Blog

Less Than a Month Until Liftoff!!

It’s hard to believe that I’ll be in Manila in less than a month. I only have a handful of things to buy/do to be ready. I’ve got everything from a sleeping mask and travel clothes to a packsafe day bag and moo.com mini cards.

January 11, 2013

Five Weeks and Counting…

My todo list is growing shorter, I’m scouring budget tour guides and making contacts in SEA (Southeast Asia). If you know friendly people in SEA please feel free to make an introduction! I’m counting down the days. I can’t wait to start exploring the Philippines!

January 3, 2013

Lift of on February 6th

Six weeks until I get on a plane for the Philippines! I’ve got a one way ticket and a rough plan. I’ll be traveling throughout Southeast Asia (SEA) for 3 to 6 months, then I plan to live in Thailand for a year. There are lots of loose ends I need to tie up before I leave and I’m making progress.

December 23, 2012

Commitments not Commandments

Are you giving commandments from on high or is your staff making commitments for work they think is important? I’ve been doing some consulting work for a non profit, mostly project management and business analysis.

June 1, 2012

The Science Behind Scrum

Scrum is a flavor of agile software development. In agile the development teams are cross functional and are self-managing. The development cycles, called sprints, are short, 4 weeks or less. By the end of a sprint the code must be functional, tested and working. Scrum functions on something called empirical process control. Traditional software development (command and control) uses defined process control, which is based on the theory of how something should work. This is at the heart of why so many traditional software projects either fail or generate bad code. A defined process control is meant to work on projects that are not very complex, tasks that do not need to be exact, like making hat pins. Empirical process control is used in serious engineering when tolerances need to be exact.

December 7, 2011

The Science of Optimism

There is a 50% difference in the chance of having heart disease between optimists and pessimists, according to a 10 year long study don’t in the 1980’s. Research done in the fields of psychology and neuroscience have proven what many people and cultures have believed for thousands of years. There is a big advantage to being an Optimist.

October 16, 2011