This week was a blur.

One of my friends was actually in the same city that I was (Seattle!) and we didn't even get to say hello! Bummer.

But I did get a lot accomplished and took some fantastic pictures of the Fall Out Boy concert. I'll post all pictures soon to the usual places.



On a completely different note, my babies leave for Costa Rica soon (sigh).

So as to take my mind off not spending time with them for a while, this weekend I'll just be relaxing. Maybe I'll get out and see Live Free or Die Hard. Whatcha think?

Lately, my team has been doing quite a bit of work using the DSL Toolkit. It has been quite a grind, but we've developed some pretty cool abilities.

Now I find that we weren't the only ones struggling and that help is on the way for the guys who start on this path next. Thanks for coming to the party guys!

The dslfactory community posted some great stuff on codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/DslFactoryUtilities

If you are working with the DSL Toolkit even a little, you should check this out.

Last weekend I was a mess. It had simply been too long since I'd been able to spend time with my babies. Finally this weekend I was able to rectify that situation.

We had a blast. They are so amazing.

It doesn't matter what else is going on, what goes right or what goes wrong. Being with them, seeing their faces, listening to their voices, letting them crawl all over me. Everything is okay after that.

Last night after watching a movie with them snuggled on the couch, eating ice cream and being scared, I had the best sleep I've had in a month. It's like they have pixie dust and being around them it just rubs off on me, making me happy and right with the world.

Or maybe it's just that we eat so much junk food and I'm on a sugar high.

Father's day weekend is always a difficult time for me. The petty and insensitive behavior of others doesn't help.

your slowly shaking finger tips
show that your scared like me so
let's pretend we're alone
and I know you may be scared
and I know were unprepared
but I don't care

tell me tell me
what makes you think that you are invincible
I can see it in your eyes that you're so sure
please don't tell me that I am the only one that's vulnerable
-- Vulnerable, Secondhand Serenade

What really beats me up is my own conscience when I realize that I take my black numbness out on others without warning. It is one thing to be a disappointment as a friend, but when I fail to allow even those who consider themselves to be my friends to know my suffering; I slip further away.

I shoulder my sorrow and refuse to share, but even if they can't help carry, knowing how screwed up I am inside should give them the pause to compensate for my short-comings. Keeping them outside the reasons for my distance isn't fair; much like life.

Unfortunately, my servants guilt finds me and binds me for the numbness as much for the vulnerability.

It was a quiet release, but Microsoft released a new offering in the Agile space built on Microsoft Team Foundation Server. Here is what the release says:

eScrum is a Web-based, end-to-end project management tool for Scrum built on the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server platform. It provides multiple ways to interact with your Scrum project: eScrum Web-based UI, Team Explorer, and Excel or Project, via Team Foundation Office Integration. In addition, it provides a single place for all Scrum artifacts such as product backlog, sprint backlog, task management, retrospective, and reports with built-in context sensitive help.

You can download it here.

Looks like things are heating up!

Being tired really screws with your ability to be patient and rational. Good thing I'm surrounded by good people.

I don't want to be perceived the way I am.
I just want to be perceived the way I am.
-- Relient K

When I'm not feeling up to it, it is good to know my weaknesses are upheld by others strengths. Now if I could just remember to let them know how much that means...

Some time ago I went to a Bowling For Soup concert and got a preview of the band Quietdrive.


They did a fantastic job and I bought their CD. Just recently they did a show I was able to watch at the Chain Reaction in Anaheim. Once again they were really excellent.


This is a band with a great stage presence and several solid hits. Their new songs were not fantastic and a little departure from their otherwise reliable song-writing ability.


Lyrically unformulaic without traditional emo obtuseness I am glad to say they are on my list of Happy Punk Bands.

In the spirit of sharing, today's post is some reading suggestions for all you agile developers out there. If you are serious about becoming more agile in your development, here are some books you should absorb:

	Agile Software Development by Alistair Cockburn
	Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber
	Agile and Iterative Development by Craig Larman
	Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck and Cynthia Andres

When you've finished with that, shoot me an email and we'll move on to real-world examples.

When you've been on a journey and you begin to see an end in sight, it is not uncommon for the travelers to begin to look up from the road and instead fix their eyes on the destination. This is not entirely without merit, excepting when you still have rivers to cross and jungles to wade through before your arrival. In those cases, it pays to keep your focus squarely on the steps directly in your path. When treading through the lava flows, it is the careful step that keeps you alive to enjoy the scenery.

I am a design chauvinist. I believe that good design is magical and not to be lightly tinkered with. The difference between a great design and a lousy one is in the meshing of the thousand details that either fit or don't, and the spirit of the passionate intellect that has tied them together, or tried. That's why programming---or buying software---on the basis of "lists of features" is a doomed and misguided effort. The features can be thrown together, as in a garbage can, or carefully laid together and interwoven in elegant unification, as in APL, or the Forth language, or the game of chess.
-- Ted Nelson

It is a lofty goal to produce elegance. Regardless of our aspirations, often as not, the measure of a design, like any art, is in the eye of beholder. With art that functions, it is primarily in the usefulness and fluidity of consumption that beauty and elegance may be found.

Nothing is more beautiful or elegant, then that which opens minds to be more, see more, create more, elegance.

This is not a post about video games.

First it was Docs & Spreadsheets, now Google is once again cooking up some interesting things that reach beyond the search universe . Check out http://code.google.com/apis/gears/ for an overview of their latest offering.

It's a great concept, if late to the party. In their case, that might not matter. We saw this before with Java, we see it currently with Ajax and we'll see it again tomorrow with another challenger. Everyone wants a piece of the desktop pie and there will be no end of challengers.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think the PC is the end-all, be-all, but I recognize clearly that corporations want stable, feature-rich, controlled applications that can be delivered by inexpensive resources. Many of the initiatives in the last few years have forgotten that businesses run by different rules than individuals. What you put up with and is important to you personally is not acceptable and irrelevant to a business. In many cases, the very things you desire for yourself are things that businesses are willing to spend money to ensure you can't have.

In any case, I think this new conglomeration of half-baked technologies has true potential and will be a significant force if it can gain even a small foothold.