I've been getting a (relatively) huge spike in hits to the Office Lexicon from google.co.uk searches for "office jargon." Can anybody explain this to me?
And as long as I'm talking about the Office Lexicon, I may as well add this entry I've recently heard:
Pull A Scotty - To tell your boss that a given (difficult) task will take X time, but you finish it in X/2 (or X/5, or even X/10) time. From Scotty on ST:tOS, who would tell Captain Kirk that (say) regonculating the warp core retroincavulators would take days, but would complete the task in hours because the survival of the ship depended on it. (Courtesy co-worker Tim O.)
Slacker Window - The gray area between screwing up an unpleasant assignment badly enough that you won't be given similar ones in the future and screwing it up badly enough that you get fired. A way to avoid Carter's Trap.
Just in time for the Three Rivers Open this weekend, I've finally put decent pictures on my Shoaff Park Disc Golf Course page.
Because I can't get enough abuse and keep volunteering for more, I am now experiencing the antonym of the Zero-Zero Split, the Hundred-Hundred Split:
When you split your time 50-50 between two bosses, and one of them thinks everything he wants you to do is more important than anything the other boss wants you to do, so he tasks you like you're working for him full time. Of course, the other boss thinks exactly the same way. Opposite of Zero-Zero Split.
Update: Upon further review, the above is pretty unfair to my day-to-day boss, who is a good guy and understands that I'm not really fully tasked in my regular job at the moment. However, my additional boss seems to think that 50% of my time is based on there being 168 hours in a week.
Today's new term for the Office Lexicon is 'Shotgun start':
Starting requirements analysis, system design, software development, and testing of a project all at the same time. (from golf - an event that starts with participants starting on different holes at the same time, with the start signalled by an official firing a shotgun)
A real time-saver if you have a well-understood task; a recipe for disaster in most other circumstances.
Today's new word for the Office Lexicon is heisenbug:
Heisenbug - a software bug you can't find using the debugger, because the debugger changes the timing of the program's execution enough to keep the bug from happening. (From the idea that the act of observing something changes it, which is part of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.)
Spotlight on the new entries on my blogroll:
And I still owe the other half of my Labor Day weekend story. And my other birthday party story. Sheesh.
New entry in the Office Lexicon:
Zero-Zero Split When you're supposed to be splitting your time 50-50 between two groups or projects, and you tell each boss that your other tasking is taking all your time. An effective way to goof off, as long as your bosses don't compare notes.
A couple of new entries in the Office Lexicon tonight: clearboard and Sharpening The Saw.
Is anybody else having problems with blogrolling.com? My blogroll isn't showing up anymore, and I didn't do anything to my template...
Update: The blogroll has returned.
I think I've found my dream job. Watching old sporting events and cracking on them, kind of like a "Mystery Science Stadium 3000" thing. Unfortunately, somebody is already doing it. On ESPN Classic's "Cheap Seats", comedians Randy and Jason Sklar make fun of old sports footage; for example, one of college football's all-time classic games, 1982 Cal-Stanford (Joe Starkey's call of The Play is one of the best of all time - right up there with Bob Ufer's 1979 U-M - Indiana call [short] [medium] [full 3:00 version (currently broken)]).
So I missed out on a cushy ESPN gig. That's OK - I'll just make my own (.mpg file, 3.6 MB).
I've finally brought my Michigan football page over from GeoCities. It still looks more or less like it did in 1997, but I'll be fixing that Real Soon Now.
Thanks to some new detailed commodities trading information (and actual details of the scene) I've recently received, I'll soon be updating the Trading Places piece. Executive summary: I got the process more or less correct but my numbers were off by several orders of magnitude (always a risk when working with brown numbers). There's also a bit of Hollywood License at work vis-a-vis trading circuit breakers (actually, the lack of them). Hat tip: Carl Speare.
'133t h4X0rz'One of the reasons my blogging dropped off (and when I say 'dropped off', I mean 'dropped to zero') a couple of months back is that I was too busy with class work (note that this is not to be confused with the blog gap last summer, which was due to my being in the Blogger Relocation Program). One of my assignments for that class was this:
You have just been hired as the head of a company's software development group. Your predecessor was fired because too many of the group's projects were behind schedule, over budget, or both. On your first day at this job, you realize that the group was not using any kind of formal development process. Write a 3-4 page paper comparing and contrasting these development methodologies: Synchronize and Stabilize, Extreme Programming, and the Rational Unified Process. Select the methodology that you would use, and explain your choice.
The monks over at Keepers of Lists have a lovely little site where you can vote on 'Top Ten'-style lists, add your own entries, and create your own lists. I contribute to it from time to time.
The blog will be here from now on, and I'll be migrating my other content here from Yahoo!GeoCities over the next several weeks. I'll try to get the most popular pages over here first, but who knows how long it'll take? Just bear that in mind if you click a link and end up nowhere, or back on my GeoCities site.
Well, now! I loaded the code, got mentioned on LangaList, and suddenly I've got more traffic today than in the previous month--total! [Full disclosure: I've been out of town or computer-impaired for most of the past two weeks; no new content, thus nothing worth seeing. Of course, it's possible that there's nothing worth seeing even with new content.] I feel like I just opened my front door, saw Gordon Elliott and a half-dozen gourmet chefs, and realized that all I have in my kitchen is three corn flakes, a ChapStick, and half a bag of dog food.
So what have I been doing for the past two weeks? Well, the Army has a test facility at Fort Hood, Texas, called the Central Technical Support Facility, whose job (actually one job of many) is to make sure all the Army's new computer systems play well together. We have a team down there full-time (join them...), but they were short-handed a couple of weeks ago and they needed somebody to help them support another group's test, so I volunteered to go down there from Fort Wayne. I should have taken TWA's loss of my luggage and driving through one bad-ass mofo of a thunderstorm between Austin and Ft. Hood as omens, but I'm pretty much paranormally-impaired. TMALSS, the other group never did get their poop in a group, and I went home two days early having accomplished virtually nothing.
I'll be out of town on business until the 27th (and sans computer to boot), so I won't be updating the site during that time. I'm sure both of you will be disappointed.
...to work on some content. I've recently HTMLized Office Lexicon, a collection of (mainly technical) office jargon collected from email, co-workers, and my own sprained imagination.
I'll be doing this periodically (read: when I can't think of anything worth blogging), because I've got a lot of stuff to add. Whether any of it is any good will be an exercise for the reader. Most of it will go here, although some will find its way here. Stay tuned.