The REAL Josh Anderson

Clapping - always a big moment...

2010-09-09T17:30:00.000-04:00

Lincoln is making leaps and bounds in his development in recent weeks. Some of the major milestones include talking (just a couple of words) and standing. Today, we add clapping. Well done little dude. Well done.

Father's Day gift ideas for the geeks among us

2010-05-30T22:45:00.151-04:00

Every year people ask me what I want for Father's Day, and I point them to my Amazon wishlist. In an effort to short-circuit that issue, I figured I'd post a couple of options in some typical gift categories. Hopefully this helps anyone else struggling to find that perfect gift for their geeky dad/husband/etc.

Reader Dad
	If you are on this page, either for yourself or your dad/husband/brother/uncle/etc., you should just go ahead and buy this. Ken, of Wired's GeekDad fame worked his tail off on this. Trust me, this is a winner.
	Remind your dad of all the crazy things he did when he was your age. He obviously turned out terrifically since he created you!
	2009's Nebula Award winner in the novel category. It's hard to argue with a book that won the same award as Dune, Ender's Game, and Rendezvous with Rama.
Gamer Dad
	Rockband has a special knack for getting families to come out of their shell and start jamming together. I've seen my mild-mannered family stay up until the wee hours of the morning trying to perfect just one more song.
	Multi-player Mario will excite and infuriate your dad all at the same time. Teamwork is key, but your teammates can also "accidentally" bump you off course mid-jump. Just don't admit that you pushed dear ole' dad off that cloud on purpose...
	If your dad is a hard-core gamer, you can't go wrong with pre-ordering the latest version of Halo for him. Sure, it doesn't ship until September, but Halo Reach is well worth the wait.
Grilling Dad
	Skewers are skewers, right? Wrong. These flat blades prevent your food from spinning as you try flip your kabobs over for a nice, even cook. It's never a bad idea to give your father one more reason to turn on the grill.
	Those skewers get HOT, so protect your father's hands with these handy gloves. You'll appreciated later that night when he can actually feel the buttons on the Rock Band guitar.
	Don't let your dad turn those burgers into hockey pucks any more. Now he can wirelessly monitor dinner and be alerted before he ruins another meal.
Movie Dad
	2009's big movie is worth seeing again. Is it the greatest movie ever? No, but pops will love showing of his home theater system to his friends with this movie.
	Finally, LOTR on blu-ray. The greatest book ever written will look even better now that your dad can bask in all of it's 1080p glory.
	Worst. Movie. Ever. So bad, it's good.
TV Dad
	Lost is the first TV series I've ever wanted to have in my library. It is actually worth watching again, from the very beginning.
	You could pick a handful of great titles from Discovery Channel, but MythBusters seemed like the best fit. It's always fun watching Jaime and Adam blow things up. Although, maybe Dirty Jobs fits your dad a bit better...
	A sneaky little sci-fi series that developed a bit of a cult following. Plus, it has Captain Hammer in it. Sorry Nathan, but you will always be Captain Hammer to me...
Web Dad
	Captain Hammer, Captain Hammer, Captain Hammer. This also single-handedly vaulted Neil Patrick Harris into my wife's favorite actor. Maybe it will do the same for your Mom. Beware, the songs are catchy!!! Oh yeah, and it has Felicia Day in it.
	This was the first web series I ever cared about. I tried others. I really did, but this one is captivating. Sure, it helps that Felicia is hot, but she writes a great story with tremendous characters.
	More awesomeness from Felicia and her crew. Season Four is in the works!!

While you are shopping around for dad, enter this amazing contest brought to us by the wonderful folks at ThinkGeek.com and GeekDad. Good luck on the search for the ultimate gift for your dad and good luck in the contest!

LEDBLOA FTW - My team's new build status "light"

2010-04-21T07:15:00.000-04:00

Having been a part of many software development teams that firmly believed in the goodness of continuous integration, I always wanted a build light for our team. First I wanted just a plain old light that would turn on if the build was broken. Then I moved on to dreaming of a siren flashing on a bad build. Next were ambient orbs and lava lamps. The final lifeless idea was a traffic light. All of those ideas never sparked my imagination and interest enough for me to actually do anything with them. Then it happened...

Our team was really struggling with build stability and breakage ownership, so I knew I had to do something...

... and so the LED-build-light-of-awesomeness (a.k.a. LEDBLOA, pronounced like Rocky Balboa, only cooler) was born!

This seemed to solve all of my problems. I could alert the team that a build was broken, tell them which build broke, and when it happened. Sure, a flashing light is cool and all, but you still have to run back to your computer to see what really happened.

I didn't have a lot of money to spend, but I found a good deal and picked up a three-color, programmable ,40"x6", Ethernet and USB enabled, LED sign. That sounds nifty, but the icing on the cake was the .Net reference libraries this company provided (I'm purposefully not naming the company because my team is already trying to hack into it). The documented protocol was easy enough to follow, but the wrappers provided in the interface really made my life easier.

Truth be told, the hardest part of the whole process was physically hanging it on the wall. I wanted it to be clearly visible from anywhere in the team's area, so I was limited in choices and ended up having to mount it on a pillar at the end of our room. It's not perfect but it works.

Speaking of not perfect...

That's the little app I wrote to feed the data to LEDBLOA. All it does right now is parse the RSS feed our CI server spits out and sends the data over USB to LEDBLOA. The team already has a bit of a backlog of enhancement requests built up, as you can see below:

1. Display all guilty parties (those people who have new/updated code checked into the failed build)
2. Display current bug counts (internal and external)
3. Display number of test failed in a broken build
4. Add a few more of these throughout the office
5. Use a stock ticker-esque display for our day-over-day backlog count (i.e. ^4%)
6. Turn red builds yellow once someone claims responsibility for a broken build

I'm trying to keep this post to a reasonable length, so I'll save the gory details of how this all works for a couple of subsequent posts.

I <3 LEDBLOA

Presentation - Becoming an Effective Agile Leader

2010-04-09T15:11:00.000-04:00

Last night, I unveiled my latest Agile talk/presentation at my local AITP (www.rtp-aitp.org) meeting. I've been working on this talk for quite some time now and I was excited and nervous to unleash it on a live audience. The feedback was great and it was received very well, so now let's see what the inter-webs thinks of it...

Becoming An Effective Agile Leader

View more presentations from Josh Anderson.

I certainly have to give some credit to Jurgen Appelo and his super-sweet presentation styles. I may have lifted a few ideas form his slide layouts (I guess we will go with the "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery" approach on this one)... :)

Best. Music Video. Ever.

2010-03-31T22:39:00.000-04:00

Best parts:
1. Boba Fett - Fett always rocks
2. "Now Han Solo's a coffee table"
3. Dancing Chewie

Wow, so I was right all this time...

2010-03-31T13:38:00.000-04:00

I found this image via one of @donttrythis's (Adam Savage from Mythbusters) tweets today and just had to share it. Once, and only once, did I pay for Monster Cables. After the hundreds of dollars wasted, I promised myself to never do that again. Never ever.

The silver lining in this post is that it also proved that Mint.com finally offers me something useful!!!

Stuck

2010-03-28T10:54:00.000-04:00

Well, we made pretty good progress on the swing set yesterday, but we are missing eight pieces of wood! Sadly, these are pretty critical parts and we can't continue building until the company ships them to us. For some strange reason, their "help hot line" is only available Monday through Friday from 7AM-4PM CST. That doesn't seem very hot...

Fear & Suffering

2010-03-23T21:44:00.000-04:00

Yeah, I am scared. Will I be angry? Undoubtedly. I already hate this pile of metal and wood, and I most assuredly suffer. I've done this before and I know the time, frustration, and splinters involved in putting this bad boy together.

That seemingly innocent stack of boxes, through thousands of screws, bolts, and other fastening devices turns into this beast:

I assembled a very similar playset back in Ohio and vowed never to do it again. Alas, I could not bring myself to pay the $600 assembly fee. So, this weekend, out of love for my kids, I will spend virtually every waking hour working on this. I'll be chronicling on this blog and via twitter, so stay tuned. I know many of you will get a chuckle out of this whole process, so I expect my page views to skyrocket... :)

Best. T-Shirt. Ever. Period.

2010-02-24T21:52:00.000-05:00

Yeah, I period'd a period. That's how cool this is.
Go buy this, now!

For those of you who have no idea what this means, Crom has pity on your soul. However, here is step one in your education:

My new Dr. Horrible - I'm on a horse.

2010-02-18T22:48:00.000-05:00

I was really hooked on Dr. Horrible for the longest time. I mean REALLY hooked. The songs were stuck in my head for months, I'd sing them to my wife and kids, and I forced most of my family to watch it.

Actually, I must admit that the songs still are stuck in my head. I may never shake free from their "horribleness", but this Old Spice commercial is working hard to help me. If you haven't seen it, I am glad I could introduce it to you. If you have seen it, trust me, it gets better every time you watch it. I'm on a horse.

Blogger's remorse

2010-02-15T15:24:00.001-05:00

Almost on a daily basis, I wonder how I didn't name my last post something like "Dude, where's my backup?" or any one of the hundreds of obvious corny play-on-words tied into the movie reference that proliferates that post. Right out of the gate, I was less than pleased with that lame-ass title of "Backup Strategy". I mean seriously, could I get any less creative?!?!

Oh well. Onward and upward, eh? I'll chalk this one up to the "lessons learned" tag and continue wondering why I won't stop thinking about this seemingly meaningless detail...

Backup Strategy

2010-02-04T08:18:00.001-05:00

8 years of family photos + 7 years of family videos + 100's of music albums + no backup plan = Pain & Suffering

How do I know? I once lost a drive on my home PC that housed all of this. Amazingly enough, I backed all of this up onto a couple of DVDs a week or two earlier. I NEVER did that before. Why I chose to back up at that time, I will never know. But, boy, am I happy I did!

So, after that happened, I vowed to never put our family's memories in jeopardy like that again. Seriously, an IT professional with all of those irreplaceable files on one drive in one PC?!?! WTF?! No, scatch that, double-WTF?!?!

So, I first had to sell the wife on the concept that a real backup strategy may not be cheap. She was down with doing whatever it took to protect our memories. However, in the end, it proved to be pretty cheap, under $400. Granted, I've evolved this plan over the past couple of years, but it has remained largely the same. Here we go.

Primary Storage Location:
1TB Buffalo Linkstation Pro Duo - NAS with basic RAID functionality and a gigabit network port. I don't think it's neccesary to mess with the RAID any more as my multiple levels of backup should protect me against a hard-drive failure in this device (yeah, it happened once to me already). As a bit of a bonus, this NAS has a built-in media server that let's me stream to my PCs or my XBox 360.

and then....

Primary Backup:
1TB USB drive attached directly to Linkstation - this is essentially a mirror of the Linkstation, just in case it decides to go out to lunch. This means that I am always instantly backed up. No waiting for a nightly upload to the web or anything like that. If that Linkstation goes dead, I lose nothing and I have instant accessibility to my data.

and then....

Secondary Backup:
Online Backup via JungleDisk.com - Powered by Amazon's Simple Storage Service, this is the only backup service I have found that charges you for only the space you actually use. No buying gigs and gigs of space that you may never use. If you use 1 GB, that is all you pay for. Simple, easy to use, and cheap. I can't ask for much more. Sure, it only runs once a night, but these backups should only be needed if the house burns down or something truly catasrophic like that. I am more than happy to pay $15/month to know that the photos and videos of my kids taking their first steps or scoring their first soccer goal are safe and secure.

... no and then!!!

Yeah, I don't know how the Dude, Where's My Car references came from. Sorry, that's the way my brain works. Maybe the strange "and then" references will remind you to go home and secure your family's memories.

Gonna have to find a baby sitter...

2010-01-25T22:49:00.000-05:00

About a month ago, as I zipped through my backlog of over 100 unread items, I "starred" a post in Google Reader about some new movie that appeard to have some geek potential. I always have good itentetions of going back and actually reading though everything I "starred" over the past week, but I tend to find other exciting things to do on the web. Yeah, my wife will tell you I have some insane form of ADHD, but I blame it on information overload. :)

Anyways (who mentioned ADHD?!), tonight I was looking for something I knew I starred last week. As I began to scroll down the rather lengthy list of unread stars, I decided to spend five minutes and whip through these hopeful web nuggets. Bingo.

Enter Kick-Ass. Watch, enjoy, watch again, and then send to your cool friends. Oh yeah, this one is a bit NSFW...

One final word. Thanks a zillion to http://www.sfsignal.com/ for the original post. Keep up the good work!

Meta-Cast, Explained

2010-01-18T09:00:00.016-05:00

This past Friday marked the launch of my first podcast, www.meta-cast.com. I must say, the whole process was quite enjoyable. From the recording itself, to whipping together a domain and website, to getting Twitter tied into my feed in hopes of increasing our visibility, I had a great time. Heck, even my kids liked the process. Their favorite part was Daddy messing around with the audio and making it "sound funny" (adjusting pitch, speeds, etc.).

After listening to the podcast a few times, and gathering a little feedback from some very kind folks, it quickly became apparent that I did about as bad a job as you could do in explaining what the podcast is all about. Damn podcasting rookie! :)

So, here we go:
Bob Galen and I started working together early last year at Teradata. Over our few months together, we found ourselves repeatedly discussing various aspects of the software development biz. We were leading the adoption of Agile/Scrum across a few teams, so many of our talks centered around Agile, but we spent many an hour just talking about "stuff". We always had a good time and ended up chuckling a whole lot. Basically, we just had fun debating various things and throwing in a quick jab at the other whenever we could.

I think I originally threw out the idea of recording those conversations over six months ago. Bob is a busy guy with all of his speaking obligations at various conferences, and, well, I have three kids, hence the six month delay in actually creating our first podcast. Our plan is to record a cast every other week and just keep trying to get better. One of our ultimate goals is to gain enough momentum to convince a conference to allow us to do a live podcast at their show. I know, one step at a time, but you do need some lofty goals if you want to do something special, right?

Anyways, thanks for caring enough to read this far. All that I can promise is that we will get better, and it will be a fun ride!

Let's hope the tortise really does win the race...

2009-11-02T22:59:00.003-05:00

National Novel Writing Month (A.K.A. NaNoWriMo) started yesterday and boy am I off to a slow start! :(

On day two, I am still unable to really crank out a bunch of "stuff" all at once. I'm OK with my pace (about one full page per day, or right around 400 words) even though it seems unlikely that I will get my 50,000 words in this month to be declared a "winner". The best news is that I am forcing myself into the habit of writing every night.

Hopefully my word count really picks up soon! We'll just have to wait and see. It's a long month, after all..

One more reason to love living in NC...

2009-10-12T16:43:00.003-04:00

Who can argue with the Nature Boy? After all, it is an "education" lottery, so we gamble for the kids...

Stop me if you've heard this one before

2009-09-30T22:12:00.004-04:00

I think I've reached the five year mark in my quest to write a novel. That's pretty sad, I must say. However, I've got a few new tricks up my sleeve that may push me over the edge, finally...

1. NaNoWriMo, more commonly known as National Novel Writing Month. They have pretty handy tools (see snazzy calendar to the right) meant to keep you on track for your goal of writing 50,000 words in the month of November. Granted, 50,000 words is a good distance from the type of novel I hope to write, but I am just looking to build a little momentum.

2. Fear of further mocking from my friends (mostly my wife) who hear me drone on and on about how I think I could actually cobble together a decent little story. See this post.

3. Five years of pent up guilt and shame for not reaching a personal goal of mine. I hope to really harness this one as it is likely to be the most powerful "trick" I can call on.

Will this work? Do you care? Will you read a similar post some time in the coming months? We shall see. In the meantime, go watch The Guild. That's what I am gonna do.

All kinds of awesomeness!

2009-07-30T16:40:00.003-04:00

As exciting as this is, I must admit that I am wee bit jealous that my wife made it on ThinkGeek.com before I did. Regardless, score one for the Anderson Family!!!

Here's the direct link if you want to see Renee in all her glory!

Leia's Blog - Yeah, that's right, Leia is online.

2009-05-04T22:43:00.004-04:00

www.LeiaAnderson.com

Why in the world does an almost-five-year-old need a blog you ask? Like many things parents buy or set up for their little ones, it's not for her. It's for me, mommy, and probably a grandparent or two.

I realized Leia needed a blog after weeks of her not letting me leave for work in the morning until she gives me a message to be relayed to my "fiends at work". These are just way too awesome to let vaporize each morning once I get into work and lose myself in the everyday chaos of life.

They always start with "Daddy, make sure you tell your friends at work...", and the rest captures what happens to be in the very front of her brain at that moment. Sometimes it's about what she wants for breakfast, and other times it is about how cool Hannah Montana is. If I am really lucky, it ends with a "Tell them I love my Daddy all the way to Saturn and back!"

These special messages NEEDED to be captured, so I linked the domain I bought when she was born to my Blogger.com account. This lets me type an email on my iPhone as I walk to the car with her message fresh in my mind.

I hope you enjoy what she has to say. I know I do.

How's my novel, you ask?

2009-04-19T09:42:00.004-04:00

This just about sums it up...