Officers reported that several people began jumping over a fence when they arrived and, specifically, they observed a group of five men attempting to jump over a fence and ordered them to stop, said Capt. Phil Trent, South Bend police spokesman.

— Notre Dame quarterback, linebacker arrested Thursday morning – wsbt.com

Police arrive to break up a party, five guys jump over a fence and the only two who get caught are Notre Dame football players.

Oakland Raiders sign Matt Leinart to back up Carson Palmer

— ESPN

Deja vu! Here’s a picture of Matt Leinart backing up Carson Palmer 10 years ago.

Backing up both of these guys was Matt Cassel (#10), who has so far had a better NFL career than Leinart, despite a college career in which he threw zero touchdown passes and never started a game.

I don’t know who the other two kids are. The coaches are current Washington head coach Steve Sarkisian and current Hawaii head coach Norm Chow.

Junior Seau Dead in Apparent Suicide

— ABC News

Seau was a legend in San Diego, where he lived and played most of his career. He was also a legendary member of the USC Trojan Family.

The number 55 is now synonymous at USC with great Trojan linebackers, but Seau was the player who made the number famous. It has since been worn by Willie McGinest, Chris Claiborne and Keith Rivers and is only assigned at the head coach’s discretion.

This picture was taken just a couple of weeks ago at the USC Spring Football game. He doesn’t look like someone ready to end his own life, but you never really know what someone’s life looks like from the inside.

R.I.P. Junior Seau #55

(Photo credit: matt hutchinson)

The biggest headache in software development is that most programmers can’t program and don’t want to learn anything.

I recently finished up a MOOC called Software Engineering for SaaS, offered by UC Berkeley through Coursera. For a modest investment of a few hours a week for five weeks, I learned some Ruby on Rails — a well-designed platform and a lot of fun to work with — as well as tools like GitHub, Cucumber, RSpec, SimpleCov and Heroku.

Over 50,000 students from 150 countries signed up for the class. According to a final email from the professors, about 10,000 students attempted at least one assignment or quiz. Or to look at another way, 80 percent of the students gave up without even trying.

Approximately 2,000 students, or 4 percent, completed all four of the assignments and the three quizzes.

One of the enrollees who gave up without trying is a former colleague of mine, an ASP.NET programmer, who threw in the towel when he realized he wasn’t going to be allowed to do the programming assignments in C#.

Evidently he read under Prerequisites: “Programming proficiency in an object-oriented programming language such as Java, C#, C++, Python, or Ruby” and missed the course description at the top of the page: “This course teaches the engineering fundamentals for long-lived software using the highly-productive Agile development method for Software as a Service (SaaS) using Ruby on Rails.”

“I’m not going to learn Ruby on Rails,” he said, as though it was a silly, irrelevant thing to suggest to a professional programmer, like learning a yo-yo trick.

Thus spoke The Programmer.

From the LinkedIn profile of a linguistically challenged IT manager:

High-Level Strategic Planner and Executioner

I’m picking up a few things at Trader Joe’s — some Clif bars, a couple boxes of cereal and a bottle of IPA.

The checker points to the bottle and says, “That’s good. Have you tried it?” Like he’s the beer expert and I don’t know anything.

“Yeah, I’ve tried it.” Not to be outdone, I pointed to the cereal boxes and said, “Have you tried it on cereal?”

“No.”

“Well . . . think about it.”

The basic ideas are to:

• cut features
• cut content
• enlarge interface elements

I got this in my email today:

From: paypal@service.com
Subject: account information needs to be updated

Dear PayPal Costumer …

Gravy-wrestling model hit in the face with monkey wrench after finding friend having sex on her sofa — now THAT’S news!

There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income.

I think the same thing is true of idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.

I’m taking a nap upstairs but I’m hearing noises from downstairs. When I hear a noise, I have to estimate how likely it is to be food-related, and how likely it is if I get up and go downstairs I’ll be able to get some of it.

I can stay right here and snooze. That’s a sure thing. Or I can go downstairs and try to get some food. But if I get up and go downstairs and I don’t get any food, then a good nap has been spoiled.

I have to do this estimation every time I hear a noise.

Being a dog is not as easy as people think.

“You could have puggles,” I suggest to one of the owners, “except they’re both boys.”

“Well, if you’re going to control buffalo, you got to know two things, and only two things: First is,

“You can make buffalo go anywhere, just so long as they want to go there.

“And second,

“You can keep buffalo out of anywhere, just so long as they don’t want to go there.

— Gerald M. Weinberg, The Secrets of Consulting

The thought that disaster is impossible often leads to an unthinkable disaster.

— Gerald M. Weinberg, The Secrets of Consulting

Currently on Amazon EC2, eight extra large compute instances will cost you $2.40/hour. If you want to run 90 of them, you’re looking at a shade over $200/hour.

This brings up a couple of questions:

1. For what tasks could artificial intelligence be as good or better as a highly trained person at $200/hour?
2. What would this mean for society?

Thanks to David Patterson at UC Berkeley for bringing this to my attention.

People who are close to a problem tend to keep repeating what didn’t work the first time. If it did work, they wouldn’t have called in a consultant.

— Gerald M. Weinberg, The Secrets of Consulting

Even when it’s “really” a technical problem, it can always be traced back to management action or inaction. Even so, the experienced consultant will resist pointing out that it was management who hired all the technical people and is responsible for their development. At the same time, the consultant will look for the people who should have prevented this problem, or dealt with it when it arose.

— Gerald M. Weinberg, The Secrets of Consulting

Not once during those months did there emanate from the screen a genuine idea or emotion, and I came to understand the medium as subversive. In its deceit, its outright lies, its spinelessness, its weak-mindedness, its pointless violence, in the disgusting personalities it holds up to our youth to emulate, in its endless and groveling deference to our fantasies, television undermines strength of character, saps vigor, and irreparably perverts notions of reality. But it is a tender, loving medium; and when it has done its savage job completely and reduced one to a prattling, salivating infant, like a buxom mother it stands always poised to take one back to the shelter of its brown-nippled bosom.

— Frederick Exley, A Fan’s Notes

I’m at the Carl’s Jr. drive-thru, and in keeping with the time-honored fast food tradition of having the person with the worst command of the English language and/or the most unintelligible accent work the drive-thru, the guy says, “Welcome to Carl’s Jr. Would you like to try [unintelligible] patty [unintelligible]?”

“What?”

“Welcome to Carl’s Jr. . . .”

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

The LA Times ran a eulogy for a young Occupy protester this weekend . . .

Alex Weinschenker was born 23 years ago last month.

He was his parents’ only child, and he was beautiful.

— Man who found a deep sense of purpose in Occupy L.A. is mourned – latimes.com

That’s a very young age to die — 23 years old. How did it happen?

. . . probably from a relapse of a drug problem he’d tried to put behind him . . .

OK, wait a minute. This seems a little disingenuous. It sounds like you’re trying to say — without actually saying it — that he was a drug addict who killed himself, perhaps accidentally, with an overdose.

Occupy L.A. had filled Alex Weinschenker with energy and optimism, which makes the timing of his death even sadder, said his father.

Hmmm . . . in my experience, people with energy, optimism and “a deep sense of purpose” don’t die of a drug overdose.

He was so smart, but different. He did not go with the flow.

He had no education and no job.

Last year, Alex became a father to his own baby boy, Rivers, now 7 months old. He was no longer romantically involved with the child’s mother, but he was committed to taking care of both of them.

Is there anything he could have done that would be too irresponsible or stupid for the Times to put a positive spin on it?

“Committed to taking care of them” — in what way? A lot of us have fathered children and committed to taking care of them but we do this via something called “work.” I guess you could say we “went with the flow.” We’re not getting rich, we’re not 1 Percenters, but we made a decision to go to school, get jobs and raise our kids.

Who’s going to eulogize us?

Here’s how you can tell a eulogy isn’t working: It’s relentlessly disingenuous when it’s not outright dishonest. You have to gloss over the cause of death, invest the deceased with “a deep sense of purpose” that he didn’t have, and ignore the collateral damage of fathering a child with no means of support and leaving him to be raised by a single mother whose idea of a good decision is to have unprotected sex with an unemployed drug addict.

I suppose the Times is trying to bring Occupy back from the dead with a positive write-up on how they became a young man’s second family, but he was a 23-year-old addict with no job, no education and a 7-month-old son. Who or what was he protesting against?

He made his choices. What did he want?

If you want to be great, you need to learn about all the possible relevant ideas that have worked for others. You need to create new ideas, blend, adapt and prioritize them, and constantly test the best ideas to see which ones work for you. Only then can you fully implement — while continuously adjusting — the ideas that really work.

[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan -- PE]

Modesto police are investigating if there’s a criminal case against a former high school teacher who resigned his job to move into an apartment with an 18-year-old girl he met while teaching.

James Hooker, 41, was placed on administrative leave Feb. 3 by Modesto City Schools and resigned less than three weeks later, according to a report at the Modesto Bee.

The newspaper reports that the man, who had taught business and computer classes, left his wife and children, to move in with Jordan Powers, an Enochs High School senior whom he met when she was a freshman at the school. One of Hooker’s children also attends the same high school.

“In making our choice, we’ve hurt a lot of people,” Hooker told the Bee. “We keep asking ourselves, ‘Do we make everyone else happy or do we follow our hearts?’”

— Calif. teacher resigns after leaving family for student

Follow your heart, you magnificent selfish bastard!

Follow it right out the front door of the family home and into a Modesto apartment with a high school girl whose poor single mom, from the looks of the photo, couldn’t afford to buy her a set of braces.

DON’T LOOK BACK!

And make yourselves available for interviews and photo ops. YES! YES! YES!

(Let me add parenthetically that, despite what you mau have heard, being raised by a single parent does not screw kids up in the head and more people should be doing it.)

One of your own kids goes to the same high school as your new live-in girlfriend?! Oh, the collateral damage is going to be prodigious!

Wait — I’m now being informed that the two of you appeared on Good Morning America this morning?!

Brilliant move, Romeo! A sane person would have said, “No, I think I’ve done enough damage already,” let things play out as just a local scandal in the backwater of Modesto, and missed out on the opportunity to traumatize everyone involved at a national level.

If this doesn’t result in at least one suicide, then my name is not Satan.

See you in Hell, professor.

Something I unfortunately have to remind everyone of once in a while is, if you have something uncomplimentary or unpleasant to say about the recently deceased, you don’t need to say it to me. (This is only an issue when someone conservative dies, by the way. I’ve never gotten any nasty-grams when a liberal, moderate, or any other kind of person has died. But a conservative? Every single time, including today. Make of that what you will.)

1. Let everyone know that you’re really glad to see them.
2. Stay positive.
3. Don’t offer unsolicited advice.

The next one is a little hard to explain. For example . . . in the morning, when my owner lets me out of my enclosure, instead of running to my food dish, I run and sit in front of the cupboard to say, “This is where the dog food is kept. Can I have some please?”

So . . .

4. Don’t take anything for granted.

— Lightning

Mary Jo Kopechne

Why doesn’t this guy have a reality show:

The son of Robert F. Kennedy has been charged with harassment and endangering the welfare of a child for allegedly clashing with two nurses who tried to stop him from taking his 2-day-old baby boy from a Westchester maternity unit, NBC New York has learned.

According to a Mount Kisco, N.Y. police report obtained by NBC New York, Douglas Kennedy, 44, took his baby from the newborn unit of Northern Westchester Hospital on Jan. 7, against the instructions of hospital staff who told him the infant needed to stay there. He faces misdemeanor charges. . . .

While holding the child in his right arm, Kennedy kicked [a nurse] in the pelvis with his right foot, knocking her backward onto the floor, police said.

As he did this, Kennedy fell onto the floor with the baby in his arms. Kennedy then got up and ran “down the stairs with the infant until he was stopped by security and escorted back to the infant’s room,” the police report said.

— RFK son arrested in NY hospital maternity unit clash, police say

This comes on the heels of a new book by a JFK White House intern “revealing” that Douglas Kennedy’s Uncle Jack used to pimp the interns to service presidential aides as well as his own family members.

At least the author lived to tell the tale of her sordid encounter with the Kennedys. Not everyone was that lucky.

You might also remember Douglas’s brother David, who died of a drug overdose in 1984, or his brother Michael, another in the family’s long line of alcoholics, who died by skiing into a tree, but not before distinguishing himself with a statutory rape allegation involving the family’s 14-year-old babysitter.

I could go on with this but you get the point: thugs, pimps, alcoholics, drug addicts, rapists . . . maybe calling Teddy a murderer is a little strong, but he did kill that girl. It’s hard to imagine a more appalling bunch of degenerates.

The Kennedys make the Kardashians look like America’s royal family.

Let me tell you something about crows: Sometimes they fly in a big circle. Sometimes they fly every which way.

Whoever invented “as the crow flies” to mean “in a straight line” must have never seen an actual crow . . .

[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan -- PE]

Next year I’m going to live tweet the Oscar In Memoriam segment so I can tell you which celebrities are in Hell.

See you at the movies!

Via Curbed LA on the occasion of what would have been DFW’s 50th birthday today.

What a depressing abode! I’m ready to drive out there right now and hang myself . . .

Things You Can Do

Discriminate against Asians in college admissions.

Things You Can’t Do

Use “Chink in the Armor” as the headline for an article on the New York Knicks.

Behind every great product you will find a good product manager, in the sense we describe here. We have yet to see an exception to this rule.

 

Product ideas can come from any number of sources. Your job as product manager is to evaluate these product ideas and decide which product ideas are worth pursuing, and which are not.

 

The art of product management is to combine a deep understanding of your target customer’s needs and desires with the capabilities of your engineering team and the technologies they have to work with in order to come up with a product definition that is both compelling and achievable.

 

Of the hundreds of possible and even desirable features in the product, which are the few that are actually essential to the success of the product?

 

The owner of the requirements and the person ultimately responsible that those are the right requirements is the product manager.

Satan

[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan -- PE]

It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

The shift is affecting children’s lives. Researchers have consistently found that children born outside marriage face elevated risks of falling into poverty, failing in school or suffering emotional and behavioral problems.

— A child out of wedlock is the new normal – The New York Times (via msnbc.com)

HA HA HA! And it’s only going to get worse!

These poor illiterate bastards will be stabbing each other for food in a few years!

Unwed mothers are my meal ticket. Keep up the good work, my little darlings!

See you all in Hell . . .

To be overly preoccupied with the future is to be inattentive toward the present where learning and growth take place. To walk around asking, “am I a success or a failure” is a silly question in the sense that the closest you can come to answer is to say, everyone is both a success and a failure.

Sometimes the best management is no management at all — first do no harm!

It’s also a perfect excuse to close your eyes, curl up in a ball and hide from the world, which is my preferred leisure-time activity anyway . . .