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I have a vivid memory of my most interesting Christmas gift ever .  Not because it was surprising.  Rather, the opposite. 

I had a great aunt and uncle who were mostly hermits.   I saw them at Christmas, Easter and the occasional service at the tiny little church at which my grandmother was custodian.  They were, as my spouse would put it, “ahem strange ahem.”

At Easter they would give my siblings and I the cheapest, most out of date, chocolate you could imagine.  At Christmas, they would give us, aged 8-12 for example, antique lace doilies.  They weren’t particularly short of money and they weren’t exactly rich.  The presents they gave provided plenty of evidence of forethought so we were amused by the audacity, innovation and lameness of the presents we received.  The presents were usually lame, but very worthwhile for their entertainment and practical qualities.

It became an exciting game trying to predict the kind of present we would get each Chrstmas.  Painted pegs?  A ball of old string?  A budgerigar cosey?

One Christmas my brother and sister had predicted we would receive something like sardine can art.  Aunt and uncle presented us with our most memorable present ever.  We each received one hundred one cent coins in a reused coronary medication container. 

Demonstrating the relative value of relatives, our parents were given one hundred two cent coins.

Fafnir nails the war on Christmas:

[...]
“There was never a convincing link between Hannukah and the Grinch, Giblets,” says me.

“Well Giblets can’t let them win now!” says Giblets. “Not after what they did to Frosty!”

“Giblets, you can’t keep blamin yourself for Frosty,” says me. “There were menorahs fallin everywhere. You hadda save yourself.”

“Giblets should have gone back for him!” says Giblets. “And by the time we did all that was left was an old top hat and a button nose!”

“Giblets, you gotta let Frosty go,” says me.

“Tell that to the eyes of coal that haunt Giblets every night!” says Giblets. It’s quiet in the trenches tonight. We can hear Suzy Snowflake playin a harmonica down along the wire.

“Some day this war’s gonna end,” says Giblets.

“Maybe on Boxing Day,” says me.

I have so much love for Fafblog.

Via Infectious Greed, Performancing looks to be a very nice offline editor that pops right up in Firefox 1.5. 

Setup was trivially easy (once I remembered I had changed my password to something unable to be remembered - thanks Password Safe) and then I used it to post this, after saving it using its internal drafting system of “notes”.  It looks very sweet so far.

(oops, remember to revise with the “publish as edit” button, and not the “publish to:” one) 

World of Warcraft has hit 5,000,000 subscribers. The press release even has an almost precise definition of what a subscriber is.

World of Warcraft customers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the installation box bundled with one free month access. Internet Game Room players that have accessed the game over the last seven days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees’ territories are defined along the same rules.

Let’s see, US$14/month times 5,000,000 is US$840 million/year. Adding box revenue of about US$30/subscriber is another US$150 million. Give or take a few months, that’s nearly a billion dollars in a year from a single game title.

I demand pictures of Blizzard developers driving gold-plated Bentleys and wearing “Sony Online Entertainment will stomp you like a bug!” T-shirts.

I commissioned Peter Roebuck to write a homage to my coder of the year, Cody Coder:

Cody Coder has emerged from years of honest toil in domestic projects to take his place among the company’s elite. After a decade spent playing his trade in local negotiations played in front of meagre audiences, he has produced the sort of code needed to confirm that he belongs in the highest company.

By scoring under 1 defect per KSLOC against untiring but unchanging customer requirements, the newcomer denied doubt its best lines. It was a marvellous project and a towering achievement. It was also an affirmation.
Clearly Coder’s years spent in repertory were not wasted. Far from fretting about his prospects, he concentrated upon mastering his craft. He did not panic. No darkness entered his soul as he studied his lines in the wings. Frustration did not turn his head. He coded and coded and eventually opportunity came knocking on his door. When the chance finally came he embraced it as a man does a long-awaited friend.

Not that the wait was ever likely to bring him down. Coder seems to be the most unflustered of characters. Timelessness counts among his strongest features. As much could be told from his work at the IDE. He has an understated style, gives little hint of the 21st century. No streaks can be detected in his hair or flashes in his technique. He goes about the business of coding without strain or emotion. He is an unhurried developer in a hurrying age.

Coder’s code was not so much an explosion of exceptional talent as a carefully constructed building. It gives hopes to every hopeful treading the backboards. Considerable satisfaction could be taken from the way his code was put together. After a slow start he gathered momentum in the manner of a driver going through the gears. He wore down the problem space before taking it to pieces. Towards the end he cut loose with disciplined brilliance, smacking a respected problem around the field without ever lifting, let alone losing, his head.

With apologies to the SMH, Brad Hodge, and Peter Roebuck

If you give a Barbie this Christmas, make sure you’re not conspiring to perform an extraordinary rendition:

“The girls we spoke to see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity, and see the torture as a ‘cool’ activity.” The academic then explicated in gruesome detail that “The types of mutilation are varied and creative, and range from removing the hair to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving.”

Don’t worry Barbie, it’s not about you, it’s about us.

[...]While boys often expressed nostalgia and affection toward Action Man - the British equivalent of GI Joe - renouncing Barbie appeared to be a rite of passage for many girls, Nairn said.

“The most readily expressed reason for rejecting Barbie was that she was babyish, and girls saw her as representing their younger childhood out of which they felt they had now grown,” she said.

Nairn said many girls saw Barbie as an inanimate object rather than a treasured toy.

“Whilst for an adult the delight the child felt in breaking, mutilating and torturing their dolls is deeply disturbing, from the child’s point of view they were simply being imaginative in disposing of an excessive commodity in the same way as one might crush cans for recycling,” she said.

I’m considering sending Dick Cheney a Barbie for Christmas. He seems to have missed out on his catharthic rite of passage.

Alan points to an excellent piece of software for people like me who complain about PowerPoint, but never do anything about it. Piro Sakura has produced a “Takahashi-Method-based Presentation Tool in XUL/Returns” which allows you to edit and present

A friend attended a talk by Lawrence Lessig on his recent visit to Australia. She claims that what he said was interesting, but not life altering. However, how he presented it had changed her life.

“Mesmerising.” she said “A number would fade onto the screen as he was talking and he would pause and then measure out only enough words to tell you why that number was important. Then an image would appear, then another word. It was all perfectly synchronised with his speaking.” My friend said next time he visits she would pay money from her own pocket to attend his talks even if the subject matter wasn’t interesting to her.

Steve Jobs presents similarly and his style helps with generating his reality distortion field. Perhaps this has something to do with his association with another presenter with a legendary style, Guy Kawasaki.

“Lessig Style” has been compared with “Takahashi Method” and “Kawasaki Method” in a post at Presentation Zen.

It’s not the size of your deck that counts
I guarantee you there is no presentation book on the market that would recommend you use a few hundred slides, some visible for 1-2 seconds, for a 15-minute presentation. That’s crazy talk, right? Yet, it works in this particular case for this particular audience and for the particular allotted time, a short 15-minutes. This is why I never recommend a specific number of slides, or even that a presenter must use slideware at all. It depends.

As we like to say in Japan, it all depends on TPO (Time, Place, Occasion). Who’s to say what an appropriate number of slides should be? [...]

There are some good examples of different presentation styles available for comparison.

I think I will attempt a presentation based on “Lessig Style” soon, I must see for myself:

1. Whether I can talk in a straight enough line to use this technique, and
2. if an audience responds to the content better when more attention is paid to choreography.

Robert Cialdini’s Inside Influence web site recently ran an article about a social psychological “chameleon effect.” This effect is demonstrated in a study that compares waiters’ tips when they repeat their customers’ order back to them with tips for waiters who simply say something positive after taking an order. In a Dutch study reported by Nature, waiters doubled their average tip by echoing customer orders.

I thought about how this applies to systems engineering. How do stakeholders feel about having their words translated into forms such as use cases, and requirements documents which are intended to be close to, but not quite, stakeholder language. Should stakeholders only be communicated with in their own language? Can they be?

In software and systems engineering much is made of using formal and unambiguous representations like UML with formal structures like use cases. Use cases, user stories and flows are all methods of bridging technical requirements and user needs.

I think it’s well understood that using the language of your audience and targeting their needs as exactly as you can is a golden rule of communication. The golden rule assumes you have the luxury of having an audience uniform enough to address as a bloc is rare in many disciplines and systems engineering is no exception. In my career it has been unusual to find a stakeholder who feels comfortable reviewing use cases.

Taking stakeholder requirements, and communicating it back to them in their own language and without translation sounds like an excellent method of clearing up requirements misunderstandings. It helps in scope and feature negotiations if your customer is predisposed to like you. However, clearing up stakeholder needs is only one step in developing a product.

Stakeholders ultimately need to trust or verify that the product meets their specifications. To do this, they need to be able to relate the acceptance criteria to their original needs or specifications.

Is mimicry useful to help the stakeholder trust that an implementation is a correctly functioning expression of their needs? This is where an ability to read, understand and verify use cases, blank verse requirements and test cases, is a valuable, and rare, skill for stakeholders.

In general, I have found that stakeholders without these skills or the energy to acquire them will either rely on the currency of trust developed in the communication of needs, or they become unsatisfied and frustrated with the developed product.

Does the rest of the Nature article have any other hints for keeping stakeholders happy?

But this is just one of a battery of ploys that waiting staff can use to increase customers’ generosity. Other studies have shown that smiling, greeting and touching the customer, and crouching down beside them while taking orders also lead to bigger tips.

So if I’m working on your project, you’ll find me repeating things you say. I’ll smile at you. I’ll impersonate, greet, crouch beside, and touch you, but I might never show you my use cases.

A long time ago in a company far away I attended a training course on workplace discrimination. I don’t remember much about the course, except that the instructor began the course with an unusually inspirational educational film from the 1960s.

The film was Blue Eyed, a documentary about a white teacher, Jane Elliott, in a predominantly white town in Iowa who decided to perform a fairly radical experiment on her 3rd grade class to help them understand racial discrimination.

The day before the documentary begins, Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis. Prompted by this, Jane Elliott desperately wanted to teach what discrimination was on a more than academic level. She divided her class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed children and treated each group differently. The effects were devastating and profound.

Blue Eyed does not appear to be available on-line in its original form, but it has been shown on SBS in the past. PBS’ Frontline has a site with excerpts from a documentary surrounding the circumstances of the film’s creation and what happened to the children involved during and after the experiment - A Class Divided. The streaming video is available here.

HOW TO - Bake and decorate a cake

Short on cake decorating talent? Buy a packet mud cake mix from the supermarket, a packet of Smarties and some Freckles. Lay out your pixel art Smarties on a piece of paper before applying them to the iced cake. Remember to anti-alias! Adventurous Bake:ers can try Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, or Starry Night.

With apologies to the excellent Make Magazine.

Some headlines that turn up in Google Desktop Search’s sidebar just beg to be clicked on. Sure, there isn’t a lot of space for writing clearly in a headline, but they could have at least changed it to “Turner’s bird, buttocks beaten by shed”

I think my all-time favourite headlines are:

Car sucked off by aliens

When the turbulence from a flying UFO was reported to have knocked a car from a road.

Queen injured in dog attack

When the Queen of England was nipped by a corgi.

Like OddThinking, I’ve decided to turn off MarkDown here at Brainsnorkel.

My reason for abandoning it is that I found that I spend more time working around MarkDown than using it. I blame my lack of commitment, and that I can more accurately predict the outcome of my (admittedly unsophisticated) use of HTML. After fighting with Asterisk pages for a while, I’ve issued my final surrender to HTML.

I still need to work through my posts to convert MarkDown to wholesome, freedom-loving HTML.

…and fix up my style sheets.