after you’ve picked them). But the $1 a bag price was tempting. I decided to buy it, since I always wanted to try out making a dish that I first encountered in Vancouver - tempura-fried zucchini flower.

So for dinner, I made up some tempura batter and fried the entire bag (well, they won’t last another day). And they turned out really well! The flower was still sweet (though not as sweet if it had been less than a day old). It went well w/ the steak that I had grilled.

The dinner would have been perfect if I had a nice white to pair the meal with. Unfortunately, I didn’t plan ahead and had no wine chilling in the fridge. Maybe next time.

Consider the following scenario…

You are a test train engineer who has been honored to test the first ever high-speed maglev (magnetic levitation) train that will connect San Francisco and Los Angeles. With this new train, the 6-hour car drive will now be reduced to 3 hours…or hopefully less. And with the great advances in technology this should be a very cheap alternative to air travel - which takes about four hours now if you factor in the security check-in process at the airport.

The track has been laid out but not completely finished. However, on it’s first maiden voyage, you will be driving the train for 300 miles (basically, the amount of track finished at the moment). You enter the engineer’s car, and find that everything is sleek and minimal - you have a comfy seat that adjusts to a recliner, and your controls are basically two buttons - a start button, and a stop button. Nothing else.

Apparently, the scientists just want you to drive the train for 300 miles, see how the ride is, and hope that you get to the destination in 3 hours (they’re assuming that the technology doesn’t blow you up ). They don’t want you fiddling around with other controls such as speed or power - which explains just having the start and stop buttons. They tell you that the train moves at a specific speed that cannot be changed for this test.

Before you go, they tell you that markers have been put every 100 miles. Since the assignment is very simple, you bid adieu to the scientists, and wait for them to disembark. Once everyone gives you the hand’s up signal, you hit the start button, and the train smoothly begins to glide and zooms off. You look at your watch - it’s 8:45 a.m. You think to yourself, “Ah, I should arrive just in time for lunch at the other end - around 11:45.”

To pass the time, you view the scenery passing by and take photos - they built the engineer’s cab w/ a 360-degree panorama bubble that lets you see everything around you. The views that whiz by are amazing and really hold your interest, and before you even realize it, you spy the first 100-mile marker coming up.

As you pass the marker, you check your watch. It says 10:10. Hmm, looks like the train is a bit slow. You were expecting to hit it around 9:45.

“25 minutes behind. Oh well, I guess I’ll have lunch 25 minutes later than expected as well…12:10 isn’t that late,” you say to yourself.

“NOW WAIT A DAMN MINUTE!” (Yes, I hear your protestations, dear reader.)

“I’m smarter than that - if I’m the test engineer, and I see after the first marker that I’m 25 minutes behind schedule, then I know I will be delayed more than 25 minutes.”

Yes, you are correct.

If the train is delayed for 25 minutes the first 100 miles, then for every 100 miles, it will be delayed by 25 minutes each. Thus, for 300 miles, it will be 3 x 25 minutes = 75 minutes. For the math geeks out there, this is the infamous algebra problem of distance = rate x time.

Yes - you won’t be having lunch at 12:10…you’ll more than likely be having lunch at 1:15 - 75 minutes later than the intended 11:45 if the train really was meant to get to its destination in 3 hours. This is way late for your stomach (or mine at least ).

Unfortunately - the above scenario happens a lot in business - it happens a lot in traditional project management. PMs have their Gant and MS Project charts telling them that a project is currently 6 days behind for this one component in the critical path. Therefore, the project manager adds 6 days to the end of the critical path, and gives a new release date 6 days later.

DEAD WRONG. 6 days is wrong - and more than likely the project will be weeks, if not months, behind schedule.

Traditional project management unfortunately doesn’t factor in the capacity of the rate of work that project teams can accomplish. Agile project management handles this through velocity measurements. Using known velocity measurements, and story point sizing of features, one can calculate the impact of a few days being late at a sprint, and how it fits into the overall project schedule. Mike Cohn covers this really well in his book, Agile Estimation and Planning.

This is great if you have velocity measurements. But what happens if you don’t have velocity measurements? What happens if the team is new to Agile and has no established velocity or much less, story point estimates for the features? What happens if you’re new to a project, and you’re expected to deliver something in 6 weeks, and all you have is the current sprint’s burn-down?

Well, this is what I faced exactly at my new job. And I had answers…

(To be continued….)

Since I started the new job last April 28, I probably have been healthy 100% for maybe two weeks at most. The rest of the time, I’ve been sick.

I’ve had asthma twice in the past 6 or so weeks. All as a result of catching the flu from someone else. The first one was sometime immediately after I had started…the cramped quarters of BART, especially during rush hour, is ripe for people to pass germs to one another. The first case I had was a mild one, and the asthma that followed it, was definitely a nuisance, but I was able to get along albeit with some limitation.

This 2nd one that I contracted, though, was a doozy. I was knocked down for at least two days, having to miss work. I most likely got it from a co-worker who had to work w/ me one day. We were seated next to each other trying to solve a problem, and all throughout you could hear the hacking cough. I was praying and hoping that I would not get anything, but alas, just after my trip to L.A. to visit Pipo, it hit me like a big dump truck.

I’m better now - but I’m still quite miserable because of my asthma. My lung capacity is still diminished because my airways are still inflamed and constricted. I have my inhalers, and they seem to help - albeit slowly.

I just hope and pray that this isn’t repeated again. I’ve had enough of being ill for a while. I still can’t believe that I’ve been hit back to back, with about a week of good health in between.

Talk about a string of bad luck - I wonder what my horoscope said about my health this past month….

Defying Gravity!

Originally uploaded by leonelescota

OMG - has it been a year already?

Well, it’s the one and only Pipo celebrating his birthday today. Best wishes to the boy who still is young…at heart. I’ll be heading down to L.A. this weekend to help him celebrate. It’s been a while since I was last down there…can’t wait.

OMG - I just realized that I’ve been working at my new job for a month already! That went by really fast. I’m already knee-deep in trying to get a project out the door by the end of June (fixed-date project). The release plan isn’t ideal, since it doesn’t leave us any room for error. But it’s what I have to work with…make that, what we have to work with. The team is giving it their best - working extended hours to meet an aggressive schedule. They all know that this is not the norm, that this is a special case for this release because of timing issues with the school registration and term (if we don’t release, we’d have to wait another quarter/term - ugh - that would be very disconcerting).

Even our CEO chimed in - meeting with the entire team, saying that he knows we’re under the gun, and that he appreciates us trying to do our best to get this out, and that he doesn’t want this to be the standard at this company. He wants us to have lives outside of work, but special circumstances for the moment require us to put in more than normal - until at least we get it out. And after this - we hopefully can do a retrospective and try and implement Agile ways of release planning that would mitigate these sort of scenarios.

I’m doing a host of stuff other than just plain program/project management. I’ve implemented bugzilla w/in the company, having to install and configure it on a windows system no less (company is a windows shop, unfortunately). I’m in the middle of trying to see if we can automate some smoke tests via Selenium and/or Fitnesse. That work is giving me a little bit of a problem, since our codebase is based on Cold Fusion - not many resources out there, unfortunately.

On the social front - there’s a lot of fun stuff happening here in the office. Lots of ping-pong addicts here - we had an impromptu doubles tournament last Friday, complete w/ brackets. The company also treated everyone out to the latest Indy flick. We had pizza and sangria before we headed out to the theaters last Friday night. And today - surprise - we had a very nice catered breakfast of made-to-order omelettes, waffles along w/ fresh juices, etc. There’s an Employee Entertainment Committee that figures out fun stuff for the entire company, and this was a surprise that no one was expecting (at least, today). (I so love working at start-ups for this reason! )

And yes - we do have a number of photographers here in the company. And - as always - I have to be the goofball that gives out all these…uhm, interesting poses and facial expressions!

A lot of my friends who have iPhones taunt it at me, showing the tricks you could do with it. I would really like to get an iPhone, but one thing stops me from doing so - I don’t want to give up my Verizon Wireless. I’ve been with Verizon since 2002 having moved from Sprint, and have not regretted it since. The service I get from their reps has been impeccable. Anytime I had hardware trouble with my Palm-based phones, they would replace it with no questions asked. And the amount of dropped calls - compared to my previous carrier - had decreased significantly.

As for AT&T - I’ve heard so many horror stories from people - both with and without iPhones. Nope, I’m not going to change just because I want an iPhone. And now, I’m vindicated for my decision to not just buy an iPhone and switch to AT&T.

Alas - my current Treo 650 is dying on me. I have to get it replaced, but I won’t switch to AT&T. I’ll have to see what smartphone I can get to tide me over till Verizon gets iPhones in their line-up.

OMG! This is sooo awesome! Equality at last (hopefully). There’s still the ballot initiative in November for a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, but I’m sending out good karma that it gets defeated.

(05-15) 12:38 PDT SAN FRANCISCO — Gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry in California, the state Supreme Court said today in a historic ruling that could be repudiated by the voters in November.

In a 4-3 decision, the justices said the state’s ban on same-sex marriage violates the “fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship.” The ruling is likely to flood county courthouses with applications from couples newly eligible to marry when the decision takes effect in 30 days.

“The California Constitution properly must be interpreted …(more)

Alas, for moi - it’s husband-hunting time!