I just picked up 2 tickets for DJ Shadow & Cut Chemist’s current tour, called “The Hard Sell”.

I’m seeing them at Sonar in Baltimore on Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 08:00 PM!

A lot of the show is broken up in pieces on youtube if you want to preview it. I’m excited!

I keep going on about Tufte stuff.

I find sparklines really really amazingly cool. I currently use them in my weekly reports for management thanks to some software from Bizzantz and a spreadsheet I kept all summer. I’m using the free version and will buy up once we decide on a license count and version that we need.

Pretty rad eh? I replaced the measured items of this example using photoshop, and it’s not as nice as it could be, but I can throw the real thing together in MS Word at the end of the week pretty quickly and send it up. I like it!

Lessons learned so far:

The first week I played with them I didn’t align them vertically, which made it less obvious that as the assholes stopped doing what they were asked to do that President Scroob got more complaints about them. It looks like too many of them were manning the radar, but who knows? Is there really a correlation between Druish / Jewish gags and gags involving Barf’s tail?

Also, the first week I relied on the ‘sparklefont’ that Bizzantz uses to create the sparklines. It is awesome, but images translate a bit better from e-mail to e-mail to executive copy / paste, and so on.

Tufte finds Conway’s law frequently rearing it’s ugly head. If you’ve worked on engineering projects, or taken over for someone else’s engineering project, you’ll recognize it immediately.

Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.

That can be reworded to encompass any design project, software engineering or otherwise. It also is evident when an engineering team is slowly recycled with new members. The designs of the original team will be deemed crufty and most engineers joining the team will want to clean-slate the entire thing. This isn’t practical, so bolt-on and secondary systems tend to emerge. Extending existing systems is an impossible ideal.

Managers of engineering teams over this lifecycle must be understanding to guide this to fruitful ends.

Emphasis mine below.

Conway’s Law can be construed as humorous, to the extent that rigid organizations that are not willing to re-organize to generate an optimal design, can end up producing a sub-standard design that merely reflects the pre-existing organization.

But the essence of Conway’s Law also applies to flexible organizations that are willing to re-organize to produce an optimal design.

For example, consider a flexible company that is charged with designing a car, and the company does not yet have a car-design organization. The new car-design organization will probably consist of groups that correspond to the major components of a car: engine, body, transmission, interior, electrical, etc.

The essence of Conway’s Law applies even in this re-organization situation: the components and interfaces of the resultant car mirror the engineering groups and their interfaces.

And, significantly, any shortcoming with the interpersonal relationships between the engineering groups, may manifest itself in a shortcoming of the resultant design.

Wikipedia offers a corollary

In every organization there is one person who knows exactly what is going on at all times. This person must be fired.

Sounds like management!

Richard: If we had someone that knew exactly what was going on in all parts of UMBC, it’d be noteworthy, possibly worth a newspaper article in the student paper.

I had the pleasure of attending a one day course on the presentation of data and information given by Edward Tufte in Washington DC.

I already owned copies of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, as well as Envisioning Information, but with the course came bundled four of his books; the two above, as well as Visual Explanations, and his newest work, Beautiful Evidence.

I thoroughly enjoyed it and actually took notes!

In addition to the general theme of data presentation, Tuft spoke to his personal interests in science, the history of data presentation, and philosophy.

Debian Administration has great advice for requesting that bash keep a history of all commands recorded. Add this to your .bashrc!

export HISTTIMEFORMAT="%s " PROMPT_COMMAND="${PROMPT_COMMAND:+$PROMPT_COMMAND ; }"'echo $$ $USER \ "$(history 1)" >> ~/.bash_eternal_history'

I’m poking my way through The Best American Mystery Stories of the Century; a collection of short stories that looks a bit like an unabridged dictionary. I read Damon Runyon’s short story Sense of Humour while I was making dinner tonight. The characters made me think of Looney Toons’ Rocky and Mugsy, but I guess the inspiration went the other way 'round.

Great stuff, and it looks like thanks to Google books you can read the entire story online.

Over the weekend I finished Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, which Amazon says I bought on Jan. 1 of 2007. I have a pretty strong romantic fascination with the period covered in the last half of the book, thanks probably to Rufus J. Fears. Pompey, Cato, Cicero, Brutus, Crassus, Ceasar, Octavian, Marc Anthony and Cleopatra…

I want to move on to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire but it’s not cheap, even used, to get the entire collection. I’ll keep looking. Exciting.

While there is still time to debate it all: my wife and I are probably bailing on all the usual holidays this winter. How controversial is it to just not show up for Thanksgiving or Christmas? In our case each consists of five or six events each, some on the same day. We’ve been making the run of it all for ten years together.

I’m not skipping Halloween and New Years parties of course, I believe in pumpkins and silly costumes, and I subscribe to the Gregorian calendar.

We make a pretty mindful effort to host and attend dinners and the like with all the the in-laws and step-in-laws frequently. Work gives us a few days off a year and spending that time driving is not our idea of “fun”.

Is that selfish?

Chase did not enter medical school; instead he played drums for a time with the college band The Leather Canary, headed by school chums Walter Becker and Donald Fagen. At the time, Chase called the group “a bad jazz band,” but Becker and Fagen went on to success after they changed their band’s name to Steely Dan…

At work, Making Plans for Nigel came up on the ipod, which I blast through a Tivoli Model Two in our six-cube windowless office with the overhead flourescent’s off because we are all nerds.

Queue it up and play along!

We’re only making plans for nigel
We only want what’s best for him
We’re only making plans for nigel
Nigel just needs this helping hand

Awesome tune. I was probably tapping my toes, playing finger-drums on my desk.

And if young nigel says he’s happy
He must be happy
He must be happy in his work

I had to break out in a very exagerated and loud parody of the actual bridge accompaniment: “Iiiiiinnnnn hiiiiisssss worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrk!!”

More toe tapping…

Again: “Iiiiiinnnnn hiiiiisssss worrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrk!!”

Jeff joined in from the next cube over: “Eeeeeee-oooohhhhhhhhhhh!”

Awesome, more finger-drumming.

Then I remembered that I had dialed into a conference call about 10 minutes previously which was about to start. I checked to make sure I was muted.

I wasn’t muted.

We went down early January before the wedding to scope out the area and to meet with the folks at Weeping Radish. They just happened to not only be happy to provide us with kegs but also to print labels for a few custom cases.

I procrastinated on submitting the designs until two days before the wedding, leaving no time to fix the spelling error that made it to the final. I fixed that and put them on flickr.

The design is an improvement on my original design for the invitations:

And everyone thought it turned out pretty well on the bottles. I still have a Maibock left, the rest is all gone!

The printer helpfully color-matched the SURGEON GENERAL and other sidebar stuff for each label.