Mishkin Berteig - Just Some Random Geek.

20030731: Today I bought three new books: The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and Dave Thomas, Agile Software Development with Scrum by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle, and The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann. I'll probably read them over the next few weeks and provide reviews as I go. From what I have heard about these books, I will probably be adding them to my software resources page.

20030730: We found the worst Dim Sum place in Markham. It is a Vietnamese restaurant just South of highway 7 on Kennedy that advertizes dim sum. We only ordered three items (thank goodness!!!) and all of them were terrible: the ha-gow (steamed shrimp dumplings) had not been de-veined and the glutenous wrap was thick and weak, the wu-gok (deep fried taro puffs) was not puffy and in fact was extremely over-cooked so that it was actually hard, and the sticky rice in lotus leaf was almost wet rather than sticky. Not only that, the water cups tasted like they hadn't been properly rinsed in a long time. Melanie and I both had upset stomachs after that.

I've updated my page of recommended movies, books and other stuff.

Wow! That was an exhausting couple of days! Right after the marriage seminar (which went very well), we rushed me off to the airport. I brought along with me a new series of novels (starting with "The Reality Dysfunction - Part I Emergence") I am reading by Peter F. Hamilton. I'm not sure yet if I recommend them so I'm not putting a link on here yet. One problem is that they are extremely sexual and they are quite graphic about some really evil things. Thus they are often more disturbing than anything else. So far the story has been good enough that I have continued into the second book. I actually stayed up quite late last night reading it. Anyway, lots of time spent on the plane and in airports (Toronto, Las Vegas, San Francisco) allowed me to read a lot. I even spent time reading about SCRUM and the Crystal family of software development methodologies.

On Monday, we (Asim, Valerie and I) did last minute preparation for the presentation to Mr. CIO. I had to make some fixes to our power point deck. Asim took me out to eat at the Cosmopolitan which is on of my favorite restaurants. Strangely I didn't really enjoy it that much. I had their Fulton Valley salad which normally I find to be quite amazing. I think my lack of enthusiasm had a lot to do with my lack of sleep. Fortunately, I reserve coffee for emergencies only. I don't ever just drink coffee or tea anymore. Now, I use caffeine like it should be used: as a drug to give me a boost on rare occaisons. I have discovered, that even with only one cup of coffee, the next day or two I suffer a terrible withdrawal headache. Anyway, at one o'clock Pacific time, we gave our presentation. We used up the full hour and Mr. CIO asked for a second meeting to continue discussing the contents of our presentation which had to do with agile methodologies. In our de-briefing, we discussed strategy for the next meeting as well as looking at what sorts of things needed fixing up in the deck. Asim and I have agreed to write some papers based on the things we have evolved in the deck.

My trip back was uneventful so I read a whole bunch more, and I even slept on the leg from Las Vegas to Toronto. I was very lucky to find an empty row to lie down in. Then, yesterday was very much a recovery day. I slept for a few hours when I got home, and then slept for a few hours in the afternoon.

So my week is almost half done, and I have not yet written up this iteration's list of To-Do items... :-(

Justice and I built a very nice Saturn-V style rocket out of Lego yesterday. It is about 1m tall. It doesn't have a lot of interesting detail, mostly because I don't have the right parts. But Justice loves it even so.

My avocado plant that I sprouted while I was in Jersey City is doing very well. It has three large leaves and is growing several more from a shoot.

I don't know if anyone is interested, but I've been working on my weight for about a year. Last summer when Melanie and I went to Sudbury, we went to he beach. I noticed a young guy: thin and with a real well-defined set of pectorals and abdominals. I asked Melanie if she would like it if I looked like that... and of course she would :-) So, after a year I have managed to go from about 208 lbs, down to my current fairly stable 193 lbs. I'm hoping to eventually get down to 180 lbs. I'm 5' 11.5" so that should be a good healthy weight for me. My diet is simple: I will eat anything I like, just not very much. While I was on the road, I ate quite a bit more than normal so yesterday I basically didn't eat anything.

20030725: I've put some more photos of my Lego work online - this time it's a tilting helicopter rotor. I readily admit that it is not that sophisticated a model, but hey, maybe someone will get some ideas from it. I'm going to start developing a Lego page with links to my projects and other sites. It's pretty bare right now. Incidentally, I got Lego model 8455 Technic Back-hoe Loader a week ago. It's an amazing model. I've been trying to do stuff like it for a long time! Here's Amazon's picture of the box:

This is one fabulous set. It's 703 pieces, it took me about 5 hours to construct, and it works fabulously. It has 10 large pneumatic actuators, some large wheels, and lots of cool parts including three I hadn't seen before. If you are into Lego, I highly recommend this one!

In other news, my presentation is coming along nicely. I will be doing it with my boss and his friend. We don't agree on all the points, but because of that, I think we have both learned a lot about agile software philosophy and methods. He (Asim Qadir) suggested that we write a paper based on this presentation which I think is a very exciting idea. I might try to convince him to publish it on some online community site.

Melanie has been doing tonnes of gardening over the last two days. Our yard is quickly being transformed. One neet thing is that she has had to dig up some grass, and she has used that to patch dead areas on our lawn - it looks a lot nicer now! She bought an apple tree that has three different types of apples grafted to it (I forget what kinds). I think we will end up staying in this house (I need a better picture of it!). Melanie is trying to make a very low maintenance garden.

Melanie and I have also started making some decisions about our financial plans in the short term. FWIW, I calculated that if I invested $25,000.00 now at 8% it would become one million in only 48 years :-) Well, once I have a spare 25 thousand, I know what to do with it!!! Anyone know any good solid 8%, 50yr investments?

20030724: Today was a very busy day. I am preparing a presentation for the CIO of a major financial corporation on agile software development. The presentation is scheduled for Monday - three days to go! It's going to be a great presentation and discussion.

Back almost a week and a half ago, I realized something really neet. Melanie has always been bugging me to create a prioritized to-do list. She is continually frustrated by my level of disorganization. Well, finally, after at least a few years of this, something clicked in my poor slow little brain: I can live my life like an agile software project. So Melanie, being so incredibly patient, has agreed with me that we will work in one-week iterations. Each week on Saturday night or Sunday morning we consult together to create our personal to-do list for the upcoming week. We always review how we did the week just past. We don't have this yet, but we will create a master to-do list that will include long term goals with sub goals etc. from which we will select the highest priority items that we think we can accomplish over the next week. Here is a small sampling of my goals for this week (only three days left):

Spiritual Goals: recite3 Fire Tablets

Intellectual Goals: finish lesson 1 in the Rosetta Stone Arabic software

Physical/Health Goals: reach 50 situps and pushups

Relationship Goals: take a walk through the neighborhood

Financial Goals: create our personal income (cashflow) statement

Work Goals: prepare for presentation to ---- (CIO)

Other Goals: create master to-do list

Each category actually has a few goals in it. The master to-do list will include the financial goals that I wrote about last month. What is interesting about this is that by making sure there is at least one goal in each category each week, one maintains a balanced and interesting life. As well, by always focussing on the highest priority goals, one gets the best value for time (just like in agile software development)! This is only our second iteration, but it is going well. We both over-committed for our first iteration, and it looks like I might have done that for this one too, but we will get better at it as time goes on, and we will have a nice record of our progress to look back upon. I've heard that this system is similar to the system described in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (CA$). If anyone could confirm this, they should let me know over on my kuro5hin journal entry about this journal entry :-/

20030723: I was just browsing through Agile Software Development again. This book is extremely good. It's not just good, or even great, it is absolutely fabulously amazing!!! If you have anything to do with software development, go buy it and read it cover to cover. For what it is worth, here is the table of contents:

Introduction: Unknowable and Incommunicable
Chapter 1: A Cooperative Game of Invention and Communication
Chapter 2: Individuals
Chapter 3: Communicating, Cooperating Teams
Chapter 4: Methodologies (This is one of the best chapters in a software book I have ever read!)
Chapter 5: Agile and Self-Adapting
Chapter 6: The Crystal Methodologies
Appendix A: The Agile Software Development Manifesto
Appendix B: Naur, Ehn, Musashi
Appendix C: Books and References

Here's a great short selection from the book:

Consequence 3. Teams should be improved, not enlarged. Here is a common problem: A manager has a 10-person team that sits close together and achieves high communication rates with little energy.
     The manager needs to increase the team's output. He has two choices: add people or keep the team the same size and do something different within the team.
     If he increases the team size from 10 to 15, the communications load, communication distances, training, meeting, and documentation needs go up. Most of the money spent on this new group will get spent on communications overhead, without producing more output.
     This group is likely to grow again, to 20 people (which will add a heavier communications burden but will at least show improvement in output).
     The second strategy, which seems less obvious, is to lock the team size at 10 people (the maximum that can be coordinated through casual coordination) and improve the people on the team.
     To improve the individuals on the team, the manager can do any or all of the following:

• Send them to courses to improve their skills.
• Seat them closer together to reduce communications cost.
• Improve their amicability and teamwork.
• Replace some of the people on the team with more talented (and more highly paid) people.

Repeating the strategy over time, the manager will keep finding better and better people who work better and better together.
     Notice that in the second scenario, the communications load stays the same, while the team becomes more productive. The organization can affort to pay the people more for their increased contribution. It can, in fact, affort to double their salaries, considering that these 10 are replacing 20! This makes sense. If the pay is good, bureaucratic burden is low, and team members are proud of their output, they will enjoy the place and stay, which is exactly what the organization wants them to do.

(Page 161)

I have a big list of other recommended software development resources here.

20030722: Took even longer than I thought to get back to this... I've done a huge amount of driving in the last week. Up to Sudbury, down to Jersey City, back to Sudbury and back home. Today, we are going up to Elmvale for a birthday party for one of Justice's friends.

20030716: Ug! Long time no write! I've been on the road to Sudbury to visit my mom and family. I'm back home now, but only for another hour or so... then I'm off to Jersey City to get the rest of my stuff and wrap up at the office there. Both Alexei and Callam are going to be on the road with me. Melanie is staying home, and the kids are still visiting the grandparents. I probably won't get a chance to update this again until the 19th or 20th.

Two days ago Melanie and I had a huge discussion about personal finances. I realized a couple of things about myself. 1. I don't believe in security - there is no such thing that I have any control over. 2. Going bankrupt or even becoming completely impovershed is not very scary to me compared to some of the things that I have already lived through.

20030710: Today Alexei put his comic "Average Man, Poor Man" up on the web. He's got a donate button at the bottom of the page, so if you feel so inspired, please do donate... It's nice to see that quite a few people have looked at it. There is a bit of discussion over at kuro5hin. If he gets some donations, he'll definitely put up some more work.

Tomorrow Melanie and the kids and I are going to go to Sudbury to visit my Mom and her family. Along the way, we are planning to stop by and look at two properties in Tiny Township that we may be able to get a good deal on... good enough that we might buy them even though we would not move up there in the foreseeable future. Maybe we could advertize them to some Baha'is and get them to move up there...

I've installed RH8 on a refurbished machine. It's a PIII 866 with 256MB RAM and an 8GB HD. I'm going to make it into my first complete windows replacement workstation. As a follow up to some questions I posed on slashdot, I'll be installing WINE, and then attempting to install Dreamweaver.

Today one of my good buddies lost his job. I can't say more right now, but in case you're reading this, my prayers are with you.

20030709: Melanie and I are going to be doing a marriage seminar in a couple weeks for the Markham Baha'i community. The topic is "preserving marriage". It is going to be very interesting. We have some seminar materials including quotations from the Baha'i writings, questions to discuss, as well as suggested activities. The materials were prepared by the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha'is of Canada. I've read them over and they seem quite good. I have an interesting question to add to the seminar: is the love between husband and wife any different than the love we should feel for any other human being? Why? Support your answer with a quotation from the Baha'i writings.... Personally, I think that most people, at least in the West, just assume that the love is different. But personally, I think that is incorrect. It is true that there is a romantic feeling, a sexual feeling, a feeling of adventure, and many other feelings that are involved in meeting someone, courtship, getting married, and being married. However, the one form of love that must remain constant the whole time is the love of one's spouse as a creation of God, reflecting the attributes of God. If this love is missing, the relationship is on very shaky ground. Interestingly, this love is the responsibility, completely and wholely, of each individual in the marriage and its lack cannot be blamed on the other person. If you do not manifest this love for your spouse, it is your problem, not your spouse's.

Today was the commemoration of the martyrdom of the Bab and therefore a Holy Day. Christian came over for a little while. While driving him back home, we talked about money, work and what we can do together.

I found an old copy of Lotus Improv for Windows 2.0. I saw it on the shelf of my accountant. This is a unique and extremely powerful spreadsheet. Instead of the standard two dimensional arrangement that Excel and others force you into, Improv gives you the ability to work in multiple dimensions with named cells. Formulas exist outside of the sheet and work with names rather than coordinates. This allows you to have one formula which generates values for many cells that all have the same relationship to other cells involved in the formula. Christian and I are working (very slowly) on an open-source version. Improv was dropped by Lotus and eventually Lighthouse Design built a version for the NeXT called Quantrix. I actually helped work on the second release of Quantrix as technical lead for the UI team.

20030708: Melanie found an amazing web site that reviews many real estate/personal finance gurus. The only problem is that there is a substantial amount of personal attacking going on that is unrelated to the actual content of the messages of the various gurus. The evaluation of the authors of both The One Minute Millionaire and Rich Dad's Guide to Investing is very negative. This is a bit challenging for Melanie and I. We really like both the books. So basically what it comes down to is trying to logically evaluate the content and verify it's usefulness. Here are some things which at a high level seem "good":

1. Challenge yourself by trying to figure out (legal/ethical) ways of creating assets that produce net income without using any money.
2. Learn as much as possible about personal and business finances including accounting, investment strategies and techniques, the law, real estate, etc.
3. Establish clear financial goals and plans to reach them. Adjust your plans as you learn. Stick to your current plan.
4. Becoming completely aware of your current financial status including using balance sheets and
5. Give away money while you are earning it, not after you have reached some theoretical goal.
6. Spend less than you earn :-)
7. Getting rid of consumer debt is priority #1.

Melanie and I will keep reading, learning and taking our baby steps.

Oh. And the google adwords experiment was a failure... at least in its current form.

20030706: Today wasn't much of anything... I did some cleaning to prepare for Justice's birthday party tomorrow (actually today, but I'm still living the 5th :-). In the morning, we went to look at a piece of land with a house. Twenty-two acres, and very beautiful, but the house was old and very moldy. Melanie spent the afternoon at a Baha'i meeting which she enjoyed very much. I spent the afternoon with the kids. Mostly they watched Dinotopia (CA$) which is their current favorite movie. It's a DVD we bought because we rented it once and Melanie really liked it. The acting and writing are kinda cheesy sometimes, but the story is nice overall. Aparently it was a TV show, but we had never heard of it. The basic premise is that two teenage boys find themselves on an Atlantis-like island where dinosaurs and humans live harmoniously (mostly). The boys are cut off from modern civilization and have to adjust to the different culture, all the while trying to return home and becoming entangled in the dinotopian society.

I also spent a lot of time today playing Civilization III. Justice likes watching me play it.

Alexei is returning on Monday from tree planting. I'm looking forward to seeing him again. Maybe we will be able to go to Jersey City together.

One really neet thing happened this evening. Our house is in a new development so the back yards do not have fences yet. The neighbors behind us had a party - seemed to be twenty-somethings. Justice was playing outside with the water hose and eventually got to be friends with the people at the party. Melanie and I were indoors. At one point I looked out and Justice was sitting that the neighbors picnic table chatting away! He stayed over there for about an hour. He had a hot dog. We got a little video footage. It is quite amazing that a boy just turned five years old would feel comfortable hanging out with a bunch of adult strangers. Melanie and I were very impressed. Justice was ecstatic: he made many new friends. It is quite an interesting contrast to the experience he had in Jersey City at the nearby playground. There, the other kids wouldn't give him the time of day. Melanie said they were very rude. Go figure!

I've added a list of top software development books to my right hand column. Check them out - every single one is extremely insightful and worth every penny to buy them and put them in your personal library (if you are involved in any way in software development).

20030705: Well, I haven't been to bed yet so to me it is really still the 4th. Here in Canada we don't think about that day too much. But for you Americans, Happy Fourth of July!

I'm going to make this quick: yesterday I read the story part of The One Minute Millionaire (CA$). I got a lump in my throat at the end (and it wan't cancer :-) - and I learned a huge amount about building wealth quickly and ethically. Once I have read the other part of the book (the detailed instructions), I'll provide a review here. I've got a few more books to read but I'm getting real close to the point where I start trying some of these things out in a big way. And that will be the real test of both the books and myself!

As part of my personal improvement regimen, I've decided that I need more self-control. I am going to lose weight. As of this morning (I always weigh myself first thing), I am 194lbs. This is actually more than ten pounds less than I was last year in California, and four pound less than I have been for the last three months. I started working on this about a week ago. My next goal is small: get to 192lbs. Hopefully in three or four days I will get there. I am specifically trying to lose weight by reducing my intake of calories. However, I am also allowing myself to eat junk as a sort of consession. I don't think I can eat healthy foods and small amounts at the same time.

This evening as I was putting Justice to bed, I told him about how God holds the universe together with love. I showed him how when you cup your hands under a water spout, the water takes shape and you hold it together. I told him that God holds us all together. He actually found it kind of funny and didn't really believe it at first when he was thinking of it as millions of hands holding everything together. But then I told him that you see God with your heart, and he got a big smile and went to bed... On a very serious note, I wonder how much destruction we cause mearly by lack of love. Does lack of love actually cause things to degenerate? Anecdotally I can give some examples: a person dying shortly after their spouse (the person no longer loves life), war.

20030703: Melanie and I decided to try an experiment. We have purchased a google adwords add to link to my software development resources page. That page has many links to books on amazon. In the history of that page, Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture has been by far the most popular book. Now we will pay google US$30 for a month of adds to see if anyone clicks through and buys books from that page. If we make more than US$30.00 off of it, it will be a success. We have also decided to set some ambitious goals for our financial development. I'll post them as soon as we have decided on them. Last night we created a balance sheet for our personal finances. It wasn't as bad as we expected. In fact, it made us both feel quite good about our prospects. It contained much more detail than the sample one I showed last month.

I've added a new feature to this page that you can see on the right. It is a list of recommended books. I'm a big reader of sci-fi and fantasy novels and I have a very particular set of standards. I don't like the typical quest format of many in these genres. I don't like novels about priviledged people becoming more priviledge (with very rare exceptions). I do like novels with moral or ethical investigation, I do like novels with aspects of enormous adversity and tragedy, and I do like novels with complex story lines. So those are the standards. I will try to keep the list small - just three books for now.

20030701: I finally got around to taking some photos of one of my Lego creations. It is a pneumatic scooper arm. I've been playing with Lego since I was a wee kid. Some of my first memories are of Lego. For example, my dad and I playing with some of the original technic lego that had red blue and yellow gears with large teeth. Anyway, over the next while, I hope to put some more pics up. (And in the wonderful world of self-referentiallism that is the web, may I present to you my kuro5hin diary entry on this topic.)

Today Justice had a pre-birthday party with some of Melanie's relatives who will not make it to his real party on Sunday. Kristine, Celine, Fanny, Benny and Linda came over. They got Justice a Lego IR RC car. He really loved it, but interestingly he had much more fun with a small paper wind-up butterfly that they put in one of his cards. It is powered by an elastic.

Over the last few days I've been reorganizing my office. Melanie and I went to Ikea a few days ago and bought six cheap bookshelves. We built them (power tools are great!) in the basement and we have been putting lots of books down there. These are the books that we don't expect to get to (or get back to) for some time. Maybe some of them will eventually be disposed of.

Older entries: October 2002, November 2002, December 2002, January 2003, February 2003, March 2003, April 2003, May 2003, June 2003 or home.

Top Sci-fi and Fantasy:

1. Ship of Magic (Robin Hobb)

2. Songmaster (Orson Scott Card)

3. The Real Story (Stephen R. Donaldson)

Top Software Development Books:

1. Agile Software Development (Alistair Cockburn)

2. Software Craftsmanship (Pete McBreen)

3. The Inmates are Running the Asylum (Alan Cooper)