mlsamuelson.com

The conversation went like this:

"E, would you like lasagna for dinner?"

"No! I want macaroni and cheese!"

"Have you ever had lasagna?"

"I want macaroni and cheese! Macaroni and cheese!"

Five minutes later...

"So, E, we're out of macaroni noodles. What if we made it with spiral noodles?"

"Yeah! Spiral noodles!"

"Or, hey, we could make macaroni and cheese with long flat noodles. Does that sound good?"

"Yeah! Macaroni and cheese! Noodles!"

"What if we mixed some tomatoes in?"

"Yay!"

"And maybe some hamburger?"

When there are no rules, the second law of thermodynamics will come into play and the entropy of the system will increase. One way in which entropy increases is that, without any restrictions on communications among subsystems, communication will occur in an unrestricted way...

from Code Complete, 2nd ed. by Steve McConnell

The above statement pertains, in context, to software development, yet "Twitter" is what popped into my mind when I read it.

I came into the office from a three-day weekend (I work a compressed four-day week) to find my phone blinking. In my job I consort with a lot with libraries and this message was from a librarian who called to ask if I had any recommendations on what to look for when interviewing an IT manager. The answer was, not really - I'm a web programmer, and haven't spent much time around IT managers - but I know some interviewing tricks.

I gave her three questions. The last was my favorite:

In prosperous times indie filmmaking is a tough field. And these aren't exactly prosperous times. It's difficult to land a distributor, but before that, hard to get into film festivals - even with good press in Variety.

The blogosphere has been alive today with serious discussion of the new iPod Nano's revolutionary design, featuring... wait for it ... curves!

I bought my son a DoodlePro a year ago to keep the boy occupied in church so he wouldn't crawl under the pews. Looking back, I'm amazed at the forward-thinking design, as the curvature of this product is not just a design decision - a sort of packaging meant to keep the innards from spilling out all over the place - but is also a feature. Amazing. I wonder if the iPod people were inspired by the DoodlePro.

My wife had a meeting tonight, so for dinner with the kids I threw together what turned out to be delicious calzones. Much to the surprise of all involved.

Here's a rundown of what I did and what I used:

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

16 oz. block of mozzarella
some Parmesan (to preference)
2 eggs

Grate the cheeses, mix in the eggs.

1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp thyme
1/4 cup green onions
2 cloves garlic

I'm a traditionalist. I'm no sucker for post modern flim-flam in my fiction or film - simply tell me a story - formal experimentation is fine - but there'd better be a human story at heart. I believe in decorum - that we can and should be decent and civil with one another. And I believe parents are to raise children, not cater to their entertainments.

Despite my healthy respect for the wisdom of ages contained in tradition, there are sometimes traditions that should die. These are often traditions only a handful of generations old - traditions like the use of the QWERTY keyboard.

I've joked before, not really thinking about myself, that Java developers are engineers, while PHP developers are indie rockers who had to get jobs.

In my case that's actually a somewhat apt characterization. All through high school I'd striven to organize a band, and had participated in various projects, some that even performed^*, but none that satisfied.

As we move from sequentially processing email queues to periodically bathing in the stream of messages coming at us and past us via Twitter, Facebook, and still email, successful and high performing workgroups are adjusting towards a more collectivist* sense of shared responsibility. No single team member is responsible for the project, nor are they responsible for every message sent on that project.

Finished watching the last episode of HBO's "The Wire" series earlier this week. The series was quality, start to finish. Smarter than any other television I've seen, and smarter than most films, art house or not. And besides that, dramatic and compelling - in the sort of way that you're rooting for everyone, despite them often times going against each other. That is to say, the characters are human, and continually remind you of that, and so they pull you into their lives, their worlds.